Suchergebnisse

This article examines the political activity—specifically lobbying and PR efforts—of major Finnish business associations during the Cold War era (c. 1945–1991). The main motivation for business political activity was the threat of socialism and state intervention in their various forms. Based on a qualitative reading of archived documents, this article illustrates a shift from the fear of an outright revolution in the 1940s, through leftist radicalism and economic regulation in the 1970s, to the rise of environmentalism in the 1980s. Influencing efforts were targeted at both politicians and the general public but, towards the end of period studies, shaping public opinion became increasingly important. This article contributes to our knowledge on business-politics links and business political activity as historical phenomena. It points out compelling similarities in the political activity of business in various Western countries and suggests that they should be examined more thoroughly in future research. ; Peer reviewed

This article traces the local and global context of two incidents of political violence among the transnational community of left-wing political exiles in Mexico City during March and April 1943. On both occasions, violent clashes resulted from attempts to commemorate two Polish-Jewish socialists who had been convicted and executed in the Soviet Union as "fifth columnist spies". A close reading of locations and chronological context relies on primary materials from Mexican, US-American, German, Austrian and Russian archives as well as the contemporary local press. The local logic of political practice (including violence) on the geographic and political periphery of world politics can be deciphered as an urban choreography of larger ideological conflicts among the Left and contributes to our understanding of the political meaning of the conflict as much as the overarching ideological debate that contributed to the global confrontation of the Cold War.

India's Xinjiang connection is age old. Since the first century bc, linkage between the two regions has been established through historical, sociocultural and economic relations and mutual exchanges. However, with the establishment of People's Republic of China in 1949 and incorporation of Xinjiang as one of the Chinese provinces, this linkage met an obvious end. Now with the end of Cold War in 1991 following the disintegration of former Soviet Union and emergence of five independent republics of Central Asia and the endeavours to revive the Silk Route, there has emerged a glimmer of hope for the renewal of relationship between strategically located Central Asia, Xinjiang and India. In this context, this article discusses the 2500-year-old India–Xinjiang historico-cultural cooperation and believes that perhaps it could act as a catalyst in promoting and strengthening overall relationship between India and China.

The International Relations Study has undergone many changes in its dynamics,especially in view of the dynamic conditions of world politics. It directly influences the development of the IR study. This paper discusses how the theory of complex systems explain the dynamics of the international system after the end of the Cold War. Through the theory, the author seeks to see the changes that occur in interstate interaction, especially in the framework of thinking about the interests of each country. Interaction between countries then encourage the existence of different systems between one another, depending on how the country chooses interaction groups. The author also seeks the inter-state interaction that formed into an international system can be studied from the transition process to change the direction of interaction to see how the true international system is formed through the views of the theory of complex systems.

Trust is central to international politics. Trust-related theoretical arguments can be divided between rationalist, cultural and psychological schools. We present concise reviews of these approaches, emphasizing the initial trust-creation phase, and apply these factors to our historical case: the emergence of a fragile interpersonal trust between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan before and during their first meeting in Geneva in 1985. Based on archives and first-hand reminiscences, we conclude that the cultural trust theories are not able to contribute much to the initial trust-building process in this particular case, except for explaining the obstacles for trust. The rational approaches explain the necessary but not sufficient conditions for trust to emerge. Ultimately, what triggered the trust that ultimately ended the Cold War cannot be understood without taking into account the cognitive and psychological factors involved in this interpersonal relationship.

Abstract. A multiscale sampling experiment was carried out in the Gulf of Taranto (eastern Mediterranean) providing the first synoptic evidence of the large-scale circulation structure and associated mesoscale variability. The mapping of the mesoscale and large-scale geostrophic circulation showed the presence of an anticyclonic large-scale gyre occupying the central open ocean area of the Gulf of Taranto. On the periphery of the gyre upwelling is evident where surface waters are colder and saltier than at the center of the gyre. Over a 1-week period, the rim current of the gyre undergoes large changes which are interpreted as baroclinic–barotropic instabilities, generating small-scale cyclonic eddies in the periphery of the anticyclone. The eddies are generally small, one of which can be classified as a submesoscale eddy due to its size. This eddy field modulates the upwelling regime in the gyre periphery.

Hannah Arendt's essay on Bertolt Brecht has often been understood as an indictment of Brecht's postwar accommodation with the Stalinist regime in East Germany, in line with Arendt's supposed commitment to a firm separation between poetry and politics. Offering the first full reconstruction of the transnational history of Arendt's writing on Brecht, this article shows instead that Arendt's essay was a defense of Brecht against the polemics it is often taken to exemplify. Joining poetry to politics by holding both at a distance from philosophy, Arendt assigned poetry the vocation of disruptive faithfulness to factual reality, which allowed her to praise Brecht on political grounds and to leverage forbearance for his political "sins." Indeed, by narrating Brecht's "sins" and "punishment" against the grain of Cold War discourse about the poet, Arendt's essay emulated aspects of the poetic practice she admired in Brecht's writing.

This article challenges the well-established presentation within conflict studies of paramilitary organizations as state-manipulated death squads or self-defence groups, and argues that some present-day militias extend their functions well beyond the role of shadowy pro-regime enforcers. Drawing its empirical insights from Ukrainian pro-government volunteer battalions and supporting its findings with empirical observations from other parts of the world, the article posits that the rise of powerful militia organizations acting in parallel with the state makes it imperative to revisit the theory and typology of paramilitary violence. The key theoretical argument of the article is that 'state-parallel' militias differ qualitatively from the 'state-manipulated' paramilitaries that are typical of the Cold War period. The article shows that although 'state-parallel' paramilitaries are not a new phenomenon, they have thus far remained critically understudied and undertheorized.

This article uses a transnational feminist lens to examine how accusations of sexual violence were mobilised by the United States (US) government to justify military intervention at the same time that the US military failed to address sexual violence perpetrated by and against its own service members. Drawing upon an archive of civilian representations ranging from the New York Times to G.I. Jane, the author explores US interventions in the Persian Gulf, Haiti and the former Yugoslavia alongside sexual assaults committed by servicemen at the Tailhook Convention, on Okinawa and at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. This article draws connections between feminism and neo‐imperialism, between Cold War and War on Terror ideologies, and between rape as a weapon of war and rape during times of 'peace' in order to better understand the relationships between sexual politics and geopolitics at the end of the twentieth century.

As tensions between the United States and China are on the rise, Europe needs to prepare for the contingency of a US-China cold war–like stand-off in Asia. Currently, Europe's political engagement with East Asia is quite underwhelming while European interest are as substantial as numerous. In this article, we focus on the question of how Europe could and should position itself in East Asia in order to increase its political weight, to cope with the negative repercussions of conflict between China and the United States, and to prevent Europe's imminent marginalization in this globally important region. For Europe and the European Union in particular, all this demands urgently to come up with a more unified and cohesive strategic approach. If Europe wants to play a meaningful role in the Asian century, significant steps are required in order to bolster Europe's existing economic and political weight with genuine 'actorness' abroad.

Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau is known for his challenge to Canada's NATO policy at the beginning of his tenure in power and his peace initiative at its end. Less well known is his support for innovative arms control policies designed to eliminate the technological impetus behind the nuclear arms race between the US and the USSR during the Cold War. At the first UN Special Session on Disarmament in May 1978, Trudeau delivered a speech outlining a "strategy of suffocation" that provided a novel package of four arms control measures that, taken as a whole, would represent an effective means of halting and eventually reversing the nuclear arms race. Although the superpowers were largely indifferent to them, these ideas helped spur the Department of External Affairs to invest in developing the institutional capacity to enable Canada to play a leadership role in future disarmament diplomacy.

In the post-Stalin period, in the USSR, there was a permanent increase in the amount of Soviet tourists who traveled abroad. These trips acquired a great popularity and a prestige among Soviet citizens, and became a channel for the illegal, or semi-legal, infiltration of foreign goods into the USSR. Despite financial, customs, administrative, and psychological barriers, as well as ideological pressure, Soviet tourists abroad acted within the concept of an "economic man" seeking to import as many things as possible. To fulfill this consumer mission, in the 1960s-1980s, Soviet tourists created a set of "shadow" consumption practices which this article examines in detail, as well as the Soviet government's responses to combat them. The imported goods and the resulting non-Soviet consumer culture ("spirit of consumerism" or "virus of consumerism"), the article concludes, undermined the concept of Soviet superiority central to the Soviet propaganda during the Cold War era.

An increasing body of literature focuses on negotiations of transitional justice, but not much has been written so far regarding contestations over its practices and the refusal of states and individuals to participate. Given the remaining legalistic dominance, this is particularly true regarding the field of international criminal law. Very little, if any, work in international criminal law engages with the topic of "resistance." Departing from this gap in research, focusing on Cambodia and the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), the objective of this article is to introduce, discuss, and analyze the "strategy of rupture"—as developed by the late French lawyer Jacques Vergès—and the ways in which this legal defense has been applied in practice at the ECCC in order to resist not only the Tribunal per se, but also the entire Cambodian transitional justice process and, by extension, the post–Cold War global liberal project.

This review article offers a critical assessment of three recent books on postwar conservatism in the United States. The broad themes of these works – anticommunism, the new class critique, and opposition to environmentalism – are used as a basis to review the extant literature and to analyse the historical trajectory of the conservative movement. Although American conservatism is generally a unified political force, important ideological divisions remain both among and between libertarians and social conservatives. These divisions are imperative for understanding the movement today and offer promising lines of future scholarship. Doody C (2013) Detroit's Cold War: The Origins of Postwar Conservatism. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Horowitz RB (2013) America's Right: Anti-Establishment Conservatism from Goldwater to the Tea Party. Cambridge: Polity Press. Layzer JA (2012) Open for Business: Conservatives' Opposition to Environmental Regulation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

This article examines the history of the development of drone technology to understand the longer histories of surveillance and targeting that shape contemporary drone warfare. Drawing on archival research, the article focuses on three periods in the history of the drone: the early years during World Wars I and II, the Cold War, and the 1990s. The history of the drone reveals two key trends in Western warfare: the increasing importance of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and the development of dynamic targeting. These trends converge today in a practice of lethal surveillance where ISR capabilities are directly linked to targeted killing, effectively merging mechanisms of surveillance and knowledge production with decisions on life and death. Taking this history of lethal surveillance into account not only reframes current debates on drone warfare, but also connects the drone to other practices of security and control.