Suchergebnisse

This article analyses the emergence of the political myth of Pëtr Stolypin and its recent institutionalization as an exemplary image for Russian politics. The article considers the memory of Stolypin together with the myth of the Time of Troubles, that served the Putin regime well in its first and second terms, to demonstrate how the post-revolutionary frame of reference implicit in the latter has been replaced by the pre-revolutionary frame of "stability Stolypin-style": a new brand of stability-oriented state patriotism that taps into the very same societal fears and insecurities connected to memories of the 1990s, but is geared to fit a situation in which recent accomplishments have to be safeguarded against the perceived threat posed by domestic rather than foreign enemies. Instead of promising a stable and prosperous future, the Stolypin myth cautions that recent achievements can all too easily be lost again.

The impact of terrorism on the travel and tourism industry can be enormous. It can lead to unemployment, homelessness, deflation, and many other social and economic ills. The contribution of tourism for many countries is so great that any downturn in the industry is a cause of major concern for many governments. The repercussions are left in many other industries associated with tourism like airlines, hotels, restaurants and shops that cater to the tourists and allied services. Terrorism is an enigmatic and compelling phenomenon, and its relationship with tourism is complex and multifaceted. This paper aims to clarify this relationship and examines the relationship between selected factors and tourists' decision-making process for destination choice. Tourists' risk perception associated with terrorism served as a basis for the analysis.

This article examines Ulrich Horstmann's science fiction radio play Die Bunkermann-Kassette (The Bunker Man Cassette, 1979), in which the author frames fears and anxieties surrounding a potential nuclear conflict during the Cold War as apocalyptic self-annihilation of the human race. Radio, especially radio drama, had a unique role in capturing the historical imaginaries and traumatic experiences surrounding this non-event. Horstmann's radio drama and the titular cassette tape become sound artifacts that speak to the technological contexts of their time, while their acoustic content carries the past sounds into the present. In the world of the play, these artifacts are presented in a museum of the future, which uses the possibilities of science fictional imagination and speculation to create prosthetic memories of the Cold War. The article suggests that these memories are cyborg memories, because the listener is a fully integrated component of radio technology that makes these memories and recollections of imagined events possible in the first place.

This discourse analytic study examines how violence can be constructed as an honourable course of action, using the example of a leaflet circulated in the loyalist Donegall Pass area of Belfast urging the removal of the minority Chinese population. Starting from the assumptions that racism is an ideological practice that naturalises social categories and devalues members of some of them so that their subjugation and exclusion is legitimised (Miles and Brown 2003; Billig 2002), and that violence is a human activity imbued with meaning through discourse, we applied guidelines set out by Parker (1992) to consider language as a social practice that achieves specific discursive effects by constructing its objects in a particular way. Two interrelated discourses were identified: a community-focused discourse construed the Chinese immigrants as morally and culturally bereft and negated their worth, while a martial discourse focused on defending the locality against foreign invasion. An examination of themes in loyalist culture revealed ways in which the text reconstructed resonant fears, and we argue that the way the in-group constructs its character defines the racist construction of the other. Adapted from the source document.

In a dramatic example of policy diffusion, the past three decades have witnessed the spread of automobile emission standards throughout the world. Contrary to fears that global competition would produce a race to the bottom, there appears to be a race to the top, not only among rich countries but also among poor ones. Using econometric analysis of the adoption of automobile emission standards over the past twenty years for 129 countries, the author argues that this global diffusion results from countries' efforts to stay competitive in the international market. Due to the pressure from importing countries that have adopted stringent emission standards, even developing countries have rapidly moved to adopt rich country standards. The evidence shows that adoption of automobile emission standards correlates with an increase in the total value of automobile exports. Under some conditions, economic incentives in a global market can be a complement to environmental protection. (World Politics / SWP)