Suchergebnisse

Study of how the Academic Karelia Society (AKS) understood Finland's national defense and foreign policy situations and tried to influence both during the period 1922-1939. The study is based on AKS original sources, including AKS personnel interviews and press clippings, as well as Finnish Defense Administration documents. AKS' most important archives disappeared without a trace immediately after the Second World War

In this thesis, I critically interrogate power relations that underlie practices, techniques and rationalities of contemporary forms of governance represented by the governing strategy of structural adjustment framework devised by the Bretton Woods institutions— especially the IMF and the World Bank. Far from being a technique of coercion and domination, the thesis demonstrates that structural adjustment framework represents a differing modality of global power that attempts to discursively legitimise external interventions through the imposition of neoliberal economic agenda. I show that structural adjustment policies are carefully constructed neoliberal rationalities of governing through which donors seek to transform the government of Ghana into a self-disciplined neoliberal subject that must behave in an appropriately competitive fashion that is congruent with the ethos of market rationality. I draw on Michel Foucault's nuanced conceptualisation of governmentality, a form of productive and relational power working through individuals' subjectivities particularly as it coexists with the disciplinary rationale of power, and extend it to the relation between the IMF and the World Bank and the government of Ghana. I analyse how these interactions are embedded within a discursive formation and concrete practices which establish certain views of 'a problem' and mobilise particular authoritative actors, techniques and forms of truth as solutions. I also explore how over the decades the IMF and the World Bank through the modalities of conditionality associated with structural adjustment have sought to govern, remake and regulate the economic, political and social institutions of recipient States. In closing, and by way of illustration, I also examine 'non-compliance' as one possibility into what Foucault has termed 'counter-conduct' through which subjects undermine and challenge governmental forms of power. This being said, within the structural adjustment discourse, there remains, I would be inclined to argue, repressive and dominant forms of power. This thesis, contributes to the contemporary scholarship on governmentality to deepen and re-evaluate the distinctiveness of power relations in the example of the IMF and the World Bank adjustment programmes in Ghana.

For the first time worldwide, this collection brings together analyses of the last two centuries of historical change around the shores and drainage basin of Lake Ladoga, Europe's largest lake. The main focus of the narrative is the Northern Ladoga region, which was a Finnish administrative area between 1812 and 1944. After the Second World War, the entire shoreline of Lake Ladoga was incorporated into the northeast part of Russia's border region, the Autonomous Republic of Karelia and the Leningrad Province. The main theme uniting this collection is how the relationship between humans and nature is shaped by industrialization and modernization in society. Other key issues include protecting nature and perspectives on particular places and times, which are reflected in the methodological and thematic choices made in this volume. The research framework set by the editor, Professor Maria Lähteenmäki, is the new lakefront history (Finn. uusi rantahistoria), focusing on approaches to environmental, economic and sensory history of lakes. To draw broad conclusions, on the one hand, the multilevel changes on the lakefront cannot be understood without knowledge of the history of the wider drainage basin, and awareness of the geopolitics of the region and the climate changes. On the other hand, the human relationship to natural waters has changed significantly in 200 years. Thinking in terms of economic benefit has gradually given way to principles of sustainable development. Lake Ladoga is also being redefined from a spatial perspective, as nationalist ownership of the region is coupled with global concern about the state of Europe's largest lake.

Alex Matson (1888–1972) is an important Finnish literary critic and essayist, whose literary reviews and collections of essays have made a vital contribution to the development of Finland's postwar literary generation. Born in Finland as the son of a sailor, Matson moved as a young child with his family to Hull in England, where he went to school. In the 1910s, he moved back to Finland, where he at first established himself as painter associated with the expressionist November Group, an important Finnish artistic movement at the time. In the interbellum, he moved from fine arts to literature. In the 1920s and 1930s, he published several novels, but more important was his work as transmitter of international literary ideas to Finland. Together with his first wife, Kersti Bergroth, he edited the literary journal Sininen kirja (""The Blue Book""; 1927–1930), which was inspired by the writings of John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield. Sininen kirja is the most international literary journal in Finnish history to date and introduced Finland to the most significant modernist writers of the first half of the 20th century (Gottfried Benn, Jean Cocteau, Alfred Döblin, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Paul Valéry, Virginia Woolf).
During the Second World War, Matson worked for the State Communications Agency, which was responsible for disseminating relevant information about Finland to other nations and for informing Finns of relevant developments abroad. It was also tasked with studying the prevailing mood among the population in Finland. In Matson's unpublished wartime diaries, one can see the first symptoms of a shift in Finnish culture away from Germany and towards Anglo-Saxon culture.
From the 1940s onwards, Matson recommended new English and American novels as a part of his work as reader for Finnish publishing houses, and he also translated works by Joyce, Hemingway and Steinbeck. With the help of a network of international literary critics, Matson became acquainted with New Criticism, which he introduced to Finland before it became established among academic researchers. He was often critical of academic literary studies, but his seminal essay works Romaanitaide (""On the Prose Novel""; 1947), John Steinbeck (1948), Kaksi mestaria (""Two Masters"", on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; 1950) as well as his impressive conversational skills were instrumental in introducing knowledge about the principles of the prose novel to several authors (including Väinö Linna, Lauri Viita, and Hannu Salama), and contributed to their views of literature. Matson emphasized the importance of reading and understanding high-quality literature for the wellbeing of society.