Suchergebnisse

This interdisciplinary volume of original and provocative essays mixes international relations with philosophy, psychoanalysis, mythology and the arts to develop an experimental framework with which to reflect on world politics.

The bicentennial of the Greek Revolution against Ottoman rule is an opportune time to ask why conflict between Greeks and Turks has continued for over two hundred years. Greek and Turkish national narratives reveal deeper reasons for the persistence of mutual belligerence, including common emphasis on national emancipation through violence, perceptions of iniquitous treatment in previous political settlements, and the influence of "banal imperialism" embedded in everyday national symbols. These mindsets continue to fuel disputes over Cyprus and maritime rights.

Summary
The Broken Chair, a colossal sculpture positioned in the Place de Nations outside the main entrance to the Palais de Nations — the UN Office at Geneva — provides a site and a micro-geography of diplomacy. This essay examines this transgressive gift to the UN, challenging customary norms of gift-giving, and its energetic use by liminal diplomatic subjects pursuing diverse causes. It explores the social life and agential competences of this diplomatic object, its ability to recontextualise 'the square of nations' and to affect and empower those connected to it. Overall, it surveys its vibrant materiality that supports alternative diplomatic presence and possibility.

Summary
In engaging the visual aspects of public diplomacy, this article has three objectives. First, it introduces the notion of visual diplomacy — the ways and means by which images are used by plural diplomatic actors to transmit ideas to audiences, producing and circulating meanings that serve particular purposes, with the aim of influencing, shaping and transforming relations between actors and across publics. Second, it examines how the spectacle of diplomacy is enacted by focusing on a particular case of commissioned cinematography of Cypriot public diplomacy. Third, it engages visual diplomacy cinematically, employing Deleuze's insights on the cinematic apparatus, and by producing an essay film, The Blessed Envoy, linked to this article. The film reuses, through creative montage, nine official documentaries of Cypriot public diplomacy, revealing the key narratives and hidden transcripts that the visual material disseminates, thus encouraging a reflexive focus on the use of imagery in diplomacy.

This interview was conducted over the Internet between February and April 2006. Armand Mattelart is Emeritus Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at the University of Paris VIII. From 1962 to 1973 he was Professor of Sociology of Population and Communication at the Catholic University of Chile, Santiago, and United Nations expert in social development. During the Popular Unity period (1970–73), he worked with the Government of President Salvador Allende until the military coup of September 1973, when he was expelled from Chile. Between 1975 and 1982, he taught at the University of Paris VII and Paris VIII, and, between 1983 and 1997, as founding member of the Communications Department at the University of Rennes 2 (Haute-Bretagne). He has carried out numerous research and teaching missions in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. His research interests include communication theory and history, media studies and international communication. He has authored and co-authored numerous books, translated into many languages, including: Advertising International: The Privatization of Public Space (1991); Mapping World Communication: War, Progress, Culture (1994), The Invention of Communication (1996), Networking the World 1794–2000 (2000), The Information Society: An Introduction (2003), and, with Michèle Mattelart, Rethinking Media Theory: Signposts and New Directions (1992); The Carnival of Images: Brazilian Television Fiction (1990) and Theories of Communication: A Short Introduction (1998). His most recent book, published in French, is: La Globalisation de la Surveillance: Aux Origines de l'Ordre Sécuritaire (September 2007).