Suchergebnisse

Lilly reviews 'The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict' by Cynthia Cockburn.

In his article, "Schindler's Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleansing, and Population Transfers," Robert Hayden combines comparative history, political commentary, and amoral realism. In the process, he presents a number of arguments with which it is difficult to disagree, but also many that are provocative and, indeed, offensive. Because Hayden makes so many arguments in this piece (both primary, secondary, and parenthetical; explicit and implicit; open and disguised) my critique will not follow the organization of his paper. Rather, it will challenge Hayden's article on three counts: 1) its factual accuracy; 2) its lack of reference to existing literature on the topic; and 3) the logic, validity, and moral consequences of its arguments.

Following the devastation of World War II, the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY) called on all patriotic youth to join volunteer labor brigades and to rebuild the country's shattered infrastructure. Party propaganda for the brigades emphasized not only their economic function but also their role in nurturing a generation of people with new values, beliefs and standards of behavior.

On 27 June 2004, Serbian voters went to the polls for the third time in a year to choose a president. The winner of the first two rounds of voting, Tomislav Nikolić, Deputy to the President of the extreme right Serbian Radical Party (SRS), lost the third round of voting to the more liberal Borisav Tadić by just under 8 percentage points (53.2 to 45.4), and the Radicals failed to form a ruling coalition in government. Nevertheless, more than five years after the last war in the disintegration of the Yugoslav state, the largest political party in the largest of the successor states has been characterized as the most extreme right party in the Balkans today. Indeed, the Radicals have been an enduring force in Serbian politics for the past decade and a half, sometimes ruling in coalition with Slobodan Milošević's Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). SRS founder Vojislav Šešelj, a flamboyant, obstreperous, highly influential figure, and his fellow Radicals have sought and in many ways succeeded in shaping the post-communist transformation of Yugoslav politics and society, calling for a return to the true spirit of Serbia, when the nation was strong because its men defended its honor as well as its borders.