Postula el presente artículo que tras la invasión a Irak estamos en presencia de una carrera bélica de los Estados Unidos, con un trasfondo geopolítico. Señala que la actual administración estadounidense busca ejercer su dominación imperial desde el poder hegemónico, renunciando a la política y al multilateralismo, sabiéndose la única potencia emergente de la postguerra fría. Tras los atentados en Nueva York y Washington habría surgido un nuevo modelo de seguridad basado en una reconceptualización de enemigo, que combina las doctrinas (...) de la guerra total y la de guerras de baja intensidad contenidas en la Doctrina para la Seguridad Nacional. Con ello sostiene el autor que el mundo ha ingresado a una era marcada por la doctrina de la guerra perpetua cuyo autonominado gendarme global son los EUA. (shrink)

Mirrors of Justice is a groundbreaking study of the meanings of and possibilities for justice in the contemporary world. The book brings together a group of both prominent and emerging scholars to reconsider the relationships between justice, international law, culture, power, and history through case studies of a wide range of justice processes. The book's eighteen authors examine the ambiguities of justice in Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, and Melanesia through critical empirical and historical chapters. The (...) introduction makes an important contribution to our understanding of the multiplicity of justice in the twenty-first century by providing an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that synthesizes the book's chapters with leading-edge literatures on human rights, legal pluralism, and international law. (shrink)

Focusing on the tradition of Roman Catholic social teaching, this dissertation examines and compares two contemporary models of theological-ethical reflection: the neoliberal model represented by the United States bishops' conference, and the structuralist model espoused by the Latin American bishops' conference, both focusing on their understanding of political economy in the context of North-South American relations. ;The thrust of this dissertation is that the study of theological ethics in general, and in this particular case of the tradition of Catholic social (...) teaching on political economy, constitute a valuable contribution to understanding of the profound human dimensions implied in the North-South relations. ;Building on the comparison of these two Catholic traditions, I propose a model of Christian social ethics which, at the normative level, attempts to retrieve the ethical claims of the option for the poor within the tradition of human rights, and at the practical level seeks to provide--in dialogue with the discipline of international Relations--a more suitable framework for addressing problems of international political economy. ;This study proposes two elements for the construction of a new model of social ethics. First, it offers an original approach method that combines the strengths of the hermeneutical and correlational methods in order to evaluate the intelligibility, coherence and adequacy of these two models, not only within their own system, but in relations to the social issues that they intend to assess. Second, it presents an alternative view to those of the structuralist and neoliberal theories of international political economy through the contribution of the newly emerging theories of neostructuralism and institutionalism. ;In light of the changes and new prospects emerging in the area of North-South relations in the post-Cold War era, this study suggests a model of social ethics based on a post-hegemonic understanding of North-South cooperation. This research indicates that the increasing number of mutual agreements among states, rather than asymmetric relations built on hegemonic power and dependency, constitute an area of international institutions that is indicative of a transformation of North-South American states. (shrink)

Technological advancements, especially with regard to enhancements of human capacities and powers, have instigated a collision between opposing views of the human person. I begin with the premise that the predominant classical view of the human person attained its clearest and most cogent expression in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and can be termed the theory of the homo integralis. The human person is, for Thomas, the integrated being par excellence: he is a union of the material (body) and the (...) immaterial (soul); his freedom is guided by a normative nature; he is himself a product of and participant in nature; he is a member of a common species from which he draws his identity; and he balances the needs of his embodied state with a recognition that his existence is not limited to it. Due to the philosophical and technological revolutions of the modern period, themselves an outgrowth perhaps of earlier attitudes, a contrasting view of the human person emerged: the homo technologicus. Technological man, unlike his classical predecessor, is marked by fundamental disintegration: he is divided in himself, between mind and body; he is dissociated from a normative human nature; he is divided from nature itself as he sets himself against it through technological means; he is divided from the human community in radical, self-determining autonomy; and he is severed from any sense of transcendent purpose or value aside from that which can be attained through his own powers, technological or otherwise. By recovering a sense of the homo integralis as articulated by Thomas Aquinas, a fresh appraisal of contemporary issues regarding the human relationship to technology, human capacities and powers as evaluated by movements like transhumanism, and ultimately, human meaning and value, is made possible and is shown to provide a consistent and appealing rejoinder to the disintegrated vision of man that emerges in a technologized world. (shrink)

Philosophy after Hiroshima offers a philosophical analysis of the issues surrounding war and peace, and their challenges to ethics. It reminds us that the threat posed to civilization by nuclear weapons persists, as does the need for continuing philosophical reflection on the nature of war, the problem of violence, and the need for a workable ethics in the nuclear age. The book recalls the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the beginning of the nuclear age, the Cold War, (...) and subsequently of the hegemonic unilateralism of the sole superpower. Reviewing early critical responses to the first atomic bombings by such figures as Camus, Sartre, Russell, Heidegger, Jaspers and others, the authors themselves respond to contemporary threats to peace, including the US "global war on terrorism," the recrudescence of militarism, and the continuation of imperial power politics by other means. In the nuclear age, the use of military force as a political instrument threatens the future of humanity. This poses formidable challenges to philosophy and calls for its transformation. In using memories of the atomic bombings to help us to grasp the moral implications of the current escalation of global violence, the authors hope to show the urgent relevance of nonviolence in the contemporary context. Drawing on a range of philosophical traditions Taoist and Western the contributors take up a welter of philosophical and political concerns of topical interest, including human rights, toleration, the politics of memory, intercultural dialogue, the ethics of co-responsibility, and the possibility of a cosmopolitan order of law and peace. Going beyond postmodernism and deconstruction, several of the authors develop a post-critical, constructive paradigm of thinking a philosophy of the possible and a new methodology for the realization of the creative potential of the humanities. Philosophy is viewed as a peace-promoting global dialogue. (shrink)

This article traces disagreements about the genetic effects of low-dose radiation exposure as waged by James Neel, a central figure in radiation studies of Japanese populations after World War II, and Yuri Dubrova, who analyzed the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant accident. In a 1996 article in Nature, Dubrova reported a statistically significant increase in the minisatellite DNA mutation rate in the children of parents who received a high dose of radiation from the Chernobyl accident, contradicting studies that found (...) no significant inherited genetic effects among offspring of Japanese A-bomb survivors. Neel’s subsequent defense of his large-scale longitudinal studies of the genetic effects of ionizing radiation consolidated current scientific understandings of low-dose ionizing radiation. The article seeks to explain how the Hiroshima/nagasaki data remain hegemonic in radiation studies, contextualizing the debate with attention to the perceived inferiority of Soviet genetic science during the Cold War. (shrink)

The author reflects on the implications of the Kosovo conflict for under-standing the post-Cold War changes in NATO's strategic concept. He develops a theoretical account of the move from war to police violence and the differences between the two concepts of violence.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, the governance of the global system has been organized around the United States and the advanced industrial democracies. In the shadow of the Cold War, these countries established a wide array of global and regional institutions to manage economic, political, and security relations. The Bretton Woods institutions, GATT, the United Nations, and various functional institutions provided the bulwark for an open and managed postwar world economy and global order. An American-led alliance system (...) provided a structure for regional security in Europe and East Asia. When the Cold War ended, these far-flung institutions were extended into a more fully global multilateral system of governance. The United States dominated the global order. But, more so than did leading states in previous eras, it established its dominance through institutions. It was an American-led liberal hegemonic order. (shrink)

An American conservative movement developed rapidly after World War II. It brought together intellectuals and politicians opposed to the New Deal in domestic policy and Soviet communism in foreign policy. The movement's first presidential candidate, Barry Goldwater, lost the election of 1964 but its second, Ronald Reagan, won the election of 1980. It has remained an influential force in American life up to the present, despite strong internal contradictions, which include disagreements about centralized power, about religion, about tradition, about (...) elites, and about the free market. To some of the movement's early luminaries, such as Russell Kirk, free-market capitalism was the antithesis of conservatism since it required perpetual innovation and the sweeping away of traditional forms. To others, such as Ayn Rand, capitalism was the heart and soul of conservatism because it alone preserved the dignity and freedom of the individual. (shrink)

The idea that peace prevails in the relations among liberal democratic states, given its first expression in Kant’s essay “Toward Perpetual Peace,” has gathered a great deal of attention in the post-Cold War period as both a testable hypothesis and a proposal for expanding peace through democratization. This article examines the explanations for how a democratic peace is achieved and sustained. It argues that, despite tendencies within democratic state relations toward peaceful conflict resolution, such a peace is (...) destabilized by continued adherence to a set of assumptions and practices which we might call, following Jane Addams and John Dewey, ‘the war system.’ In the context of the ideological and institutional supports of militarism, democratic states remain subject to the dynamics of conflict escalation that produce occasions for war. This war system is the undoing of the democratic peace. (shrink)

Donnelly's essay reconstructs the scholarly discourse on human rights that began with the initial mid-1970s "innovative and controversial" approach of linking human rights to foreign policy.

The past thirty years have been marked by an energetic renewal of traditional just war theory. Now changes in relations among nations and changes in military technology may require a recasting of the just war ethic comparable to its recasting by Vitoria and Suarez in the six-teenth century. After reviewing the way the just war tradition met the practical tests posed by Vietnam, nuclear deterrence, and the Gulf War, I will argue that the erosion of the Westphalia legacy and the (...) collapse of the cold war press two questions upon us: Can any modern war be defended as just? Are there resources in the just war tradition for assessing what constitutes morally defensible, even morally required, intervention by one state in the affairs of another? (shrink)

There is nothing new or even faintly original in the neoconservative foreign policy vision. It simply recycles the old national security ideology for a post-Cold War era. Consistent with this ideological agenda, conservatives have also been advancing the case for the strong executive who operates above the law. In championing the principle of the strong executive, they are seeking to re-define the meaning of modern republicanism around this principle. During the 1960s Hannah Arendt and Hans Morgenthau developed a (...) broad critique of the national security state and its ideology in their opposition to the Vietnam War. This essay examines their critique, and the alternative conception of republicanism they developed as part of this critique. (shrink)

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 Resumo O tema deste trabalho é "conservadorismo em educação". Problematiza indagando: como o pensamento conservador, sobretudo que expressa a visão política durante os anos 1990, manifestou-se no campo educacional? O objetivo deste artigo é o de evidenciar que o pensamento conservador interferiu no campo educacional durante as reformas educacionais realizadas nos anos 1990, mediante rearranjos curriculares, face às necessidades do sistema capitalista, então globalizado ou mundializado. A metodologia utilizada neste trabalho segue as diretrizes (...) da pesquisa conceitual, implicando o tratamento bibliográfico-documental da literatura especializada em Filosofia da Educação. A título de resultados, o trabalho mostra que, hoje, vivemos na vigência de marcos legais e diretrizes filosófico-pedagógicas lastreadas nos imperativos que orientaram as reformas político-econômicas, ideológico-culturais e epistêmico-educativas afeitas às necessidades do sistema capitalista, então hegemônico no período pós-Guerra-Fria. WHAT IS CONSERVATISM IN EDUCATION ?The theme of this work is " conservatism in education” . It presents a research p roblem by asking : how conservative thought , particularly the one expressing the political point of view during the 1990s , manifested itself in the educational field ? This to e vidence that conservative thought has manifested itself in the educational field for the educational reforms during the 1990s through curriculum rearrangements , for the needs of the capitalist system , then globalized or in world wide range. The methodology used in this work follows the guidelines of conceptual research , involving the treatment of bibliographic and documentary specialized literature in P hilosophy of E ducation. As a result , the study demonstrates that today we live in the presence of legal and philosophical - pedagogical guidelines based on the imperatives that have guided the political and economic , ideological , cultural and epistemic -educational reforms related to the needs of the capitalist system , hegemonic during the post - Cold War period. Keywords : Education , Conservatism , Capitalism, Educational Reform. (shrink)

The article focuses on the politics of representation in Kosova since the United Nations took over ‘peace management’ in 1999. It uses UN propaganda posters (political pedagogy) and local nationalist political advertising as a way to read the multiple gendered discourses of representation. It shows how gender is used relationally between competing forces – the ‘international community’ and nationalists – as a tool to ensure UN's imposition of Western policies and norms and as a mechanism for local politicians to consolidate (...) their domination of the domestic/private sphere. Moreover, it discusses the price paid to mimic the West: how Kosovar politicians have sought to ‘undo’ national identity in favour of a Western self-representation through a gendered abnegation of Islam. Thus, as an intrinsic part of the discourse of ‘peace-building’, these images represent the site of power production, domination, negotiation, and rejection, involving the collaboration of different actors, institutions, and individuals. Three specific points will be made: first, the article seeks to show that a Western political modernization discourse has, paradoxically, reinforced patriarchal relations of power and traditional gender roles in Kosova through the subjugation of women. Second, it explains the inability to resolve competing Albanian narratives – one relying on the legacy of peaceful resistance and the other on the armed struggle against Serbian domination during the 1990s. Third, through the intermeshing of international peace-keepers and local nationalist patriarchs, it will show how the militarization of culture is perpetuated through, and in relationship to, gender. (shrink)

A step towards constructing an ethics of international activism is proposed by formulating a series of constraints on what would constitute morally permissible agency in the context that involves delivering services abroad, directly or indirectly. Perhaps surprisingly, in this effort the author makes use of the concept of ‘force multiplier’. This idea and its official applications have explanatory importance in considering the correlation between the post-Cold War phenomenal growth in the number of international non-governmental organizations and the emergence (...) of the US as the sole, unchallenged superpower. Four moral constraints useful for morally assessing international activism are formulated and defended. The final outcome is an argument in favor of an overarching duty for any activist-minded Westerner to go local, while developing nations are urged to closely regulate, even criminalize, activities by international activists and ‘human rights organizations’ on their territory when not in solidarity or in support of local movements. The position defended, urging the normative primacy of local over international activism, also finds support in Immanuel Kant’s Third Definitive Article for A Perpetual Peace. (shrink)

For some years now, Jürgen Habermas, possibly the most influential European philosopher of today, has been producing a growing number of publications on world politics. In the historical context of the collapse of bipolarity and the advent of the triad, along with the punitive wars in the Gulf and Yugoslavia, he is very far from being alone: Jacques Derrida and Noberto Bobbio,Michael Walzer and John Rawls, to name only the most forceful, have also been thinking out loud about the new (...) political configurations beyond the nation-state. The characteristic feature of Habermas’s thought is to perceive a radically new historical configuration, which he calls a‘post-national constellation’ and which would justify the development of a new political project, as a transition to a new cosmopolitan law. In what follows, I examine the precise modalities that are supposed to transform his philosophical design into political and legal arrangements, attempting to dissect the Habermasian vision of a post-Cold War politics better adapted to the challenges of the new century, and to throw light on the ideology behind it, as a prolegomenon to the larger project Habermas invites us to undertake. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons ed. by Alexandru Matei, Christian Moraru and Andrei TerianLaura Elena Savu WalkerMatei, Alexandru, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian, editors. Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons. Bloomsbury, 2021. 376pp.Far from “mourning” the demise of theory, this timely and thoughtfully curated essay collection testifies to its “renewed vitality,” its compelling (...) presence “across fields, domains of life, and geocultural boundaries,” and its power to build an ever-expanding world community of practioners who are forming what has come to be known as a “theory commons” (ix). As the collection’s editors point out, theory’s new lease on life hinges on ensuring both the democratic workings of this “world discourse formation” (1) and on the responsible theorizing of the very notion of community in “a world threatened by all kinds of anti-communal actions and reactions, from runaway globalization to exacerbated tribalism and tunnel-vision politics” (x). Working on the margins, specifically, out of a Romanian “lab” called The Critical Theory Institute (CTI), which opened its doors in early 2000, the contributors seek to revise the “standard history of theory,” one whose “Western origins, authority, and cultural compass ” strike them as “exceedingly reductive” (3). This project of geotheoretical repositioning and recalibration aims to recast theory as a “quintessentially cross-linguistic, cross-cultural, trans- and intercontinental undertaking” (4). As such, it carries on the project, launched in a previous volume, Romanian Literature as World Literature (2018), of fashioning an alternative to the nation-state paradigm that has long shaped literary and intellectual histories. In both of these works, Romanian critics and theorists have tuned into a wide range of voices, and tapped into a shared conceptual and methodological apparatus—itself the product of “an ethno-linguistic medley of traditions” (8). This approach informs what editors see as the “epoch-making” (17) discursive paradigm that has taken shape in globally networked post-Cold War societies (17), a viral model of cultural influence that fosters an ontology of “contact, contagion, of infection, dissemination, and horizontal accumulation” (15).To give us a sense of theory’s complex genealogy and evolution, the editors reference the Bulgarian critic Galin Tihanov, who has attributed [End Page 122] important developments in contemporary theory to the achievements of theorists (Nikolai Trubetskoi, Roman Jakobson, Vladimir Propp, and Georg Lukács) and schools of thought (Russian Formalism and the Prague Linguistic Circle). In “Traveling Theory” (1983) and “Traveling Theory Reconsidered” (2000), Edward Said called attention to the migratory nature of contributions made, for instance, by Georg Lukács, whose theories moved across different European locales in this period. Since then, contemporary theory has branched out to integrate the travels and travails of scholars affiliated with theory labs located in Bulgaria, Hungary, Slovakia, and last, but not least, Romania (10).Theory in the “Post” Era highlights five characteristics that distinguish theory in the “post” era from earlier forms: 1) It has a “reluctantly epoch-alist” thrust (19; original italics), which assumes that the “post” lexicon entails “rupture, discontinuity, and opposition” (19), radical departures, tentative claims, provisional conclusions, and ex-centric perspectives; 2) it adopts a “self-reflexive and experimental” (20; original italics) stance in which theorists invoke inherited approaches or invent new ones; 3) it introduces a “transdisciplinary” (21; original italics) scope that allows authors to interrogate the foundations, aims, and methods of theoretical discourse and practice across several knowledge domains, from which they “borrow whole vocabularies and toolkits” (21); 4) it is “nationally, transnationally, and ecologically affiliative” (20) in ways that allow theorists to “think with others at a distance” (21) about global issues; and 5) it is programmatic, placing critical and theoretical concerns in the service of “the ethical, the political, and the communal” (22). Organized around three main themes (“Aesthetics,” “Temporalities,” and “Critical Modes”), the essays juxtapose discussions of pivotal historical events and cultural phenomena with literary analyses of Romantic era “classics,” modernist experiments, and postmodern works of the post-Communist era, a corpus that includes, but is not limited to, landmark works of national culture that are now part of a fast-expanding planetary... (shrink)

In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, it is timely to ask what continuing role, if any, the concept of sovereignty can and should play in the emerging "new world order." The aim of _Law, Power, and the Sovereign State_ is both to counter the argument that the end of the sovereign state is close at hand and to bring scholarship on sovereignty into the post-Cold War era. The study assesses sovereignty as status and (...) as power and examines the issue of what precisely constitutes a sovereign state. In determining how a political entity gains sovereignty, the authors introduce the requirements of de facto independence and de jure independence and explore the ambiguities inherent in each. They also examine the political process by which the international community formally confers sovereign status. Fowler and Bunck trace the continuing tension of the "chunk and basket" theories of sovereignty through the history of international sovereignty disputes and conclude by considering the usefulness of sovereignty as a concept in the future study and conduct of international affairs. They find that, despite frequent predictions of its imminent demise, the concept of sovereignty is alive and well as the twentieth century draws to a close. (shrink)

This article examines European memory and memory politics. Taking as my starting point the deepening divisions between the “old” and “new” members of the European Union since the 2004 and 2007 enlargements, I investigate whether differences in official memory concerning World War II on the one hand and communism on the other should be regarded as permanent. Using examples from the development of West-European postwar memory-regimes and comparing them to the current state in postcommunist Europe I suggest that with respect (...) to historical memory the two parts of Europe underwent similar developments, crises and debates, thus making eventual convergence and consensus possible. However, there are various factors that complicate progress in this area: postcommunist countries have to contend not only with their wartime history but also with the experience of communism, which latter colours the assessment of the former. (shrink)

Linguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist, Julia Kristeva is one of the most influential and prolific thinkers of our time. Her writings have broken new ground in the study of the self, the mind, and the ways in which we communicate through language. Her work is unique in that it skillfully brings together psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, literature, linguistics, and philosophy. In her latest book on the powers and limits of psychoanalysis, Kristeva focuses on an intriguing new dilemma. Freud and (...) psychoanalysis taught us that rebellion is what guarantees our independence and our creative abilities. But in our contemporary "entertainment" culture, is rebellion still a viable option? Is it still possible to build and embrace a counterculture? For whom--and against what--and under what forms? Kristeva illustrates the advances and impasses of rebel culture through the experiences of three twentieth-century writers: the existentialist John Paul Sartre, the surrealist Louis Aragon, and the theorist Roland Barthes. For Kristeva the rebellions championed by these figures--especially the political and seemingly dogmatic political commitments of Aragon and Sartre--strike the post-Cold War reader with a mixture of fascination and rejection. These theorists, according to Kristeva, are involved in a revolution against accepted notions of identity--of one's relation to others. Kristeva places their accomplishments in the context of other revolutionary movements in art, literature, and politics. The book also offers an illuminating discussion of Freud's groundbreaking work on rebellion, focusing on the symbolic function of patricide in his _Totem and Taboo_ and discussing his often neglected vision of language, and underscoring its complex connection to the revolutionary drive. (shrink)

Contemporary (post-1945) liberalism functions analogously to Roman Catholicism in the decades after 1443. Both ideologies, in their respective periods, represent the hegemonic ideology of Western civilization, despite the fact that both comprise a miscellany of competing belief systems. Both ideologies are dominated by a single hegemonic power—the United States and the Renaissance papacy, respectively—which strives for doctrinal stability. All who reject official “doctrine,” however, are rendered liable to violent suppression. In this, papal Catholicism and American liberalism (...) display an ultra-conservative outlook; but they also evince a powerfully millenarian streak, as evidenced by their dual proclamations of the “end of history” and their zealous missionary responses to macro-historical events in the final decades of the fifteenth and twentieth centuries. For ideologues of both regimes, those events speak to an ultimate harmony of truth and value that only serves to entrench their own dogmatism. This, however, has dire consequences when it comes to war, as can be seen in the “crusading” character of contemporary liberal warfare. Ultimately, the Renaissance papacy proves unable to maintain its monopoly on Christian doctrine; and one has to wonder if a similar fate may befall America's perceived role as the champion of liberalism. (shrink)

This paper examines the development of British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby's views and their scientific and social reception in the United States during the 1950s. In a 1951 report for the World Health Organization Bowlby contended that the mother is the child's psychic organizer, as observational studies of children worldwide showed that absence of mother love had disastrous consequences for children's emotional health. By the end of the decade Bowlby had moved from observational studies of children in hospitals to (...) animal research in order to support his thesis that mother love is a biological need. I examine the development of Bowlby's views and their scientific and social reception in the United States during the 1950s, a central period in the evolution of his views and in debates about the social implications of his work. I argue that Bowlby's view that mother love was a biological need for children influenced discussions about the desirability of mothers working outside the home during the early Cold War. By claiming that the future of a child's mind is determined by her mother's heart, Bowlby's argument exerted an unusually strong emotional demand on mothers and had powerful implications for the moral valuation of maternal care and love. (shrink)

This article examines Thai policy towards Malaysia and Myanmar in the post-Cold War period and argues that bilateral relations between Thailand and these countries have deteriorated considerably. The immediate reason for the change is the collapse of structural arrangements associated with the Cold War, in particular the Indochina Security Complex and domestic political developments in Thailand and Myanmar. Whereas a number of issues like illegal migration, fishing and insurgency have contributed to the deteriorated relations, the situation has (...) been reasonably well managed. Factors contributing to the stability of the situation include regular bilateral dialogue and exchanges as well as common membership in a number of multilateral fora like ASEAN, ARF, AFTA and APEC. (shrink)

In the fall 2007 Diet session, the largest opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) showed strong opposition against the government's proposal to continue the Self-Defense Forces (SDF) refueling operations to support maritime inspections in the Indian Ocean. In order to evaluate this parliamentary confrontation, the article compares the handling of this issue with the six past major post-Cold War national security policies. The DPJ constantly presented its own legislative proposals in order to participate in Diet deliberation. DPJ's counter (...) proposals, however, were not always cooperative with the government. This different attitude by the DPJ could not be explained by the public and media opinions or the position of the supporting organization but by DPJ's political calculation. (shrink)

Linguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist, Julia Kristeva is one of the most influential and prolific thinkers of our time. Her writings have broken new ground in the study of the self, the mind, and the ways in which we communicate through language. Her work is unique in that it skillfully brings together psychoanalytic theory and clinical practice, literature, linguistics, and philosophy. In her latest book on the powers and limits of psychoanalysis, Kristeva focuses on an intriguing new dilemma. Freud and (...) psychoanalysis taught us that rebellion is what guarantees our independence and our creative abilities. But in our contemporary "entertainment" culture, is rebellion still a viable option? Is it still possible to build and embrace a counterculture? For whom -- and against what -- and under what forms? Kristeva illustrates the advances and impasses of rebel culture through the experiences of three twentieth-century writers: the existentialist John Paul Sartre, the surrealist Louis Aragon, and the theorist Roland Barthes. For Kristeva the rebellions championed by these figures -- especially the political and seemingly dogmatic political commitments of Aragon and Sartre -- strike the post-Cold War reader with a mixture of fascination and rejection. These theorists, according to Kristeva, are involved in a revolution against accepted notions of identity -- of one's relation to others. Kristeva places their accomplishments in the context of other revolutionary movements in art, literature, and politics. The book also offers an illuminating discussion of Freud's groundbreaking work on rebellion, focusing on the symbolic function of patricide in his _Totem and Taboo_ and discussing his often neglected vision of language, and underscoring its complex connection to the revolutionary drive. (shrink)

As a rising power, China has become actively involved in regional bilateral/multilateral arrangements in the post-Cold War, especially post-crisis (1997– 98 financial crises) era, and this has attracted much attention from within and outside East Asia. Diverse understandings of China's regional ambition have appeared, especially since the launch of the China-ASEAN free trade agreement (FTA). Aiming at deciphering the ideas behind China's regional thinking, this paper argues that China's perspective on regionalism is a broadened economic regionalism, (...) which is basically economic-centered, because economic performance is vital both to its long-term strategic target and to its internal social stability. This economic regionalism will last for some time because China will be a developing country at least in the mid-term, which means China will have to focus more on its economic performance. In practice, China will engage bilaterally or multilaterally with others through its FTA strategy. Thus, China cannot be a main contributor to East Asian integration as expected, owing to the inward-looking nature of its economic regionalism. Also, the institutional integration of East Asia needs the effort of all the players in the region. (shrink)

After the collapse of the Cold War system, Japan became more active in contributing to international peace and security. Especially under the Koizumi administration, Japan successfully passed major pieces of national security legislation, such as the 2001 Anti-Terrorism and the 2003 Iraq Special Measure Laws, in a timely manner. A changing international security environment in the Cold War transformed Japan's media and public opinion to a more realistic one, which supported Koizumi's active national security policy and changed the (...) dynamics of party politics. In order to prove this, this study first explores the influence of the Japanese media, especially the press. Next, it presents the opinion of major newspapers and the public on individual national security issues. Finally, it analyzes the press's influence on public over the issue of constitutional revision. (shrink)

For the past three decades Sri Lanka was stalemated between governments that were not prepared to devolve power to the Tamil majority provinces and a Tamil militant movement that wanted a separate country. In February 2002, the Sri Lankan government and LTTE signed a ceasefire agreement under Norwegian government auspices that appeared to offer the real prospect of a final end to violence as a means of conflict resolution. The ceasefire between the government and the LTTE held for nearly (...) four years despite significant problems affecting the peace process, problems that led to the LTTE’s withdrawal from the peace talks. However, the ceasefire collapsed in early 2006 with a series of ambushes of government soldiers by the LTTE, eventually leading to counter measures and counter attacks by the forces of the government, measures in which the government wrested back control of territory placed under the control of the LTTE by the terms agreed upon by the Ceasefire Agreement. Today Sri Lanka is a country that continues to be deeply divided on lines of ethnicity, religion and politics. Horizontal inequalities, defined as severe inequalities in economic and political resources between culturally defined groups, were undoubtedly a contributing factor for the perpetuation of Sri Lanka’s long-running conflict. No sooner it won the war, the government asserted economic development to be the main engine of reconciliation. (shrink)

The difference in attitudes, interests and influences of the great powers contributedto greater uncertainty and fear for the future of nations and states. In the pastdecade, revisionist and autocratic countries such as Russia and China have sought toshift the focus from the West to the East and build a “post-Western world order” thatwill reshape the world against American values and interests. In this new period of transition,which resembles the time of the Cold War, the traditional security-military issuesof the (...) balance of power, the arms race, the struggle for territories and the strengtheningof alliances are being emphasized again. A possible confrontation between the greatpowers, where the United States of America is still the leading power in the world, whilethe PRC is the second economic and military power, and Russia is one of the two mostpowerful nuclear powers, could threaten global and regional security and stability.The sharpened geopolitical rivalry between the “big three” will increase tensionsin their spheres of interest, that is, in the regions and countries that are locatedon the strategic lines of separation. The focus of attention is on Eastern Europe and theIndo-Pacific region, which are of great geostrategic importance for the great powers andtheir alliances. Due to the historical connection with these “exclusive zones of interest”,there is a possibility that the previous “competitive coexistence” will escalate into anintense security rivalry. (shrink)

Why should sovereign states obey international law? What compels them to owe allegiance to a higher set of rules when each country is its own law of the land? What is the basis of their obligations to each other? Conventional wisdom suggests that countries are too different from one another culturally to follow laws out of mere loyalty to each other or a set of shared moral values. Surely, the prevailing view holds, countries act simply out of self-interest, and they (...) eventually consent to norms of international law to regulate matters of common interest.In this groundbreaking book, Fernando Tesón goes against this prevailing thought by arguing, in the Kantian tradition, that a shared respect for individual human rights underpins not just the obligation countries feel to follow international law but also international laws themselves and even the very legitimacy of nations in the eyes of the international community. Tesón, both a lawyer and a philosopher, proposes that an overlapping respect for human rights has created a moral common ground among the countries of the world; and moreover, that such an outlook is the only one that is rationally defensible. It is this common set of values rather than self-interest that ultimately provides legitimacy to international law. Using the tools of moral philosophy, Tesón analyzes the concepts of sovereignty, intervention, and national interest; the contributions of social contact theory, game theory, and feminist theory; and the puzzles of self-determination and group rights.More than simply outlining his theory, Tesón goes on to give detailed examples of international laws, international institutions, and their human rights foundations, putting his ideas to work and addressing legal reforms called for by the theory. He suggests that treaties, for example, should be considered binding if, and only if, the consent to the treaty was given by a genuinely representative government, one that acts out of interest for the human rights of its citizens. Although the theoretical achievement of this book is to challenge received wisdom on the foundation of international law, the practical ambition is a call to reform the international legal system for the post–Cold War era, to substitute for the old order one that gives primacy to human dignity and freedom over state power. (shrink)

Is it possible to preserve national security through ethical policies? Richard Ned Lebow seeks to show that ethics are actually essential to the national interest. Recapturing the wisdom of classical realism through a close reading of the texts of Thucydides, Clausewitz and Hans Morgenthau, Lebow argues that, unlike many modern realists, classic realists saw close links between domestic and international politics, and between interests and ethics. Lebow uses this analysis to offer a powerful critique of post-Cold War American (...) foreign policy. He also develops an ontological foundation for ethics and makes the case for an alternate ontology for social science based on Greek tragedy's understanding of life and politics. This is a topical and accessible book, written by a leading scholar in the field. (shrink)

The emergence of private authority has become a feature of the post-Cold War world. The contributors to this volume examine the implications of this erosion of the power of the state for global governance. They analyse actors as diverse as financial institutions, multinational corporations, religious terrorists and organised criminals. The themes of the book relate directly to debates concerning globalization and the role of international law, and will be of interest to scholars and students of international relations, (...) politics, sociology and law. (shrink)

The past decade has seen an explosion of work on the history of the human sciences during the Cold War. This work, however, does not engage with one of the leading human sciences of the period: linguistics. This article begins to rectify this knowledge gap by investigating the influence of linguistics and its concept of study, language, on American public, political and intellectual life during the postwar and early Cold War years. I show that language emerged in three (...) frameworks in this period: language as tool, language as weapon, and language as knowledge. As America stepped onto the international stage, language and linguistics were at the forefront: the military poured millions of dollars into machine translation, American diplomats were required to master scores of foreign languages, and schoolchildren were exposed to language-learning on a scale never before seen in the United States. Together, I argue, language and linguistics formed a critical part of the rise of American leadership in the new world order — one that provided communities as dispersed as the military, the diplomatic corps, scientists and language teachers with a powerful way of tackling the problems they faced. To date, linguistics has not been integrated into the broader framework of Cold War human sciences. In this article, I aim to bring both language, as concept, and linguistics, as discipline, into this framework. In doing so, I pave the way for future work on the history of linguistics as a human science. (shrink)

This article considers why institutionalized commemoration of the Holocaust in the United Kingdom developed in the 1990s. It finds that the answer may have less to do with Jewish lobbies, or the influence of a “Holocaust Industry” and much, more to do with state political objectives in the ebb of the Cold War. It argues that by repackaging and ritualizing the Holocaust into a “sacred” event in which Western states themselves were absolved of responsibility but also sought to come (...) to Jewish rescue, it became an invaluable prop with which to promulgate Western values while at the same time acting as a moral alibi for interventions against anti-Western regimes. By focusing on the example of specifically British relations with Iraq, it is demonstrated that the moral high ground which Western states have attempted to milk from a Holocaust association is meretricious cant.Appalling and inhuman acts of genocide changed the course of history in the twentieth century. Millions of people perished or had their lives hideously damaged. This is an opportunity for us to recognize and act upon the lessons of the past. Our aim in the twenty-first century must be to work towards a tolerant and diverse, society which is based upon the notions of universal dignity and equal rights and responsibilities for all citizens. The Holocaust Memorial Day is a symbol of this. (shrink)

In this essay, I reflect on the divergent arguments about limited force made by Daniel R. Brunstetter and Samuel Moyn in their respective monographs. Arguing that their positions can be reconciled, I agree with Brunstetter that limited force has a role to play in establishing and maintaining a just world order. At the same time, however, I am mindful of Moyn's warning that limited force may lead to perpetual war. The way to ensure that limited force both works toward (...) justice and does not result in perpetual war, I argue, is to focus more on considerations of jus ante bellum (right before war) and jus post bellum (right after war), the so-called “growing edges of just war theory.” I hold that the responsible use of statecraft, which just war thinking seeks to inform, accepts that limited force constitutes a legitimate tool to facilitate order, justice, and peace. However, any justifiable use of force must be restrained and limited and aim for a just peace. The embrace of limited force should thus be complemented with an effort by state leaders to bolster the edges of just war in order to facilitate a security environment that requires the use of limited force less frequently. (shrink)

This article considers the capacity of the military body to appropriate various modes of power, personnel and material, in terms of the tache. In particular we examine the (post)colonial military body, especially in Southeast Asia, and its intimate relations to the detachment of the colonial state from the colonial body and attachment to the global regimes of Cold War and neo-liberal post Cold War processes. We do so through a wide range of ‘texts’– including a (...) Conrad novella, a Singaporean documentary series, transformers (toys), and international money laundering – in which the defining logic that the (post)colonial military body deploys is its capacity to attach and detach at will. A series of related and homologous attachments and detachments proceed from this capacity: the power of sovereignty, the generation and circulation of capital, and the transformation of the colonial military body into the postcolonial military body. However, it is also the logic of this empowering connectivity that imposes intractable limits on the desire for ultimate control, as the tache always indicates something beyond the corpus, something outside the locus of control. (shrink)

In the past two decades academic and research literature on “corruption” has flourished. During the same period organizations and initiatives fighting against corruption have also significantly expanded, turning “anti-corruption” into a new research subject. However, despite a few exceptions there is a division of labor between scholars who study corruption itself and those who study the global anti-corruption industry. Juxtaposing corruption’s local discourses and anti-corruption international practices, this article is an attempt to bring together these two intertwined research dimensions and (...) explore how an ethnographic approach might contribute to framing them together. Firstly, it describes how corruption in Romania is often conceptualized and explained in terms of national heritage, something related to old and recent cultural history, including traditional folklore. Secondly, it explores how anti-corruption works in practice, focusing on international legal cooperation projects monitoring the progress and shortcomings both prior to and post Romania’s accession to the European Union. Finally, revealing the articulations of these two apparently unrelated research fields, the article argues that corruption’s local explanations and the circular logic of auditing observed within the anti-corruption industry share a common developmental ideology mirroring the crypto-colonialist structure of power relations and dependency among European nation-states emerging out of the Cold War. (shrink)