scholarly journals Emerging trends: Ethics, intimidation, and the Cold War

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-390
Author(s):  
Kenneth Ward Church ◽  
Valia Kordoni
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Care Needs ◽  
Checks And Balances ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emerging Trends ◽  
New Process ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractThere are well-meaning efforts to address ethics that will likely make the world a better place, but care needs to be taken to avoid repeating mistakes of the past. In particular, ACL has recently introduced a new process where there are special reviews of some papers for ethics. We would be more comfortable with the new ethics process if there were more checks and balances, due process and transparency. Otherwise, there is a risk that the process could intimidate authors in ways that are not that dissimilar from the ways that academics were intimidated during the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

The Doppelgänger and his Master

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kuba Mikurda
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Repressed Memory ◽  
Current State ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Two Sides

A performative introduction, by Kuba Mikurda, to Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take (2009). Based on the themes of duality, playing for both sides, and doppelgänger fantasy, the tells not only the tale of Alfred Hitchcock’ lifelong fascination with such motifs, but also of the Cold War (and its influence on our contemporaneity) as a Hitchcock-esque reality. Using archive footage of Alfred Hichcock Presents, where the author of Psycho impersonates various alternative versions of himself, Grimonprez shows that the two sides of the Iron Curtain are actually two sides of the same coin – perfect mirror images of its double. The same is true for Cold War paranoia, the returning phantom of a global conflict, or atom war – it is ultimately difficult to say whether the films of the master of suspense, such as Birds and North by Northwest are its manifestation or is it maybe that in the current state of late modernity, our experience of the world took on the features of a Hitchcock film. Grimonprez – an artist known for gallery projects and theoretical interests, offers a story of the duplexity of a divided world – a slightly histo/erical one and full of distance and games. All the same, as Karen Beckmann reminds us, “the sameness of a twin is based on the repressed memory of division, breakage, and a sudden partition”.

Freedom and democracy

2018 ◽  
pp. 74-131
Author(s):  
Andrea Mariuzzo
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Central Eastern Europe ◽  
The Past ◽  
Red Army ◽  
Central Eastern ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter explains the importance of the values of freedom and democracy in the Cold War struggle between Italian Communists and anti-Communists. As soon as Cold War tensions broke down the ‘national unity’ of anti-fascist forces, both fronts claimed to be the exclusive representatives of ‘true’ democracy, and compared their competitor with the defeated fascist enemy. The Socialist-Communist alliance acquired the programme of ‘progressive’ (or ‘people’s’) democracy inspired by the experiments in Central-Eastern Europe, and made it the base for its opposition to the supposed Christian-Democratic ‘restoration’ of a new ‘reactionary clerical fascism’, along with the defense of the guarantees for parliamentary opposition established by the republican Constitution of 1948. The anti-Communist front, on its side, found strong unifying motifs in the description of Soviet dictatorship and the ‘sovietization’ of the countries occupied by the Red Army filtered beyond the Iron Curtain, and in their comparison with ‘totalitarian’ experiences lived by Italians in the past years.

Thirty years from Tiananmen: China, Hong Kong, and the ongoing experiment to preserve liberal values in an authoritarian state

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 439-452 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cora Chan
Keyword(s):  
Hong Kong ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
World History ◽  
Tiananmen Square ◽  
Authoritarian State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

Abstract The 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre marked China out as an exception in the chapter of world history that saw the fall of international communism. The massacre crystalized the mistrust between China and Hong Kong into an open ideological conflict—Leninist authoritarianism versus liberal democracy—that has colored relations between the two since then. This article tracks the hold that authoritarianism has gained over liberal values in Hong Kong in the past thirty years and reflects on what needs to be done in the next thirty years for the balance to be re-tilted and sustained beyond 2047, when China’s fifty-year commitment to preserving Hong Kong’s autonomy expires. Still surviving (just) as a largely liberal (though by no means fully democratic) jurisdiction after two decades of Chinese rule, Hong Kong is a testing ground for whether China can respect liberal values, how resilient such values are to the alternative authoritarian vision offered by an economic superpower, and the potential for establishing a liberal-democratic pocket within an authoritarian state. The territory’s everyday wrestle with Chinese pressures speaks to the liberal struggles against authoritarian challenges (in their various guises) that continue to plague the world thirty years after the end of the Cold War.​

Icons of Dissent

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremy Prestholdt
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Transnational Relations ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
Osama Bin Laden ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Che Guevara

The global icon is an omnipresent but poorly understood element of mass culture. This book asks why audiences around the world have embraced particular iconic figures, how perceptions of these figures have changed, and what this tells us about transnational relations since the Cold War era. Prestholdt addresses these questions by examining one type of icon: the anti-establishment figure. As symbols that represent sentiments, ideals, or something else recognizable to a wide audience, icons of dissent have been integrated into diverse political and consumer cultures, and global audiences have reinterpreted them over time. To illustrate these points the book examines four of the most evocative and controversial figures of the past fifty years: Che Guevara, Bob Marley, Tupac Shakur, and Osama bin Laden. Each has embodied a convergence of dissent, cultural politics, and consumerism, yet popular perceptions of each reveal the dissonance between shared, global references and locally contingent interpretations. By examining four very different figures, Icons of Dissent offers new insights into global symbolic idioms, the mutability of common references, and the commodification of political sentiment in the contemporary world.

scholarly journals Hard Ground-Soft Politics: The Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana and Biting of the Iron Curtain

Humanities ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Wiktor Komorowski
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Third Space ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Graphic Arts ◽  
Graphic Art ◽  
Robert Rauschenberg ◽  
Santiago De Chile ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

In 1955, the Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts was founded. It was the first curatorial initiative that aimed to link graphic artists working around the world and with those divided by the Cold War. The Ljubljana Biennial became a major success and its model quickly spread worldwide, augmenting the international circulation of prints and exchanges of artistic concepts. Over the next twenty years similar exhibitions were established in Krakow, Tallinn, San Juan, Santiago de Chile, Cali, Tokyo, Cairo, Fredrikstad, Frechen, Sofia and Bradford. The Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts offered an opportunity for artists from Yugoslavia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, such as Andrzej Lachowicz, Mauricio Leib Lasansky, Adolfo Quinteros and Aleš Veselý, to exhibit their works alongside the protagonists of the western contemporary graphic art circuit such as Robert Rauschenberg, Antonio Segui, Yozo Hamaguchi, Max Bill and Victor Vasarely. The network of exhibitions that followed the example set by Ljubljana Biennial of Graphic Arts became a window into the world not only for printmakers, but also for a number of artists who were affected by Cold War cultural exclusion. The network of dedicated international print exhibitions created favourable conditions for an emerging third space, which became a platform for communication between the cultures divided by the Iron Curtain. This article focuses on the curatorial assumptions that brought the Biennial of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana to life and questions its position as a cultural cornerstone for the Non-Aligned geopolitical order.

Italy: A Clean‐up after the Cold War

1993 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franceso Sidoti
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Democratic System ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Conflictual Relationship

In These Pages We Will Discuss The Thesis That in order to understand the present problems of Italy, one must look back on an era of international politics dominated by the bipolar and conflictual relationship between East and West. This came to an end finally after the failed Moscow coup in mid-1991.From 1946, without interruption, in a Europe divided by the iron curtain, Italy was the frontier country where the cold war was most bitterly fought, because the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was the strongest communist party in the world outside the Soviet empire. From many viewpoints, the Italian Communists were ordinary politicians peacefully involved in cooperatives and in the trade unions. Their management of some important regions and municipalities was judged very favourably by many scholars. In public declarations they stated their preference for a peaceful way to socialism, conversion to liberty, independence from Soviet influence, and acceptance of a democratic system. In fact they shared Moscow's orientations in every international problem where East and West were opposed. Now we understand why: they were heavily financed, directly and indirectly, by the Soviets. But after Yeltsin had thrown out many skeletons from the Kremlin closets, we had the proof that the staunch anti-communists were right. The big lie about Bolshevism concerned Italy also, where the PCI had been helped from Stalin to Gorbachev. This is why still in 1985 the Italian Communists declared the USA to be the only imperialist state in the world.

Conclusion

2021 ◽  
pp. 263-280
Author(s):  
David L. Pike
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Half Century ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Number Of Individuals

The world after 1989 was not necessarily less likely to suffer cataclysmic destruction; however, the imagination of that destruction had moved to new hopes and fears. These new sites of imagination were not only filtered through and generated from the half century of nuclearity that had preceded them; they dwelt in its physical and fictional ruins. Far from receding into the past along with the Cold War that birthed it, the affordances of nuclear apocalypse have proliferated in the new millennium. And as their atomic origins continue to mutate, the process appears less as novelty or aberration than as an everyday matter of course. Dwelling in a permanently bunkered and postapocalyptic condition affords several insights that clinging to the fantasy of a preapocalyptic way of life surviving under the nuclear condition does not afford. Recognized as ontological, the bunker fantasy ceases to operate exclusively as a powerful tool for legitimating surveillance, separation barriers, and enclosure in the name of enhanced security. It can also help to understand the spatio-cultural history of the security imaginary that makes these measures welcome to some, tolerable to some, and abhorrent to others. It enables us to recognize apocalypse not solely as the cataclysmic, unique, and always deferred rupture in time that a nuclear war surely would be, but as an ongoing historical condition always affecting a certain—and substantial—number of individuals and groups within unequal societies, affecting them unequally, and affecting them in intersecting but not always commensurate ways.

Nationalism in Today’s Antarctic

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 531-555 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan D. Hemmings ◽  
Sanjay Chaturvedi ◽  
Elizabeth Leane ◽  
Daniela Liggett ◽  
Juan Francisco Salazar
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
National Pride ◽  
The Past ◽  
Relative Proximity ◽  
The World ◽  
Regional Order ◽  
Carry Over ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Antarctic

Whilst nationalism is a recognised force globally, its framing is predicated on experience in conventionally occupied parts of the world. The familiar image of angry young men waving Kalashnikovs means that the idea that nationalism might be at play in Antarctica has to overcome much instinctive resistance, as well as the tactical opposition of the keepers of the present Antarctic political arrangements. The limited consideration of nationalism in Antarctica has generally been confined to the past, particularly “Heroic-Era” and 1930s–1940s expeditions. This article addresses the formations of nationalism in the Antarctic present. Antarctic nationalism need not present in the same shape as nationalisms elsewhere to justify being called nationalism. Here it occurs in a virtual or mediated form, remote from the conventional metropolitan territories of the states and interests concerned. The key aspect of Antarctic nationalism is its contemporary form and intensity. We argue that given the historic difficulties of Antarctic activities, and the geopolitical constraints of the Cold War, it has only been since the end of that Cold War that a more muscular nationalism has been able to flourish in Antarctica. Our assessment is that there at least 11 bases upon which Antarctic nationalism might arise: (i) formally declared claims to territorial sovereignty in Antarctica; (ii) relative proximity of Antarctica to one’s metropolitan territory; (iii) historic and institutional associations with Antarctica; (iv) social and cultural associations; (v) regional or global hegemonic inclinations; (vi) alleged need in relation to resources; (vii) contested uses or practices in Antarctica; (viii) carry-over from intense antipathies outside Antarctica; (ix) national pride in, and mobilisation through, national Antarctic programmes; (x) infrastructure and logistics arrangements; or (xi) denial or constraint of access by one’s strategic competitors or opponents. In practice of course, these are likely to be manifested in combination. The risks inherent in Antarctic nationalism are the risks inherent in unrestrained nationalism anywhere, compounded by its already weak juridical situation. In Antarctica, the intersection of nationalism with resources poses a particular challenge to the regional order and its commitments to shareable public goods such as scientific research and environmental protection.

New walls to keep the bad out: populism and the totalitarian psyche

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 120-130
Author(s):  
Coline Covington
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
Berlin Wall ◽  
Group Solidarity ◽  
Freedom Of Movement ◽  
Psychological Understanding ◽  
Psychic Development ◽  
The World ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War

The Berlin Wall came down on 9 November 1989 and marked the end of the Cold War. As old antagonisms thawed a new landscape emerged of unification and tolerance. Censorship was no longer the principal means of ensuring group solidarity. The crumbling bricks brought not only freedom of movement but freedom of thought. Now, nearly thirty years later, globalisation has created a new balance of power, disrupting borders and economies across the world. The groups that thought they were in power no longer have much of a say and are anxious about their future. As protest grows, we are beginning to see that the old antagonisms have not disappeared but are, in fact, resurfacing. This article will start by looking at the dissembling of a marriage in which the wall that had peacefully maintained coexistence disintegrates and leads to a psychic development that uncannily mirrors that of populism today. The individual vignette leads to a broader psychological understanding of the totalitarian dynamic that underlies populism and threatens once again to imprison us within its walls.

Land of Blue Helmets

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Arab World ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Member States ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Mediation

Born in 1945, the United Nations (UN) came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This book's claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume includes chapters on the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document