Comparative Area Studies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Berg-Schlosser
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Ivory Coast ◽  
Qualitative Comparative Analysis ◽  
The Other ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
International Context ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Cross Area Studies ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Analytical Approaches

Area studies have undergone significant changes over the last two decades. They have been transformed from mostly descriptive accounts in the international context of the Cold War to theory-oriented and methodological analytical approaches. More recent comparative methods such as “Qualitative Comparative Analysis” (QCA) and related approaches, which are particularly suitable for medium N studies, have significantly contributed to this development. This essay discusses the epistemological background of this approach as well as recent developments. It provides two examples of current “cross area studies,” one concerned with successful democratic transformations across four regions (Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America, and East Asia), the other with political participation in marginalized settlements in four countries (Brazil, Chile, Ivory Coast, Kenya) in a multilevel analysis. The conclusion points to the theoretical promises of this approach and its practical-political relevance.

The Futurists. Experts in World Futures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Way

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

Reply to the Commentaries

2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-95
Author(s):  
Christian Nuenlist ◽  
Anna Locher ◽  
Garret Martin
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Charles De Gaulle ◽  
International Perspectives ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
French Foreign Policy ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
De Gaulle

Four distinguished analysts of French foreign policy under Charles de Gaulle provide in-depth assessments of the new book edited by Christian Nuenlist, Anna Locher, and Garret Martin, Globalizing de Gaulle: International Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958–1969, published by Lexington Books. The commentators praise the book's wide scope and many of its essays and broad themes, but they raise questions about Garret Martin's contention (shared by a few, though not all, of the other contributors to the volume) that de Gaulle had a coherent if ultimately unsuccessful strategy to overcome the Cold War and move toward the unification of Germany and Europe. In article-length commentaries, both Andrew Moravcsik and Marc Trachtenberg take issue with Martin's view, arguing that de Gaulle's foreign policy involved more bluff and bluster than any genuine attempt to bring about the reunification of Germany or to end the Cold War. Moravcsik also provides a spirited defense of the “revisionist” conception of de Gaulle's policy toward Europe, which sees the general as having been guided mostly by his domestic economic and political interests—a conception that Trachtenberg has also come to accept. The forum ends with a reply by Nuenlist, Locher, and Martin to the four commentaries.

scholarly journals Current Nuclear Strategies and Arsenals of the United States of America and the Russian Federation

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 23-44
Author(s):  
Adam Potočňák
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nuclear Forces ◽  
Nuclear Strategy ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Russian Federation ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The U.S

The article holistically analyses current strategies for the use and development of nuclear forces of the USA and Russia and analytically reflects their mutual doctrinal interactions. It deals with the conditions under which the U.S. and Russia may opt for using their nuclear weapons and reflects also related issues of modernization and development of their actual nuclear forces. The author argues that both superpowers did not manage to abandon the Cold War logic or avoid erroneous, distorted or exaggerated assumptions about the intentions of the other side. The text concludes with a summary of possible changes and adaptations of the American nuclear strategy under the Biden administration as part of the assumed strategy update expected for 2022.

An Ordinary Soviet Death

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Victoria Smolkin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Christian Tradition ◽  
The West ◽  
Rational Argument ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter describes the timing and motivations of the USSR's promotion of atheist doctrine. At the outset, it seems, the Soviets expected Orthodoxy to wither away, invalidated by rational argument and the regime's own record of socialist achievement. This did not happen, but Soviet officialdom did not take full cognizance of the fact until the 1950s and 1960s at the height of the Cold War. Then it was that the Soviet Union's confrontation with the West came to be recast in religious terms as an epic battle between atheist communism on the one hand and on the other that self-styled standard-bearer of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the United States. So, here indeed, in Soviet atheism, is a secular church militant—doctrinally armed, fortified by the concentrated power of the modern state, and, as many believed, with the wind of history at its back. It speaks the language of liberation, but what it delivers is something much darker. The chapter then considers the place of ritual in the Soviet secularist project.

Escaping Stalemate

2020 ◽  
pp. 66-93
Author(s):  
Keir A. Lieber ◽  
Daryl G. Press
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Competitive Dynamics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nuclear Forces ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Over Time

This chapter analyzes the durability of stalemate. It investigates whether the situation can be reversed once countries reach the point where neither can disarm the other. For geopolitical competition to be greatly mitigated, the path to stalemate must be a one-way street. If the opposite were true, then even the achievement of stalemate would not eliminate competitive dynamics. The chapter shows that the survivability of nuclear arsenals has varied over time. During the later decades of the Cold War, it seemed that the superpowers were permanently locked into stalemate. It talks about “counterforce” attacks that are aimed at disarming the enemy's nuclear forces and appeared impossible because the superpower arsenals were enormous and dispersed, and some weapons seemed impossible to find.

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