Net-Centric and Information Wars

2018 ◽  
pp. 75-90
Author(s):  
Ofer Fridman

This chapter analyzes two contemporary approaches towards confrontation: net-centric and information wars, developed during late 1990s early 2000s by two Russian scholars, Aleksandr Dugin and Igor Panarin. Although neither mentions Messner’s works, the essence of their concepts echo many of Messner’s ideas discussed in the previous chapter. Indeed, the core of Dugin’s net-centric war and Panarin’s information war (as well as Messner’s subversion-war, as it was interpreted by many Russian contemporary military thinkers) is quite similar. As this chapter shows, all these theories claim that with the geopolitical and technological realities of the twenty-first century, it is easier to achieve political goals by undermining the political authority of the adversary through the manipulation of political elites and the generation of political dissent, separatism and social problems, rather than by waging classic wars and military operations.

Author(s):  
Jack Santino

Since the nineteenth century, attention in folklore and folklife studies has shifted from viewing certain customary symbolic actions such as “calendar customs” and rituals of the life course to a more inclusive performance-oriented perspective on holidays and customs. Folklorists recognize the multiplicity of events that people may consider ritual and festival, and the porous nature of these categories. The concept of the “sacred” has expanded to include realms other than the strictly religious, so as to include the political and other domains, both official and unofficial. A comprehensive study of ritual and festival incorporates a close study of folk and popular actions as well as institutional ceremony. In the twenty-first century, approaching events as both carnivalesque and ritualesque allows folklorists to describe purpose and intention in public events, and to account for political, commemorative, celebratory, and festive elements in any particular event.


Inner Asia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-171
Author(s):  
Hildegard Diemberger

AbstractIn this paper I follow the social life of the Tibetan books belonging to the Younghusband-Waddell collection. I show how books as literary artefacts can transform from ritual objects into loot, into commodities and into academic treasures and how books can have agency over people, creating networks and shaping identities. Exploring connections between books and people, I look at colonial collecting, Orientalist scholarship and imperial visions from an unusual perspective in which the social life and cultural biography of people and things intertwine and mutually define each other. By following the trajectory of these literary artefacts, I show how their traces left in letters, minutes and acquisition documents give insight into the functioning of academic institutions and their relationship to imperial governing structures and individual aspirations. In particular, I outline the lives of a group of scholars who were involved with this collection in different capacities and whose deeds are unevenly known. This adds a new perspective to the study of this period, which has so far been largely focused on the deeds of key individuals and the political and military setting in which they operated. Finally, I show how the books of this collection have continued to exercise their attraction and moral pressure on twenty-first-century scholars, both Tibetan and international, linking them through digital technology and cyberspace.


2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
KARA MOSKOWITZ

AbstractThis article examines squatter resistance to a World Bank-funded forest and paper factory project. The article illustrates how diverse actors came together at the sites of rural development projects in early postcolonial Kenya. It focuses on the relationship between the rural squatters who resisted the project and the political elites who intervened, particularly President Kenyatta. Together, these two groups not only negotiated the reformulation of a major international development program, but they also worked out broader questions about political authority and political culture. In negotiating development, rural actors and political elites decided how resources would be distributed and they entered into new patronage-based relationships, processes integral to the making of the postcolonial political order.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-116
Author(s):  
Jude Lal Fernando

The aim of this article is to identify the glimpses of prophetic imagination amongst the Christian communities in Asia, particularly in Korea and Japan, who are engaged in resisting the new round of militarization in the twenty-first century. This resistance denounces the globalist security complex in the region and announces a nonmilitaristic alternative forming a praxis that is necessary for a new theology of peace in East Asia and in Asia broadly. The political reality of the new round of military empire-building will be discussed with a personal narrative and a political analysis after which the theological meaning of prophetic imagination as opposed to imperial consciousness will be analyzed, correlating the personal and political with the theological. The ways in which the resistance to militarization resonates with the prophetic imagination of an alternative consciousness and community will be examined through an analysis of memories and renunciation of war by the churches. Broad implications of these resonances for a peace theology in Asia will be identified.


2014 ◽  
pp. 106-124
Author(s):  
Konrad Sebastian Morawski

Status of the newspaper “Politika” in Karađorđevićs’ Yugoslavia (1918-1941)The newspaper Politika was founded on 25 January 1904 by Vladislav F. Ribnikar. Since that time the Serbian Press market has begun to develop, and the Politika permanently has taken the important role up to this day. The newspaper witnessed important events in the Balkans in the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century but at the same time it was also under strong influence of Serbian centers of political authority. One example of such an influence was the status of the Politika in the period during the reign of Karađorđević dynasty in Yugoslavia, in 1918-1941. The newspaper then served a propaganda function for the royal court, particularly in 1929-1934. Then king Aleksander ruled in an authoritarian way and Politika played an important part in the country. The mechanism of functioning of the newspaper in the period of the royal authoritarianism, as well as in the remaining years of the interwar Yugoslavia was thus discussed in the article to help clarify the status of Politika under the rule of Karađorđevićs. Status gazety „Politika” w Jugosławii Karađorđeviciów (1918–1941)Gazeta pod nazwą „Politika” została założona 25 stycznia 1904 roku przez Vladislava F. Ribnikara. Od tego czasu zaczął kształtować się serbski rynek prasowy, w którym „Politika” trwale zajmuje istotne miejsce do dzisiejszego dnia. Gazeta była świadkiem ważnych i doniosłych wydarzeń na Bałkanach w XX wieku i na początku XXI wieku, ale zarazem znajdowała się również w strefie ścisłych wpływów politycznych serbskich ośrodków władzy. Jednym z przykładów takiego wpływu był status „Politiki” w okresie panowania dynastii Karađorđeviciów w Jugosławii w latach 1918–1941. Gazeta pełniła wtedy funkcję propagandową dworu królewskiego, co dało się szczególnie zauważyć w latach 1929–1934. Wtedy bowiem król Aleksander I sprawował autorytarne rządy w państwie, których ważną częścią stała się „Politika”. Mechanizm funkcjonowania gazety zarówno w okresie autorytaryzmu królewskiego, jak i w pozostałych latach międzywojennej Jugosławii został więc poddany omówieniu, które umożliwiło wyjaśnienie statusu „Politiki” pod panowaniem Karađorđeviciów.


Author(s):  
J. P. Clark

This article examines the U.S. military’s plans for carrying out combined joint operations across multiple theaters and domains in the twenty-first century. It summarizes the most likely strategic and operational approaches available to future adversaries, such as anti-access/area denial (A2/AD), gray zone warfare, and other asymmetric methods. The article also considers the respective challenges posed by the two likely catalysts for military operations: contested norms and persistent disorder. The U.S. military response to this strategic context is still forming, but there are common themes among the services: the recognition that future operations will entail greater risk; the need to disperse forces to survive on a more lethal battlefield; a desire to create networked forces attacking with a combination of physical and nonphysical (cyber and electronic warfare); and a rebalancing of force structure in terms of both weapon sophistication and mission type.


Author(s):  
Nathan Brown

Twenty-first century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. In this important intervention, Nathan Brown argues that the key to overcoming this antinomy is rethinking the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing claims of those competing schools, any speculative critique of Kant will have to reopen and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to both extend and delimit one another has always been at the core of philosophy and science, and that coordinating their discrepant powers is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique. Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux, while showing how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism is a book that reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Insko

The book’s final chapter turns to the twenty-first-century historical present to examine the resurgence of pious warnings about the dangers of presentism in current debates over historical monuments and other forms of historical commemoration. After linking, by way of Afrofuturism, the recent political slogan #StayWoke to the political disposition identified in the book’s previous chapters, I turn to debates about the renaming of college buildings in order to challenge the ideas about history promoted by antipresentists, whose claims are themselves often ahistorical. The historiographical injunction against presentism, I claim, has unwittingly sustained white supremacy in the United States. I feel strongly that we’re not yet done with history—but not done precisely because of, not despite, the history that we inhabit.


Author(s):  
Laura Robson

This chapter introduces the main question of the book: how did mass violence come to be a primary—perhaps the primary—mode of making political claims in the twentieth and twenty-first century Middle East? It asks when mass violence became a constitutive aspect of the political landscape of the region, why it took precedence over other strategies of state building and establishing political authority, and how governments, armies, and civilians alike came to think of mass violence as a viable and legitimate mode of claiming political space and national rights. Drawing on several different and largely separate historiographies, this introduction argues, makes it possible to produce a synthetic account of violence in the twentieth century Eastern Mediterranean that takes account of regional developments as much as individual national histories.


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