“Bridges of Reconciliation”

2019 ◽  
pp. 96-127
Author(s):  
Petra Goedde
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Internal State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Universal Code ◽  
Peace Activism ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Politically Active ◽  
Political Realm

A host of religious individuals and groups became politically active on behalf of world peace at the height of the Cold War. Those groups tried to add a religious dimension to the debates about Cold War international relations, while at the same time pushing the religious conceptualization of peace into the political realm. The Cold War turned religious groups and individuals into political activists. These activists still promulgated peace as an internal state of spiritual harmony, common to many of the world’s largest religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Hinduism. But they added a new dimension that stressed its communal, political, and global aspirations. They merged the ideals of peace activism and ecumenism in the postwar world by relying on the universal code enshrined in the global human rights agenda, doing so a decade before the secular human rights revolution erupted in the 1970s.

scholarly journals Examining the ‘age of apology’: Insights from the Political Apology database

2021 ◽  
pp. 002234332110246
Author(s):  
Marieke Zoodsma ◽  
Juliette Schaafsma
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War

It is often assumed that we are currently living in an ‘age of apology’, whereby countries increasingly seek to redress human rights violations by offering apologies. Although much has been written about why this may occur, the phenomenon itself has never been examined through a large-scale review of the apologies that have been offered. To fill this gap, we created a database of political apologies that have been offered for human rights violations across the world. We found 329 political apologies offered by 74 countries, and cross-nationally mapped and compared these apologies. Our data reveal that apologies have increasingly been offered since the end of the Cold War, and that this trend has accelerated in the last 20 years. They have been offered across the globe, be it that they seem to have been embraced by consolidated liberal democracies and by countries transitioning to liberal democracies in particular. Most apologies have been offered for human rights violations that were related to or took place in the context of a (civil) war, but there appears to be some selectivity as to the specific human rights violations that countries actually mention in the apologies. On average, it takes more than a generation before political apologies are offered.

Gendered Peace, Women’s Peace

2019 ◽  
pp. 128-161
Author(s):  
Petra Goedde
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Early Years ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Advocacy Groups ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Women Strike For Peace ◽  
War Discourse ◽  
Political Realm ◽  
International League

During the early years of the Cold War, women were active participants in all major peace advocacy groups, and they continued to work in traditional women’s peace organizations, such as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). They also created new groups, such as the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), Women Strike for Peace (WSP), and Another Mother for Peace (AMfP). Some groups relied heavily on their identity as women and mothers, others not at all. Regardless of how much or little they emphasized a special feminine disposition toward peace, these activists believed that their common experiences as women and mothers united them across national, ideological, and religious divides. Gendered language in the Cold War discourse on peace reinforced the notion that women had a special predisposition toward peace. The gendering of peace empowered women in the political realm, but it also allowed male-dominated political elites to marginalize peace as a women’s issue.

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

State Failure and the Political Violence Phenomenon: A Comparative Analysis of Iraq and Syria Cases

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 170 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Eylem Özkaya Lassalle
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
State Failure ◽  
The Political ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

The concept of failed state came to the fore with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the USSR and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Political violence is central in these discussions on the definition of the concept or the determination of its dimensions (indicators). Specifically, the level of political violence, the type of political violence and intensity of political violence has been broached in the literature. An effective classification of political violence can lead us to a better understanding of state failure phenomenon. By using Tilly’s classification of collective violence which is based on extent of coordination among violent actors and salience of short-run damage, the role played by political violence in state failure can be understood clearly. In order to do this, two recent cases, Iraq and Syria will be examined.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Print Literacy

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.

‘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.

Od politycznej współpracy do gospodarczej konkurencji – przemysł obronny krajów Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej po upadku ZSRR

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
Mieczysław Szlachta ◽  
Andrzej Ciupiński
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Economic Recession ◽  
Defense Industry ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Central Eastern Europe ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Cold War

The paper presents the scope and scale of transformation of the defense industries of Central Eastern Europe (CEE) countries after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR. The starting point is the role and position of the armaments economy sector (armaments economy environment), embedded in the realities of the centrally planned economy, and its submission to the politics of the USSR. The turn of the centuries was a period of political and economic transformation conducted during the conditions of a deep economic recession. The defense industry was one of the economic sectors most affected by the crisis. The economic and defense policy of CEE countries was aimed at preserving the capabilities of the armaments sector. Restructuring activities initiated and forced by the change of the political and economic environment have already brought noticeable effects, even though the process has not yet been completed. Defense industry enterprises have become entities operating on the same terms and conditions as other companies on the competitive market. The method of comparative analysis and a case study supplemented with elements of descriptive statistics were used to evaluate the course of the processes. The study has been focused on the analysis of the course of the changes and examination of effects of the analyzed phenomena for the economy and defense of the CEE countries, taking into account primarily their scale and scope.

scholarly journals From Iron Curtain to Velvet Curtain? Peter Brook's Hamlet and the Origins of British–Soviet Cultural Relations during the Cold War

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-626 ◽  
Author(s):  
SARAH DAVIES
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Iron Curtain ◽  
Cultural Relations ◽  
East And West ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Divide

The article assesses the significance of the Moscow tour of Peter Brook's Hamlet. It considers how far the tour succeeded in overcoming the symbolic iron curtain by examining what Hamlet meant for contemporaries on both sides of the political divide. It argues that the Hamlet tour served at once to perpetuate and undermine the divisions between East and West, confirming Iriye's observation that on one level the Cold War intensified antagonism between states, while on another it helped to foster the growth of internationalist sentiment.

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