Disciplinary History

2020 ◽  
pp. 111-132
Author(s):  
Andrew R. Hom
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Dual Task ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Theoretical Knowledge ◽  
World War ◽  
Problem Of Time ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Disciplinary History ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Cold War

Part Two uses narrative timing theory to tease out the many ways that IR works to time global political life—that is, to identify which political processes matter, specify how they hang together, and propose how they can unfold toward particular outcomes reflecting our vocational commitments. Chapter four shows that, from very early on, timing dynamics influenced the emergence and development of IR as a distinct domain of inquiry. In fact, timing crises played a constitutive role in key moments of the field’s history. We can see this in scholarly responses to World War I, the thermonuclear revolution, and the end of the Cold War. Taking a closer look at what analysts said and how they thought about these shocking events suggests that the IR project evolved as a collective narrative timing project. More specifically, when confronted by confounding world historical changes, scholars explicitly lamented the problem of time as they worked to rectify, modify, or replace existing accounts of how politics work. In the process, their loosely organized efforts produced and reproduced vocational stories about IR’s role, importance, and potential impact. When IR grapples with temporal phenomena, restoring order to international politics and to its academic study go hand in hand. This supports the argument developed in Part One that whatever else it does, IR pursues the dual task of securing political practice and theoretical knowledge against the ravages of Time.

scholarly journals Troops of the Vilna and Warsaw military districts of the Russian Empire in Belarus (1864–1914)

2020 ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Alexander В. Arlukevich
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Political Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Russian Army ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The World ◽  
The Russian Empire

The article reflects the processes of concentration and territorial deployment of troops of the Russian Empire in Belarus during the existence of the Vilna and Warsaw military districts after the end of the uprising of 1863–1864. The analysis of the reasons for the concentration of formations and units of the Russian army in the region, taking into account the current military-political situation in Europe and socio-political processes that took place within the Belarusian provinces themselves, allowed the author to determine the goals and tasks of the troops that were solved by the latter in Belarus from the middle 1860s to the beginning of the World War I. This research is based on a wide range of sources that were first introduced into scientific circulation, identified by the author in the archives and book repositories of Russia and Belarus. The author identifies the causes and preconditions of creation of system of territorial administration of the armed forces of the Russian Empire in Belarus. The process of creating organizational structures of the Vilna military district and the composition of the military contingent stationed in Belarus and the locations of individual parts and units of the Russian army within the borders of Belarusian provinces are discovered. The author identifies the causes of changes in the composition and the scheme of territorial deployment of troops during the period of military districts.On the basis of a comparison of the results obtained in the study of the above aspects of the subject, the author tried to give an overall assessment of the role and place of Belarusian lands in the system of ensuring military-strategic interests of the Russian Empire, as well as the role of the army in political life of Belarus in the second half of the 1860s until the outbreak of the World War I.

A Tower of Tangled Histories: The Upper Silesia Tower in Poznań and the Making of an Unromantic Poland, 1911–1955

Slavic Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-590
Author(s):  
Patryk Babiracki
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Material Structure ◽  
World War ◽  
Upper Silesia ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The City ◽  
Over Time

Engaging with regional, international, and spatial histories, this article proposes a new reading of the twentieth-century Polish past by exploring the vicissitudes of a building known as the Upper Silesia Tower. Renowned German architect Hans Poelzig designed the Tower for the 1911 Ostdeutsche Ausstellung in Posen, an ethnically Polish city under Prussian rule. After Poland regained its independence following World War I, the pavilion, standing centrally on the grounds of Poznań’s International Trade Fair, became the fair's symbol, and over time, also evolved into visual shorthand for the city itself. I argue that the Tower's significance extends beyond Posen/Poznań, however. As an embodiment of the conflicts and contradictions of Polish-German historical entanglements, the building, in its changing forms, also concretized various efforts to redefine the dominant Polish national identity away from Romantic ideals toward values such as order, industriousness, and hard work. I also suggest that eventually, as a material structure harnessed into the service of socialism, the Tower, with its complicated past, also brings into relief questions about the regional dimensions of the clashes over the meaning of modernity during the Cold War.

Eastern Europe in the Global History of Decolonization

2018 ◽  
pp. 350-372 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Mark ◽  
Quinn Slobodian
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
World War I ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter places Eastern Europe into a broader history of decolonization. It shows how the region’s own experience of the end of Empire after the World War I led its new states to consider their relationships with both European colonialism and those were struggling for their future liberation outside their continent. Following World War II, as Communist regimes took power in Eastern Europe, and overseas European Empires dissolved in Africa and Asia, newly powerful relationships developed. Analogies between the end of empire in Eastern Europe and the Global South, though sometimes tortured and riddled with their own blind spots, were nonetheless potent rhetorical idioms, enabling imagined solidarities and facilitating material connections in the era of the Cold War and non-alignment. After the demise of the so-called “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, analogies between the postcolonial and the postcommunist condition allowed for further novel equivalencies between these regions to develop.

Art and Propaganda

Art History ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Evonne Levy
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Digital Media ◽  
Art History ◽  
World War ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Political Upheaval ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
The Cold War

The rise of the propaganda production in World War I coincided with art history’s consolidation as a discipline. Immediately, the modern category “propaganda” was taken up to describe the relations between art, politics (sacred and secular), and power. After World War II, and in the Cold War, the use of the word “propaganda” shifted and many North American and European art historians resisted the categorization of “art” (associated with freedom) and propaganda (associated with fascist instrumentalization), although historians were less troubled by its use for “images.” The end of the Cold War loosened the prohibition on the term, though many art historians still prefer cognate terms, “persuasion” or “rhetorical,” when pointing to the key element of audience and effectiveness; similarly, many speak of “power,” “politics,” or “ideology” when pointing to institutions and their messages. Because there are alternatives for “propaganda,” the emphasis here is on the literature that have engaged the term itself and the problems it poses to art history, including its ongoing toxicity. Because propaganda arts are so closely associated with the modern regimes that perfected their use (communist Russia, fascist Italy, Nazi Germany), one of the major questions in the art historical literature is the appropriateness of the concept before the 20th century and for nonautocratic regimes. While some periods have attracted the term more than others, since Foucault and post–Cold War, there has been at once an understanding of all institutions, sacred and secular, as imbricated in power relations and on the other, a relaxation of rigid definitions of propaganda as “deceptive” or “manipulative.” These factors have opened scholars in art history considerably to a use of the term, although a reductive understanding of propaganda as inherently deceptive still persists. Three main criteria were used in compiling this article: periods of political upheaval or change in government that have attracted the term in particularly dense ways and generated dialogue over these issues; works that explicitly frame the study of objects as propaganda or substitute terms, rhetoric, persuasion, and ideology; and works by historians of images that explicitly engage with the category of propaganda (excluding, with a few exceptions, popular forms like posters as well as film, television, and digital media). Whenever possible, propaganda’s specificity is insisted on here in relation to art, for art poses special problems to the use of the word propaganda, and its invocation in art history often makes an explicit point.

The Political History of American Food Aid

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Riley
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Food Aid ◽  
The Political ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Agriculture Sector ◽  
History Of

This book discusses the 220-year history of the political and humanitarian uses of American food as a tool of both foreign and domestic policy. During these years, food aid has been used as a weapon against the expansion of bolshevism after World War I and communism after World War II, a cudgel to force policy changes by recalcitrant recipient governments, a method for balancing disputes between Israel and Egypt, a backdoor means of increasing military aid to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, a signal of support to friendly governments, and a resource to help achieve economic development in food-insecure countries. At home, international food aid has, at times, been used to dump troublesome food surpluses abroad and has served politicians as a tool to secure the votes of farming constituents and the political support of agriculture-sector lobbyists, commodity traders, transporters, and shippers. Most important in the minds of many, it has been the most visible—and most popular—means of providing humanitarian aid to tens of millions of hungry men, women, and children confronted, on distant shores, by war, terrorism, and natural cataclysms and the resulting threat—if not the reality—of famine and death. The book investigates the little-known, not well-understood, and often highly contentious political processes that have converted fields of grains, crops of pulses, and herds of livestock into the tools of U.S. government policy.

US-Italian Relations

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leopoldo Nuti ◽  
Daniele Fiorentino
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Strong Relationship ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Political Alignment

Relations between Italy and the United States have gone through different stages, from the early process of nation-building during the 18th and the 19th centuries, to the close diplomatic and political alignment of the Cold War and the first two decades of the 21st century. Throughout these two and a half centuries, relations between the two states occasionally experienced some difficult moments—from the tensions connected to the mass immigration of Italians to the United States at the end of the 19th century, to the diplomatic clash at the Versailles Peace Conference at the end of World War I, culminating with the declaration of war by the Fascist government in December 1941. By and large, however, Italy and the United States have mostly enjoyed a strong relationship based on close cultural, economic, and political ties.

The Arts of War and Deception

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 550-563
Author(s):  
Elizabeth D Samet
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
World War I ◽  
American Literature ◽  
World War ◽  
War Narratives ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Intimate Relation ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Revolutionary Period

Abstract Three recent books—Benjamin Cooper’s Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction (2018), Keith Gandal’s War Isn’t the Only Hell: A New Reading of World War I American Literature (2018), and Jonathan Vincent’s The Health of the State: Modern US War Narrative and the American Political Imagination, 1890–1964 (2017)—invite us to reevaluate the tradition of US war literature. Attempting to rescue it from the misunderstanding and marginalization to which it has been subject over the years, they assess its expression of persistent anxieties about national identity, citizenship, and masculinity. Covering a broad swath of US history, from the Revolutionary period through the Cold War, these books work together to illuminate crucial aspects of the perilous, enduring connection between citizenship and violence. This work is characteristic of a renewed post-9/11 attentiveness on the part of literary and cultural critics to war and its representation. Central to any exploration of the war narratives at the very core of national identity is a recognition of the intimate relation between the arts of war and those of deception.

Humanitarianism, Development, and Security in the 21st Century: Lessons from the Syrian Refugee Crisis

2016 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 382-386 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nell Gabiam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Western World ◽  
World War ◽  
Humanitarian Action ◽  
Syrian Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The 19Th Century

The term humanitarianism finds its roots in 19th-century Europe and is generally defined as the “impartial, neutral, and independent provision of relief to victims of conflict and natural disasters.” Behind this definition lies a dynamic history. According to political scientists Michael Barnett and Thomas G. Weiss, this history can be divided into three phases. From the 19th century to World War II, humanitarianism was a reaction to the perceived breakdown of society and the emergence of moral ills caused by rapid industrialization within Europe. The era between World War II and the 1990s saw the emergence of many of today's nongovernmental and intergovernmental organizations. These organizations sought to address the suffering caused by World War I and World War II, but also turned their gaze toward the non-Western world, which was in the process of decolonization. The third phase began in the 1990s, after the end of the Cold War, and witnessed an expansion of humanitarianism. One characteristic of this expansion is the increasing prominence of states, regional organizations, and the United Nations in the field of humanitarian action. Their increased prominence has been paralleled by a growing linkage between humanitarian concerns and the issue of state, regional, and global security. Is it possible that, in the 21st century, humanitarianism is entering a new (fourth) phase? And, if so, what role have events in the Middle East played in ushering it in? I seek to answer these questions by focusing on regional consultations that took place between June 2014 and July 2015 in preparation for the first ever World Humanitarian Summit (WHS), scheduled to take place in Istanbul in May 2016.

Niemcy w Warszawie po raz pierwszy. Nowsze opracowania na temat niemieckiej okupacji 1915–1918

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (1 (464)) ◽  
pp. 129-140
Author(s):  
Maciej Górny
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
World War ◽  
Proper Place ◽  
The Many ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Great War

The article describes the newer works devoted to the occupation of Polish lands, especially of Warsaw during World War I. Recently, this subject, so far neglected, has drown the attention of numerous scientists, both from Poland and from abroad. Their point of view is different not only from the older perspectives, but also from the perspectives of slightly newer works on the other occupied areas and emphasizing the connection between the experience of the Great War and genocide during World War II. In the most precious fragments, the new historiography gives a very wide image of social life, in which the proper place is taken by previously marginalised social groups. Differently from the older works, the policy of the occupants on the Polish lands is not treated only as a unilateral dictate, but rather as a dynamic process of negotiation, in which the strength and position of each of the (many) sides has been changed. And, this change is accompanied by the new arrangements concerning almost all aspects of the German policy and the conditions of living during World War I.

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