Power Lies in the Barrel of a Gun: Diplomacy Without Strategic Military Capability Is Futile

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 77-99
Author(s):  
Moorosi Leshoele

Abstract The United States of America invests heavily on their military capability and it is estimated that it spends, alone, approximately 40 per cent of what the whole world spends on military. Four of the other super powers that make up the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UN-SC) also spend a significant percentage of their national budgets on military. Chinweizu has for a long time argued that Africa needs a well-resourced African Standby Force (or the Black Africa League) that will protect the interests of the continent so as to prevent the history of Africans enslavement and colonialism repeating itself. This article seeks to analyse Africa’s investment on its military defense capability vis-à-vis the five permanent members of the UN-SC and North Korea, by critiquing two case studies of two of the continent’s economic giants – South Africa and Egypt. Realist and Sankofa perspectives are used as the prisms through which the article was researched. In line with Chinweizu’s observation, the article argues that without serious political will and dedication to building Africa’s nuclear weapons capability and ensuring that Africa is economically self-reliant, diplomatic engagements with the rest of the world as (un)equal partners will remain a pipe dream and the looting of Africa’s mineral wealth will continue unabated. It is clear that given the reality of the African Holocust if African countries fail to collectively defend themselves, Africa will continue to be a political football for the rest of the world.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Yusuf Zaidan ◽  
Moses Glorino Rumambo Pandin

Verbal harassment has become a major scourge of racism against people of Asian descent around the world during the Covid-19 pandemic. According to the national Stop AAPI Hate data, verbal harassment is the most common type of racism among Asian citizens. This behavior takes various forms: scolding, insulting, berating, expelling, yelling, forcing, threatening, and accusing. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze why Non-Asians do not tolerate verbal harassment of people of Asian descent which tends to increase during the Covid-19 pandemic. This study aims to provide information and solutions to the problem of xenophobia during the Covid-19 pandemic against non-Asians which led to acts of racism in the form of verbal harassment of citizens of Asian descent, as well as providing information about the history of racism against Asians, especially in the United States which has been going on for a long time. The method used in this study is a literature review technique from library sources for the last three years with the keywords verbal harassment, racism, and anti-Asian using a constructivism approach. The findings of the study is that the Covid-19 pandemic has built an understanding that non-Asian people have a higher rate than Asian descent who is accused of being the main source of the spread of the pandemic, resulting in inequality in society. simply because they are of a different race. The significance of this research focuses on the main causes of the emergence of a superior understanding of race as seen from the Constructivism approach. Where the bad view of the race of Asian descent is constructed through the influence of the surrounding environment which leads to acts of racism in the form of verbal harassment.


Volume Nine of this series traces the development of the ‘world novel’, that is, English-language novels written throughout the world, beyond Britain, Ireland, and the United States. Focusing on the period up to 1950, the volume contains survey chapters and chapters on major writers, as well as chapters on book history, publishing, and the critical contexts of the work discussed. The text covers periods from renaissance literary imaginings of exotic parts of the world like Oceania, through fiction embodying the ideology and conventions of empire, to the emergence of settler nationalist and Indigenous movements and, finally, the assimilations of modernism at the beginnings of the post-imperial world order. The book, then, contains chapters on the development of the non-metropolitan novel throughout the British world from the eighteenth to the mid twentieth centuries. This is the period of empire and resistance to empire, of settler confidence giving way to doubt, and of the rise of indigenous and post-colonial nationalisms that would shape the world after World War II.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343
Author(s):  
Francis Dupuis-Déri

Résumé.L'étude des discours des «pères fondateurs» du Canada moderne révèle qu'ils étaient ouvertement antidémocrates. Comment expliquer qu'un régime fondé dans un esprit antidémocratique en soit venu à être identifié positivement à la démocratie? S'inspirant d'études similaires sur les États-Unis et la France, l'analyse de l'histoire du mot «démocratie» révèle que le Canada a été associé à la «démocratie» en raison de stratégies discursives des membres de l'élite politique qui cherchaient à accroître leur capacité de mobiliser les masses à l'occasion des guerres mondiales, et non pas à la suite de modifications constitutionnelles ou institutionnelles qui auraient justifié un changement d'appellation du régime.Abstract.An examination of the speeches of modern Canada's “founding fathers” lays bare their openly anti-democratic outlook. How did a regime founded on anti-democratic ideas come to be positively identified with democracy? Drawing on the examples of similar studies carried out in the United States and France, this analysis of the history of the term “democracy” in Canada shows that the country's association with “democracy” was not due to constitutional or institutional changes that might have justified re-labelling the regime. Instead, it was the result of the political elite's discursive strategies, whose purpose was to strengthen the elite's ability to mobilize the masses during the world wars.


2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 36-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Stocker

Nuclear weapon free zones (NWFZs) were an important development in the history of nuclear nonproliferation efforts. From 1957 through 1968, when the Treaty of Tlatelolco was signed, the United States struggled to develop a policy toward NWFZs in response to efforts around the world to create these zones, including in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Many within the U.S. government initially rejected the idea of NWFZs, viewing them as a threat to U.S. nuclear strategy. However, over time, a preponderance of officials came to see the zones as advantageous, at least in certain areas of the world, particularly Latin America. Still, U.S. policy pertaining to this issue remained conservative and reactive, reflecting the generally higher priority given to security policy than to nuclear nonproliferation.


2011 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-228 ◽  
Author(s):  
John L. Rury

The distinguished Africanist Robert Harms once observed that “we historians are a practical people who pride ourselves on our attention to facts and our painstaking attention to detail.” If this is the case in other parts of the world, it is certainly true of American historians, who have been periodically admonished for their disinterest in questions of theory and purpose related to their craft. In this issue we have an opportunity to discuss the question of theory as it may pertain to the history of education, with particular attention to the United States. Regardless of whether one believes that historians should be ardent students of social theory, after all, there is little question about whether they should be cognizant of it. Indeed, there is danger in ignoring it. Quoting John Maynard Keynes, Harms suggested that practical people who feel “exempt from any intellectual influences” run the risk of “becoming slaves to some defunct economist.”


2021 ◽  

The fourth volume of The Cambridge History of America and the World examines the heights of American global power in the mid-twentieth century and how challenges from at home and abroad altered the United States and its role in the world. The second half of the twentieth century marked the pinnacle of American global power in economic, political, and cultural terms, but even as it reached such heights, the United States quickly faced new challenges to its power, originating both domestically and internationally. Highlighting cutting-edge ideas from scholars from all over the world, this volume anatomizes American power as well as the counters and alternatives to 'the American empire.' Topics include US economic and military power, American culture overseas, human rights and humanitarianism, third-world internationalism, immigration, communications technology, and the Anthropocene.


1948 ◽  
Vol 52 (447) ◽  
pp. 141-150
Author(s):  
Wilbur ◽  
Orville

On 6th January 1916 Lord Northcliffe, seconding a vote of thanks to Mr. Griffith Brewer for his lecture on the Life and Work of Wilbur Wright, said among other things : “The fact remains, however, that after more than one hundred years of experiment with aeroplanes, these two brothers were the first people in the world who made a machine to fly, and flew it. I make that remark emphatically, because there is one point to which Mr. Griffith Brewer did not call attention, and that is the attempt that has been made to rob the Wright brothers of the credit of their invention. We have not heard much of that in England, but ‘a prophet is not without honour save in his own country,’ and in the United States there have been long and persistent attempts to belittle the work of Wilbur and Orville Wright. I have closely read and followed the history of the hundred years of aeroplane experiments, and I am convinced that the credit of the first flying aeroplane is due to the Wright Brothers, and from the point of practical flying to nobody else. As an Englishman I am in an independent position, and I know that these words of mine will go across the Atlantic, and I believe they will assist in stopping the spread of the insidious suggestion that the Wrights did not invent the aeroplane.”


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terje Tvedt

AbstractGlobal history has centred for a long time on the comparative economic successes and failures of different parts of the world, most often European versus Asian regions. There is general agreement that the balance changed definitively in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when in continental Europe and England a transformation began that revolutionized the power relations of the world and brought an end to the dominance of agrarian civilization. However, there is still widespread debate over why Europe and England industrialized first, rather than Asia. This article will propose an explanation that will shed new light on Europe’s and England’s triumph, by showing that the ‘water system’ factor is a crucial piece missing in existing historical accounts of the Industrial Revolution. It is argued that this great transformation was not only about modernizing elites, investment capital, technological innovation, and unequal trade relations, but that a balanced, inclusive explanation also needs to consider similarities and differences in how countries and regions related to their particular water systems, and in how they could exploit them for transport and the production of power for machines.


2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 313-321
Author(s):  
Z. H. Popandopulo

In 1977 on the site of famous burial mound Chmyrеva Mohyla located on the northern outskirts of Velyka Bilozerka village of Zaporizhzhia region three bronze pole-tops with images of gryphons were found by local people on the plowed field. There is no evidence whether other artifacts have been found. Luckily nearby in Gunovka village the expedition of Institute of Archaeology of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine was working under the leadership of Yu. V. Boltryk who got the founded artifacts and then sent them to Zaporizhzhia regional museum of local lore, history and economy. The history of excavations of Chmyrеva Mohyla numbers more than a century. They were started by F. A. Braun in 1898, M. I. Veselovskiy (1909—1910) continued the excavations and Yu. V. Boltryk in 1994 completed them. The burial mound has not been excavated in full because of various reasons. The destiny of finds from this barrow was tragic. A lot of artifacts among them silver vessels from the hiding-place which was revealed by M. I. Veselovskiy were lost during the World War II when the collections of Kharkiv historic museum were evacuated. Scythian bronze pole-tops as one of the most interesting categories of artifacts for a long time attracted attention of scholar world. They were classified by types and date, their significance in funeral ceremony and everyday life was searched for. The questions still remain. In this article we tried to put into scholar circulation a scanty type of pole-tops with the image of pacing gryphon on the pear-shaped little bell which is characteristic only for Steppe Dnieper river region. For today only eight of them are known and most of them are originated from of the burial mounds of high Scythian aristocracy: Tovsta Mohyla, Haimanova Mohyla, Chmyrova Mohyla. Chronologically they are slightly differed from other pole-tops both with the image of deer on pear-shaped little bells from Tovsta Mohyla, and with the image of deer on flat cone bushes from Haimanova Mohyla. The question about the place of production of such pole-tops is still opened. Probably just these types of pole-tops could be produced in one workshop but not all known variety of objects as V. A. Ilinska thought. One of the problems to be solved by researchers is searching for such workshops. But if these objects have been moulded by wax models the task becomes more complicated.


Author(s):  
Alexander Sukhodolov ◽  
Tuvd Dorj ◽  
Yuriy Kuzmin ◽  
Mikhail Rachkov

For the first time in Russian historiography, the article draws attention to the connection of the War of Khalkhin Gol in 1939 and the conclusion of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939. For a long time, historical science considered these two major events in the history of the USSR and history of the world individually, without their historic relationship. The authors made an attempt to provide evidence of this relationship, showing the role that surrounding and defeating the Japanese army at Khalkhin Gol in August 1939 and signing in Moscow of the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact played in the history of the world. The study analyzes the foreign policy of the USSR in Europe, the reasons for the failure in the conclusion of the Anglo-Franco-Soviet military union in 1939 and the circumstances of the Pact. It shows the interrelation between the defeat of the Japanese troops at Khalkhin Gol and the need for the Soviet-German treaty. The authors describe the historic consequences of the conclusion of the pact for the further development of the Japanese-German relations and the course of the Second World War. They also present the characteristics of the views of these historical events in the Russian historiography.


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