scholarly journals Global IR and Western Dominance: Moving Forward or Eurocentric Entrapment?

2019 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melody Fonseca

Over the last decade, a call for decolonisation has challenged IR scholarship. The call has advocated for the need to decolonise the epistemology and ontology of the discipline, critically engaging with the legacies of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and patriarchy in global power relations. Parallel to the decolonial project, a call to globalise International Relations has been made by well-known scholars in recent years predominantly through the Global IR project. In this review essay of four books I briefly engage with the debates around Global IR and its critics drawing on a decolonial perspective. On the one hand, I discuss the potentialities and limitations of historiographical deconstruction as a methodological tool, raising issues with the current silencing of the ‘present’ due to the continued coloniality of knowledge. On the other hand, I delve into the wide range of possibilities that a serious and critical commitment to diversifying the discipline of IR might bring to academics in the so-called non-West/Global South. I analyse current critiques of Global IR considering them necessary though, in some cases, agents for the reification and silencing of the interests of the non-West/Global South. I argue that, whilst coloniality operates in multiple ways, decoloniality is also a project that surpasses the ideal total exteriority as imagined through the West/non-West dichotomy. Relaciones Internacionales Globales y Dominación Occidental: ¿Avance o entrampamiento eurocéntrico?

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (5) ◽  
pp. 882-901
Author(s):  
Julia Gallagher

AbstractThis article draws on a Kleinian psychoanalytic reading of Hegel’s theory of the struggle for recognition to explore the role of international misrecognition in the creation of state subjectivity. It focuses on Ghana’s early years, when international relations were powerfully conceptualised and used by Kwame Nkrumah in his bid to bring coherence to a fragile infant state. Nkrumah attempted to create separation and independence from the West on the one hand, and intimacy with a unified Africa on the other. By creating juxtapositions between Ghana and these idealised international others, he was able to create a fantasy of a coherent state, built on a fundamental misrecognition of the wider world. As the fantasy bumped up against the realities of Ghana’s failing economy, fractured social structures, and complex international relationships, it foundered, causing alienation and despair. I argue that the failure of this early fantasy was the start of Ghana’s quest to begin processes of individuation and subjectivity, and that its undoing was an inevitable part of the early stages of misrecognition, laying the way for more grounded struggles for recognition and the development of a more complex state-subjectivity.


IJOHMN ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Boubaker Mohrem

After the World War II, the world remarks many changes in every aspect including culture, society, literature and so on. Writers around the world wrote about the effect of colonizer/colonized relationship. Edward Said is one of the pillars who deals with such discourse. Said believes that the legacy of the colonizer still exists in terms of civil wars, corruption and labor exploitation. In other word, Said means that the West creates a wrong image about the Orient and considers it as the “Other” in contrast to the ideal West. Said was the one who deconstructs the western’s thinking about the East. So his books : Orientalism (1978), The Question of Palestine (1979) and Covering Islam (1981) are appropriate to examine the idea of the ‘Other’ and to show how Said decipher the western wrong image about the East. Thus, this paper will emphasis on the concept of the Other according to Said.


Author(s):  
K.T. Zhumagulov ◽  
◽  
R.O. Sadykova ◽  

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the evolution of international relations in Europe in the middle of the 5th century, which involved a struggle for hegemony between the Hunnish Empire ruled by Attila on the one hand and both of the Roman Empires - on the other hand. By the late spring of 452, Attila had gathered capable troops and went ahead with launching a new campaign into Italy, the heart of the Roman Empire. The Byzantine diplomacy managed to send Attila against the West and may have played its role in this. The Hun aristocracy and hordes are thought to spur their ruler into launching the campaign to capture new spoils of war too. At all events, it is necessary for us to objectively reconstruct the events of the Italian campaign


Author(s):  
Евгения Андреевна Долгова

В статье анализируется трансформация сюжета шпиономании в советских игровых кинокартинах о быте советских учёных конца 1940-х - начала 1950-х гг. Кинематограф этого времени внимателен к фигуре ученого: картины, посвященные героическим биографиям или научной повседневности, отражали статус науки в обществе, повседневность научных работников. Автор анализирует мифологию современного кинолентам общества, реконструирует представления власти об идеальном типе взаимоотношений ученого и государства. Делается вывод о том, что роль учёного в кинематографе тех лет специфична - с одной стороны, его образ часто приобретал черты нравственной максимы, с другой - оказывался в фокусе шпиономании. Мотив шпиономании, отрицание «низкопоклонства перед Западом» и космополитизма - специфичные черты кинематографа тех лет, нашедшие отражение и в конкретных исторических событиях - например, предвоенной дескридитирующей компании против Н. Н. Лузина, послевоенном деле «КР». В основу работы с аудиовизуальными источниками положен метод поэтапного структурированного наблюдения. The article aims to study the plot of espionage in Soviet films about the life of Soviet scientists in the late 1940s-early 1950s. The Cinema of this time is attentive to the figure of a scientist: the films are dedicated to heroic biographies or scientific everyday life, they reflected the status of science in society. The author analyzes the mythology of films, reconstructs the authorities ' ideas about the ideal type of relationship between the scientist and the state. It is concluded that the role of the scientist in the cinema of those years is specific - on the one hand, his image often acquired the features of a moral maxim, on the other-was in the focus of espionage. The close intertwining of the spy motif, the negation of «admiration for the West» and cosmopolitanism - specific feature of the cinema of those years, as reflected in specific historical events - for example, the defamatory company against Nikolay N. Luzin, post-war case «КR». The audio-visual sources were analyzed with the method of step-by-step structured observation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI

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.


Matatu ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-134 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chantal Zabus

The essay shows how Ezenwa–Ohaeto's poetry in pidgin, particularly in his collection (1988), emblematizes a linguistic interface between, on the one hand, the pseudo-pidgin of Onitsha Market pamphleteers of the 1950s and 1960s (including in its gendered guise as in Cyprian Ekwensi) and, on the other, its quasicreolized form in contemporary news and television and radio dramas as well as a potential first language. While locating Nigerian Pidgin or EnPi in the wider context of the emergence of pidgins on the West African Coast, the essay also draws on examples from Joyce Cary, Frank Aig–Imoukhuede, Ogali A. Ogali, Ola Rotimi, Wole Soyinka, and Tunde Fatunde among others. It is not by default but out of choice and with their 'informed consent' that EnPi writers such as Ezenwa–Ohaeto contributed to the unfinished plot of the pidgin–creole continuum.


1999 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-32 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. H. Vaux ◽  
M. P. S. F. Gomes ◽  
R. J. Grieve ◽  
S. W. Woolgar

This paper addresses differences in the way that the problems of small UK firms are construed by policy makers on the one hand, and by the executives of small companies on the other. The authors employ a discursively-based analysis of interviews carried out with managers of small manufacturing companies in the West London area. They suggest that SME executives construe their attitudes to advanced technology and innovation within the terms of some clear, but implicit management values which tend to lead to the perception of innovation as a risk to be managed, rather than an opportunity to be exploited. It is suggested this has significant implications for attempts to change small company culture.


Author(s):  
Valerii P. Trykov ◽  

The article examines the conceptual foundations and scientific, sociocultural and philosophical prerequisites of imagology, the field of interdisciplinary research in humanitaristics, the subject of which is the image of the “Other” (foreign country, people, culture, etc.). It is shown that the imagology appeared as a response to the crisis of comparatives of the mid-20th century, with a special role in the formation of its methodology played by the German comparatist scientist H. Dyserinck and his Aachen School. The article analyzes the influence on the formation of the imagology of post-structuralist and constructivist ideological-thematic complex (auto-reference of language, discursive history, construction of social reality, etc.), linguistic and cultural turn in the West in the 1960s. Shown is that, extrapolated to national issues, this set of ideas and approaches has led to a transition from the essentialist concept of the nation to the concept of a nation as an “imaginary community” or an intellectual construct. A fundamental difference in approaches to the study of an image of the “Other” in traditional comparativism and imagology, which arises from a different understanding of the nation, has been distinguished. It is concluded that the imagology studies the image of the “Other” primarily in its manipulative, socio-ideological function, i.e., as an important tool for the formation and transformation of national and cultural identity. The article identifies ideological, socio-political factors that prepared the birth of the imagology and ensured its development in western Humanities (fear of possible recurrences of extreme nationalism and fascism in post-war Europe, the EU project, which set the task of forming a pan-European identity). It is concluded that the imagology, on the one hand, has actualized an important field of scientific research — the study of the image of the “Other”, but, on the other hand, in the broader cultural and historical perspective, marked a departure not only from the traditions of comparativism and historical poetics, but also from the humanist tradition of the European culture, becoming part of a manipulative dominant strategy in the West. To the culture of “incorporation” into a “foreign word” in order to understand it, preserve it and to ensure a genuine dialogue of cultures, the imagology has contrasted the social engineering and the technology of active “designing” a new identity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-277
Author(s):  
Tzu-Lung Chiu
Keyword(s):  
The One ◽  

Vinaya rules embody the ideal of how Buddhists should regulate their daily lives, and monastics are required to observe them, despite the fact that they were compiled nearly 2,500 years ago in India: a context dramatically different not only from Chinese Buddhism's present monastic conditions, but from its historical conditions. Against this backdrop, rules of purity (qinggui) were gradually formulated by Chinese masters in medieval times to supplement and adapt vinaya rules to China's cultural ethos and to specific local Chinese contexts. This study explores how the traditional qinggui are applied by the Buddhist sa?gha in present-day Taiwan, and contrasts modern monastics' opinions on these rules and their relation to early Buddhist vinaya, on the one hand, against classical Chan literature (such as Chanyuan qinggui) and the Buddhist canon (such as Dharmaguptakavinaya), on the other. This comparison fills a notable gap in the existing literature.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-24
Author(s):  
Akmal Hawi

The 19th century to the 20th century is a moment in which Muslims enter a new gate, the gate of renewal. This phase is often referred to as the century of modernism, a century where people are confronted with the fact that the West is far ahead of them. This situation made various responses emerging, various Islamic groups responded in different ways based on their Islamic nature. Some respond with accommodative stance and recognize that the people are indeed doomed and must follow the West in order to rise from the downturn. Others respond by rejecting anything coming from the West because they think it is outside of Islam. These circles believe Islam is the best and the people must return to the foundations of revelation, this circle is often called the revivalists. One of the figures who is an important figure in Islamic reform, Jamaluddin Al-Afghani, a reformer who has its own uniqueness, uniqueness, and mystery. Departing from the division of Islamic features above, Afghani occupies a unique position in responding to Western domination of Islam. On the one hand, Afghani is very moderate by accommodating ideas coming from the West, this is done to improve the decline of the ummah. On the other hand, however, Afghani appeared so loudly when it came to the question of nationality or on matters relating to Islam. As a result, Afghani traces his legs on two different sides, he is a modernist but also a fundamentalist. 


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