Big Rewards for the Small Screen

Cold War II ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 49-69
Author(s):  
Helena Goscilo

President John Kennedy’s suggestion to the UN General Assembly that the U.S. and the USSR embark on a joint expedition to the moon adumbrated the appearance of a highly successful American TV series: NBC’s Man from U.N.C.L.E (1964-68). What, one may ask, prompted the successful British director Guy Ritchie in 2015, when relations between Russia and the US were (and remain) at a nadir, to reprise/revamp the 1960s series in a film with the same title? To what extent does Ritchie’s film revise the earlier situation and the symbiosis between the two spies from the 1960s, even as he recreates that period? Does the film reflect the political tensions of the 1960s or of the 2010s–or both? These constitute some of the key questions that the chapter addresses in a comparative, politically contextualized analysis of The Man from U.N.C.L.E on the small and big screens.

Author(s):  
Williamson Myra

This chapter analyses the context and legality of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, also referred to as the First Lebanon War and ‘Operation Peace for Galilee’. It began on 6 June 1982 and became an 18-year-long occupation, ending on 22 May 2000. The first section discusses the immediate pretext for Israel’s invasion—the attempted assassination in London of the Israeli Ambassador to Britain, Schlomo Argov, by Abu Nidal terrorists—as well as the more complex causes, such as the political animosity between Israel, Lebanon, Syria and the PLO. Section two analyses the positions of the main antagonists—Israel, Lebanon and the PLO—as well as other interested parties (the US, the UN Security Council and the UN General Assembly). The third section addresses the legality of Israel’s use of force, citing the arguments of scholars on both sides of the debate. Finally, the chapter assesses the precedential value of this use of force, in light of the Security Council’s refusal to accept that the attempted assassination was an ‘armed attack’ and its condemnation of the Israeli aggression.


Author(s):  
Giuliano Garavini

Chapter 4 describes the rapid shift from a “consumer” to a “producer” market at the end of the 1960s. This shift was characterized by the radicalization of the political and social climate in most petrostates, by the emergence “peak” oil production in two crucial producers such as the US and Venezuela, and generally by the passage from the era of “cheap oil” to that of “expensive oil.” The chapter will also explain the cultural context of this passage with the rise of environmentalist movements and criticism towards overconsumption that had characterized the societies in industrialized countries. All of these factors led to the first two major victories of OPEC during the Tehran and Tripoli negotiation with the international oil companies in 1971.


2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Octavio Amorim Neto ◽  
Andrés Malamud

AbstractIs it domestic politics or the international system that more decisively influences foreign policy? This article focuses on Latin America's three largest powers to identify patterns and compare outcomes in their relations with the regional hegemon, the United States. Through a statistical analysis of voting behavior in the UN General Assembly, we examine systemic variables (both realist and liberal) and domestic variables (institutional, ideological, and bureaucratic) to determine their relative weights between 1946 and 2008. The study includes 4,900 votes, the tabulation of 1,500 ministers according to their ideological persuasion, all annual trade entries, and an assessment of the political strength of presidents, cabinets, and parties per year. The findings show that while Argentina's voting behavior has been determined mostly by domestic factors and Mexico's by realist systemic ones, Brazil's has a more complex blend of determinants, but also with a prevalence of realist systemic variables.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Zimmerman

Universities are usually considered bastions of the free exchange of ideas, but a recent tide of demonstrations across college campuses has called this belief into question, and with serious consequences. Such a wave of protests hasn't been seen since the campus free speech demonstrations of the 1960s, yet this time it is the political Left, rather than the political Right, calling for restrictions on campus speech and freedom. And, as Jonathan Zimmerman suggests, recent campus controversies have pitted free speech against social justice ideals. The language of trauma--and, more generally, of psychology--has come to dominate campus politics, marking another important departure from prior eras. This trend reflects an increased awareness of mental health in American society writ large. But it has also tended to dampen exchange and discussion on our campuses, where faculty and students self-censor for fear of insulting or offending someone else. Or they attack each other in periodic bursts of invective, which run counter to the “civility” promised by new speech and conduct codes. In Campus Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Jonathan Zimmerman breaks down the dynamics of what is actually driving this recent wave of discontent. After setting recent events in the context of the last half-century of free speech campus movements, Zimmerman looks at the political beliefs of the US professorate and students. He follows this with chapters on political correctness; debates over the contested curriculum; admissions, faculty hires, and affirmative action; policing students; academic freedom and censorship; in loco parentis administration; and the psychology behind demands for "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces." He concludes with the question of how to best balance the goals of social and racial justice with the commitment to free speech.


Author(s):  
Noura Erakat

This chapter focuses on the United Nations's Palestinian “statehood” bid starting in 2011. In May 2011, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)/Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that it would seek membership as a state within the UN. The UN statehood bid would alter the PLO's status as a nonmember observer entity, conferred upon it by the UN General Assembly in 1974. While the benefits of UN membership, or in the alternative, a UN upgrade, are manifold, none of them guarantee Palestinian self-determination or freedom from Israeli control. The chapter suggests that this statehood bid could have been a pivot away from complete reliance on the United States to deliver independence and a return to multilateralism that positioned the world superpower as part of the problem rather than the solution. However, the promise of multilateralism, signaled by Palestinians in 2011, has not been realized. The Palestinian leadership has responded to the ever-diminishing potential of the US-brokered peace process with incremental steps into international forums.


Author(s):  
Lawrence S. Kaplan

Eisenhower’s reservations in December 1955 did not keep his special assistant from unveiling a new package of proposals in January 1956. As always, Stassen’s work was fast and thorough. He characterized the results as a compromise, although Dulles and the Joint Chiefs groused that they failed to find any evidence of it. His plan contained elements of both the incremental approach to disarmament that he and the president had advocated in the past and other, more extravagant ideas encompassing a wide range of steps toward disarmament. He believed that the UN General Assembly substantially endorsed his views. Stassen also justified his haste, noting that a delay “would cause a serious loss of US initiative.” Not surprisingly, he encountered the continuing hostility of Dulles, who “believed that adoption by the U.S. of the position which you recommend would not be sufficient to maintain for us our leadership in the free world coalition and to secure the essential support of world public opinion.”


Author(s):  
Mona Lena Krook

Chapter 5 traces how the discussions outlined in previous chapters have become embedded in a growing number of international normative frameworks. The architecture surrounding the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has provided one entry point. The CEDAW Committee raised the issue in a number of country reviews and issued several General Recommendations alluding to violence in the political sphere. A second pathway has been via the mandate of the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, who issued two reports on this topic in 2018. A third involves UN General Assembly resolutions, including a recent resolution identifying sexual harassment as a form of violence against women referencing violence in politics. The new International Labor Organization Convention Concerning the Elimination of Violence and Harassment in the World of Work serves as a fourth venue, filling important gaps related to sexual and online harassment in political spaces.


2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 53558-53572
Author(s):  
Rafael Cordovil de Souza Almeida

This article argues that BRICS is a political alliance. In order to comprehend the BRICS as a political alliance, one has to distinguish the difference between the master narrative of the BRICs from what is being hereby denominated the political narrative of the BRICS. The master narrative was fabricated by Jim O’Neill in 2001 and is vastly discussed in the economics’ literature, while the political narrative, despite being under edification has its origin traced to the 61st UN General Assembly session that took place on September 23rd 2006. It was only in 2006 when the states that compose the BRICs declared openly its desire to gain power in the international arena in order to attempt to redesign the balance of world politics. The addition of South Africa in 2011 supports the alliance’s geopolitical stance on international politics. The main mortar of the BRICS is founded on the fear that any power may pursue its national interests by acting unilaterally as the alliance perceives unilateralism as a behavior that jeopardizes the post World War II order, and consequently, may also threaten security of the members of the BRICS. This is the main logic behind the BRICS discourse.


2020 ◽  
pp. 007327532097420
Author(s):  
Jaehwan Hyun

This paper examines the planning, execution, and closure of the US–Korea Cooperative Ecological Survey project in the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) in the 1960s. In this period, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) initiated bilateral scientific cooperation between the NAS and similar organizations in developing countries along the line of the developmental turn of U.S. foreign assistance. Working closely with the NAS, U.S. conservationists used this scheme to introduce nature conservation practices and the discipline of ecosystem ecology to developing countries. In this context, by way of the NAS’s Pacific Science Board, two countries’ biologists initiated the preliminary cooperative project in the DMZ in 1966. Korean and U.S. scientists soon began to realize that their collaboration was marked by dissonance. The U.S. side attributed the cooperation failure to Korean culture while the Korean side criticized the unequal structure of their cooperation. Joining the global historiography of Cold War scientific collaboration, this paper pays particular attention to the intermediaries of the collaborative project and their rivalry. It argues that political struggles revolving around the position of go-betweens – as what I call knowledge brokers – on the recipient side provoked contestation between American and Korean scientists. The contention between the two sides played out in the collaboration coming to an end, albeit partially. Throughout this analysis, this study suggests paying more serious attention to the politics of scientific exchange among actors on the recipient side as an outset from which to analyze the heterogeneity of the Korean side without losing sight of their active role in the building process of American hegemony.


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