Emissaries of the Violent Peace

Mortal Doubt ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 67-92
Author(s):  
Anthony W. Fontes

This chapter pieces together a few key elements of mara history that set the arc of their dystopian evolution and made them into harbingers of a new age of violence. Exploring the rise of the gangs in Guatemala means linking irrefutable historical phenomena—U.S. imperialism and Cold War atrocities, transnational migrations and deportations, and so on—with the multiple and contradictory ways people remember and make meaning out of the past. Drawing on the stories of former gang members and gang associates alongside journalists’ and scholars’ accounts, this chapter maps the political and social ferment of Guatemala City when the maras first took root; how decades of U.S. involvement in Guatemala gave the maras’ made-in-America style an irresistible magnetism for some urban youth; and, finally, the ways that this “new way of being a gang” seemed, for a moment, to structure and regulate internecine gang violence before it too fell apart.

2021 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-32
Author(s):  
Guadalupe Escobar

A reassessment of the testimonio genre over the past five decades reveals continuities of state-sponsored violence from the revolutionary period to the present. An analysis of Pamela Yates’s 500 Years: Life in Resistance (2017) and Katia Lara’s Berta vive (Berta Lives, 2016) shows Cold War reverberations, unfolding deeper histories of dispossession and legacies of resistance. The first uncovers entangled issues of Guatemalan genocide disavowal and extractive industry while the second denounces the political feminicide of the Honduran environmental activist Berta Cáceres. Both testimonial documentaries mobilize an “archive effect” to contest the optic of colonial capitalism through the ecofeminist perspectives of indigenous women activists. Una reevaluación del género del testimonial durante las últimas cinco décadas revela la continuidad de la violencia estatal desde el período revolucionario hasta el presente. Un análisis de 500 Years: Life in Resistance (2017) de Pamela Yates y Berta vive (2016) de Katia Lara da cuenta de las reverberaciones de la Guerra Fría, desplegando historias más profundas de desposesión y legados de resistencia. La primera obra muestra los intrincados hilos en torno a la negación del genocidio guatemalteco y la industria extractiva, mientras que el segundo denuncia el feminicidio político de la activista ambiental hondureña Berta Cáceres. Ambos documentales testimoniales utilizan un “efecto de archivo” para impugnar la óptica del capitalismo colonial a través de las perspectivas ecofeministas de las activistas indígenas.


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-260
Author(s):  
Antonio Cazorla-Sánchez

The recent evolution of both the historiography on the Spanish Civil War, and even the general population's perception of the conflict, cannot be separated from the changes in the political and cultural paradigms in Europe since the end of the Cold War. By this I mean that Europeans, but not only them, have been evolving from a mostly ideological view of the past to an increasingly humanistic one.


2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuk Wah Chan

AbstractThis article examines the contested identity of a particular group of Viet-kieu, who were born in China and who returned to Vietnam in the 1970s, by looking into their personal histories, descent backgrounds and the political and socio-economic processes they lived through in the past few decades. Unlike other Viet-kieu who returned from the West, the Viet-kieu in the borderlands rarely received any attention from the media or academia. They led a double life both in China and in Vietnam and experienced dramatic changes of fate from the 1970s, through the 1980s, to the 1990s. Their hybrid cultural endowment and cross-border familial ties were both detrimental and beneficial to their social and economic life within different historical contexts. Reopened borders around the world in the post-Cold War era have generated discourses on transnational economic integration, regional connectedness, as well as fluid mobility and identities. It has become a fashion to criticize the study of culture and identity as rigid entities, while the increasing stress on subjectivity and agency has made identity seem ever more evolving and changing. Putting aside the romantic notion of fluid and multiple identities, this article brings up a number of empirical cases to illustrate how identity is often shaped by the possibilities and constraints under different politico-economic circumstances.


2012 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Narizny

For the past three centuries, Great Britain and the United States have stood in succession at the apex of the international hierarchy of power. They have been on the winning side of every systemic conflict in this period, from the War of the Spanish Succession to the Cold War. As a result, they have been able to influence the political and economic development of states around the world. In many of their colonies, conquests, and clients, they have propagated ideals and institutions conducive to democratization. At the same time, they have defeated numerous rivals whose success would have had ruinous consequences for democracy. The global spread of democracy, therefore, has been endogenous to the game of great power politics.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 452-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard MacDonald

This article explores the discursive theme of documentary's crisis and renewal through internationalism as it evolved at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, established in 1947. During its first decade Edinburgh was the most significant forum for discussion on the future of documentary as an international genre, a debate to which all the key figures of the prewar generation contributed, as critics, panelists, advisors, speakers and film-makers. Amid a sense of crisis for British documentary, marked by the perceived dominance of instructional film-making of limited social and aesthetic ambition, these figures urged film-makers to look to the developing world, where the old themes of documentary could inspire new work to match the canonical works of the past. Presented at Edinburgh in 1953 World Without End, an aesthetically ambitious film made in Siam and Mexico, sponsored by the international agency UNESCO and co-directed by two of the British documentary movement's most celebrated film-makers Basil Wright and Paul Rotha, was widely praised as renewing the prewar traditions of the sponsored documentary. The article argues that the well-intentioned critical discourse of renewal through thematic engagement with international development, evident in the reception of World Without End, evades the contemporary politics of the British state's relationship to its empire, the movements of national liberation that actively sought to end it and the new forms of despotism nurtured by the geopolitics of the Cold War.


2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 336-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
Li Zhiyu ◽  
Morgan Rocks

Contemporary left-wing debate in the Sinosphere, here limited to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong, and Taiwan, is often fuelled by the political, economic, and social implications of the PRC’s rise as a world power. While agreeing upon basic premises of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism, left-wing intellectuals in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan come to loggerheads over critiquing how China’s rise influences its leftist identity. In the past few years we have witnessed a series of fractured and one-sided arguments among Sinosphere left-wing intellectuals. As part of the research dialogues on mapping the intellectual public sphere in China today, this article examines the cacophony of the Sinosphere leftist echo chamber, starting from contentious debates over the leftist nature of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement and Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement, and then focusing on voices that are attempting to bring together left-wing traditions from the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Scholars such as He Zhaotian, Chen Kuan-Hsing, and Sun Ge are exploring possibilities of de-imperialization, decolonization, and de-Cold War-ization, in the hopes of creating a shared, emancipatory ‘Asian perspective’. Though few in number, these voices demonstrate a growing utopian urge within the Sinosphere left to participate in mutual dialogues on possible futures.


2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (03) ◽  
pp. 1850006
Author(s):  
HUNG-JEN WANG

In the past decade, observers in Western countries have been increasingly challenged to describe China’s rising power in one of two ways: as contributing to established world systems, or as a growing threat fulfilling certain predictions made at the end of the Cold War. For some, perceptions of increasingly assertive regional behaviors confirm that China’s self-proclaimed policy of pacifism is being used to cloak selfish national interest and power goals. The current international relations (IR) literature tends to treat China’s assertiveness as evidence that it is indeed a threat, with few attempts to conceptualize assertiveness as a relational strategy. In this paper, the author uses eight current and historical cases involving four relational strategies — engagement, boycotting, reciprocation, and pressing — to examine conventional assessments of assertiveness that focus solely on perceptions of and responses to threatening statements and behaviors made in defense of Chinese national interests. In the end, this paper tries to contribute to the general IR literature that has tended to misinterpret China’s assertiveness, which is actually an identity issue regarding bilateral relationality instead of power or interest calculations.


2016 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 307
Author(s):  
Diana Maksimiuk

The Year 1956 in Poland – Lawyers’ Discussions aboutbJustice, Public Prosecutors’ Offices and Criminal LawSummary The year 1956 was frequently described as a “breakthrough” in the postwar history of Poland and constituted the end of the Stalin’s epoch. The change of the political conditions which took place during that time, as well as accompanying freedom of speech, created unlimited opportunity to criticise that period. In deliberation of the state of Poland the debate about the issue of the justice has been also led. The law society which participated actively in those events was aimed mainly at restoring the rule of law and reconstructing the justice’s authority. Definitely, the most important matter under discussion was to deal with the past. Criticism and even self-critical opinions occured together with proposals concerning the future situation. Among so many solutions which have been presented by lawyers, the most noticeable was the tendency to bring the status of prewar law back. Although this returing was not achieved, in consequence of that debate the transformation which symbolised new age was introduced.


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