scholarly journals Beyond the Territorial Trap?: The Geographic Interrogation of Sovereignty

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 10-15
Author(s):  
Matthew Derrick
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The State ◽  
State System ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Dialectical Relationship ◽  
Post Communism ◽  
The Cold War

Sovereignty is now a key concept in geographic scholarship. However, sustained geographic investigation of sovereignty commenced only in the 1990s, after the collapse of the Cold War order. Early, important contributions to the interrogation of sovereignty were historical, providing rigor in understanding the dialectical relationship between space and politics in the development of the state system. By the close of the twentieth century, however, historical complementarity in important geographic tracts on sovereignty, conditioned by new geopolitics of post-communism, gave way to diverging prognostications among academic geographers on the contemporary and future nature and salience of state sovereignty.

War and strong states, peace and weak states?

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-268 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael C. Desch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
International Security ◽  
International Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Weak States ◽  
The Cold War

For most of the twentieth century, international politics were dominated by World Wars I and II and by the cold war. This period of intense international security competition clearly strengthened states, increasing their scope and cohesion. However, the end of the cold war may represent a “threat trough”—a period of significantly reduced international security competition. If so, the scope and cohesion of many states may likewise change. Although this change will not be so great as to end the state or the states system, the state as we know it surely will change. Some states will disintegrate, many will cease growing in scope and may even shrink a little, and few will remain unaffected.

scholarly journals Who Knows What's Going On? Mapping New Security Landscapes in Contemporary Espionage Fiction

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 775-792 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANDREW PEPPER
Keyword(s):  
Risk Assessment ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The State ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
The Cold War

This article explores whether or to what extent the contemporary espionage novel is able to map and interrogate transformations in the post-9/11 security environment. It asks how well a form or genre of writing, typically handcuffed to the machinations and demands of the Cold War and state sovereignty, is able to adapt to a new security environment characterized by strategies of “risk assessment” and “resilience-building” and by modes or regimes of power not reducible to, or wholly controlled by, the state. In doing so, it thinks about the capacities of this type of fiction for “resisting” the formations of power it wants to make visible and is partly complicit with.

Book Reviews

2009 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 94-122
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
East Germany ◽  
The State ◽  
Military Reform ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Cold War

Alon Confino, Paul Betts and Dirk Schumann (eds.) Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: the Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)Reviewed by Ran ZwigenbergHanna Papanek, Elly und Alexander: Revolution, Rotes Berlin, Flucht, Exil—eine Sozialistische Familiengeschichte, trans. Joachim Helfer and Hannah C, Wettig (Berlin: Vorwärts Buch, 2006).Reviewed by Gerard BraunthalDolores L. Augustine, Red Prometheus: Engineering and Dictatorship in East Germany, 1945-1950 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007)Reviewed by Thomas A. BaylisTom Dyson, The Politics of German Defense and Security: Policy Leadership and Military Reform in the Post-Cold War Era (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007)Reviewed by Gale A. MattoxRolf Steininger, Austria, Germany and the Cold War: From the Anschluss to the State Treaty, 1938–1955 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008)Reviewed by Barbara Stelzl-Marx

Espionage and Exile

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Crises ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
John Le Carre ◽  
The Cold War

Espionage and Exile demonstrates that from the 1930s through the Cold War, British Writers Eric Ambler, Helen MacInnes, Ann Bridge, Pamela Frankau, John le Carré and filmmaker Leslie Howard combined propaganda and popular entertainment to call for resistance to political oppression. Instead of constituting context, the political engagement of these spy fictions bring the historical crises of Fascist and Communist domination to the forefront of twentieth century literary history. They deploy themes of deception and betrayal to warn audiences of the consequences of Nazi Germany's conquests and later, the fusion of Fascist and Communist oppression. Featuring protagonists who are stateless and threatened refugees, abandoned and betrayed secret agents, and politically engaged or entrapped amateurs, all in states of precarious exile, these fictions engage their historical subjects to complicate extant literary meanings of transnational, diaspora and performativity. Unsettling distinctions between villain and victim as well as exile and belonging dramatizes relationships between the ethics of espionage and responses to international crises. With politically charged suspense and narrative experiments, these writers also challenge distinctions between literary, middlebrow, and popular culture.

Prologue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Expression ◽  
Intangible Heritage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Print Literacy

The section introduces Part II, which spans the period 1946 to 2014, by tracing the history of the debates about culture within UNESCO from 1947 to 2009. It considers the central part print literacy played in the early decades, and the gradual emergence of what came to be called ‘intangible heritage’; the political divisions of the Cold War that had a bearing not just on questions of the state and its role as a guardian of culture but on the idea of cultural expression as a commodity; the slow shift away from an exclusively intellectualist definition of culture to a more broadly anthropological one; and the realpolitik surrounding the debates about cultural diversity since the 1990s. The section concludes by showing how at the turn of the new millennium UNESCO caught up with the radical ways in which Tagore and Joyce thought about linguistic and cultural diversity.

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.

scholarly journals GRANDE ESTRATÉGIA: POLÍTICA EXTERNA E DEFESA EM UM MUNDO EM TRANSFORMAÇÃO

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (7) ◽  
Author(s):  
Celso Amorim
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soft Power ◽  
World Order ◽  
Defense Policy ◽  
Mixed Structure ◽  
Hard Power ◽  
The World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Brazilian Case

In the last years of the twentieth century, after the end of the Cold War, the world has evolved into a mixed structure, which preserves the characteristics of unipolarity at the same time that approaches to a multipolar world in some ways. In an international reality marked by its fluid nature, the emergence of new actors and the so-called "asymmetric threats" has not eliminated the former agents in the world order. And the conflict between the States has not disappeared from the horizon. In this context, diplomacy must have the permanent support of defense policy. Therefore, in the Brazilian case, the paper presents that the country should adopt a grand strategy that combines foreign policy and defense policy, in which soft power will be enhanced by hard power.

Human (In)Security

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Hayes
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Human Security ◽  
The State ◽  
Human Rights Abuses ◽  
Significant Challenge ◽  
Humanitarian Crises ◽  
Privileged Status ◽  
Heated Debate ◽  
The Cold War

The 1990s was host to a range of conflicts emerging from weak or failed states. These conflicts typically involved significant humanitarian crises and widespread human rights abuses. Within this changing global environment, new security thinking started to engage “people” as the referent of security, moving away from the previous privileged status granted to the state as the only referent of security. The end of the Cold War enabled the human security paradigm to provide a significant challenge to the primacy of the state in security thinking. On the other hand, human security has been subject to much criticism and there has been heated debate over its applicability within the security agenda. This chapter argues that despite earlier concerns over its efficacy, human security has made inroads into security thinking and is mutually reinforcing to national security.

Violent Origins of Authoritarian Variation: Rebellion Type and Regime Type in Cold War Southeast Asia

2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Slater
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Southeast Asia ◽  
The State ◽  
Regime Type ◽  
Critical Question ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Historical Case ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

AbstractDictatorships are every bit as institutionally diverse as democracies, but where does this variation come from? This article argues that different types of internal rebellion influence the emergence of different types of authoritarian regimes. The critical question is whether rebel forces primarily seek to seize state power or to escape it. Regional rebellions seeking toescapethe state raise the probability of a military-dominated authoritarian regime, since they are especially likely to unify the military while heightening friction between civilian and military elites. Leftist rebellions seeking toseizethe state are more likely to give rise to civilian-dominated dictatorships by inspiring ‘joint projects’ in which military elites willingly support party-led authoritarian rule. Historical case studies of Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam illustrate the theory, elaborating how different types of violent conflict helped produce different types of dictatorships across the breadth of mainland and island Southeast Asia during the Cold War era.

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