scholarly journals Weaponization: Metaphorical Ubiquity and a Shared Rejection of Politics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greggor Mattson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Defense Industry ◽  
Social Time ◽  
Metaphor Theory ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Groups

This paper presents a discourse analysis of metaphor emergence from coinage to conventionality, responding to calls for metaphor analysis that take social context and chronology into account. It does this through a case study of the career of the metaphor of weaponization that became ubiquitous around the United States’ 2016 presidential election. As a concept, the word originated in the Cold War defense industry as a literal description of the logistical deployment of weapons systems. As its use mutated into a metaphor between 1999-2003, it took on its contemporary moral meaning of over-politicizing things that had been, and should remain, neutral or peaceful. By 2017 “the weaponization of everything” implied that all aspects of social life were newly embroiled in illegitimate politics, making the metaphor a profound act of nostalgia that erased even recent conflicts. Weaponization demonstrates that a metaphor can retain its meaningfulness when it becomes ubiquitous by marshalling a temporal narrative tension against widely shared perceptions of recent social change. This is surprising because contemporary metaphor theory implies that ubiquitous metaphors become mere descriptions or concepts if they are not used in different ways that are embedded in competing discursive communities. Because metaphors derive their meaningfulness through tension, weaponiz- shows how temporality, or social time, can be marshalled to attempt to create a shared public that understands itself as deeply divided. Weaponization is thus instructive as an act of folk sociology that exposes as social and conflicted, things that were previously natural or innocuous. Weaponization indicates a yearning for a shared polity in divided times, and shows that political metaphors can create broad publics that share the same meaning for all sides among competing political groups, even if that meaning is a naïve or utopian rejection of politics altogether.

Od politycznej współpracy do gospodarczej konkurencji – przemysł obronny krajów Europy Środkowo-Wschodniej po upadku ZSRR

2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
Mieczysław Szlachta ◽  
Andrzej Ciupiński
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Economic Recession ◽  
Defense Industry ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Sectors ◽  
Central Eastern Europe ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Cold War

The paper presents the scope and scale of transformation of the defense industries of Central Eastern Europe (CEE) countries after the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR. The starting point is the role and position of the armaments economy sector (armaments economy environment), embedded in the realities of the centrally planned economy, and its submission to the politics of the USSR. The turn of the centuries was a period of political and economic transformation conducted during the conditions of a deep economic recession. The defense industry was one of the economic sectors most affected by the crisis. The economic and defense policy of CEE countries was aimed at preserving the capabilities of the armaments sector. Restructuring activities initiated and forced by the change of the political and economic environment have already brought noticeable effects, even though the process has not yet been completed. Defense industry enterprises have become entities operating on the same terms and conditions as other companies on the competitive market. The method of comparative analysis and a case study supplemented with elements of descriptive statistics were used to evaluate the course of the processes. The study has been focused on the analysis of the course of the changes and examination of effects of the analyzed phenomena for the economy and defense of the CEE countries, taking into account primarily their scale and scope.

The Truman Doctrine Speech: A Case Study of the Dynamics of Presidential Opinion Leadership

1976 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel Kernell
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Truman Administration ◽  
Opinion Leadership ◽  
Single Event ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Truman Doctrine ◽  
The Cold War

During the twenty year period of 1945 through 1965 perhaps the most dramatic example of presumed presidential opinion leadership is President Truman’s speech proclaiming what came to be called the Truman Doctrine. Delivered to Congress and broadcast across the nation on radio, the speech has been widely acknowledged as establishing the temper of postwar U.S. foreign policy. Historians whether sympathetic or critical of the Truman administration agree that this speech more than any other single event marks the beginning of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Moreover, its implications for the future did not require hindsight available only to historians. Immediately, contemporaries in Washington and abroad grasped that President Truman was advocating a fundamental change in the U.S. responsibility and posture toward the world.

Securing Central America Against Communism: The United States and the Modernization of Surveillance in the Cold War

1999 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert H. Holden
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Central America ◽  
Formation Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Central American ◽  
Sponsored Programs ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Cold War

The US.-sponsored programs of military and police collaboration with the Central American governments during the Cold War also contributed to the surveillance capacity of those states during the period when the Central American state formation process was being completed. Guatemala is used as a case study. Washington’s contribution was framed by the conventional discourse of “security against communism” but also by an underlying technocratic ethos in which “modernization” and “security” were higher priorities than democratization.

scholarly journals The Case for Foreign Electoral Subversion

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cécile Fabre
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Democratic Elections ◽  
The Cold War

AbstractIt is widely alleged that President Putin's regime attempted to exercise influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It is known that its Soviet predecessors funded Western communist parties for decades as a means to undermine noncommunist regimes. Similarly, the United States has a long history of interfering in the institutions and elections of its Latin American neighbors, as well as (at the height of the Cold War) its European allies. More recently, many believe that, absent U.S.-driven assistance, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia would have lost the 2000 Yugoslavian presidential election to Slobodan Milošević. As those examples suggest, attempting to subvert the democratic elections of a putatively sovereign country is a time-honored way of bending the latter's domestic and foreign policy to one's will. In this paper, I focus on the state-sponsored, nonviolent, nonkinetic subversion of nationwide elections (for short, subversion) through campaign and party financing, tampering with electoral registers, and conducting disinformation campaigns about candidates. I argue that, under certain conditions and subject to certain constraints, subversion is pro tanto justified as a means to prevent or end large-scale human rights violations.

3. The Cold War in the Middle East

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Sluglett
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
The United States ◽  
Eastern State ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines how the Cold War affected the states of the Middle East. More specifically, it considers the evidence of which factors drove regional developments and how it has been contested by both international relations and regional scholars. After providing an overview of the immediate origins of the Cold War, the chapter discusses the role played by oil during the Cold War. It then analyses early manifestations of the rivalry between the Soviets and the United States in Greece, Turkey, and Iran at the beginning of the Cold War, and uses Iraq as a case study of the changing nature of the relations between a Middle Eastern state and both superpowers from the 1940s until the collapse of the Soviet Union. Finally, it evaluates the overall impact of the Cold War on the Middle East as a whole.

Valorizing Uncertainty

2019 ◽  
pp. 258-274
Author(s):  
Janice Ross
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Relevant Case ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Bolshoi Ballet

Chance. Improvisation. Uncertainty. During the Cold War, these words came to be freighted with a complex set of aesthetic meanings in the Soviet Union and the United States. These nuances in the usage of these terms, the kind of arts practice they made possible, and the ways they were linked to each nation’s political frames hold important insights into the politicizing of aesthetic practices and the aestheticizing of social revolutions. This essay considers the affordances of constraints when paired with the selective use of improvisation in the work of Russian choreographer Leonid Yakobson. A close reading of the work of Yakobson, the leading modernist at the Kirov Ballet and the Bolshoi Ballet throughout the years of Stalin’s rule and into the first decades of the Cold War, is a relevant case study. It reveals how, clandestinely in his rehearsal rooms, a degree of improvisation and chance carried unique aesthetic force and political risk.

Transpacific Talent

2018 ◽  
Vol 87 (3) ◽  
pp. 473-498
Author(s):  
Benjamin M. Han
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Race Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Television Programming ◽  
American Orientalism ◽  
Entertainment Television ◽  
The Cold War

This article examines the Kim Sisters, a trio of female performers from South Korea, as a case study to explore the transpacific exchange of ethnic talent between the United States and Korea during the Cold War. It illustrates how U.S. military occupation, popular music, and Cold War diplomacy were visibly intertwined in entertainment television programming. The performances of the Kim Sisters in variety shows as a display of ethnic spectacle under the mask of internationalism constructed a false projection of race relations while the United States sought to win the cultural Cold War. The Kim Sisters navigated the complex structures of American Orientalism that television ascribed to them.

International interventions in non-democratic states between democratic change and achieving interests (Iraq as a case study after 2003)

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Omran Ali
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
The United States ◽  
Economic Relations ◽  
The Us ◽  
Democratic Change ◽  
The Cold War

This research seeks to critically analyze the international efforts, particularly the United States of America, in transforming authoritarian and non-democratic states into democratic ones, and clarify to what extent the US seeks to achieve real democratic change in non-democratic countries, especially Iraq, and whether their main goal is to achieve stability and their vital interests or democratic change and reform. It argues that although spreading democracy and human rights in the Middle East has become, especially after the end of the Cold War, one of the main goals of the US, but, in reality, the US is not ready to sacrifice its vital interests in the region at the expense of spreading democratic values, as well as reducing its strong security and economic relations with its non-democratic allies, or even applying the required pressure on them. Consequently, this increases doubts about the credibility and seriousness of the US in achieving its goal of spreading democracy in the Middle East in general, and Iraq in particular.

Worse Than a Monolith

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas J. Christensen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
The United States ◽  
Burden Sharing ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Coercive Diplomacy ◽  
Regional Conflicts ◽  
Security Relations ◽  
Opposing Camp ◽  
The Cold War

In brute-force struggles for survival, such as the two world wars, disorganization and divisions within an enemy alliance are to one's own advantage. However, most international security politics involve coercive diplomacy and negotiations short of all-out war. This book demonstrates that when states are engaged in coercive diplomacy—combining threats and assurances to influence the behavior of real or potential adversaries—divisions, rivalries, and lack of coordination within the opposing camp often make it more difficult to prevent the onset of regional conflicts, to prevent existing conflicts from escalating, and to negotiate the end to those conflicts promptly. Focusing on relations between the Communist and anti-Communist alliances in Asia during the Cold War, the book explores how internal divisions and lack of cohesion in the two alliances complicated and undercut coercive diplomacy by sending confusing signals about strength, resolve, and intent. In the case of the Communist camp, internal mistrust and rivalries catalyzed the movement's aggressiveness in ways that we would not have expected from a more cohesive movement under Moscow's clear control. Reviewing newly available archival material, the book examines the instability in relations across the Asian Cold War divide, and sheds new light on the Korean and Vietnam wars. While recognizing clear differences between the Cold War and post-Cold War environments, the book investigates how efforts to adjust burden-sharing roles among the United States and its Asian security partners have complicated U.S. security relations with the People's Republic of China since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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