Colonial Legacies, War Memories, and Political Violence in Taiwan, 1945–1947

2020 ◽  
pp. 76-97
Author(s):  
Victor Louzon
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
War Memories ◽  
Colonial Legacies

In this chapter Victor Louzon turns our historiographical focus to the violence of decolonization in Taiwan, namely the 1947 uprising known as the February 28 Incident. Louzon details how the revolt broke out, and places the incident in the context of memory wars in Taiwan since. His chapter delves into the politics and geopolitics the incident, highlighting both the KMT brutal suppression of the revolt, and the experience of Taiwanese at the center of the revolt, many of whom had been mobilized by the Japanese army and paramilitary structures. His work redirects our attention to the experience of “remobilized” Taiwanese and the repertoire of actions and symbols invoked from the imperial era which defined the incident. Even more his work suggests new insights into broader transnational questions of the imperial roots of mobilization and militarization in Cold War Asia.

State Failure and the Political Violence Phenomenon: A Comparative Analysis of Iraq and Syria Cases

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 170 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Eylem Özkaya Lassalle
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
State Failure ◽  
The Political ◽  
Collective Violence ◽  
Short Run ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

The concept of failed state came to the fore with the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the USSR and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. Political violence is central in these discussions on the definition of the concept or the determination of its dimensions (indicators). Specifically, the level of political violence, the type of political violence and intensity of political violence has been broached in the literature. An effective classification of political violence can lead us to a better understanding of state failure phenomenon. By using Tilly’s classification of collective violence which is based on extent of coordination among violent actors and salience of short-run damage, the role played by political violence in state failure can be understood clearly. In order to do this, two recent cases, Iraq and Syria will be examined.

Conceptualizing Militias in Africa

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Tapscott
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Analytic Elements ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Legitimate Violence

Although militias have received increasing scholarly attention, the concept itself remains contested by those who study it. Why? And how does this impact contemporary scholarship on political violence? To answer these questions, we can focus on the field of militia studies in post–Cold War sub-Saharan Africa, an area where militia studies have flourished in the past several decades. Virtually all scholars of militias in post–Cold War Africa describe militias as fluid and changing such that they defy easy definition. As a result, scholars offer complex descriptors that incorporate both descriptive and analytic elements, thereby offering nuanced explanations for the role of militias in violent conflict. Yet the ongoing tension between accurate description and analytic definition has also produced a body of literature that is diffuse and internally inconsistent, in which scholars employ conflicting definitions of militias, different data sources, and often incompatible methods of analysis. As a result, militia studies yield few externally valid comparative insights and have limited analytic power. The cumulative effect is a schizophrenic field in which one scholar’s militia is another’s rebel group, local police force, or common criminal. The resulting incoherence fragments scholarship on political violence and can have real-world policy implications. This is particularly true in high-stakes environments of armed conflict, where being labeled a “militia” can lead to financial support and backing in some circumstances or make one a target to be eliminated in others. To understand how militia studies has been sustained as a fragmented field, this article offers a new typology of definitional approaches. The typology shows that scholars use two main tools: offering a substantive claim as to what militias are or a negative claim based on what militias are not and piggy-backing on other concepts to either claim that militias are derivative of or distinct from them. These approaches illustrate how scholars combine descriptive and analytic approaches to produce definitions that sustain the field as fragmented and internally contradictory. Yet despite the contradictions that characterize the field, scholarship reveals a common commitment to using militias to understand the organization of (legitimate) violence. This article sketches a possible approach to organize the field of militia studies around the institutionalization of violence, such that militias would be understood as a product of the arrangement of violence. Such an approach would both allow studies of militias to place their ambiguity and fluidity at the center of analyses while offering a pathway forward for comparative studies.

scholarly journals The Political Economy of Violent Conflict Within States

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Achim Wennmann
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Violent Conflict ◽  
The Political ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Criminal Violence ◽  
The Cold War

The political economy of violent conflict is a body of literature that investigates how economic issues and interests shape the dynamics associated to violent conflict after the Cold War. The literature covers an area of research focusing on civil wars—the predominant type of conflict in the 1990s and early 2000s—and an area of research focusing on other types of violent conflict within states, such as permanent emergencies, criminal violence, and political violence associated to turbulent transitions. The first area involves four themes that have come to characterize discussions on the political economy of civil wars, including research on the role of greed and grievance in conflict onset, on economic interests in civil wars, on the nature of conflict economies, and on conflict financing. The second area responds to the evolution of violent conflict beyond the categories of “interstate” or “civil” war and shows how political economy research adapted to new types of violent conflict within states as it moved beyond the “post-Cold War” era. Overall, the literature on the political economy of violence conflict emphasizes the role of informal systems behind power, profits and violence, and the economic interests and functions of violence underlying to violent conflict. It has also become a conceptual laboratory for scholars who after years of field research tried to make sense of the realities of authoritarian, violent or war-affected countries. By extending the boundaries of the literature beyond the study of civil wars after the Cold War, political economy research can serve as an important analytical lens to better understand the constantly evolving nature of violent conflict and to inform sober judgment on the possible policy responses to them.

scholarly journals Terrorists and Revolutionaries: The Achilles Heel of Communist Surveillance

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 277-297
Author(s):  
Daniela Richterova
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Communist State ◽  
State Security ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Security Practices ◽  
State Surveillance ◽  
State Actors ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Cold War

The scholarly understanding of communist state surveillance practices remains limited. Utilising thousands of recently declassified archival materials from communist Czechoslovakia, this article aims to revise our understanding of everyday security practices and surveillance under communist regimes, which have thus far been overwhelmingly understood in relation to the domestic population and social control. In the 1970s and 1980s, Czechoslovakia attracted the Cold War terrorist and revolutionary elite. Visits by the likes of Carlos the Jackal, Munich Olympic massacre mastermind Abu Daoud, and key PLO figures in Prague were closely surveilled by the Czechoslovak State Security (StB). This article investigates the motifs and performance of a wide range of mechanisms that the StB utilised to surveil violent non-state actors, including informer networks and SIGINT. It argues that in the last decade of the Cold War, Prague adopted a “surveillance-centred” approach to international terrorists on its territory—arguably enabled by informal “non-aggression pacts.” Furthermore, it challenges the notion that the communist state security structures were omnipotent surveillance mechanisms. Despite having spent decades perfecting their grip on domestic dissent, when confronted with foreign, unfamiliar, and uncontrollable non-state actors engaged in terrorism or political violence, these ominous institutions were often shown to be anxious, inept, and at times impotent. Finally, it explores the parallel state approaches to international terrorists and revolutionaries, and their shortcomings, across the Iron Curtain jurisdictions. Overall, this article seeks to expand our understanding of the broad and varied complexities of intelligence and surveillance in communist regimes.

Uruguay, 1968

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vania Markarian ◽  
Eric Zolov ◽  
Laura Pérez Carrara
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Social Representations ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Revolutionary Change ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Youth Movements ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

This book examines the creation of new conceptions of youth and politics during the Cold War era by focusing on the case of Uruguay in the 1960s. In this decade, a generation of Latin American youth entered political life inspired by a heroic view of activism that coincided, often contentiously, with the spread of new cultural trends from youth movements in Europe and United States. The Uruguayan case shows a series of distinctive features which can help us rethink the significance of similar Cold War processes in the region and across the globe. This study analyzes the Uruguayan student movement of 1968 through a close examination of the intellectual debates, ideological schisms, and social representations that shaped the positions of leftist groups and fueby building on earlier discussions about how to achieve revolutionary change in Uruguay and the region as a whole. By exploring the intersection of activism, political violence, and youth culture, this book opens new insights on categories such as the 哲‎ew

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Kevin Duong
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
The People ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter introduces redemptive violence and situates its appeal in a paradox intrinsic to modern revolutionary democracy: enthroning the people as sovereign came at the price of dissolving them into a multitude of abstract individuals. It focuses readers’ attention on redemptive violence in nineteenth-century French thought, outlines the structure of the book, and formalizes the book’s main claims. It shows why this book’s argument forces us to rethink inherited accounts of political violence, especially those generated during the Cold War. Where liberal antitotalitarian critics have drawn teleological connections between redemptive violence and totalitarianism, this chapter resists those connections to invite readers to consider what redemptive violence can reveal about democracy.

The Islamist Terrorist as the New Universal Enemy

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pinar Kemerli
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
September 11 ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Terrorism Discourse ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

Treating modern terrorism discourse as an important political problem in the history of Western legal theorizing and national security policy, this chapter examines the impact of the end of the Cold War and September 11 on political debates on terrorism at the United Nations. Surveying the framing of Palestinian terrorism at the General Assembly and Security Council between the 1960s and late 2000s, it argues that the disavowal of the legitimacy of non-sovereign political violence at the end of the Cold War, and the association of political Islam with terrorism following September 11 have facilitated the discursive construction of a universal enemy in the image of the “Islamist terrorist.” The chapter shows that this discursive formation is laden with, and thus perpetuates, politically significant normative presumptions that are related to anxieties concerning sacrificial violence with which political Islam is widely associated.

Sounds of the Apocalypse: Preserving Cold War Memories in Ulrich Horstmann's Radio Play Die Bunkermann-Kassette

2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-109
Author(s):  
Gerrit K. Roessler
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Traumatic Experiences ◽  
Radio Drama ◽  
Unique Role ◽  
Fully Integrated ◽  
War Memories ◽  
Radio Technology ◽  
Radio Play ◽  
The Cold War

This article examines Ulrich Horstmann's science fiction radio play Die Bunkermann-Kassette (The Bunker Man Cassette, 1979), in which the author frames fears and anxieties surrounding a potential nuclear conflict during the Cold War as apocalyptic self-annihilation of the human race. Radio, especially radio drama, had a unique role in capturing the historical imaginaries and traumatic experiences surrounding this non-event. Horstmann's radio drama and the titular cassette tape become sound artifacts that speak to the technological contexts of their time, while their acoustic content carries the past sounds into the present. In the world of the play, these artifacts are presented in a museum of the future, which uses the possibilities of science fictional imagination and speculation to create prosthetic memories of the Cold War. The article suggests that these memories are cyborg memories, because the listener is a fully integrated component of radio technology that makes these memories and recollections of imagined events possible in the first place.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document