Turf Wars in Colombia’s Red Corner

2020 ◽  
pp. 35-58
Author(s):  
Teo Ballvé

This chapter shows how, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Cold War drew Urabá's economies of violence into the vortex of insurgency and counterinsurgency, reinforcing the region's reputation as a stateless frontier. The political violence wracking Urabá had clinched its position in the minds of locals and outsiders alike as a lawless, stateless frontier zone. While critical of these discourses of statelessness, the chapter demonstrates how they had a powerful effect on local political struggles. The frontier effect enabled the proliferation of competing state projects, turning the region into an even more fractious social space—a jagged mosaic of rival territorialities. But the violent clashes between insurgency and counterinsurgency that made Urabá into the “red corner” of Colombia were not caused by the absence of the state; they were conflicts over the form and content of statehood itself. None of these struggles played out in the absence of governmental structures and practices.

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 170 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Eylem Özkaya Lassalle

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.


Author(s):  
Peter D. McDonald

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-134
Author(s):  
Daniela Popescu

"The Escape to Turkey. Ways and Methods of Illegal Border Crossings into Turkey from the perspective of SSI documents (1945-1948). Romania`s first years after the communist regime took political power in Romania, concurrent with the onset of the Cold War, meant a reshuffle of the state institutions at first and later a dramatic impact on people`s lives. The political and institutional purges were the first signal that soon repression and terror will follow, thus prompting numerous Romanian citizens to leave the country. Yet, due to the strict surveillance of the Secret Police Services which did not easily allow traveling to Western countries, the only way to escape was through illicit border crossings. One of the most common destinations was Turkey, with documents issued between 1945 and 1948 by the Secret police services revealing an impressive number of such cases. Keywords: Illegal border crossings, escape, communism, Romania, Turkey. "


Author(s):  
Alejandra Bronfman

This chapter opens with an exploration of audience research techniques and the ways that even those conducting the research acknowledged the impossible nature of their task. This sets out the paradox that structures the chapter: even while there was no guarantee that listening publics were listening, they came to occupy a central position in the political struggles of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The notion of fidelity runs through the chapter as it traces the mediated strategies with which institutions and entities vied for the loyalty of listeners and laid the ground for the media battles of the anti-Batista struggle in Cuba. The “radio wars” that erupted in the Caribbean, a series of clandestine broadcasts urging the overthrow of Castro, Trujillo, and Duvalier in the early 1960s, speak to the centrality of mediated interventions in the changing geopolitics of the Cold War. The chapter ends with an emphasis on silence, as it attends to the ways that Jamaican broadcasting continued to speak only to limited publics and tendered a deaf ear to the creole-inflected sounds of politics on the eve of decolonization.


Author(s):  
Achim Wennmann

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.


2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-65
Author(s):  
Samra Sarfaraz Khan

The research paper entitled “Political and Economic Development in China and Russia During the Cold War,” focuses on the struggles made by the Chinese and Russian governments during the Cold War years for the improvement of economic situation of the two countries. By addressing such questions as the viability of the economic policies of Russia and China, the paper aims to bring to light the various methods used by the two governments to ensure improvement of the economic condition of the state, as well as of its people. Effort has also been made to draw a critical analysis of the power struggles and confrontations within the two regimes and the influence of the same on the political and economic graph of the two states. The paper, therefore, discusses the political issues within the People’s Republic of China and Russia and the effects of these frictions on the overall political and economic condition of the country. Moreover, the paper is also an attempt to analyze the reasons why Chinese attempts at economic development were more fruitful than the efforts made by their Russian counterparts.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 170
Author(s):  
K. Eylem Özkaya Lassalle

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.


Author(s):  
Phyllis Lassner

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.


2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-98
Author(s):  
Mieczysław Szlachta ◽  
Andrzej Ciupiński

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.


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