Côte d’Ivoire

Côte d’Ivoire first experienced a civil war in 2002, but the country’s rapid socio-political disintegration after the demise of Félix Houphouët-Boigny in 1993 produced several risk factors that would eventually culminate in atrocity crimes between 2010 and 2011. This article identifies a weak state that only exercised jurisdiction over the south of the country, years of instability driven by horizontal inequalities and an identity crisis, past abuses that had gone unpunished, and election disputes that served as triggers for atrocity crimes. The deeply polarized nature of Ivorian society meant that local mechanisms for resolving disputes and building peace were not wholly effective, even though they helped to resolve disputes and prevent violence in some local communities. Findings from the Ivorian case demonstrate the need to pay closer attention to the structural and proximate factors that underpin conflicts. Côte d’Ivoire also presents lessons on the need for decisive action in the face of unfolding atrocity crimes. There was a need for timely and decisive response in accordance with the principles of R2P. Nonetheless military intervention was delayed for months, resulting in avoidable fatalities.

Rereading Empire, Rethinking History: Rehabilitation of the Vietcong in Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge

Throughits reading of Lan Cao’s Monkey Bridge, credited as the first Vietnamese American novel, this article seeksto investigate the discourse of reconciliation or refugee settlement in the context of the changing US master narratives from Empire to Cold War 2.0. Itarguesthat Cao’s novel in its effort to register a South Vietnamese perspective reorients modern Vietnamese experiences in relation to the US sense of democracy and freedom and in the process challenges what Donald Pease calls the state fantasy of American exceptionalism in the US military intervention in Vietnam. What Cao’s novel achieves is to blur the boundary between nationalism and communism in its representation of the Vietnamese struggle for independence in its early stage and to humanize and rehabilitate the Vietcong soldier as a possibly assimilable “us” rather than as simply “them” in the realm of the other.

Regional Russian Books of Memory as a Form of Preservation and Transfer of Cultural-Historical Memory about the Afghanistan War of 1979-1989

The historical memory of the Soviet military intervention in Afghanistan (1979-1989) is studied through the prism of memory books dedicated to the participants of the war and those who died in it. The present paper is the first study of the Afghan books of memory that were published over the past decades in different regions of Russia. The first part of this paper analyzes the regional books of memory published in various regions of the Russian Federation from 1991 to the present day; the second part analyzes the books of memory published in small cities of Russia as a separate cultural phenomenon. In conclusion, the author describes the main features of regional Afghan books of memory, emphasizing that the memory books are published with the active participation of various regional organizations - from local archives to representatives of municipalities - revealing that the publication of these books is part of cultural policy in the regions. Many memory books have been reprinted, which indicates the continued collection and processing of information about the military casualties in Afghanistan. The regional books of memory are one of the most important forms of preserving and transmitting the historical memory of the Afghanistan war.

Transnational Politics in Video Games

Political claims about the real world are abundant in video games, and the medium persuades uniquely through procedural rhetoric, the rules of behavior contained in computational code. The transnational scope of the video game industry makes it productive ground for interrogating how a game’s persuasion might influence international audiences with nationally situated politics. The 2012 third-person shooter Spec Ops: The Line, produced by the German studio Yager Development, depicts the international concern of a fictional conflict in the Middle East and the atrocities of failed military intervention. The game’s core procedural rhetoric, which tasks players to push ahead at all costs, cautions an international audience about the futility of deploying military power abroad, a warning that mirrors particularly German political anxieties. The game’s depiction of extreme violence—and the player’s participation in it—raises further questions about the cultural status of the medium in the country and abroad.