Diversity vs the 2030 agenda. A deconstructive reading of the United Nations agenda for sustainable development

This article analyses the marginal position cultural diversity is granted in the United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, it analyses and deconstructs the ontological assumptions of the UN's discourse. The inquiry shows that the ontological structure of the UN's agenda creates an essentialist and teleological understanding of history that privileges universality – unity – at the expense of diversity. In this way, the UN's plan of action reproduces what Ernesto Laclau defined as hegemony – a particularity assuming the representation of the totality. The 2030 Agenda naturalises the international power structure designed after World War II and presents it as beneficial for everyone. The article concludes that the 2030 Agenda's ontological assumptions create an inherently ethnocentric understanding of global issues.

The international politics of truth: C. Wright Mills and the sociology of the international

C. Wright Mills's critical work on international relations is well known, but is often dismissed as being unscholarly, reductionist, and overly polemical. However, seeing the work in the context of his earlier career can allow for a new perspective, with Mills's activist views on war and militarism shaped very clearly by his earlier theoretical and political commitments. Mills developed a distinctive political sociological understanding of international politics, theorising the state as a historically-situated structural determinant of international power: a network of elite power that was contextualised by the influence of the socially constructed realities of the international created by elites. Mills's crucial critical contribution was to see the role of the intellectual as criticising these realities through the imaginative reconceptualisation of the world, which he called the ‘politics of truth’. The article argues the international politics of truth was not only Mills's distinctive theory of the international, but that it was clearly supported by his early theorisation of the international. A revised view of the importance of Mills's international relations work can help to situate Mills as part of a broader tradition of IR scholarship, a lost lineage of the critical historical and political sociology of the international.

Global Trade and Cybersecurity

Trade in information and communications technologies (ICTs) is a new currency of international power. On the one hand, this commerce boosts national prosperity and the global economy. On the other hand, it puts capabilities for harm into the hands of potential malicious actors or political adversaries. States are scrambling to introduce new security control mechanisms through a variety of laws, regulations, and policies. These practices will have mixed results, not least because some of the more threatening elements of the trade relate to software products and even the results of basic scientific research that cannot be tracked as easily as physical goods. Enforcement of trade restrictions in this area will remain problematic. Even so, states are looking to undertake economic sanctions in this area to retaliate for the malicious behaviour in cyberspace of other states (or of criminals operating with impunity from the territory of other states). The corporate sector has emerged as an independent actor in these interstate controversies, and they have been joined by scientists and civil society activists, all pressing for a more liberal and open approach. While the unilateralist trend seems to have the upper hand for now, common interests and the imperatives of trade may force new collaborative behaviours among states.

Global Perspectives on Smart-Power Strategy in International Arena: Critical Discovery into Philosophy of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu from Strategic Implications

Within the military discipline, the doctrine from Carl von Clausewitz and Sun Tzu can be framed as the ones among the most influential strategy-based philosophical domains. Carl von Clausewitz’s theoretical framework of consolidation of all powers and strategic obliteration of all forces of the opponents and rivals seems not uncommon in analysing the scenarios of international power competition and contest. On the contrary, Sun Tzu (around 545B.C.-470B.C.), the ancestral Chinese military strategist during the Spring and Autumn Period, put forward the complete distinctive strategic conception of optimum winning without engaging in any fight, which meanwhile plays a more epistemologically productive, thought-provoking role in utilising smart power strategy in a complex, evolving international arena where hard power alone has been of no avail to keep a dominantly advantageous position. Sequentially, it is indispensable for strategists to conduct in-depth exploration into the role of smart power through abstractly inheriting the consequential philosophical implications from Sun Tzu and Clausewitz as a distinctive strategy-building element and eclectically and rationally combine, enliven and hierarchise their implicit ties with an authentic world matrix that it is hard to empirically theorise and accurately quantify. Through deductive-analysis approaches and case studies of the US (a dominant power in relative terms over the long run), China (the second-largest economic power thus far) and India (a rising power in BRICS), the primary purpose of this paper seeks to dialectically explore an implicit dyadic nexus between 1) the philosophical implications for Sun Tzu and those for Clausewitz and 2) the nature and implementation of smart power strategy ranging from the perspectives of historical origin and international context. It can be argued that the philosophical standpoint of smart power strategy bears historical merits that the principal arguments from Clausewitz and Sun Tzu somehow generated. This paper-based on existential research findings meanwhile prognosticates that the strategic implementation of smart-power strategy, which tends to be highlighted worldwide in the foreseeable future, will advance in a world of multipolarisation instead of bipolarity and strategic co-opetition (i.e. cooperation and competition combined) will grow as an alternative widespread international phenomenon and trajectory that complicates the magnetism, flexibility and unpredictability of how a broad definition of national strength would influence the international structure and international standing.

Encountering Chinese development in the Maldives

This chapter examines the longest and most developed road in the Maldives archipelago, a fifteen-kilometre-long link road connecting four islands of the Laamu (or Haddummati) Atoll. In the planning phase, there were tensions between those who argued that the road should connect houses to the school and the mosque and those who argued that the road should connect the harbour to the market. Such appeals, bifurcated along gender lines, reflect local mobility concerns and were tied to existing political rifts between the four islands that were intensified by the appearance of a new infrastructural asset. The built road facilitates a multitude of local encounters as people travel further and more regularly, but it is also through the road that islanders encounter the global forces of capital and construction that shape their islands. The Laamu link road was a ‘gift’ from the Chinese government, constructed by the Jiangsu Transportation Engineering Group (JTEG), and amidst local mobility concerns and inter-island politics swirl rumours and hearsay of land grabs and international power struggles between China, India, the US, and Saudi Arabia. This chapter, as well as being an ethnographic exposition of Chinese infrastructure development in a South Asian archipelago, explores the road as a social experience as it crosscuts competing visions of modernity, global connectivity, and anxiety about material change on remote coral atolls in the Indian Ocean.

Domini da Mar: Manifestations of the aquapelagic imaginary in Venetian symbolism and folklore

The concept of the aquapelago, an assemblage of terrestrial and aquatic spaces generated by human activities, was first advanced in 2012 and has been subsequently developed with regard to what has been termed the ‘aquapelagic imaginary’ – the figures, symbols, myths and narratives generated by human engagement with such assemblages. Venice, a city premised on the integration of terrestrial and marine elements within an intermediate tidal lagoon, is a paradigmatic aquapelago and its artists have produced a substantial corpus of creative work reflecting various aspects of its Domini da Mar (maritime dominion). This article engages with one aspect of these engagements, the use of sirenas (mermaids), sea serpents, Neptune and associated motifs in visual and narrative culture from the Renaissance to the present. This subject is explored in a reverse chronological order. Commencing with a discussion of two striking contemporary sculptures, the article goes on to analyse modern renditions of Venetian folklore before moving back to explore a variety of Renaissance paintings and sculptures that feature mythic maritime motifs. Having followed this trajectory, the article shifts focus to examine the manner in which the prominence of the winged Lion of Saint Mark in Venetian iconography counteracts the aforementioned aquatic imagery, reflecting different perceptions of Venice as a social locale and as regional and international power at different historical junctures.

Khyber Pakhtoonistan is a Factor in Pak-Afghan Relations: Challenges and Way Forward

This paper aims to explore out the challenges of Pak-Afghan relations and their impact on regional peace. Despite geographical proximity and common socio-cultural legacy, Pakistan and Afghanistan failed to settle their mutual differences amicable as a result, their bilateral relations have been exploited by the regional and international power. In addition to this, KPK and Balochistan provinces of Pakistan which are the main causes of geo-political differences between Pakistan and Afghanistan have been the home of terrorism, extremism and Afghan refugees since 1980s. The paper is qualitative in nature, and based on investigation of the various events and facts in order to address the question why did Pakistan and Afghanistan failto set a mechanism to end up their mutual geo-political difference? The paper also intends to forward policy recommendations for the durable and permanent friendly relations of Pakistan and Afghanistan and their possible impacts on the region.