Suchergebnisse

Muss ein Staat seine Untaten bereuen, um außenpolitische Legitimität zu erhalten? Was bedeutet es, Kriegsverbrechen aufzuarbeiten? Und wie agieren und kommunizieren Politiker, die unter internationalem Druck aufarbeiten müssen? Am Beispiel des serbischen Umgangs mit während der Jugoslawienkriege begangener Kriegsverbrechen sucht Daniela Mehler Erklärungen für Politikwandel und Ambivalenzen. Sie rekonstruiert die serbischen Aufarbeitungsdebatten vom Beginn der Jugoslawienkriege bis zur Verhaftung von Ratko Mladic und stellt die Positionen und Norminterpretationen der serbischen Akteure vor.

Aus osteuropäischer Sicht

Abstract
This article is aimed at transdisciplinary (critical International Relations, visual anthropology, and existential philosophy) analysis of Russian gendered nationalism and masculine ontological insecurities. It explores and re-imagines how visual representations of "Mother Russia" became signifiers of the phallocentric voice of the Russian gendered state. What can return the voice back to the "invisible women"? I claim that the political activism of the singer Madonna in the spheres of resistance to warfare and protection of gender minorities may shed new light on hidden manipulations with masculine anxieties in modern Russia. Besides original empirics, the article proposes theoretical avenues to integrate into gendered nationalism studies research on what I call masculine "politics of loneliness." I also look at the role such politics plays in constituting Russia's domestic narcissistic master narratives of the collective self and its frontiers with transnational celebrity activism. Based on feminism and narrative IR, this article investigates the "sociological dimension" of Russian loneliness. It examines the alienation of femininity as reflected on Russian street posters photographed during 2021–2023 and represented in the form of five "dialectical collages."

Abstract
The concept of agency has long been a focal point of research in the social sciences. While traditional discussions primarily centered on human agency, recent scholarship has increasingly turned its attention to agency beyond the human realm. This paper introduces a framework for comprehending the agency of spiritual beings within complex pluriversal sociopolitical systems. It contends that exploring the agency of spiritual beings challenges established binary distinctions and acknowledges their inherent complexities. Drawing from a relational understanding of animacy, this framework reveals that the agency of spiritual beings cannot be simply equated with gods or fixed other-than-human agencies. Instead, it enriches our understanding of agency by highlighting how diverse agencies shape and influence social interactions. The paper compares Jane Bennett's "thing power" and social assemblages to the Andean concepts of camaq (creating animating force) and Ajayu (spirit). By doing so, it uncovers both tensions and connections between these approaches, underscoring the need for pluriversal methodologies in analyzing pluriversal societies. In conclusion, the paper reflects on the implications of re-enchantment through animacy and its potential to provide fresh insights into understanding international phenomena.

This article is aimed at transdisciplinary (critical International Relations, visual anthropology, and existential philosophy) analysis of Russian gendered nationalism and masculine ontological insecurities. It explores and re-imagines how visual representations of "Mother Russia" became signifiers of the phallocentric voice of the Russian gendered state. What can return the voice back to the "invisible women"? I claim that the political activism of the singer Madonna in the spheres of resistance to warfare and protection of gender minorities may shed new light on hidden manipulations with masculine anxieties in modern Russia. Besides original empirics, the article proposes theoretical avenues to integrate into gendered nationalism studies research on what I call masculine "politics of loneliness." I also look at the role such politics plays in constituting Russia's domestic narcissistic master narratives of the collective self and its frontiers with transnational celebrity activism. Based on feminism and narrative IR, this article investigates the "sociological dimension" of Russian loneliness. It examines the alienation of femininity as reflected on Russian street posters photographed during 2021–2023 and represented in the form of five "dialectical collages."

AbstractAccess to social protection in old age is crucial and yet contingent upon negotiations between the social structures of the welfare states and the personal networks within which individuals are embedded. International migration, changing family dynamics, and the transformation of care and other welfare policies in the global North make it challenging for older migrants to negotiate social protection. Drawing on 45 semi-structured interviews with first-generation older Turkish migrants in London and 13 semi-structured interviews with professional service providers for the community, the paper aims to investigate the assemblages of formal and informal social protection in the lives of older migrants. Findings indicate the complexity in accessing informal social protection and the navigation of formal care support in the UK for first generation older Turkish migrants and the contingency of access to formal care services on informal support networks for participants. It has been demonstrated that built infrastructure and policies aimed at older adults have great influence on assemblages of care, highlighting the need for more age-friendly and integrated policies to facilitate access to social protection for diverse groups of older adults.

Abstract This article argues that in a Janus-faced Liberal International Order, American grand strategy faces an economy-security conundrum. Tensions between transnational economic networks and national security concerns require different administrations to square a balance between important yet competing interests. This conundrum is especially challenging for Washington, D.C., when dealing with China. Indeed, while the Chinese and the American economies are interdependent, China continues to rise, with revisionist demands, and outside of the US-led system of alliances. The economy-security conundrum is managed by different presidents who pursue similar long-term objectives but through different approaches, leading to both strategic continuity and policy changes between one administration and the next. Former US President Barack Obama's Trans-Pacific Partnership, subsequent President Donald Trump's trade war, and President Joe Biden's Build Back Better World (B3W)—most recently rebranded as Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII)—are indeed different policies, but all are aimed at either compelling China to abide the free-market rule of law or to separate from the West, especially regarding strategic and future industries.

AbstractWhile the explosion of videogames as a global entertainment medium has been explored in International Relations (IR) and associated fields in some detail in recent years, the proliferation of games in military settings remains under-researched. This paper examines the uses to which US military veterans put videogames following service, showing that they play an important role in healing and rehabilitation processes through community building, therapeutic relief, and suicide prevention. Drawing in detail on interviews conducted with veterans and support workers between 2017 and 2019, the paper shows that grassroots gaming groups promote forms of communication, connectivity, and community which the military's stigmatizing reintegration and mental health programs often do not. The core argument developed is that while they do not embrace an antimilitarist ethos, through their promotion of mental and physical recovery, veterans' gaming groups can be read as important sites of everyday resistance to the violences enacted by the US military on its personnel. Unsettling critical scholarly assumptions about what resistance looks like, and where it takes place, the paper ultimately demonstrates that it is possible to challenge the embodied alienations of militarism from within.

AbstractThe aim of the study was to examine changes in objective and self-reported physical activity (PA) among women aged 60 years and older. The study included 200 women aged over 60 years, divided into three groups according to age (60–65 years, 66–70 years, > 70 years). The subjective assessment was provided with the International Physical Activity Questionnaire (IPAQ) – short version with self-reported PA assessment, and objective data was provided by an Actigraph GT3-BT worn for seven days. Significant differences in moderate and high intensity PA, moderate-to-vigorous PA and steps per day were found between the oldest and youngest groups; as well as in low, moderate, moderate-to-vigorous PA and steps per day between groups middle and oldest. In all three age groups, 1) significant differences were observed between subjective and objective measurements of physical activity and 2) no correlation was found between assessment measures. It was found that only direct PA measurement declined with age in women over 60 years old, and that sedentary behavior is underestimated, and moderate and vigorous PA overestimated, with the self-reported IPAQ.

Abstract China is a key player, not just an actor, in the global search for health security. Reiteration of this point is useful for International Relations studies, which often portray China as a factor to contend with, especially given the background of the country as the first to report the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper adopts an analytical framework developed through a summary of routines in Chinese engagement in global health from a practitioner's perspective: aid, interdependence, governance and knowledge. These are the core elements in a country's pursuit of engagement with the rest of the world. After the introduction, the second section of the paper reviews contributions from China in the history of global plague control over the past century. The third section discusses structural issues affecting access to vaccines, which are essential for bringing COVID-19 under effective control. The fourth section identifies a number of challenges China is facing in global health governance. The final section offers a few concluding thoughts, reiterating the nature of interdependence in the global search for enhancement of health security.

AbstractThe paper explores the political narratives produced in English-language Israeli cookbooks. We examine an understudied, yet central component of everyday international relations, everyday nationalism, and identity contestations as practiced through gastronomy, and highlight the dilemma between the different political uses of popular culture in the context of conflict resolution and resistance. Our argument identifies different narratives represented in what we term Culinary Zionism. One narrative is explicitly political, discusses Israeli cuisine as a foodway, and contributes to creating a space of, and a path for, coexistence and recognition of the Other. A second narrative is found in tourist-orientated cookbooks that offer a supposedly apolitical story of culinary tours in Israel. We problematize the political and normative implications of these narratives by exploring the potential role of these books to open space for dialogue and to increase the familiarity and interest of foreign audiences of Israel and the conflict. We contrast this possibility with their potential to what we term foodwashing, namely the process of using food to symbolically wash over violence and injustices (the violence of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in this case).

This collective discussion proposes a novel understanding of intelligence as a social phenomenon, taking place in a social space that increasingly involves actors and professional fields not immediately seen as part of intelligence. This discussion is a response to the inherent functionalism in Intelligence Studies (IS) that conceives of intelligence as a cycle serving policymakers. Instead, our interventions seek to problematize and break with this notion of the cycle and show what an alternative study of intelligence would look like. In the first part of the discussion, we situate our intervention in the broader fields of IS and International Political Sociology. Espousing a transdisciplinary approach, we build our four interventions as transversal lines cutting through a social space in which agents with differing stakes participate and reframe the meaning and practice of intelligence. Intelligence professionals not only have to reckon with policymakers, but also increasingly with law enforcement agents, representatives from the science and technology sector, judges, lawyers, activists, and Internet users themselves. Each move takes a step further away from the intelligence cycle by introducing new empirical sites, actors, and stakes.

AbstractThis article advances a critical outlook on dominant interpretations of ontological security in international relations. It suggests that the preoccupation with state- and identity-centric analyses diminishes the value of the Other to an archetype of ontological insecurity and a source of ontological insecurity for the Self. It argues that seeing ontological security from the postcolonial perspective expands the self-referential understanding of ontological security to a Self-Other relation of mutual coexistence. To do so, the article proposes a framework that loosely intersects Giddens' work on late modernity with postcolonial notions of interstitiality and hybridity. Postcolonial ontological security foregrounds the emergence of a "third hybrid Other" from an ontologically insecure status through three interrelated conditions of reflexivity, resourcefulness, and resistance. It aims to shed light on creative, nondestructive ways of confronting ontological insecurity and to encourage a view of the postcolonial Other as a learning source for the Self. These arguments are illustrated with the case of Okinawan "Otherness" vis-à-vis the US and Japanese selves, with particular attention to antimilitary base movements.

From 2009 to the first half of 2019, China–U.S. relations have experienced a gradual yet sustained downturn. Particularly since 2017, the bilateral relationship has suffered a rapid downward spiral in almost every dimension. By early 2019, more and more Chinese and American observers are warning that the two countries may be moving toward a long-term, full-scale confrontation. This article reviews the 10-year deterioration of bilateral ties in three stages and analyzes the context behind and reasons for the steady downturn. Internal developments in the two countries have driven the changes in U.S.–China relations. Bilateral tensions in the realms of geostrategy, ideology, economics and trade, and international security are escalating and intensifying. Such a trend is unlikely to be reversed without major changes in world politics or the two countries' domestic politics. The greatest probability, as we see it, will be a continued downturn in the U.S.–China relationship with many bumps and stumbling blocks along the way. The best prospect both sides can hope for may be the Chinese saying dou-er-bu-po, or "fighting without breaking."