Suchergebnisse

The concept of civilization has gained political as well as theoretical attention in the 1990s owing to Samuel P. Huntington's influential thesis about civilizational conflicts being the new conflict formation of the post-Cold War era. It is the aim of this article to problematize Huntington's claim that one particular reading of the Bosnian War follows from adopting a civilizational optic. Huntington argues that the war took place between three different civilizations & that the West should have abstained from intervention. I will draw out competing accounts of the war through detailed examination of three sets of texts -- George Kennan, the Carnegie Commission investigating the first & second Balkan wars, & the second Carnegie Commission examining the Bosnian war -- all of which are representative of a common position in the Western debate. These texts specifically foreground "civilization" as the key analytical concept, but they challenge Huntington both in terms of the construction of "Balkan civilization" & in terms of the policy prescription that should be adopted by the West. Whether to read the Balkan wars as products of civilizational continuity or Western neglect is ultimately not simply a matter of objectively measuring historical facts, but of political & moral interpretation. 68 References. Adapted from the source document.

This article points to the absence of gender in the Copenhagen School of security studies & argues that this is indicative of two problems stemming from the Copenhagen School's "speech act" framework: the "security as silence" & the "subsuming security" problems. "Security as silence" occurs when insecurity cannot be voiced, when raising something as a security problem is impossible or might even aggravate the threat being faced. "Subsuming security" arises because gendered security problems often involve an intimate interlinkage between the subject's gendered identity & other aspects of the subject's identity, for example, national & religious. Because gender rarely produces the kind of collective, self-contained referent objects required by the Copenhagen School, it often gets defined as an individual -- & less important -- security problem. The article argues that a theory of gender & security demands a more thorough concern with how security discourses are produced than offered by the Copenhagen School. Drawing on Judith Butler's work, two suggestions are presented: to examine the bodily performance taking place within the speech act & to look at the individualizing strategies employed in keeping security problems from appearing at the collective level. Adapted from the source document.

This paper argues that the field of security studies would benefit from engaging more closely with the poststructuralist writings on security than has previously been the case. Poststructuralism advocates a position different from both the traditional realist and idealist perspectives in IR and offers important insights on the construction of the national-international dichotomy, the relationship between national identity and security politics, the discursive character of the concept of security, and the late-modern transformation of security. Specifically, poststructuralism is an important contribution to the debate on whether and/or how to expand the concept of security. It is argued from the poststructuralist position, most clearly by Ole Wæver, that security is a discursive practice and that the concept of security cannot therefore by definition be linked to the military domain: the crucial point is not to establish an objective relationship between the concept and the possible domains of security, but to study whether and how an issue is securitized. The paper concludes by pointing towards further research within poststructuralist security studies and argues in favour of more studies problematizing the possible and argues relationships between the state and the Other, asking whether security politics has to be built on a conquest of the Other.

How Slovenian national identity has been constructed since the 1980s; especially in light of the collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991.