What do we imagine Afghanistan to be? The Ruins of Kabul examines how the meaning of "Afghanistan" has been produced, ordered, and perpetuated through literary and visual texts that were published after the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent U.S.-led invasion—the era that propelled Afghanistan into the center of global media visibility. Through an analysis of fiction, graphic novels, memoirs, plays, and film, the book demonstrates that writing and screening Afghanistan has become a tool for understanding our shared post- 9/11 condition—a hermeneutics of the contemporary.
The term 'Global South' marks a new attempt at providing order and meaning in the current global political constellation, replacing the term 'Third World'. But the term 'Global South' is fraught with many ambiguities. This book explores the possible meanings of this new distinction and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of adopting it for understanding the contemporary world. It casts a wide exploratory net, addressing historical transformations of world-interpretation and wider cultural-intellectual meanings.
In a period of increasing geopolitical insecurity and economic instability this title provides an authoritative yet accessible commentary on debates on capitalism and globalization in the wake of the financial crisis.
Cowinner of the International Studies Association's Chadwick F. Alger Prize, Winner of the American Political Science Association's Comparative Democratization Section Best Book Award, and Cowinner of the Yale University MacMillan Center's Gustav Ranis International Book Prize. Why did election monitoring become an international norm? Why do "pseudo-democrats" (undemocratic leaders who present themselves as democratic) invite international observers, even when they are likely to be caught manipulating elections? Is election observation an effective tool of democracy promotion, or is it simply a way to legitimize electoral autocracies? This book uses cross-national data on election observations since 1960 and case studies of Armenia, Indonesia, Haiti, Peru, Togo, and Zimbabwe to explain international election monitoring with a new theory of international norms.
In the globalised world of today, traditional definitions of national Self and national Other no longer hold. The unmistakable transformation of German and Dutch societies demands a thorough rethinking of national boundaries on several levels. This book examines how literature of migration intervenes in public discourses on multiculturality in Germany and the Netherlands, epitomised in the strikingly parallel debates on the 'German Leitkultur' and the Dutch 'multicultural drama' in the year 2000. By juxtaposing detailed analyses of literary work by the Turkish-German writers Emine Sevgi özdamar and Feridun Zaimoglu and the Moroccan-Dutch writers Abdelkader Benali and Hafid Bouazza, New Germans, New Dutch offers crucial insights into the specific ways in which this literature negotiates its national context of writing. This book demonstrates how German literature of migration seeks alternative forms of community outside the national parameters, whereas the Dutch literature negotiates difference and re-imagines Dutchness within the national framework.
El conjunto de trabajos aquí reunidos apuntan a una lectura crítica del proceso de globalización, rasgo distintivo que resume el carácter expansivo de la fase actual de acumulación capitalista en el plano mundial, y que, a juicio del autor, representa, ante todo, el resultado de un proceso político: el resultado del retroceso que, con desfases y despuntes diversos, se observa, a partir de 1968, en las luchas y los niveles de organización de los trabajadores en el conjunto del planeta. No es la lógica de expansión de las fuerzas productivas, ni la pretendida "eficiencia" de los procesos de producción capitalista ni la racionalización que esta conlleva, ni tampoco las economías a escala, sino la organización de los trabajadores y del movimiento popular en su conjunto los que, en su accionar político, posibilitan o no la expansión del capital, por tanto los únicos que pueden detener o, en ausencia de una voluntad política en este sentido, facilitar la expansión de éste. Todo este festín del capitalismo, en plena euforia expansiva que hoy observamos con horror, hubiera sido a todas luces impensable sin la desarticulación previa del nivel de resistencia de los trabajadores.
'Global' is everywhere – recent years have seen a significant proliferation of the adjective 'global' across discourses. But what do social actors actually do when using this term? Written from within the political studies and international relations disciplines, and with a particular interest in the US, this book demonstrates that the widespread use of 'global' is more than a linguistic curiosity. It constitutes a distinct political phenomenon of major importance: the negotiation of and play with the notion of the 'new world'. As such, the analysis of the use of 'global' provides fascinating insights into an influential and politically loaded aspect of contemporary imaginations of the world.
Die Globalisierung ist zur allgegenwärtigen Gewissheit geworden. Doch wie zutreffend ist das Konzept »Globalisierung«, wenn zeitgleich nationale Grenzen gestärkt und transnationale Freihandelszonen ausgeweitet werden, wenn auf unterschiedlichen scales Territorien überwunden und zugleich territoriale Abgrenzungen neu gesetzt werden? Aktuelle Veränderungen als Refiguration von Räumen zu verstehen, ermöglicht die Analyse und Diskussion widersprüchlicher, spannungsreicher und konflikthafter räumlicher Prozesse und ihrer alltäglichen Erfahrung. Die interdisziplinären Beiträge des Bandes präsentieren theoretische und empirische Ergebnisse des Berliner Sonderforschungsbereichs 1265 »Re-Figuration von Räumen«.
Structures and processes occurring within and between states are no longer the only – or even the most important - determinants of those political, economic and social developments and dynamics that shape the modern world. Many issues, including the environment, health, crime, drugs, migration and terrorism, can no longer be contained within national boundaries. As a result, it is not always possible to identify the loci for authority and legitimacy, and the role of governments has been called into question. Civil Society and International Governance critically analyses the increasing impact of nongovernmental organisations and civil society on global and regional governance. Written from the standpoint of advocates of civil society and addressing the role of civil society in relation to the UN, the IMF, the G8 and the WTO, this volume assess the role of various non-state actors from three perspectives: theoretical aspects, civil society interaction with the European Union and civil society and regional governance outside Europe, specifically Africa, East Asia and the Middle East. It demonstrates that civil society's role has been more complex than one defined in terms, essentially, of resistance and includes actual participation in governance as well as multi-facetted contributions to legitimising and democratising global and regional governance. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, international relations, civil society, sociology, European politics and global governance.
The countries of the South Pacific have struggled to generate sustainable economic growth since their independence. Interventionist policies have failed in the past here, as they have in all other regions. Business and government leaders in this region are now beginning to acknowledge - as has happened in many other developing country regions over the past two decades - that major reforms are needed to put their economies onto a higher growth path. This study examines the growth record of key Pacific island economies and indentifies the reasons for their relatively poor performance. It then looks at the process of globalization that is affecting those and indeed all economies increasingly; and the role the WTO has played in that process.
This book addresses how sexual practices and identities are imagined and regulated through development discourses and within institutions of global governance.The underlying premise of this volume is that the global development industry plays a central role in constructing people's sexual lives, access to citizenship, and struggles for livelihood. Despite the industry's persistent insistence on viewing sexuality as basically outside the realm of economic modernization and anti-poverty programs, this volume brings to the fore heterosexual bias within macroeconomic and human rights development frameworks. The work fills an important gap in understanding how people's intimate lives are governed through heteronormative policies which typically assume that the family is based on blood or property ties rather than on alternative forms of kinship. By placing heteronormativity at the center of analysis, this anthology thus provides a much-needed discussion about the development industry's role in pathologizing sexual deviance yet also, more recently, in helping make visible a sexual rights agenda. Providing insights valuable to a range of disciplines, this book will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Development Studies, Gender Studies, and International Relations. It will also be highly relevant to development practitioners and international human rights advocates.
This book proposes an innovative conceptual framework to explore cultural organizations at a multilateral level and cultural mediators as key figures in cultural and institutionalization processes. Specifically, it analyzes the role of Ibero-American mediators in the institutionalization of Hispanic and Lusophone cultures in the first half of the 20th century by means of two institutional networks: PEN (the non-governmental writer's association) and the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (predecessor to UNESCO). Attempting to combine cultural and global history, sociology, and literary studies, the book uses an analytical focus on intercultural networks and cultural transfer to investigate the multiple activities and roles that these mediators and cultural organizations set in motion. Literature has traditionally studied major figures and important centers of cultural production, but other regions and localities also played a crucial role in the development of intellectual cooperation. This book reappraises the place of Ibero-America in international cultural relations and retrieves the lost history of key secondary actors. The book will appeal to scholars from international relations, global and cultural history, sociology, postcolonial Studies, world and comparative literature, and New Hispanisms.
Investigates how activists confront global powers with their street-level dissent. Two Sides of a Barricade argues that to construct global democracy, conflict and dissent must be taken seriously. Christian Scholl explores the political significance of the confrontations within four sites of interaction: bodies, space, communication, and law. Each site of struggle provides a different entry point to understand the influence of protester and police tactics on each other. At the same time, the four sites of struggle allow a comprehensive analysis of how the contestation of global hegemonic forces during summit protests trigger a preemptive shift in social control through increased deployment of biopolitical forms of power. Christian Scholl is Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. He is the coauthor (with Amory Starr and Luis Fernandez) of Shutting Down the Streets: Political Violence and Social Control in the Global Era .
This book is about the radical novelty of modern polities in a functionally differentiated world society. Premodern states were at the apex of a stratified, hierarchical society. They dominated society and all its groups and strata. Modern polities have to be understood through the ecology of relations among different function systems. They have to find and incessantly redefine their place in society. They produce decisions that are collectively binding, but in preparing these decisions experience constraints and knowledge deficiencies that are related to the complexity of a functionally differentiated society. The book concentrates on six analytical perspectives that reflect how modern polities are embedded into 21st century society. These perspectives are: the concept of inclusion and the inclusion revolution constitutive of modern polities; the internal differentiation of polities that endows them with an unprecedented complexity; the fact that polities do not know anything about society and the ways in which they compensate for this; representation and responsiveness as strategies to reconnect with society; the self-restriction of some polities that brings about ever new autonomous expert organizations; the symmetrical rise of autocracies and democracies as the two modern variants of political regimes.
Europa steht vor enormen Herausforderungen: die Gewaltkonflikte in Bergkarabach und der Ukraine bedrohen den Frieden in Europa, die Spannungen zwischen den USA und China geraten zusehends zu einem Großmachtkonflikt, in dem Europa seine Rolle noch finden muss, und die Debatten über die »europäische Souveränität« vernachlässigen die friedenspolitischen Prioritäten zugunsten militärischer Fähigkeiten. Die Auswirkungen der Covid-19-Pandemie auf den globalen Süden erfordern zudem neue Akzente in der Entwicklungspolitik. Zugleich hält weltweit der besorgniserregende Trend zur Entdemokratisierung an. Das Friedensgutachten 2021 analysiert diese Entwicklungen und gibt Empfehlungen für die Politik.Das Friedensgutachten 2020 analysiert vor diesem Hintergrund aktuelle Gewaltkonflikte, zeigt Trends der internationalen Außen-, Sicherheits- und Entwicklungspolitik auf und gibt Empfehlungen fur Bundesregierung und Bundestag. Die deutschen Friedensforschungsinstitute (BICC/HSF/IFSH/INEF) geben das Gutachten seit 1987 heraus.
