Explaining State Violence in the Guatemalan Civil War: Rebel Threat and Counterinsurgency

Literature on the Guatemalan Civil War has debated whether or not state violence was triggered by rebel activities. Did the government respond to each insurrection caused by the rebels, or did it blindly target regions where antigovernment antipathy and movements had historically prevailed? Because state violence was extensive during the civil war period, the dynamism of the war could have been the reason for its occurrence. Relying on the threat‐response model of state violence, this article argues that human rights violations occurred when the government perceived a rebel threat that would have seriously degraded its capability in future counterinsurgencies. The article employs propensity score matching to address the problem of confounding in empirical analysis, and reveals that rebel attacks, particularly those targeting security apparatus and resulting in human injury, increased the likelihood of state violence in the Guatemalan Civil War.     

Political stability,transition and conflict: Tajikistan compared with Georgia

Tajikistan and Georgia, in Central Asia and the South Caucasus respectively, are both small Soviet successor states with a recent history of political volatility and instability until the mid-2000s. Nevertheless, these independent countries have eventually developed diverging policies, notably with regard to their political alliances and world orientations. The Tajikistani Civil War resembles in many ways that of the Chechen conflict and also helps us understand the Syrian conflict. Similar to Georgia, Tajikistan had experienced the collapse of state institutions more intensely than other Soviet republics. Although contingent and actor-driven factors may have influenced the outcome, the influence of structural factors has been far greater than those agency-driven factors. This review article discusses, and tries to offer understanding and explanations for, political stability, transition and conflict in these two countries.     

Ahmad Amin and nationalism

With the breakup of the Soviet Union at the end of the Cold War, three republics in the South Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan) achieved independence for the second time during the twentieth century. Their first experience was contentious and short-lived, had little or no support from the Western powers and was brought to end by the newly formed Soviet Union with the tacit approval of Turkey. While Georgian, Armenian and Azerbaijani national aspirations were quashed in the early post-First World War era, Zionism was given encouragement with the establishment of the Palestine Mandate. When Israel was established it was given immediate recognition by the Soviet Union, but most Jews from Georgia and Azerbaijan – Armenia's population was very small in comparison – only made their way to Israel during the last years of the Cold War. On the other hand, following the Second World War, some members of the Armenian Diaspora, including those in the Arab world, immigrated to the Soviet Union. While Soviet-Israeli relations had been strained since the Six-Day War, the end of the Cold War not only brought better ties between Russia and Israel, but it allowed Israel to establish relations with the other successor states of the former Soviet Union. Many of those countries sought ties with Israel (and the other Western states) to insure their continued independence from Russia, while, at the same time, Arab-Israeli relations improved and Turkey and Israel drew closer together. Iran was regarded with suspicion by Azerbaijan and along with Georgia, which wanted to enhance its ties with the West, drew closer to Turkey. Both countries have benefited from the transport of oil. Jews from Georgia and Azerbaijan have kept close connections with their former countries, where anti-Semitism was never the problem it was in Russia. Armenia has remained the closest to Russia with its conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno Karabakh and its distrust of Georgia. However, Armenians experienced genocide at the hands of the Ottomans and have sought support from Israel over that issue.     

History and hero-making: patriotic narratives and the Sovietization of Kazakh front-line propaganda, 1941–1945

This article analyses Soviet agitprop that was produced for Kazakhstani soldiers during the Great Patriotic War. The author argues that one of the main goals of this propaganda was to cultivate a complementary Soviet-Kazakh identity. Conditions at the front made this difficult to accomplish, but Soviet propagandists persisted in tailoring their propaganda for the benefit of Kazakh soldiers. As the war progressed, Kazakh front-line propaganda acquired a more unambiguously Soviet orientation, a consequence of the elimination of key themes derived from Kazakh national history and considered too politically volatile by the Communist Party. The article concludes by suggesting that the narratives articulated during World War II by Soviet propagandists went a long ways towards setting the contours of a prescribed Soviet-Kazakh identity.     

From princely fiefdoms to Soviet nations: interethnic border conflicts in the North Caucasus and the village of Lesken

This article examines interethnic border conflicts that accompanied the Soviet division of the North Caucasus into ethno-territorial autonomous districts after the Civil War. It traces the tumultuous, and often violent, events that led to the transfer of the ethnically Ossetian village of Lesken from the Kabardino-Balkar Autonomous Oblast to the North-Ossetian Autonomous Oblast. The essay shows how the Soviet-sponsored ethnicization of territory exacerbated interethnic tensions in a multiethnic region that defied neat delimitation into coherent ethno-national administrative units. It highlights the ‘dual-assimilation’ that accompanied the introduction of the national principle and the delimitation of national borders. Ethno-national mobilization of populations in defence of their ‘national’ territory from neighbouring ethnic groups, though achieved for reasons of daily survival, represented an initial lesson in the importance of national identity in the modernizing Soviet state, as villagers learned to speak national and Bolshevik. In concluding, this paper seeks to understand the larger significance of Soviet border making in the North Caucasus by exploring issues of continuity and change, both in terms of imperial governance and the lived experience of ethnicity.     

Between Two Fires: Mayangna Indians in Post‐Revolutionary Nicaragua, 1979–1990

The predominant Mayangna narrative of the Nicaraguan Civil War holds that the Miskitu tricked them into joining the conflict. However, I argue here that the Mayangna leadership and the Sandinista government were also responsible, as Sandinista denial of the importance of ethnic difference in Nicaragua allowed Miskitu nationalists, using the language of religion, to co‐opt Mayangna leaders, while subsequent Sandinista violence turned Mayangna civilians against the revolution. Accusations of trickery stem from later Mayangna disillusion with the war and from problems with the autonomous political system set up in its wake, which encourages the Mayangna to underplay the role of their own leaders and the Sandinista government in embroiling them in the conflict. This one‐sided narrative, however, increasingly defines Mayangna interpretations of their very identity as a people.     

Soviet Work Attitudes and Politics, 1953–91: A Preliminary Historical Sociology

The main question investigated here is the extent to which Russian workers' changing attitudes toward their labour contributed to the systemic political crisis of the Soviet regime during the latter part of the 1980s. The related issue of the workers' understanding of what has been called the "social contract" between themselves and government is also explored. The goal is to assess the relationship between their political allegiance and historical Soviet practices that guaranteed rudimentary welfare and job security, irrespective of work performance.     

The Strained Alliance: Peking,Pyongyang, Moscow and thePolitics of the Korean Civil War

Abstract

The burden of many conventional interpretations of the Korean War is that the conflict represented a test of strength between the Soviet and American Cold War antagonists which helped establish the ground rules for limited war in the nuclear age. The great virtue of Simmons' book is that it confronts us with the obvious but hitherto elusive truth that the Korean Civil War (as it is correctly called here) originated in Korean political issues. Simmons paints Korean features onto the Soviet-American Cold War mask. His book's second significant contribution is in its probing beneath the surface unity of the communist camp in the early 1950s to suggest that serious conflicts of interest arose between Moscow, Peking and Pyongyang in the course of the war.     

Turkish transformation and the Soviet Union: navigating through the Soviet historiography on Kemalism

Being founded in the wake of the First World War, both Turkey and the Soviet Union followed revolutionary modernizing pathways. At the outset, one could trace many similar patterns in their radical modernization paradigms; however, their development models as well as political and social orders were radically distinct, which became more obvious with the passage of time. The paper discusses the external interpretations of Kemalism by observing the Soviet perspectives on the inception and evolution of Kemalism. Paying more attention to diplomatic, geopolitical and economic complexities of the Turkish-Soviet relations, scholars have rarely problematized the Soviet Union perceptions of Turkish ideological transformations. In reality, since the early 1920s, different state institutions, intellectual schools of thought and research in the Soviet Union closely observed the domestic transformations in Turkey by providing valuable insights on the perspective and the implications of the Kemalist transformation. The article also looks at the question of how the incorporation of Soviet perspectives can enrich the historiography and our understanding of Kemalism.     

Anarchism, Internationalism and Nationalism in Europe, 1860–1939

This article is part of a broader project on the social history or histories of anarchism. The standard accounts of anarchism (Nettlau, Joll, Woodcock, Marshall etc.) have been combinations of the histories of ideas and political/social movements. A larger project I am engaged in uses another methodology and is reliant upon the vast outpouring of published and unpublished academic writing on social history that has been produced since the 1960s. I will cover only several interconnected themes here: anarchism, internationalism and nationalism in Europe. This article will give a synoptic overview of the internationalism of the European anarchist and syndicalist movements during the “classical” period of anarchism (1860–1939). It focuses on the First and Second Internationals and the birth of the Third. It examines the ideology and culture of Internationalism, which was the nursery of the modern anarchist movement. The linkage between federalist and regionalist republicanism is stressed and the legacy of the Paris Commune of 1871 is highlighted. The desire to secure a global level playing field in labour markets promoted labour internationalism during the First International and a revival of this strategy by anarchists and syndicalists during the era of the Second International. The mismatch of industrial development and union density between industrialised Britain or Germany and artisanal and industrialising France and southern Europe limited internationalism in the 1860s and the 1900s. Equally the patriotic legacy of the Commune of Paris undermined the internationalism of anarchists and syndicalists when war broke out in 1914. In 1917–1918 anarchist and syndicalist internationalism seemed to be revived as Europe entered a period of revolutionary discontent. But very quickly the Bolsheviks and the Soviet Union channelled this wave into the Third International and ultimately the interests of the newly born Soviet State. Anarchist and syndicalist internationalism had little effect on the fortunes of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil War in a world of nation‐states and state‐centric political parties and movements.     

"A Very Present Menace"? Attlee, Communism and the Cold War!

With the end of the Cold War and the further opening of archives, the role of Western communist parties and their relationship with the former Soviet Union has been the subject of fresh scrutiny. This article examines the conviction of the British Labour Government and its security services that the Communist Party of Great Britain represented, at least in the early Cold War period, a "very present menace". The article discusses the policies of the Soviet Union in Europe and the Communist Party in Britain and explores how these shaped the perspectives of the Attlee Government, especially during the London dock strike of 1949. When placed against this background, Attlee's anti-communism can no longer be accepted, as most commentators do, as simply a product of Cold War paranoia.     

(Over)determining social disorder: Tajikistan and the economic collapse of perestroika

This article analyses the rise of social unrest in the Tajik SSR in 1990–1991 from the perspective of the republic’s place within the broader Soviet economy and the collapse of that economy over the course of perestroika (1985–1991). Countering standard narratives of glasnost, democratization and nationalism in Tajikistan, it demonstrates that a close reading of the historical record points to sharp economic downturn as the most plausible immediate cause of the social disorder that came to engulf the Tajik SSR in the final years of the USSR and led to the Tajik Civil War of the 1990s.     

浅析认知变量对欧洲安全观变化的影响

欧洲战略文化从冷战时期的防御型模式向冷战后的干预型模式转变,其中,认知变量对战略文化中的核心要素——安全观的变化起着重要的作用。认知变量主要包括四大变量,即内生变量、外生变量,传导变量和干扰变量。由于认知变量发生变化,导致欧洲国家在冷战后不再把苏联作为主要威胁来源,而把非传统安全威胁,特别是人道主义灾难作为主要威胁来源,确定了新的威胁来源和安全观,并在此基础上形成了关于安全战略方面的基本认知规范,从而导致欧洲战略文化模式的变迁。本文主要从战略文化的理论角度出发,围绕安全观及其认知变量的概念,简要阐述认知变量如何影响安全观,从而更好地理解欧洲安全观改变的原因,以及这些变化对欧洲战略文化的影响。     

战争中的符号暴力——以二战时期日本军人切腹自杀为例

纵观整个日本战争史，军人自杀作为一种极端个人行为，背后常常具有深刻的社会因素与时代因素。其重点不在于自杀行为本身的意义与作用，而在于身处特定环境里的军人自杀行为的选择及运用方式的取舍背后所蕴涵的社会动因——符号暴力。借用布迪厄“符号暴力”及其相关概念，重点探讨日本极端军国主义分子利用日本的传统国民性宣扬并阐释战争的正当性的过程，通过教育机制，尤其是学校教育，鼓动日本民众积极参战并誓死效忠，甚至不惜以切腹自杀的方式表示尽忠的决心。其特色在于选取特定的民族——日本，特定的自杀方式——切腹为研究主体，着重阐述日本教育的“符号暴力”——软暴力的形成以及这种暴力在日本战争年代的特殊作用。切腹自杀只作为本文的一个引例，例证这种暴力的意义与作用。     

Baltic Refugees and Policy Formation in Sweden 1940–1950

The Baltic refugees of the Second World War, in Sweden, were part of the opening up of Sweden to immigration. New research, after the turn of the century, has shown how this change of policy was part of the emerging welfare state, embracing a wider geographical area. Still, the opening was conditioned by degrees of “Nordicness” and the conditions of neutrality toward Germany and not least the Soviet Union. This review article highlights some of the new insights of Swedish historiography.     

Agency and Terror: Evdokimov and Mass Killing in Stalin's Great Terror

This article presents an account of the history of Soviet repression, which integrates our current understanding of the scale and nature of repression with a history of the agents responsible for carrying out these operations. It notes that the major shifts in the nature of repression were accompanied by shifts in the operational leadership within the security forces, and that it was largely the same groups of individuals who were responsible for the mass killing operations during the civil war, collectivization and the Great Terror. These were the groups associated with Efim Georgievich Evdokimov, which operated in Ukraine during the Civil War, in the North Caucasus in the 1920s, and in the Secret Operational Division within OGPU in 1929‐1931. Evdokimov transferred into party administration in 1934 when he became party secretary for North Caucasus Krai. But he appears to have continued advising Stalin and Yezhov on Security matters, and the latter relied upon Evdokimov's former colleagues to carry out the mass killing operations that are known as “The Great Terror” in 1937‐1938.     

Populism and Peasant Iconography: Turkish painting in the 1930s

The Six Day War is renowned for its impact on the shaping of the Middle East. In the last few decades, much research examining the reasons for the outbreak of the Six Day War, its development and its ramifications has been published. Most of the research has focused on an examination of Israeli government policy before and after the war, on the Egyptian regime's hatred of the ‘Zionist entity’ and on the involvement of the superpowers during and after the war. Some research has also touched on Syria's role in the outbreak of the war. Researchers such as Eyal Zisser and Moshe Maoz have shown Syria's decisive role in initiating the war and suggest that various factors, such as a lack of government stability in Syria, precipitated the conflict. This research continues, to a great extent, in the line of those researchers: indeed, it points to Syria as being the main factor behind the outbreak of war through an examination of the changes that occurred in the character of its government from 1966. However, unlike other research so far, this attempts to show that the unique character of the neo-Ba'ath regime is what brought war to the region and that, had the Ba'ath coup not occurred in 1966, it is doubtful whether Syria would have entered the conflict. This article seeks to emphasize that the Syrian regime went blindly into the war despite military unpreparedness and a lack of political and military cooperation with other Arab countries and with the Soviets. It also exposes, for the first time, the state of the Syrian troops on the front and in the cities, as well as the feelings of the senior officers on the eve of the war, and reveals documents about the military and political cooperation between Syria and Egypt that would eventually force President Nasser to enter a war he did not want to get involved in. Moreover, the research exposes the deep rift – which many believe pushed Syria to take rash independent measures –between the Soviet leadership and the Ba'ath regime before the war. And, finally, the research exposes the atmosphere in Syria following the war, and the administrative and military steps the Syrian regime took immediately after the defeat in order to consolidate its power.     

The Relations of the Central Asian Republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan with Israel

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan became independent upon the breakup of the Soviet Union. Neither of these republics developed strong nationalist identities and it has been the task of their former communist leaders who are still in power to develop such identities while suppressing internal divisions. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have had a history of tolerance toward their respective Jewish populations, from which many have immigrated to Israel (and the United States) in recent years to unite with family or for economic reasons. Those republics view Israel Diaspora Jews as a source of investment and technological know-how as well as an avenue for better relations with the United States. Conversely, Israel, while considering Russian sensitivities in its relations with Central Asia, values the region as a market for Israeli products, a source for hydrocarbon resources and a way to counteract Iran as well as to seek a more favourable attitude in disputes with the Arabs.     

Economic liberalization and poverty in the developing countries

In recent years the neoliberal economists have sought to establish the claim that economic liberalization unfailingly promotes growth and reduces poverty in the developing countries. Liberalization of markets in the developing countries, according to them, promotes economic perfection by intensifying competition between domestic and external economic actors and exposing management and workers to improved practices. Thay also claim that liberalization of trade and investment regimes by the developing countries has attracted more direct foreign and portfolio investment which, in turn, has accelerated the rate of economic growth and lifted the poor out of poverty. This article contends this neoliberal claim and argues that the post-Cold War neoliberal regime of global economic liberalization ensures the production of poverty in the developing countries by shrinking their prospects of economic growth. It pursues a structural explanation to explore how the neoliberal regime fosters conditions that make possible the continued production of poverty in the developing South and arrives at the conclusion that the neoliberal regime of economic liberalization was not designed to promote growth in the developing countries, rather it was initiated to facilitate capital accumulation by transnational capitalist class at the global level. As its consequence, the poverty situation has not improved; rather there has been a rise in absolute poverty in many developing countries.     

The Impact of External Factors on Regime Transition: Lessons from the Russian Regions

While many studies have examined the external dimensions of democratization, the role of external anti-democratic factors remains unaddressed. Using an original dataset to analyze the presence and impact of external anti-democratic factors, this article aims to untangle the international dimensions of regime transition by singling out foreign trade. International post-Soviet trade links' impact on subnational political regimes in Russia is analyzed. Trade links between post-Soviet states and their regions are longstanding, dating back to the Soviet or even the tsarist period. The authors hypothesize that this variable was an important factor in regime transition in Russia's regions. The findings have wider implications for area studies and theoretical studies of democratization and regime transition.