Introduction: Kosovo’s Symbolic Importance

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the special section argues that Kosovo is important to the West because it is considered to symbolise Western power and efficacy. The intervention, and subsequent statebuilding project, were less about Kosovo, and more about a determination to project a particular image of the West as both benevolent and powerful. Over the past twenty years, the clash between the motivations of the external actors and the aspirations of Kosovo’s citizens have become more apparent catalysing a tension between the official Western narrative which presents Kosovo as a “success” and the reality on the ground.     

Editors’ Introduction

Political Behavior -     

Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

The police restructuring efforts in Bosnia and Herzegovina driven by the international community, using in particular the leverage of European integration, attempted to achieve a reform that would transform a very fragmented police system into a de-politicized single structure and ended in the signing of a rather weak political agreement. The main reason why the process proved to be so difficult was that police restructuring touched upon the fundamentals of a delicate ethno-political power-sharing model in a post-conflict situation. But also, the approach chosen by the international community had serious deficiencies as the international community was far from speaking with one voice, thereby limiting its leverage.     

Introduction to China’s Economic Statecraft: Rising Influences,Mixed Results

Journal of Chinese Political Science - China’s embrace of a comprehensive and aggressive economic statecraft as part of its grand strategy indicates a paradigm change in its foreign policy....     

Levi’s Auschwitz and Dante’s Hell

On reading Primo Levi’s Holocaust memoir If This is a Man, one is immediately struck by its literary quality, and especially its generous use of Dante’s Inferno, both of which point to the more general problem of Holocaust witnessing. This paper focuses on Levi’s reasons for using Dante’s poem in particular to communicate his experience. Levi’s choice of Inferno is pointed, not only because of the obvious trope of existence in Hell, but also because Levi conceived of Auschwitz as an experiment designed to destroy the “human,” created in part, at least in the West, by Dante’s poem. What I will be suggesting is that Levi emphasizes the distinctions between his and Dante’s experiences by including in his conversation with Dante’s Inferno (paradoxically) his rejection of that conversation. There may or may not be something “human” which persists after Auschwitz, and the only way to ask this question, without preconceiving an answer, is to dramatize silence. The resultant ambiguity urges readers to, as Levi puts it, “participate in” the events described and/or dramatized.

Introduction to special issue on ‘professional insecurities’

Introduction

Introduction to special issue on professional insecurities     

Libya’s conflict

With the battle for Tripoli, Libya’s civil war has entered a key stage. Powerful outside states are fuelling the conflict, and recent events have raised the prospect of more direct military intervention. No diplomatic solution is foreseeable while the United Nations Security Council’s permanent members support different factions. Moreover, each side in the conflict currently believes it can achieve more through fighting than through the necessary compromises of a peace settlement.     

Israel’s election

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears most likely to form Israel’s next government following its election on 9 April, although it is unclear how stable such a government would be. Further elections within the next two years are quite possible. Whatever the outcome of the election, Israel’s next leader will be forced to address a range of serious and interrelated strategic challenges.