“A Sacred Duty”: Red Army Women Veterans Remembering the Great Fatherland War, 1941–1945

Some 500,000 women fought with the Red Army in the Great Fatherland War, 1941‐1945. Based on a selection of women veterans’ memoirs published since the demise of the Soviet Union, this article looks at what these women choose to remember about the war, and how, and equally what they choose to forget or remain silent about. The paper seeks to illuminate shared or disparate collective and individual memory and experiences. A particular objective of the paper is to assess the degree to which these written recollections coincide with or deviate from the predominant patriotic, heroic, masculine paradigm of the Great Fatherland War and its historiography. The overall objective of the paper is to humanise the female faces behind the masculine mask of the Red Army at war against Nazism.     

Cocaine's Long March North, 1900–2010

This essay charts the entanglements and “blowback” effects of U.S. policy toward Latin American drug exports over the last century as the backdrop to today's cascading drug violence in northern Mexico. The history of cocaine reveals a series of major geopolitical shifts (closely related to U.S. interdictionist drug war policies) that bring drug commodity chains, illicit trafficking centers, and conflicts, over the long run, closer to the United States. It analyzes shifts from initial legal cocaine and small‐time postwar smuggling of the central Andes to the concentrating 1970s–1990s “cartel” epicenter in northern Andean Colombia, to the 1990s political shift north to Mexican transhipment and organizational leadership. Violence around cocaine has intensified at every step, and the present conflict portends another shift in the chain.     

The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939–45

The German War: A Nation under Arms, 1939–45. B y Nicholas Stargardt (London: Bodley Head, 2015), 704 pp. £30.00 (cloth).     

Saving Private Hegel — Australian Liberalism and the 1914–1918 War

In this essay I explore the pamphlet literature and related sources, in order to assess the effects of the 1914–1918 War on liberal political ideas in Australia. The main focus of the study is the WEA intellectuals in Sydney and Brisbane, and the core group of Deakinite liberals in Melbourne as represented by the overlapping membership of the Boobooks Club and the Round Table. Themes of compulsion, Progressivism, industrial relations, citizenship, and internationalism are examined. In particular the tension which wartime experiences produced within the high idealism of Kantian and Hegelian new liberal political philosophy is investigated. The bitterness caused by the war and the doubts raised about German philosophy help us to understand the decline of statist and idealist elements within liberal thought in Australia. It seems impossible, during the present war, to write any book or to deliver a sermon or an address which does not in some way refer to the war. H.B. Higgins, Socrates, the State and War, p.7     

Leningrad 1941 – 1942. Morality of a City under Siege

Leningrad 1941 – 1942. Morality of a City under Siege . By Sergey Yarov. Foreword by John Barber. Translated by Arch Tait (Cambridge, UK and Malden, USA: Polity Press, 2017), pp.xiii + 409. Notes. Index. £26.99 (hb).     

Difficult Partners: Indo‐Australian Relations at the Height of the Cold War, 1949–1964

This article aims to make a long overdue re‐examination of Indo‐Australian relations in the early Cold War years. By drawing on available secondary sources, it reassesses the existing literature on Australian engagement with Asia. In so doing, it seeks to understand the reasons why the Menzies government found it so difficult to forge a close partnership with India. Canberra's rather frosty relations with New Delhi during the Menzies‐Nehru years had little to do with Menzies' alleged condescension towards the Asians or his personal antipathy towards Nehru. Rather, it had to do with the two leaders' different readings of Cold War politics as well as their responses to the structural changes taking place at the international level following the end of the Second World War.     

Exile and Diaspora in an Atypical Context: Chileans and Argentineans in the United States (1973–2005)

This article focuses on two groups of Southern Cone exiles' communities, Chileans and Argentineans, choosing to settle down in an atypical destination: the United States. After estimating some qualitative and quantitative findings, the article delves into the ways these communities settle down, remember their relationship with politics, maintain their connection with exiled fellow‐countrymen worldwide and perceive their national identity. By relying on an empirical, single‐case perspective, with no theoretical ambitions to extrapolate its conclusions to other contexts, this article examines the extent to which the conceptualisation of the exile and diaspora categories changes when applied to these two communities.     

Sacred Sovereigns and Punishable War Crimes: The Ambivalence of the Wilson Administration towards a Trial of Kaiser Wilhelm II*

Conventional wisdom characterises President Woodrow Wilson as a progressive internationalist in the making of foreign policy, sceptical of international practices such as secret diplomacy and balance-of-power theories. An examination of the Wilson Administration's record in quelling Allied attempts to punish Kaiser Wilhelm II after the end of the First World War provides a contrasting view. The White House, leading figures in the State Department and a large grouping of prominent lawyers argued that punishing the German sovereign for waging war in violation of treaties would destabilise international order and lose the peace. Current American reluctance to participate in the International Criminal Court and fears of an undue intrusion of an international judiciary on the merits of foreign policy make an understanding of these reservations timely.