“Glory to Breivik!”: The Russian Far Right and the 2011 Norway Attacks

This article documents Anders Behring Breivik's reception on the Russian far Right, with a comparative view to Western Europe. On July 22, 2011, Breivik carried out two terrorist attacks in Norway, killing 77 people. Based on a variety of open sources, the article finds that Breivik has received much more open support in Russia than in Western Europe. I suggest there are three main reasons why Russia stands out. First, a weaker social stigma attached to Right-Wing extremism reduces the cost of publicly embracing Right-Wing terrorists. Second, higher levels of violence in Russian society increase desensitization and violence acceptance. Third, the embrace of Breivik fits into a vibrant tradition of iconizing Right-Wing militants on the Russian far Right. The article highlights Russia as a hotspot of Right-Wing extremist activism in Europe. It also provides insights that may prove useful in future comparative research on cross-national variation in Right-Wing violence and terrorism.     

老挝:2010年回顾与2011年展望

2010年是老挝"六五"计划结束和"七五"计划开局之年。全年政治社会继续保持稳定,年底突然进行的高层人事调整没有对老挝政局产生影响;经济增长达7.9%;多元化务实外交成果丰硕。2011年3月老挝人民革命党将召开"九大",制订未来5年总任务及奋斗目标,力争"七五"期间GDP年均增长8%以上。     

Globalization,democratization, and the Arab uprising: the international factor in MENA's failed democratization

What explains the almost wholly negative impact of international factors on post-uprising democratization prospects? This article compares the utility of rival “diffusionist” and neo-Gramscian political economy frames to explain this. Multiple international factors deter democratization. The failure of Western democracy promotion is rooted in the contradiction between the dominance of global finance capital and the norm of democratic equality; in the periphery, neo-liberalism is most compatible with hybrid regimes and, at best, “low intensity democracy”. In MENA, neo-liberalism generated crony capitalism incompatible with democratization; while this also sparked the uprisings, these have failed to address class inequalities. Moreover at the normative level, MENA hosts the most credible counter-hegemonic ideologies; the brief peaking of democratic ideology in the region during the early uprisings soon declined amidst regional discourse wars. Non-democrats – coercive regime remnants and radical charismatic movements – were empowered by the competitive interference of rival powers in uprising states. The collapse of many uprising states amidst a struggle for power over the region left an environment uncongenial to democratization.     

东南亚2011～2012年形势回顾与展望———专家访谈录

本刊编辑部邀请部分东南亚研究专家、学者对2011～2012年东南亚形势作简要的回顾与展望。     

The ‘Arab Spring’: the view from Tehran

2011 saw an unprecedented wave of popular protests shake the foundations of many Arab regimes across the Middle East and North Africa. While many observers welcomed the uprisings as movements for greater freedoms and democracy, Iran celebrated the unrests as an ‘Islamic awakening’ – the first steps in a process that would eventually result in the realignment of the Greater Middle East. This article will examine the official narrative of the Iranian regime and will contextualise the apparent contradiction in the Islamic Republic's support for the Arab uprisings despite its brutal suppression of its own people and the incitement of the same practise in Syria. The article will then assess Iran's actual role in the Arab unrests and whether the Islamic Republic has, and will retain, the ability to exploit the ‘Arab Spring’ as part of its broader revisionist struggle to weaken the forces of status quo in the region.     

我国宏观经济状况及其走势分析

2011年是十二五的开局之年,从前三季度的宏观经济数据看,中国经济结构调整仍面临巨大压力。在长期经济走势中,通货膨胀、就业压力和人民币升值预期可能成为常态,而世界经济低迷则成为不可忽视的外部背景,在此基础上,中国经济增长面临更加复杂的局面。因此,有效的宏观经济政策是对我国政府宏观调控能力的巨大挑战。     

老挝:2011年发展回顾与2012年展望

2011年,是老挝人民革命党第九次全国代表大会召开及国会、政府换届选举年；“七·五”经济社会计划开局良好,尽管遭遇较严重的风灾洪涝,经济增长仍达8.1％,脱贫取得重要成果；外交活跃务实,获得了大量外援与投资；2012年底,老挝将主办第九届亚欧领导人峰会.     

Manipulating the Census: Ethnic Minorities in the Nationalizing States of Central Asia* 1

Even though self-critical dealing with the past has not been an official criterion for joining the EU, the founding of the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research and the Holocaust conference in Stockholm at the beginning of 2000 seem to have generated informal standards of confronting and exhibiting the Holocaust in the context of “Europeanization of Memory.” Comparative analysis shows that post-Communist museums dealing with the World War II period perform in the context of those informal standards. Both the Jasenovac Memorial Museum in Croatia and the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica were founded in the Communist era and played an important role in supporting the founding myths of the two countries. Both were subjected to historical revisionism during the 1990s. In the current exhibitions from 2004/2006, both memorial museums stress being part of Europe and refer, to “international standards” of musealization, while the Jasenovac memorial claims to focus on “the individual victim.” But stressing the European dimension of resistance and the Holocaust obscures such key aspects as the civil war and the responsibility of the respective collaborating regime.     

Egyptian Cinema as a Tool in the Struggle Against Islamic Terrorism

The cinema has been used by Egyptian regimes, from the monarchy until Mubarak, to resist the political agenda of Islamic radicals and terrorists. Edward Said and others describe Islamic terrorists’ images in the Western media as “Western fantasies.” Nevertheless, for Egyptian intellectuals, terrorists were and remain a stark reality. In Egypt, the entire state apparatus was set in motion to fight Islamic terrorism. The state was unprepared for the massive popular uprising of 2011. While the direction that Egyptian culture will follow after Mubarak remains unclear, an important objective is to study pre-revolutionary Egyptian cinema and to understand its ideological tendencies.