Russian Studies Without Russia

A distinguished American specialist on Soviet and Russian politics addresses the lessons of the seven years leading to Russia's crash of 1998 for how US scholars, journalists, and politicians have analyzed Russia under Yeltsin. Citing a wide range of academic and journalistic sources, including materials published from October 1998 to January 1999, the article surveys and criticizes the mainstream concepts employed for comprehending social, political, and economic life in that country. It proposes both an alternative vocabulary and different comparative references for explaining and predicting developmental trends in Russia.     

Cultural heritage and development: UNESCO’s new paradigm in a changing geopolitical context

In the 1980s, the process of convergence between culture and development began to emerge in the context of post-colonialism and changing geopolitical realities. Later on, along with increasing multilateralism, The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) eventually became the main actor in promoting culture as a fourth pillar of sustainable development. The paradigm shift in the heritage-development agenda is examined in the context of growing aspirations of non-Western states to play an active role in the global heritage regime, and the interests and strategies of UNESCO’s secretariat and the member states. At first, heritage and development were perceived as separate or opposed fields. Recently, a sustainable development framework emerged as a new global development model. UNESCO has engaged in the shaping of the United Nations (UN) 2030 agenda, and advocated a pragmatic approach to heritage. This paper examines the evolution of ideas and concepts linking ‘development’ and ‘heritage’ forged at the forum of UNESCO as part of its Culture and Development framework. The role of the Global South in the paradigm change is highlighted.     

The Malaysian “Islamic” State versus the Islamic State (IS): evolving definitions of “terror” in an “Islamising” nation-state

ABSTRACT

This article provides a study of how the Malaysian state defines and redefines “terror” as the nature of militancy changes from the Communist insurgency to present day’s Islamist jihadism. Tracing such definitional changes, the article demonstrates how the portrait of a terrorist not only is inherently political (and at certain junctures, politicised), but also reflects the changing nature of the state. While able to ethnicise and externalise the Communist Terrorists (CTs), the rise of Islamist militancy forced the Malaysian state to shelve the term “terrorist” in favour of religious “deviancy” until the advent of the “war on terror”. Advancing along a state-driven Islamisation project, the discursive ideal that is the “Islamic state”, was securitised (1980–2001), normalised (2001–2013), and resecuritised (2014–2016) as a balancing act not only to neutralise the security threat but also to augment the state’s “Islamic” credentials for domestic political gains. Following the emergence of the Islamic State (IS), I argue that the Malaysian state is now embroiled in an “Islamic state versus Islamic State” dilemma, where in the face of a far enemy it cannot decisively eliminate, the state has no choice but to defend itself as a sovereign nation-state as well as an “Islamic” one, further problematising Islam in discourses of security and violence.     

Epistemological failures: everyday terrorism in the West

This article attempts to problematise the disparate levels of attention paid to similar violences globally, whereby violence against women in the developing world is seen as a security concern to the West, and yet violence against women in the West is minimised or ignored. It will do this, first, by demonstrating that everyday violences, better known as everyday terrorism, in the West are subjugated knowledges within Terrorism Studies. To demonstrate this, Half the Sky, Sex and World Peace and The Better Angels of Our Nature serve as exemplar texts that reflect Western exceptionalism and non-Western savagery, particularly within Muslim societies, and deflect from everyday terrorism within the West. This reifies the West as an exceptional saviour and the non-West as a problematic savage. This article looks to flip that reification on its head by recognising that everyday terrorism happens everywhere and is not bound to non-Western identities.     

“International terrorism” in the League of Nations and the contemporary terrorism dispositif

This article recovers states’ discursive practices regarding “international terrorism” in the 1930s. It examines the internal conditions of the discourse of terrorism among states in this period with a particular focus on its conspiratorial elements and suggests external conditions for this discourse’s emergence and order. Furthermore, it points to continuities and discontinuities between the 1930s discursive series and the constituent discursive forms of the contemporary global terrorism dispositif – an assemblage of power practices which bear on individual human bodies, populations or (rogue or fragile) states and which are all strategically oriented through the concept of terrorism. The purpose of such a genealogical history is to expand the space of dissent to power practices in the dominant structures of (terrorism) knowledge by problematising their object and the ways in which these formations are productive of human subjectivity.     

Media Logic and Political Communication

Abstract

The election of 1952 saw the beginning of the age of telepolitics. In that year the medium of television played a decisive role in the nomination by the Republican Party of Dwight D. Eisenhower since it exposed convention proceedings to a national audience and gave that national audience, as well as representatives of the media, major influence over convention events. In the post‐convention period, Eisenhower's public relations advisors used television to soften the General's military image, reach Democrats and Independents, and increase the pro‐Eisenhower voter turnout. Whereas Stevenson never fully mastered the demands of television, Eisenhower was adept and skillful at using the medium as a major new campaign vehicle.     

Legitimate Power in a Mediated Age: Revisiting Carl J. Friedrich's “Authority,Reason and Discretion”

Although scholars of political communication study legitimacy and power consistently, we often overlook older works on the topic from political theory and philosophy that might give us guidance in a mediated age. Friedrich was a contemporary of Lazarsfeld, Merton, and so many of the great 20th-century social scientists we look to as providing the foundations for our field. This essay asks that we go back to Friedrich as well, and to others who found authority to be one of our most complex and important social phenomena.     

Visualising violence: legitimacy and authority in the ‘war on terror’

This paper explores the relationship between visual representation and claims to legitimacy in the current George W. Bush administration's ‘war on terror’. Drawing on discourse theoretical works that focus analytical attention on the power of visual representation in communicating authority and legitimacy, this paper argues that crucial to such communicative acts is the rendering of a receptive audience complicit in particular interpretations of the images in question. While various visual representations construct political subjectivity and agency in different ways, common to all interpretations is the centralisation of an authoritative narrative. It is argued that this authorial voice must be challenged in the formulation of a politics resistant to dominant discourses of security/counter-terrorism in the West.     

“Worth It If It Saves Just One Life”? Ethical Reservations Regarding AMBER Alert

This article provides an exploratory ethical critique of the AMBER Alert system. Using illustrative examples of actual AMBER Alerts and the public discourse regarding them, it notes potentially problematic impacts on victims and/or offenders, and investigation of child abduction cases, as well as the public discourse about the system in particular and threats to children in general. None of these issues have been adequately addressed either by system operators in their public portrayals of the system or rigorous research as to their practical impacts, or in the suggestion of possible remedies. At the heart of the open and unresolved ethical quandaries confronting the AMBER Alert system lies a failure on the part of system operators and supporters to acknowledge apparent limits to the system's effectiveness, and an exaggeration of its capacities in the absence of adequate evidence, which should be sought in earnest through rigorous research. The article argues that system operators should discuss AMBER Alert more candidly and downplay expectations to avert at least some of the problems its facile portrayal can engender. The article also provides directions for future research on the system—research which could either show some of the ethical reservations that are cited to be moot, or reveal ways they could be resolved.