国家安全学学科建设路径探析

近年来,国家安全学学科建设问题成了学界探讨的热点。这既源于相关学者对国家安全理论长期不懈的构建,也源于教育主管部门对建设国家安全学一级学科的政策支持。作为一门新兴学科,国家安全学的学科发展需要充分借鉴新兴学科建设的一般规律,在体系聚合、制度构建以及内涵建设三个方面着力。长期以来,中国国家安全学学科建设取得了长足的进步。在体系聚合层面,形成了较为系统的核心理论,也通过“他向培育”对分支学科进行了构建。在制度构建层面,学科制度精神以及制度结构都处于不断完善的过程之中。相关学者也对国家安全学学科建设的内涵进行了充分论证。在新的历史起点上,我们需要进一步推进国家安全学的学科建设,既要不断完善国家安全学的核心理论,也要合理构建分支学科;既要加强国家安全学的学科制度精神构建,也要在师资队伍建设、人才培养计划制定、核心期刊打造以及争取基金项目支持等方面进一步加强建设;同时,更需要不断加强内涵建设,对学科逻辑起点、学科文化以及国家安全学在整个学科体系中的定位等问题进行深入探讨。     

Terrorism,counter-terrorism,and critique: opportunities,examples, and implications

This article explores the parameters, value and limitations of different critical strategies for those dissatisfied with the contemporary politics of terror. It argues, first, that the prominent (counter-)terrorism paradigm – in which terrorism is approached as a ubiquitous and very specific security challenge meriting appropriately exceptional responses – is far more critiqued than we might anticipate. And, second, that such critiques – which can be found across political language, popular culture, everyday life, and beyond – employ distinct critical resources to serve varying ends. Reflecting on these, the article offers a new heuristic distinguishing five critical strategies which seek to: (i) repudiate; (ii) question; (iii) subvert; (iv) replace, or (v) deconstruct the prominent counter-terrorism paradigm. This typology, it argues, offers scope for optimism and strategic resources for those attracted to a critical terrorism studies project going forward.     

The afterlife of Osama bin Laden: performative pictures in the “war on terror”

In his interview with CBS News on 4 May 2011, US President Barack Obama acknowledged the power of images when he explained that his government would not release a photo of the dead Osama bin Laden due to moral considerations and security-related issues. How is it possible that a photo is perceived as too horrific to be published and as a powerful threat to national security? In this article, I argue that the concept of performativity helps to acknowledge the iconic power of an image as well as its discursive contextualisation. Yet, the meaning of a picture is not only discursively constituted but made possible by a performative act of showing/seeing. Empirically, I focus on pictures that refer to the killing of Osama bin Laden, based on a critical reading of three defining and prominent images in the US public discourse (that circulated worldwide): the Situation Room photo by Pete Souza, a photo-shopped image purporting to show the terrorist’s dead body and the iconic X-ing out of bin Laden on the cover of Time magazine. This reading looks at three dimensions of performative pictures: (1) their success and failure, (2) their self-reflexivity and sociability and (3) their performativity.     

The Chilean exception: racial homogeneity,mestizaje and eugenic nationalism

Scholarship on race in Latin America has overwhelmingly characterized racial mixture as a unique feature of the political and social landscape there. Studies of eugenics in Latin America especially highlight the relative pragmatism regarding race mixing in contrast to eugenics elsewhere. However, an acceptance of race mixing did not preclude the persistence of racial hierarchy among Latin American racial theorists. Examining the development of eugenics in Chile, this article reveals how notions of racial plasticity existed alongside that of racial superiority. Specifically, it contends that Chilean racial exceptionalism in the early twentieth century was predicated on the idea that some types of racial mixture were better than others. Conveniently for Chileans, their mostly indigenous and European ancestry was one such preferred combination. Yet, racial mixing was only desirable insofar as it resulted in a homogeneous national population. This combination of ideas functioned much like white supremacy in other parts of the world. Using historical texts, popular and medical periodicals, and visual images produced between 1900 and 1950, this paper will demonstrate how race science in Chile reconciled the nation’s history of racial mixture with its claims to racial homogeneity and superiority relative to the rest of Latin America.     

China’s development: a new development paradigm?

The emergence of China as a development actor across the global South has raised significant questions regarding the extent to which the country presents new development opportunities to its compatriots in the South. My aim is to reflect on and parse out the experiences and policies that have shaped China’s development to assess how it can inform the field of development studies. I argue that we need to critically engage in China’s development process, as China’s own development has led to the emergence of many more problems than solutions, ranging from increasing inequality to exclusionary development practices pertaining to ethnic minorities.     

Dancing Sita/reinventing a body disappeared: Notes from from Sita: Lament,fury, and a plea for peace

Richard Shannon's solo performance piece, The Lady of Burma, takes his audience inside Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi's imprisonment as she tells her story, moving between memory and the present. This excerpt begins as Suu Kyi has returned to Burma to care for her ailing mother, just as students begin to take to the streets against the ruling junta. In this sequence, Suu Kyi re-enacts the early violence subjected to the democracy activists (scenes that are eerily reminiscent of the spectacle of violence documented in Iran over the past year). As the scene continues, Suu Kyi describes her gradual engagement with the democracy activists, building to her famed address at the sacred Shwedagon Pagoda, in which Suu Kyi mobilized many of the nation's population in their struggle for liberation. The excerpt ends as Suu Kyi continues her struggle to lead the Burmese people to freedom through peaceful revolution, at the same time that her mother's life is coming to a close.     

Judith Scott’s What is Property?: an inquiry into principles of dependency,propriety, and self-possession of an “outsider” artist

The essay addresses the politics of biography in the interpretation and reception of “outsider artist” Judith Scott’s work. Drawing from feminism, disability studies, and Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt’s History and Obstinacy (1981) and its political economy of labor power, the essay proposes a new method of analysis which would foreground Scott’s work as a mode of institutional critique. Kluge and Negt ask “Can capital say ‘I’?.” The essay argues that Scott’s work compels a concomitant questioning of this “I” and the very terms of biography, authorship, and ownership that undergird the myths – and the institutions – of the “outsider” and her “art.”     

Literature,trauma and the African moral imagination

Trauma theory claims to represent a ‘new mode of reading and of listening’, but its Eurocentric roots lead to the question of whether or not this approach is relevant in postcolonial contexts. This essay makes the case that engaging trauma theory through African literatures is in fact a productive exercise, mostly because of what it does for the former. African social thought, expressed through its writers and critics, allows us to refine and address crucial problems in trauma theory, including questions about the representation of trauma and strategies for trauma healing. African writers' deployment of images such as the railroad, which is closely linked with discourses of trauma and of modernism, illustrates how their works can reframe trauma studies from an African perspective. An appreciation of the continent's traumatogenic contexts, of writers' cultural resources and strategies for speaking to those contexts, and of the intrinsically transformational impulse of the African moral imagination, suggests that African literatures are grounded in the types of imaginative ‘re-membering practice[s]’ that promote recovery and healing from the destructive effects of trauma.     

近年国内软力量理论研究综述

近年来,我国学者对约瑟夫.奈提出的软力量理论进行了集中研究,推动了对这一概念的深入理解和广泛运用。从软力量的由来与发展、软力量的汉语翻译、软力量的内涵以及软力量理论的贡献与不足四个方面进行学术成果梳理。中国学者在这一理论研究上取得了一些成就,但一些问题还值得深入探讨。要把对软权力的研究引向深入,就有必要引入新的角度,把软权力和国民凝聚力综合起来进行研究,同时考虑中国的独特性,体现中国软力量的特色。     

Federalism and Governability in Brazil: Oil Royalties in Dispute

This article discusses the relationship between governability and federalism in Brazil, analysing the dispute among Brazilian states for oil royalties. This conflict features an unusual pattern in federal legislative voting, leading to regional alignment, rather than the usual party political configuration. This study explains the phenomenon by showing how this organisation makes it possible to align the preferences of national party leaders, regional party leaders, parliamentarians, and each state's voters. The political influence of governors and mayors is also underlined, and the Union's role in the process is described in detail.