1,720,982 research outputs found
Review of Basaran’s Security, Law and Borders
No full textBasaran, Tugba. 2010. Security, Law and Borders: At the Limits of Liberties. London: Routledge. 160pp. Hardback, £75 (UK). ISBN: 978-0-415-57025-1
Bearing Witness: Truth, Violence and Biopolitics of Everyday Lives in Kashmir
No full textWho is a true witness? With the publication of Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz: The witness and the archive (1999), the scope of witnessing has become a deeply contested field. Is the true witness the one who does not survive, the Muselmann? Departing from Agamben, this research project argues that those who bear witness do so to convey the conditions that they lived through and survived or are enduring at present, thereby rejecting the burden of inauthenticity that their story is positioned at the expense of those who have been forced out of sight. They testify through speech or silences, mourning privately and publicly, remembering by memorialising or chronicling their journey from down to the nethermost on the spectrum of bare life, retrospectively or in an ongoing context of atrocity.
Focusing on Kashmir, through field research from 2013-2015, to bring to light the structures of militarisation and acquiescence, this research brings to the fore personal narratives of people exposed to everyday violence to engage with the dominant scholarship in order to redefine the scope of witnessing. It explores the multiplicities of witnesses and the acts of bearing witness through three figures, namely, the mother of the disappeared, the local medical worker and the gravedigger of the unmarked mass graves in Kashmir, to point out the heterogeneities of bearing witness. The three figures suggest a spectrum of witnessing to a body: its absence, its reduction and its final departure, and at the same time, they bear witness to their own conditions of disposability. In so doing, there is a shift from an individual act, as advanced by Agamben, to the formation of collective forms of witnessing through a connection with the body, subsequent attachments and practices like public grieving. Departing from the understanding that the act of bearing witness is performed only when a violent event is over, this research will widen the scope by including the voices from an ongoing violent conflict in Kashmir to suggest the precarious existence in a camp and the possibilities of witnessing. This research project attempts to understand the techniques of witnessing by the actors in conflict as forms of truth telling and as a reflexive relationship through which people respond to their marginalisation by the state. Penalisation of public mourning in Kashmir suggests 'the courage of truth' and its relation with politics.
With those propositions in mind to broaden the scope and shift the perspective, this research argues that bearing witness is a vital task to foreground one's grieving self and intervene in the production of the truth of unacknowledged violence
Perspectives on the Iranian Nuclear Programme: Analysing Chinese, Russian, and Turkish Foreign Policies
Get PDFThe Iranian nuclear crisis is a proxy arena for competing visions about the functioning of international relations. Yet, no comprehensive analyses have been conducted so far that use the Iranian nuclear case as an illustration to conceptualise the interaction between ‘hegemonic structures’ and those actors resisting them. This doctoral dissertation is a first step to fill this gap in the literature. It analyses the foreign policies of China, Russia and Turkey towards the Iranian nuclear programme and thereby answers the research question to what extent their policies are indicative of a security culture that resists hegemony. Based on 55 semi-structured elite interviews with experts and decision-makers closely involved with the Iranian nuclear file, this research draws on neo-Gramscian scholarship to analyse resistance to hegemony across its ideational, material and institutional framework conditions.
The case studies examined show how ‘compliance’ on the part of China, Russia and Turkey with approaches to the Iranian nuclear conflict has been selective, and how US policy preferences in the Iran dossier have been resisted on other occasions. To understand such variation in ‘norm compliance’, this dissertation introduces a two-level model to understand foreign policy discrepancies between a discursive and a behavioural level. Chinese, Russian, and Turkish reluctance to use sanctions as tools in international diplomacy on a discursive level did not prevent the eventual adoption of international sanctions against Iran and Chinese, Russian, and Turkish compliance therewith on a behavioural level. While multilateral Iran sanctions are seen as complying with the rules of the UN system, additional unilateral sanctions are contested on normative grounds and perceived as illegitimate and as an extraterritorialisation of domestic legislation.
Besides an ideational resistance to unilateral sanctions, the economic impact of these ‘secondary sanctions’ on third country entities constitutes an additional material reason for Chinese, Russian, and Turkish criticism. Their eventual compliance with sanctions lists, however, indicates a level of receptiveness to the economic leverage of US-dominated international financial mechanisms. In this context, the Iran nuclear case serves as an illustration to shed light on the contemporaneous interaction of the forces of consent and coercion in international politics. This research thus makes a critical contribution to key questions of International Relations at the interstice of security governance, proliferation policies, and debates surrounding the co-existence between hegemonic structures and ‘norm-shapers in the making’
Constructing Security: A Relational Mapping of the EU Security Market
No full textThe present research provides a study of the growing EU (border) security market. It demonstrates how the practices of the security market elude commonly made distinctions of public/private,
internal/external, civil/military and security/defence dichotomies. It underlines the significance of collaboration, convergences and circulations as the dynamics behind the
growth of the EU security market. In particular, it focuses on the collaboration of private actors with their public counterparts. Leveraging Bourdieu's notion of 'field', this research maps
the variety of actors involved in the EU security market, focusing on the questions of domination, transversality, gravitational forces and conflict. It outlines convergences between public/private
by highlighting shareholding patterns of the companies, their cross-sectoral competencies, circulation of personnel and routinized activities of lobbying, marketing, and sales
through which they construct the security market. Further, utilizing the concept of 'habitus' and 'capital', this research analyzes the career trajectories and biographies of the security professionals,
including raising questions of gender and generation that differentiate the field of security. Furthermore, by examining a range of terms and phrases, it explores the vocabulary
of security - the security lexicon - which is employed by the security professionals to further the global (in)security doxa. Methodologically, my research draws upon interviews with over
60 security professionals working with security companies, EU bodies, research institutes, law firms and lobbying consultancies, along with participant observation at high-level security conferences
and security exhibitions. This study seeks to reveal the obscured relations and motivations, profit motives and politics explaining the dynamics of the growing security market,
which raise questions of accountability, responsibility and transparency that are circumvented through these (blurring) practices
Presidential Term Limits in African post-Cold War Democracies: The Role of Political Elites
Get PDFWhy have attempts to repeal presidential term limits succeeded in some African countries and failed in others? What measures and pressures were required to demand and enforce presidential term limits compliance? The lack of precise and effective strategy to enforce term limits compliance seems to expose term limits to incipient repeals by incumbent presidents in Africa.
My field observation in various African democracies shows that the parliament, the judiciary, democracy movements and the international community, though occasionally influential, have not played a decisive role in enforcing term limits compliance in Africa. Their roles rather appear to be dependent on elite dissidence, resistance, sponsorship and sometimes manipulation. My fieldwork in Zambia, Nigeria and Malawi reveals the critical influence and role of political elites in mobilizing and converging pressures to demand and enforce compliance. These cases further find that a compliance outcome becomes possible if individual political elites choose to resist any incumbent president seeking to repeal term limits. The ability of dissenting elites to provide an alternative platform for the convergence of other pressures raise the cost of repression for presidents and force them to compliance.
Since othe pressures achor around elite dissidence, the position of some political elites either for or against the removal of term limits explains why some presidents have succeeded and why others failed in repealing term limits in Africa
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Tugba Basaran on Savings Services for the Poor: An Operational Guide edited by Madeline Hirschland. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2005. 380pp.
Get PDFA review of:
Savings Services for the Poor: An Operational Guide edited by Madeline Hirschland. Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2005. 380pp
- …
