Search

Bamboo diplomacy, the latest conceptualization in Vietnamese foreign policy, has recently captured widespread media coverage. This study investigates the discursive legitimation strategies employed by the Vietnamese Communist Party to justify the adoption of the aforementioned policy. In addition, the study focuses on the integration of nationalism in the legitimation process of bamboo diplomacy discourse in the context of digital media. Drawing upon constructivism, banal nationalism, and Van Leeuwen's model of legitimation in discourse and communication, the study utilizes CDA and DHA to analyze 66 articles on six official Vietnamese online news outlets. The findings revealed that nationalism-based legitimacy is a key underpinning of three discursive strategies of the four implemented in the VCP's bamboo diplomacy discourse. Accordingly, three main patterns of nationhood reproduction were identified: (i) the myth of national history, (ii) the authority of national traditions, and (iii) the moralization of bamboo iconography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adopts a poststructural approach to examine the relationship between the news media and international relations. It compares 15 years of international aid coverage from two donor nations, the United States and Britain, and two recipient nations, India and Pakistan, to understand the types of identities news media construct for a nation in relation to other nations. Despite their differences, the news discourse in all four nations has a neoliberal orientation. Moreover, neoliberalism underpins a hierarchical structure of relations that privileges some nations as superior and makes other nations willing participants in their own subordination. While scholars of press–state relations regard newsmaking as epiphenomenal to foreign policymaking, this article argues that newsmaking and policymaking are mutually constitutive social phenomena: both draw from and, in turn, reproduce a shared conception of national identity vis-à-vis other nations. In doing so, the article illustrates the productive power of news media in international relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationalism is often singled out as the powerful force that brought about the collapse of the last great land empires of the 19th and early 20th centuries. We offer a different picture: nationalism was weak before 1914, with war being caused by the fears of the great powers rather than pressures from below; crucially war was less an opportunity for pre-existing nationalists to seize than a maelstrom that created new identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International Relations (IR) has long been criticized for taking a particular (Western) experience as basis for formulating theories with claim to universal validity. In response, recent discussions have therefore centered on making IR 'truly global', that is, more inclusive and less parochial in its language and substance. But the concept of the global underpinning this discussion is both illusive and strongly contested. It requires problematization. But how? In this Forum, scholars discuss this question with a forward-looking agenda. Building on recent critical engagements with the question of the global as a concept in general and Global IR specifically, the authors ask how the global should be problematized in order to achieve a (more) progressive agenda for IR. They draw on different regional and disciplinary perspectives to both further the agenda of a less exclusive and racist discipline without falling into the trap of shallow inclusivity, and to discuss ways of problematizing the global without falling back into nativism or nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Authoritarian regimes are frequent targets of international pressure in the form of economic sanctions or threats thereof. Existing research shows that foreign interventions can carry several unintended consequences for politics and the economy in the targeted countries. One of the side effects of such interventions is boosting support for incumbent autocrats. Public demonstrations in support of embattled leaders are one aspect of this dynamic. This article investigates the link between foreign pressure and domestic mobilization in favor of ruling autocrats. It is argued that pressure simultaneously increases regime supporters' willingness to participate in rallies and the regime's demand to display and even overstate regime support. Foreign pressure facilitates mobilization as autocrats can fuel nationalist sentiments and frame foreign interventions as an attack on the nation as a whole. At the same time, rallies are a strategic tool to reduce political opportunities for the opposition and to signal resolve to the international community. Empirically, I conduct the first quantitative analysis that evidences the existence of a relationship between international pressure and mobilization in support of incumbent autocrats. Using monthly data on rally events in all authoritarian regimes between 2003 and 2015, I find that sanctions but also threats significantly increase pro-government mobilization. In addition, I show evidence for a moderating role of media freedom in the targeted state, highlighting the importance of how international events are portrayed in national news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines parallels between the resolidification of German identity and reconfigurations of German national space and nation-state time. From recurring events (refugee-guided tours) to temporary installations (a private home's garden memorial), these performances by and about those excluded or conditionally tolerated define an emerging refugee subjectivity. Each performance stages the dichotomy between transience and permanent residence and engages the public in perpetual enactments of democratic deliberation. We argue that these performances force audiences to recognize how they implicitly define their nations and fellow citizens by both their domestic democratic practices and the exceptions at the border: who is deported and kept out, who are permitted to enter and remain. With growing critical interest in performance and performativity in international relations, we consider the impact of individual and collective pro-migrant protest performances on national identity and electoral politics in Germany and their effects on organizing, resistance, and performance "artivism" globally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary populist movements have inspired political pundits in various contexts to opine on the resurgence of victimhood culture, in which groups demonstrate heightened sensitivity to slights and attempt to evoke sympathy from third parties to their conflicts. Although reference to victimhood's politics oftentimes surfaces examples of egregious microaggressions, when victimhood claims are scaled up to the realm of nationalisms, oftentimes so too are their consequences. Current literature on victimhood in international politics, though, lacks a unifying theorisation suitable for the comparative analysis of victimhood nationalisms as important identities in the international arena. This gap prevents scholarship from investigating how the severity of perceived or real suffering relates to the formation of victimhood, as well as how victimhood nationalisms legitimize the projection of grievances onto third parties, potentially sowing new conflicts. This article theorises victimhood nationalism as a powerful identity narrative with two key constitutive elements. First, drawing on the narrative identity approach, it outlines how victimhood nationalisms are constructed via narrations of perceived or real collective trauma. Second, it argues that victimhood nationalist narratives, unlike other narratives of collective trauma, break down the idealized victim–perpetrator relationship and project grievances onto otherwise uninvolved international actors, including other nation-states. The article concludes by offering comparative case studies of Slobodan Milošević's and David Ben-Gurion's respective invocations of victimhood nationalism to illustrate the empirical applicability of this theorization, as well as victimhood nationalism's importance in international politics across time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops an English School framework for analysing the emergence of new primary institutions in global international society, and applies this to the case of environmental stewardship. The article traces the impact that global environmentalism has had on the normative order of global international society, examines the creation of secondary institutions around this norm and identifies the ways in which these developments have become embedded in the constitution and behaviour of states. It assesses the ways in which environmental stewardship has interacted with the other primary institutions that compose global international society, changing some of the understandings and practices associated with them. The conclusions argue that environmental stewardship is likely to be a durable institution of global international society, and that it might be a harbinger of a more functional turn in its priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tracks how political and intellectual leaders from south-eastern Europe used the concept of civilization, or a particular type of ‘civilization-speak’, from the end of the eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century. It compares and contrasts how they employed civilization-speak in different linguistic milieus – French, Modern Greek, and Romanian – and how they deployed it to further changing political aims during a period of political upheaval in the Balkans. It traces how civilization-speak served initially as a tool for extracting support from west European, especially French, patrons, and was later refashioned into a rhetorical instrument of nationalism. This study places the intellectual and political history of south-eastern Europe during the era in a pan-European context and adds nuance to discussions about the development of nationalism in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses Edward Said’s post-colonial framework to analyze India–United States (US) nuclear security relations in the post-Cold War period as a clash of US Orientalism and India’s nuclear sovereignty as a key marker of India’s post-colonial essence. Through an analysis of the discourses of India and the US with regard to India’s May 1998 detonation and the 123 Agreement, it explores the following questions: To what extent has America’s security relationship with India been characterized by Orientalist discourses? Does the revision of the US post-9/11 security relationship with India as evidenced through the 123 Agreement indicate continuity or change in America’s Orientalist discourses vis-à-vis the nuclear policies of the Indian state? How has this shaped India’s nuclear nationalism? In exploring these questions, it will be argued that US security discourses reflective of Orientalism have constructed India along Orientalist lines; have structured US security policies towards the nuclear strategies of the Indian state (thereby consolidating India’s nuclear nationalism); and, that the revision of the US security relationship with India post-9/11 shows a continuity of America’s Orientalism towards the Indian state and its nuclear program. The article concludes with an analysis of the implications of Orientalism on South Asian security/International Relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benedict Anderson’s seminal work on imagined communities has opened a multitude of explorations in how mass media construct and represent social identities in relation to nationalism. Depicting and at the same time creating social groups, media representations are permeated by questions of inclusion and exclusion. As a result, it is important to study media representations of social identities as strategic ideologies that debilitate or stabilize, support or condemn a specific identity discourse. In this study, we explore how Kurdish identity has been represented in Newroz TV, one of the most popular satellite TV channels among Iranian Kurds. Findings show that Kurdish nationalism is first defined in opposition to Persian, Arabic (as in Syria and Iraq) and Turkish national identity. However, the resulting images are permeated by partisan ideological divisions among Kurdish political groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is soft power, and how can we analyse it empirically? The article proposes a social constructivist take on soft power by anchoring it to the concept of collective identity, and by suggesting a set of criteria that can be used to assess whether soft power is present in a relationship between two or more states. It argues that soft power is generated through continuous renegotiation of collective identity. We can assess the weight of a state’s soft power vis-a-vis another state by investigating the extent to which the discursively constructed collective identity projected by the first state is accepted or rejected by different audiences in the second state, and by examining the ability of these audiences to affect the process of foreign policy decision-making. To illustrate this approach, the article applies it to an analysis of Russia’s relationship with Ukraine prior to the 2014 crisis. In the late 2000s–early 2010s, Russia’s dominant identity was increasingly associated with the idea of a ‘Russian world’ — an imagined community based on the markers of the Russian language, the Russian culture and the common glorious past. Despite a significant increase in Moscow’s public diplomacy activities in Ukraine around that time, those efforts did not and could not fundamentally transform the psychological milieu in Moscow’s relationship with Kyiv because the projected identity was inherently incompatible with one of the main identity discourses in Ukraine and was only partially compatible with another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ulrich Beck's quest to unshackle the social sciences from their methodological nationalism has yielded numerous influential concepts. In his last work he theorized the transformation of a globally connected world through the notion of 'metamorphosis' understood as a form of radical (paradigmatic) change. This transfiguration is driven by different perceptions of catastrophism, carrying the potential to re-shape world risk society. In this essay I critically assess what Beck refers to as 'emancipatory catastrophism'. I suggest substituting emancipatory with cosmopolitan catas-trophism. Cosmopolitan catastrophism seeks to adjoin an event-centered approach with a relational understanding of world risk society. By emphasizing cosmopolitan trajectories we avoid the linear fallacies plaguing earlier theories of modernity. Beck's iterative approach provides us with a heuristic tool, which addresses the ongoing interplay of universal scripts and local appropriations in the context of contingencies and uncertainties. Previously seen as residual, catastrophism becomes the center of our analytic efforts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Faking it: US Hegemony in a Post-Phallic Era" by Cynthia Weber is presented which focuses on the crisis in foreign relations between the U.S. and India based on issues of sex, gender and caste. Topics include arrest of former Indian Deputy Consul-General in New York, Devyani Khobragade on charges of visa fraud, Dalit caste identity of Khobragade and masculinity of India suffering humiliation of rape.

The term ‘abnormal’ has frequently been used to describe post-war Japan. Together with the idea that the country will, or should have to, ‘normalise’ its foreign and security policy, it has been reproduced in both academia and Japanese society. Why is Japan branded as ‘abnormal’, and from where does the desire to ‘normalise’ it come? Drawing on a relational concept of identity, and the distinction between norm and exception, this article argues that the ‘abnormality–normalisation nexus’ can be understood in terms of three identity-producing processes: (1) the process whereby the Japanese Self is socialised in US/‘Western’ norms, ultimately constructing it as an Other in the international system; (2) the process whereby the Japanese Self imagines itself as ‘legitimately exceptional’ (what is called ‘exceptionalisation’), but also ‘illegitimately abnormal’ — both of which are epitomised by Japan’s ‘pacifism’; and (3) the process whereby both the Self’s ‘negative abnormality’ and China/Asia are securitised in attempts to realise a more ‘normal’ (or super-normal) Japanese Self. How Japan is inter subjectively constructed on a scale between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ enables and constrains action. Although Japan has not remilitarised nearly as much in the 2000s as is often claimed, these processes might very well forebode an exceptional decision to become ‘normal’ and therefore more significant steps towards remilitarisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study reconstructs the concept of interstate rivalry in accordance with a min–max strategy in order to determine the necessary characteristics of rivalry, provide a template with which to assess existing conceptualizations, and provide a means by which conceptualizations of rivalry can be formulated and operationalized. I argue that there are two necessary characteristics of a minimal conceptualization of interstate rivalry — temporal dependence and issue competition. Contextual conceptualizations are then formulated by adding dimensions, such as militarization, identification, and psychological hostility, among others, to the minimal definition. By defining interstate rivalry in its most extreme form (when all of the potential dimensions of rivalry are present in the fullest), I also establish a maximal or ‘ideal-type’ conceptualization. In adopting a min–max approach, this project seeks to unify conceptualizations of interstate rivalry along a common continuum in which the empirical coverage of cases decreases as properties are added to the minimal definition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]