Search

Michael Rosen's The Shadow of God includes an account of historical theodicy, which is the idea that the arc of history justifies the ways of God. Formulated by the German Idealists, its American expositors influenced the ideas of the nineteenth-century American theologian and activist Theodore Parker. As the orginator of the phrases "arc of history" and "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," Parker's influence extends to presidents and Supreme Court justices, demonstrating the long and influential afterlife of the German philosophical discourses that Rosen explores. But examining this afterlife also challenges the assumption that we can discern the arc of history without the monotheistic presuppositions present in Parker. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers a critical rhetorical analysis of neoconservative filmmaker Dinesh D'Souza's popular political documentary film, 2016: Obama's America. I argue that the documentary's narrative emulates conservative Black Frankenstein stories, whereby a monstrous black slave revolts against his white slave owner, justifying a violent white backlash to restore white supremacy [Young, E. (2008). Black Frankenstein: The making of an American metaphor. New York: New York University Press]. Obama's America re-presents overt and inferential antiblack racist caricatures that depict President Obama as a ruling mixed mulatto monstrosity determined to destroy America. I argue that D'Souza's documentary aimed to revive extreme white conservative resistance to Obama's presidency, specifically by equating Obama's 2012 re-election with America's looming economic collapse and escalating threats of Islamist terrorism. To deflect racist accusations, D'Souza adopts a journalistic persona and re-presents a colonial narrative, which suggests that racism and colonialism no longer exist, thereby sanitizing and idealizing contemporary America neocolonialism. Finally, I argue that the popular conservative depictions of Obama as a menacing mulatto monster destroying America were precursors of a white backlash against America's first black U.S. president and his multicultural coalition, culminating in Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A cacophony of protest greeted President Biden's withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan following a 20-year deployment, implemented and overseen by four different administrations, both Republican and Democrat. For all the criticism of the final withdrawal's implementation, however, strategic ambivalence was always present in U.S. operations in Afghanistan. The bi-partisan decisions that defined the Afghan mission can best be seen in the National Security Strategy documents produced by successive administrations as they sought to address the evolving situation on the ground and the perceived level of threat to the United States. The utilization of discourse analysis to examine these official policy documents allows for an understanding of the comparable attention that was paid to Afghanistan by successive administrations, as well as for an appreciation of the tone and language used regarding the nation. Doing so reveals that despite the duration of the mission and the associated costs, a deep-seated strategic ambiguity existed towards Afghanistan, as it languished as a sideshow for U.S. grand strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in conceptualising the political nature of human rights as well as intense debate over the precise nature of Western biases in the whole project. Spurred by the fresh renewal of radical theory, a growing body of literature explores the role that racialized power hierarchies have played in the human rights project through the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine. Drawing from critical human rights scholarship, this article explores the way human rights have been employed as a legitimising discourse for justifying military intervention in Libya. In doing so, it illustrates the Eurocentric conceptualisation of power, power hierarchies and subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to develop the study of remote warfare's constitutive "remoteness." It proposes a novel definition of remoteness as the degree of the American public's socio-psychological detachment from the realities of political violence fought at a physical distance from the continental United States, as mediated through spectatorship of the use of military force. The remoteness of remote warfare has physical, psychological, and social properties. We argue that it exists on a continuum subject to change over time and should not be approached as a fixed condition measured solely by the physical distance separating combatants involved in armed fighting or as the use of various weapons technologies. The numerous dynamics associated with the remoteness of remote warfare are illustrated through an examination of American military intervention in Libya during Obama's presidency. From the height of the 2011 NATO intervention in the country onwards, US military operations in Libya became more "remote" for the American public. Whilst other contextual factors contributed toward this outcome, we argue that the diminished spectacle surrounding the 2016 Operation Odyssey Lightning helps explain the American public's increasing remoteness from military intervention in Libya. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how American presidents retell and interpret the so-called "First Thanksgiving." It offers analysis of the 20 presidential Thanksgiving proclamations issued from 2001 to 2020, situating them within the long evolution of the holiday. The specific focus is on how Bush, Obama, and Trump spoke of God, Pilgrims, Indians, and the enduring "spirit" of the First Thanksgiving. This analysis gives a glimpse into contemporary popular understandings and political uses of Thanksgiving and its imagined roots—and how those understandings and uses contrast with those of previous generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American history has often witnessed a "Pendulum Effect" in consideration of the nation's own past. That is, attitudes swing from one interpretive pole to the opposite, in this case for interpretations of the Plymouth Pilgrims, the Mayflower, and "the first Thanksgiving." The articles in this special issue try to avoid those extremes, but while still treating fairly and with sharp moral scruples, the events of four centuries ago and their contemporary legacies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores US foreign policy discourse surrounding the rise of ISIS, from 2014 to 2016. Specifically, it asks how Obama constructed ISIS as a threatening Other at this time. This research responds to a gap in the literature concerning official Western discourses on ISIS violence, and partially fills this by tracing the formation of US foreign policy narratives and exploring how this drew from existing discourses and older Orientalist tropes. Conducting a discourse analysis of official statements, this paper shows how Obama modified his language to elevate the level of the threat in official discourse. It argues that he achieved this by drawing upon longstanding racialised and Orientalist archives of knowledge, effectively resituating the terrorist Other within a more markedly Orientalist discourse. Finally, the article concludes that by (re)producing the traditional Orientalist character of the barbarian as an existential threat to a Eurocentric idea of Western civilisation, Obama made possible an approach to intervention that prioritised air power, targeted assassinations and international cooperation to defend the "civilised" world. This had the effect of stigmatising Muslim communities who were left occupying a discursive space between the civilised West and the barbaric ISIS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I focus on a subset of Obama's foreign policy views, namely his beliefs about the appropriate circumstances under which the United States should engage in armed conflict. I argue that the Iraq war served as a formative event in the development of Obama's worldview. He derived distinct lessons from this policy failure, leading him to articulate a restrictive set of conditions that should be met before the United States considered intervening in the internal politics of another nation, absent a direct threat to national security. I undertake a detailed examination of two case studies – the administration's debates leading to the 2011 intervention in Libya and the decision not to intervene in Syria in 2013 – and demonstrate how the lessons of Iraq shaped Obama's policy choices at critical junctures in the deliberations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Turkey's 68-year-old formal alliance with the US, this study asks why the alliance persists in spite of diverging perceptions of threat and worldviews. The first section of the article explains that the alliance has been transformed into a more than a threat-centric and transactional partnership over time. The second section focuses on the key issues of the US–Turkey alliance management between January 2009 and 2020 and points to a significant increase in the alliance security dilemma. The third section explores the AKP leadership's divergent worldviews and rising contestations against the US. Overall, the study argues that both transactional and 'order-centric' arguments can be useful to explain the resilience of the US–Turkey alliance in the post-Cold War era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article probes the relationship between hope and security, looking at how hope is appropriated and used by the US security apparatus under President Obama to pre-empt radicalisation. It looks specifically at strategic narratives designed to infuse hope within the global Muslim population – identified in US security discourse as being particularly vulnerable to terrorist recruitment. While critical studies of security often articulate hope and security to be diametrically opposed concepts, this article shows that hope not only is an active and important part of contemporary technologies and logics of security, but also that hope can be productive of the insecurities, fear and exclusions that such politics often is assumed to entail. The use of hope within US counterterrorism communications further indicates that, rather than a subversive force, hope has come to legitimise some of the key facets of post 9/11 politics of security, namely the identification of human nature as a site of potential danger, the invocation of permanent intervention, the radical exclusion of the global Muslim population from political rights, and, not the least, the effective denial of our capacity to imagine another world, free from the insecurities of our political present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the years since 11 September 2001, pundits, politicians and scholars of terrorism and international relations routinely have declared that 9/11 "changed everything". This article explores not only how those decisions transformed the United States and the global response to terrorism, but also how both the decisions and response sustained a sense of fear. Further, they made possible, to paraphrase then candidate Joseph Biden's critique of former New York Mayor Rudy Guiliani, the framing of so much of the global political debate about terrorism, and national security references as simply 9/11 accompanied by a noun and a verb. Finally, the article examines the consequences of this framing for not only our understanding of terrorism, but also our understanding of terrorism and violence within the current global system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

President Obama's commitment to a creedal narrative of American exceptionalism and his understanding of the Third World as a space of ontological deficit together made for a presidency that could neither mitigate the structural racism of the United States nor deflect a racist foreign policy premised on an unending war against terror. By examining the murders of two American teenagers – Trayvon Martin and Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki – this essay argues that the very self-fashioning narratives that propelled Obama to the presidency of the United States rendered him incapable of effecting any substantive changes in the racism than animates its domestic and foreign policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009, Martinican writers Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau published a short address to President Obama, writing his rise and election victory into planetary histories of creolization. This short text appears outdated or even naïve today, since Glissant and Chamoiseau's reading of Obama seeks to inaugurate new narratives of American historical and political time that seem entirely foreclosed by the arrival of Donald Trump on the world stage. And yet I argue that we can recuperate and reactivate utopian threads in Glissant and Chamoiseau's text that provoke us to reread contemporary U.S. politics in the light of these imagined futures that never came about. What appears at first glance to be a fantastical reading of the Obama presidency actually opens up new ways of imagining utopian political strategies today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Barack Obama's 2008 election to the presidency of the United States, many predicted that the first Black president would inspire a generation of Black Americans, especially students. While stories of Obama inspiring individuals to overachieve are common, it remains to be seen if there was a systemic shift in Black student achievement after Obama's election. Given the persistent racial score gap between Blacks and Whites on standardized tests, it is important to know if an inspirational figure could have a significant impact. Using ACT data from Chicago Public Schools, I find there is no evidence that Obama's election had an impact on Black test scores. The racial ACT gap has been increasing since the beginning of the 21st century, and that trend continued after Obama was elected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transatlantic relations reached a low point during the first Bush Administration, as U.S. and European partners fell out over the invasion of Iraq. Using a framework developed by G. John Ikenberry, this article examines this difficult period in transatlantic relations as a baseline for assessing the eight years of the Obama Administration. Although the transatlantic relationship moved in and out of crisis during this period, it emerged at the end of the second Obama term recovered. The Trump Administration has put this newfound resilience to the test. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the cinematic representation is extremely useful in framing of counter-terrorism policies, whether in the US or elsewhere. This paper examines cinema’s interest in drone warfare as well as the lives and personalities of drone pilots. It argues that drone warfare suffers a considerable image problem that has been brought out in several recent features and it is unlikely that any major cinematic myth of drone warfare will easily develop, certainly in comparison to myths concerning special forces and special operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Anglo-American and Israeli-American special relationships have proved to be unusually close and have confounded expectations that they would wither away with the changing international environment. In order to explain this, the article proposes a theory of ‘alliance persistence’ that is based on reciprocity over shared geostrategic interests, sentimental attachments and institutionalised security relations. The article employs this theoretical framework to explore how Anglo-American and Israeli-American relations have developed during the Obama administration. It argues that the Anglo-American relationship has been closer because of the two countries’ shared strategic interests, whilst the Israeli-American relationship has experienced divergences in how the security interests of the two sides have been pursued. The article concludes by assessing how the two relationships will fair in the post-Obama era and argues that there are numerous areas of tension in the US-Israeli relationship that risk future tensions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a review and analysis of cybersecurity policy and strategic initiatives by the Obama Administration, and an argument for continuity and improvement of initiatives already in motion through the Trump Administration that will allow for growth of critical cybersecurity strategies that will improve critical infrastructure protection, modernize and defend the U.S. federal IT enterprise, and secure U.S. and allied investments in cyberspace. A discussion on key strategic efforts of the Obama Administration from 2008 to 2016 is presented, as well as challenges and potential improvements that could be made in the Trump Administration. We conclude by making several recommendations for U.S. policymakers that would provide continuity and iterative improvement to President Obama’s cybersecurity policy strategy: deepen the federal cybersecurity bench, accept recent bipartisan recommendations for policy improvement and strategic direction, and continue U.S. leadership in public-private and international partnerships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the vocabulary provided by scholarship on gaffes, narrative paradigm, and representative anecdote to suggest that both the Obama and Romney campaigns employed Mitt Romney's leaked “47%” comment as a Burkean representative anecdote in the 2012 election. The elevation of the leaked comment was possible because the gaffe held narrative fidelity for the stories proposed by both campaigns, but narrative coherence and transcendent values became contentious aspects of the respective narratives. Critically analyzing divergent meanings assigned to the leaked comment opens space to discuss the role gaffes play in campaign narratives, complicates contemporary understanding of gaffes and their integration into broader political campaigns, and illuminates the impact of particular rhetorical constructions on campaigns and public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the rhetorical qualities of neoliberalism through an analysis of economic and rhetorical theories of conventional wisdom and common sense. I analyze Barack Obama’s health care advocacy to demonstrate how neoliberal language animated his arguments for reform and frustrated his appeals to community. I argue that neoliberalism maintains its influence on political culture in large part because of its deep embeddedness in political language. The essay concludes with a discussion of how rhetors might operate within a culture marked by this prominent and often problematic discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines Obama's savvy use of humor and argues that his intentional comedic communication offers a new model of negotiating Black masculinity. The author grounds her argument by discussing the contradictions, oppressive cultural perceptions, and instabilities of gender and racial repertoires that challenge the existence of all Black men, including our president. To disrupt these challenges, she posits that Obama engages in intentional performative practices of comedy to attain and sustain his own sense of Black masculinity. Next she unpacks Obama's comedic style, further positing that the true value of his comedy lies in the purpose and effect of his rhetorical messaging. To support her theorizing, she then analyzes a variety of comedic experiences in which Obama's humorous intentionality provides an emancipatory, rearticulated paradigm for rethinking Black masculinities. Finally, the author demonstrates the ways in which Obama's racio-rhetorical style, via humor, is already influencing other Black men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barack Obama finishes his second term with a mixed but positive foreign policy legacy. America’s global standing is much improved from the waning days of the George W. Bush administration eight years ago. Obama’s most notable achievements were the international agreement slowing Iran’s progress toward nuclear weapons capability and diplomatic normalisation with Cuba. On the other side of the ledger were his failure to extricate America from military overextension in the greater Mideast and from the global policing mindset that produced that overextension. Also marring his record was his incoherent response to Syria’s deadly civil war and Libya’s collapse into anarchy following the 2011 international intervention. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Working from Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” this essay examines the recent interest in the messianic and messianicity in continental philosophy. To ground its discussion, the essay analyzes two recent cultural examples of messianic rhetoric – Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and Dan Savage’s 2010It Gets Better Project, in order to explore hidden theological dimensions of recent cultural and political discourse in the US. The essay argues that both examples showcase a reliance on the language of the messianic promise as a means of creating a docile public focused on imagined future liberation rather than a critical confrontation of the often violent and disturbing realities of the now. At the same time that the essay problematizes messianic rhetoric’s connection to deeply entrenched narratives of “progress,” the essay also works to posit alternative visions of the messianic and to question whether it is possible to redefine the concept of messianism without relying on a narrative of progress which is outdated, irresponsible, and likely violent. In the end, the essay explores how the language of queer theory, with its resistance to traditional logics of future-oriented (re)production, might provide a useful vocabulary for such a reimagining of the messianic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The perennial concern over executive overreach continues well into Obama's presidency, leading many to wonder if the “unitary executive” is here to stay. Discussions of executive war powers focus on three models. The Hamiltonian perspective gives presidents the lead position in foreign affairs; the second model, following Madison, presents Congress as the leader when initiating hostilities. Finally, Jeffersonians present emergency powers as extra-legal, giving presidents a sphere of actions that cannot be contained within constitutional discussions. Problematically, current scholarship implicitly or explicitly grounds these explanations in Locke's political philosophy. This occurs despite a dearth of references to Locke during the Constitutional Convention and infrequent references to his thought during early debates over executive-congressional divisions of war powers. Comparatively, all of these seminal American figures frequently mention Montesquieu, often fighting over the specifics of his theory. While scholars widely acknowledge this influence, they rarely mention him during discussions of war powers or the nature of executive power in general. This article examines the Montesquieuan understanding of executive power and shows how this model represents a viable alternative to the Lockean one. Most importantly, examining the executive from a Montesquieuan perspective provides solutions to current problems that the Lockean perspective does not. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examine columns of three Pulitzer Prize-winning African American columnists to identify the frames they used to offer perspective on the candidacy and early administration of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States. The period under study stretches from the time when it became clear that Obama would be the Democratic Party's presidential nominee through the first six months of his administration. Using a typology we developed for identifying frames, we find that the columnists—Leonard Pitts ofThe Miami Herald, Eugene Robinson ofThe Washington Post, and Cynthia Tucker ofThe Atlanta Journal-Constitution—concentrated on a frame of duality that shows Obama defined by race while trying to transcend the moniker, a conflict successful African Americans have known all too well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The official Russian position in the Ukrainian crisis is based on a reversal of reality: Ukraine is accused of deceit, the European Union of aggression, and the United States of pulling the strings behind the scenes. Russia is presented as a victim, and its agents in Donbass as freedom fighters. Moscow does not care if its arguments are believable or not and appears ready to sever its historic ties with Europe in order to adopt a Eurasian identity whose only characteristic seems to be the rejection of Western ties. While Moscow managed to recover Crimea, it drove itself into political isolation and revived the cold war. Having cornered itself by its own doings while being simultaneously afflicted by a serious economic downturn caused mainly by falling oil prices and Western sanctions, the Kremlin can see no possible way out and risks becoming more and more aggressive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This analysis responds to two questions in recent scholarship. The first is Ulrich Beck’s call for scholars to empirically explore how nationhood is evolving in a global context – whether and how nation-states are being cosmopolitanised. The second concerns normative debates regarding what form belongingshouldtake in a global era – patriotic attachments or cosmopolitan ones. The rhetoric of Barack Obama provides empirical fodder for both explorations. As a leader who proclaimed and was widely noted for his cosmopolitan sensibilities, yet ultimately relied heavily on themes of patriotism and American exceptionalism, Obama’s case confirms that nationhood remains a potent form of collectivity in the contemporary era; suggests that although the conditions of globalisation may be facilitative ones with regard to cosmopolitanisation, they are not sufficient ones; and calls into question Martha Nussbaum’s recent claim that if ‘purified’, patriotism lends itself to a ‘striving for global justice and inclusive human love’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The timing of the 2008 American National Election Studies panel's implicit and explicit items on race allowed for a kind of natural experiment about the effect of presidential debate exposure on racial attitudes. The 2008 debates and Obama's composed performance in them gave tens of millions of Americans an extended look at a highly vivid, salient, cognitively available, counterstereotypical exemplar that may have changed the way they feel about African Americans. Exposure to the presidential debates was positively related with post-debate affect toward African Americans after controlling for predebate affect, whether this affect was measured implicitly or explicitly. The results for explicit affect were more robust to the addition of more controls to the model. Party interacted with debate exposure such that the effect on implicit affect was reversed for Republicans. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When United States (US) President Barack Obama announced in 2013 that he would host the first United States-Africa leaders' summit the next year, he was greeted with considerable scepticism. Many critics thought he was just playing catch-up with other countries and organisations which had been holding Africa summits for years, especially China. But, whatever the motives, the event itself proved to be a substantial success, probably re-setting US relations with Africa for many years to come. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay provides a descriptive interpretation of the role of digital media in the campaigns of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 with a focus on two themes: personalized political communication and the commodification of digital media as tools. The essay covers campaign finance strategy, voter mobilization on the ground, innovation in social media, and data analytics, and why the Obama organizations were more innovative than those of his opponents. The essay provides a point of contrast for the other articles in this special issue, which describe sometimes quite different campaign practices in recent elections across Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing from the work of cultural memory and racial formation theory (Omi and Winant 1994) we explore the ascension of Barack Obama as an illustration of how ‘race’ is understood and remembered. This article focuses on the public media discourse of the 2012 Obama re-election to illustrate how the narrative morphed racially from 2008 to 2012. Our findings suggest that the public discourse about ascension and re-election of Barack Obama drew from racial and post-racial narratives to describe his re-election. We contend that attention given to the public construction of Barack Obama in the present is vitally important to how the narrative arc of ‘race’ in the US will be understood in schools and society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Sub-Saharan Africa is emerging as a rapidly growing continent that has weathered the storm of worldwide recession. The United States should no longer view Africa as an area for humanitarian initiatives to be treated solely through foreign assistance. The time has come for a new relationship based on mutual interests signified by expanding trade and investment. The United States needs to get away from the conventional wisdom that Africa is too risky. African nations are engaged in adopting necessary reforms—especially the rule of law and expedited formalities—designed to attract and reassure investors. Times have changed and U.S. thinking needs to adapt if the United States wants to take advantage of some interesting new opportunities to make money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that discourse used to define and understand Israel by prominent American Christian Zionists is a discourse of national idealisation. Drawing on Durkheim's (2008) notion of symbols as sources of social solidarity, I argue that this imagined Israel reflects conservative social and military values that are shared among Christian Zionists and their supporters – values which many in this broad category see the United States failing to uphold. Following this, I show how one of America's most prominent pastors – John Hagee – and his organisation – Christians United for Israel – have taken on the role of a contemporary Jeremiah, criticising the American government for not adequately supporting Israel. This article concludes by considering how Christian Zionists are calling America to renew and align itself with God by ‘blessing’ Israel, and acting like Israel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After more than 60 years of military occupation, 30 of these under violent military practices, a social movement forced the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques. This victory would not have been possible without the highly effective organization of civil disobedience carried out on the island. But the sum total of the actions that eventually forced out the U.S. Navy, neither happened exclusively within the boundaries of Vieques, nor was carried out by Viequense residents alone. In this article we want to suggest that this amazing victory—a testament of people's will in the face of globalization—is also a border-crossing tale. Drawing from interviews with key activists currently based in Puerto Rico and New York, this article will explore the myriad routes of connections enacted, maintained and negotiated within and beyond territorial and ethnic boundaries. It will particularly look at how various activists conjured networks of solidarity, kinship, political affiliation, and friendship, among others, in their quest to liberate the island from the U.S. military occupation. Under the backdrop of Obama's post-racial discourse, this paper illustrates how the Vieques movement circumvented the politics of Empire through creative maneuvers and negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study employed content analysis bused on Functional Theory to investigate the three general election debates featuring Democratic nominee Barack Obama and Republican nominee John McCain in the 2008 presidential campaign. These debates were mostly positive (58% acclaims) with numerous attacks (35%) and some defenses or refutations of attacks (7%). There was no significant difference in the two candidates' use a acclaims and attacks; however, Obama worked to link McCain with unpopular President Bush and a much higher percentage of Obama's discussion of pust deeds were attacks (86%), compared with McCain (56%). The candidates stressed policy (70%) more than character (30%), with Democrat Barack Obama stressing policy more, and character less, than Republican John McCain. In this debate, both general goals and ideals were employed more often as the busis for acclaims than for attacks, consistent with previous research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evidence for a putative Obama Doctrine. Its main finding is that a Doctrine is identifiable and is characterised by amodus operandideriving its strength not from what it threatens to do but from what it offers: a calibrated, multilateral response to egregious humanitarian crises. This nascent Doctrine is identifiable in three main ways: first, it is an attempt to clarify and institutionalise a response to the massive human rights violations that have typically engendered little or no action on the part of the USA. Second, it seeks to recast a series of false choices which have historically compelled an uncomfortable commitment to stability rather than the pursuit of reform. A third defining element concerns the practical application or operationalisation of this philosophy. While adding clarity – specifically in terms of identifying how and when to act – the Obama Doctrine is very broad indeed, raising concerns about both content and articulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the United States' military strikes in Libya in 2011, the debate over the authority to use force reached levels not experienced in recent American history. Many members of Congress, both Democrat and Republican, expressed concern over what they viewed as a usurpation of Congress's constitutional war powers. These concerns were exacerbated when the Obama administration maintained that it was not engaged in ‘hostilities’ and that the War Powers Resolution, which was intended to limit the president's war authority, did not apply to this use of force. Yet despite the strong levels of bipartisan constitutional pressure waged against the commander in chief, these efforts were generally discouraged, co-opted or simply opposed by the House and Senate leadership. This research examines the role of Congress's institutional and party leaders, specifically Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH), and Senators John Kerry (D-MA) and John McCain (R-AZ), and finds that their leadership was instrumental in keeping Congress's war powers authority subdued, which limited congressional interference in President Obama's military actions in Libya. Understanding these political dynamics is crucial to understanding when and how the world's sole superpower commits to overseas military actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and victory were highly publicized events that reverberated outside the United States and were of significant interest to many Brazilians. In this research note, I argue that the longstanding comparison between race relations in Brazil and the United States contributed to Obama’s meaningfulness for Afro-Brazilian activists. Many scholars and non-elite Brazilians have depicted Brazil as less racist than the United States, which contributes to an idea of Brazilian exceptionalism. Afro-Brazilian activists seized upon the public attention paid to Obama to counter this Brazilian exceptionalist position by pointing to forms of racism in Brazil that limit Afro-Brazilian political ascension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2012 election resulted in a major victory for President Obama and while his Democratic Party improved its Congressional strength, the House of Representatives remains under Republican control. The election revealed the depth of America's political and voter divisions with each party showing dramatically different areas of strength and weakness. Yet the election did not hinge on foreign policy leaving the Obama administration likely to continue most of its earlier policies toward East Asia as marked by the multilayered ‘pivot’ toward Asia. Relations with China and North Korea are likely to remain difficult to manage while US–ROK links should be far smoother. Of particular concern is the economic sluggishness and rising nationalism in Japan which could well cause bilateral problems with the US and regional problems with Japan's neighbors, including US ally, South Korea. And at home the bipolar divisions over how best to deal with America's economic revitalization could well impede US abilities to exert a convincing multi-dimensional role in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article addresses the influence of U.S. online campaign practices on West-European party organizations. The empirical case is the Norwegian Labor Party: To what extent did Labor adopt the online practices of the Obama campaign, and in what sense was the online strategy adapted to fit existing campaign and organizational structures? Based on the diffusion of technology and a hybridization perspective on campaign change, it is suggested that the literature on political parties and the network party model in particular is helpful to understand this process. The findings show that the Norwegian Labor Party was highly influenced by Obama's online campaign and U.S. online practices. However, the practices were adjusted to an existing campaign style and organizational structure. Moreover, an essential part of the online strategy was a thematic network structure that aimed to lower the threshold for participation and thereby engage and activate party members, as well as recruit new members. Hence, U.S. campaign practices diffuse to Norwegian electoral politics, and the adopted U.S. practices are implemented based on the ideals of the network party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The financial crisis that erupted in September 2008 seemed to confirm all the worst stereotypes about the United States held abroad: that Americans are bold, greedy, and selfish to excess; that they are hypocrites, staunch defenders of the free market ready to bail out their own companies; and that the US has long been the architect and primary beneficiary of the global economic system. So the crisis had an enormous potential for deteriorating further the global image of the United States, already at an all-time high during the George W. Bush era. Yet anti-American sentiments did not surge worldwide as a result of the crisis, neither at the level of public opinion, nor at the level of actions and policy responses by foreign policy-makers. This article explains why the dog did not bark and reawaken anti-Americanism in the process. The central argument is that this potential anti-Americanism has been mitigated by several factors, including the election of Obama, the new face of globalization, and the perception of the relative decline of US power coupled with the rise of China, which suggests that the ‘post-American’ world may be accompanied by a ‘post anti-American’ world, at least in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this essay I use an updated approach to Richard Hofstadter's paranoid style to analyze the contemporary birther movement. While the paranoid style provides a set of characteristics that describes paranoid narratives, it does not account for why some narratives ring true for certain audiences. Thus, in order to explain how and why the birther narrative resonates with a substantial portion of Americans, I argue that the resonance of the birther narrative can be explained through Kenneth Burke's scapegoating process, which activates the conspiratorial story for the birther audience. I use an analysis of a popular birther film, materials on the birthers' website, and media commentary on the group to illustrate this position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article approaches translation through the application of the model of systemic functional linguistics. More specifically, it explores the use of the potential of appraisal theory of evaluation (Martin, J.R., & White, P.R.R., The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. London: Palgrave, 2005), centring on the realization of interpersonal meaning, for the uncovering of translator decision-making. The analysis is applied to a case study of two of President Obama's speeches, including the subtitles of President Obama's State of the Union speech of 25 January 2012. These subtitles were crowdsourced by Amara/Universal Subtitles in collaboration with the Public Broadcasting Service into 25 languages and they provide an illuminating canvas for the analysis of new modes of communication affecting the phenomenon of translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the different views regarding the controversial concept of terrorism, noting that there are many definitions of this concept with no internationally agreed definition. It then examines the US attitude and policy towards terrorism prior to the coming of the Obama administration. It continues by describing the Obama administration's general policy towards the Greater Middle East region and appraises its position on the concept of terrorism and the action of Hezbollah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2008, Barack Obama made history as the first politician to advertise in video games, but this was overlooked by political scientists and received little media coverage. Obama's decision marked a major turning point in campaign strategy because he used the new technology of dynamic advertising to target voters in specific states and only in the month before Election Day. He was able to speak directly to young voters for a small cost compared to his expenditures on traditional media. This article explores Obama's use of dynamic advertising and shows why other candidates are likely to emulate him by running their own virtual campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is the third time that American policy makers have considered a pivot to Asia. This time is different, however, because it is clear that the base of gravity of the global economy is shifting from West to East. As the most powerful nation in the Asia-Pacific, the United States has an overriding national interest in the preservation of regional prosperity and order. But Washington recognizes that it can no longer impose solutions on the major governments in the region. A new U.S. strategy for the Asia-Pacific will have to take into account the very strict limits imposed on U.S. foreign and defense policies by America's relative economic decline. This means that Washington will have to convince its friends and allies to take greater responsibility for regional security. The so-called San Francisco system of U.S.-sponsored alliances will have to be transformed, in order to make it more responsive to the problems that confront America and its regional friends and allies. This essay will draw upon Joseph Nye's concept of ideal and material resources to assess the viability and adaptability of the San Francisco system. It will also consider the merits of the Pentagon's proposed AirSea Battle concept as a response to Chinese military modernization and as a source of reassurance for Washington's regional friends and allies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The transatlantic tensions of the Bush years are behind us but the future of transatlantic relations remains uncertain at the closing of the Obama term. Policy alignment has been found on a host of issues but ‘existential’ questions have resurfaced, casting shadows on Western unity and relevance in the coming years. So far the crisis has failed to focus attention on the need for a common vision for the 21st century. Key strategic issues, from the future of the European order to transatlantic engagement in the Middle East, should figure prominently on the next transatlantic agenda, shifting the debate from the notion of a ‘Pacific century’ to how the West can address ongoing power transitions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the US state–capital nexus at the heart of an American imperialism currently reaching its limits. In a first part we argue that the US state has consistently sought to promote and facilitate the global expansion of US capital, indicating a tight coupling between the two. Indeed, this so-called Open Door imperialism has been shaped and cemented by the strong ties between the foreign policy-making state apparatus and America's corporate elite. With the aid of social network analysis and biographical mapping we show how many key foreign policymakers of the past three administrations have been recruited from the ranks of US transnational capital. This nexus helps to explain how under Obama, US ‘grand strategy’, analysed in the second part, remains wedded to the goal of maintaining the global Open Door empire in spite of the deepening contradictions in the context of the current crisis of the US-led neoliberal order. Este artículo analiza el nexo entre el estado y el capital estadounidense en el corazón del imperialismo americano, actualmente alcanzando sus límites. En una primera parte sostenemos que el estado estadounidense ha intentado consistentemente de promover y facilitar la expansión global del capital estadounidense, que indica una conexión estrecha entre los dos. De hecho, este así llamado imperialismo a Puertas abiertas ha sido forjado y cimentado por fuertes lazos entre el aparato extranjero de creación de leyes y la élite corporativa americana. Con la ayuda del análisis de las redes sociales y la representación biográfica, mostramos como muchos de los estrategas políticos extranjeros claves de las tres administraciones anteriores han sido seleccionados de los rangos del capital trasnacional estadounidense. Este nexo ayuda a explicar cómo bajo Obama, la ‘gran estrategia’ de E.E.U.U., analizada en la segunda parte, permanece casada con la meta de mantener el imperio global de Puerta abierta, a pesar de las contradicciones cada vez mayores en el contexto de la actual crisis del orden neoliberal encabezado por los Estados Unidos. 本文分析了美国国家（the US state）与资本的联结，它处于当前达于极限的美国帝国主义的核心。在第一部分，我们认为美国国家一直不断地寻求促进美国资本的全球扩张，表明了二者之间的紧密结合。确实，这一所谓的门户开放资本主义是由制订外交政策的国家机构和美国的公司精英之间的强劲纽带所塑造和加强的。通过借助社会网络分析和生平描述，我们表明了过去三届行政当局中有多少关键的外交政策制订者是从美跨国资本阶层中招募的。这一连结有助于解释第二部分所分析的美国“大战略”在奥巴马时期是如何继续坚持维护全球门户开放帝国目标的，尽管在美国主导的新自由主义秩序发生当前危机的背景下各种矛盾在加深。 이 글은 한계에 달한 미국 제국주의의 중심에서 미국의 국가-자본 관계를 분석한다. 첫 번째로 우리는 국가와 자본의 단단한 결합을 지적하면서 미국 국가가 지속적으로 미국의 지구적 팽창을 장려하고 촉진시켰다고 주장한다. 정말로 소위 문화개방 제국주의가 외교정책을 펴는 국가 기구와 미국의 기업 엘리트 간의 강한 유대에 의해서 만들어 지고 또 강화되었다. 우리는 사회연결망 분석과 전기적 서술의 도움으로 과거 3개 정부의 많은 핵심적인 외교정책가들이 미국의 초국적 기업에서 충원되었다는 것으로 보여준다. 이러한 관계는 2부에서 분석된 오바마 정부에서 미국의 ‘거대 전략’이 미국주도 신자유주의 질서의 위기 속에서 심화되는 모순에도 불구하고 지구적 문화개방 제국을 유지하려는 목표에 어떻게 연결되어 있는 지를 설명하는 데 도움을 준다. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Obama's 2008 campaign rhetoric consciously borrows from Lincoln's discourse of national unity and racial equality in the Gettysburg Address and his House Divided and Cooper Union speeches. Lincoln is invoked as the mythic saviour of the Union and guardian of liberty while his 'limited views on race' are disregarded. Obama's 'Announcement for President' and 'A More Perfect Union speeches' are analysed as examples of how the memory of Lincoln is co-opted to create cultural reference points that provide a framework for Obama's own appeals for national unity and racial harmony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]