Book
Post-Cold War Borders Reframing Political Space in Eastern Europe
In the aftermath of the Ukraine crises, borders within the wider post-Cold War and post-Soviet context have become a key issue for international relations and public political debate. These borders are frequently viewed in terms of military preparedness and confrontation, but behind armed territorial conflicts there has been a broader shift in the regional balance of power and sovereignty. This book explores border conflicts in the EU’s eastern neighbourhood via a detailed focus on state power and sovereignty, set in the context of post-Cold war politics and international relations.
By identifying changing definitions of sovereignty and political space the authors highlight competing strategies of legitimising and challenging borders that have emerged as a result of geopolitical transformations of the last three decades. This book uses comparative studies to examine country specific variation in border negotiation and conflict, and pays close attention to shifts in political debates that have taken place between the end of State Socialism, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the outbreak of the Ukraine crises. From this angle, Post-Cold War Borders sheds new light on change and variation in the political rhetoric of the EU, the Russian Federation, Ukraine and neighbouring EU member countries. Ultimately, the book aims to provide a new interpretation of changes in international order and how they relate to shifting concepts of sovereignty and territoriality in post-Cold war Europe.
Shedding new light on negotiation and conflict over post-Soviet borders, this book will be of interest to students, researchers and policy makers in the fields of Russian and East European studies, international relations, geography, border studies and politics.
This chapter traces shifts in political conceptualisations of Russia’s borders since 1991. The primary method for accomplishing this study was through the application of the bordering paradigm, which was interpreted in the broadest sense, taking into consideration the shifting qualities of Russia’s ‘stateness’ and positionality as reflected in relations to new post-Soviet and established states. The analysis shows that the process of bordering in Russia has been determined by the nature of relations between ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ geopolitical concerns. A new aspect of the dominant border-related discourse is the link between integration in the post-Soviet space and the framing of the west as a potential threat. The relations with the west are increasingly considered as a zero-sum game based on harsh geopolitical competition. These trends have led to a hardening of Russia’s western boundaries and a sharp deterioration of mutual relations reflected in political discourse, public opinion, the freezing of joint projects, and an increasing emphasis on security. Nevertheless, cross-border programmes remain one of few fields where cooperation continues. © 2019 selection and editorial matter.
Upon analyzing the political processes occurring during the nineteenth-twentieth centuries, G.Musikhin posits that the popular idea about the supremacy of professional managers in politics over demagogues speculating with mass’ political aspirations conceals an attempt by the power holders to get rid of the axiological rationale for the political hegemony. He concludes that when the governmental policy is supported by the voters’ will rather than sovereign power per se, the ideological discourse becomes of fundamental importance since support is lent to someone who can present his ideological position as a majority’s goal. The debate within the political space is built around an ability to offer to the society a more attractive political (to be more precise, ideological) prospect rather than detailed mechanisms of how to govern society (that are largely universal).
Performatives are helpful in analyzing and interpreting political actions and events. Speech act and logical studies often reduce performatives to performative utterances. HSE scholars differentiate performative event, performative act and performative utterance. Their mutual interface coupled with reactive speech acts produce nested performative.Structural patterns of nested performatives are established with the help of funnel of performativity fashioned after the funnel of causality.
This book addresses a subject that can in the broadest sense be stated as interplay of language and ideology in process of instantiating historical knowledge in texts of political significance. The aim of the present volume is to discuss how history is recontextualized in national political discourse in the framework of two basic strategies of in-group and out-group categorization and biased representation of historical facts. It is contended that such recontextualization leads to what can be described as blending of national political discourse with a nationalistic one.
The evidence for the above contention is provided through linguistic analysis of three chunks of texts.
First, American presidential rhetoric spanning the last 50 years of history was analyzed. This part of the analysis suggests that a productive way to analyze the ‘enemy construction’ strategy seen as one of the key strategies of the discourse of the New World Order is to analyze it in a broader historic perspective, viz. as taking over the same principles, which defined the discourse of the Cold War. The ‘enemy construction’ strategy in both discourses is analyzed as resting on logic of binarism of the classical Us and Them opposition. Thus, it is contended that textual actualization of the ‘enemy’ is the projection of the basic category of the ‘other’ which is perpetuated in the political discourse and gets lexicalized differently depending on the text’s instantiating a particular order of discourse and the ideology informing it.
Second, a chunk of texts produced by those claiming to be professional historians has been addressed to see how national historical discourse is reinstantiated vis-à-vis a newly acquired national identity. An example of such discourse would be texts by Ukrainian historians writing on Great Patriotic War/World War II.
Third, texts of public figures, state leaders among them, instantiating post-Soviet geopolitical situation in the Caucasus, in particular, tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorny Karabakh were looked into. The tension aggravated with unresolved conflicts, involvement of both Russia and the USA, results in this material being a valuable source for pinpointing linguistic patterns of historical and political discourse in general and patterns indicative of national historical discourse transforming into nationalistic discourse, in particular.
Discourse analysis is neither meant to substitute historical analysis, nor claims that all historical permutations are of discursive nature solely. Instead, we see the role of discourse analysis in placing a broader question: To what extent that which has really happened is displaced by its recontextualization in discourse, i.e. by its description? Since any conflict is always closely tied with conflicting values the question can be restated as: To what extent in such historical accounts accurate rendition is displaced with evaluation and appraisal? What comes first: the unresolved issues themselves or discursive practice perpetuating those issues? In other words, is it the conflict itself or the conflict of conflicting textual descriptions?
One way or the other, historical representations are not static; they are flexible and more than prone to distortion when values come into play. Reinventing the history to mesh with a new national identity is number one example. A clash of different political perspectives is a clash of different historical descriptions. And in this clash a power-wielding social agent has the power to reinterpret the history that will fit their political narrative with other interpretations outlawed and rendered unhistorical.
In the meantime, the true power of history as a field of study and an academic discipline should be seen in presenting multiple interpretations of phenomena in question with these interpretations being mutually complementary rather than mutually exclusive. In which lies the real power and the mission of all the humanities.
The article describes the results of comparative analysis of three texts created in three different countries under totalitarian power, delivered by three political leaders. The texts in German, Italian, and Russian have been analysed.
Cet ouvrage explore des aspects méconnus des dynamiques et des politiques migratoires dans un grand espace, de l’Europe au Sahel, considéré en crise. En croisant les disciplines et les terrains, il offre une mise à distance et des éléments de réflexion sur une problématique, la migration, dont l’appréhension est rendue difficile par le foisonnement et l’orientation des discours politiques et médiatiques. Les différentes contributions permettent de replacer la Méditerranée dans un contexte géographique et géopolitique plus vaste, l’inscrivant dans des dynamiques régionales et internationales qui la traversent et l’affectent, et l’étirant dans ses ramifications nationales peu explorées (Sénégal, Maroc, Tunisie, Algérie, Libye). En combinant ces diverses échelles qui se croisent et se nourrissent mutuellement, l’ouvrage apporte une analyse de dynamiques nouvelles mais structurantes qui accompagnent la question des migrations, telles que l’évolution du marché de la consultance, des réseaux religieux ou de transport, la diffusion des normes, des politiques et des pratiques. Les études de cas qu’il contient permettent de décentrer le regard pour le porter sur des mouvements en cours au sud de la Méditerranée, marqués par le poids des politiques européennes tout en s’émancipant dans des parcours qui leur sont propres.
The article discusses the concept of "communication failure. Special attention is given to the identification and description of the causes of communication failures in the political discourse, as well as possible ways of their correction.
This article describes linguistic peculiarities of a column - one of the most popular and scantily explored genres of contemporary journalism. This genre, initially intended for commenting the political events, is undergoing transformation under the influence of non-professional authors, still keeping its basic features.
The results of cross-cultural research of implicit theories of innovativeness among students and teachers, representatives of three ethnocultural groups: Russians, the people of the North Caucasus (Chechens and Ingushs) and Tuvinians (N=804) are presented. Intergroup differences in implicit theories of innovativeness are revealed: the ‘individual’ theories of innovativeness prevail among Russians and among the students, the ‘social’ theories of innovativeness are more expressed among respondents from the North Caucasus, Tuva and among the teachers. Using the structural equations modeling the universal model of values impact on implicit theories of innovativeness and attitudes towards innovations is constructed. Values of the Openness to changes and individual theories of innovativeness promote the positive relation to innovations. Results of research have shown that implicit theories of innovativeness differ in different cultures, and values make different impact on the attitudes towards innovations and innovative experience in different cultures.
We address the external effects on public sector efficiency measures acquired using Data Envelopment Analysis. We use the health care system in Russian regions in 2011 to evaluate modern approaches to accounting for external effects. We propose a promising method of correcting DEA efficiency measures. Despite the multiple advantages DEA offers, the usage of this approach carries with it a number of methodological difficulties. Accounting for multiple factors of efficiency calls for more complex methods, among which the most promising are DMU clustering and calculating local production possibility frontiers. Using regression models for estimate correction requires further study due to possible systematic errors during estimation. A mixture of data correction and DMU clustering together with multi-stage DEA seems most promising at the moment. Analyzing several stages of transforming society’s resources into social welfare will allow for picking out the weak points in a state agency’s work.