Телеграм канал «Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)»

Andrea Benvenuti - Nehru’s Bandung: Non-Alignment and Regional Order in Indian Cold War Strategy This book sheds light on a neglected aspect of India’s Cold War diplomacy, starting with the role of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and his Congress government in organising the first Asian-African Conference in Bandung in April 1955. Andrea Benvenuti shows how, in the early Cold War, Nehru seized the opportunity accorded by the conference to transcend growing international tensions and pursue an alternative vision: a neutralised Asian ‘area of peace’, underpinned by a code of conduct based on the five principles of peaceful coexistence. Relying on Indian, Western and Chinese archival sources, Nehru’s Bandung focuses on the policy concerns and calculations, as well as the international factors, that drove a sceptical Nehru to support Indonesia’s diplomatic push for such a gathering. It reveals how, in Nehru’s estimation, Bandung also served a further important purpose securing China’s commitment to peaceful coexistence, without which stability in Asia would be illusory. Nehru’s support for an Asian-African conference did not derive from an emotional commitment to Afro-Asian internationalism. Instead, it stemmed from a desire to promote a ‘third way’ in an increasingly polarised world, and to forge a stable regional order one that would enhance India’s external security and domestic prosperity.

Cold War Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies The Cold War was not only about the imperial ambitions of the super powers, their military strategies, and antagonistic ideologies. It was also about conflicting worldviews and their correlates in the daily life of the societies involved. The term “Cold War Culture” is often used in a broad sense to describe media influences, social practices, and symbolic representations as they shape, and are shaped by, international relations. Yet, it remains in question whether or to what extent the Cold War Culture model can be applied to European societies, both in the East and the West. While every European country had to adapt to the constraints imposed by the Cold War, individual development was affected by specific conditions as detailed in these chapters.

Teresa Fava Thomas - American Arabists in the Cold War Middle East, 1946–75: From Orientalism to Professionalism This book examines the careers of 53 area experts in the US State Department’s Middle East bureau during the Cold War. Known as Arabists or Middle East hands, they were very different in background, education, and policy outlook from their predecessors, the Orientalists. A highly competitive selection process and rigorous training shaped them into a small corps of diplomatic professionals with top-notch linguistic and political reporting skills. Case studies shed light on Washington’s perceptions of Israel and the Arab world, as well as how American leaders came to regard (and often disregard) the advice of their own expert advisors. This study focuses on their transformative role in Middle East diplomacy from the Eisenhower through the Ford administrations.

César Graña - Bohemian Versus Bourgeois: French Society and the French Man of Letters in the Nineteenth Century There have not been many general studies of the vast problem of the alienation of the artist from society, although the theme has been endlessly commented on, in an unsystematic way, as one of the cultural commonplaces of the last century and a half. Colin Wilson's The Outsider was more of a stimulating rag-bag than an organized book; Albert Camus's L'homme révolté remains a major document, written by an artist who was trying to move convincingly from alienation to integration; Jean-Paul Sartre's Qu'est-ce que la littérature is full of interesting suggestions but, of course, contains no built-in explanation of its own strongly emotional assumptions. Dr. Graña has now come along to take a more coolly academic view, and he relates the whole question to the attitudes of certain French writers of the 19th century. He divides his book into three parts: “The Social World Of Modern French Letters,” which sketches in the political and social background of 19th-century France; “Three Literary Critics of Bourgeois Society”; and “The Heritage of Alienation: Productivity, Social Efficiency, and Intellectual Gloom.” His three major exemplars in the middle section are Stendhal, Baudelaire, and Flaubert; all three, although of bourgeois origin, were violent enemies of the “bourgeois,” and their different personalities had a tremendous effect on subsequent writers and artists. It was Stendhal who helped to make the artistic cult of the self enjoyable and who popularized in France the Shakespearean phrase “the happy few” to refer to those superior souls who really understand what the artist is doing; Baudelaire gave the prestige of sophistication to the Romantic idea of the uniqueness of the poet; Flaubert firmly placed the alienated artist's ideal in art, whether or not there was any public to appreciate that art.

Нира Юваль-Дэвис - Теоритизируя гендер и нацию Большинство теоретических подходов к изучению наций и национализма игнорировали гендерные отношения, считая их несущественными. При обсуждении вопросов национального «производства» или «воспроизводства» литература по национализму обычно не учитывает роль женщин. Вместо этого внимание сосредотачивается на бюрократии и интеллигенции. Материалистский подход придаёт первостепенное значение государственной бюрократии и другим государственным институтам в формировании и воспроизводстве национальных идеологий и границ. Другие исследователи национализма и социологии знания, такие как Геллнер (1983) и Смит (1986), подчёркивают особую роль интеллигенции в создании и воспроизводстве национальных идеологий, особенно для угнетённых народов. Будучи исключёнными из гегемонической интеллигенции и лишённые открытого доступа к государственным структурам, эти интеллектуалы «пересоздают» коллективную память, трансформируют народные устные традиции и языки в письменные формы, а также воссоздают «национальный золотой век» в историческом прошлом, реконструкция которого становится основой их национальных стремлений. https://syg.ma/@she-is-an-expert-1/nira-yuval-devis-teoritiziruya-gender-i-naciyu