War Atrocities Research Articles

Disrupting ‘Wills to Truth’. How Catalan TV documentary contributed to the democratization of Spanish Civil War narratives

Catalan television journalism disrupted the existing hegemonic discourses of the 1990s and 2000s by broaching unknown or silenced topics regarding civilian suffering and the post-Civil War atrocities of Franco’s fascist dictatorship. The author introduces the concept of ‘narrative democratization’ to highlight the existence of alternative narratives regarding the Spanish Civil War and its consequences, paying special attention to a number of documentaries by award-winning journalists Montserrat Armengou and Ricard Belis. It is suggested that narrative democratization is grounded in four discourse strategies: giving the victims a voice, unveiling untold or unknown stories, representing remembrance as an act of justice and internationalizing the narratives of the Civil War. Taking a Foucauldian approach to the concept of ‘will to truth’ ( volonté de vérité), the author argues that television documentaries presented new perspectives on the public story of the Spanish Civil War.

The interrelationships between moral attitudes, posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and mixed lateral preference in Israeli reserve combat troops

Combat soldiers often encounter moral dilemmas during operational deployment, especially when an armed engagement is situated within a civilian setting. The study of moral dilemmas and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has mostly focused on the impact of war atrocities and moral injury. However, the relationship between moral attitudes and different combat-related pathologies has not been thoroughly addressed by quantitative studies. We aimed to assess the relationship between combatant's moral attitudes, severity of PTSD symptoms and mixed lateral preference. Data on moral objection, PTSD severity and lateral preference were collected in a right-handed non-pathologic sample (n = 147) of reserve combat troops in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). Nearly one-fifth (19.7%) of the reserve personnel who served in the occupied territories have reported high moral objection to the commands they were expected to act upon. This group of participants exhibited more PTSD symptoms and higher levels of mixed lateral preference. Multiple linear regression analyses revealed a mediating role of moral objection in the relationship between PTSD symptoms severity and lateral preference. Our findings suggest that moral objection has significant implications on combatant's psychological and organic well-being. The findings highlight the need to include moral attitudes in research and clinical practice among combat personnel and veterans.

Long-Term Trajectories and Service Needs for Military Families

The deployment of US military personnel to recent conflicts has been a significant stressor for their families; yet, we know relatively little about the long-term family effects of these deployments. Using data from prior military service eras, we review our current understanding of the long-term functioning and needs of military families. These data suggest that overseas deployment, exposure to combat, experiencing or participating in violence during war deployment, service member injury or disability, and combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) all have profound impacts on the functioning of military families. We offer several recommendations to address these impacts such as the provision of family-centered, trauma-informed resources to families of veterans with PTSD and veterans who experienced high levels of combat and war violence. Recent efforts to address the needs of caregivers of veterans should be evaluated and expanded, as necessary. We should also help military families plan for predictable life events likely to challenge their resilience and coping capacities. Future research should focus on the following: factors that mediate the relationship between PTSD, war atrocities, caregiver burden, and family dysfunction; effective family-centered interventions that can be scaled-up to meet the needs of a dispersed population; and system-level innovations necessary to ensure adequate access to these interventions.

Post-traumatic stress disorder in adolescents in Lebanon as wars gained in ferocity: a systematic review.

Significance for public healthPost traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in adolescents has been implicated in developmental impairments, mental and scholastic problems, alcohol and drug abuse, and antisocial behavior in its victims among others. Absence of review studies regarding the prevalence of PTSD in adolescents in Lebanon, a country plagued by decades of civil strife and external occupation and invasion, is noted. Such information may reinforce the need to develop national public health policies to identify PTSD in children and adolescents, provide them with counseling and treatment, and formulate prevention strategies to protect vulnerable youth from devastations of war.For decades, Lebanon was war-torn by civil strife, and occupation and invasion by neighboring countries. In time, these wars have escalated in intensity from sniping, barricading streets and random shelling of residential quarters to the use of rockets, aerial bombing, and heavy artillery. Adverse mental health effects are noted in times of war with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a main outcome. The aim of this study was to carry out a systematic review of published studies documenting the prevalence of PTSD in the adolescent population of Lebanon, to investigate the increase in these rates with the escalation of war intensity, and to examine PTSD determinants. A search strategy was developed for online databases (PubMed and Google Scholar) between inception to the first week of January 2013. Search terms used were PTSD, adolescents and Lebanon. Eleven studies reporting PTSD in adolescents met the inclusion criteria for a total number of 5965 adolescents. Prevalence rates of PTSD ranged from 8.5% to 14.7% for the civil war, 3.7% for adolescents with sensory disabilities, 21.6% for the Grapes of Wrath War, and 15.4% to 35.0% for the 2006 July War. Some increase in PTSD rates in time is noted. Type of trauma such as bereavement, injury, house destruction, and economic problems, low self efficacy and scholastic impairment were related to PTSD. These findings may help in the development of public health policies for PTSD prevention and treatment for the protection of adolescents from war atrocities and their consequences.

Unethical Battlefield Conduct Reported by Soldiers Serving in the Iraq War

Research involving military service members has shown a strong relationship between combat experiences and increased risk for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other mental health problems. Comparatively little research has examined the relationship between combat experiences, PTSD, aggression, and unethical conduct on the battlefield, although news stories sometimes suggest links between unethical conduct and disorders such as PTSD. This study systematically examined whether unethical conduct is a proxy for aggression and whether specific combat experiences and PTSD are independently associated with unethical behavior. The results of this study indicate that aggression (β = 0.30) and specific combat experiences (particularly, witnessing war atrocities [β = 0.14] and fighting [β = 0.13]) are much more strongly associated with unethical conduct than is PTSD (β = 0.04).

“Nothing is truly hidden”: visibility, aesthetics and Yasmina Khadra’s detective fiction

This article examines the politics and form of Yasmina Khadra’s use of the detective genre to reveal invisible social conditions. I argue that the problem of visibility operates on multiple levels in Khadra’s crime fiction: firstly, at the level of genre, where the investigative impulse of the police detective novel is used to map the uneven socio-economic relations of the petro-state intensified by neo-liberalization; secondly, in catachrestic tropes of spectrality and invisibility which signal the seeming irreality of Algerian modernity and visualize the unrepresented atrocities of the civil war; and finally, in the ideological contradictions of the plots, where the emphasis on revealing occluded histories is contradicted by the texts’ erasures.

The Divided Mind: New Perspectives on Colonial Representations in Isabela Figueiredo’s Caderno de Memórias Coloniais

The idea of mild Portuguese process of colonization in Africa, reiterated by many academic and social milieus, is described in Caderno de Memorias Coloniais as an old wives tale (Figueiredo 131). (2) In this paper, propose discussion on the representation of colonial history in Isabela Figueiredo's book through the analysis of transculturation processes. argue that the narrator challenges the Portuguese colonial memory by adding divergent perspective to the historical archive. This occurs through her self-placement in liminal space that lies between cultures, national boundaries and identities. use the term double consciousness to refer to split within the protagonist, who is conflicted between being faithful to her Portuguese roots and (re)telling the truth about the colonization of Mozambique. (3) This question of truthfulness is explored in relation to the literary genre of the book, which puts at stake emotional and political implications for the understanding of history. This paper's main goals are to contribute to the deconstruction of the links between identity, nation and citizenship in postcolonial context, and to provoke awareness of the validity of different versions of history that are created by social regimes of remembering and forgetting. Caderno de Memorias Coloniais is first person account of Figueiredo's recollections of life in colonial Mozambique under the Portuguese dictatorship. The writer, born to Portuguese parents in Maputo (former Lourenco Marques) in 1963, moved to Lisbon in 1975 as one of many returnees who fled to Portugal following the fall of the Portuguese dictatorship in 1974. Being too young to participate in colonial oppression, instead the author acts as witness. She crudely describes and interprets the everyday life in the former colony, the atrocities of the colonial war, the massacres that plagued the regime's collapse and the aftermath of the traumatic decolonization process of the former colony. find the adjective transcultural appropriate to describe how the Mozambican and Portuguese cohabitate within the mind of the narrator. The term transculturation was coined by Fernando Ortiz to refer to the turbulent and unpredictable process resulting from the interaction among in contact [...] which potentiates, in spite of unequal power relations, the emergence of new cultural forms (qtd. in Cheadle and Pelletier xi). More recently, Roland Walter defines transculturation as a critical paradigm enabling us to trace the ways that transmission occurs within and between different cultures (idem 27). argue that the narrator is in this contact zone, occupying the position of mediator between the two cultures. This in-betweenness is visible in many ways. She lies between two homelands: Portugal, the land of her inherited roots and country of citizenship but which she does not see until she is nearly thirteenth, and Mozambique, the place of her birth and childhood, but, lacking natural claim to the land, place to which she never fully belongs. describing her last images of Maputo before taking the plane to Portugal, the narrator says: I wouldn't return to that place, which, being my land, did not belong to me (Figueiredo 87). In another passage, referring to the adult moment when she wrote those words, the storyteller states: I am here, but I'm still there. In fact, can only speak using the words border, transition, stained, dual formed therein (107). This double standard is also perceptible in her overlapped feelings for her dead father: When we love and we are violated at the same time, and we cannot escape, we deal from the same distance with love and hate (117). Furthermore, this split is the result of (then) young girl's inability to understand the unequal power relations at work in the former colony based on socially constructed distance of races. Her curiosity of the black children, and desire to join them in play could not be pursued because they lived in separate worlds: Life in the colony was impossible. …

Massacre and Memory, History and Humanity: A Discussion on Iris Chang’s The Rape of Nanking

While World War II seemed inevitable in Europe, Japanese aggression was well underway in Asia. Japan assaulted the capital of China, Nanking, in December 1937 and perpetrated a six-week-long massacre, killing thousands of unarmed Chinese military troops and civilians, including women and children. Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II exposes this horrific event that showcases humanity at its worst. After reading Chang’s book, it is clear why “rape” was deemed necessary for the title; her gripping account will make one’s stomach turn. War brings up questions of the human condition, responsibility, and justice. In the following discussion, students at Armstrong respond to the atrocities of war presented in this book and confront issues of massacre, memory, history, and humanity.

“Aren't You Haunted by All This Recurrence?”: Spectral Traces of Traumatized Childhood(s) in Doris Lessing's The Sweetest Dream

In response to Susan Watkins's call for a need to re-evaluate and re-examine Doris Lessing's work in the light of recent criticism, this essay explores the spectral traces of traumatized childhoods in The Sweetest Dream (2001), following the theoretical framework of haunting and spectrality. Lessing's novel addresses the coping strategies used by wounded characters in the face of traumatic events, be they childhood memories or war atrocities.

An Exploration of the Experiences of Migrant Women

Women across the world migrate for a wide range of reasons. Some gravitate to urban centres in their own countries seeking safety, education, health care, and employment opportunities. Others travel across national boundaries seeking reprieve from the atrocities of war and extreme poverty. Migration within countries is on the rise, as people move in response to adverse conditions such as lack of resources, services and education, and employment opportunities. In addition they may want to escape from violence or natural disasters. This movement of people from rural to urban areas has resulted in an explosive growth of cities around the globe. This paper draws on a research case study undertaken with the Kewapi language group in Port Moresby and the Batri Villages of the Southern Highlands in Papua New Guinea. It seeks to highlight the perspectives of women traveling vast distances from their home communities in order to seek education and health care. It explores the implications for developing effective service user focused health care systems designed to meet the needs of mobile and vulnerable women. The study suggests that if women and their families from remote rural communities are encouraged and facilitated in participating in health promoting initiatives they can dramatically improve their life and health experiences and that of their community.

China’s Japan Policy: Seeking Stability and Improvement in Uncertainties

Due to historical legacies in Sino-Japanese relations, including the absence of a satisfactory apology to the Chinese people for Japan’s war atrocities, the related history textbook issue in Japan’s secondary schools, the visits to the Yasukuni Shrine by Japanese political leaders and the territorial disputes over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands as well as the exclusive economic zones in the East Asia Sea, China’s rising nationalism has been mainly directed at Japan, making it difficult for the Chinese leadership to engage in negotiations with its Japanese counterpart with respect to agreements on mutual concessions.

China's Japan Policy: Seeking Stability and Improvement in Uncertainties

Due to historical legacies in Sino-Japanese relations, including the absence of a satisfactory apology to the Chinese people for Japan's war atrocities, the related history textbook issue in Japan's secondary schools, the visits to the Yasukuni Shrine by Japanese political leaders and the territorial disputes over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands as well as the exclusive economic zones in the East Asia Sea, China's rising nationalism has been mainly directed at Japan, making it difficult for the Chinese leadership to engage in negotiations with its Japanese counterpart with respect to agreements on mutual concessions.

‘We Shall Be Punished’: Positionality and Postmemory in Rachel Seiffert’s The Dark Room and Uwe Timm’s In My Brother’s Shadow

During the Second World War, the German officer Wilm Hosenfeld, on duty in Poland, wrote about the war atrocities committed by his country, ‘We shall be punished for it. And so will our innocent children, for we are colluding when we allow these crimes to be committed.’ Taking this diary entry as its starting point, this essay assesses Rachel Seiffert’s 2001 novel The Dark Room and Uwe Timm’s 2005 autobiographical novella In My Brother’s Shadow in the light of contemporary German victim and collective guilt discourses, transposing Marianne Hirsch’s term ‘postmemory’ on to the children of the perpetrators.

Plain of Jars and Other Stories by Geary Hobson , East Lansing (review)

eventually do,"from theAmerican astronauts wholandedonthemoon in1969. AdrianLockheart is a middleaged psychologist who travelsto postwarSierraLeone in searchof something thatis missingin his lifein Englandand armedwitha genuinedesireto aid thewar-torn country. He believes"talktherapy" can helpthenation.Initially, Cole (whoisEuropean) isoneofthetwo patients Lockheart treats. Coleissuffering from pulmonary fibrosis, and "Hereinthelandofthemute, Elias Cole haselected totalk."Theother is a womanwhosuffers fugue - an obsessivetraveling disease. Lockheart himself hastiestoSierra Leone in thathisgrandfather had beena district commissioner inthecountry. KaiMansaray isa medical doctorandoneofthefewprofessionals who remainedafterthe war. He suffers nightmares as a result ofa heart-wrenching experience during the war. He befriends Lockheart, andeventually their livesintertwine in a verypersonalway.Mansaray seestheEuropeans inpostwar Sierra Leoneas refugees: frommarriage, facing retirement, or,in thecase of Lockheart, as refugees running from mediocrity andboredom. Howdoesonewrite aboutmodernwar ?Forna tells thestory ofpeople . The novelalternates between theglorious past(circa1969)tothe yearsof rebeloccupation and the present(circa 1999),witha love story, a story ofobsession, a story of nearlove,anda story offriendship. Replete withbetrayal and heroism, thenovelis stylishly written and compelling. Aboveall,itisthestory ofhowa nation copesafter thehorrific atrocities ofwar. Adele Neivson-Horst Morgan State University GearyHobson.Plain of Jarsand Other Stories. EastLansing. Michigan StateUniversity Press. 2011.xiv+ 245 pages.$29.95. isbn 978-0-87013-998-7 GearyHobson's thoughtful introduction toPlain of Jars cites theinfluenceofKatherine AnnePorter, but thecollection seemsmorereminiscentofErnest Hemingway's InOur Time.Bothcollections portray"a particular person. . . involvedin an episodeof his or herlife. . . caught, fora moment in a manner that signals a turning point." Ashort story, Hobsonadds,"is a segment, orchapter, ofa person's life that can berendered inonesceneorseveral." Roughly two-thirds ofthestoriesinthecollection conform tothis description, andalmost allfollow the progress ofa Marine from bootcamp until someforty years after theaction (inonecase,theex-Marine isa minor figure inthebackground). Although he has various names - Lawson, Rollins,Darysaw,Wayne,Steve and theepisodesare sometimes in first person, sometimes inthird, the character is identified and identifieshimself as Indian,though as a mixed-blood he doesn'tlookitand is questioned aboutwhyhe doesn't actlikeeveryone else.He feelsthe call of home - usuallyArkansas butknows ,as at theend of "Shin Splints," that"itcouldnever be the samefor himas itoncewas." Most of the time,thecentral character reacts rather thanacts:to thethoughtless racismin an overheardmonologue thatprompts his decision toreturn homerather than go toSan Francisco andsamplethe whiteworld;to theinsistent evangelistin "TheOdor ofDead Fish" who leadshimtoabandonthelast vestiges ofChristianity; tothemartinetlieutenant in "Plain of Jars" Nota Bene Jim Drummond The Coyotes Forgive You Mongrel Empire Press Drummond's collection offifteen stories is funny, quirky, andsometimes disturbing. Theshort stories reflect the author's Oklahoma upbringing as they delve into the world of the small town and the mindset of its seemingly ordinary inhabitants. Seyhan Eroz^elik Rosestrikes andCoffee Grinds Talisman House Inthis Collection ofpoetry translated from Turkish byMurat Nemet-Nejat, Erdz^elik explores the concept of"Eda"-a poetic style that erriphasizes themystical qualities of language. According toJerome Rothenberg , Rosestrikes andCoffee Grinds represents "atrue exemplar" of this poetic movement aswell as"awork of both intelligence and passion." July -August 2011 163 whoorders theneedless slaughter of elephants, and,on a larger scale,to thedestruction ofirreplaceable Laotian artifacts bytheU.S.military that parallelsthe Corps of Engineers' bulldozingof ceremonial mounds inArkansas. Bothpointto "typical American wastefulness." Althoughthe focal character findscomfort in therarepresence ofother Natives, Hobsondoes not further themyth ofIndiannobility, savageornot. Inseveral stories, charactersdestroy themselves and others .One,"the Lagunaprima donna," dogs thecentral character untilhis new girlfriendbackhands her, "woman towoman." Apparently this gets herattention, for ina subsequent story sheis friendly andsupportive. Hobsonisparticularly critical ofprofessional Indians, like Wounded Knee wannabesin "A Christmas Story" andthedrunken, wife-beating pseudopoet in"Hollow Horn." But"HollowHorn"and what Hobson calls"fantasies" - allofthem satiric - seem less successful (some basedonpremises whose conclusions soon becomeapparent) thanthose stories involving Marines. Andthey lacktheprecision of languageand feeling ofthe great majority ofthe stories . Thosearedistinguished attimes by closeobservation ofthenatural world andmost often byembodying a psychological andsocialworld that exists, ifnotexactly in ourtime, in a sharply rendered and deceptively modest vision. Robert Murray Davis University ofOklahoma IsakaKotaro. RemoteControl. StephenSnyder , tr.Tokyo / NewYork. KodanshaInternational. 2010. 343 pages.$24.95. isbn 978-4-7700-3108-2 Itisearly afternoon ona late-Novemberday .A motorcade wendsitsway through thedowntown streets ofa major city. Inthebackseatofa long convertible, thecharismatic young headofstate sitsnext tohisbeautiful wife, wavingto crowds.Suddenly, fromatop a bricktextbook warehouse , death descends.Instantly, television screens fill thenation with nightmare images: theheadofstate hasbeenassassinated. No...

Satiated and Denied

Today realism is in any event strategic. -Friedrich Kittier (1) For political, ethical, and historical reasons--as well as for pleasure--modern culture has esteemed horrific and atrocious images of war. From the earliest examples of war photography to the latest developments in media technologies, this appetite for visual realism has been both satiated and denied. However, it is not the desire to see horror and abominations that is the problem; rather, the issue is how we see and engage these images of atrocity. Who shapes these perceptual fields, for what reasons, and under what conditions? The how of seeing--which techniques and desires reveal or mask war--makes war and visual realism a question of ethics and politics. REALISM Often associated with modernism, realism renders people, places, and things in a true-to-life objective fashion. Unlike literature or painting, photographic realism raised audience expectations for the genre. Once emancipated from the tripod, portable cameras gave birth to an unprecedented demand for close-up and graphic depictions of death and decay. Only cameras can capture and embalm death, Susan Sontag argued in 1977. (2) Through photography, the twentieth century nurtured its taste for visual atrocity, which became an aesthetic norm--a testament to its truth and matter-of-fact reality. In comparison to fallible humans, a machine's slice of reality was incontrovertible. If the horrors and injustices of war are made visually explicit, many believe, an appropriate response of outrage will result. In 1924 Ernst Friedrich set out to accomplish this with his book War Against War!, filling its pages with numerous images of war atrocities under the guise of shock therapy. (3) This notion was reinforced during the Vietnam War--the first war to receive daily television coverage--as images of death, coupled with photographs of children running from napalmed villages, shocked and horrified Western viewers. As televised images of death entered the homes and lives of those far away and safe, graphic images of war incited passionate anti-war protest and political action. Today, the same link between images of war and political activism does not hold. The sheer number of international wars waged in the past fifty years, coupled with a growing appetite for immediate and graphic evidence of the violence, has made the horrors of war common, banal, and everyday. (4) Many argue that we, denizens of the first world, have become politically and ethically numb--hypnotized by the hypodermic needle of visual media. Are the realities of war still real to us? THE DEATH OF REALISM That reality has imploded into its inverse, a hyperreal--a series of media effects and simulations--is not an uncommon view among contemporary critical theorists. From Jean Baudrillard and Guy Debord to Paul Virilio and Slavoj Zizek, one encounters a slew of sophisticated arguments explaining the fundamental erasure of truth, origin, authenticity, and reality. In 1995, Baudrillard argued that the first Gulf War did not take place, and that what we witnessed was not a genuine war, but a media spectacle. In Ecstasy of Communication (1988), Baudrillard analyzed how media images have been brought too close, made too real, and as a result, have imploded into their opposite: a hyperreal that simulates reality in a better, yet more artificial, fashion. (5) Consider the 1992 Breadline Massacre and the 1994 Market Massacre in Bosnia. In both cases, large-caliber shells were launched on public markets in Sarajevo, killing and wounding dozens of civilians and creating, in Sontag's words, some exceptionally gruesome sights for the foreign journalists' cameras. (6) This is precisely the implosion of reality Baudrillard diagnoses--or simply, the CNN-effect that creates a reality of war by way of simulated spectacle. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Two decades earlier, French theorist Debord similarly argued that society had become a visual spectacle for capitalist consumption. …

Hannah Arendt: a Question of Character

The trouble with the Nazi criminals was precisely that they renounced voluntarily all personal qualities ... The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons. Hannah Arendt, 'Some Question of Moral Philosophy' Philosophy constantly brings conceptual personae to life; it gives life to them. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? This chapter is about the ethical importance of 'character' or 'personality' in Hannah Arendt's political philosophy. I argue that Arendt's interest in the 'valid personality which once acquired, never leaves a man' (Men in Dark Times) is of axiomatic importance for her attempt, after the atrocities of the Second World War, to overturn the philosophical privileging of contemplation and eidetic intuition, and evoke thinking and judgment as quintessentially worldly human activities. By exploring what it means to have a principled character or morally significant personality capable of resisting totalitarianism, Arendt offers an ethical alternative to moralistic and parochial explanations of the Holocaust. On the one hand Arendt eschews the explanatory narrative, recently typified by the work of Zygmunt Bauman, which blames the Holocaust on the instrumental, taxonomic rationality of post-Enlightenment modernity. (1) On the other hand Arendt does not locate the origins of the Holocaust in a Sonderweg thesis which points to the exceptional, anti-modern course of German nationalism and the pervasive anti-Semitism, romantic nationalism, and authoritarian tendencies of the German people themselves. Instead Arendt's interest in the 'representative significance' of personality, and the disastrous ethical consequences of not having one, reflects her postwar commitment to thinking history and politics from the cosmopolitan standpoint of a 'citizen of the world'. Arendt refrains from facile, self-exculpatory rationalisations of the causes and significance of the Holocaust, instead submitting that capitulation to fascism is a constant possibility for the great majority of us who do not have a distinctive character which animates and unifies our comportment toward the world. While to some extent Arendt shares Erich Fromm and the Frankfurt School's contemporaneous interest in analysing the 'authoritarian personality' or 'fascist character', she disdains psychoanalytic taxonomies and adjudges personality discursively, as the capacity or otherwise for performative self-constitution or worldly 'display', incessant self-dialogue, and the imaginative refusal of cliched thinking. While Arendt's interpretation of the ethical personality shares Fromm's concern with the 'realization of man's total personality' as an affirmative response to modernity, I argue that her characterological pluralism, in conversation with Immanuel Kant, Georg Simmel, and Walter Benjamin, places greater emphasis on resistant and refractory versions of moral character. (2) To be a 'citizen of the world' in Arendtian terms is in one sense a subject position acutely responsive towards the contemporary ills and future prospects of humanity as a whole. (3) The citizen of the world desires a 'compact' with all of mankind as a potential audience to which she or he would like to communicate her or his perceptions, ideas, and judgments. Interacting with a diverse human cosmos, the citizen of the world acquires a 'valid personality', a distinctive character that is generously humane but also stubbornly resistant to ideological fashion. Arendt's citizen of the world displays an exemplary validity in a world attempting to overcome nationalism, racism, militarism, and genocide. As we shall see, Arendt evokes intellectuals as diverse as Socrates, Kant, and her friend Karl Jaspers, as having representative significance in this regard. For Arendt, reflection on character and personality is politically and ethically important, because it enhances judgment, the consideration of particulars that cannot be subsumed under a general rule. …

Understated Meaning in Frank O’Hara

Not surprisingly, many critics of O’Hara's “A Step Away from Them” have focused on 1950s’ postwar themes, contrasting the atrocities of World War II (WWII) with a celebration of daily life in the h...

В Поисках Места Между Сталиным и Гитлером: О Постколониальных Историях Социализма

SUMMARY: In his article, Serguei Oushakine argues that the condition of post-Soviet Belarusian society can be best and meaningfully captured if analyzed through the lens of postcolonial analytics. The author advances this argument in the context of the field dominated by studies of democratic transit and formation of post-communist civil society. Oushakine claims that an attempt to understand post-Soviet subjectivity has to be associated with attending to a post-Soviet discussion of the Soviet past, the search for national authenticity outside the structures of domination in the twentieth century, and estrangement as the discursive technique in dealing with narratives of the Soviet past. Explicitly locating this analysis in the broader field of postcolonial studies, Oushakine emphasizes the productivity of looking at post-Soviet historical narratives through the lens of postcolonial analytics as well as the difference in the postcolonial condition of post-communist societies, in which one finds a merger of the technique of estrangement from the past of alien hegemony with the romantic narratives of national history. Oushakine bases his argument on his fieldwork in post-Soviet Belarus during the Lukashenko presidency and the analysis of debates about two key locations in the Belarus Soviet official and counterofficial memory: Khatyn and Kurapaty. In his empirical material the author finds his interlocutors using the rhetoric of postcolonial condition. The article traces the evolution of the Khatyn commemoration site from the official Soviet narrative of suffering of the peasant population at the hands of the Nazi invaders to the discovery of the role of collaborators in the atrocities of World War II. He proceeds with the post-Soviet strategies of evacuating altogether from the narratives of resistance and collaboration insofar as the heroic narratives of guerilla resistance of Belarusians in wartime became associated with the imposed domination of Soviet power and political myth. The second case treated in the article is Kurapaty, the place where the mass grave resulting from Soviet pre–World War II executions was found during the perestroika period. The debate and commemorative movement around Kurapaty became the symbolic reference of the Belarusian postcolonial condition defined as the luminal place between Hitler and Stalin. The initial attempt of Belarusian activists to elevate Kurapaty to a commemoration of Soviet genocide became marred by confusing evidence revealed concerning who actually perished on the site. Oushakine concludes that Kurapaty failed to demarcate the autonomous space of post-communist subjectivity that could have distanced the post-communist subject from structures of imposed hegemony. The article concludes that the processes of mapping post-Soviet and postcolonial subjectivity in Belarus are far from being completed and that it could take two different routes: the creative rethinking of history through the figure of nonpresence in the past or the conservative and nostalgic substitution of the imagined national past for structures of post-Soviet and postcolonial subjectivity that are available in the present.

When children commit atrocities in war

There is considerable disagreement among governments, civil society groups and scholars as to whether the prosecution of child soldiers who have committed war crimes is ever appropriate. In one camp are those who argue that child soldiers should always be considered as victims, and that prosecutions are necessarily at odds with rehabilitation and reintegration efforts. On the other side of the debate are those who maintain that the prosecution of the worst child offenders – those who have occupied command positions in armed forces, and carried out particularly egregious crimes – can help to end impunity for war criminals and bring a degree of solace to the victims of their brutal assaults. This article considers the different approaches to criminal responsibility for minors in domestic legal systems and under international law, and concludes that the prosecution of child soldiers should only be pursued in exceptional circumstances.

Ralf Dahrendorf (1929-2009)

Lord Dahrendorf is one of the “builders” of the new united Europe. He belongs to the generation of scholars, novelists, politicians who have seriously attempted to rebuild Europe after the atrocities of the Second World War, the Nazi regime in Germany, Fascism in Italy and Japan, Communism in Russia.. He moved from Germany to London, to the London School of Economics & Political Science, for a variety of reasons. First, the LSE was an international centre which offered a shelter to Karl Mannheim, Hayek, Popper, Polanyi, some of the best, independent minds of the time. Second, the School has a long and honoured tradition in the field of social studies, social structure and conflict, social history, citizenship rights, and social and economic policies. The LSE was one of the mothers of the universal welfare state in England and Wales. In London, Lord Dahrendorf met some of the leading sociologists of our time, working on authority, social conflict, social and class structure and equality. A tradition which remains one of the most powerful contribution Sociology has given the world. Dahrendorf brought his Weberian studies into this tradition. The LSE concern with rights, especially with equality, has been one of Dahrendorf enduring research interests, as it has been of scholars like A. Sen, Marshall, Gellner, Miliband, and others at the School. Dahrendorf insisted on liberty alongside with equality. Liberty was of course one of the paramount themes at the School, with Karl Popper and Hayeck, Mannheim and Polanyi. Liberty from tyrannies, liberty from constraints but also liberty as independence of research and criticism, from the overarching power of big organizations. The guidelines of the new Europe