Domestic Power Struggles Research Articles

The critical geopolitics of the Uzbekistan?Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley boundary dispute, 1999?2000

In 1999 the Uzbekistan–Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley boundary became a brutal reality in the lives of borderland inhabitants, when it became the key issue in a crisis of inter-state relations. Mainstream explanations have suggested that the Soviet boundary legacy and convergent post-Soviet macro-economic policies made conflict inevitable. Drawing on critical geopolitics theory, this paper questions the implicit determinism in these accounts, and seeks to augment them by a political analysis. It suggests that ‘the border crisis’ was the product of the interaction of complex domestic power struggles in both countries, the boundary itself acting as a material and discursive site where elites struggled for the power to inscribe conflicting gendered, nationalistic visions of geopolitical identity. It concludes by insisting upon a moral imperative to expose and challenge the geographical underpinnings of state violence.

An empire of schools: Japan's universities and the molding of a national power elite

This work examines the historical lineage of Russian foreign policy and its development in the context of domestic power struggles and a changing international environment. This updated edition includes Russian foreign policy from the Tsarist period through the Putin succession.

An Empire of Schools: Japan's Universities and the Molding of a National Power Elite.

This work examines the historical lineage of Russian foreign policy and its development in the context of domestic power struggles and a changing international environment. This updated edition includes Russian foreign policy from the Tsarist period through the Putin succession.

La résolution des conflits : le rôle de la Fédération de Russie

Coping with conflict : the role of the Russian Federation. The revolutionary changes of recent years that resulted in the end of the cold war, the collapse of the Soviet empire in East-Central Europe and, finally, in the very dissolution of the Soviet state have had a major impact on the role of the Russian Federation, as the major successor state to the USSR, in coping with regional conflict. Against growing domestic opposition, the current Russian leadership of President El'tsin and Foreign Minister Kozyrev has emphasized a general foreign policy of cooperation with the West as an essential element of joining the « civilized » community of nations and supporting domestic democratization and marketization. This overall policy has resulted, officially at least, in efforts by the Russian government to emphasize negotiations and cooperation in dealing with the conflicts that have broken out in the « near abroad » - the non-Russian successor states of the former USSR. Elsewhere, in former Yugoslavia and the developing world for example, the Russian Federation has tended to play a modest direct role in regional conflict management, but a role that has generally been supportive of Western policy initiatives. The future policy of Russia in coping with regional conflict will depend, to a substantial degree, on the outcome of the domestic power struggles in Russia. Even the liberal democratic elements represented by the present government have often found it difficult to deal with its new neighbors on the basis of sovereign equality. This is especially true because the emerging view of Russian national interests tends to conflict with the interests of the new states on Russia's borders. A more nationalist leadership in Moscow would likely be much more assertive - even aggressive - in dealing with regional conflicts in the « near abroad » and less cooperative with the West in responding to regional conflicts elsewhere in the world.

Guinea-Bissau Since Independence: A Decade of Domestic Power Struggles

Amílcar Cabral was perhaps the foremost political thinker to emerge out of the many independence movements of post-World War II Africa. His insightful theory of class struggle in the continent, his informative analysis of the history of Guinea-Bissau, his original concept of ‘class suicide’, and his notion of the relationship between national liberation and culture,1 helped convince many scholars of the viability of a class and ideological approach to the study of African politics.2

Versions of a Human Sublime

STUDIES of the sublime, from Burke to Monk and Hipple, used to focus on the enumeration of qualities in the sublime object or, more precisely, as they are reflected in the mind of the spectator (pain, obscurity, power, privation, vastness, difficulty). In the last decade, mediated by Nietzsche and Freud, by Harold Bloom and Thomas Weiskel, the focus has shifted to the agon between subject and object. The former both/either a participant within a sublime confrontation and/or a spectator without. Burke had claimed that only the spectator has the aesthetic distance to qualify for the sublime experience; but then obscurity was Burke's chief criterion, whereas writers like those in this issue of New Literary History are more interested in pain, especially as it relates to power. (Pain, Burke wrote, is always inflicted by a power in some way superior, because we never submit to pain willingly.) Two consequences of the structuralist emphasis on relationship seem to me implicit in these essays: the humanization of the sublime relationship, of the object as well as of the participant-subject, and the demystification (which takes the form of the beautification) of the sublime relationship by the spectator-subject outside the action. The first plays down Burke's belief in the need for aesthetic distance from the immediate pain; the second introduces the political dimension of censorship. Freud hovers over both, lending to the first his concept of internalization and to the second repression. By the humanization of the sublime object I mean naturalizing, or arguably travestying, the sublime encounter formulated by John Dennis between man and the most sublime of all objects, God. The supernatural force revealed (in the manner of Ann Radcliffe's Gothic tales) to be a participant in a domestic power struggle. Kant's formulation of the spectator's response as an oscillating pattern of challenge and withdrawal leads into a plot in time beginning with the confrontation of what can most generally speaking be called the incomprehensible (whether nature, God, or paternal authority) followed by accommodation or, in Freud's term, internalization. Weiskel's incisive reading of Burke's Philosophical Enquiry in his Romantic Sublime revealed traces of a father-son confrontation in the example

Nationality Question in the Resolutions of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 1898–1964

Since its conception in 1898 the Communist Party of the Soviet Union has had to contend with the nationality question. The Party has had to formulate programs and make organizational and functional decisions pertaining to national rights. It has had to dwell on political aspects of the issue and adopt resolutions touching on the social, economic, and cultural problems of non-Russian nations in the Russian Empire and the Soviet State. What were these resolutions and what effect, if any, did ideological considerations, domestic power struggles, situational factors, and personal styles of the party leaders have on the resolutions?