Ideological Project Research Articles

Demos at war: Revisiting the democratic boundary problem with a performative lens

This essay revisits a classic conceptual puzzle in democratic theory – the democratic boundary problem – to shed new light on contentious politics and separatist conflict in Sri Lanka. This theoretical problem is congruent with the core disagreement of this conflict – whether or not the Tamils comprise a nation that is entitled to its own state. Democratic theory struggles to adjudicate between competing political projects that pivot on different conceptions of the demos. Sri Lanka's conflict protagonists have advanced a wide range of institutional forms for their competing ideological projects. To understand these efforts, I posit, we need to look beyond legal strictures and formal delineations of democratic institutions by conceptualizing politics as a performative arena. This opens up analytical space to understand how institutions may be valorised or mocked, reenacted, sidelined or reversed. This article comprises a sequence of empirically based reflections organised around five keywords, which elucidate some of the central tenets and historical shifts of ethno-political contestation in Sri Lanka: Constitution, election, court, checkpoint, and Prime Minister. Contentious forms of political performativity around each of these five institutions unmask the self-referential nature of constitutional and democratic legitimacy. I thus argue we must mitigate the problematic tendency to accept as real and legitimate those political entities that emerged from history as part of recognised sovereign states, while the efforts of sovereign aspirants are shrugged aside as a problem that needs be explained and addressed.

ДЕГУМАНІЗАЦІЯ ЖІНОК У МЕТОДИЧНИХ ВИДАННЯХ РОСІЙСЬКИХ ІДЕОЛОГІВ

The results of a study of intangible aspects of combat readiness of Russian combatants had been represented in the article. In particular, the gender markers of the readiness of Russian militants to attack with the commission of sexual violence were investigated. The process of formation of socio-psychological attitudes in the motivational sphere of Russian men had been illustrated. A socio-philosophical analysis based on a gender approach was used to study the relationship between ideology, politics and social practices. Author emphasized, that analysis of the causes of complex social phenomena and processes requires possession of a complex of methodological and interpretive practices, which goes beyond jurisprudence or psychology and requires socio-philosophical research. Based on a number of criteria, a collection of methodical materials was selected for analysis - a publication specialized on pro-life and anti-choice topics. It was found that under the guise of an educational project, russian ideologues had been carried out a destructive influence on the personality of men. The peculiarities of such influence are revealed, which are illustrated by original Russian-language quotations from methodical materials. The list of target groups of this ideological project had been given. The geography of such projects had been studied. As a result of the study, applied aspects of the formation of misogyny in the Russian military were clarified. Methods of dehumanization of woman through the deprivation of a person's right to control his body in an anti-choice context had been demonstrated. It has been confirmed that the dehumanization of women enables gender-based violence as a means of warfare, including rape, enslavement, and forced pregnancy. It has been found that the dehumanization of real women as a group is a strategy of so called ―russian world‖ and a condition for sexual violence.

Revolutionary Military Railway Tribunals in Northwestern Russia

This article discusses aspects of activities and social functions of the revolutionary military railway tribunals, which operated in 1920–1923. The novelty of the research is ensured by the lack of attention to this theme in historiography and the involvement of a wide range of sources which have not been previously introduced into the scholarship. The author focuses on the activities of the railway tribunals in four railway networks: the United North-Western Roads (Warsaw and Baltic directions), the Petrograd part of the Moscow-Vindava-Rybinsk network, Nikolaevskaii railway network (the prospective October railway), and Murmansk network. Three revolutionary military railway tribunals operated there. The author, for the first time in historiography, describes the reasons and the process of organizing the latter, their staff composition, and the forms of their work that changed at different stages. The emphasis is placed on the emergency powers of employees of these departments and the tasks assigned to them which was manifested in almost unlimited freedom of the members of the tribunals in administering justice in the “interests of the revolution”. The article presents an original perspective on the process of the controversial activity of the transport tribunals. The study reveals a conflict between their urgent task to restore labor discipline, on the one hand, and practical activities aimed at indulging the avant-garde class, on the other hand. The author comes to the conclusion that the tribunals, first of all, sought to unite the proletarian collectives around the Communist Party. Managers’ enthusiasm for an ideological project led them away from reality. In the final part of the article, it is proved that during the period of new economic policy, the activities of the revolutionary tribunals lost their extraordinary character. They ceased tocorrespond to their purpose and, in fact, turned into people’s courts, being abolished in 1923.

Finance, Fiction, and Loss

Finance, Fiction, and Loss

스타벅스 매장의 공간구성요소에 관한 탐색적 분석

This study examined the spatial characteristics of Starbox stores through exploratory factor analysis that discovers detailed spatial components based on the spatial experience experienced by visitors to Starbucks general stores. As a result of the analysis, a total of five factors were grouped and derived, and each factor was named as ‘culture/artistry’, ‘five senses/hospitality’, ‘behavior/psychology’, ‘taste/hardware’, and ‘lead/pandemic’. Through exploratory factor analysis based on the visitor's experience, the significance of this study was able to identify the cause of continuous visits to Starbucks stores and infer detailed components related to Starbucks' third place, which shows a commercialized space but differentiated place. This is a strategic projection of Starbucks' corporate philosophy and ideology into space and place, and it is judged that this positioning is perceived and experienced by the visitor group through five senses.It is judged that these attributes will be a very important space and place strategy for commercial real estate, especially retail real estate, which requires continuous visits. As a future research topic, the factors derived through exploratory factor analysis are independent variables, and it is necessary to measure dependent variables for visitor satisfaction and revisit intention, and to analyze visitors by group to examine the differences.nalyze visitors by group to examine the differences.

Walka Karnawału z Postem. Karnawalizacja obrazu rodziny w Śmierci i pogrzebie Mamy Grande i Stu latach samotności Gabriela Garcíi Márqueza

CARNIVAL VS. LENT: THE CARNIVALIZATION OF THE FAMILY IMAGE IN GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ’S DEATH AND FUNERAL OF MAMMA GRANDE AND ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE This article presents a socio-critical analysis of the family image in two works by Gabriel García Márquez: the short story Death and Funeral of Mamma Grande and the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. In the literary cosmos of Macondo, the social microstructure that is the family is at the center around which a discursive image of the world is constructed. In this perspective, the strategy of carnivalization becomes particularly important, allowing for a subversive portrayal of the dominant ideological projects and axiological patterns present in Colombian realities, and more broadly speaking, Latin American ones. The creation of family portraits reveals a “carnivalesque worldview” rooted in popular laughter culture. Parody, grotesque realism, and carnival laughter are tools for criticizing dogmatic and hierarchical orders of power and official culture language.

“Telling China’s story”: innovations in school history education in PRC in 2010–2020s.

Innovations in school historical education allow not only to track changes in the educational and academic environment, but also to record new trends in the ideological and political sphere. The aim of the proposed article is to identify the main trends in school history teaching in China in 2010–2020s. This goal is specified in several tasks: to consider organizational and content innovations in the teaching of history in secondary schools, as well as to identify the specifics of these innovations in the context of the main trends in the political and academic life of the PRC in the 2010–2020s. The results of the study presented in the article were obtained by analyzing the original texts of history textbooks for junior and senior secondary schools, as well as educational standards in history. In addition, the texts of relevant speeches of Chinese leaders were involved. The leading trend in 2010–2020s. was the strengthening of ideological control and state regulation in the development and approval of teaching materials. The introduced conceptual innovations reflect the dynamics of ideological changes in modern Chinese society. The new ideological task set before the school history course was the dissemination of new ideologems by Xi Jinping, in particular, “confidence in culture” and “three leaps” in the history of the Chinese nation and the Sinification of Marxism. The reform of historical education undertaken by Xi Jinping is part of a large-scale ideological project initiated by him, aimed at strengthening China’s “discourse power’. Its core is an original vision of China’s own history, within which new dates and evaluations of historical events are introduced, and a new terminological apparatus is gradually introduced to describe them. And it is this renewed vision of its history that China is disseminating to its domestic audience through its education system.

Contemporary Scientific Approaches to the Definition of the Concept «Information Sovereignty of Ukraine»

In the conditions of martial law in Ukraine and the development of globalization processes, the Ukrainian information resource is a subject to the development strategy of the nation or state, which is implemented through the appropriate state information policy. It should cover all areas of life in the development process of a new information society. Its basis can only be a national ideology, which should become the core of information policy and fill the entire information space with meaningful content. Moreover, regardless of the processes of informatization, politics remains, first of all, a value-symbolic sphere. The absence of a nationwide ideological project leads to the formation of an information and communication vacuum, the consequences of which can be complex socio-psychological crises in the society. Ideology as a set of certain ideas, values and beliefs is both the basis of the formation of information policy and the most important element of mass political communications. Thus, the formation of the information political space, the role and place of the state in this process, as well as the importance of the value-ideological component in its information policy reflects high scientific and practical interest and requires constitutional support. The use of hybrid warfare technologies by the Russian Federation against Ukraine has turned the information sphere into a key arena of counterinsurgency. It is against Ukraine the Russian Federation uses the latest information technologies to influence the consciousness of citizens, aimed at inciting national and religious enmity, promoting an aggressive war, changing the constitutional order by force or violating the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine. It also undermines information sovereignty with the help of disinformation, fakes, cyber attacks with interference in the work of state bodies and critical infrastructure of Ukraine, and other risks that pose a general challenge to the state security of Ukraine. And therefore, it gives reason to thoroughly analyze and provide recommendations in terms of the conceptual apparatus in the field of information sovereignty of Ukraine in the modern period, which is also confirmed by the relevance of this scientific study. The purpose of the article is to analyze the conceptual apparatus in the field of «information sovereignty of Ukraine» in the modern period and to provide the author's proposals for its improvement. Thus, in order to carry out further research and for the purpose of streamlining and unifying the terminology in the analyzed area, it is proposed to understand the essence of the concept of «information sovereignty» to supplement it with the word «technological» and define it in the ab. 10th century 1 of the Law of Ukraine «On the National Informatization Program» as follows: «information and technological sovereignty of Ukraine» is the state's ability to organize, control and regulate information flows with the help of domestic innovative technologies (data registers and own information resources) from outside and inside the state to form the infrastructure of the Ukrainian information space, in order to observe the constitutional rights and freedoms of a person and a citizen of Ukraine, as well as to realize the right to truthful information (primary source), by means of interaction with the world information space to guarantee the national security of the state. Further scientific research will be devoted to problematic issues of legal regulation of Ukraine's information technology sovereignty and protection of Ukraine’s interests in the global information space and international information relations. Keywords: conceptual apparatus, cyberspace, information sovereignty, innovative technologies.

Mass urban festivals in Ukraine (1950s to 1980s). Rituals, loci and actors

If the subject of Soviet urban ritualistic as the central part of the ideological project in historiography is represented by many scientific works, then the ritual culture of the inhabitants of Ukrainian cities of the Soviet period of the 1950–1980s is still insufficiently studied. This article, based on the analysis of research literature, the introduction into scientific circulation and interpretation of archival sources, as well as press materials and testimonies of respondents, examines the efforts of the authorities aimed at creating a festive atmosphere on the streets of the Ukrainian city. The author proposes to look at the civil holidays through the prism of the anthropological approach, highlighting the main rituals, loci, and characters. To achieve the objectives of the research, scientific methods of analytical interpretation of sources, comparative historical analysis, historical reconstruction and case studies were used. The conclusions emphasize the existence in the specified period of a contradictory attitude towards citizens’ participation in Soviet rituals, since they simultaneously understood the coercive nature of the celebrations, but also received some opportunities for recreation in the conditions of routine everyday life of the Soviet era.

Slavery and the Ambiguities of Diaspora in Haile Gerima’s Sankofa

In this essay, I question how the Ethiopian-American director Haile Gerima theorizes diaspora in his 1993 historical drama Sankofa. By reading against the grain of the film’s ideological project of reconciling the trauma and indignity of African slavery in the New World, I consider how Sankofa’s investments in a transhistorical account of race underpin its mission to remind the black descendants of enslaved Africans of their ancestors’ inalienable human dignity. While Sankofa endeavors to draw African and African diasporic histories closer by dramatizing “return” at Cape Coast Castle in southern Ghana, the film’s attention to its diasporic audience omits African experiences of the slave trade and creates a notably ambiguous relationship between diaspora, slavery, and the filmmaker’s distinct idea of Africa.

The Actuation Problem

The actuation problem asks why a linguistic change occurs in a particular language at a particular time and space. Responses to this problem are multifaceted. This review approaches the problem of actuation through the lens of sound change, examining it from both individual and population perspectives. Linguistic changes ultimately actuate in the form of idiolectal differences. An understanding of language change actuation at the idiolectal level requires an understanding of ( a) how individual speaker-listeners’ different past linguistic experiences and physical, perceptual, cognitive, and social makeups affect the way they process and analyze the primary learning data and ( b) how these factors lead to divergent representations and grammars across speakers-listeners. Population-level incrementation and propagation of linguistic innovation depend not only on the nature of contact between speakers with unique idiolects but also on individuals who have the wherewithal to take advantage of the linguistic innovations they encountered to achieve particular ideological projects at any given moment. Because of the vast number of contingencies that need to be aligned properly, the incrementation and propagation of linguistic innovation are predicted to be rare. Agent-based modeling promises to provide a controlled way to investigate the stochastic nature of language change propagation, but a comprehensive model of linguistic change actuation at the individual level remains elusive.

The Idea of the Border in the Digital Age

Our history of border wars and entrenched positions has given us officially drawn lines, that notwithstanding their obvious irrationality, are so deeply embedded in our psyches that we no longer even register them. At the same time, during the digital age, the rise of different ways of looking at the borders in Mexico and South Asia has explicit and implicit relations to these brutal histories, defining ways we continue to negotiate national and transnational identities and ideological projects. This contribution looks at theoretical and artistic examples from both continents to ask about the effects of new media on our experiences of our bodies and our sense of human agency.

Political Philosophy of Eurasianism: Paradigmatic Foundations and Their Limitations

The article examines, in relation to the data of modern science and current geopolitical trends, the key ideas of the founders of Eurasianism, analyzes the transformation of the ideology of Eurasianism in the modern ideological and political space of Russia. The authors pay attention to the concepts of “neo-Eurasianism” and attempts to revive Eurasian ideas and supplement them with new original views. Eurasianism, being one of the largest and most significant philosophical, political and ideological projects of the XX century, as well as neo-Judaism, which became its logical continuation, attracted the attention of a large number of both supporters and opponents

A Loud Dance of Silence: The Unsaid of Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests

After being a British protectorate for nearly sixty years, in 1960, Nigeria gained independence the same year A Dance of the Forests was published. The play, which expresses ambivalence toward radical changes with premonitions between its lines, has been regarded as one of the most challenging to understand. With an eye on the work's historical context, it is treated as a symptom of history that reveals its "political unconscious" based on Fredrick Jameson's ideas. Furthermore, Pierre Macherey's Theory of Gaps highlights "the ideological project" of the literary work by focusing on the "unsaid" in the text, which shapes its "speech." In conclusion, regarding the synthesis of Jameson and Macherey's ideas, which reveals and studies the correlation between ideology and narrative, the article sets out to find the central topic of the work and describe the imaginary/symbolic system put into the service of the ideological project concerning its context.

Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era by Justus Nieland

Reviewed by: Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era by Justus Nieland Dan Bashara (bio) Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era by Justus Nieland. University of Minnesota Press. 2020. 400 pages $160 hardcover; $39.95 paper; also available in e-book. "Do designers ever sleep?"1 In Happiness by Design: Modernism and Media in the Eames Era, Justus Nieland highlights the tirelessness of Charles and Ray Eames, their commitment to design as a force for social transformation, and their conviction that work is play and play is happiness. But this isn't just a book about the Eameses; in invoking the "Eames era," Nieland conjures an ensemble of designers, filmmakers, theorists, artists, and other cultural figures who contributed to the development and the texture of the American midcentury. At the core of the invigoratingly dizzying array of ideas in this book—communication, transparency, democracy, technophilia, organicism, and, yes, happiness—is film, and more specifically, film's role in the development of an interdisciplinary design discourse promising the good life. And we can't talk about any of these ideas, or any of these people, without talking about Charles and Ray Eames. Not for nothing does Nieland refer to the postwar power couple as "the happy protagonists of midcentury lifestyle media."2 Nieland has done mind-bogglingly exhaustive research into this moment, and the result is a dazzling intellectual history of a period marked [End Page 203] by creative ferment and interdisciplinary collaboration. One of the book's greatest strengths is the way it situates the Eameses within a vast network of transdisciplinary figures; far more than merely fleshing out the history of the titular couple, Nieland conjures a widespread and intricately connected milieu. Reading these microhistories often feels like finding out two of your closest friends knew each other independently of you, long before you met them. Eero Saarinen, Billy Wilder, and Norbert Wiener appeared together in a public affairs TV segment devoted to the Eameses? Maya Deren hung around with László Moholy-Nagy? Jean Baudrillard joined environmental protestors to interrupt Walter Paepcke's design conference? Nieland's talent not just for finding connections between far-flung figures, but also for transporting the reader to the places where they connected, brings this deeply theoretical work of historiography to immediate, tangible life. Through these stories, Happiness by Design develops a divergent, design-oriented film theory "shaped by a modernist aesthetics and ideology of information that crossed a range of disciplines and institutional agendas."3 Part of Nieland's project is to challenge the dominant idea of modernism at midcentury as willfully difficult, obsessed with medium specificity, and devoted to the personal expression of the artist. He foregrounds a modernism running parallel to this old story, one that is in almost every way its opposite: transparent instead of obscure, televised instead of cloistered, promiscuous instead of pure. It is a modernism of toys and chairs, of serious ideas expressed in whimsical photographs. It is not a modernism of austere contemplation; it is a modernism of happiness. Yet in all this discussion of happiness and the good life, Nieland doesn't shy away from the Eameses' complicity in larger and more overtly ideological projects of nation-building and corporate hegemony. If happy modernism was envisioned for everyone, it was also swept up in burgeoning technocracy and corporate managerial logics that threaten to discipline as much as they aim to liberate. He follows these tensions into design studios, conferences, and schools, tracing the development of a film theory that is rigorously interdisciplinary and immersed in the language of design. Chapter 1 is about chairs. But in exploring the Eameses' work in furniture, Nieland embraces the Eames ethos in his own scholarship: if you're talking about chairs, you're actually talking about everything. In his inventive readings of Eames furniture, as well as the films about that furniture, Nieland hits upon the core of the Eameses' worldview: they didn't care about things. They cared about the variety of things, the networks those things reached out to join, the permutations that arose when chairs and sofas met the people who sat in them. The chapter masterfully...

Power relations in the deployment of linguistic resources by world leaders during the Russian-Ukrainian war

On the 24th of February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine in a war that has drawn widespread condemnations, criticisms, and reactions from world leaders. While an infinitesimal figure has spoken in support of the invasion, most world leaders have outrightly condemned the action of the Russian government led by Vladimir Putin who in the process of justifying his actions, claims that the reason for the invasion was to “de-nazify” the Ukrainian government policies. Ironically, Putin himself is a product of Nazism, a system of government that he strongly supported in his prime. Moreso, in the days of the USSR, the Russian government had been accused of the same offense the Russian government is accusing Ukraine of. Therefore, this is a clear case of linguistic labeling embellished in the exercise of power as a justification for the activity carried out by a more superior force. The theoretical framework of CDA was adopted in this study because it focuses squarely on the projection of ideology and the intersection of power play in any form of discourse. It also brings out indices of hidden meanings in texts and tries to proffer solutions to societal problems from the perspective of language use. The study reveals cases of polarization, ideological projection, the deployment of linguistic resources in form of labeling to justify the actions of Putin over the Ukrainians. There is also the deliberate attempt to “annex” or “conquer” the less powerful using application of force through the policy of “imposition”.

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Eugene Rivers and the responsibility of intellectuals

Muslim pasts and presents: Displacement and city-making in a Delhi neighbourhood

AbstractThrough an engagement with the histories of Muslim pasts, presences, and absences in the locality of Jangpura-Bhogal in the Indian capital city of Delhi, this article examines the constitutive relationship between displacements and city-making. It addresses Jangpura-Bhogal's post-colonial history (1947–present) through instances of the erasure of Muslim property, spaces, and histories, and the reoccupations, replacements, and redefinition of spaces, properties, and memories that they constituted. The article shows how protracted material displacements of Muslim property and spaces have contributed to the erasure of a Muslim historical presence from Jangpura-Bhogal. By tracing the afterlives of these material displacements, it tracks how narrative discourses draw on these Muslim absences and the sense of an abstract ‘diverse space’ to produce new sets of exclusions and practices of Othering in the present. The discussion focuses on the processual/everyday, ‘below the radar’, and, at times, invisible displacements, more than sudden eruptions of violence or overt ideological projects aimed at a deliberate Muslim erasure. Thus, Delhi's post-colonial history is not only about the well-rehearsed story of migrations and arrivals but equally about departures and displacements that have produced the neighbourhood and the city as particular kinds of majoritarian places and spaces. Current acts of Muslim displacement, that is, the Delhi ‘riots’ of February 2020 are enabled not only through visible and violent histories of Muslim marginalization, but also by longer histories of non-overt erasures, displacements, and replacements.

РОСІЯ “РАННЬОГО ПУТІНАˮ В ПОШУКАХ НОВОЇ НАЦІОНАЛЬНОЇ ІДЕНТИЧНОСТІ: МОДЕРНА ІМПЕРСЬКА ІДЕОЛОГІЯ В ТІНІ “ГУМАНІТАРНОГОˮ “РУСЬКОГО МИРУˮ

At the beginning of the XXI century the leadership of the Kremlin significantly strengthened control over the processes in the Russian state, achieved certain successes in the implementation of integration projects in the post-Soviet space. To increase the geopolitical weight of the Russian Federation and further strengthen its position on the territory of the so-called “near abroadˮ, Kremlin political technologists developed a new imperial ideology. Ivan Ilyin, a critic of the Bolsheviks and a supporter of monarchism and fascism, acted as an ideological guide for the Russian ruling elite. A practical manifestation of the new ideological approaches was the introduction of the “Day of People’s Unityˮ associated with the traditions of tsarist Russia, which essentially replaced the celebration of the so called “Great October Socialist Revolutionˮ. In the same vein, we can consider the launch of the action called “Saint George's ribbonˮ, which is a kind of attempt to combine the legacy of the Romanovs with the pages of the history of the USSR convenient for the Kremlin. Criticizing the federal nature of the Soviet Union, the Kremlin at the same time actively used the victory of the USSR in World War II for its geopolitical purposes. To the greatest extent, this was manifested due to the active popularization of the myth of the “Great Victoryˮ and the hypertrophied celebration of “Victory Dayˮ − the so-called “Pobedobesieˮ. One of the important components of the new state ideology of the Russian Federation was the active use of the “besieged fortressˮ concept. Tough declarations of the leadership of Russia at that time were complemented by decisive steps. The use of radioactive substances on the territory of Great Britain to kill a former employee of the FSB, cyber-attacks on the governmental structure of a NATO and EU member – Estonia, a return to the Soviet practice of aviation combat duty, a missile strike on Georgian territory by a Russian aircraft demonstrated the readiness of official Moscow to raise the stakes in the framework of the struggle for the redistribution of geopolitical “chessboardˮ. The ideological project “Russian Worldˮ became the decoration for Russian imperialism and revanchism. During the second presidential term of Vladimir Putin, it was already possible to trace warming signals that unequivocally demonstrated that behind the “humanitarianˮ envelope of “Russian Worldˮ the aggressive foreign policy goals of the Russian leadership were hidden. The most openly imperial essence of the Putin regime in its early stages is reflected in the framework of the so-called “Russian doctrineˮ. This document included provisions on the messianic role of Russia, criticism of the Bolsheviks for the division of the USSR into republics, the postulate on the historical continuity of the Russian Federation from tsarist times, etc. In the context of outlining the foreign policy goals of the Russian Federation, the doctrine refers to the creation of a multipolar world, the non-recognition of the 1991 Belovezh Accords, and the beginning of the path that should lead to the “reunificationˮ of Russia with Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan is declared.

Миротворческая деятельность буддийской конфессии СССР (1950–1980-е гг.)

In this article is considered the phenomenon of Buddhist confessional diplomacy in 1950– 1980s. It is shown, that the continuing struggle with religion was not an obstacle for international activity of confessions and was used as «soft power» for popularization of the Soviet ideological project. The diplomacy of Buddhist leaders became a steady channel of alternative communication between the two world poles, contributing to a reduction in international tensions.