Imaginary Enemy Research Articles

‘Walled’ activism: transnational social movements and the politics of Chinese cyber-public space

This article examines China's cyber-activism in relation to the politics of making a transnational, Chinese public sphere in both the virtual world and real-life locations. By conceptualising Chinese cyber-activism as ‘walled’ activism, this article describes an invisible yet effective ‘wall’ constructed through hegemonic affective conditioning to separate those who are within the ‘wall’ from those on the outside. This ‘wall’ shields particular types of moral sensibilities, political consciousness and cultural discourse and conditions the ways in which Chinese citizens envision the possibility of engaging in public movements both online and offline, in China and elsewhere. This article argues that while it is possible to forge an ‘insurgent’ Chinese transnational civil sphere that remakes urban public spaces, this sphere operates largely within the ‘walls’ of a hegemonic nationalist agenda that promotes China's ‘rise’ and fends off imaginary enemies, not by the force of an oppressive regime but by the agency and free will of individuals.

The Real and Imagined Enemy in the Process of Shaping the Macedonian National Identity

The article deals with the issues associated with creating thenotion of the enemy in the Macedonian territorial area underlining that image of the enemy was closely related to notion of potential threat. It was strengthened by the geopolitical situation after the year 1878, which led to the formation of the modern Macedonian national identity. On the basisof various textsbelonging tothe Macedonian cultural heritage (including G. Pulevski, K. Misirkov, S. Verković) we can recognize the transfer of the black legend of the Jesuits into the Macedonian territory. In the Macedonian literature at the turn of the 20th century, next to the existing real enemies (Turks, the Greek Church hierarchy (Phanariots)), also appeared an imaginary enemy, represented by the Jesuits. They became the model enemy who was the incarnation of evil fighting against the Orthodoxy and striving for control over the enslaved Slavs by the use of lies, treachery and falsehood. When creating this “enemy” the Macedonian literature used all the elements of the black legend of the Jesuits which existied earlier in Western Europe, and this contributed to the dissolution of the order in 1773. In the article it is noted that the Russian policy towards the Slavic peoples of the Balkans used concepts of the ethnic and religious unity in the Macedonian lands as opposed by the negative image of Catholicism and the “black legend” of the Jesuits, that was already successfully used in other circumstances.

Iran's Power in Context

Iran–US relations – strained at the best of times since the 1979 Iranian revolution – have never been worse than during the past six years, due to the much more intense interaction between the two ...

An application of the genetic programming technique to strategy development

In this paper, we will apply genetic programming (GP) and co-evolution techniques to develop two strategies: the ghost (attacker) and players (survivors) in the Traffic Light Game (a popular game among children). These two strategies compete against each other. By applying the co-evolution technique alongside GP, each strategy is used as an “imaginary enemy” from which evolves (is trained in) another strategy. Based on this co-evolutionary process, these final strategies develop: the ghost can effectively capture the players, but the players can also escape from the ghost, rescue partners, and detour around obstacles. The development of these strategies has achieved phenomenal success. The results encourage us to develop more complex strategies or cooperative models such as human learning models, cooperative robotic models, and self-learning of virtual agents.

Imaginary Enemy (review)

Imaginary Enemy (review)

Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds

Popular interest in cryptozoology (the study of unconfirmed species, such as bigfoot and chupacabra) has been fuelled by a recent publishing frenzy of encyclopaedias, dictionaries, and guides devoted to the subject, as well as by unprecedented opportunities for enthusiasts to collect data and exchange stories via the Internet. The author situates the emotional commitment many exhibit toward cryptids (the creatures themselves) in a broad historical context. Unconfirmed species served as an implicit ground of conflict and dialogue between untutored masses and educated elite, even prior to the rise of academic science as a unified body of expert consensus. The psychological significance of cryptozoology in the modern world has new facets, however: it now serves to channel guilt over the decimation of species and destruction of the natural habitat; to recapture a sense of mysticism and danger in a world now perceived as fully charted and over-explored; and to articulate resentment of and defiance against a scientific community perceived as monopolising the pool of culturally acceptable beliefs. “Man, it is true, can, by combination, surmount all his real enemies, and become master of the whole of animal creation: But does he not immediately raise up to himself imaginary enemies, the dæmons of his fancy …?”—David Hume (Smith 1947, 195).

The Practice and Politics of “Tradition” in Indonesia

Suharto's New Order in Indonesia was built on the physical disorganization of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Indonesian people experienced violence of a nation and fear of death by the disorganization.The New Order invoked the tradition of gotong royong as a given “moral fact” under two logics, “development” and “stability, ” and made gotong royong as an expression to justify people's cooperation with the pro-development policy of the government.The New Order employed the two policies at the same time in late 1970s and early 1980s. One made Pancaslia a national ideology, and the other released former political prisoners of PKI. The policies urged people to participate in the new surveillance system of the nation and in gotong royong to help each other by night watch at the neighborhood association RT/RW. And the surveillance and guard system Siskamling, including night watch by neighbors, institutionalized these different forms of participation, and the neighbors obeyed them.Especially, the political tactics of the New Order reminded people their fear to violence and made PKI their imaginary enemy. Consequently, the problem of local order become a reality to the people.For this reason, the adoption of Siskamling enhanced night watch. Therefore, night watch systemized a series of making decisions, giving directions, and actual practice, and it was done by the neighbors, who were mobilized by the Indonesian government during certain periods, such as the general election. But actually, the purpose of night watch was not crime deterrence, but a political display of power against social forces hostile to the New Order.“Tradition, ” which is called gotong royong in Indonesia, was practiced and reproduced by Suharto's subtle political tactics and strategies in the New Order.

Intervención militar en Irak: seguridad, democracia y guerra contra el terrorismo

The purpose of this article is to question the reality principies that made US and UK military intervention possible in Iraq. Three theses are set forth. First, the political realism that justified military intervention in Iraq is both paradoxical and false since, instead of propitiating sustainable conditions of international security, it is in fact generalizing the insecurity. Secondly, the threat of Islamic fundamentalism is a creation of the western world's monologue of universalism with respect to the Islamic world which camouflages the far more serious threat which that very same universalism constitutes. Thirdly, the «war against terrorism» has generauzed the creation of imaginary enemies which makes it possible to conceal and manage the real contradictions endemic to the competitive world in which it was defined. In this sense, the «war against terrorism» becomes a war against everyone, aimed to administer and reproduce the conditions of generalized insecurity which it supposedly seeks to combat.

AIDS rumors, imaginary enemies, and the body politic in Indonesia

Rumors about disease and illness draw on the rich symbolism of the body and are a way for social groups to express concerns about their relationships to the community and state. The Indonesian "AIDS Club" rumors are part of a corpus of contemporary legends about AIDS that have circulated globally. In their local form, however, they speak to particular concerns that urban Indonesians have about modernity and the power of the Indonesian state. [AIDS, rumors, Indonesia, New Order, disease and illness, violence, body politic, somatization]

The use of antisemitism in the Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War saw an outburst of antisemitism in the Nationalist-controlled areas of the peninsula and in the Moroccan protectorate, an antisemitism influenced by the work of ultra-right-wing intellectuals associated with the Acción Española review. All the factions of the Nationalist camp interpreted the civil war as a crusade against the 'Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevist' conspiracy. In mainland Spain, where there were only a few Jewish families, antisemitism was largely confined to the written word. In this way, it was used mostly as a rhetorical tool to attack the Nationalists' real and imaginary enemies: the Republican forces, the French and the Soviets. Although there was no systemic persecution of the Jews, some aggressive acts took place in Seville and Barcelona. The situation of the larger Jewish community in Spanish Morocco was quite different. The Moroccan Jews were adversely affected by the Nationalists' efforts to enlist the support of the Muslim population against the Republicans and by the German presence in the protectorate. They were also victimized by the Falangists who confiscated their property and imposed heavy fines on them. The military authorities of Morocco tried to restrain these excesses as they realized that blatant antisemitism could hurt the rebels' image abroad. They also believed that Jewish wealth and connections could serve the Nationalist cause.

Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination by John V. Tolan (review)

REVIEWS 266 and selflessness are central to the discussions here since the force of individual will, so central to the fearless confrontation with death by the Christian and Moslem martyrs is precisely what defines the Hindu sati and Gandhi’s ideal of reducing himself to zero. The question raised by all the pieces in the volume, and the question that remains unanswered, is what does the “self” mean in a religious context? Can there be volition in a “selfless” act? That is the question that martyrdom forces us to confront and that separates the religious “faithful” from religions’ victims. CHERYL GOLDSTEIN, Comparative Literature, UCLA John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press 2002) xxiii + 372 pp. John V. Tolan in Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination examines and contextualizes various Christian writings against Islam in the middle ages. The similarity of his project to that of Edward Said is no coincidence; Tolan wants to complement Said’s Orientalism. Yet he has done more; he subverts Said. Tolan thinks that Edward Said’s “Occident” is in danger of becoming the same kind of monolithic caricature as the “Orient” of the worst of the Orientalists. In Saracens, the medieval West is a much more dynamic entity. Furthermore, Tolan uses Said’s Culture and Imperialism to show how the earliest of these anti-Islamic writings were composed by “oriental” Christians colonized, as it were, by the expanding Muslim empire in the seventh and eighth centuries. These texts, Tolan argues after Said, express a “culture of resistance” in which subjected Christians “rejected the triumphalist historiography of the ruling Muslims and countered with their own subversive reading of Muslim history” (276). Tolan begins in seventh-century Roman west Asia and Iberia, where the defeated Christians viewed the Muslim conquest as divine scourge upon an erring flock. As the years went by, authors from these communities treated Islam as a Christian heresy invented by a crafty pseudo-prophet (Muhammad) to fool lascivious people into following him. However, these writings were apologetic, intended primarily to prevent Christian conversions to Islam. In more distant Byzantium and northern Europe, Islam was imagined as a pagan idolatry with colorful rites devoted to Apollo, Jupiter, Priapus, and the special god Muhammad . This idea of an imaginary enemy was used for the redirection of knightly violence outwards, beyond the boundaries of European Christendom, and in order to justify the conquest of Muslim-occupied territories. However, once the Latins came into more intimate contact with Muslims as crusaders, they readopted the old image, forged by the Christians of the eastern Mediterranean, of Islam as a heresy. Here for the first time, Islam, Judaism, and the beliefs of various heretics (Petrobrusians, Cathars, and Waldensians) were lumped together as potentially dangerous influences to be countered. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, scholastic theologians set out on a mission of rational argumentation in order to prove the truth of the Catholic doctrine to Jews, Muslims, and heretics. The failure of this movement, manifested by the fall of the crusader kingdom of Acre and the conversion of the Mongol emperors to Islam, prompted an angry and frustrated response. If the missionaries could not convince their audience with reason, the fault surely lay REVIEWS 267 with the infidels. They were incapable of reason, too obstinate (Jews), lascivious (Muslims), or barbarous (Mongols) for intellectual and spiritual comprehension . Increasingly, the polemical association of Jews and Muslims accompanied judicial association of the two—particularly in post-reconquista Spain. Legislation was passed to protect the Christian community from “contamination ”—sexual contact, marriage ties, and religious influence—by Jews and Muslim. After this point in the thirteenth century, there did not appear any major development in the approach to the “problem” of Islam until the Enlightenment . In the meantime, and even thereafter, Western authors kept referring back to the fundamental texts and images created between the seventh and the thirteenth centuries. Tolan’s Saracens is the history of a discourse—that of medieval Christian authors writing against Islam. It is useful to historians of Europe, both of the pre-modern and modern periods, as well as to those scholars interested in the development and use...

Shadow Boxing with an Imaginary Enemy — A Response to “Law and Order Blues”

In our rejoinder to Don Weatherburn's paper, “Law and Order Blues”, we do not take issue with his advocacy of the need to take crime seriously and to foster a more rational approach to the problems it poses. Where differences do emerge is (1) with his claim that he is willing to do so whilst we (in our different ways) are not; and (2) on the question of what this involves. Of particular concern is the way in which his argument proceeds by a combination of simple misrepresentation of the positions it seeks to disparage, and silence concerning issues of real substance where intellectual debate and exchange would be welcome and useful. Our paper challenges, in turn, the misrepresentation of Indermaur's analysis of trends in violent crime, the misrepresentation of Hogg and Brown's Rethinking Law and Order, the misrepresentation of the findings of some of the research into the effectiveness of punitive policies and the silence on sexual assault in “Law and Order Blues”. We suggest that his silence on sexual assault reflects a more widespread unwillingness to acknowledge the methodological problems that arise in the measurement of crime because such problems severely limit the extent to which confident assertions can be made about prevalence and trends.

“Shadow Boxing with an Imaginary Enemy”: A Rejoinder

“Shadow Boxing with an Imaginary Enemy”: A Rejoinder

Shadow Boxing with an Imaginary Enemy — A Response to "Law and Order Blues"

Shadow Boxing with an Imaginary Enemy — A Response to "Law and Order Blues"

"Shadow Boxing with an Imaginary Enemy": A Rejoinder

"Shadow Boxing with an Imaginary Enemy": A Rejoinder

Out of the Shadows: Confronting America’s Mental Illness Crisis, 2nd ed.

Out of the Shadows: Confronting America’s Mental Illness Crisis, 2nd ed.

Censorship

In a handbook on psychiatry, I came across a description of something called the blank-page test. If an alcoholic in the last stages of delirium tremens is shown a blank sheet of paper, he starts reading it without any hesitation, enumerating all his own obsessions, suspicions, the names of imaginary enemies, murderers, and so on. This sounded so familiar to me that I decided to write about censorship.

Intelligence in Animals

1. I OBSERVE that Dr. Romanes, in his very interesting work on “Animal Intelligence,” has been good enough to notice an account given by me in NATURE, vol. xi. p. 29, of an instance of a scorpion committing suicide under special excitement. It may be well to remention the fact that in this case the rays of the sun, focused on the back of the scorpion by means of a common lens, were the exciting cause of the self-inflicted fatal sting; and to set the matter at rest it may be remarked that two witnesses who saw the experiment can corroborate my statements. On reconsidering the whole affair, however, it occurred to me that in wounding its own back the scorpion may have merely been trying to get rid of an imaginary enemy. The concentrated rays of the sun no doubt caused pain, and the sting was probably directed towards the seat of this in an automatic manner, as a defensive act. This seems to me a more feasible explanation than to regard the action as due to an instinct detrimental to the individual and to the species.