National Paradigm Research Articles

Understanding the Past, Imagining the Future: Teaching Speculative Fiction and Afrofuturism

Understanding the Past, Imagining the Future:Teaching Speculative Fiction and Afrofuturism Jacqueline Ellis and Jason D. Martinek Teaching the Future: Teachers Talk with Sonya Donaldson In this Teachers Talk, Transformations editors Jacqueline Ellis and Jason Martinek spoke with our New Jersey City University colleague, Sonya Donaldson. Our conversation focused mostly on her scholarly and pedagogical interests in speculative fiction and Afrofuturism, but this discussion also led us to make connections to institutional and disciplinary structures in education, the devaluing of historical knowledge, the importance of creativity and imagination in the classroom, and the transformative potential of, as Donaldson eloquently puts it, "looking to the past, to understand the present, to build for the future." Donaldson is currently completing work on a book manuscript, "'Irreconcilable Differences?': Memory, History, and the Echoes of Diaspora," which examines the ways in which black artists, in engaging sites of shared memory (both real and imagined), construct diasporic spaces outside of the nation paradigm. Her digital humanities project, "Singing the Nation Into Being: Anthems and the Politics of Black Performance," is an Omeka site that looks at the ways that black subjectivities are constituted and contested vis-à-vis singing of "The Black National Anthem." Jacqueline Ellis: Tell us a little bit about your academic background and your interests in speculative fiction and Afrofuturism. Sonya Donaldson: I've always been interested in speculative fiction, from the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises to the literature of Octavia Butler—who [End Page 111] I think of as foundational to my knowledge of speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, and my ability to imagine a different world in many ways. I was also a technology journalist and editor for many years. At one point I set up and ran my own small test lab. I tested hardware and software and wrote articles about them. Then, in graduate school at the University of Virginia, I designed a course called "Technology and Identities." It was an interesting moment. One of the people tasked with advising graduate students kept saying, "It's a course about identity politics." I'm pretty sure he meant "It's a course about black people" when he said that. I replied, "No, it's literally about technology and our identities–who we are in terms of how we identify ourselves, how we are socially constructed, whether by race or gender, and how our identities shape our interactions with technology and the broader implications of those kinds of interactions." I teach primarily African diasporic literature so race is key to what I do. But I think that the questions that were central to "Technologies and Identities" apply broadly. One of the things that I realized was important was for students to have technology literacy. We had conversations about the digital divide and access to technology from the perspective of race and economics. But here I was at an institution that had relatively wealthy students from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds. And they still needed technology literacy. Yes, there were disparities—absolutely—but we were at a cultural moment (one that is still ongoing) in terms of our relationship with technology where we needed to think deeply about understanding and not just consuming technology. JE: So the technology literacy you mentioned is who are you or how your identity is constructed in relation to the technology? SD: Yes, that's part of it. But it is also understanding technology itself, how it operates, how it's not this neutral thing. Technology comes with its own biases because it's programmed and developed by human beings. One of the things that we did early on in the "Technologies and Identities" course was to use a Facebook app called "Make A Baby." My students had to go on Facebook and make a baby. It was this virtual baby that you had to make and then care for. You also had to make sure within the game, within the app, that you had enough resources to maintain the baby because the baby would grow into a toddler and then a child. It was an interesting moment for my students when they came back at a certain point during the semester freaking out because...

Городское население российской провинции в годы Первой мировой войны: особенности выявления документов по проблемам общественных настроений и поведенческих практик

The article offers a systematization of archival sources on formation and development of public moods and behavioral practices of the rear zone population of the Russian periphery in the days of World War I. The following groups of archival sources have been identified: laws and regulations of central and local authorities (circulars, resolutions of ministries and departments, governors, heads of gubernia gendarme departments, commissars of the Provisional Government, orders of garrison commanders); record keeping materials (reports of gendarmerie officials, governors, uezd police officers, polizeimeisters, and police supervisors (nadzirateli); reports of self-government institutions; censorship officers reports; reports and reviews of various committees, meetings, societies, cultural and educational institutions); personal provenance sources (letters, memoirs, anonymous and named complaints and police information); statistical and reference materials. This complex of sources allows to characterize public sentiments and behavioral practices of provincial towns citizens in the wartime: their perception of reality in the changing multifaceted demographic situation; attitudes towards national and confessional groups and their representatives; their reaction to veterans, wounded, prisoners of war, recruits, personnel of rear garrisons, and refugees; leisure possibilities; cultural entertainment and its impact on mood and behavior of citizens; their attitude towards authority and its representatives; impact of the opposition on political activities and dissatisfaction of citizens; organization of supply and its influence on socio-political processes in the urban environment; transformation of official national paradigm. The case-study of the Volga region registers difficulties in identification of sources in the fonds of regional and central archives, which pertain to the subject. The regional specificity in structure and content of archival materials is demonstrated.

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

Nationalism and African Communal Identity in Marguerite Abouet’s and Clement Oubrerie’s Aya de Yopougon

Abstract Nationalism has become a contested construct because scholars doubt its ideological authenticity and global migratory consciousness, which promotes transcultural / transnational identity, and problematizes its raison d’être. Though Abouet and Oubrerie’s graphic novel could be read as a portrayal of the emerging urban center and its postmodern identities, this study rather investigates how Aya de Yopougon galvanizes juvenile nationalistic consciousness through age-long African communal identity. Using the postcolonial theory, the paper argues that the epistemology of nationalism, as a forerunner of nationhood, has been inherently encapsulated in African communal identity as manifested in the lives of middle-class dwellers of Yopougon, a suburb of Abidjan. It further deconstructs the symbolic Eurocentric paradigms of nationalism because nationalistic consciousness is located in the African definition of “family” and “community” revealed in the setting of Yopougon which contrasts with other spaces that bear the emblem of nationhood in the novel. Yopougon is not Anderson’s “imagined community”; its inhabitants reflect African communal identity that is located in gender complementarities and civic interdependence. The paper concludes that communalism could be an African brand of modern nationalism, used to develop the nationalistic and communalistic consciousness of the Ivorian youths who are faced with crude realities of a postcolonial society.

German Missionaries and Australian Anthropology

ABSTRACTIn their primary task of converting Indigenous Australians to Christianity, German missions active in various parts of Australia through the nineteenth and into the twentieth century recorded relatively few successes. On the other hand, their endeavours in observing and recording Aboriginal languages and cultures have left a rich – and yet frequently overlooked – anthropological legacy. A common element in that legacy is their work in the area of linguistics, which they understood to be a necessary foundation for their evangelical work. Nonetheless, caution must be exercised in evaluating the German missionary contribution to Australian anthropology according to either national or religious paradigms. German anthropology, as practised within the community of missionaries and outside, evinces a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. Moreover German anthropologists, including missionaries, were by the late nineteenth century connected into international knowledge networks.

Visitor preferences of thinning practice in young even-aged stands of pedunculate oak (Quercus robur L.): comparing the opinion of forestry professionals in six European countries

ABSTRACTThis study compared visitor preferences of forestry professionals across six European countries (Sweden, Denmark, Great Britain, Austria, Romania and Portugal) using a questionnaire survey. The 598 interviewees were asked to rank photographs depicting recently thinned experimental plots in a 13-year old stand of pedunculate oak (Quercus robur L.) according to the criterion: “Which forest environment do you prefer as a visitor?” The plots represented five different residual stem densities: 7000 (no thinning, very high stem density), 5300 (heavy thinning, high stem density), 1000 (very heavy thinning, medium stem density), 300 (extremely heavy thinning, low stem density/open stand) and 100 (solitary trees, very low stem density/very open stand) stems ha−1. The results indicated geographical variation in the preferences for different thinning practices in young stands of oak. Portuguese, Austrian and Romanian respondents generally favoured thinned, but dense stands, whereas Danish and British respondents preferred very heavily thinned stands. Swedish respondents preferred open stands resulting from extremely heavy thinning. Photographs taken along rows were favoured to photographs across rows, indicating a preference for scenes offering perspective and accessibility. The results indicate a variation of visitor preferences among forestry professionals for different silvicultural regimes. We interpret this in the context of national traditions and forestry paradigms that influence the shaping of preferences.

Decolonization as reconciliation: rethinking the national conflict paradigm in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that thinking about reconciliation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict requires a paradigmatic shift in conflict analysis. The international community has approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a national conflict between Zionism, as the national movement of the Jewish people, and the Palestinian National Movement. The partition plans proposed from before 1947 until the recent “two-state solution” formula have all been based on this assumption. I argue that the premise of national conflict is fundamentally flawed, and, therefore, reaching a settlement based on partition – let alone reconciliation – is becoming increasingly unlikely. A new paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense) is needed that applies a settler-colonial framework to the conflict while also taking into consideration the national component. Reconciliation in this conflict is conceived as decolonization within a transitional justice framework. This approach overcomes major pitfalls in the hegemonic discourse on reconciliation in this conflict, including the symmetrical analysis and psychologizing the process.

Kulttuuripolitiikka ja nationalismi kilpailuvaltio-Suomessa: innovatiivinen luova talous


 
 
 Nationalism is constitutive of modern political forms of social life and also historically one of the key features defining cultural policy in modern nation states. Regardless of transformations called globalization, methodological nationalism remains rooted also in the underlying logic of national cultural policies. In the 1990s the Finnish welfare-state shifted towards so-called competition state. In Finnish public cultural policy this marked a shift from a welfare orientation towards a more economy-oriented neo-liberal rationale. Alongside the old welfare and cultural nationalisms, new forms of nationalism emphasizing individual creativity, innovation and economic value of art and culture emerged in cultural policy discourses in a framework of national competitiveness. This article looks into economic rationale and competitiveness as one of the thriving paradigms of cultural policy and nationalism in the field of culture from the 1990’s onwards. It examines discursively the idea of innovative knowledge and creative economy as an example of national-economic project which has somewhat blurred the definitions of culture and creativity. Furthermore, the article discusses the idea of creative economy in the institutional politics of different administrational sectors.
 Keywords: Competition state, nationalism, neoliberalism, creative economy, cultural policy strategies.
 
 

Frontiers of the Ottoman Imagination: Studies in Honour of Rhoads Murphey Edited by MariosHadjianastasis

The emphasis of the twelve essays in this well-deserved Festschrift in honour of Rhoads Murphey is on the history of Ottoman Greece and Cyprus between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is not only appropriate—Rhoads was a member of the Centre for Byzantine, Modern Greek and Ottoman Studies in the University of Birmingham from 1992 until his retirement—but also very welcome. As the editor points out in the cogent introduction to his own contribution (‘Between the Porte and the Lion: identity politics and opportunism in seventeenth century Cyprus’), it is only recently that historians have begun not simply to question but to abandon the nationalist paradigm which had effectively prevented any intelligent study of the tourkokratia. This volume continues on this pioneering path. The first essay in the volume, by Hasan Çolak, does not discuss the ‘Greek lands’ in particular, but is rather a study of the persistence and transformation of Byzantine titulature in the Ottoman Empire (‘Tekfur, fasilyus and kayser: disdain, negligence and appropriation of Byzantine imperial titulature in the Ottoman world’), whether applied to the Byzantine emperors before 1453 or adopted by the Ottoman sultans themselves after the fall of Constantinople. Still in the early Ottoman period, Konstantinos Moustakas presents a study of Ottoman slave labour (‘Slave labour in the early Ottoman rural economy: regional variations in the Balkans during the 15th century’), largely in the areas of Thessaly and south-eastern Macedonia which saw large-scale Muslim settlement in the immediate post-conquest period. The major sources for this study are the surviving tahrir defters of the region, which unexpectedly reveal the existence—although with an infuriating lack of detail—of slave-holding peasants in the area. The defters also form one of the sources for Ourania Bessi’s investigation of the development of Ottoman Dimetoka, from the time of Murad I (1362–1389) to the sixteenth century (‘The topographic reconstruction of Ottoman Dimetoka: issues of periodization and morphological development’). Dr Bessi takes as her starting point Gilles Veinstein’s description of what he saw as the characteristics of a ‘typical Ottoman town’, showing how Veinstein’s observations apply to Dimetoka, and demonstrates how the Ottomans transformed the Byzantine town with the settlement of the wealthier inhabitants in the area outside the walls (varoş), rather than in the citadel as had been the case in Byzantine times. The study is amply illustrated with maps, historic photographs and tables, extracted from the defters, showing the tax-paying population of each quarter between 1485 and 1570. From the sixteenth century, the articles in the volume covering the tourkokratia skip to the time of the Greek war of independence. Katerina Stathi’s ‘The Carta Incognita of Ottoman Athens’ is an account of the author’s chance discovery of an Ottoman map of Athens in the Hatt-i hümayun collection in the Başbakanlık Archives in Istanbul, and a description and an analysis of the map itself, leading her to the conclusion that it was produced for the use of the Ottoman military during the siege of the Acropolis in 1826-7. Sophia Laiou’s article (‘Entre les insurgés reaya et les indisciplinés ayan: la revolution grecque et la réaction de l’État’) is, as the title suggests, as much about the Ottoman authorities’ reaction to the rebellion of the Samiots and their plundering of the coasts of Anatolia, during the Greek war of independence, as it is about the rebels themselves, showing how it was, in most cases, the protection of their own lands and revenues that guided their actions in the face of insurgency. The last paper with a Greek theme is Michael Ursinus’ ‘Regional reform as an ambition: Charles Blunt Sen., His Majesty’s consul in Salonica, during his early years in the Ottoman Empire (1835–39)’. Describing the consul’s service in Salonica in the years immediately before the announcement of the Tanzimat reforms, the article demonstrates the close involvement of a foreign consul in the affairs of an Ottoman region, and what might be described as the mutually dependent relationship between the consul and the local authorities in effecting administrative improvements. As an example of how the British attempted to establish an ‘informal Empire’, the article is as much of interest to English, as it is to Ottoman, historians.

“Our Country Is Destined to be the Great Nation of Futurity”: John L. O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny and Christian Nationalism, 1837–1846

As founding editor of the United States Magazine and Democratic Review, John L. O’Sullivan (1813–1895) preached a particular form of Christian nationalism that centered on expansionist fever occurring during the 1830s and 1840s. O’Sullivan’s Christian nationalism was known as “Manifest Destiny”. He famously coined the term in 1845 while defending the right of the United States to annex the Republic of Texas. The central argument of this essay is that Manifest Destiny, as O’Sullivan articulated it in the pages of the Democratic Review, follows the contours of the innovative and heterodox political religion developed by Elie Kedourie and expounded upon by Anthony D. Smith. O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny was a conglomerated nationalistic paradigm consisting of elements from Protestant theology, Lyman Beecher’s vision for civilizing the West, and German idealism via George Bancroft’s use of historicism in his History of the United States of America, from the Discovery of the American Continent. As a form of Christian nationalism located in the context of antebellum America, Manifest Destiny is helpful to historians as they trace both continuity and change over time in how Americans have self-identified in religious terms since their origin as a collection of colonial, and later independent, polities.

Comprehensive Approach to the Asymmetric Endangerment of National Critical Infrastructure

Contemporary global security moment are characterized by great interaction of national and supra-national security structure, the interdependence of national, regional and multilateral forms of higher security integration. However, the role of the state as a single security entity in international relations remains a crucial and indispensable role in the broadest observation security organization. Also, in the contemporary global security paradigm, actualization of asymmetric forms of endangering state security should not be overlooked. The arising question is: How much individual country, especially those in transition process, could comprehensively respond to the current form of asymmetric national security threats to critical infrastructure? Moreover, South East Europe (SEE), or even closer, Western Balkan region, is the part of European continent that we can, by historically overlook, analyzing as the cradle and arena of complex, escalating conflicts. All of them are concluded by the mediation of third part, usually through the negotiation and bargaining of the “big players” on the world’s stage. In this region, the nation’s looking for their own national paradigms, which are often in correlation with the interests of global powers. The beginning of the twenty-first century reflects a significant aspiration of all countries in this part of Europe for development of partnership and allied relations toward of contemporary security risks and threats. Acknowledging the declarations and growing bilateral and multilateral cooperation in the field of security and defense, yet, the questions arises as: Whether states of Southeast Europe identify same security risks and threats? Do they have a unanimous opinion of the potential ways of the vulnerability of critical national infrastructure? Do they share the perception that the security of Southeast Europe are equally nationally as well as common regional issue? The complexity and multifaceted of named questions leads to necessity of a comprehensive approach to the analysis of forms of potential endangering elements of national critical infrastructure which are crucial for security. In addition, particular attention should be paid to unconventional, asymmetric forms of national security jeopardizing and their potential endangering effects on elements of national critical infrastructure. In this paper authors offer the possible overlook of the cross analysis of asymmetrical endangering of national critical infrastructure of Western Balkan countries, as part of SEE. In paper authors use comparative analysis of contemporary approach to the concept of asymmetric security threats, through the prism of particular states perception of endangering forms regarding their national critical infrastructure.

Sport und die jüdische Suche nach Gemeinschaft in (ost-)europäischen Metropolen der Zwischenkriegszeit

AbstractThe main Jewish sport movement was and is Zionist (and as such nationalist), nevertheless I would claim that Jewish sport is a transnational practice par excellence. Sport, and especially Jewish sport, transcends the concept of nation and state, but sport historiography still follows national paradigms. The sport history of big cities might help to find an empirical basis for a transnational history of modern sports. The search for community and belonging is vital for the experience of the modern individual. From the nineteenth century onwards the »nation« was the preferred »imagined community« to fill the void left by religion and tradition after the age of Enlightenment. But there were other communities as well, such as the workers’ movement or other political communities and social classes or sporting communities. By looking at an East European Jewish metropolis such as Vilne (today’s Vilnius), I want to explore the ambiguous character of the Jewish sport movement and the agency of Jewish athletes in their search for identity and belonging.

KEMBALINYA SURGA FIRDAUS: MENILIK KEMERDEKAAN INDONESIA MELALUI PANDANGAN ‘ALI AḤMAD BĀKATHĪR DALAM DRAMA ’AUDAT AL-FIRDAUS

Ali Ahmad Bākathīr was a prolific Arab playwright, novelist and poet of the 20th Century. He wrote almost fifty literary works and more than thirty plays in Arabic which developed Islamic character in Arabic literature. His works sought to establish Islamic values and traditions that occurred in Islamic societies. Although his works contributed immensely to the Arabic and Islamic literature, Bākathīr has received lack of attention from scholars both in Islamic world and in non-Islamic world. This paper explores the Muslim effort in acquiring national independence on the literary works of Bākathīr, particularly on the concept of nationalism. In the process of acquiring national independence, Indonesia’s figures usually utilized the paradigm of nationalism through words of dialog. The words of figure that referred to nationalism will be discussed. In this paper, we argue that Bākathīr literary work’s ’Audat al-Firdaus contains the spirit of nationalism for gaining independence.

From an Inconsequential Legacy to National Heritage: Revisiting the Conservation Approaches Towards the Ottoman Buildings in British Colonial Cyprus

Cyprus came under British control in 1878. At this time the Western-based orientalist mind-set, which saw ‘Ottoman’ as a synonym for stagnation was at its zenith, and this view was strategically disseminated as the European empires expanded. This also coincided with the evolution of the ethnic-nationalism that facilitated the formation of national heritage constructs. By analysing the case of Cyprus, a place which is entangled with British colonial governance as well as revolutionary Turkey, this paper aims to widen the discussion on the conservation trajectory of the Ottoman built heritage in post-Ottoman environments. Approaches to the restoration, interpretation, and management of Cyprus’s Ottoman buildings between 1878 and 1960 are dissected, assessed and categorized through British-era archival collections. The history of conservation practices is contextualised in changing political and professional perspectives, which reveal the role of Eurocentric paradigms of orientalism and nationalism in managing the perception and treatment processes of Ottoman-built heritage.

Marginocentricity and cosmopolitan interconnections of black radical thought in Arna Bontemps’s Black Thunder

ABSTRACTThis study uses Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer’s notion of marginocentricity to examine Arna Bontemps’s novel Black Thunder (1936) as a construction of the American South, seeing it as a peripheral yet cosmopolitan topographical node that interlinks the slave community of Richmond, Virginia, with the French peasant revolution and the Black Revolution of Haiti. It argues that Bontemps’s fictional account of Gabriel Prosser’s 1800 revolt connects the slave uprising with the transnational, multiethnic, and cross-cultural radical political struggles for and discourses about an egalitarian American democracy, thus challenging national cultural paradigms from the margins. At the same time, Bontemps situates Gabriel’s rebellion within the class struggle of African-Americans during the 1930s, propelling the black proletariat to the center of radical social transformation and anticipating some of the major ideas of such future anticolonial and Diasporic thinkers as Frantz Fanon. By exploring Black Thunder as a testimony of a cosmopolitan African-American humanist tradition that speaks from the national and cultural margins, this article also sheds new light on the writer Arna Bontemps as a spokesperson of the oppressed and as an advocate for black radical political thought, supporting a culturally pluralist society based on humanitarian and egalitarian principles, which in turn converge with socialist and communist ideas of the period between the 1920s and the 1940s. With the figure of Gabriel, Bontemps creates a black working-class leader inciting social change from the bottom up, categorically rejecting the black petit bourgeoisie as a driving force for radical social transformation and instead prefiguring Fanon’s later milestone of “revolutionary praxis” and humanism put forth in The Wretched of the Earth in the context of an international anti-imperialism.

A long way home: the rhetoric of family and familiarity in Yang Yong-hi’s Pyongyang Trilogy

ABSTRACTNothing is more emblematic of the increasingly transnational and decentralized conditions for filmmaking in Japan today than Yang Yong-hi’s meteoric rise from a freelance video journalist to a leading minority director in Japan. In just over seven years, Yang has collected awards in film festivals including Berlin, Sundance, and Yamagata with two documentary features and one narrative fiction that she completed with Japanese and South Korean funding. But the cosmopolitan reception of Yang’s works belies the fact that all her works to date have singularly focused on the obstinacy of the national border that has divided her family: her brothers in Pyongyang and her parents in Osaka. This study offers an analysis of Yang’s ‘Pyongyang Trilogy’ comprising Dear Pyongyang (2005), Sona, the Other Myself (2009) and Our Homeland (2012), with a particular emphasis on her creative uses of familial framing, that is to say, snapshots, home videos, and family melodrama. I examine the ways in which ‘family’ functions as a critical third space outside the national paradigm of the diaspora discourse, on the one hand, and the post-sovereign paradigm of independent cinema, on the other hand.

Constructing Difference and Imperial Strategy: Contrasting Representations of Irish and Zionist Nationalism in British Political Discourse (1917-1922)

The Irish struggle for independence (1917–1922) coincided with the beginnings of the mandate in Palestine, by which the British government sought to encourage the establishment of a Jewish National Home. Analogies between these two territories regularly surfaced in the papers of British officials and policy makers. Universally perceived as a paradigm of nationalism and insurrection, the Irish precedent colored the British understanding of Palestine. Essentialist representations of national groups such as the Irish or the Jews were also common as the British government lent support to various nationalist movements in order to further strategic objectives during the Great War. However, British attitudes toward Irish nationalism and Zionism varied widely. A careful examination of Arthur James Balfour’s representations of the Irish and Jewish nations reveals that nationalist ideology, far from relying on a coherent and systematic understanding of national groups, shifted depending on Britain’s geopolitical interests.

The “East” as a Category of Bolshevik Ideology and Comintern Administration: The Arab Section of the Communist University of the Toilers of the East

The Third International (or Comintern) transformed dynamics of anti-colonial resistance around world by linking communist activists in various countries with Moscow. As one scholar of postcolonialism put it, time, anti-colonial struggles could be articulated within a wider framework and, more importantly, could look to a major world power for organizational, material and military support. (1) The scholarship focusing on transnational exchanges resulting from this support, however, has largely failed to take into account notions of space as either an object or a problem. As Brigitte Studer has argued, tendency to treat space as a given, or as a mere fact, has led many scholars to confine themselves to national paradigm. (2) If we consider Comintern and Bolshevik support for anticolonial struggles more closely, however, spatial imagination of Moscow-based organizers appears to be both more ambiguous and contradictory. As early as 1917, in an effort to legitimize their revolutionary manifest destiny, party-state officials spoke of responsibilities of new socialist republic to awaken the peoples of (3) These statements, as well as their understanding of Russia's advantageous geographical location Europe and Asia echoed those voiced by 19th-century Russian intellectuals and politicians. (4) Yet their approaches to the also differed from Russian imperial versions in several key ways. Between 1914 and 1917, Lenin introduced oppressor/oppressed nations dichotomy into popular analysis of international politics both inside Russia and in broader world. By juxtaposing European colonial and Great Russian chauvinist oppressors against Eastern nations and peoples, his definition of imperialism explicitly linked revolutionary world struggle for socialism with revolutionary program on national question. (5) In domestic context, as Terry Martin has argued, greatest danger principle--the 1920s idea that great-power (or Russian) chauvinism posed a graver danger than local nationalism--reproduced hierarchical distinction between state-bearing and colonized peoples but reversed its valence by downplaying expression of Russian national identity and promoting national forms among formerly colonized nations instead. (6) Internationally, hierarchical distinction between oppressor and oppressed nations was further preserved and partially reversed, with Comintern assuming responsibilities for providing ideological and financial support to foreign anticolonial revolutionaries, including those considered most oppressed in East. In 1930s, as Russians were again raised to rank of first among equals in Soviet family of nations and as Bolsheviks assumed ever greater control over Third International, Soviet Union settled into its duty as liberator and leader of all of its different Easts. More so than the colonized world, individual nations, or any other category inherited from prerevolutionary political geography, it was the that came to be embraced by early Bolsheviks. A flexible and vague concept, it accommodated both revolutionary domestic program on national question and world struggle for socialism. For this reason, especially in formative period of many party and Comintern institutions, the came to be used for a wide range of political and propaganda initiatives. (7) In 1917, it allowed Lenin and Stalin to appeal simultaneously to toiling Muslims of Russia, Persia, Turkey, India, and Arab world. In 1919, it formed basis of Russian Communist Party's Central Bureau of Communist Organizations of Peoples of East as well as of Comintern's Eastern Section, Third International's center of communist organization outside Europe and North America. In 1920, idea of the played a role in discussions of national and colonial problems at Comintern's Second Congress and was then used to mobilize more than 2,000 delegates from Caucasus, Central Asia, Turkey, Iran, India, and other surrounding regions to attend a special Congress of Peoples of East in Baku. …

Is There a National Paradigm to Sustainable Development?

Is There a National Paradigm to Sustainable Development?

THE SOCIAL DIMENSION OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF UKRAINE

Urgency of the research. The identification of threats to sustainability and definition of measures of their overcoming play an important role in the transition of Ukraine to the model of sustainable development. Target setting. In order to determine the ways of assurance of social sustainability it is reasonable to investigate the social dimension of the development of Ukraine at the modern stage. Actual scientific researches and issues analysis. The investigations of sustainable development are carried out by a wide range of scientists, among them: E. Griessler, A. Colantonio, B. Littig, S. McKenzie. Uninvestigated parts of general matters defining. Despite the numerous researches in the field of sustainable development, the social component of sustainable development of Ukraine is underinvestigated. The research objective. The aim of the article is to investigate the essence of the category “social sustainability”, to define the threats to social sustainability and to determine the strategic directions of socially-oriented development of Ukraine. The statement of basic materials. The essence of the social sustainability is investigated in the article. The review of the results of the assessment of social sustainability, which are presented by international analytical organizations, is performed. The main strategic directions of socially-oriented development of Ukraine are defined. Сonclusions. The definition of national paradigm of sustainable development with taking into account social, cultural, economic and other peculiarities of the country and step-by-step implementation of sustainability principles in all spheres of human activity are important prerequisites for improvement of social wellbeing of the population and formation of socially-oriented market economy in Ukraine.