Fallujah, by Jonathan Holmes (2007), is one of the archetypal examples of verbatim theatre, which addresses the truths of the Iraq War through dramatised eyewitness accounts and documentation reconstructions. Sketched in the Second Battle of Fallujah, the play reveals moral, political, and epistemological aspects of how modern warfare is presented. This article hinges on the postmodern theory of Jean-François Lyotard—especially the concepts of language games, paralogy, and the differend—to discuss the play Fallujah as a subversion of official grand narratives of the Iraq War. Through the use of testimonial intertextuality, irony and fragmentation, Holmes builds a multidimensional tableau of discourse contradictions in which truth is relative, and legitimacy is constantly deferred. The play turns into a meta-discursive critique of Western power dynamics, challenging the manner in which the knowledge is created, distributed, and twisted in the name of liberation and humanitarianism. Further, the article examines both dramaturgical and aesthetic techniques that lend truthfulness to Holmes’ concept of the verbatim approach as it dislocates the truth in relation to war and victimhood. The results help us comprehend the role of modern theatre in the reconstruction of the cultural memory and morality in the post-war era. The article concludes that Fallujah is a vivid example of postmodern theatrical resistance, an ethical and artistic response to commodity violence and the obliteration of lived suffering.

After 2003, Iraq underwent a profound political and economic transformation, accompanied by various challenges, including the burden of accumulated external debt. The post-regime government restructured Iraq’s debt within the framework of the ‘Paris Club’ and through bilateral negotiations with creditor countries. The debt rescheduling aimed to alleviate the financial burden and reintegrate Iraq into the global financial system, but this process was conditional upon implementing economic and political reforms. External political factors played a crucial role in debt rescheduling. Decisions regarding rescheduling were influenced by the political motives of major powers seeking to achieve strategic gains in Iraq. Additionally, the United States and its partners imposed conditions related to reconstruction, regional stability and the safeguarding of their strategic interests in the post-war era. These political interventions affected the course of the economic process and sparked discussions about national sovereignty and the influence of external powers in shaping Iraq’s economic policies. The study, conducted through a descriptive–analytical method, concluded that the rescheduling of Iraq’s debt was more than just an economic process; it reflected the deep interconnection between international politics and economics in the context of rebuilding a post-conflict state.

Sweden is renowned for its centralised wage bargaining system, which has been studied from the point of view of inflation, wage differentials and unemployment. This article studies media coverage of wage bargaining rounds in the 1950s–1960s and in the 2000s–2010s to investigate the social understanding of what the wage bargaining institutions are supposed to do. The results indicate that the operation of the wage bargaining system in the 2000s and of that in the postwar era are in fact understood very differently: while widely shared aims for wage bargaining rounds in the 1950s and 1960s were to a high degree formulated by the trade unions, trade union influence over the agenda was significantly weaker in the 2000s and 2010s, when external experts, not least from the financial sector, were to a much higher degree used to define and formulate what good bargaining outcomes would be.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the role of total factor productivity (TFP), often used to proxy technological change, in building resilience against economic shrinking. Technological change is an important engine of economic growth, yet its role in helping to avoid GDP per capita contractions in the long run is less clear. Increasingly, research is showing that avoiding negative growth episodes, or shrinking, may be equally important for sustainable development. TFP is the primary differentiator in between-country incomes, yet it has not been studied from a shrinking perspective. This study employs a novel growth accounting extension to decompose TFP into positive and negative performance components. Using a global country sample and selected case studies reveals distinct positive and negative TFP performance patterns across country groupings between 1961 and 2019. Negative TFP performance is found to be the key limiting factor for catch-up growth in lower-income countries. High-income countries have mitigated negative TFP more effectively, with declining positive TFP performance lowering their trend TFP growth in recent decades. Resilience against shrinking appears to be a necessary, though insufficient, condition for trend TFP growth to emerge, suggesting that it is a key facilitator of catch-up growth.

Abstract This article interrogates the formation of a national political consensus around coal in the United States. In the postwar era, the domestic future of coal was seriously challenged by the oil, gas, and nuclear alternatives. In less than two decades, however, coal mining shifted from being one of multiple energy options to being a national political project tied to regional development and energy sovereignty. Why did this shift occur? Using archival data, I argue that it was not primarily a response to market forces or corporate pressures but was furthered through the work of the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC). In the years following its inception in 1965, the agency articulated the coal consensus as both a solution to the problem of Appalachian underdevelopment and to the looming energy crisis. In doing so, it brought together the interests of regional, federal, and corporate actors around this consequential project. In this article, I delineate a pathway through which bureaucratic agencies can play a decisive role in the formation of political ideas and advance our understanding of the conditions that make energy transitions possible.

The Untold Story of the Composers Who Fled Hitler sets out to capture the diverse experiences of composers exiled from Europe in the 1930s.Following the author's debut monograph, Forbidden Music: The Jewish Composers Banned by the Nazis (2013), which primarily detailed the bodily and sonic treatment of composers in the lead up to and under the Nazi regime, this new book focuses on how "a representative rather than comprehensive" group of composers personally and professionally negotiated the process of exile through their music during the wartime and the postwar eras (xiv).As Haas argues, "the music of exile was the means by which composers could return to a sense of inner stability" through "a state of physical and mental transplantation."It was "a unique synthesis written by a composer in a place to which they did not fully belong" (9).Haas' findings speak to a plethora of highly individualized experiences of exile as expressed through music, but he also identifies certain patterns in compositional approaches that reflect a shared longing for "return" or "inner restitution" (9).As Haas explains, these composers yearned for return not only "to a country, a homeland, a language, but also to a particular way of life, a loss of privilege and position within an educated and cultivated society" (20).Both the composers who remained in Nazi-occupied Europe and those who left composed music that employed the same compositional tools, structural forms, or poetry as revered composers of their former homelands, while many of the Jewish exiles drew on quintessentially Jewish, Yiddish, or Zionist texts, titles, or musical language.One of this book's many interventions is its deliberate reconceptualization of the meaning and long-lasting impacts of exile.Haas understands exile to include both those Jewish and non-Jewish composers who were physically displaced, as well as non-Jewish composers who experienced what he calls "inner emigration" or "internal exile" by bodily remaining under Nazi authority but composing as if they were abroad (1-2).Music of Exile endeavors to resolve a discrepancy between the music that composers crafted in their former homelands, and the aesthetic and stylistic changes they later made either in internal exile or in the countries where they found refuge.Rather than foregrounding the triumphalist view of migr musicians' contributions to their new homelands, as many contemporary scholars have done, Haas instead asks what the "cost" of these aesthetic and stylistic changes were, and whether they were "organic, or made out of existential necessity" (4).Composers who remained in Nazi-occupied Europe, he explains, navigated the local regime by withholding

As the largest operation of Jewish arrests during the Occupation, the Vel d’Hiv roundup of 16 and 17 July 1942 has become a metonymy for the complicity of France in the Holocaust, and for the difficult acknowledgement of that complicity in the second half of the twentieth century. Representations of the roundup on film and television during the postwar era toed the line between honoring victims and survivors of the roundup on the one hand, and on the other, preserving the national narrative according to which the governments of the 4th and 5th Republics were not guilty of the crimes committed under the Vichy regime. Up until Jacques Chirac’s historical recognition of guilt in 1995, film and television therefore provided platforms for survivors to tell their stories, sometimes against the grain of national narratives, before shifting, in the 2000s, to the consumerist model of representation Audrey Brunetaux called “Holocaust Kitsch.” This essay analyzes two twenty-first century productions about the roundup, the 2010 blockbuster La rafle/The Roundup (Bosch 2010) and the TV documentary La rafle du Vel d’Hiv: La honte et les larmes (Korn-Brzoza 2022). Both of these productions deploy a wealth of digital special effects meant to give a visual incarnation to a historical event famously bereft of visual traces, in an effort to reduce the gap between past and present. How do evolving visual technologies affect the ethics of representing the traumatic past? Does the production of specific affects get in the way of a national devoir de mémoire? To what extent does hypervisuality transform memory into myth? The essay will explore these questions through close analyses of specific scenes in each film, as well as by discussing the extensive marketing efforts made prior to their release.

This article explores labour importism (LI) as a process of labour provisioning whose organising principle is the importation of temporary migrant workers. The analysis is developed around the Arab Gulf States (AGS), the most notable cases of LI in the post-war era. To begin, LI is fleshed out through a ‘history of the present’ genealogy that excavates archival material of the British colonial bureaucracy, the first to systematically administer LI in the AGS. Its lineages are traced from the fin de siècle until the 1970s, the pivotal decade in which LI expanded at scale and was institutionally embedded across all the AGS, continuing to shape migration policy until today. The article then analyses the contemporary social reproduction of LI using the lenses of social difference, global labour arbitrage based on unequal exchange, and super exploitation. As an empirically derived, analytically versatile and spatio-temporally dynamic conceptualisation, LI can overcome the shortcomings associated with state, market, or capital accumulation-centric approaches to labour migration in the AGS and beyond.

Abstract This study analyzes 191 popular cultural artifacts referencing New Math and shows that broader cultural themes of the postwar era, including the urgent need and potential of technological progress, align with widespread beliefs about New Math. The analysis reveals that the public knew little about New Math and regarded it as a mysterious, powerful new technology that would empower the next generation. The study suggests that the public’s perceptions of New Math, and likely other educational reforms, were shaped in a social dialogue among producers and consumers of culture as much as by the content of those reforms.

During moments of institutional change, advocates and critics of reform are forced to publicly and privately articulate why their city should consider or avoid a proposed change. These arguments for and against reform rely on assumptions about the character and purpose of municipal politics—the relevant cleavages, the proper purposes to which municipal politics is directed, and the character of municipal political representation. Moments of reform thus reveal the “implicit theories” of urban politics held by the individuals involved—an opportunity to peer behind quotidian policy debates and explore how local political elites think about the character and purposes of municipal politics. To this end, this article explores implicit theories of urban politics in Calgary, Alberta, during the early post-war period in which the city abandoned its proportional representation, partisan, and at-large electoral system and adopted single-member majoritarian ward-based politics. Combining quantitative electoral data with qualitative archival and newspaper material, the author describes how long-term shifts in electoral competition combined with changing conceptions about the purposes of local politics—especially among the labour movement and urban left in Calgary—to produce a period of major reform. The author shows how these changes reflect changing theories of urban politics, originating in particular configurations of local institutions, in Canadian cities in the early post-war era.

Abstract Beginning with Freud, psychoanalysis and literature have maintained a close, albeit at times confusing, relationship. The preceding century witnessed unspeakable horrors, both in the intensity and magnitude of armed conflicts, likewise producing numerous works of war literature based on experiences in combat and the trauma suffered. Psychoanalysis responded, in turn, to the exigencies of moving beyond the consulting room in order to address mass psychosis and the dangerous corollaries of warmongering, particularly in the postwar era of nuclear rapprochement. War has a fundamentally psychological dimension, and literary criticism must take into consideration the psychic factors which actuate the push toward war within the individual and society. Imprinted with memory, war literature thus emerges as a primary resource for exposing the motivations and visualizations of strategists, politicians, soldiers, and civilians who have rallied round and responded to the call to battle. The following essay examines the phenomenon of war lust in literature through a psychoanalytic lens, tracing the significant theoretical contributions of Freud, Fornari, Fromm, Hillman, and Jacoby, thereby offering a hermeneutics of the destructive attitudes that constitute casus belli.

The UK housing system is in crisis. In 2021, 8.5 million people had unmet housing needs on account of affordability, accessibility and quality. While the Labour Government have placed emphasis on liberating private builders from red tape to build, evidence suggests a much more coordinated and ambitious state-led approach may be necessary. It is unclear, though, whether this is electorally feasible. We report qualitative and quantitative survey-based evidence (survey 1 n = 693; 2 n = 10; 3 n = 2,200), including adversarial co-production and evaluation of narratives, on drivers of support for an illustrative policy programme in the run up to the 2024 General Election. This unique examination of public preferences on housing finds high levels of support for an expansive programme of reform comparable to the post-War era. We find that higher risk of destitution, low socioeconomic status and lower health status predict higher levels of support and that adversarially co-produced narratives increase levels of support, particularly among firm opponents of the policy. We analyse these associations through Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to identify pathways of impact and find moderately strong positive correlations with levels of support for tax and spend. These findings have clear implications for UK Government housing policy.

World War II (WW II) has been the most destructive war the mankind has ever experienced. It has started in Europe like World War I (WW I), most of fighting went on in Europe, but it has spread to North Africa and Far East. The estimated causalities are around 60 million people, 60 % of them being civilians. The devastating results of the war inevitably caused major global changes. The two opposing ideologies, capitalism and communism, practically divided the political arena into two blocks under the leadership of United States and Soviet Union. United Nations has been established with the purpose of solving problems by negotiations and maintaining world peace. The bipolar political status often referred to as “cold war” has lasted more than four decades ending with fall of Berlin wall and disintegration of Soviet Union. Turkey’s position both during WW II and postwar era has been crucial in the history of the young Republic.

Songaksan, a volcano in the southwestern part of Jeju Island, has been a place of contention since Japanese colonial rule, through the US occupation (1945–48), the Korean War, and the postwar era. With its military airfield, forced mobilization of labor, war preparation, civilian massacre, militarized dispossession, and speculative property development, the violence imposed on the place has continued and has been reinforced throughout each of these historical eras. Land has been central from multiple perspectives throughout Songaksan's history. First, the land becomes a key site at which colonialism, militarism, developmentalism, and predatory capitalism operate altogether. Second, the land is a repository of the scars of colonial domination, coercive labor, civilian massacre, militarized dispossession, and speculative extraction. Third, since the land is a reminder of the painful memories and ongoing violence, it has potentials for decolonial reconciliation and community resilience. By acknowledging multiple temporalities of the land and listening to stories the land tells, Songaksan's land-based movement opens up room for self-determination and alternative possibilities. The powerful documentation of Songaksan's densely layered histories and local struggles guides readers to think about broader questions of colonialism, militarism, developmentalism, and predatory capitalism in Jeju and East Asia.

An overview of the history and current state of theriological research across the entire re-gion from the Dnipro to the Donets, including research centres in Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, Poltava, and Kharkiv oblasts. The prehistory (up to 1940) is reviewed, along with the characteristics of research at that time in universities, biological stations, plant protection stations, and game management laboratories. The modern period, considered from the post-war era (1945–1950), covers research at regional universities, biological stations, plant protection stations, and nature reserves. The north-eastern region is one of the richest in terms of regional theriofauna composition, owing to the coexistence of forest and steppe habitats and the diversity of landscapes. Considerable attention has been paid to this region by faunists and applied zoologists, particularly in the fields of plant protection, game management, epidemiology, and nature conservation. The region has repeatedly served as a centre for theriological forums, including several theriological schools.

The article provides information about the history of theriological research at Lviv University. The material is structured according to sections that correspond to the main components, in particular the Zoological Museum, the Department of Zoology, and field stations—Vysokohirnyi in the Carpathians and Shatsky in Polissia. The conducted research indicates a constant connection between these units, through employees, among whom were the first naturalists—O. Zawadski, B. Dybowski, J. Wodzicki, and J. Hirshler; the first theriologists of the post–war era—Y. Valenta, H. Benedyuk, A. Senyk, N. Polushyna, I. Yemelyanova, and M. Vozniuk; and the new generation of theriologists—Y. Srebrodolska, A.-T. Bashta, I. Dykyy, O. Kondratenko, A. Zaytseva, O. Kusnezh, I. Ivashkiv, and M. Martsiv. Thanks to the first cohort, the foundations of research into the animal world, including mammals, were laid, and thanks to the second, significant museum material was collected and the characteristics of mammal populations of certain territories were given, whereas the third continued the work and developed new modern directions.

This research paper examines the high-profile formal international institutional advantages that the West has gained in the global order since the post-war era. Since the mid-1940s, nearly 90% of key international institutions have been founded and operate worldwide. Institutions underpin the global eco-political order because they are instrumental in structure and political in nature. Thus, the West remains structurally powerful enough to maintain its supremacy in the international order. However, global institutions are not permanent, as powerful countries often seek to establish such institutions in their favour. The historical shift reveals that institutional locations frequently change in tandem with the country's shifting global hegemony. This article analyses the influence of global institutions and their roles in the 21st century, adopting institutionalism as the theoretical lens. Institutionalism in IR as a theoretical approach primarily focuses on the prominent roles of formal institutions as soft power actors in anarchical power politics and the global order. Since the 1980s, China has experienced remarkable economic growth and is expected to surpass the USA in the late 2020s, potentially relocating high-status institutions out of the West. Therefore, it may be extremely challenging for the West to maintain its global institutional dominance in the 21st century.

ABSTRACT 2025 marks the 50th anniversary of the end of Oman’s Dhofar War, one of the most pivotal, yet underexamined counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns of the post-Second World War era. The success of the campaign rested largely on the British provision of seconded (loaned) senior officers to lead the Sultan’s Armed Forces (SAF) and conduct the war effort. This article examines the key individual and collective roles played by these officers in shaping the overall strategic picture, SAF capability, operational performance, and ultimately overall Dhofar campaign success. This success cemented its place in a select group of post-war era COIN ‘wins’ worldwide.

ABSTRACT This article interrogates the long-standing yet underexplored alignment between the Italian far right and the State of Israel from the post-war era to the present. Drawing on declassified intelligence files, judicial records, oral testimonies, and discourse analysis, it demonstrates that Italian far-right formations–ranging from the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) to Ordine Nuovo (ON) and the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR)–cultivated ideological, political, and operational links with Israel. These ties encompassed parliamentary support, clandestine intelligence cooperation, and paramilitary training in Lebanon. By situating the Italian case within wider European trajectories, the study challenges the prevailing thesis that contemporary far-right pro-Zionism derives exclusively from Islamophobia. Instead, it shows that such positions emerge from deeper historical patterns of anti-communism, radical Westernism, and admiration for ethnonationalist militarism. The article concludes that the Italian far right’s support for Israel constitutes not a contingent or expedient realignment, but rather a durable cornerstone of its geopolitical imaginary–one that illuminates both the movement’s transnational entanglements and its remarkable aptitude for ideological recalibration.

ABSTRACT This paper focuses on Col. Samuel Ogbemudia’s military career and soldiering exploits during the Nigerian Civil War, and actions in the implementation of the post-civil war reconstruction programme in the Midwest State, especially in Western Igboland, which was a war theatre. It examines the role he played in the liberation of the Midwest State from the Biafran secessionists and how his military exploits accelerated his appointment as the Military Governor of the Midwest. Assessment of Ogbemudia remains a subject of debate among scholars. Some consider him a hero for his military exploits during the Nigerian Civil War, leadership role in the post-war period and after. Others question his role during the war and post-war periods, casting him as a villain. These differing perspectives raise some pertinent questions about his actions as a leader and patriot who contributed immensely to Nigerian unity or rather his political decisions during the war and post-war eras foster interethnic divisions in the Midwestern State. It assesses Ogemudia's role and legacy in Nigerian history to ascertain whether he should be considered a Nigerian Civil War hero or villain. It examines his foray into partisan politics in the Second Republic, his accomplishments and the challenges he encountered as a civilian governor of Bendel State. It evaluates his life as a statesman and highlights his contributions to nation-building. The study used a qualitative research method, and data was collected from primary and secondary sources and critically analyzed.