Este é um estudo que analisa o comportamento internacional do Brasil desde o fim da Guerra Fria até o início da primeira década deste século. Em particular, trata-se de uma investigação sobre as percepções dos formuladores da política externa brasileira sobre as mudanças na distribuição de poder no mundo e o reflexo dessas percepções na relação do Brasil com os Estados Unidos, com a região e com os principais regimes e instituições internacionais. / This is a study of Brazils international behavior from the end of the Cold War to the beginning of the first decade of this century. The investigation focuses on Brazils foreign policy elite, with an emphasis on their perceptions about the changes on the international system and the impacts of these perceptions on Brazils relations with the United States, with its own region and with leading international regimes and institutions.

On May 9, 1950, President Truman declared that “all our international policies, taken together, form a program designed to strengthen and unite the free world.” My dissertation is the first history of the “free world,” a crucial concept that identified the object of U.S. leadership, drove the country to seek global preeminence, and shaped the American understanding of the Cold War. For much of the nineteenth century, American policymakers had envisioned a globe divided into a “new world” of freedom and an “old world” of tyranny. In 1917, Woodrow Wilson proposed a new global dichotomy, arguing for the creation of a trans-Atlantic coalition of democracies against aggressive autocracies whose very existence threatened the survival of freedom everywhere. A revised version of this logic prevailed during the Second World War. But it was only after the start of the Cold War in the late 1940s that American policymakers embraced the concept of an enduring and extra-hemispheric “free world.” Their efforts to lead, unite and strengthen this spatially defined “free world” prompted a massive expansion of American foreign policy and fundamentally transformed the country’s position in the international arena.

Kohoutovíce is my interpretation of urban district moving on the edge of village and cold war urban development. Duality who are giving into context grew old buildings and cold war development as a place with exception identity. Identity based on mutual disharmony forming a function unit when one part complements other. Action causes a reaction. Culture Social center with the Town Hall as the main bearer of the idea of mutual penetration between coexistence looking for its history and future. Instead of overlap, which aims to reflect both the present and future needs and significantly cities and boroughs, necessary for quality of living and use. The project implements existing hall located on the border of the original buildings, but also in direct contact with another typical feature of the whole territory, and panel buildings. Duality, otherness, diversity as incompatible interaction forming a single center of gravity in one place. Persona grata.

The doctoral thesis Czechoslovakia and the Southern Cone 1945-1989 analyses political, economic and cultural relations between an important country of the Eastern Bloc and three countries of the southernmost area of South America - Argentina, Chile and Uruguay - during the Cold War. The main objective of the thesis is to interpret unpublished Czech and foreign archives. The first chapter outlines Czechoslovak policy towards Latin America in the period under consideration. The following sections describe the relations between Czechoslovakia and the individual countries of the Southern Cone. These chapters are divided according to the nature of relations into political, economic and cultural contacts. Each of these three parts is further divided into subsections which correspond to important milestones of mutual relations. The thesis ends with an interview with Stanislav Svoboda, a senior diplomat of communist Czechoslovakia. His observations shed new light on the archive documents. Without abandoning the effort of presenting foreign researchers with the value of Czech archives, whose importance is further increased by the limited accessibility of Russian archives, the paper attempts to analyse the issue in the broader context of international politics. In a bipolar world, each of these countries had...

Author analyses three protracted conflicts of the 20th century (Cold War, Israeli-Arab Conflict and Indo-Pakistani Rivalry) in both qualitative and quantitative manner in order to find out an answer for the following research question: "Does a deterrence failure caused by a lack of credibility increase the likelihood of general deterrence failure in the next crisis?"

Russian-American Relations and the Mass Media Securitization of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in the American Press by Valeriia Alikina This thesis is focused on two issues relevant to Security Studies and Political Science: relations between the Russian Federation and the United States of America, which are currently experiencing yet another decline, and problematics of political journalism. It reviews the process of securitization of Russia through speech acts in the mass media of its historical opponent, the United States. First, the thesis provides a theoretical framework, securitization theory, introducing its main principles. To prove that the process of securitization indeed occurs, the method of discourse analysis is employed. The third chapter provides background information on the relations between the Soviet Union/Russia and the United States since the end of the World War II; this information is completed by the role mass media had in their affairs. The next chapter frames the issue of propaganda, elaborating on the meaning behind this concept, the "fake news" narrative, and the idealistic idea of media objectivity. In the fifth chapter, the case study, two processes of securitization are reviewed. The first one is the American mainstream media, namely ​The New York Times​ and ​The...

The subject of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is widely known and has the public attention. Still it is not processed enough by the historians. The end of the 1980's, as a period of withrdraw of the Soviet soldiers, draws more attention. Even the person of Jimmy Carter does not draw that much attention as the personality of his successor Ronald Reagan. The author will concentrate on the steps that were taken consequently after the Soviet incursion by the leading policy makers of the USA headed by president Carter. The author will analyse the indirect American involvement in the conflict and its influence on the relations of the superpowers and the condiotions in the administrative of the president of the USA. The author will also make an effort to show the continuity with the previous foreign policy of USA, Afghanistan and Soviet Union.

The project “Telling Sounds” (www.mdw.ac.at/imi/tellingsounds) has the goal of preparing online available audio-(visual) sources (clips) as a basis for understanding contemporary musical history. The metadata of these clips will be enriched and grouped according to thematic aspects as a starting point for case studies. As a basis for such a digital research environment, a special tool will be developed which makes it possible to visualize the connections between clips and the entities and meanings, thus open them up for further research. As an example of the consequences and possibilities of such a music-historical representation, the following text relates different musical and media forms of expression in Vienna in the 1970s: the Beethoven anniversary, the history of Austropop, the communication of women-related topics on the radio and the propagandistic significance of this medium during the Cold War in connection with the topos “Music Country Austria” are thus made comprehensible as facets of music-related constructions of meaning in a concrete historical time and place.

<p>This project argues that the nuclear bomb has made speculation an integral part of representing the material world. The bomb’s capability to cause an unprecedented extent of destruction and the constant state of latent war between nuclear-armed countries (expressed through arms race and high alert readiness) created a reality where the disasters in the future must be constantly speculated to understand the contemporary world’s material state. The tens of thousands of nuclear warheads sleeping in silos and submarines are not just the sum of their material components, but also incredibly compressed embodiments of future disasters that may be released at a moment’s notice. Regardless of the likelihood of nuclear conflicts (with which this dissertation is not concerned), the weapon exerts its influence as one of the most catastrophic possibilities even as it remains dormant. In considering the implications of nuclear weapons, all nations and people on the planet think not of what they are, but what they can do. The weapon’s possible future states define its present significance.</p><p> The inherent oxymoron of the nuclear bomb is thus that despite its staggering materiality, it is fiction as well. Any representation of the bomb that ponders its sole purpose—mass destruction—is inevitably speculative. While the degrees in which they reference empirical data vary, the narratives from which people around the world from heads of nations to common citizens learn anything at all about nuclear weaponry are forms of fiction, ranging from fantastical literary fictions to strategic fictions attempting to represent the power of the weapon that is itself fantastical. Not all representations of the weapon or nuclear war are, of course, taken seriously. Apocalyptic nuclear events are often used in popular nuclear fictions as a convenient excuse for dismantling the existing social structures and providing interesting backdrops for survivalist stories. The very fact that imaginations of hypothetical nuclear disasters have become an overused cliché all the while proliferation remains an active threat, however, also indicates that the world has been living with the horrifying prospect of nuclear disasters for decades without an actual event of the kind—that, in other words, the weapon has existed mostly as a fiction. The introduction of the nuclear bomb to the world in this sense marks a critical point in history beyond which the speculated future outcomes of the productions in the present increasingly becomes an integral part of understanding the latter.</p><p>The central concept with which I articulate the relationship between the present and the future created by nuclear weaponry is “eventuality.” Eventuality is a narrativization process through which a historical event develops into an anticipated future event as the original event’s outcome. A story about a fictional World War III involving nuclear weapons, for example, is a form of eventuality. The conceptual usefulness of eventuality is that it articulates the historical trend in the post-1945 era as well as the more recent years of climate change, in which hypothetical future events are increasingly represented not just for the purpose of knowing the future itself, but also reassessing the history to date. Eventuality establishes a causal relation between an event and its hypothetical future outcome—or its “eventual” as I call it. By drawing a line of synthetic history extending beyond the present, eventuality as a narrativization process defines the direction in which history has been heading up to the present. Compared to the postmodernist understanding of the representation of the past, eventuality is concerned with how human productions in the present already creates the future and, consequently, how the very ways in which we conceive the present is influenced by the possible futures.</p><p>To discuss the concept of eventuality in detail, the first chapter examines time travel narratives as ideal instances of eventuality. Eventuality consists in two operations running in opposite temporal directions—speculatively writing the future (prospection) and assessing history in light of that speculated future (retrospection). The literary genre that embodies this exact pair of movements is the time travel narrative. H. G. Wells’s novel <i>The Time Machine </i>(1895), the first scientific time travel story, creates a critical legacy for the genre: the assumption that the entirety of time already exists. The conceptualization of the already-existing future is important because it emphasizes the causal relation between the present and the future—the future which the time traveler witnesses is the direct outcome of his present. In the movie adaptation produced during the Cold War, the dystopian course of history is rewritten to be a nuclear war narrative, which suggests that the time travel narrative as a base frame has been appropriated by the desire to speculate the future born with the nuclear bomb. Then decades later the <i>Terminator </i>movies develop the time travel narrative as an instance of eventuality even further by creating a scenario in which the future is no longer just an uncharted territory to be explored, but an active force that has a direct sway over the present’s world. </p><p>Along with literary fictions of nuclear disasters, strategic studies on nuclear conflicts also attempt to represent the nonexistent events of future disasters. The historical significance of the advent of wargaming, a major form of nuclear strategic fiction, is that even the comparatively scientific and empirical study of nuclear war funded by the U.S. military is fundamentally speculative. The very formation and development of wargaming, in other words, is an indication that the nuclear weapon brings with it unknown possibilities for the future. The legitimacy of a wargame’s findings is dependent on that of the future projection used in the scenario. But since the latter is itself speculative and thus cannot be proven, the narrative logic of a wargame is circular or self-referential. This circularity is exactly the structure of the synthetic history in the <i>Terminator </i>films, which is a form of eventuality in which the present creates the future and the future retrospectively redefines the present.</p><p>The nuclear bomb, finally, also contributed to the advent of ecological worldview with its ecocidal nature and sheer extent of destructive capability. Geosciences in the U.S. experienced a rapid growth following the second World War, as the military pursued global surveillance for nuclear activities. Some of the same scientists who developed the weapons also began to study the interactions between radiation and the human body, as the workers in the weapons production lines began to experience radiation sickness. This kind of research was soon expanded to the study of radiation’s ecological effects on a broader scale involving not just the human bodies but also other environmental entities, organic and inorganic. Civilian research projects, in the meantime, found a widespread impact of weapons tests, including the “bone seeker” radioisotopes accumulated in the human body. Lastly, in terms of the more general way of understanding the world, the cases of radiation exposures discovered far away from the sources offered people around the world points of reference with which they could conceive an ecologically interconnected network on a planetary scale. </p>

Proměny konceptu neutrality v teorii a praxi vybraných evropských států Abstract The thesis explores the emergence of a unique concept of neutrality within each the three neutral European countries: Sweden, Switzerland and Austria. In then examines changes in the policy of neutrality over time within each compared states, with emphasis on the post - Cold War transition from a bipolar to a multipolar world order. It is concluded that the end of the Cold War has had a marked influence on changes in the concept of neutrality within each of the compared states, largely because of the emergence of novel threats which can be now more effectively controlled through international cooperation as opposed to unilateral action by a single nation.