During the early Cold War, as the Soviet menace placed Canada in between two hostile superpowers, the Canadian government decided to take steps to ensure that its sovereignty and national interests were not threatened by the Americans in the new strategic environment. This study examines the extent to which the Canadian government actually defended its sovereignty and rights against American intrusions in the early Cold War. At its core is an examination of the government’s policy of gradual acquisition in the Arctic between 1945 and 1951. This thesis explores the relationships that existed at the time, the essence of the negotiations, the state of international law and the potential costs and benefits of certain Canadian courses of action. It also explains how Canada’s quiet diplomacy allowed it to avoid alienating its chief ally, contribute to continental defence, and strengthen its sovereignty during this period.

Filmmediet idag är den mest populära formen av masskultur. Med sin världstäckande genomslagskraft och sitt stereotypa porträtterande av verklighet, påverkar filmen världsåskådningen för människor runtom i världen. Ett brinnande ämne i amerikansk film har alltid varit Ryssland, på grund av de politiska motsättningarna och den historiska rivaliteten med USA. Studiens syfte är att undersöka hur Ryssland porträtteras i amerikanska filmer från perioden för presidenterna Dmitrij Medvedevs respektive Barack Obamas första mandatperiod. Frågeställningen för uppsatsen är: hur ser stereotypa föreställningar om Ryssland ut i amerikansk film 2008-2011? Trettiotal filmer med ryska motiv valdes ut för undersökningen och analyserades utifrån de visuella och sociala aspekterna. Resultatet visar på att det förekommer tre skikt av stereotyper om Ryssland: de eviga, som har existerat i hundratals år och spridits av resenärer; stereotyper från epoken för det kalla kriget; och stereotyper om det moderna Ryssland inspirerade av medias nyhetsrapporteringar.

This dissertation explores the central paradox of Mexico's foreign relations with Cuba and the United States in the decade following the Cuban Revolution--why did a government that cooperated with the CIA and practiced conservative domestic policies defend Castro's communist regime? It uses new sources to prove that historians' previous focus on the foreign and ideological influences on Mexico's relations with Cuba was misplaced, and that the most important factor was fear of the domestic Left. It argues that Mexican leaders capitalized upon their country's "special relationship" with Castro as part of their efforts to maintain control over restive leftist sectors of the Mexican population. This project uses new sources to illuminate how perceptions of threat shaped Mexico's foreign and domestic politics. In 2002, the Mexican government declassified the records of the two most important intelligence organizations--the Department of Federal Security and the Department of Political and Social Investigations. The files contain the information that Mexico's presidents received about potential dangers to their regime. They reveal that Mexican leaders overestimated the centralization, organization, and coordination of leftist groups, and in so doing gave them more influence over policy than their actual numbers or resources logically should have afforded. The dissertation uses the concept of threat perception as an analytic and organizational tool. Each chapter considers a different potential source of danger to the Mexican regime in the context of the Cold War and the country's relations with Cuba. For the sake of clarity, it breaks the threats into the categories of individual, national, and international, even though these subjective categories may blend into one another throughout the course of the analysis. The first chapter begins with an individual threat: Lázaro Cárdenas, a powerful former president who became one of Fidel Castro's most dedicated supporters. The next three chapters analyze threats on the national level by looking at the domestic groups that Mexican leaders perceived to be the greatest dangers to their regime. The final two chapters move to the international level and examine the roles of Cuba and the United States. As a whole, this study of the connections between Mexico's foreign and domestic politics makes a significant and timely contribution to the historiographies of modern Mexico, U.S.-Latin American relations, and the Cold War. / text

The conclusion of the Cold War has had contradictory effects on on-going conflicts in the former superpower client states of Ethiopia, Somalia and Angola. The argument proposed in this dissertation seeks to explain these variations in conflict. Two conditions, distribution of power and governing agreement, are considered to be fundamental to this explanation. In many cases, disputants have had access to arms in the past and their ability to pursue violent means to their objectives in the future is contingent on their continued access to weapons or other resources. These patterns are reflected in the distribution of power. The second condition, governing agreement, reflects the fact that in the immediate post-Cold War era, disputants have frequently sought to resolve their differences through negotiations. What is relevant here is whether any subsequent political pact exists between disputants and whether it involves power-sharing or a winner-take-all process. These two conditions, military viability and governing agreement, are combined in a matrix to suggest how their interaction leads to divergent outcomes. Depending on the mix of conditions, the outcomes range from "stable peace" to "tense peace or low-level conflict" to "civil war." The argument is applied to the three cases from 1985 to 1995. The author concludes that winner-take-all elections, though often the preference of African leaders, can be a recipe for disaster in tightly contested states with a history of violent conflict. On the other hand, while power-sharing agreements are difficult to arrive at (and even more difficult to implement), agreements leading to governments which are inclusive of the main disputants are an important step in the mitigation of conflict. By building security and creating the sense that both parties have a stake in the continued functioning of a political system, armed movements may be more willing to relinquish their weapons and embrace peace.

To wield direct influence on the everyday lives of citizens, new political elites have often professed a profound interest in shaping the politics of dwelling. In the 1920s, Vienna’s Social Democrats built 400 communal housing blocks equipped with public gardens, theaters, libraries, kindergartens, and sports facilities, hoping that these facilities would serve as loci for “growing into socialism”. In the 1950s, housing construction in Berlin became a site of the Cold War. East Berlin’s social realist “workers palaces” on Stalinallee were meant to serve as an ideal flourishing ground for the “new socialist men and women”. In contrast, West Berlin's modernist Hansa-Viertel was designed to showcase an ideal dwelling culture and an urban environment that would cultivate individuality. This dissertation examines three historically situated and ideologically distinct responses to the housing question: social democracy in Red Vienna, state socialism in East Berlin, and liberal capitalism in West Berlin. It illuminates how political promises of a radical new beginning were translated into spatial arrangements—the private scale of the apartment and the urban scale of the city—as well as how citizens appropriated the social, political, and economic norms inherent to the new spaces they inhabited. More specifically, the following analyses demonstrate the fact that inherited social, technological, and economic practices have often subverted political visions of a radically different future. This was the case with pedagogy in Red Vienna’s municipal housing, instrumental reason in the form of Taylorism and Fordism in East and West Berlin’s mass housing, and gender relations in Red Vienna’s and East Berlin’s politics of dwelling. At the same time, this dissertation examines counter-spaces that emerged from the dialectics between political promises and actual socio-spatial realities, counter-spaces that both reflect critically on past hegemonic “politics of dwelling” and that foreshadow alternative political imaginations that are still relevant today. Of particular interest are counter-hegemonic practices of dwelling that embody possibilities of emancipation—of experiencing oneself as subject instead of object of social transformation, justice—of emphasizing considerations of equality and recognition, and radical democracy—of questioning power relations and of forming alliances among disadvantaged groups to transform everyday life.

The subject matter of my study is representations of Russia in Anglo-American and Russian spy novels, mysteries, and action thrillers of the 1990s. Especially suitable for representing the world split between good and evil, these genres played a prominent role in constructing the image of the other during the Cold War. Crime fiction then is an important source for grasping the changes in representing Russia after the Cold War. My hypothesis is that despite the changes in the political roles of Russia and the United States, the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union continued to have a significant impact on popular fiction about Russia in the 1990s. A comparative perspective on depictions of Russia in the 1990s is particularly suitable in regard to American and Russian popular cultures because during the Cold War, Soviet and American identities were formed in view of the other. A comparative approach to the study of Russian popular fiction is additionally justified by the role that the idea of the West had played in Russian cultural history starting from the early eighteenth century. Reflection on depictions of Russia in crime fiction by writers coming from the two formerly antagonistic cultures poses the problem of representation in its relationship to time, history, politics, popular culture, and genre. The methods used in this dissertation derive from the field of cultural studies, history, and structuralist poetics. A combination of structuralist readings and social theory allows me to uncover the ways in which popular detective genres changed in response to the sentiments of nostalgia and anxiety about repressed or lost identities, the sentiments that were typical of the 1990s. My study of Anglo-American and Russian spy novels, mysteries, and action thrillers contributes to our understanding of the ways American and Russian cultures invent and reinvent themselves after a significant historical rupture, how they mobilize the past for making sense of the present. Drawing on readings of literature and culture by such scholars as Mikhail Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, Siegfried Kracauer, Andreas Huyssen, Fredric Jameson, and Svetlana Boym, I show that differences in Anglo-American and Russian representations of Russia are a result of cultural asymmetries and cultural chronotopes in the United States and in Russia. I argue that Russian and American crime fiction of the 1990s re-writes Russia in the light of cultural memory, nostalgia, and historical sensibilities after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. Memories of the Cold War and coming to terms with the end of the Cold War played a defining role in depicting Russia by Anglo-American detective authors of the 1990s; this role is clear from the genre changes in Anglo-American thrillers about Russia. Similarly, reconsideration of Russian history became an essential characteristic in the development of the new Russian detektiv.

Through their stories, South African Defence Force (SADF) veterans of the Border War participate in the historical revival of South Africa’s involvement in the Angolan conflict, 1966-1989. Their engagement in the Border War discourse sets these veterans apart for an analysis of their motivations to participate and how their views compare and contrast with one another. SADF veterans are reconstructing their past within their present context in the new South Africa. Their struggle to rectify public knowledge and perceptions of the past through the provision of their personal memories is a growing trend within South Africa, one that has become a conversation between the various competing narratives.

The question raised in this dissertation is: how is foreign policy explained by analyzing the use of historical analogies by decision-makers in their public statements? The purpose of this study is to develop an analytical framework that will help one to analyze the role of historical analogies in foreign policy. This dissertation challenges conventional approaches to historical analogies. It claims that conventional approaches unduly restrict the role that historical analogies play in foreign policy because of the way they perceive variety of practices in which historical analogies are used, as well as their premises about history and language analysis. This dissertation argues against the arguments of conventional instrumental, cognitive and integrated approaches and claims that the scope of constitutive approach needs to be extended. An alternative conceptualization of historical analogies is built on premises of rule-oriented constructivism, speech act theory and dialogical analysis method. In order to demonstrate the significance of the alternative approach to historical analogies the model is applied to an illustrative analysis of the Cold War historical analogy used by the U.S. and Russia’s officials in 2007–2008. The question whether a chance of a (new) Cold War between the U.S. and Russia was possible at that time is answered by showing what kind of rules policy-makers had constituted by using the Cold War historical analogy. / Disertacijoje keliamas klausimas, kaip galima paaiškinti valstybės užsienio politiką analizuojant užsienio politikos veikėjų viešuose pasisakymuose naudojamas istorines analogijas ir su jomis susijusį užsienio politikos procesą? Tyrimo tikslas – sukonstruoti modelį, kuris leistų paaiškinti istorinių analogijų vaidmenį užsienio politikoje. Teigiama, kad konvenciniai požiūriai į istorines analogijas, dėl savo prielaidų apie istorinių analogijų naudojimo praktikas, istorijos ir kalbos analizę, pernelyg siaurai aiškina istorinių analogijų vaidmenį užsienio politikoje. Disertacijoje oponuojama instrumentiniam, kognityviam ir integruotam požiūriams į istorinių analogijų vaidmenį užsienio politikoje ir teigiama, kad reikėtų išplėtoti konstitutyviojo požiūrio aiškinimą. Tyrime formuluojamas konvenciniams požiūriams alternatyvus istorinių analogijų analizės modelis, apimantis taisyklių konstruktyvizmo ir kalbėjimo akto teorijos prielaidas bei dialoginės analizės metodą. Siekiant atskleisti, kaip remiantis modeliu gali būti analizuojamos istorinės analogijos, jis pritaikomas atvejo analizei – 2007–2008 m. JAV ir Rusijos politikų naudotos Šaltojo karo istorinės analogijos tyrimui. Remiantis istorinių analogijų analizės modeliu tuo metu JAV ir Rusijos santykių tyrimuose dažnai keltą klausimą, ar egzistuoja (naujas) šaltasis karas tarp JAV ir Rusijos, bandoma atsakyti tiriant, kaip pasiremdami Šaltojo karo istorine analogija JAV ir Rusijos užsienio politikos veikėjai apibrėžė dvišalius... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

The purpose of this investigation is to discuss the relevance of Black theology in light of the emergence of reconstruction theology. It offers a critical survey of a range of contributions on this issue, questioning whether scholars who have used Black theology as a form of self description should shift emphasis, from the paradigm of liberation to reconstruction. The significance of this study has to be understood within the context of the proposal to redirect African theological initiatives from liberation theologies to reconstruction theology. The basis for this call was the end of apartheid in South Africa, which signalled the independence of all countries on the African continent.

Dans ce mémoire, il s’agit de développer et d’appliquer une méthode qui peut saisir le manuel scolaire comme objet de l’analyse historique et de l’analyse du discours. La méthode cible le livre seulement et combine des outils littéraires et historiques, quantitatifs et qualitatifs, en essayant de tenir compte de l’expérience du livre. L’analyse porte sur la narration de la guerre de Corée dans les manuels de six pays (Allemagne RDA et RFA, la Chine RPC, les États-Unis, le Chili et l’Argentine) de deux moments différents (1962 et 1992). La guerre de Corée a été un événement majeur de la Guerre froide entre les mondes capitalistes et communistes et a contribué à la course aux armements nucléaires. Elle a installé le modèle de la guerre par procuration comme solution de conflits entre les deux idéologies. Une comparaison large d’un événement précis peut nous donner des indications sur le fonctionnement des différents niveaux de la mémoire d’une société et expliquer des éléments du fonctionnement des cycles historiographiques. / This master’s thesis develops and tests a methodology that tries to understand the textbook as an object of historical and discourse analysis. The method centers primarily on the textbook and combines tools of literary criticism and historical research, using quantitative and qualitative analysis, while trying to capture the reader’s experience of the narrated history. We analyze the narration of the Korean war in the textbooks from six different coun- tries (East and West Germany, mainland China, the United States, Chile and Argentina) at two different times (1962 and 1992). The Korean war has been a major event of the cold war between capitalist and communist world and lead to the nuclear arms race. It introduced the model of the proxy war as a means of conflict resolution between the two ideologies. A larger comparison of a precise event can yield indications about how the different levels of social memory work and can explain elements of of the cycles of historiograph- ical paradigms.