Which grand strategies do Great Powers adopt towards rising challengers? When do Great Powers conciliate their potential rivals, and when do they opt for strategies of containment? In this master’s report, I outline an argument to answer these and related questions. I add to the existing literatures on grand strategy and power transitions in several key respects. First, I model power shifts between Great Powers as contests over access to externally located benefits rather than as contests over power for its own sake. Second, I emphasize the weight of domestic politics in shaping states’ preferences over the apportionment of these benefits. Third, I highlight the role of diplomacy in determining whether established Great Powers choose to conciliate or else contain potential rivals. Empirically, I provide four vignettes of Great Power responses to rising states: the United States’ strategy towards Japan during the Cold War; Britain’s appeasement of the United States, 1890-1914; the United States’ containment of the Soviet Union under Ronald Reagan; and Britain’s containment of Wilhelmine Germany. / text

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Political Science, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis presents three main arguments. First, that curating in national museums is a process of meaning making and that the exhibitionary meaning is situated in and mediated by culture, thus, the products of curatorial work, i.e. the exhibitionary complexes are complex political and cultural constructions. Second, that the exhibitionary complexes final visual outcome, i.e. the exhibitionary complexes images and texts result in the presentation of mythological constructs of Byzantium as the only truth to their audiences. Third, that what is finally communicated through the presentation of mythological constructs of Byzantium is national identity and dominant cultural values. The latter is effected through the representation of the Byzantine Empire as part of the identity of the dominant cultural group of the country to which each national museum belongs. National identity is communicated through the exhibitionary complexes, either by suggesting historical continuity of the contemporary national identity of a country s dominant cultural group through Byzantium, as in the case of the Greek national museums, or by undermining the very idea that Byzantine history, European history and British history are so very different, as in the case of the British Museum. Both interpretations are culturally constructed realities . The above approaches are explained through the investigation of exhibitionary meaning around Byzantium, by identifying and analysing the nature and cultural functions of the presuppositions that are involved in each museum s curatorial practices. These presuppositions are the cultural ideas, values and beliefs of the involved dominant cultural groups on Byzantium and on their own identity. My identification and analysis of these presuppositions includes research on the historical, political and cultural context of each museum, the culturally accepted history and art history literature of each country on Byzantium, as well as research on museum archives. By explaining and using the curatorial concepts of democratisation and demystification , adopted and adapted to the practices of the museums under study, and by analysing the British and Greek interpretations of Byzantium, which make themselves apparent in the images and texts of the British and Greek exhibitionary complexes , I provide a cultural account of the making of exhibitionary meaning, explaining contemporary perceptions of Byzantium, its use in identity making and its relation to national politics. By doing this, I also explain the implications of those presuppositions to the making of exhibitionary meaning, and I provide an explanation of how and why the power system of the exhibitionary complex is still in play although we are shifting into the era of the Democratic museum (Fleming, 2008). The concluding remarks of the thesis include suggestions for the further development of the curatorial practices of democratisation and demystification.

This dissertation investigates how the category of gender difference was mobilised as a practice of power at the early modern court. It argues that gender was not simply a relational category affecting who could participate in early modern politics in what ways, but that it constituted a crucial and active resource of dynastic power. This subject of study is opened up through a case study of the court of Württemberg in the subsequent reigns of Dukes Friedrich I and his son Johann Friedrich, which span the period of time from 1593 to 1628. The reign of Duke Friedrich I was a time of political reform, which saw the influence of the local estates curtailed and an extroverted foreign policy pursued, whilst the duke concurrently entertained several extramarital affairs in contention with Lutheranism’s prescriptions. His son Johann Friedrich clearly took exception to his father's lifestyle, since, at Friedrich's premature death in 1608, he imprisoned a number of his father's mistresses and procuresses. He was forced to let the majority of these women go again quite quickly, keeping only one suspected procuress in custody, whose case was to drag on until 1618. Johann Friedrich's mother Duchess Sibylla, who had borne fifteen children to Friedrich and thus became the Stammesmutter of a new Württemberg dynastic line, was involved in these dealings. The contrast of these two differently structured approaches to rulership allows for the investigation of the power dynamics of monogamy and polygamy in one coherent case study. Württemberg is an interesting location for this research since it was a large and important territory of southern Germany, which came to be deeply involved in Protestant resistance in the worsening religious strife leading up to the Thirty Years’ War. Documents ranging from court ordinances, festival descriptions and servants registers, to courtly correspondences, juridical supplications and declarations have been consulted. This broad range of primary sources facilitates the investigation of the salience of gender difference both in the context of a courtly system heading a polity, as well as on the level of individual actors whose personhood was intricately entwined with their gendered identities. It is argued here that it is imperative to avoid a fragmentation within court studies into gender and women’s history on the one side and political approaches on the other, in order to maximise our understanding of the practice of power located at early modern courts. Gender difference complicated and further differentiated courtly status hierarchies and lent flexibility to increasingly rigid sets of dynastic rules about reproduction, succession, and etiquette, which had a beneficial impact on the longevity of the dynastic system.

When thinking about Stuart Hall’s theoretical legacy, ‘power’ is probably not the first term that comes to mind. Concepts like representation, racism, ethnicity, encoding/decoding, articulation, conjunctural analysis etc. more readily suggest themselves and structure our reception of his work. Yet nonetheless, when taking a closer look, his entire oeuvre may be said to be permeated, on different levels, by themes that touch upon the issue of power, not least in connection with the concepts listed above. The latent omnipresence of power in Hall’s thinking is perhaps most readily detectable on the meta-level on which he situates and positions himself as a cultural-studies scholar, and it is this level that hence will be addressed first. In the second section, Hall’s view of power on the economic, social and state levels will be considered, particularly by pointing out his indebtedness to Antonio Gramsci’s conception of hegemonic power. In an attempt to let Hall speak for himself as much as possible, the section will provide quite a few quotes, many of which will be taken from the collaboratively written Policing the Crisis, in order to shed some light on his – and his co-authors’ – ideas about power. The third section attempts a systematisation of the issues raised, particularly by integrating a Foucauldian perspective on power, which was nearly as important for Hall as the Gramscian. The last section will conclude by returning to the beginning, reconsidering Hall’s self-positioning within the power/knowledge nexus that structures the discourse of cultural studies.

In the past decades, political theory and philosophy have seen the canonization of a new conceptual difference, whose roots have been traced back to a number of thinkers, but whose main theoretical elaboration can be said to have begun with the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique founded by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in 1980 and closed in 1984: the difference between la politique and le politique, or between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. As Chantal Mouffe (2005a: 8f), borrowing Heidegger’s vocabulary, has pointed out, the two terms operate on different levels: whereas ‘politics’ refers to the ‘ontic’ level and designates the empirical ‘facts’ of political organization – practices, institutions, discourses, etc. – ‘the political’ implies a philosophical inquiry at the ‘ontological’ level, asking, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1981: 12) put it, about the ‘essence of the political’. While, in theorists as diverse as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, Claude Lefort, Roberto Esposito, Ernesto Laclau, and many others – most of them located on the political left – this inquiry has yielded very different results, they all agree on the basic necessity to make this distinction between conventional politics, on the one hand, and a more profound dimension concerning the institution of the social itself, on the other. Similarly, virtually all the thinkers mentioned are in agreement as to the state of the political in the contemporary world: they all see it as in danger of being ignored, repressed or neutralized in the context of what they criticize as increasingly ‘post-political’ and ‘post-democratic’ social arrangements. This critique of today’s post-politics is a powerful and important one. In the following, I want to argue that the work of Stuart Hall to some extent shares in – in fact, anticipates, since most of the relevant theories were developed after 1989 – this critical discourse. More specifically, I will 1) bring out and discuss Hall’s critique of post-politics; 2) elaborate upon his own understanding of the political, which is implicit in this critique and elsewhere in his writings – I will argue that Hall’s thought can be considered as belonging to what the sociologist Oliver Marchart (2010) has termed ‘the moment of the political’, insofar as it is a product of and response to our ‘post-foundational condition’, emphasizing as it does conflictuality, contingency and the groundlessness of society; 3) and finally, building on this, I will briefly talk about the conclusions concerning (ontic) politics that the post-foundationalism Hall shares with most of the other theorists I have mentioned leads him to, which are very different from those arrived at by philosophers such as Badiou, Rancière or Žižek and closer – partly via the shared engagement with Gramsci – to those of Mouffe and Laclau or Lefort.

No description available.

When I first came across Stuart Hall’s engagement with Gramsci in his analysis of Margaret Thatcher’s struggle for power, I was excited by how much his theoretical framework provided new perspectives to reflect on my own experiences of social and political struggles. Here was somebody who analysed social change in its contradictory fluidity as something in the making. Not from ‘out there’, but as someone acting on it. It haunted me how valuable his approach was for understanding the unexpected outcomes and victories of social movements – not only for a better understanding of history and society, but also with a view to actively partaking in these movements and shape them. In this paper, I will demonstrate the strength of Hall’s approach for highlighting the chances of social movements to achieve their alternative goals although they fight from a position of weakness against powerful adversaries. I have been (and still am) an active part of the two movements I want to explore. First, I will discuss the success of the squatters and their allies in defending ‘their’ houses in Hamburg’s St. Pauli Hafenstraße, where I still live, in the 1980s and 90s, and, second, the current2 struggle of the refugee group ‘Lampedusa in Hamburg’ for the right to stay in Germany despite the ‘Dublin’ regulations which force refugees to stay in those countries where they first arrived. Both of these struggles had to engage with and counter stereotypical representations. Both of them, as I will show, started by addressing “immediate troubles” and led to a deeper understanding that another world is not only needed, but also possible – “an entirely new form of civilization” (Hall 1987: 21). Therefore, I think it is worthwhile to engage with them.

Yes / Are nuclear weapons still relevant to global security? Compared with the nuclear confrontation in the depths of the Cold War, nuclear weapons and deterrence appear to have lost their salience. Considering the conflicts in which the major powers engaged, the focus in strategic studies changed to counterinsurgency, counterterrorism, and subconventional conflict.2 Only recently, with the conflict in Ukraine and the increasingly confrontational relationship between the United States and China has this narrative come into question. The general perception on international security exhibits a strange paradox. On the one hand the US-led military interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq and other parts, the conflicts in the Middle East and Africa, the nuclearization of North Korea and the conflict between India and Pakistan among other regional security issues have given rise to a view that the modern world is less secure than ever, and we live in a world of chaos riven by unpredictable patterns of violence. By contrast, Steven Pinker has demonstrated the casualties from armed conflict are at their lowest point in human history, and interstate warfare has virtually ceased to exist as a phenomenon.3 The imminence of a global nuclear war in which at a minimum hundreds of millions of people would die appears to have dissipated. In some respects, it appears that war has become almost a phenomenon of the past. Most of the recent literature on nuclear weapons has focused on regional crises areas, such as South Asia (India and Pakistan) or the Korean peninsula.4 However, the modernization of arsenals by the nuclear powers, the integration of strategic conventional and nuclear weapons in strategic doctrines and the more confrontational dynamics in Great Power politics is cited as evidence that the risk of nuclear use is increasing. This paper contests the emerging narratives on an increased threat of nuclear conflict and considers the sources of insecurity in the contemporary period and in particular the risks of armed conflict between the United States, Russia, and China in order to assess the role of nuclear weapons in contemporary security.

In his review of John Akomfrah’s experimental documentary The Stuart Hall Project (2013), Adam Elliott-Cooper highlights the growing necessity to revisit Hall’s scholarly and activist legacy today. Elliott-Cooper takes issue with the contemporary left for failing to properly respond to a persistent institutional racism during neoliberalism and particularly argues that the 2011 English riots, following the shooting of Mark Duggan by police in Tottenham, are proof that an approach informed by Hall’s theoretical and activist work on race, ethnicity and policing is now more needed than ever in order to come to terms with the problems underlying the riots. In fact, the years after the riots have seen an increase in scholarship indebted to the “political and critical tradition of British cultural studies best exemplified by the work of Stuart Hall”, functioning as a “backlash against [...] current forms of post-ideological scholarship”, as Imogen Tyler describes her own current work on social abjection (2013: 215). In the following argument, I regard the English riots as a test case that can shape a dialogue between Hall’s work on ethnicity and difference, and younger currents in cultural studies. In particular, I will focus on the interplay of race and class that seems to be at the heart of the riots, and which has surfaced in many responses to them, most infamously historian David Starkey’s statement about the looters and rioters who, in his words, were “whites [who] have become black” (BBC 2011).