attacks on civilian targets and their suffering. For example, it was usually appealing for Biafrans to hear that they were fighting with Britain and not Nigeria. They saw the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, as the real enemy of Biafrans while General Gowon [military head of the Nigerian state] was portrayed as his deputy. The USSR also gave open support to the Nigerian government. What helped Biafra so much was the kind of propaganda machine it was able to set up. The
For over five decades, the Cold War security agenda was distinguished by the principal strategic balance, that of a structure of bipolarity, between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR). This book seeks to draw from current developments in critical security studies in order to establish a new framework of inquiry for security in the Middle East. It addresses the need to redefine security in the Middle East. The focus is squarely on the Arab-Israeli context in general, and the Palestinian-Israeli context in particular. The character of Arab-Israeli relations are measured by the Israeli foreign policy debate from the 1950s to the 1990s. A dialogue between Islam and Islamism as a means to broaden the terrain on which conflict resolution and post-bipolar security in the Middle East is to be understood is presented. The Middle East peace process (MEPP) was an additional factor in problematizing the military-strategic concept of security in the Middle East. The shift in analysis from national security to human security reflects the transformations of the post-Cold War era by combining military with non-military concerns such as environmental damage, social unrest, economic mismanagement, cultural conflict, gender inequity and radical fundamentalism. By way of contrast to realist international relations (IR) theory, developing-world theorists have proposed a different set of variables to explain the unique challenges facing developing states. Finally, the book examines the significance of ecopolitics in security agendas in the Middle East.
regions. But if we adopt the definition of a federation given by Watts in chapter 1, then clearly the USSR was not an authentic federation. For whilst the Constitution proclaimed the republics’ rights of sovereignty (article 76), and secession (article 72), the right to enter into treaties with foreign powers (article 80), and local control over economic developments (article 77), such rights were heavily qualified in practice, by the provisions of other articles, which made a mockery of the republic’s sovereign powers.1 And, in any case, whilst the state was supposedly
largely unanticipated, as for many was the Russian military deployment to Syria in autumn 2015. More precisely, however, it is another rude awakening. Since the ‘founding surprise’ of the collapse of the USSR – still for many the exemplary failure of expert political prediction 4 – Western officials and observers have been repeatedly surprised by developments in Russian
Iskusstvo, an official journal of the Artists’ Union of the USSR, published an article written by the prominent art historian Aleksandr Saltykov. The article argued that decorative art requires a different methodology of depiction compared to easel art. Saltykov asserted that the form, proportionality and naked beauty of an object should serve as the basis for decoration, and this decoration should not be a depiction with atmospheric perspective. Therefore, ‘of primary importance are the foreground, the clear, expressive contours, and the rhythmically arranged and
The major part of this book project was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 700913.
This book is about two distinct but related professional cultures in late Soviet
Russia that were concerned with material objects: industrial design and
decorative art. The Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is broadly recognised to
have been Russia’s first truly original contribution to world culture. In
contrast, Soviet design of the post-war period is often dismissed as hackwork
and plagiarism that resulted in a shabby world of commodities. This book
identifies the second historical attempt at creating a powerful alternative to
capitalist commodities in the Cold War era. It offers a new perspective on the
history of Soviet material culture by focusing on the notion of the ‘comradely
object’ as an agent of progressive social relations that state-sponsored Soviet
design inherited from the avant-garde. It introduces a shared history of
domestic objects, handmade as well as machine-made, mass-produced as well as
unique, utilitarian as well as challenging the conventional notion of utility.
Situated at the intersection of intellectual history, social history and
material culture studies, this book elucidates the complexities and
contradictions of Soviet design that echoed international tendencies of the late
twentieth century. The book is addressed to design historians, art historians,
scholars of material culture, historians of Russia and the USSR, as well as
museum and gallery curators, artists and designers, and the broader public
interested in modern aesthetics, art and design, and/or the legacy of socialist
regimes.
ran, would offer decision-makers greater flexibility during a confrontation with the USSR and prevent a scenario where a president of the United States would be forced to surrender or precipitate a nuclear Armageddon in response to any Soviet military aggression in Europe.53 However, NATO’s force levels fell well short of being able to realistically pursue this flexible response strategy. As Nixon’s team had been informed prior to taking office, and soon concluded once in office, the Warsaw Pact held an advantage in conventional forces and had also reached parity
expressions of ‘white innocence’ (Ross 1990 ) against which Wekker and Imre both write suggest that, in racial exceptionalism and attachment to whiteness, the two regions are not so far apart. They share, at least, a European family resemblance transcending the west/east divisions constructed before and during the Cold War; recognising race as a systemically global structure (Mills 2015 ) makes them not just in parallel but connected. Scholars of other eastern European countries and the USSR, not just the Yugoslav region, face
FAD5 10/17/2002 5:44 PM Page 72 5 Fiscal federalism and socio-economic asymmetry He who controls the economy controls the polity. But who does control the purse strings in Russia, and how are federal funds distributed across the federation? To what degree have federal policies ameliorated the high levels of socio-economic asymmetry inherited from the USSR? To answer these questions we need to examine fiscal federalism taking into account both the formal structural aspects of the system and the more hidden informal practices. Fiscal federalism As Bradshaw
principally by political and economic factors rather than constitutional norms. The difficulties of creating a democratic federation in Russia have undoubtedly been made much more problematic by the nature of its origins as a quasi-federation within the USSR. One of the most destructive legacies which Russia inherited from the Soviet Union was its ethnoterritorial form of federalism. The ‘dual nature’ of Russian federalism, which grants different constitutional rights and powers to different subjects of the federation, has from the outset created major tensions and