The Transitional Justice and Foreign Policy Nexus: The Inefficient Causation of State Ontological Security-Seeking

How does an approach towards transitional justice produce preconditions for a country’s international action, enabling certain policies and practices in the immediate neighborhood and international society at large? This article unpacks ontological security-seeking as a generic social mechanism in international politics which allows to productively conceptualize the connection between a state’s transitional justice and foreign policies. Going beyond the dichotomy of transitional justice compliance and non-compliance by gauging the role of states’ subjective sense of self in driving their behavior, I develop an analytical framework to explain how state ontological security-seeking relates to major transitions and consequent state identity disjuncture, the ensuing politics of truth and justice-seeking, and its international resonance in framing and executing particular foreign policies. I offer a typology of the international consequences of states’ transitional justice politics, distinguishing between reflective and mnemonical security-oriented approaches, spawning cooperative and conflictual foreign policy behavior, respectively. The empirical purchase of the purported nexus is illustrated with the example of post-Soviet Russia’s limited politics of accountability towards the repressions of its antecedent regime and its increasingly self-assertive and confrontational stance in contemporary international politics

Demokratični element v Hobbesovem Behemothu

In this paper, I examine Hobbes's Behemoth as an extended description of and reaction to the dynamism, both positive and negative, of new conditions of democracy. It is not just disorder per se to which Hobbes is responding, but disorder resulting from a democratizing world and the demands of mobilized populations. On one level, he attacks democracy as a realm of elite competition that destroys a public good, yet on another he recognizes the necessity of constructing political principles as responsive to a politicized people and accepts the relevance of the people's judgment. Correspondingly, in this history of the English Civil War, Hobbes emphasized the ideological contention over ideas as a primary political force, with the implications this has for how the king must persuade the people to obey him and for how Hobbes's own positive political philosophy might be made a source of motivation for people.Avtorica analizira Hobbesov Behemoth kot obsežen opis novih demokratičnih razmer ter pozitivne in negativne reakcije na njihov dinamizem. Hobbes se ne odziva zgolj na nered kot tak, pač pa na nered, ki izhaja iz demokratizacije sveta in zahtev različnih skupin prebivalstva, ki jih je to mobiliziralo. Na eni strani Hobbes napada demokracijo kot kraljestvo tekmovalnosti med elitami, ki uničuje javno dobro, na drugi pa priznava nujnost oblikovanja političnih načel, ki bi omogočala odzivanje na spo-litizirano ljudstvo, ter sprejema pomen njegove razsodnosti. Skladno s tem Hobbes v svoji zgodovini angleške državljanske vojne poudaija prvenstveni politični pomen ideološkega spopada. To ima implikacije tako za kralja, ki mora vedeti, kako naj prepriča ljudstvo, da mu bo poslušno, kot za samo Hobbesovo pozitivno politično filozofijo, če naj bi postala vir motiviranja ljudstva

The fate of territorial engineering: mechanisms of territorial power and post-liberal forms of international governance

This article deals with the general fate of borders and territories in the current discussions of globalization and the future of liberal tolerance in the international sphere. It delves into the historical constitution of national borders and their meaning, and how they helped establish ‘territorial governance’. It examines the role of domestic toleration in this constitution and investigates how toleration might be recast in an international context of growing antagonisms and increased complexity