Why, Then, Is It So Bright? Towards an Aesthetics of Peace at a Time of War

"Why do the nations so furiously rage together?" ask the voices of the choir in Georg Friedrich Handel's The Messiah (1742). And so ask two excellent recent books by senior German international relations scholars: Dieter Senghaas' 'Klange des Friedens: Ein Horbericht' (Sounds of Peace: A Listener's Report) and Ekkehart Krippendorff's 'Die Kunst, nicht regiert zu werden: Ethische Politik von Sokrates bis Mozart' (The Art of Not Being Governed: Ethical Politics from Socrates to Mozart). These books deserve sustained engagement, and attention among Anglo-Saxon readers, not only because they employ unusual aesthetic sources to investigate the political (from music to painting, poetry and theatre), but also because the ensuing ruminations offer a formidable challenge to prevailing practices and conceptualisations of international relations. Although suffused with a strong pacifist spirit, both volumes advance more than mere programmatic oppositions to war. They offer inquiries into the dialectic of violence that can make war appear inevitable or legitimate, even when it is only a straightforward struggle for power and superiority. Such problematisations are particularly needed today, at a time when the promotion of global peace and justice is becoming increasingly couched in terms of a violent suppression of forces that threaten the existing order. To challenge this automatic resort to militaristic means as the only way of maintaining security is not to question the need for order or to forego the use of force to defend humanitarian causes. Rather, the key is to oppose a narrowing down of political debates in a challenging time, for precisely at such moments do we need as many insights as possible into the problem of war and peace

Ko Un and the poetics of postcolonial identity

Ko Un is one of South Korea\u27s most important writers of the past 50 years, and a poet whose work provides important insights into crucial linkages between language, identity and community. He lived through, chronicled and critically engaged most of the traumatic events his nation faced during the last century: a brutal colonial occupation by Japan; the division of the peninsula into communist North and capitalist South; an unusually devastating fraternal war; the integration of the divided peninsula into global Cold War politics; periods of authoritarian rule on both sides; and the more recent challenge to promote reconciliation. Some of these episodes challenged the very existence of Korea as a people, nation and state. Ko Un\u27s poetry was part of a larger effort to regain a sense of being and national identity in the face of turmoil, war and globalisation. We argue that by engaging with these highly political issues Ko Un\u27s work provides important clues about how to articulate notions of identity and community in a way that empathetically portrays other people and their identities. In doing so he offers an alternative to the prevailing inside/outside logic that often leads to problematic forms of nationalism. <br /

Reconciling colonial memories in Korea and Japan

The Republic of Korea and Japan share a tumultuous history, but arguably no period has caused greater trauma in bilateral relations than the twentieth century. After Japan&rsquo;s four-decade long colonial occupation of Korea, the two countries took two decades just to establish diplomatic relations. Subsequent interactions have remained seriously compromised by the memory of colonialism. This article reviews the tensions behind the tempestuous bilateral relationship, focusing on the depiction of Japan&rsquo;s wartime past in school textbooks. We advance three suggestions for reconciliation: viewing reconciliation not as the restoration of a harmonious pre-conflict order, but as an ongoing, incomplete process; expanding promising bilateral dialogues; and accepting that there will always be differences between Korea and Japan, most notably with regard to representations of the past. Rather than being an inevitable source of conflict, these differences should contribute to an ongoing process of negotiation between the two neighbors.<br /

Discourse and human agency

The conceptualization of human agency is one of the oldest and most debated challenges in political theory. This essay defends the continuous relevance of this endeavour against a proliferating theoretical pessimism. Instead of engaging the much rehearsed structure-agency debate, the author conceptualizes agency in relation to discourses. However, such an approach inevitably elicits suspicion. Is discourse not merely a faddish term, destined to wax and wane with fleeting intellectual trends of the postmodern and poststructural kind? Does the concept of discourse, as many fear, suck us into a nihilistic vortex and deprive us of the stable foundations that are necessary to ground our thoughts and actions? Not so, argues this essay, and defends an anti-essentialist stance as the most viable chance for retaining an adequate understanding of how people situate themselves as agents and influence their socio-political environment. The ensuing analysis, which focuses on everyday forms of resistance, demonstrates how the very acceptance of ambiguity, often misrepresented as relativism, is a crucial precondition not only for the conceptualization of human agency, but also for its actual application in practice

Politics After Seattle: Dilemmas of the Anti-Globalisation Movement

Introduction "It was just like May 1968," said José Bové, sheep-farmer and French anti-globalisation hero, about the events in Seattle of December 1999 four days of massive street protests against the World Trade Organisation (WTO) turned the city into a battle ground - literally and metaphorically. Bové joined some 700 nongovernmental organisations and an estimated 40,000 demonstrators, including steelworkers, environmentalists, AIDS-activists, farmers, anti-capitalists, anarchists, students..

Timor-Oriental : le combat pour la paix et pour la réconciliation

Timor-Oriental : le combat pour la paix et pour la réconciliation Roland BLEIKER et Rodd MCGIBBON Quelle est la part du passé dont il faut garder le souvenir et faire le récit ? Quelle est la part qu’il faut oublier et pardonner ? Septembre 1999 : le résultat du référendum organisé au Timor-Oriental est très largement favorable à l’indépendance. Grâce à CNN, gouvernements et simples citoyens du monde entier assistent alors, scandalisés, aux exactions perpétrées par les milices anti-indépenda..

Discourse and emotions in international relations

The field of International Relations (IR) has recently witnessed the emergence of a wide variety of different approaches to make sense of the many ways emotions work in and through discourse. This forum takes stock of and investigates this link based on two interrelated questions: Why study emotions through discourse? How can we study emotions through discourse? Concerning the first question, we argue that textual and verbal utterances provide us with a promising way to make emotions empirically accessible for researchers. Regarding the second question, we argue that it is essential to develop specific criteria for the study of emotions via speech acts. We propose three criteria that the study of emotion discourse must answer to, which revolve around theory (what is an emotion?), expression (how are emotions communicated?), and effects (what do emotions do?). In a step toward fostering engagement and dialogue on these questions, the contributors of this forum propose a variety of approaches to study emotion discourse in world politics. The idea is to explore the ways in which discourse evokes, reveals, and engages emotions and how these effects can speak to larger questions in IR. Precisely, the goal with this forum is to go beyond the “emotions matter” approach of the first wave of emotions scholarship in IR to offer more specific ways to integrate the consideration of emotion into existing research, particularly that of a constructivist vein

Emotional reactions to involuntary psychiatric hospitalization and stigma-related stress among people with mental illness

Compulsory admission to psychiatric inpatient treatment can be experienced as disempowering and stigmatizing by people with serious mental illness. However, quantitative studies of stigma-related emotional and cognitive reactions to involuntary hospitalization and their impact on people with mental illness are scarce. Among 186 individuals with serious mental illness and a history of recent involuntary hospitalization, shame and self-contempt as emotional reactions to involuntary hospitalization, the cognitive appraisal of stigma as a stressor, self-stigma, empowerment as well as quality of life and self-esteem were assessed by self-report. Psychiatric symptoms were rated by the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale. In multiple linear regressions, more self-stigma was predicted independently by higher levels of shame, self-contempt and stigma stress. A greater sense of empowerment was related to lower levels of stigma stress and self-contempt. These findings remained significant after controlling for psychiatric symptoms, diagnosis, age, gender and the number of lifetime involuntary hospitalizations. Increased self-stigma and reduced empowerment in turn predicted poorer quality of life and reduced self-esteem. The negative effect of emotional reactions and stigma stress on quality of life and self-esteem was largely mediated by increased self-stigma and reduced empowerment. Shame and self-contempt as reactions to involuntary hospitalization as well as stigma stress may lead to self-stigma, reduced empowerment and poor quality of life. Emotional and cognitive reactions to coercion may determine its impact more than the quantity of coercive experiences. Interventions to reduce the negative effects of compulsory admissions should address emotional reactions and stigma as a stressor