René Alladaye, The Darker Shades of Pale Fire. An Investigation into a Literary Mystery

This is an unusual book about a one-of-a-kind novel. René Alladaye’s study is both strikingly original and the product of a sustained engagement with Nabokov’s critics. The Darker Shades of Pale Fire provides readers with an attentive account of others’ readings and offers a solution to the novel’s central mystery. By giving pride of place to Pale Fire’s critics, Alladaye’s book at times re-enacts the structure of the work it sets out to solve. Yet it seeks to move beyond the intriguing realm..

The limits of hybridity and the crisis of liberal peace

Hybridity has emerged recently as a key response in International Relations and peace studies to the crisis of liberal peace. Attributing the failures of liberal peacebuilding to a lack of legitimacy deriving from uncompromising efforts to impose a rigid market democratic state model on diverse populations emerging from conflict, the hybrid peace approach locates the possibility of a ‘radical’, post-liberal, and emancipatory peace in the agency of the local and the everyday and ‘hybrid’ formations of international/liberal and local/non-liberal institutions, practices, and values. However, this article argues, hybrid peace, emerging as an attempt to resolve a problem of difference and alterity specific to the context in which the crisis of liberal peacebuilding manifests, is a problem-solving tool for the encompassment and folding into globalising liberal order of cultural, political, and social orders perceived as radically different and obstructionist to its expansion. Deployed at the very point this expansion is beset by resistance and crisis, hybrid peace reproduces the liberal peace's logics of inclusion and exclusion, and through a reconfiguration of the international interface with resistant ‘local’ orders, intensifies the governmental and biopolitical reach of liberal peace for their containment, transformation, and assimilation

State-building, nation-building and reconstruction

This chapter explores a new kind of interventionism in the post-Cold War era and challenges faced by global actors in the reconstruction of domestic political authority in the aftermath of conflict. The chapter reflects on the meanings and implications of different facets of comprehensive external involvement in state-building, nation-building and reconstruction, before addressing the theoretical framings of international intervention in terms of (post)liberal peace and its critique. What follows is a review and discussion of dilemmas and contradictions inherent in the outsiders’ project to pursue liberal peace-based interventions by focusing on: sovereignty, legitimacy, ownership and accountability. The chapter turns to hybridity as an alternative conceptualisation of international peacebuilding and concludes with the policy implications on rethinking wholesale reconstruction of state and society by external actors

Appeals to semiotic registers in ethno-metapragmatic accounts of variation

Discussions of folklinguistic accounts of language use are frequently focused on dismissing them because of their limitations. As a result, not a lot is written regarding how such accounts are done and how they ‘work’. This article examines how folklinguistic evaluations are achieved in interaction, particularly through appeals to semiotic registers (Agha 2007). It describes how in explaining their beliefs regarding linguistic variation, speakers frequently produce voicings with varying transparency. These rely on understandings of the social world and bring large collections of linguistic resources into play. They offer rich insights if analytic attention is given to their details because even when evaluating a single variant, whole ways of speaking, and even being, may be utilized. The paper explores in turn how analysis reveals the inseparability of variants, understandings of context and audience, the relationship between linguistic forms and social types, and the performance of social types via the evaluation of semiotic resources. In each section, discussion is grounded in extracts from interviews on Australian English with speakers of this variety of English. Cumulatively they show the primacy of semiotic registers in ethno-metapragmatic accounts.N/

A long view of liberal peace and its crisis

The ‘crisis’ of liberal peace has generated considerable debate in International Relations. However, analysis is inhibited by a shared set of spatial, cultural and temporal assumptions that rest on and reproduce a problematic separation between self-evident ‘liberal’ and ‘non-liberal’ worlds, and locates the crisis in presentist terms of the latter’s resistance to the former’s expansion. By contrast, this article argues that efforts to advance liberal rule have always been interwoven with processes of alternative order-making, and in this way are actively integral, not external, to the generation of the subjectivities, contestations, violence and rival social orders that are then apprehended as self-evident obstacles and threats to liberal peace and as characteristic of its periphery. Making visible these intimate relations of co-constitution elided by representations of liberal peace and its crisis requires a long view and an analytical frame that encompasses both liberalism and its others in the world. The argument is developed using a Foucauldian governmentality framework and illustrated with reference to Sri Lanka

Winning wars, building (illiberal) peace? The rise (and possible fall) of a victor’s peace in Rwanda and Sri Lanka

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Third World Quarterly on 25th September 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/01436597.2015.1058150.© 2015 Southseries Inc., www.thirdworldquarterly.com.The literature on peacebuilding dedicates very little space, empirically and theoretically, to countries that are emerging from a war waged to a decisive outcome. This review essay looks at Sri Lanka and Rwanda, two countries where a victorious leadership has led the process of post-conflict reconstruction, largely by employing illiberal means. It looks at the effect of decisive war on statebuilding and at the role of local agency and illiberal practices in a post-victory context. It concludes by assessing the global significance and long-term sustainability of post-victory illiberal statebuilding