Critique internationale - Content
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[J-Cool and the Global Imagination]
This paper considers the operation of “soft power” in the currency of made-in-Japan youth goods as they achieve the popularity of a new fad in US pop culture. This craze of “J-cool” is mainly a youth phenomenon which, less likely to be shared or understood by adults, trades in products for and about youth. Questioned here is what meaning or impact do these “Japanese” goods have on or for “American” kids. In other words, what is the construction of “Japan(ese)” in J-cool and does this stand (or not) for a Japan that actually exists?
[Leaving aside “Cool Japan”… Things we’ve got to discuss about media and cultural globalization]
The spread of Japanese media culture to many parts of the world has been domestically and internationally acclaimed for its cultural creativity that stands out from its American counterparts and for its promotion of Japan’s “soft power.” However, such an affirmative discourse tends to ignore how it has been occurring in the uneven globalization process. This paper will argue that the developments of Japanese media culture export are symptomatic of the restructuring of unevenness in the transnational media and cultural flows, in the process of which the logic of neoliberalism has deeply penetrated not only the corporate production and circulation of media culture but also the state’s cultural policies in its opportunistic uses to maximize national interests.
[Japaneseness according to Joan of Arc. Western Myths and Narratives in Manga and Anime ]
The appropriation of transnational cultural flows that occurs as a result of globalization is studied here through adaptations of Western narratives in manga and anime. This “Other” is integrated by exacerbating some of its features: The West is presented in Japanese works as conveyor of an excessive, unjust and potentially dangerous world, as the manifestation of Cartesianism taken to the extreme. Japaneseness, which is then defined by opposition to this incorporated otherness, brings out a supposedly specifically Japanese sensitivity, thus perpetuating a long intellectual tradition that sees in the feeling of things the very essence of Japaneseness by contrast to the rational Chinese and Western mind. Episodes from the life of Joan of Arc and Athena’s divine interventions for instance then take on new meaning, which serves to promote Japaneseness and the essential values it conveys, such as the importance of social harmony and the close interdependence among members of the community
[The Political Imaginary of Video Games]
While most computer games are devoid of political content, at least two gaming universes have an explicitly political character, namely strategy and quest games, which have an imaginary that lends itself to suggestive analysis. What is striking is that such games have almost no place for democracy. There are two sets of reasons, with rather different implications. First genre, which connects digital universes to science fiction and heroic fantasy, the books and films of which provide the games with their background. Secondly, the issue of algorithmic structure. A digital game is neither a novel nor a film, not is it merely a game: the hardware and software that make it work subject it to certain constraints and shape its meaning. By taking seriously the imaginary and ludic power of certain antidemocratic forms, it is possible conversely to understand certain properties of the democratic imaginary, specifically those that relate democracy to a realm of ennui where nothing “great” is possible.
[Our Kind of Jazz: Music and Identity in South Africa]
The history of music, and especially that of jazz and the popular music styles it spawned, was from the start a story of blends and creations out of these blends. Music thus constantly provides a demonstration that the ideologies positing non-Europeans as inferior and segregation policies never had any foundation. From the mid-19th century, Afro-American music styles, first as a borrowing form of Blackface Minstrel songs, then under the name of jazz, took part in these creative mixes. Jazz helped to conceive and symbolically express an identitarian complex at the same time asserting that blacks are human beings like any other and that they have a specific contribution to make to human culture. South African endeavors to appropriate jazz and its local stylistic evolutions thus became closely tied into the political events that marked South African in the 20th century and the successive ideological reformulations of the fight against racism.
[Between Legalism and Constructivism: Human Rights in American Foreign Policy]
The sociology of international norms has often focused on human rights in order to illustrate the 'power of ideas' to inform policies: as the story goes, the successful institutionalization of human rights principles under the Carter administration forced the Reagan administration to adjust its policies to principles it could not uproot or use for purely legitimating purposes. The paper argues that these approaches ignore the disputed nature of political-legal concepts and the fact that their very definition is at stake in struggles between contending groups of actors seeking to use these concepts in order to legitimate different policy courses. Mapping out the field of producers of the human rights discourse in the late 1970s-early 1980s, both in their civil and governmental components, the paper shows that the concept of human rights can be construed in two different ways, each corresponding to specific social groups and policy interests: one that anchors human rights in the field of international law, promoted essentially by lawyers or activists connected with international organizations; the other turning it into an anti-juridical concept primarily concerned with political regimes and "democracy promotion," and elaborated by neoconservative policy makers.
[What Is Left of International Functionalism? Rereading David Mitrany (1888-1975)]
David Mitrany is known as the founder of international functionalism. His seminal book, A Working Peace System, dates from 1943 and remains remarkably topical. In defending a global conception of security and a liberal interpretation of peace, his arguments are at the crux of debates on the future of multilateralism. But they also have their weaknesses. An overly rational viewpoint on international behavior and a disproportionate belief in the dynamics of common needs end up suggesting that political conflicts can be resolved by debates among experts. However, these rather standard criticisms in no way detract from Mitrany’s intuitions, whether they pertain to the advent of “human security” or the limits of political regionalism. Even more so, it is the quest for a method for “making peace’ that constitutes the most novel contribution of Mitrany’s functionalism. Pragmatic in its inspiration, it constitutes an unusual approach among international relations scholars. A real practical philosophy, it is also a lesson for their research to study from.
[A Silent Big Bang? A Historical Perspective on Israeli Democracy and the 2006 Elections]
If the 2006 election campaign seems to have left voters cold or indifferent, it is because they know very well that Israeli political parties are not the only ones making the decisions that will influence their fate: The Palestinians, neighboring countries, the United States, and even the European Union and the UN must be taken into account. A democratic election limited to the community of citizens in its pre-1967 definition cannot settle everything. It will never be any more than one aspect among others of the political dynamics on which the fate of the populations living in the territories disputed by Israel and Palestine depends. The theory propounded here is that democratic rules thus limited are incapable of producing a political space that can contain the conflicts, and this due to the lack of consensus regarding the borders of the state and the nation and the lack of an undisputed definition of those who are its “citizens with equal rights.” Yet these are essential conditions for any legitimate democratic process by which social antagonism can be mediated and resolved by assumed compromises. When the process of opening a political space for collective demands is blocked, then violence becomes an option.
L’ambiguïté des sémantiques de la victime en Allemagne
Glenn Palmer, T. Clifton Morgan, A theory of foreign policy Princeton, Princeton university press, 2006, 216 pages
Keir Lieber, War and the engineers : the primacy of politics over technology ,Ithaca, Cornell university press, 2006, 226 pages.
Pierre Berthaud, Gérard Kébabdjian (dir.), La question politique en économie internationale, Paris, La Découverte, 2006, 320 pages
