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Cold War Period (cold + war_period)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

State Collapse and its Implications for Peace,Building and Reconstruction

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 5 2002
Alexandros Yannis
At the beginning of the twenty,first century, terms such as state collapse and failed states are becoming familiar, regularly used in international politics to describe a new and frightening challenge to international security. The dramatic events of September 11 have pushed the issue of collapsed states further into the limelight. This article has two aims. Firstly, it explains the contextual factors that gave rise to the phenomenon of state collapse. In the early post,Cold War period, state collapse was usually viewed as a regional phenomenon, and concerns were mainly limited to humanitarian consequences for the local population and destabilizing effects on neighbouring countries. Now, state collapse is seen in a more global context, and concerns are directed at the emergence of groups of non,state actors who are hostile to the fundamental values and interests of the international society such as peace, stability, rule of law, freedom and democracy. Secondly, the article offers some observations about the normative implications of the phenomenon of state collapse for peace,building and reconstruction. [source]

Nation Building and Women: The Effect of Intervention on Women's Agency

FOREIGN POLICY ANALYSIS, Issue 1 2008
Mary Caprioli
Regardless of the primary motive, international military intervention aimed at nation building is partly intended to establish democratic societies. And scholars have demonstrated that intervention does have a positive impact on democratization. With democratization generally follows greater support for human rights. Feminist scholars, however, have questioned definitions of democracy in which at minimal, women's political rights are absent. This brings into question the impact of intervention on the status of women. Particularly in both Iraq and Afghanistan women's rights have become prominent in the post-invasion American political rhetoric. Since intervention seems to be associated with the spread of democratic principles, we seek to discover whether intervention actually moves societies toward gender equality. We examine all six cases of completed military intervention aimed at nation building in sovereign states during the post Cold War period. Three of the cases,El Salvador, Mozambique, Namibia,evidence democratic change; whereas, the remaining three states,Cambodia, Haiti, Somalia,remain undemocratized. We test the extent to which intervention has or has not improved women's equality and find no dramatic effect, either positive or negative, of intervention on the status of women in any of the six states. [source]

Educators and Armaments in Cold War America

PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 4 2009
Charles L. DeBenedetti
This essay was written prior to the end of the Cold War. It may very well be the last scholarly essay that peace movement historian Charles DeBenedetti wrote prior to his death. Charles sent it to me in 1984, and for many years it was kept in one of my files. It is a historical commentary about the nuclear arms race based upon a thorough reading of education journals. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that in the very early years of the Cold War educators paid particular attention to the militarization of society and the construction of weapons of mass destruction. What is most telling is that from 1945 to the early 1950s concerned teachers voiced their worries regarding a race between catastrophe and education. However, by 1953, educators had dropped out of the race, falling victim to McCarthyism and the national government's concern for civil defense. This scholarly article points out that educators had a responsibility to teach the public about the horrors of nuclear armaments as an overwhelming threat and danger to humankind, but failed to do so as prosperity and government pressure silenced their voices. By the time of Sputnik in 1957, DeBenedetti tells us, they considered "nuclear weaponry as the very symbol of the uncharted ocean that separated advancing scientific and technological revolutions from the hoary human politics that made for an intractable Cold War." How can educators today rekindle that awareness and replace complacency with determination? What historical lessons can peace educators today learn from DeBenedetti's research on peace educators of the Cold War period? [source]

Frederic Eggleston on International Relations and Australia's Role in the World

AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF POLITICS AND HISTORY, Issue 3 2005
Neville Meaney
Frederic Eggleston was a prominent public intellectual whose reflections on international relations constitute one of the most important records by an Australian liberal thinker during the first half of twentieth century. Eggleston wrote extensively, and hopefully, about the capacity of international organisations to discipline the behaviour of nation-states; but his hopes were tempered in his writing also about the descent to wars, including the early Cold War period in which his support for American foreign policy grew stronger. His liberal outlook was also informed by his sense of Australia's Britishness, Australia's location in the Pacific, and Australia's future relations with Asian countries. [source]

Reorganising the Infantry: Drivers of Change and What This Tells Us about the State of the Defence Debate Today

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 4 2006
Andrew M. Dorman
This article uses the case study of the reorganisation of the infantry announced in December 2004 to argue that the government undertook reforms that were in the army's interest rather than its own and that the existing schools of thinking within defence fail to explain this behaviour. The article goes on to make three conclusions. Firstly, our traditional assumptions about structure-agency within defence are incorrect and that agency has a far greater role to play. Secondly, that the battle of the Scottish Regiments raises questions about the balance between local, regional and ethnic identity. Thirdly, that the army reorganisation highlights the weakness of the current defence debate in the United Kingdom with much of the existing literature left over from the Cold War period. [source]

Portents of Pluralism: How Hybrid Regimes Affect Democratic Transitions

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 3 2009
Jason Brownlee
The original studies of "competitive authoritarianism" and "hegemonic authoritarianism" inspected the occurrence of hybrid regimes during the 1990s but stopped short of testing their propensity for democratic change. This article assesses the causal effects of hybrid regimes, and the post,cold war period itself, on regime breakdown and democratization. Using a dataset of 158 regimes from 1975 to 2004, and a discrete measure for transitions to electoral democracy, I find that competitive authoritarian regimes are not especially prone to losing power but are significantly more likely to be followed by electoral democracy: vigorous electoral contestation does not independently subvert authoritarianism, yet it bodes well for democratic prospects once incumbents are overthrown. [source]