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Begin New Search Topic International Affairs Content Type Journal Article

1. THE HISTORY OF BRICS’ INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (2009-2019): DISCOURSES, INNOVATION AND SENSITIVITIES

Author:
Thiago Gehre
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Conjuntura Austral: Journal of the Global South
Institution:
Conjuntura Austral: Journal of the Global South
Abstract:
The BRICS is a group of countries formed by Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa that began to operate formally in 2009 as a legitimate, efficient and durable agent of governance in the world order (ACHARYA 2016: 1-27). Scholars all over the world –many of them cited here in this article –have painted the image of the BRICS as an ‘economic colossus’, assuming an underdeveloped intra-bloc cooperation restricted to economic issues. Nonetheless, from an economic starting point, the BRICS has evolved in the last years expanding its cooperation capabilities to a huge array of issues that encapsulates innovation and sensitivity.
Topic:
International Relations, International Affairs, Geopolitics, and Innovation
Political Geography:
Russia, China, India, South Africa, and Brazil

2. The Modern Interfaces of Intermarium and the Fight against Destiny

Author:
Adrian Popa and Cristian Barna
Publication Date:
01-2020
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Warsaw East European Review (WEER)
Institution:
Centre for East European Studies, University of Warsaw
Abstract:
Russia’s recent buildup of A2/AD (anti-access/area denial) forces in Crimea and Kaliningrad, coupled with its increasingly confronting rhetoric in the Black and Baltic Seas, pose a serious challenge for the NATO’s Eastern flank countries. While the mare sui generis status of the Black Sea might be altered under the expected inauguration of Canal Istanbul in 2023 as it would probably require the revision of the Montreux Convention, the mare liberum status of the Baltic Sea might also be questioned as Russia contests NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence in this region. Facing this challenging geostrategic context, Pilsudski’s ideas of Intermarium seem to have revived within the Central and Eastern European countries under modern interfaces such as the Bucharest Nine and the Three Seas Initiative. This paper proposes a comparative analysis between the Black Sea and the Baltic Sea in terms of their newly-emerged geostrategic context, discusses the feasibility of the recent endeavours to promote cooperation within the Central and Eastern European countries and not ultimately, highlights the utility of a regional military alliance in support of NATO.
Topic:
NATO, Diplomacy, International Security, International Affairs, and Geopolitics
Political Geography:
Russia, Europe, Asia, Crimea, Baltic Sea, and Baltic States

3. From Third World Theory to Belt and Road Initiative: International Aid as a Chinese Foreign Policy Tool

Author:
Victor Carneiro Corrêa Vieira
Publication Date:
12-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Contexto Internacional
Institution:
Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
In 1946, Mao Zedong began to elaborate his theory of the Third World from the perception that there would be an ‘intermediate zone’ of countries between the two superpowers. From there, he concluded that Africa, Latin America, and Asia, except for Japan, would compose the revolutionary forces capable of defeating imperialism, colonialism, and hegemonism. The start of international aid from the People’s Republic of China to developing countries dates back to the period immediately after the Bandung Conference of 1955, extending to the present. Through a bibliographical and documentary analysis, the article starts with the following research question: What role did domestic and international factors play in China’s foreign aid drivers over the years? To answer the question, the evolution of Chinese international assistance was studied from Mao to the Belt and Road Initiative, which is the complete expression of the country’s ‘quaternity’ model of co-operation, combining aid, trade, investment, and technical assistance.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, International Trade and Finance, International Affairs, and Foreign Aid
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Global Focus

4. Problematising the Ultimate Other of Modernity: the Crystallisation of Coloniality in International Politics

Author:
Ramon Blanco and Ana Carolina Teixeira Delgado
Publication Date:
12-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Contexto Internacional
Institution:
Institute of International Relations, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro
Abstract:
This article examines a key element of the power relations underpinning international politics, namely coloniality. It delineates the coloniality of international politics, and elucidates the fundamental aspects of its operationalisation on the one hand, and its crystallisation into international politics on the other. The article is structured into three sections. First, it explores the meaning of coloniality, and outlines its fundamental characteristics. Next, it delineates a crucial operative element of coloniality, the idea of race, and the double movement through which coloniality is rendered operational – the colonisation of time and space. Finally, the article analyses two structuring problematisations that were fundamental to the crystallisation of coloniality in international politics – the work of Francisco de Vitoria, and the Valladolid Debate. It argues that the way in which these problematisations framed the relationship between the European Self and the ultimate Other of Western modernity – the indigenous peoples in the Americas – crystallised the pervasive role of coloniality in international politics.
Topic:
Post Colonialism, Race, International Affairs, Colonialism, and Indigenous
Political Geography:
Europe, Latin America, and Global Focus

5. Palestinian Engagement with the Black Freedom Movement prior to 1967

Author:
Maha Nassar
Publication Date:
06-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article examines early Palestinian engagements with multiple facets of the Black American struggle for freedom through a content analysis of influential Palestinian press outlets in Arabic prior to 1967. It argues that, since the 1930s, Palestinian intellectuals with strong anti-colonial views linked anti-Black racism in the United States to larger imperial and Cold War dynamics, and that they connected Black American mobilizations against racism to decolonization movements around the world. This article also examines Mahmoud Darwish’s early analytical writings on race as a social construct in both the U.S. and Israeli contexts. Understanding these early engagements sheds light on subsequent developments in Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity and on Palestinian Afro-Arab cultural imaginaries.
Topic:
International Affairs and Minorities
Political Geography:
Palestine

6. Troubling Idols: Black-Palestinian Solidarity in U.S. Afro-Christian Spaces

Author:
Taurean J Webb
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This article claims that insofar as they continue to omit analyses of colonialism and racialization, retellings of the biblical Exodus and of twentieth-century Black-Jewish relations—two massively significant narratives in the U.S. Black Christian imaginary—will inevitably continue to fuel the Zionist impulse that prevents much of Afro-Christianity from intentionally engaging Palestinian justice. Furthermore, the religious trope of chosenness, along with the dominant narration of the European Jewish Holocaust moment, have provided a politico-ethical basis for a unique type of dispensation that filters the two aforementioned retellings to ultimately deselect non-Jewish Palestinians from a recognizably complex humanity. The tools of the Black radical tradition, however, coupled with a reimagining of coalitional politics, carve out a radical Black Christian sensibility that is best equipped to speak to the devastations of military occupation and racist exclusion and forge life-giving relationships within the freedom struggles against them
Topic:
Race, International Affairs, and Minorities
Political Geography:
Palestine

7. “To Build a New World”: Black American Internationalism and Palestine Solidarity

Author:
Russell Rickford
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This essay traces the arc of Black American solidarity with Palestine, placing the phenomenon in the context of twentieth-century African American internationalism. It sketches the evolution of the political imaginary that enabled Black activists to depict African Americans and Palestinians as compatriots within global communities of dissent. For more than half a century, Black internationalists identified with Zionism, believing that the Jewish bid for a national homeland paralleled the African American freedom struggle. During the 1950s and 1960s, however, colonial aggression in the Middle East led many African American progressives to rethink the analogy. In the late 1960s and the 1970s, African American dissidents operating within the nexus of Black nationalism, Pan-Africanism, and Third Worldism constructed powerful theories of Afro-Palestinian kinship. In so doing, they reimagined or transcended bonds of color, positing anti-imperialist struggle, rather than racial affinity, as the precondition of camaraderie.
Topic:
International Organization, Race, and International Affairs
Political Geography:
Palestine

8. From the River to the Sea to Every Mountain Top: Solidarity as Worldmaking

Author:
Robin Kelley
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
This essay questions a key takeaway from the Ferguson/Gaza convergence that catalyzed the current wave of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity: the idea that “equivalence,” or a politics of analogy based on racial or national identity, or racialized or colonial experience, is the sole or primary grounds for solidarity. By revisiting three recent spectacular moments involving Black intellectuals advocating for Palestine—Michelle Alexander’s op-ed in the New York Times criticizing Israeli policies, CNN’s firing of Marc Lamont Hill, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute’s initial decision to deny Angela Davis its highest honor—this paper suggests that their controversial positions must be traced back to the post-1967 moment. The convergence of Black urban rebellions and the June 1967 Arab-Israeli war birthed the first significant wave of Black-Palestinian solidarity; at the same time, solidarities rooted in anti- imperialism and Left internationalism rivaled the “Black-Jewish alliance,” founded on analogy of oppression rather than shared principles of liberation. Third World insurgencies and anti-imperialist movements, not just events in the United States and Palestine, created the conditions for radically reordering political alliances: rather than adopting a politics of analogy or identity, the Black and Palestinian Left embraced a vision of “worldmaking” that was a catalyst for imagining revolution as opposed to plotting coalition.
Topic:
International Affairs, Popular Revolt, anti-capitalism, and Solidarity
Political Geography:
Palestine

9. Trumps Dangerous Vision for Palestine

Author:
Khaled Elgindy
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
The Bahrain workshop and its associated economic plan are little more than elaborate smokescreens for U.S. president Donald Trump’s political vision centered on the broader goals of normalizing Israeli occupation, consolidating the “Greater Israel” agenda, and effectively foreclosing Palestinian political aspirations. By working together with the government of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to redefine the conflict and do away with the traditional ground rules of the peace process, including the two-state solution, Trump is attempting to turn back the clock to the pre-1967 era when Palestinians were viewed mainly as an economic, humanitarian, and security problem rather than a political one. For Palestinians to effectively confront this unprecedented challenge, they will need to put their political house in order, including ending the debilitating political division between Fatah and Hamas, reviving institutional politics, and working to build a national consensus around a new strategy.
Topic:
International Security, International Affairs, and Populism
Political Geography:
Palestine

10. The Kushner Plan: Keeping Israeli-Palestinian Peace out of Reach

Author:
Paul R. Pillar
Publication Date:
10-2019
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Journal of Palestine Studies
Institution:
Institute for Palestine Studies
Abstract:
The U.S. administration’s Israeli-Palestinian “peace plan,” under President Donald Trump, has so far yielded only an inconclusive talkfest about economic development. The underlying rationale of the plan—that economics must come before any addressing of core political issues—is fundamentally flawed for several reasons. The biggest impediments to Palestinian economic development stem from aspects of the Israeli occupation that would continue under the plan, which rejects a two-state solution and is a slightly revised and renamed version of the current arrangement of limited Palestinian autonomy under Israeli domination. The plan flows directly from the Trump administration’s policy of acquiescing in the preferences of the right-wing government of Israel. Accordingly, the political portion of the plan is indefinitely delayed and might never be announced. Keeping the full plan under wraps serves the Israeli government’s purpose of holding out the promise of—but never delivering—peace with the Palestinians, while more facts are created on the ground
Topic:
International Relations, International Affairs, Fragile States, and Populism
Political Geography:
Israel and Palestine