Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations PDF Download

Author: Mark B. Salter
Publisher: Pluto Press (UK)
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Explicitly engaging and criticizing Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, Salter (The American U., Cairo, Egypt) places Huntington's thesis in context of long line of discourses justifying imperialism. Acknowledging a debt to post-structuralist theory, he argues that Huntington distinguishes between a civilized West and a barbarous Islam that is the natural enemy of civilization. In order to expose and delegitimize this attempt to "reinscribe imperial cartographies on the post-Cold War order," he traces the civilization/barbarian discourse through the 19th and 20th centuries, in order to illustrate the political function that the discourse serves in international relations theory. Distributed by Stylus. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Author: Tzvetan Todorov
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226805786
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
The relationship between Western democracies and Islam, rarely entirely comfortable, has in recent years become increasingly tense. A growing immigrant population and worries about cultural and political assimilation—exacerbated by terrorist attacks in the United States, Europe, and around the world—have provoked reams of commentary from all parts of the political spectrum, a frustrating majority of it hyperbolic or even hysterical. In The Fear of Barbarians, the celebrated intellectual Tzvetan Todorov offers a corrective: a reasoned and often highly personal analysis of the problem, rooted in Enlightenment values yet open to the claims of cultural difference. Drawing on history, anthropology, and politics, and bringing to bear examples ranging from the murder of Theo van Gogh to the French ban on headscarves, Todorov argues that the West must overcome its fear of Islam if it is to avoid betraying the values it claims to protect. True freedom, Todorov explains, requires us to strike a delicate balance between protecting and imposing cultural values, acknowledging the primacy of the law, and yet strenuously protecting minority views that do not interfere with its aims. Adding force to Todorov's arguments is his own experience as a native of communist Bulgaria: his admiration of French civic identity—and Western freedom—is vigorous but non-nativist, an inclusive vision whose very flexibility is its core strength. The record of a penetrating mind grappling with a complicated, multifaceted problem, The Fear of Barbarians is a powerful, important book—a call, not to arms, but to thought.

Author: Peter Bogucki
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781789149265
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Beginning in the Stone Age and continuing through the collapse of the Roman empire, a fascinating exploration of the increasing complexity, technological accomplishments, and distinctive practices of the non-literate peoples known as Barbarians. We often think of the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome as discrete incubators of Western culture, places where ideas about everything from government to art to philosophy were free to develop and then be distributed outward into the wider Mediterranean world. But as Peter Bogucki reminds us in this book, Greece and Rome did not develop in isolation. All around them were rural communities who had remarkably different cultures, ones few of us know anything about. Telling the stories of these nearly forgotten people, he offers a long-overdue enrichment of how we think about classical antiquity. As Bogucki shows, the lands to the north of the Greek and Roman peninsulas were inhabited by non-literate communities that stretched across river valleys, mountains, plains, and shorelines from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Ural Mountains in the east. What we know about them is almost exclusively through archeological finds of settlements, offerings, monuments, and burials—but these remnants paint a portrait that is just as compelling as that of the great literate, urban civilizations of this time. Bogucki sketches the development of these groups’ cultures from the Stone Age through the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, highlighting the increasing complexity of their societal structures, their technological accomplishments, and their distinct cultural practices. He shows that we are still learning much about them, as he examines new historical and archeological discoveries as well as the ways our knowledge about these groups has led to a vibrant tourist industry and even influenced politics. The result is a fascinating account of several nearly vanished cultures and the modern methods that have allowed us to rescue them from historical oblivion.

Author: Maria Boletsi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804785376
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Barbarism and civilization form one of the oldest and most rigid oppositions in Western history. According to this dichotomy, barbarism functions as the negative standard through which "civilization" fosters its self-definition and superiority by labeling others "barbarians." Since the 1990s, and especially since 9/11, these terms have become increasingly popular in Western political and cultural rhetoric—a rhetoric that divides the world into forces of good and evil. This study intervenes in this recent trend and interrogates contemporary and historical uses of barbarism, arguing that barbarism also has a disruptive, insurgent potential. Boletsi recasts barbarism as a productive concept, finding that it is a common thread in works of literature, art, and theory. By dislodging barbarism from its conventional contexts, this book reclaims barbarism's edge and proposes it as a useful theoretical tool.

Author: Maria Boletsi
Publisher: Brill / Rodopi
ISBN: 9789004352001
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
In a contemporary political climate where barbarians, monsters, and savages have become ubiquitous figures of otherness, Subjects Barbarian, Monstrous, and Wild gathers essays which explore both the oppressive, dispossessing functions and subversive potentials of these figures in and through art and literature.

Author: Iver B. Neumann
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 145290359X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

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Book Description
The field of international relations has recently witnessed a tremendous growth of interest in the theme of identity and its formation, construction, and deconstruction. In Uses of the Other, Iver B. Neumann demonstrates how thinking about identity in terms of the self and other may prove highly useful in the study of world politics. Neumann begins by tracing the four different paths along which this thinking has developed during this century -- ethnographic, psychological, Continental philosophical, and "Eastern excursion" -- and he shows how these blended at the margins of the discipline of international relations at the end of the 1980s. There follow several incisive readings of European identity formations on the all-European, regional, and national levels. The theme that draws these readings together is how "the East" is used as a sign of otherness at all three levels. Whereas previous studies framed this process as part of colonial and postcolonial developments, this book suggests that "Easternness" is also present as a marker in contemporary discourses about Russia, Turkey, Central Europe, and Bashkortostan, among others.

Author: Mlada Bukovansky
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198873468
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 769

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Book Description
Historical approaches to the study of world politics have always been a major part of the academic discipline of International Relations, and there has recently been a resurgence of scholarly interest in this area. This Oxford Handbook examines the past and present of the intersection between history and IR, and looks to the future by laying out new questions and directions for research. Seeking to transcend well-worn disciplinary debates between historians and IR scholars, the Handbook asks authors from both fields to engage with the central themes of 'modernity' and 'granularity'. Modernity is one of the basic organising categories of speculation about continuity and discontinuity in the history of world politics, but one that is increasingly questioned for privileging one kind of experience and marginalizing others. The theme of granularity highlights the importance of how decisions about the scale and scope of historical research in IR shape what can be seen, and how one sees it. Together, these themes provide points of affinity across the wide range of topics and approaches presented here. The Handbook is organized into four parts. The first, 'Readings', gives a state-of-the-art analysis of numerous aspects of the disciplinary encounter between historians and IR theorists. Thereafter, sections on 'Practices', 'Locales', and 'Moments' offer a wide variety of perspectives, from the longue durée to the ephemeral individual moment, and challenge many conventional ways of defining the contexts of historical enquiry about international relations. Contributors come from a range of academic backgrounds, and present a diverse array of methodological and philosophical ideas, as well as their various historical interests. The Oxford Handbooks of International Relations is a twelve-volume set of reference books offering authoritative and innovative engagements with the principal sub-fields of International Relations. The series as a whole is under the General Editorship of Christian Reus-Smit of the University of Queensland and Duncan Snidal of the University of Oxford, with each volume edited by specialists in the field. The series both surveys the broad terrain of International Relations scholarship and reshapes it, pushing each sub-field in challenging new directions. Following the example of Reus-Smit and Snidal's original Oxford Handbook of International Relations, each volume is organized around a strong central thematic by scholars drawn from different perspectives, reading its sub-field in an entirely new way, and pushing scholarship in challenging new directions.

Author: Shao-yun Yang
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295746017
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.

Author: Gerrit W. Gong
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
This penetrating new study of the complex interplay between politics and culture weaves together both European and non-European perspectives, focusing on the standard of "civilization as a specific legal principle.

Author: Collectif
Publisher: Publications de l’École française de Rome
ISBN: 2728314659
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
The Roman empire set law at the center of its very identity. A complex and robust ideology of law and justice is evident not only in the dynamics of imperial administration, but a host of cultural arenas. Citizenship named the privilege of falling under Roman jurisdiction, legal expertise was cultural capital. A faith in the emperor’s intimate concern for justice was a key component of the voluntary connection binding Romans and provincials to the state. Even as law was a central mechanism for control and the administration of state violence, it also exerted a magnetic effect on the peoples under its control. Adopting a range of approaches, the essays explore the impact of Roman law, both in the tribunal and in the culture. Unique to this anthology is attention to legal professionals and cultural intermediaries operating at the empire’s periphery. The studies here allow one to see how law operated among a range of populations and provincials—from Gauls and Brittons to Egyptians and Jews—exploring the ways local peoples creatively navigated, and constructed, their legal realities between Roman and local mores. They draw our attention to the space between laws and legal ideas, between ethnic, especially Jewish, life and law and the structures of Roman might; cases in which shared concepts result in diverse ends; the pageantry of the legal tribunal, the imperatives and corruptions of power differentials; and the importance of reading the gaps between depiction of law and its actual workings. This volume is unusual in bringing Jewish, and especially rabbinic, sources and perspectives together with Roman, Greek or Christian ones. This is the result of its being part of the research program “Judaism and Rome” (ERC Grant Agreement no. 614 424), dedicated to the study of the impact of the Roman empire upon ancient Judaism.