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41. The USSR and its Influence on Developments in the Right to Self- Determination

Author:
Robert McCorquodale
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Institution:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Abstract:
On a cold day in early March 1990, a phone call was made from the office of an economics minister in the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic (Lithu- anian SSR) to a junior academic at the University of Cambridge. The question was asked: what laws should the government of Lithuanian SSR pass to declare itself independent from the Soviet Union? After a few days, the junior academic proposed a potential course of action to the Lithuanian caller. His proposal, combined with other, more expert opinions, was adopted by the government of the Lithuanian SSR as part of its declaration of (renewed) independence proclaimed on 11 March 1990.1
Topic:
Development, Independence, Post-Soviet Space, and Self-Determination
Political Geography:
Soviet Union

42. Dynamics of Ukraine-Russia Relations

Author:
Roman Popadiuk
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Institution:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Abstract:
The end of the Soviet Union seemed to augur an era of peace and coopera- tion: The Cold War was over, Europe was whole and free, and Russia—moving toward democracy and a free-market economy—held the promise of becoming a meaningful member of the global community. While much of the interna- tional community’s focus was on Russia, a key factor for realizing the West’s aspirations was dependent on the development of Ukraine and its relationship with Russia.
Topic:
Cold War, Bilateral Relations, Regional Integration, and Post-Soviet Space
Political Geography:
Russia, Eurasia, and Ukraine

43. Hegemony Without Leadership: Russia’s Strategy in the Post-Soviet Space

Author:
Kataryna Wolczuk
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Institution:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Abstract:
During its relatively long existence, the Soviet Union was viewed with a mix of awe and fear: awe, owing to its immense capacity to play economic catch-up and fear, as to how that capacity would be used. It was only after the state’s collapse that its true nature was exposed. Despite its immense—though extremely costly in terms of human suf- fering—achievements, the USSR turned out to be a house of cards: the speed with which its institutions collapsed left behind 15 ostensibly modern, yet mis-developed, states. Not one of them possessed the functional capacity or the expertise to address the manifest legacies of Soviet mis-development, which included an autocratic political culture, maladapted institutions, pervasive cor- ruption, and swaths of socioeconomic deprivation.
Topic:
Hegemony, Leadership, Strategic Interests, and Post-Soviet Space
Political Geography:
Russia and Eurasia

44. The Rise of Global Islamophobia and the Uyghur Genocide

Author:
Rushan Abbas
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Abstract:
The world is observing one of the worst humanitarian crises of this century: the Uyghur genocide, a colonial project that uses modern surveillance and widespread concentration camp apparatuses. At the heart of this genocide is a fundamental “otherization” of the Uyghur people that relies on Islamophobic policy and rhetoric to dehumanize the indigenous population of East Turkistan, known to China as Xinjiang. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) employs Islamophobia to over-police Muslim populations and curtail their civil liber- ties. Islamophobic rhetoric has also driven surges in hate crimes against Muslim communities. The United Nations notes that this trend continues today as Is- lamophobic incidents continue to rise globally.1 The genocide in East Turkistan is the defining human rights atrocity of the twenty-first century thus far. The CCP has remolded a global trend of Islamophobia to fit their own needs—a new chapter in a horrific history. Though the motivations of the Chinese state in East Turkistan are varied, economic gain, cultural unification, and national consolidation all rank highly. Specific policies targeting the practice of Islam have allowed for a brutal crackdown on cultural norms in the region. Meanwhile, a global trend toward Islamophobia has given the genocide some political cover in the global sphere.
Topic:
Genocide, Human Rights, Islamophobia, and Uyghurs
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Global Focus

45. Islamophobia, Internationalism, and the Expanse Between

Author:
Khaled A. Beydoun
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Institution:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Abstract:
While delivering a lecture for the BBC, Edward Said maintained, “Speaking truth to power is no Panglossian idealism: it is carefully weighing the alterna- tives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change.”1 This was 1993. A world not yet remade in the image of the war on terror and the new order it ushered in eight years later. Not even Said, the secular hu- manist whose Orientalism crystallized how the West mispresented Islam, could anticipate the coming urgency of his work and the weight of the words he spoke in London.2 Speaking at the doorstep of the imperial power that divided much of the world and entrenched the epistemological binary that oriented Islam as a civilizational other, Said’s spoken truth confronted power beyond domestic boundaries. He was a grassroots internationalist who challenged the violence wrought by transnational hegemonies, new and old. He saw beyond boundar- ies, political and existential, to link struggles and galvanize oppressed groups against hegemonic forces.
Topic:
Ideology, Islamophobia, Internationalism, and Edward Said
Political Geography:
Global Focus

46. What Did 9/11 Mean for U.S. Media Coverage of Muslims and Islam?

Author:
A. Maurits van der Veen and Erik Bleich
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Institution:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Abstract:
The twentieth anniversary of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks is an opportune moment to review the impact of those attacks on the U.S. media’s coverage of Muslims and Islam. In 2003, Vice President Dick Cheney famously argued that “[i]n a sense, 9/11 changed everything for us.”1 Evidence suggests that—within the U.S. government—“everything” includes how officials perceive Muslims; they became the target of wide, undifferentiated suspicion.2 The picture for the U.S. media is less clear-cut: some have argued that, as within the govern- ment, the attacks “thrust a certain type of Orientalist stereotype firmly back... into our news media, and into the mouths of politicians.”3 Meanwhile, others have found an “increase in sympathetic representations of Arab and Muslim Americans in the U.S. media after 9/11.”4 In our own research, we find two key changes after 9/11: an enduring rise in the number of newspaper articles about Muslims and Islam and a dramatic increase in the share of articles linking Muslims to terrorism or extremism.
Topic:
Islam, Media, News Analysis, and 9/11
Political Geography:
North America and United States of America

47. Securitization of Islam: The Lethal Combination of Threat and Identity Politics

Author:
Jocelyne Cesari
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Institution:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Abstract:
The work of Samuel Huntington, first presented in a 1993 article in Foreign Affairs and subsequently elaborated upon in his 1996 book Clash of Civiliza- tions, has shaped the perception of the role of religion in general, and Islam in particular, in international conflicts.1 Huntington argued that Islam is uniquely incompatible with and antagonistic to the core values of the West, values which he defines as democracy and equality of individuals. Since Huntington first presented his work, much ink has been spilled by scholars attempting to invali- date his thesis. They show that civilizations are not homogenous or monolithic players in world politics with an inclination to “clash,” but rather that they consist of pluralistic, divergent, and convergent actors and of practices that are constantly evolving.2 Nonetheless, Huntington’s concept of the “Clash” has remained relevant in political discourse and in the media.
Topic:
Islam, Identity Politics, Securitization, and Threat Perception
Political Geography:
Global Focus

48. Humanitarian Intervention and International Order: The Endless Wars Problem

Author:
Alex J. Bellamy
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Institution:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Abstract:
Nowadays, few approve of humanitarian intervention, understood as the use of non-consensual force for the principal purpose of alleviating massive human suffering. Realists have always held that armed humanitarian crusades are an irrational, dangerous, and counterproductive extravagance likely to cause more problems than they solve, and at great expense.1 In a world full of autocracies and communities that define their values very differently from one another, re- alists argue, the forceful pursuit of “liberal hegemony” is likely to produce only “a perpetual state of war.”2 Critical thinkers have always suspected that a thinly veiled Western liberal imperialism lay behind what some described as the “new military humanism.”3 Its confidence in Western perfidiousness was briefly shaken by revelations of its misplaced faith in the Khmer Rouge and Slobodan Milošević but restored with gusto by the false pretexts for war with Iraq in 2003. English School pluralists value international order over individual rights;4 legal positivists lament the illegality of humanitarian intervention;5 post-colonial scholars, states, and other critical writers believe humanitarian intervention is the thin end of a neo-imperial wedge to erode hard-won self-determination and sovereignty;6 pacifists complain that humanitarian war is still, after all, war, and highlight the tragic irony of taking lives in order to save lives.7 More recently, Samuel Moyn situated humanitarian intervention within a broader politics by which “endless war” has been normalized as humane at the expense of war prevention.8 So intense is global antipathy that prominent advocates of the “responsibility to protect,” like Gareth Evans, carefully distinguish the principle they champion from humanitarian intervention. Samantha Power, meanwhile, was chastened by a painful experience in Libya into doubting whether humanitarian goals could be achieved by military force.9
Topic:
Human Rights, War, Humanitarian Intervention, and International Order
Political Geography:
Global Focus

49. Armed Conflict and the Protection of Populations: The Debate over Humanitarian Intervention, Using Armed Force, and the Idea of Sovereignty

Author:
James Turner Johnson
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Institution:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Abstract:
This paper examines the development of the idea of humanitarian in- tervention and its implications for state sovereignty. It begins with a moral discussion of intervention from the rediscovery of the just war theory in the 1960s and 1970s, extends through public debates about intervention to protect fundamental human rights during armed conflicts over succeed- ing decades, and includes the production of the global commitment of the “Responsibility to Protect” and its treatment in the Outcome document of the 2005 UN World Summit. The article notes that two competing ideas of sovereignty have been recurrent themes in humanitarian intervention debates. One idea, expressed in Article 2 of the UN Charter, defines sovereignty in terms of the inviolability of state territory. The other, surfacing in human rights law and in moral debates in the public sphere, defines sovereignty in terms of the responsibility of states and the world order to protect funda- mental human rights domestically and internationally. This paper identifies the deep historical roots of both conceptions and their mutual, but different, connections to the idea of natural law, as well as their different implications regarding the roles of states, regional organizations, and the UN. It concludes by noting that while the 2005 Summit reaffirmed the former conception of sovereignty, it also acknowledged the latter as a domestic obligation of states, though one in which the international community also has an interest.
Topic:
Sovereignty, Humanitarian Intervention, Armed Conflict, and Protection
Political Geography:
Global Focus

50. The Uyghur Genocide and International Policy Response

Author:
Omer Kanat
Publication Date:
09-2021
Content Type:
Journal Article
Journal:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Institution:
Brown Journal of World Affairs
Abstract:
The Chinese government’s treatment of the Uyghurs has gone from a relatively obscure issue in the international press to a central one. It has become the subject of discussion and policymaking in the halls of governments around the world and has gained widespread awareness among the general public. This is because Uyghurs are subject to some of the worst human rights abuses in the world; in many respects, their treatment meets the accepted definition of geno- cide. The fact that these abuses are being perpetrated in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a nation widely expected to have a major role in shaping the twenty-first century, has contributed to the urgency of the issue. The Uyghur community has welcomed the long overdue response from some governments. An increasing number of parliaments have condemned the Chinese government’s actions as genocide, and some are developing legislation aimed at addressing issues such as forced labor in the supply chain and transnational repression di- rected at Uyghurs living abroad. Although the Chinese government denounces these as attempts to meddle in their internal affairs, the repression of Uyghurs has a global dimension that requires a global response.
Topic:
Foreign Policy, Genocide, Human Rights, and Uyghurs
Political Geography:
China, Asia, and Global Focus