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In den vorliegenden gesellschaftskritischen Kolumnen setzt sich die Autorin Gabriela Pagener-Neu mit aktuellen Themen auseinander – eingebettet in politische, psychologische, soziologische und philosophische Fragestellungen. Leicht verständlich und präzise trifft sie den Kern der jeweiligen Problematik, regt zum Nachdenken und vermutlich längst notwendigem Umdenken an.

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The USSR’s dissolution resulted in the creation of not only fifteen recognized states but also of four non-recognized statelets: Nagorno-Karabakh, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Transnistria. Their polities comprise networks with state-like elements. Since the early 1990s, the four pseudo-states have been continously dependent on their sponsor countries (Russia, Armenia), and contesting the territorial integrity of their parental nation-states Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova. In 2014, the outburst of Russia-backed separatism in Eastern Ukraine led to the creation of two more para-states, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) and the Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR), whose leaders used the experience of older de facto states. In 2020, this growing network of de facto states counted an overall population of more than 4 million people.
The essays collected in this volume address such questions as: How do post-Soviet de facto states survive and continue to grow? Is there anything specific about the political ecology of Eastern Europe that provides secessionism with the possibility to launch state-making processes in spite of international sanctions and counteractions of their parental states? How do secessionist movements become embedded in wider networks of separatism in Eastern and Western Europe? What is the impact of secessionism and war on the parental states?
The contributors are Jan Claas Behrends, Petra Colmorgen, Bruno Coppieters, Nataliia Kasianenko, Alice Lackner, Mikhail Minakov, and Gwendolyn Sasse.

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The contributions gathered in this fascinating collection, in which scholars from a diverse range of disciplines share their perspectives on Russian covert activities known as Russian active measures, help readers observe the profound influence of Russian covert action on foreign states’ policies, cultures, people’s mentality, and social institutions, past and present. Disinformation, forgeries, major show trials, cooptation of Western academia, memory, and cyber wars, and changes in national and regional security doctrines of states targeted by Russia constitute an incomplete list of topics discussed in this volume. Most importantly, through a nexus of perspectives and through the prism of new documents discovered in the former KGB archives, the texts highlight the enormous scale and the legacies of Soviet/Russian covert action.
Because of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its on-going war in Ukraine’s Donbas, Ukraine lately gained international recognition as the epicenter of Russian disinformation campaigns, invigorating popular and scholarly interest in conventional and non-conventional warfare.
The studies included in this collection illuminate the objectives and implications of Russia’s attempts to ideologically subvert Ukraine as well as other nations. Examining them through historical lenses reveals a cultural clash between Russia and the West in general.

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This book draws on the author’s experience from 26 years of Ukrainian diplomatic service in, among others, Bonn, Berlin, Washington, and Vienna, and his work as a speechwriter to most Ukrainian foreign ministers for the last two decades. Scherba’s captivating essays reflect his views of international affairs from a Ukrainian perspective. His deliberations are presented in uncomplicated, plain language. The articles assembled here have repeatedly caused discussion in Ukraine and abroad.
By his opponents, Scherba is often described as being surprisingly undiplomatic and even provocative. For instance, his article “Why nationalism can’t be the national idea of a European Ukraine”, published on a Ukrainian nationalist website, stirred considerable controversy in Ukraine. Aside from explaining Kyiv’s take on some key issues of international relations, these essays provide insights into Ukrainian political thinking since the start of Russia’s military aggression in 2014, and into the painful political intramural fights in Ukrainian society ever since.

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Our Others: Stories of Ukrainian Diversity is an award-winning exploration of both the histories and personal stories of fourteen ethnic minority groups living within the boundaries of present-day Ukraine: Czechs and Slovaks, Meskhetian Turks, Swedes, Romanians, Hungarians, Roma, Jews, ‘Liptaks’, Gagauzes, Germans, Vlachs, Poles, Crimean Tatars, and Armenians. Based on a combination of academic research, fieldwork, and interviews, Olesya Yaremchuk’s literary reportages paint realistic, thoughtful, and historically informed depictions of how these various groups arrived in Ukraine and how they have fared within the country’s borders. Accompanied by vivid photographs that bring the reportages to life, Our Others is in some respects a chronicle of the myriad voluntary and forced migrations that have rolled through Ukraine for centuries. Simultaneously, the book offers a tender—and timely—study of the little islands of cultural diversity in Ukraine that have survived the Soviet steamroller of planned linguistic, cultural, and religious unification and that deserve acknowledgement in Ukraine’s broader cultural identity.
The volume’s contributors are: Marta Barnych (contributing co-author), Anton Semyzhenko (contributing co-author), Ostap Slyvynsky (foreword)

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The Russian Federation’s official acknowledgement of the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in August 2008 has since been undermining both overall political stability in the Southern Caucasus in general and future perspectives of Georgia’s development in particular. Such recognition of new quasi-legal entities without consent of the parent state and a subsequent erosion of the principle of territorial integrity are pressing challenges in current world affairs. The Kremlin’s controversial 2008 decision continues to be an important bone of contention in Russian-Western relations.
This study explores the emergence and recent transformation of modern norms of recognition, secession, and self-determination in international law. It traces the evolution of Soviet and Russian perspectives on the recognition of new states, and discusses overall Georgia-Russia relations in order to answer the question: Why did the Kremlin recognize Georgia’s two breakaway entities in contradiction to traditional Russian approaches to recognition? The author argues that Moscow’s deviant behavior vis-à-vis Tbilisi was caused by three major reasons, namely: the earlier recognition of Kosovo by many Western nations in disregard of Russia’s stance, the intention to prevent Georgia’s accession to NATO, and the necessity to legitimize a continued presence of Russian armed forces in Georgia’s two breakaway provinces.

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В 2008 году Грэм Паско и Питер Пеппер, два британских автора, не принадлежащих к научным кругам, опубликовали на английском и испанском языках очерк, озаглавленный «Настоящая история Фолклендских/Мальвинских островов». Доводы, которые приводятся в этих текстах, были подхвачены в официальных британских нотах в ООН, а также в британских петициях, адресованных Комитету ООН по деколонизации. Аргументы авторов очерка приводятся впервые в истории этого продолжительного конфликта, и они грубо противоречат позиции, которую колониальные власти занимали на протяжении десятилетий, пока продолжался этот спор. Речь идет попросту о попытке переписать историю. Вот почему, на наш взгляд, важно исправить ошибки и указать на недостоверные сведения и ложные заключения, содержащиеся в документе, который уже успел стать в Великобритании едва ли не официальным. Данная работа состоит из шести глав, которые повторяют, насколько это возможно, порядок изложения аргументов в британском очерке. Ответственность за содержание лежит в полной мере и исключительно на авторах, которые при подготовке этого текста не следовали ничьим указаниями и не получали никаких грантов или вознаграждений. В формате PDF A4 сохранен издательский макет книги.

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<P>At the height of the Cold War in 1954, President Eisenhower inaugurated a program of cultural exchange that sent American dancers and other artists to political «hot spots» overseas. This peacetime gambit by a warrior hero was a resounding success.</P><P>Among the artists chosen for international duty were José Limón, who led his company on the first government-sponsored tour of South America; Martha Graham, whose famed ensemble crisscrossed southeast Asia; Alvin Ailey, whose company brought audiences to their feet throughout the South Pacific; and George Balanchine, whose New York City Ballet crowned its triumphant visits to Western Europe and Japan with an epoch-making tour of the Soviet Union in 1962. The success of Eisenhower's program of cultural export led directly to the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts and Washington's Kennedy Center.</P><P>Naima Prevots draws on an array of previously unexamined sources, including formerly classified State Department documents, congressional committee hearings, and the minutes of the Dance Panel, to reveal the inner workings of «Eisenhower's Program,» the complex set of political, fiscal, and artistic interests that shaped it, and the ever-uneasy relationship between government and the arts in the US.</P><P>CONTRIBUTORS: Eric Foner.</P>

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Goethe’s 1832 poem Faust offers a vision of humanity realising freedom and prosperity through transcending natural adversity. Changing European Visions of Disaster and Development returns to Faust as a way of exploring the rise and fall of European humanist aspirations to build free and prosperous national political communities protected from natural disasters. Faust stories emerged in early modern Europe linked to the shaking of the traditional religious and political order, and the pursuit of new areas of human knowledge and activity which led to a shift from viewing disasters as acts of God to acts of nature. Faust’s dam building and land reclamation project in Goethe’s poem was inspired by Dutch hydro-engineering and in turn inspired others. Faustian dreams of an engineered future were pursued by the American Yugoslav inventor Nikola Tesla and the country of his birth towards establishing its national independence and escaping the fate of being a borderland. Faust remains a compelling reference point to explore European visions of disaster and development. If Faust captured the European spirit of earlier centuries, what is today’s outlook? Ambitious Faustian development visions to eradicate natural disasters have been replaced by anti-Faustian risk cosmopolitanism sceptical towards human activity in ways counter to building collective protection from disaster. Tesla’s country of birth fears returning to being an insecure borderland of Europe. This powerful and timely book calls for a rekindling of European humanism and Faust’s vision of ‘free people standing on free land’.

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