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In this study, Teresa L. Ebert makes a spirited, pioneering case for a new cultural critique committed to the struggles for human freedom and global equality. Demonstrating the implosion of the linguistic turn that isolates culture from historical processes, The Task of Cultural Critique maps the contours of an emerging materialist critique that contributes toward a critical social and cultural consciousness. Through groundbreaking analyses of cultural texts, Ebert questions the contemporary Derridian dogma that asserts "the future belongs to ghosts." Events-to-come are not spectral, she contends, but the material outcome of global class struggles. Not "hauntology" but history produces cultural practices and their conflictive representations--from sexuality, war, and consumption to democracy, torture, globalization, and absolute otherness. With close readings of texts from Proust and Balzac to "Chick Lit," from Lukács, de Man, Deleuze, and Marx to Derrida, Žižek, Butler, Kollontai, and Agamben, the book opens up new directions for cultural critique today.
This book explores the lives and expectations of young women in the new Russia, looking at the enormous changes that the new social and economic environment have brought. The authors draw on the growing literature on gender and generation in the West which has arisen as a result of the recognition that the experience of youth is classed, raced and gendered and that the experience of gender is mediated by class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and age. They consider the role of the media, state and social institutions in shaping opportunities and experiences in the post-Soviet environment, focusing on the strategies employed by individual women to reforge social identities in a society in which they have been dislocated more acutely than in any other `postmodern' society.
Since its independence in 1991, Russia has struggled with the growing pains of defining its role in international politics. After Vladimir Putin ascended to power in 2000, the country undertook grandiose foreign policy projects in an attempt to delineate its place among the world's superpowers. With this in mind, Robert Nalbandov examines the milestones of Russia's international relations since the turn of the twenty-first century. He focuses on the specific goals, engagement practices, and tools used by Putin's administration to promote Russia's vital national and strategic interests in specific geographic locations. His findings illuminate Putin's foreign policy objective of reinstituting Russian global strategic dominance. Nalbandov argues that identity-based politics have dominated Putin's tenure and that Russia's east/west split is reflected in Asian-European politics. Nalbandov's analysis shows that unchecked domestic power, an almost exclusive application of hard power, and determined ambition for unabridged global influence and a defined place as a world superpower are the keys to Putin's Russia.
This book explores the diplomatic, security and energy relations of Turkey and Iran, analysing the impact of religious, political and social transformation on their bilateral relationship. It examines Turkey and Iran’s security relations with the wider Middle East - including the Kurdish-Turkish War, the Kurdish-Iranian War and the Kurdish-Arab War - and their impact on regional politics.
Initially expected to bring efficiency to the Russian economy and prosperity to Russian society, the shock therapy of price liberalization, privatization and macroeconomic stabilization introduced under Boris Yeltsin was quickly condemned as having worsened the lives of most Russians. Based on conversations with more than two dozen women in a provincial Russian capital, this book takes a retrospective look at these economic policies and explores how they transformed the trajectory of the lives of these women- both positively and negatively- in the family and in the workplace. McKinney considers the everyday experiences of the women as they provided for their families, established businesses, travelled abroad, and adjusted to the new economic, political and social environment of the Late Soviet and Post-Soviet era. Through their divergent experiences, Russian Women and the End of Soviet Socialism casts light on how these women view issues of gender, ethnicity, domestic and international politics, and the end of the Soviet experiment. Students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including gender studies, sociology, economics and history, will find this book of interest.
This volume is the first to to take a systematic look at the position of women in the post-Soviet states of the former USSR.
This edited volume explores the everyday struggles and challenges of women living in the South Caucasus. The primary aim of the collection is to shift the pre-occupation with geopolitical analysis in the region and to share new empirical research on women and social change. The contributors discuss a broad range of topics, each relating to women’s everyday challenges during periods (past and present) of turbulent transformation and conflict, thus helping make sense of these transformations as well as adding new empirical insights to larger questions on life in the South Caucasus. Part I begins the discussion of women and social change in Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan by examining the con...
This book explores why, despite the initial promise and enthusiasm at the beginning of the 1990s, the European Union (EU) and the Russian Federation have encountered severe difficulties in developing their institutionalised relationship.
Russia and the West have avoided renewed confrontation despite many post Cold War crises, but illiberal trends in Russia rule out any prospect of developing a mutual agenda for closer integration. Russian engagement with the leading Euro-Atlantic institutions on a special, but still subordinate, nonmember basis remains a clever yet suboptimal substitute. Such relationships, as this monograph about Russia and the European Union explains, tend to produce shallow collaboration, symbolic summitry and costly standoffs. Closer cooperation is blocked by an ongoing dispute over terms, which is rooted in asymmetries in power, ambivalent preferences, uncertainty about the distributional costs and benefits of deeper engagement, and Russia's continued unwillingness or inability to lock-in the liberal domestic structures necessary to make credible commitments. Moscow's renewed self-confidence and geopolitical ambitions, bolstered by sustained economic growth and high energy prices, complicate the bargaining and further strain these special relationships which persist for lack of a realistic, superior alternative.
This collection highlights changes in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 from the perspectives of gender and identity. Resistance to the negative consequences of certain changes demonstrate that women's activities have played a large part in democratic developments in various countries.