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Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War by Kees van der Pijl Pdf
Deals with the downing of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine on 17 July 2014, amid a civil war that followed the violent seizure of power by Ukrainian nationalists on 22 February of that year, leading to a NATO-Russia standoff.This is the first scholarly work on the Ukrainian civil war and the downing of MH17. It offers a contextual analysis that radically challenges the Western consensus that "Putin" was behind it all without making pertinent claims as to the perpetrators.It analyses the Western advance to the east after 1991 and investigates the Ukraine crisis in light of internal fault-lines, the formation of the BRICS bloc and US-EU rivalry over Russian energy links.Based on previously unpublished government and NATO documents as well as a wide array of sources, the book is written in an accessible style.
The Ukrainian crisis that dominated headlines in fall 2013 was decades in the making. Two great schisms shaped events: one within Ukraine, its western and southeastern parts divided along cultural and political lines; the other was driven by geopolitical factors. Competition between Russia and the West exacerbated Ukraine’s divisions. This study focuses on the historical background and complex causality of the crisis, from the rise of mass demonstrations on Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) to the making of the post-revolt regime. In the context of a “new cold war,” the author sheds light on the role of radical Ukrainian nationalists and neofascists in the February 2014 snipers’ massacre, the ouster of President Viktor Yanukovych, and Russia’s seizure of Crimea and involvement in the civil war in the eastern region of Donbass.
This book presents a comprehensive survey of the current state of Russia and how Russia is likely to develop in the immediate future. Not always sticking to the mainstream narrative, it covers political events including Putin’s constitutional reforms of January 2020 and their likely consequences, economic developments, Russia’s international relations and military activities, and changes and issues in Russian society, including in education, the place of women, health care and religion. Special attention is paid to manifestations of the COVID-19 pandemic. The book’s overall conclusion is that events of 2020 may compel Putin to ‘think again’ before he decides whether to run for office in 2024.
Displacement in War-Torn Ukraine by Viktoriya Sereda Pdf
This Element offers a multi-scalar perspective on the transformational effects of war and dislocation on people's sense of belonging. It begins with an examination of the brief historical and socio-demographic profiles of Crimea and the Donbas, stages of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, main explanatory frameworks as presented in the scholarly literature and policy reports, with a critical re-evaluation of identity-based explanations, and the directions of conflict-driven displacement flows. It examines state failures and the role of internal displacement governance in shaping new lines of social inclusion or exclusion through the production of multiple physical, symbolic and bureaucratic borders. It discusses Ukraine's civil society response to IDP dislocation and IDPs' engagement through various formal and non-formal networks. The final section explores the multidimensional and complex (dis)connections that IDPs experience with regard to their imagined past, their new places of residence and the social groups perceived as important in their hierarchies of belonging.
Blurring Intelligence Crime by Willem Bart de Lint Pdf
This book explores the conundrum that political fortune is dependent both on social order and big, constitutive crime. An act of outrageous harm depends on rules and protocols of crime scene discovery and forensic recovery, but political authorities review events for a social agenda, so that crime is designated according to the relative absence or presence of politics. In investigating this problem, the book introduces the concepts ‘intelligence crime’ and ‘critical forensics.’ It also reviews as an exemplar of this phenomenon ‘apex crime,’ a watershed event involving government in the support of a contested political and social order and its primary opponent as the obvious offender, which is then subject to a confirmation bias. Chapters feature case study analysis of a selection of familiar, high profile crimes in which the motives and actions of security or intelligence actors are considered as blurred or smeared depending on their interconnection in transactional political events, or according to friend/enemy status.
During the 2016 presidential election, many younger voters repudiated Hillary Clinton because of her husband’s support for mass incarceration, banking deregulation and free-trade agreements that led many U.S. jobs to be shipped overseas. Warmonger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the Trajectory from Bush II to Biden, shows that Clinton’s foreign policy was just as bad as his domestic policy. Cultivating an image as a former anti-Vietnam War activist to win over the aging hippie set in his early years, as president, Clinton bombed six countries and, by the end of his first term, had committed U.S. troops to 25 separate military operations, compared to 17 in Ronald Reagan’s two terms. Clinton further expanded America’s covert empire of overseas surveillance outposts and spying and increased the budget for intelligence spending and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA offshoot which promoted regime change in foreign nations. The latter was not surprising because, according to CIA operative Cord Meyer Jr., Clinton had been recruited into the CIA while a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and as Governor of Arkansas in the 1980s he had allowed clandestine arms and drug flights to Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries (Contras) backed by the CIA to be taken from Mena Airport in the western part of the state. Rather than being a time of tranquility when the U.S. failed to pay attention to the gathering storm of terrorism, as New York Times columnist David Brooks frames it, the Clinton presidency saw rising tensions among the U.S., China and Russia because of Clinton’s malign foreign policies, and U.S. complicity in terrorist acts. In so many ways, Clinton’s presidency set the groundwork for the disasters that were to follow under Bush II, Obama, Trump, and Biden. It was Clinton—building off of Reagan—who first waged a War on Terror ridden with double standards, one that adopted terror tactics, including extraordinary rendition, bombing and the use of drones. It was Clinton who cried wolf about human rights abuses and the need to protect beleaguered peoples from genocide to justify military intervention in a post-Cold War age. And it was Clinton’s administration that pressed for regime change in Iraq and raised public alarm about the mythic WMDs—all while relying on fancy new military technologies and private military contractors to distance US shady military interventions from the public to limit dissent.
Did NATO cause the crisis in Ukraine? Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the fortunes of NATO—pronounced “braindead” only a few years prior—have been miraculously revived. The alliance, buoyed by surging European military budgets and inflows of combat-ready troops and cutting-edge hardware, looks forward to welcoming additional member states. Originally conceived as a bulwark against the Soviet Union, NATO has outlasted its ostensible foe by over three decades. Its geostrategic remit is limited to the North Atlantic in name only. Treaty obligations range from the Andes to the Gulf of Aden and the Khyber Pass, and allied commanders now prepare for battle in the South China Sea. Natopolitanism takes an in-depth look at the evolution and aggrandizement of NATO since the turn of the 1990s. What purposes does NATO serve in the post-Cold War world? What is the balance sheet of a quarter century of alliance expansion, and what part did it play in the eruption of conflict on Europe’s eastern marches? Contributors to the volume, including John J. Mearsheimer, Mary Elise Sarotte, Susan Watkins, Wolfgang Streeck, and Volodymyr Ishchenko, revisit this this history as it unfolded. Varying in viewpoint and judgment, all share a critical perspective at odds with wartime pieties.
The Militarization of the European Union by Kees van der Pijl Pdf
From the establishment of NATO in 1949, Western Europe has been under Anglo-American tutelage in military and security matters. Several countries, most notably France and (since reunification) Germany, have experienced this as a hindrance to the pursuit of their particular interests. Since 2008, the European Commission has actively joined the quest for “strategic autonomy” within NATO. The elections of Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron in 2016-17 further widened the Atlantic rift, while the COVID-19 crisis with its colossal economic costs has, in turn, exacerbated the already worsening geopolitical tensions with states like Russia and China. With chapters on the politics and economics of European defence, on France, Germany, and Russia, the EU’s energy provision, the militarization of migration control, and the restructuring of the transatlantic bond, this volume offers an up-to-date, critical assessment of the militarization of European integration, written by established scholars in the fields of international relations and security studies.
Transnational Capital and Class Fractions by Bob Jessop,Henk Overbeek Pdf
Emerging in the late 1970s, the Amsterdam School’s (AS) most distinctive contribution to international political economy was the systematic incorporation of the Marxian concept of capital fractions into the study of international politics. Contending that politics in advanced capitalist countries takes place in a fundamentally transnationalized space in which the distinction between ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ has blurred, it shows how in this space, politics is structured by competing comprehensive concepts of control. Presenting a concise and instructive introduction to the origins, development and significance of this distinct approach, this book provides a unique overview of the School’s contemporary significance for the field. Offering a new generation of critical scholars the opportunity to become acquainted at first hand with some of the contributions that have shaped the work of the AS, the contributions present critical commentaries, discussing the merits and shortcomings of the AS from a variety of perspectives, and undertake a (self-) critical evaluation of the current place and value of the AS framework in the broader landscape of approaches to the study of contemporary capitalism. Written for scholars and students alike, it will be of interest to those working in international political economy, international relations and political science, political sociology, European studies and branches of academic economics such as regulation theory and institutional economics.
"Brilliantly researched, impeccably sourced, the story is told in an engaging style and with great analytical acuity. Here is a dire warning against the slide into authoritarianism..." WILLIAM I. ROBINSON, Distinguished Prof. of Sociology, UC-Santa Barbara Ever since large parts of the world were placed in lockdown in March 2020 in the name of public health, there has been a growing public suspicion that some sort of global seizure of power and social transformation is being implemented under guise of the extraordinary suspension of democracy and unprecedented restrictions of basic freedoms occurring in so many countries at the same time. This book contends that since the financial collapse of 2008, populations in many countries have become restive in the face of extreme inequality and diminishing life chances. In a digital economy, one to two billion people will soon be superfluous, but they are not likely to remain sitting on their hands; in many parts of the world their resistance has begun. The Western capitalist elites have lost the capacity to engage their respective peoples in an equitable social contract and have resorted to stoking fear -- from the terrorism scare and the Russian threat to the COVID infliction, with more variants coming on line -- as a formula for curtailing protest and maintaining power. It analyses the social forces driving this process: the US national security state and its intelligence apparatus, the IT giants spun off from it, and the large media conglomerates that have joined forces to create a comprehensive surveillance system of Orwellian dimensions The production of disease threats is amplified by the Gates Foundation and other public international organizations including the WHO, along with the pharmaceutical industries, foresee unprecedented profit in plans to inoculate the world population with experimental gene therapies sold as vaccines. Ideas on using a pandemic to initiate a worldwide state of siege have matured until the need for collective intervention -- the threat of a new financial meltdown and the need to remove Trump -- prompted global elites to seize the day. The virus threat may not be an idle one, given the Pentagon's biowarfare infrastructure which for decades has been producing gain-of-function viruses in laboratories the world over, as have a wide range of countries. The book is the first to offer an extensively documented, comprehensive analysis of all aspects of this real and embellished threat
RussiaGate and Propaganda by Oliver Boyd-Barrett Pdf
This book furthers our understanding of the practice of propaganda with a specific focus on the RussiaGate case. RussiaGate is a discourse about alleged Russian "meddling" in US elections, and this book argues that it functions as disinformation or distraction. The book provides a framework for better understanding of ongoing developments of RussiaGate, linking these to macroconsiderations that rarely enter mainstream accounts. It demonstrates the considerable weaknesses of many of the charges that have been made against Russia by US investigators, and argues that this discourse fails to take account of broader non-transparent persuasion campaigns operating in the election-information environment that are strengthened by social media manipulation. RussiaGate has obscured many of the factors that challenge the integrity of democratic process in the USA. These deserve a much higher priority than any influence that Russia may want to exert. The book concludes that RussiaGate discourse needs to be contextualized with reference to a long-established broader competition between great powers for domination of EurAsia. This pitches the US/European Union against Russia/China and perhaps, ultimately, even the USA against Europe. This book will be of much interest to students of media and communication studies, propaganda studies, US politics, Russian politics, and International Relations in general.
As the centres of world capitalism struggle to overcome long-term stagnation and existential crisis, this book aims to recover the legacy of revolutions against capitalism and imperialism. The capitalist world today faces pervasive crises of unprecendented depth. To economic and social crises that were already deepening as the neoliberal decades wore on, it added the ecological emergency and then a pandemic of historic proportions, both made worse by political and ideological paralysis. These crises also raise the threat of imperialist war. The possibility of revolutionary change is increasingly in the air and this volume captures this extraordinary moment. Anticipating this situation, we at the Geopolitical Economy Research Group organized an international conference on Revolutions at the University of Manitoba, Canada, in 2017, to mark the centenary of the Russian Revolution, and this book stems from it. The editors’ introduction interrogates the intimate relation of capitalism to revolutions, and scans the political horizon of the present conjuncture. The chapters that follow fill in this retrospect and prospect. The five keynote addresses provide the historical spine and they are supplemented by others from the conference and beyond. These chapters consider revolution from a variety of perspectives, including the revolutions in Russia, China and Venezuela but also the French and Haitian Revolutions; Marx’s critical political economy and revolution; the long history of counter-revolution; revolution and indigenous peoples; the media and revolution and the importance of revolution at the grassroots. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.
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.
China-US Rivalry and Regional Reordering in Latin America and the Caribbean by Li Xing,Javier Vadell Pdf
This book provides a comprehensive, conceptual and analytical framework for understanding the reordering process in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region, driven and shaped by China–US rivalry. It demonstrates the differences between China–US, China–LAC and US–LAC relations and questions to what extent the LAC region can be considered a unified actor. Exploring broad perspectives such as global governance, international institutions, trade, security policy, climate change, multilateralism and regional and global peace and stability, the contributors also consider China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) and “minilateral” cooperation, sustainable development and business and the role of soft power, such as tourism and education in China–LAC relations. This timely and important contribution analyzing the changing regional order in the LAC region brought about by China’s global rise and increasing hegemonic competition with the US will appeal to scholars and student of international relations, international political economy, and security studies.
Ukraine's Maidan, Russia's War by Mychailo Wynnyckyj Pdf
In early 2014, sparked by an assault by their government on peaceful students, Ukrainians rose up against a deeply corrupt, Moscow-backed regime. Initially demonstrating under the banner of EU integration, the Maidan protesters proclaimed their right to a dignified existence; they learned to organize, to act collectively, to become a civil society. Most prominently, they established a new Ukrainian identity: territorial, inclusive, and present-focused with powerful mobilizing symbols. Driven by an urban “bourgeoisie” that rejected the hierarchies of industrial society in favor of a post-modern heterarchy, a previously passive post-Soviet country experienced a profound social revolution that generated new senses: “Dignity” and “fairness” became rallying cries for millions. Europe as the symbolic target of political aspiration gradually faded, but the impact (including on Europe) of Ukraine’s revolution remained. When Russia invaded—illegally annexing Crimea and then feeding continuous military conflict in the Donbas—, Ukrainians responded with a massive volunteer effort and touching patriotism. In the process, they transformed their country, the region, and indeed the world. This book provides a chronicle of Ukraine’s Maidan and Russia’s ongoing war, and puts forth an analysis of the Revolution of Dignity from the perspective of a participant observer.
