Political disagreement in intergroup terms: Contextual variation and the influence of power

In two studies we examined justificatory attributions made in the face of political disagreement. Study 1 showed that Australian supporters and opponents of Australian involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq made stereotypical attributions that justified the superiority of the in‐group over the out‐group. Stereotypical attributions were consistent with the justification that the supporters of the war had been misled by dishonest political leaders. Study 2 replicated this pattern with supporters and opponents of Australia's policy of mandatory detention of asylum seekers. It also identified pragmatism as a dimension that dominant, government‐aligned, groups may use to justify the superiority of the in‐group over the out‐group. In both studies political leaders were seen as more competent than members of the public. The results show the influence of intergroup power and within‐group leader/supporter distinctions on people's attributions about political disagreement. They point to the power of social psychological theory to help analyse important contemporary political concerns.

One Nation Over Coals: Cold War Nationalism and the Barbecue

1950s Americans fervently embraced the barbecue in attempts to understand themselves and their place in an uncertain world. Barbecue extended a ready-made analogy to those seeking national fortification; just as red meat’s protein and iron nourished the individual body, its consumption strengthened the body politic in the face of continued geopolitical conflict and shifting domestic structures. Postwar barbecue culture celebrated democracy’s bounty, fortitude, and might; invoked American values of ingenuity, community, and progress; and invited individuals to find security in a shared heritage of American exceptionalism. Simultaneously, it excluded populations who threatened its white, heterosexual, home-owning image of model citizenry. This exclusivity, however, signals awareness of the presence and permanence of political and social change. Thus, postwar barbecue is a contested site, the examination of which illuminates our understanding of the ideological and ontological struggles in Cold War America.

What Almost Was: The Politics of the Contemporary Alternate History Novel

The alternate history novel, a genre of American popular fiction that has become increasingly popular since the mid-1990s, has flown under the critical radar. In this paper, I contextualize the emergence of the genre, identify its common properties, and closely analyze several texts. I argue that the development of the alternate history can be tied to the end of the cold war and the loosening grip of deterministic ideologies; by comparing the internal worlds of alternate histories with the site of their production, I suggest that the underlying militaristic, anti-“big government” tone of the genre reflects the power of libertarian ideas in the contemporary United States.

"You Should Give them Blacks to Eat": Waging Inter-American Wars of Torture and Terror

Introduction: Guinea-Bissau Today—The Irrelevance of the State and the Permanence of Change

As I was writing this introduction, Guinea-Bissau was rocked by yet another “political crisis.” On the night of March 1 and 2, 2009, the army chief of staff, General Batista Tagme Na Waie, and the president of Guinea-Bissau, João Bernardino “Nino” Vieira, were killed in the space of a few hours. As was to be expected, articles mushroomed in the international press in the following days, sporting headlines that we have long since become accustomed to, such as “Guinea-Bissau Collapse Deepens after Leader Killed” (Pitman 2009) or “Guinea-Bissau Threatens Return to Bad Old Days in Africa” (George 2009). An article by the Economist Intelligence Unit was entitled—with a literary touch reminiscent of Conrad's Heart of Darkness—“Edge of the Abyss.” These days Guinea-Bissau, particularly since the 1998–99 civil war, seems to be the poster child for all the negativity generally attributed to African countries, an overlapping of political, economic, and humanitarian crises, in blatant confirmation of the picture of “shadowy Africa” that James Ferguson pinpoints as one of the features of international discourse on Africa today (2006:15,190). Despite these clichéd articles (identical in tone to those that have appeared during the various crises that have characterized the last decade of Guinea-Bissau's history) and pessimistic forecasts from international experts, these violent events have not triggered any real political or civil turmoil. The following morning the capital city, Bissau, was calm. The army leaders declared that they had no intention of intervening in the upcoming elections.

Notes from a Forgotten War, So-called

<i>Voices in Revolution: Poetry and the Auditory Imagination in Modern China</i> (review)

China's century of revolutionary change has been heard as much as seen, and nowhere is this more evident than in an auditory history of the modern Chinese poem. From Lu Xun's seminal writings on literature to a recitation renaissance in urban centers today, poetics meets politics in the sounding voice of poetry. Supported throughout by vivid narration and accessible analysis, "Voices in Revolution" offers a literary history of modern China that makes the case for the importance of the auditory dimension of poetry in national, revolutionary, and postsocialist culture. John Crespi brings the past to life by first examining the ideological changes to poetic voice during China's early twentieth-century transition from empire to nation. He then traces the emergence of the spoken poem from the May Fourth period to the present, including its mobilization during the Anti-Japanese War, its incorporation into the student protest repertoire during China's civil war, its role as a conflicted voice of Mao-era revolutionary passion, and finally its current adaptation to the cultural life of China's party-guided market economy. "Voices in Revolution" offers an accessible yet conceptually fresh and often dramatic narration of China's modern literary experience.

Forced migration and mortality in the very long term: Did perestroika affect death rates also in Finland?

In this article, we analyze mortality rates of Finns born in areas that were ceded to the Soviet Union after World War II and from which the entire population was evacuated. These internally displaced persons are observed during the period 1971-2004 and compared with people born in the same region but on the adjacent side of the new border. We find that in the 1970s and 1980s, the forced migrants had mortality rates that were on par with those of people in the comparison group. In the late 1980s, the mortality risk of internally displaced men increased by 20% in relation to the expected time trend. This deviation, which manifests particularly in cardiovascular mortality, coincides with perestroika and the demise of the Soviet Union, which were events that resulted in an intense debate in civil society about restitution of the ceded areas. Because state actors were reluctant to engage, the debate declined after some few years, and after the mid-1990s, the death risk again approached the long-term trend. Our findings indicate that when internally displaced persons must adjust to situations for which appropriate coping behaviors are unknown, psychosocial stress might arise several decades after their evacuation.

The Specter of Russian Nationalism

When he was named acting president of Russia on December 31, 1999, Vladimir Putin inherited a country still reeling from the Soviet Union's breakup: economic woes caused by the rapid privatization of state assets and the August 1998 financial crisis, ethnic unrest and war in Chechnya, and Russia's demotion from superpower status. Over the next seven years, the Putin government introduced a series of national reforms aimed at making Russia once again a major player on the world stage. Dmitry Medvedev's election as the new president means that his term will be a continuation of the policies set in place by his predecessor and mentor, who stays on as prime minister and seems literally prime—"first in rank, authority, or significance," as the Oxford English Dictionary says.

Algeria