Ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe: Poles and Ukrainians beside the Curzon Line

ABSTRACT. The article draws on anthropological fieldwork in southeast Poland to illuminate both the historical development of national identities and the contemporary revival of ethnic tensions. For many centuries Eastern Galicia, and within it the town and district of Przemys?l, exemplified what Ernest Gellner refers to as the diversity of the ‘Agrarian Age’. A drive towards homogenisation (associated by Gellner with modern industrial society) began here in the later Habsburg period, and reached its culmination after the imposition of a new and much sharper national boundary in 1945. The socialist period opened with a further burst of ethnic cleansing. Memories of this and of earlier confrontations this century are central to the antagonisms that have emerged in the new public sphere since 1989. It is important to move beyond Gellnerian abstractions and to examine both the social mechanisms and the symbols whereby ethnic and national sentiments are mobilised for political ends. In these case materials, as elsewhere in the region, symbols related to religion and to violence seem to be the most powerful, while the main agents of ethnic antagonism are ex-communists.     

Realism: rational or reasonable?

Realism has maintained its central role in International Relations theory throughout the post‐1945 era, but the relative clarity of the realism of Carr and Morgenthau has been lost by the addition of several variant forms of the structural realism of Kenneth Waltz; moreover, while some liberals may have tempered their criticisms of realism, constructivist scholars have taken their place as opponents of the doctrine. In the books under review, Samuel Barkin attempts to reconcile constructivism to classical realism, while Charles Glaser has produced the most sophisticated account of structural realism since that of Waltz. Both books are well‐reasoned and stimulating, but as yet constructivist realism has produced no substantive findings, while Glaser's account of states as rational egoists cannot underpin an account of the national interest which is sensitive to the reasonable interests of others.     

Courting the Right: Richard Nixon's 1968 Campaign against the Warren Court

When you look at what the United States Supreme Court has done to hamper law enforcement and realize the difficulties the police now have in getting convictions in the first place, I wonder if we truly have representative government anymore. ¹ The main emphasis is on demagogic appeal; crime is the communism issue of 1968. This is the extent to which apparently there is a new Nixon. ²     

South Africa in the company of giants: the search for leadership in a transforming global order

South Africa, the continental economic giant and self‐appointed spokesman for African development, is finding its distinctive national voice. Emboldened by the invitation to join the BRICS grouping, its membership of the G20 and a second term on the UN Security Council, Pretoria is beginning to capitalize on the decade of continental and global activism undertaken by Thabo Mbeki to assume a position of leadership. Gone is the defensive posturing which characterized much of the ANC's post‐apartheid foreign policy, replaced by an unashamed claim to African leadership. The result is that South Africa is exercising a stronger hand in continental affairs, ranging from a significant contribution to state‐building in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and South Sudan, to an unprecedented assertiveness on Zimbabwe. But this new assertiveness remains constrained by three factors: the unresolved issue of identity, a host of domestic constraints linked to material capabilities and internal politics, and the divisive continental reaction to South African leadership. These factors continue to inhibit the country's ability to translate its international ambitions and global recognition into a concrete set of foreign policy achievements.