An ethnonational perspective on territorial politics in the EU: east–west comparisons from a pilot study
Nationalities Papers, Volume 42, Issue 3, Page 449-468, May 2014.
Archiv für Mai 2014
Diversity recognition and minority representation in Central and Southeast Europe: a comparative analysis
Nationalities Papers, Volume 42, Issue 3, Page 426-448, May 2014.
Odessa: genius and death in a city of dreams
Nationalities Papers, Volume 42, Issue 3, Page 562-564, May 2014.
Speaking Soviet with an accent: culture and power in Kyrgyzstan
Nationalities Papers, Volume 42, Issue 3, Page 564-566, May 2014.
Mapping Europe’s Borderlands: Russian Cartography in the Age of Empire
Nationalities Papers, Volume 42, Issue 3, Page 548-557, May 2014.
Between global dreams and national duties: the dilemma of conscription duty in the transnational lives of young Korean males
In this study, I examine the dilemmas arising from the tension between citizen duties and youthful aspirations in a globalizing world. The state’s requirement of military conscription structures the transnational lives of young Korean male migrants. More particularly, the timeline for serving the duty works as a primary temporal reference for the males‘ initial migration planning and future projections. Drawn from ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews among a community of young Koreans in New Jersey, USA, my research reveals that their life planning in accordance with this institutional schedule is vulnerable to unexpected changes. The consequences are potentially detrimental to their futures, which not only differ from their individual ideals but also contain a high risk of marginalization both in Korea and in the USA. Building on the transnational migration literature, which focuses predominantly on spatiality, individual rights/agency and the marginalization of women migrants, I am concerned with temporality, citizens‘ duties and the constraints of masculinity as important parts of unravelling the complexities of transnational life.
Discursive representations and policy mobility: how migrant remittances became a ‘development tool’
In this article, I focus on two sets of practices that researchers and policy advocates carry out within international organizations and think tanks promoting what I term the remittances-to-development (R-2-D) agenda. Their work conjured up, elaborated and diffused a representation of remittances as a financial flow and made remittances visible as a promising source of development finance for the global South. First, there is the work of discursive representation in which the advocates of the R-2-D agenda collected, compiled and visually represented data to draw out the characteristics of remittances that would make them attractive to development policymakers. Second, there were the policy transfer efforts, in which the champions of the R-2-D agenda wielded various forms of soft power to convince national government officials to ‘improve’ remittances statistics by adopting new measurement techniques. These practices turned remittances into a neoliberal development tool.
Tamil diaspora and the political spaces of second-generation activism in Switzerland
In this article, we study the emergence of the political spaces of activism of second-generation Swiss Tamils resulting from a critical event – the suffering of Tamils during and after the final battle in early 2009 of a civil war in northern Sri Lanka that had lasted for decades. We contend that we can explain the geographies of newly emerging second-generation activism committed to achieving Tamil Eelam through two factors. These are first, this generation’s multiple senses of belonging both to Switzerland and to the Tamil ‘nation’ and, second, the way a specific politics of affect remoulded second-generation identities because the pain of witnessing the brutality of war and suffering of Tamils occurred concurrently with a perceived lack of interest from their ‘new home’ (Switzerland). The combination of these factors made them want to acknowledge their Tamil ‘roots’ and encouraged them to become politically active. Consequently, these second-generation activists primarily sought to engage with their host society – to awaken it from its indifference to the suffering of Tamils and from its passivity in taking action on an international level. We thereby witness the emerging of a new type of Tamil activism in Switzerland, which is firmly located in and bound to the host country.
Review: Susanne Martin (2013). Denken im Widerspruch. Theorie und Praxis nonkonformistischer Intellektueller [Thinking in Contradictions. The Theory and Practice of Nonconformist Intellectuals]
This publication is the revised version of the author’s doctoral thesis. The theory and practice of nonconformist intellectuals is laid out persuasively through focus on three selected intellectuals who played a decisive role in the first three or four decades of the Republic of Germany: Theodor W. ADORNO, Jean AMÉRY, and Günther ANDERS. Their nonconformist approach is then contrasted with the works of Paul F. LAZARSFELD und Helmut SCHELSKY who are introduced as conformists. Although the selected analyses are well chosen, they cannot represent the whole range of nonconformist thinkers. In addition, the comparison made between non-conformism and conformism is too schematic, and the description of and reflection on intellectuals in today’s knowledge societies are only partly convincing. Nevertheless, the approach employed here shows some value and should be further developed, applied, and differentiated by analyzing more cases and integrating further contexts.
Review: Brian Kleiner, Isabell Renschler, Boris Wernli, Peter Farago & Dominique Joye (Eds.) (2013). Understanding Research Infrastructures in the Social Sciences
Research infrastructures constitute an essential part of social sciences research which, however, is under-represented in the public and scientific consciousness. Nevertheless, research infrastructures are significantly involved in producing, documenti…