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| 1 |
ID:
147966
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article introduces the socio-anthropological concept of international representations to examine the relationship between a civilizational rhetoric, the West European and the international politics of otherization and containment of Southeast Europe, and an essentialist and timeless bias in international relations theory, including both radical and constructivist trends. We first explore the different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars from the beginning to the end of the twentieth century. Their subsequent problematization is aimed at challenging the way they have constructed commonplace and time-worn representations, which international society shares with different consequences in international affairs. This is a limited conception since international representations as a socio-anthropological concept are always socially, culturally and politically constructed, contested and negotiated. They do not neutrally refer to a reality in the world; they create a reality of their own. Moreover, this limited conception ignores the fact that how, by whom and in whose interest international representations are constructed is itself a form of power in international relations. Therefore, the way international representations are constructed can be problematized as an example of political and ideological projects that operate in the West as well as in the Southeast European countries that are the object of Western foreign policy.
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| 2 |
ID:
112847
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| Publication |
2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article argues that multicultural representations of Japan make demands of the populations they describe as much as they open new social and political possibilities. This argument mirrors others that have been made about the myth of Japanese homogeneity, i.e. that representations of the Japanese citizenry are historical formations, entrenched in institutionalized practice, and with characterizable effects. Examining contemporary representations of Buraku issues within the work of political organizations, foreign scholars, and funding agencies such as the Japan Foundation, I explore four maneuvers of multicultural political practice: enlistment, equilibration, authentication, and woundedness. In this examination, I aim to shed light simultaneously upon the processes through which multiculturalism disciplines the subjects it describes and upon the ways in which such maneuvers help achieve international recognition of a liberal, multicultural Japan.
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