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ID: 116578

Occupier/occupied / Visweswaran, Kamala

Visweswaran, Kamala	Journal Article
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2012.

Summary/Abstract

As military occupation increasingly informs the politics of both democracies and dictatorships, capitalist and socialist regimes, this essay asks why it is foundational for sovereignty and the post-war state-form. In particular, it questions the complicity of post-colonial theory with security discourses in reading movements for self-determination as threats to the state or as forms of terrorism rather than as alternate possibilities for freedom and liberty. It suggests not only that the ongoing twenty-first century relations between occupier and occupied reprise the racialised forms of identity that characterised relations between coloniser and colonised in the preceding two centuries, but also that relations between occupied peoples may produce affiliative poetics and shared terms of political reference or solidarity.

Key Words

Civil Society ; Military Occupation ; Tourism ; Poetics ; Post - Colonial Theory ; Security Discourse

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ID: 168794

Star wars or strategic defense initiative: what's in a name? / Stimmer, Anette

Stimmer, Anette	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

Popular culture can influence debates over security policy. This article studies the use of Star Wars in the debate over Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The term Star Wars was widely used to refer to SDI during debates in the 1980s. Scholars have pointed to both disabling and enabling effects of popular culture on political debates. This article refines these effects and introduces a third effect that comes from the widespread use of popular culture: a neutralizing effect that turns popular culture references into descriptive shorthands. Studying these dynamics contributes to our understanding of why popular culture is or is not used as a framing device and how it is used and perceived by decision-makers. I rely on content analysis of newspaper articles, congressional records, and political speeches and incorporate findings from elite interviews and the norm literature to conduct my analysis. I find that critics capitalized on linkages between the movie franchise and the policy to frame Reagan's missile defense system as Star Wars and to criticize his policy proposal. This science-fictionalization soon constituted the sociopolitical context surrounding Reagan's missile defense initiative. Most decision-makers perceived the Star Wars label to have a disabling effect as it cast doubt on the viability and desirability of SDI. Opponents initially tried to mobilize this effect, whereas most proponents argued against the label or refrained from using it. Few tapped into the enabling potential of Star Wars to communicate the potential benefits of SDI. The introduction of the professional term SDI helped proponents mitigate science-fictionalization in expert settings, while among the public the widespread use of the Star Wars label neutralized its meaning and turned it into a descriptive shorthand.

Key Words

Strategic Defense Initiative ; Popular Culture ; Framing ; Security Discourse

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