Cultural Dynamics

This paper examines the complex entanglement of national and international violence and control in Belgrade. In particular, the ways in which the identity of the city has been affected in the aftermath of NATO’s 1999 Operation Allied Force as manifest in the hollowness of the unreconstructed Generalstab complex. The notion of hollowness presents an oppportunity to reformulate and reconsider the identity of Belgrade and Serbia as well as proffer an opening towards reconceptualising post-war reconstruction.

The Israeli demobilized reservists’ protest after the Yom Kippur War is historically renowned for accelerating the emergence of civil criticism with regard to military and strategic affairs and for enabling the formation of peace movements in Israel. This article argues that this movement’s largest contribution was its ability to restructure the rigid cultural division of protest. In the political culture of the early 1970s in Israel, any form of street protest was associated with marginal groups engaging in a disruptive revolt against the established order. The demobilized reservists’ protest recruited members of mainstream social categories for a series of large-scale peaceful demonstrations, which concluded with the resignation of the Israeli government. This precedent blurred the traditional association of street protest with counter-hegemonic movements, and liberated the Israeli repertoire of contention for new social actors and issues. Analyzing the dialectic relations between the cultural division of protest and tactical selection in the demobilized reservists’ protest, this article shows that when members of the mainstream society employ tactics affiliated with marginal or radical groups, they legitimize these tactics as standard forms of political participation and expand their society’s modular repertoire of contention.

This article analyses two post–civil war Lebanese films, Ghassan Salhab’s Terra Incognita and Khalil Joreige and Joana Hadjithomas’ A Perfect Day, to examine how the conditions and valences of a particular sociocultural moment register affectively and mobilize the investments that inform memory making in the Lebanese context. In particular, I study these works as embodiments of an emerging structure of feeling specific to post–civil war Beirut, in which the haunting remnants of an unresolved violent past intersect with the neoliberal imperatives to propel Lebanon into a global market. In this sense, I build upon an exclusive concern with ‘pastness’, which often dominates discussions about post-conflict and post-colonial societies, in order to consider how an unfinished traumatic past intersects with more contemporary oppressions and the affective dimension of these intersections. Through a series of visual motifs and audio techniques, Terra Incognita and A Perfect Day track the ways that forces from the past encounter a wholesale embrace of neoliberalism and commercialism to create a kind of affective impasse that plays out either in depressed apathy or in excessive indulgence.

As the middle space for ‘post ceasefire-cold peace’ politics expanded in Nagaland in India’s Northeast, the Naga women’s question has emerged as symbolic of the intense social churning in traditional hierarchies around three sites of inequality: decision-making in the public sphere, patriarchal customary laws and property rights. The article tracks the shift in Naga women’s peace politics, from motherhood politics to asserting more equal modes of citizenship, and explores the emancipatory potential of Naga women’s emergence in the public sphere as key stakeholders in the peace process within a context of growing tensions in the relationship between gender and ethnicity.

This essay examines the social origins of the election of Donald Trump in November 2016, and assess the possible direction of his presidency. Riding the wave of middle class radicalism that began with the Tea Party insurgency, Trump’s nomination temporarily disrupted the dominance of capitalists over the Republican Party. Despite his economic nationalist rhetoric, Trump will be unable to break in practice with the neo-liberal consensus of the past forty years.

Donald Trump’s election and subsequent presidency reveal important contradictions between the workings of the capitalist state and the capitalist class. While Trump may not have been the choice of the capitalist class, he is now in charge of the capitalist state. Within the context of this contradiction the essay explores the political category of the “white working class” and whether this class was a contributive factor in this unexpected electoral victory for Trump. It concludes by drawing attention to the unhelpful political and analytical fragmentation between exploitation (class) and oppression (gender, race, sexuality) under neoliberalism and urges a more unitary approach.