Recent Articles

The Retribalization of the Modern World: How the Revival of Ancient Sentiments Leads to Persisting Nationalist and Ethic Conflicts

Notes: Ab Imperio is a Russian-American journal sponsored in part by the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. This article about nationalism reviews some contemporary theories and concludes that even if the phenomenon is disliked by most contemporary Western scholars, it is not going away. Neither economic globalization nor the rise of certain international institutions are diminishing its force. Rather than finding ways of demeaning nationalism and predicting its imminent decline we would do well to understand that it is rooted in strong, ancient sentiments rather than just a modern invention. If the forms change, the power of nationalist feelings of solidarity, just like very old kinds of tribal and clan allegiance, remain one of the strongest bases, perhaps the very most important one of communal solidarity. The abstract at the end of the article was written in Russian and is left out here.

Causes and Consequences of the Current Economic Crisis

Notes: This article is part of a Social Science Research Council project on the current world economic crisis. It will be published as part of an SRRC book. The article explains the banking and financial crisis, examines various economic theories that might help us understand why it is so serious, and concludes with some possible future scenarios ranging from the benign to the catastrophic. It will be published in 2011 by NYU Press in a book entitled “Possible Futures” edited by Craig Calhoun and Georgi Derlugian.

Europe’s Troubled World War II Memories: Are They That Different?

Notes: This essay is part of a project being conducted by Stanford’s Shorenstein Asian Studies Center about memories and interpretations of World War II in East Asia. The project is now extending this to a comparison with Europe’s memories of World War II. This particular piece is going to be published by Routledge in 2011 in a volume about the controversies surrounding Japanese textbooks’ information about the Pacific War. The volume, edited by Gi-Wook Shin and Dan Sneider, contains articles by Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, and American scholars. Mine is meant to show that aside from the unusual West German case, other former allies of Germany and occupied countries in Europe avoided confronting the degree to which they contributed to the Holocaust and other German atrocities. In that sense, Japan’s avoidance of the issue was not so unusual. Also, the geopolitical situation in East Asia after the war was very different from West Germany’s so there was little pressure put on Japan to face up to what it had done. This was not the case with West Germany, though even the West German public was slower to accept the enormity of the crimes committed than most people realize. The pattern of avoidance of the reality of collaboration began being remedied in Western Europe in the 1990s, but has hardly been faced in much of Eastern Europe to this day.