Academic Articles with RI Themes: A Wishlist

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Academic Articles with RI Themes: A Wishlist

Postby Joao » Wed Oct 02, 2013 10:11 pm

Researchers and scholars of RI: What academic articles are you currently seeking?

Resourceful helpers and internet magicians: Your help is appreciated.
Joao
 
Posts: 522
Joined: Wed Jun 26, 2013 11:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Academic Articles with RI Themes: A Wishlist

Postby Joao » Wed Oct 02, 2013 10:17 pm

Why do states bother to deceive? Managing trust at home and abroad
John Kurt Jacobsen, Review of International Studies / Volume 34 / Issue 02 / April 2008, pp 337-361

Why do democratic states try to deceive their own citizens as to the foreign policies they practice, their motives, and their consequences? This question presupposes not only that states craft ‘stories’ to disguise activities abroad, but that they do so because they are constrained by an audience of non-elite actors. Theories derived from realpolitik, at best, make little allowance for such domestic ‘interference’. Yet there is evidence that in democracies the role of mass publics in driving, curbing, or modifying the conduct of foreign policy is a force, and explanatory factor, to reckon with.
Joao
 
Posts: 522
Joined: Wed Jun 26, 2013 11:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Academic Articles with RI Themes: A Wishlist

Postby Joao » Wed Oct 02, 2013 10:26 pm

Grey Room #45, Fall 2011: On Brainwashing: Mind Control, Media, and Warfare
MIT Press

  • Brain Warfare: The Covert Sphere, Terrorism, and the Legacy of the Cold War (Timothy Melley)
  • Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject (Andreas Killen)
  • Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron (Rebecca Lemov)
  • The Sleeper Effect: Hypnotism, Mind Control, Terrorism (Stefan Andriopoulos)
  • Manchurian Candidates: Forensic Hypnosis in the Cold War (Alison Winter)
Joao
 
Posts: 522
Joined: Wed Jun 26, 2013 11:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Academic Articles with RI Themes: A Wishlist

Postby Joao » Fri Oct 04, 2013 1:30 am

Osiris Vol. 22, No. 1, 2007: The Self as Project: Politics and the Human Sciences
Published by The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society

Weimar Psychotechnics between Americanism and Fascism
Andreas Killen
In the aftermath of the Great War, the new science of psychotechnics was enlisted in the construction of the democratic social order that emerged from the ruins of German authoritarianism, a key component of the fragile social compromise between capital and labor that was a foundation of the Weimar Republic. During the 1920s, representatives of this branch of social engineering promised to use science to conjure away the workplace conflicts that had wracked Wilhelmine Germany and to usher in a new era of social harmony and productivity. Advertised as modern, rational, and humane, psychotechnics became a cornerstone of the rationalization movement that, originating in America, swept Germany in the 1920s. This article, focusing on interactions between psychotechnicians and female switchboard operators, places the objectives and contradictions of this new science of the working self within the context of wider debates about Germany’s postwar economic and political restructuring as well as the process of personal restructuring associated with the so‐called new woman. Ultimately, the article shows that the psychotechnicians’ failure to realize their aims within the Weimar system led them to reposition their science as handmaiden to the new National Socialist order, which they embraced as the best means of bringing about this process of restructuring.

Sick Heil: Self and Illness in Nazi Germany
Geoffrey Cocks
Illness in Nazi Germany was a site of contestation around the existing modern self. The Nazis mobilized the professions of medicine and psychology, two disciplines built around self, to exploit physical and mental capacity. Nazi projects thus instrumentalized the individual and essentialized a self of race and will. A cruel and anxious obsession with health as a means of racial exclusion was a monstrous form of the modern turn inward to agency of body and mind. The Nazis regulated the individual through family and factory (social control), areas of ordinary life in which modernity located human activity and meaning, and propagandized traditional values the populace internalized (social discipline). A Nazi premodern warrior ethos was served by a liberal ethic of productivity and an absolutist tradition of state control. Medicalization and commodification of health was continuous with modern trends and became a wartime site of attempted well‐being of the self at the expense of the Nazi ethnic community.

“New Soviet Man” Inside Machine: Human Engineering, Spacecraft Design, and the Construction of Communism
Slava Gerovitch
Soviet propaganda often used the Soviet space program as a symbol of a much larger and more ambitious political/engineering project—the construction of communism. Both projects involved the construction of a new self, and the cosmonaut was often regarded as a model for the “new Soviet man.” The Soviet cosmonauts publicly represented a communist ideal, an active human agency of sociopolitical and economic change. At the same time, space engineers and psychologists viewed human operators as integral parts of a complex technological system and assigned the cosmonauts a very limited role in spacecraft control. This article examines how the cosmonaut self became the subject of “human engineering,” explores the tension between the public image of the cosmonauts and their professional identity, and draws parallels between the iconic roles of the cosmonaut and the astronaut in the cold war context.

Cultures of Categories: Psychological Diagnoses as Institutional and Political Projects before and after the Transition from State Socialism in 1989 in East Germany
Christine Leuenberger
How can psychological categories be understood as historical, political, and cultural artifacts? How are such categories maintained by individuals, organizations, and governments? How do macrosocietal changes—such as the transition from state socialism in East Germany in 1989—correlate with changes in the social and organizational structures that maintain psychological categories? This essay focuses on how—pre‐1989—the category of neurosis (as a mental disorder) became entwined with East Germany’s grand socialist project of creating new socialist personalities, a new society, and a new science and on how diagnostic preferences were adapted, modified, and extended by local cultural and institutional practices. It also examines how post‐1989 the category of neurosis became redefined in accord with a formerly West German psychotherapeutic paradigm and was eventually obliterated by the bureaucratic health care system of the new Germany. East German practitioners adopted new therapeutic guidelines and a new language to make sense of the “normal,” “neurotic,” and “pathological” self in terms of “individualizing forms of knowledge” that tied in with efforts to remake East German citizens as liberal democratic subjects. At the same time, practitioners’ clinical practice remained based upon face‐to‐face encounters in which formal guidelines and stipulations were often superseded by local, interactional, institutional, and cultural practices and contingencies.
Joao
 
Posts: 522
Joined: Wed Jun 26, 2013 11:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Academic Articles with RI Themes: A Wishlist

Postby elfismiles » Sat Oct 05, 2013 9:16 am

Those last 3 look particularly interesting...

Joao » 03 Oct 2013 02:26 wrote:
Grey Room #45, Fall 2011: On Brainwashing: Mind Control, Media, and Warfare
MIT Press

  • Brain Warfare: The Covert Sphere, Terrorism, and the Legacy of the Cold War (Timothy Melley)
  • Homo pavlovius: Cinema, Conditioning, and the Cold War Subject (Andreas Killen)
  • Brainwashing's Avatar: The Curious Career of Dr. Ewen Cameron (Rebecca Lemov)
  • The Sleeper Effect: Hypnotism, Mind Control, Terrorism (Stefan Andriopoulos)
  • Manchurian Candidates: Forensic Hypnosis in the Cold War (Alison Winter)
User avatar
elfismiles
 
Posts: 8511
Joined: Fri Aug 11, 2006 6:46 pm
Blog: View Blog (4)


Re: Academic Articles with RI Themes: A Wishlist

Postby TheBlackSheep » Sat Jan 18, 2014 9:13 am

This is a great thread. I was reading in the article "Biomusic" you posted, it was really haunting.

There are a lot of articles I'd love to get my hands on, books too...

Here are some particular ones:

Sociotechnics, by Adam Podgorecki
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF02737080

You can click the look inside, I think it's particularly revealing how the first sentence of that one is "Whether we like it or not, we are living in an era of social engineering."

Also the article Social Oppression, also by Adam Podgorecki

I guess this is a link to it: http://www.download-genius.com/download ... ff.id=3637

Also the Rand Corp's "The Value of Ignorance"

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2 ... 3355083053
User avatar
TheBlackSheep
 
Posts: 128
Joined: Wed Jan 15, 2014 9:37 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Academic Articles with RI Themes: A Wishlist

Postby Joao » Sun Jan 26, 2014 5:28 pm

Thanks for making me aware of Podgorecki.

Sociotechnics: Basic Concepts and Issues
Adam Podgorecki, Knowledge in Society, Spring 1990, Vol. 3, Issue 1.

The article draws the links between social engineering and sociotechnics (and its various forms). It introduces and gives examples of the concepts of sociotechnical duels, social warpiness, and maneuverability of social factors. Also an attempt is made to describe links among various types of social systems and types of sociotechnical activities. Finally, the concept of sociotechnical paradigm (teleological scheme of efficient social activity) is developed.

The Value Of Ignorance
Anke S. Kessler, The RAND Journal of Economics, volume 29, 1998.

This article provides a new perspective on the information structure of an agent in a standard model of adverse selection. Before contracting takes place, the agent has the opportunity to gather (private) information on a relevant parameter that affects final payoffs. I allow for the possibility that the agent remains uninformed with some probability. The agent's optimal choice of information structure is derived, and it is shown that in the case of two states of nature, the possibility of remaining ignorant has a positive strategic value for the agent. Since a poor information structure generates strategic benefits, there will be no equilibrium in which the agent is perfectly informed even if additional information is costless at the margin.
Joao
 
Posts: 522
Joined: Wed Jun 26, 2013 11:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Academic Articles with RI Themes: A Wishlist

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Mar 07, 2014 2:05 pm

Giles Scott-Smith.Western Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network: Cold War Internationale. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 356 S. ISBN 978-0-230-22126-0.

Reviewed by Eva Neumann
Published on H-Soz-u-Kult (May, 2013)


G. Scott-Smith: Western Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network

The setting for this in-depth study on a little-known joint European-American operation called Interdoc reads rather conventional. Giles Scott-Smith draws a classic Cold War panorama of Europe and the United States entering the post-war two-block world order, as it was described exhaustively before by Western historians. In that he stresses Germany’s exclusive role on the frontline between ideologies and the Psy Wars during the 1950s that led towards a decided anti-communist movement are depicted correctly and reproducible, but strictly Western-biased. With a Marxian twist, but lacking the irony, Scott-Smith could also have captioned his monograph’s introduction: a spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism. All the powers of ‘old’ Europe have entered into a holy alliance of intelligence to exorcize this spectre: Dutch BVD and German BND, French SDECE and British MI6, even US agencies join the mission. This mission was the Interdoc network, an international alliance dedicated to promoting Western values and a counter offer to communism.

But Giles Scott-Smith explains his angle later on: the founding fathers and protagonists of Interdoc – mainly intelligence officers assigned to psychological warfare and counter espionage – perceived the Cold War first and foremost as an ideological struggle. See also: Scott-Smith, Giles, Interdoc: Dutch-German cooperation in pychological warfare, 1962-1973, in: De Graaf, Beatrice; de Jong, Ben and Platje, Wies (Ed.): Battleground Western Europe: Intelligence Operations in Germany and the Netherlands in the twentieth century, Amsterdam 2007, p. 170. Especially the concept of peaceful coexistence posed a somehow new soft threat in the battle of ideas – and Eastern ideology appeared more and more attractive and persuasive to certain intellectual groups in the West. Fighting and challenging communism on a mere theoretical and ethical level was at the core of an innovative enterprise which was initiated by an illustrious group of ‘Cold Warriors’. This introduction as well as the first chapter on Anti-Communism and Psy Wars give a comprehensive overview, but seem to renarrate stereotyped eurocentric Cold War history.

The first main research area discusses preconditions and preliminaries for building the network. According to Scott-Smith, during the mid to late 1950s, the Dutch Interior Securitiy Service (BVD, Binnenlands Veiligheidsdienst) and the French SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionage) joined forces to fight communist activities on an international level – rather than focusing on national approaches to weaken the domestic communist parties. Namely Louis Einthoven (head of BVD), Cees Van den Heuvel (head of BVD’s training division) and Antoine Bonnemaison (head of SDECE psychological warfare department) established regular meetings, the colloques, which had been originally a forum for Franco-German intelligence cooperation since 1957. They addressed not only intelligence personnel but also representatives from academia, business, politics, the media and the military. Reinhard Gehlen, head of the now official German Intelligence Service (BND), also showed significant interest in joint anti-communist operations and a general exchange of information, both within NATO and among the European neighbors. Scott-Smith analyzes this sometimes rocky road those European colloques (including participants from Switzerland, Italy, Great Britain and Belgium) took until the conviction of the urgent need for a collective and permanent institute against communism resulted in Interdoc’s foundation in 1963. The author emphasizes that this network was not an intelligence agency but an organizational approach to gather, analyze, and distribute information on communist activities on an international level in order to „transform a mentality“ (p. 134) towards positive anti-communism.

But soon after signing the statutes the success story of a free Europe, acting in concert to promote a „superior ideology“ (p. 30) began to crumble. This second focus of the book concentrates on the inner-European/international coordination, successes and difficulties as well as Interdoc’s day-to-day business. Neither the French nor the British, Swiss, Italians or Belgians remained as highly involved and dedicated as the Dutch and the Germans, Scott-Smith almost bemoans. However, the financial situation developed favorably: companies like Shell, Unilever and Philips invested remarkable amounts of money (adjacent to the allowances the BND provided) and enabled Interdoc to build up a net of sub-institutes. To reach out to a broader audience and to set a distinct tone in the discussion, several journals (e.g. Oost-West) were established and disseminated. Yet, these publications shortly struggled with similar problems as periodicals sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, an institution covertly financed by the CIA and exposed as such in the late 1960ies. The abundant contiguousness between intellectual handling of communism and politic propaganda conducted by intelligence and security services discredited Interdoc’s aim of influencing opinion among students, businessmen and diplomats etc. See: Hochgeschwender, Michael, Freiheit in der Offensive? Der Kongress für kulturelle Freiheit und die Deutschen, München 1998. Although Scott-Smith points out the inaccuracy of this comparison (particularly the great monetary difference), one of his arguments appears not less suspicious: the (financial and ideological) involvement of contributors „who wanted to achieve a level of influence without relying on that world“ (p. 90). The perpetual risk of muddling with right-wing ideas and organizations alienated many of those intellectuals and cliques that the Interdoc men were aiming at.

Chronologically Scott-Smith in his last four chapters describes Interdoc’s assignment to its end in 1986. Attempts to re-internationalize the enterprise by launching the Interdoc Youth, a group consisting of young, hand-picked students and military officers from all over Europe, and a stronger cooperation with the United States via CIA marked a new peak during the late 1960s. Especially the intention of manipulating discourse both in the East and in the West (p. 244) seems to have proven a promising but difficult task. But the emerging German Ostpolitik and the general Détente movement later on resulted in a constant decline of significance and also funding. Besides his indication of Interdoc as a tool to understand the Cold War as a merely philosophical and psychological struggle, Scott-Smith recognizes the network as a part of the overall European cooperation and integration, having and using the encouragement of the United States.

The apparently meticulous work the author invested in his book will certainly be appreciated, but the approach is somewhat underwhelming. On the one hand, Scott-Smith describes exhaustively structures, organizations and networks, including their predecessors and short historical abstracts. But on the other, his analysis and interpretation remain superficial. He leaves out any non-Western perspective, as if there never was one. Digging into the logic of Cold War strategy in the year 2012 could (and should) be more prolific than re-echoing a one-sided, oversimplifying narrative.

Nevertheless, Giles Scott-Smith provides a flawless, well-informed and agreeably written monograph, including a diligently chosen bibliography and a helpful appendix (Interdoc conferences, publications and contacts in Eastern Europe). In terms of transnational historiography he makes an exemplary case of cooperation among diverse agencies, institutions, enterprises and protagonists. For those who are interested and somewhat experienced in the various and complicated ramifications among Western politics, intelligence, economy and intelligentsia during the Cold War this book offers a good case study.

Via: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=39118
User avatar
Wombaticus Rex
 
Posts: 10896
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 6:33 pm
Location: Vermontistan
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Academic Articles with RI Themes: A Wishlist

Postby Joao » Tue Mar 18, 2014 2:49 am

Here's chapter 1 of Western Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network, and a closely related journal article by the same author.
ImageAnti-Communism and PsyWar in the 1950s
Giles Scott-Smith, Chapter 1 of Western Anti-Communism and the Interdoc Network: Cold War Internationale (Palgrave Macmillan 2012)

Interdoc was established in 1963 by Western intelligence services as a multinational effort to coordinate an anti-communist offensive. Based in The Hague in the Netherlands, Interdoc sought to link up with allies across Western Europe, North America and beyond to become the central point through which anti-communism--ranging from propaganda to covert action--could be organized. Drawing on exclusive sources, never-before-released material, and the memories of its participants, this book charts Interdoc's remarkable campaign, the people and ideas that lay behind it, and its rise and fall during the Cold War.

Interdoc and West European Psychological Warfare: The American Connection
Giles Scott-Smith, Intelligence and National Security, April–June 2011

Interdoc, or the International Documentation and Information Center, was established in The Hague in early 1963 in order to coordinate a transnational network of institutes active in the field of analyzing trends in communist ideology and societies. The product of deliberations between intelligence agencies and the private sector in Western Europe during the late 1950s, Interdoc reflected a need to develop and project a European stance on Cold War issues separate from an all-dominant US influence. Yet the Americans were present from the beginning, and their involvement gradually increased over time. This article covers the details of this involvement and uses it to comment on how Interdoc represents an interesting case of inter-service cooperation in anti-communist activities in the West.
Joao
 
Posts: 522
Joined: Wed Jun 26, 2013 11:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Academic Articles with RI Themes: A Wishlist

Postby smiths » Sun May 18, 2014 8:36 pm

not for long though ...

http://goo.gl/Ar4rQ5
the question is why, who, why, what, why, when, why and why again?
User avatar
smiths
 
Posts: 2205
Joined: Wed May 18, 2005 4:18 am
Location: perth, western australia
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Academic Articles with RI Themes: A Wishlist

Postby Zombie Glenn Beck » Mon Jun 02, 2014 11:28 pm

http://memoirs.gsapubs.org/content/203/41.full.pdf

Geochemical concepts in Isaac Newton's early alchemy
barracuda wrote:The path from RI moderator to True Blood fangirl to Jehovah's Witness seems pretty straightforward to me. Perhaps even inevitable.
User avatar
Zombie Glenn Beck
 
Posts: 244
Joined: Fri Jan 24, 2014 2:55 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Academic Articles with RI Themes: A Wishlist

Postby Joao » Wed Dec 02, 2015 4:07 pm

Complete text posted to scribd (link in title):
Vampires, Werewolves, and Demons: Twentieth Century Reports in the Psychiatric Literature
Richard Noll, 1992

Richard Noll ventures where few psychologists dare to go. With a scholar’s eye and the zeal of a horror movie devotee, he treads the bizarre and macabre netherworld of vampirism, lycanthropy, and demonical possession. Bringing to bear his unique qualifications in psychology, folklore, religious history, and anthropology, Noll leads the reader into the darker regions of the human psyche in search of the syndromes and disorders that modem psychiatry refuses to acknowledge.

ImagePART I: VAMPIRISM
1. Vampirism: A Review with New Observations
2. Vampirism: Historical Perspective and Underlying Process in Relation to a Case of Auto-Vampirism
3. Cannibalism and Vampirism in Paranoid Schizophrenia
4. Clinical Vampirism: A Presentation of 3 Cases and a Reevaluation of Haigh, the "Acid-Bath Murderer"
5. Vampirism: A Clinical Condition

PART II: LYCANTHROPY
6. Lycanthropy Revisited
7. A Case of Lycanthropy
8. Another Case of Lycanthropy
9. Lycanthropy Lives On
10. Lycanthropy: Alive and Well in the Twentieth Century

PART III: DEMONIACAL POSSESSION
11. Demonomania
12. Cinematic Neurosis Following The Exorcist: Report of Four Cases
13. Cacodemonomania and Exorcism in Children
14. The Possession Syndrome on Trial
15. Cacodemonomania

And for the wishlist:
The anarchism of fools: Conspiracy theory as a substitute for social critique
Peter Staudenmaier, 2004

Conspiracy theory continues to enjoy a generally positive reception within many sectors of the contemporary North American anarchist movement. As this presentation will argue, conspiracy models of social reality consistently distort and obfuscate the power relations they purport to explain. Instead of examining or refuting specific instances of conspiracy thinking within the popular anarchist milieu, this analysis will concentrate on the logical structure of conspiracy theory as such, and attempt to illuminate its psychological, political, philosophical, and historical roots.

ImageRevisiting the "Nazi Occult": Histories, Realities, Legacies
Monica Black and Eric Kurlander (eds.), 2015

Historians have long debated the role of the occult in the Third Reich. After 1945 the consensus held that occultism, an ostensibly anti-modern, irrational blend of pseudo-religious and -scientific practices, directly facilitated the rise of National Socialism. More recently, scholarly debate has denied the occult a role in shaping the Third Reich, emphasizing the Nazis' hostility to esoteric religion and alternative forms of knowledge. Bringing together cutting-edge scholarship on the topic, this volume calls for a fundamental reappraisal of these positions. The book is divided into three chronological sections. The first, on the period 1890 to 1933, looks at the esoteric philosophies and occult movements that influenced both the leaders of the Nazi movement and ordinary Germans who became its adherents. The second, on the Third Reich in power, explores how the occult and alternative religious belief informed it as an ideological, political, and cultural system. The third looks at Nazism's occult legacies. In emphasizing both continuities and disjunctures, this book promises to re-open and re-energize debate on the occult roots and legacies of Nazism, and with it our understanding of German cultural and intellectual history over the past century.

Hat tip to semper occultus for pointing out Revisiting the Nazi Occult. Some of that book's contents (and a related piece) have been posted elsewhere on the board:

  • Fascism and the Occult, p3:
    • Monica Black and Eric Kurlander: Introduction
    • Peter Staudenmaier: Esoteric Alternatives in Imperial Germany: Science, Spirit, and the Modern Occult Revival (first five of 20 pages only)
  • Fascism and the Occult, p2:
    • Eric Kurlander: Hitler’s Supernatural Sciences: Astrology, Anthroposophy, and World Ice Theory in the Third Reich
    • Eric Kurlander: Hitler’s Monsters: The Occult Roots of Nazism and the Emergence of the Nazi "Supernatural Imaginary" (not published in RTNO)
Joao
 
Posts: 522
Joined: Wed Jun 26, 2013 11:37 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)


Return to Data & Research Compilations

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 8 guests