Expansionism

About: Expansionism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 979 publications have been published within this topic receiving 11169 citations.

Securing the long-term peaceful use of space

Abstract: Abstract Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics and the Ends of Humanity (Deudney 2020) claims that space expansionism will result in the destruction of the environment, hierarchical world government, interplanetary war, and human extinction. This chapter argues that its rejection of space expansionism is unwarranted. On the contrary, global security and the long-term sustainability of space activities would be served by expansionist projects. In support of this view, it traces the historical connection between negotiations for general and comprehensive disarmament and the “peaceful purposes” of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Archival research from the period suggests that two fundamental problems of space arms control remain unsolved: the problem of verifying treaty compliance and the prevention of surprise attack. In addressing these problems, the chapter draws inspiration from proposals by space lawyers in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Christianity in the Far East

Abstract: From the middle of the 16th century on, the encounter between Christianity and East Asian languages and cultures was partly shaped by European expansionism, partly by the interaction between cultural–linguistic matrices proper to worldviews that had developed apart from each other. Biblical translation was a battleground on which religious inculturation slowly occurred. The determination of theological terminology also allowed for creative linguistic and cultural accommodation. Today, biblical, literary, and extratextual hermeneutics contribute to the reshaping of East Asian Christianity. The appropriation of Christianity by East Asian languages and cultures is ultimately an ongoing narrative told in many tongues.

Containment: A Failed American Foreign Policy and How the Truman Doctrine Led to the Rise in Islamic Extremism in the Muslim World

Abstract: After World War II the United States, faced with the new Soviet threat of Communism, instituted the foreign policy known as “containment” in order to mitigate the threat to Western European states of Soviet expansionism. After the fall of Communism in the USSR in 1991 that policy was deemed, at once, a success and an anachronism. The power vacuum that the subsequent abandonment of that policy created was most notable in the Islamic states that had served as proxies in the Cold War against Communism. Both the backdrop of containment as well as the withdrawal of that policy served to lay the foundation for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism throughout the Muslim world as a function of American hegemony after 1991.

The cold war, American anticommunism and the global ‘Colour Line’

Abstract: Race has been expunged from the history of international relations and yet, as the introduction to this book points out, “race and racism continue to subliminally structure world politics, in both material and ideological ways”. Du Bois had argued that despite its absence from dominant explanations, the racial order, as manifested in colonialism and other forms of expansionism, was the infrastructure of the world system behind the crisis of the European state system culminating in World War I. In a similar fashion, the world system after 1945 must be interpreted in view of the tectonic shifts in its racial order. The absence of race from explanations of the Cold War must therefore be rectified. This chapter will argue that one of the ways in which race has been simultaneously repressed and its effects sustained in the international order is through the deployment of anticommunism in the Cold War. The history of anticommunism is enfolded within a history of race. In two greatwaves of US anticommunism, the first immediately following the Russian Revolution, and the second following the defeat of the Third Reich, race figured centrally in the understanding of communism and in the organisation of its suppression. The rise and breakdown of the anticommunist consensus was, when it came, intricated with the overthrow of the colonial world system and the concomitant upsurge of civil rights activism. The modes of repression and the techniques of ascriptive denigration deployed in each case were contiguous. As Heonik Kwon put it,[b]eing a white person or person of color was a major determining factor for an individual’s life career for a significant part of the past century, but so was the relatively novel color classification of being ‘Red’ or ‘not Red’ in many corners of the world, including the United States and South Africa.