Subversions Of International Order

Uses ethnographic tools to analyze political disorder and its representation at the end of the Cold War.

In this series of essays, the author shifts the focus of anthropology from a study of discrete cultures to one of alternative and sub-versions of large-scale global orders. Borneman employs new descriptive tools to analyze political disorder and its representation, issues which have become central with the end of the Cold War. Despite living in an era when group legitimacy depends on the ability to approximate national form, we have instead been witnessing the dissolution of coherent identities and nations. Ethnographically, Borneman focuses on these transformations in Germany during the disintegration and collapse of the socialist project, concentrating on relations between the first and the second Worlds.

The German Democratic Republic has become the subject of novels, memoirs and films, and the backdrop for general debates over the power of intellectuals in contemporary media and society. This collection considers the demise of the GDR and its impact on the place of intellectuals.

Policymakers worry that "ungoverned spaces" pose dangers to security and development. Why do such spaces exist beyond the authority of the state? Earlier scholarship—which addressed this question with a list of domestic failures—overlooked the crucial role that international politics play. In this shrewd book, Melissa M. Lee argues that foreign subversion undermines state authority and promotes ungoverned space. Enemy governments empower insurgents to destabilize the state and create ungoverned territory. This kind of foreign subversion is a powerful instrument of modern statecraft. But though subversion is less visible and less costly than conventional force, it has insidious effects on governance in the target state. To demonstrate the harmful consequences of foreign subversion for state authority, Crippling Leviathan marshals a wealth of evidence and presents in-depth studies of Russia's relations with the post-Soviet states, Malaysian subversion of the Philippines in the 1970s, and Thai subversion of Vietnamese-occupied Cambodia in the 1980s. The evidence presented by Lee is persuasive: foreign subversion weakens the state. She challenges the conventional wisdom on statebuilding, which has long held that conflict promotes the development of strong, territorially consolidated states. Lee argues instead that conflictual international politics prevents state development and degrades state authority. In addition, Crippling Leviathan illuminates the use of subversion as an underappreciated and important feature of modern statecraft. Rather than resort to war, states resort to subversion. Policymakers interested in ameliorating the consequences of ungoverned space must recognize the international roots that sustain weak statehood.

How did the United States defeat the Soviet Union from its own backyard? How is China undermining freedom of the sea? Are these subversive activities new or do they reflect ancient wars? This book explores how state and non-state actors subvert one another. The core question is: why do strategies of subversion, whereby a weaker political entity undermines the dominant entity within a system to increase the weaker entity's relative power, appear to have so many commonalities across different situations and by both state and non-state actors? I theorize that underlying principles exist within all subversive strategies. This question is timely amid a rising China, aggressive Russia, rogue Iran, and a global Salafi-Jihadist insurgency. The current US National Security Strategy identifies these challenges as four of the five greatest threats to US national security. These challenges each involve entities subverting US dominance as a major component of adversary strategies. This new theory, the theory of strategic subversion, outlines fundamental principles regarding strategies of subversion to better enable policy makers and analysts to understand and respond to current security challenges. This book reviews existing literature on subversive strategies and synthesizes a new fundamental theory. The book then tests the theory of strategic subversion against four case studies: US support to the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, Rising Athens at the onset of the Peloponnesian Wars, China's current rise, and Russian subversion.

In Subversion, Lennart Maschmeyer provides a powerful new theory and analysis of an age-old concept. While a strategy of subversion offers great strategic promise in theory, it faces an underappreciated set of challenges that limit its strategic value in practice. Drawing from two major cases--the KGB's use of traditional subversion methods to crush the Prague Spring in 1968 and Russia's less successful use of cyberwarfare against Ukraine since 2014--Maschmeyer demonstrates both the benefits and weaknesses of the approach. While many believe that today's cyber-based subversion campaigns offer new strategic opportunities, they also come with their own challenges. Because of these disadvantages, cyber operations continue to fall short of expectations--most recently in the Russo-Ukrainian war. By showing that traditional subversion methods remain the more potent threat, Subversion forces us to reconsider our fears of the subversive potential of cyberwar.

In this conceptually bold project, Heonik Kwon uses anthropology to interrogate the cold war's cultural and historical narratives. Adopting a truly panoramic view of local politics and international events, he challenges the notion that the cold war was a global struggle fought uniformly around the world and that the end of the war marked a radical, universal rupture in modern history. Incorporating comparative ethnographic study into a thorough analysis of the period, Kwon upends cherished ideas about the global and their hold on contemporary social science. His narrative describes the slow decomposition of a complex social and political order involving a number of local and culturally creative processes. While the nations of Europe and North America experienced the cold war as a time of "long peace," postcolonial nations entered a different reality altogether, characterized by vicious civil wars and other exceptional forms of violence. Arguing that these events should be integrated into any account of the era, Kwon captures the first sociocultural portrait of the cold war in all its subtlety and diversity.