Journal articles on the topic 'Territorial Chinese reunification question'

AbstractMajor changes in the postwar global environment have transformed “the” German question into many German questions that continue to complicate the foreign and domestic policy-making processes in the Federal Republic. Inconsistencies between official policy pronouncements and the accepted political modus operandi are explainable in terms of four “paradoxes”: (1) the nation/state identity paradox; (2) the reunification/integration paradox; (3) the stability/security paradox; and (4) the lessons-of-history/normalcy paradox. West German commitment to the Atlantic Alliance remains unshaken, but the FRG should not be forced to choose between the U.S. and Europe, between integration with the West and further improvement in relations with the GDR. Normalization of those relations will be best served by a mutual adherence to the principles of balance, territorial integrity, confidence building and greater transparency in matters of inter-German decision making.

Three main reasons can be identified which triggered a social and political debate whether the task of reaching equal living conditions in Germany has to be abandoned. First, the costs of the reunification and the changed environment caused by globalisation have tightened state budgets available to achieve that aim. Second, economic backwardness and social disengagement of rural areas led to a lasting dependence on transfers from richer German regions. Third, the upcoming demographic change has raised the question whether equal living conditions can be financed for rural areas with low population density. However, the far reaching social consequences of abandoning the aim of equal living conditions remained unconsidered in the debate. Accepting huge differences in living conditions and thus severe territorial disparities means to restrict the equality of opportunity of the rural population and with it endangering the territorial cohesion.

Abstract In 1978–1979 the news reporting on the Vietnamese boat people attracted attention from the whole world. Not only the media but also scientific researchers were interested in these mass refugees. However, this phenomenon has been detached from its context and perceived as a self-contained event on many occasions. Furthermore, most people were not aware of the fact that the main body of these refugees were ethnic Chinese, known as the Hoa. The study presented in this paper takes this as its starting point and focuses on the question of the motivations of the Hoa in leaving North Vietnam. It takes the historical, internal and foreign political context into consideration and identifies a political atmosphere extremely hostile to the ethnic Chinese.The páihuá policy drove them to leave behind what they had built up and led to the mass exodus of 1978–1979, but also gave the Hoa hope for a new and better life for themselves and especially for their future descendants outside of Vietnam.

About some recent trends in economic and political relations between Japan and China. The opinions and conclusions of Western Russian and Japanese scholars with regard to the Chinese policy of Shinzo Abe government and Japanese aspects of Chinese foreign policy under Xi Jinping are considered. Special attention is paid to the ambiguous attitudes of both states to territorial conflicts and their strategy of exploration of islands in the open sea. Evident traces of “double standards“ can be revealed in the political declarations and actions of both countries. Controversies between China and Japan are dangerously aggravating especially with a prospect of strengthening China’s positions in the Asia-Pacific region. Nevertheless solving of territorial question will depend mainly on the outcome of economic rather than military competition between China and Japan.

As the Deng era approaches its end, concern abroad, particularly in East Asia, focuses on how the People's Republic of China (PRC) will cope with territorial disputes with Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and India, and the continued quest for Taiwan. Meanwhile Chinese military modernization steadily increases the People's Liberation Army (PLA) air and sea power projection. The question arises: might a beleaguered post-Deng leadership seek to strengthen its legitimacy through exploitation of Chinese nationalism and if so, how would this manifest itself in foreign relations?

This article uses a network approach and a negative binomial regression model (NBRM) to shed light on the association between Domestic Investment (DI) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in interlinking Chinese cities in a space of flows. The empirical analysis is based on 2743 FDI and 9315 DI projects covering 77 Chinese cities. We address the question of what the association is between DI network measures and city attractiveness for FDI, and if the geographic distance of DI matters. While the physical distance of DI activity is found to have a negative association with FDI, city functional proximity and structural position in the DI network are found to have a positive association. We conclude that strategic policies to stimulate cross-territorial economic ties between Chinese cities should be advantageous in attracting inward foreign investment.

AbstractTraditionally, research that examines foreign policy in sport often revolves around the prestige, status, welfare and protection of ethnic or human kin. However, this article argues that from the outset, China's foreign policy on sport vis-à-vis Taiwan has placed national security and territorial integrity as its number one priority. Chinese leaders have developed a carrot-and-stick policy. On the one hand, an “Olympic formula” has been devised enabling Taiwan to participate in non-governmental international organizations such as the Olympics. On the other hand, a “one China principle” has been imposed, to treat Taiwan as a local province that ceases to be a sovereign state. The 2008 Beijing Olympics is a perfect arena for China to use the two doctrines interchangeably.

It is difficult to say authentically whether the COVID-19 virus is being developed in Chinese laboratory or shredded from the vet market of China. In any case it’s a Chinese virus affecting the human population, and one such major public health event occurs approximately one in every 100 years. It is as devastating, if not more, than the dinosaurs of past millennia, but as the size reduced from animal to nano particle, the devastating capability also increased in million times. The major pandemics have been usually pneumonic in nature whether plague, flue or Covid. The Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) of WHO (World Health Organization) has been launched as a Knowledge resource. But the role of China or WHO in declaring this pandemic is suspicious even today. This arouses a question, was the discovery actually Chinese in nature and with the help of higher public health organization (WHO?) the matter was hidden and bio-weapon was developed by China to be used for Indian, Taiwan, US or Japanese soldiers in cold seasons, with whom China is engaged in territorial expansion through encroachment? As such excepting US president Mr. Donald Trump, no one expresses it aloud. There has been economic crisis, socio-psycho-political melancholy, vaccine development delays and global health system failure.

In the light of China’s rise, it is of great interest to consider the views that are widespread in the PRC on the nature of Chinese state and the proper mode of international relations. Considering that Chinese leadership has proclaimed the goal of "rejuvenation" of the Chinese nation, modern assessments of China's historical past allow us to take a fresh look at the prospects for China's internal development as well as Chinese foreign policy in Asia. In this regard the era of the Qing Dynasty is of particular interest. During that period Chinese territory expanded approximately to its modern borders, and the relations with the neighbors underwent a transition from the tributary system to the modern Westphalian type of international relations. There exist various interpretations of Chinese foreign policy’s traditions. Those interpretations are largely determined by the attitude to China's current behavior at the international stage. While the Chinese rulers have adopted the concept of traditional Chinese world order that is of Western origin, many Western researchers nowadays question this concept and tend to describe pre-revolutionary China as one of many expansionist empires in Eurasia. That point of view is subject to sharp criticism from Chinese authors. The portrayal of Qing China as one of the empires can entail serious consequences for international relations as well as the territorial integrity of the PRC. In order to achieve their goals in domestic and foreign policy, Chinese leaders strive to build a historical narrative in such a way that it combines the elements of various historical periods which are most profitable in the current circumstances, including the history of Silk Road.

In the context of growing tensions in East Asia over territorial disputes and history issues, one can observe the rise of anti-Chinese sentiments among South Koreans in the early 2010s although many South Koreans had positive views on China a decade earlier. What affects South Korean attitude toward China? Despite China’s significance to South Korea, there have been surprisingly few scholarly works attempting to answer this question. Based on an empirical analysis of survey data, this paper finds that Koreans’ favorable attitude towards China is negatively affected by threat perception of China’s military buildup, opposition to anftawith China, and exclusive national identity but not by whether or not one feels threatened by the American unilateralism and Japan’s remilitarization. This finding suggests that South Koreans’ feeling toward China is primarily affected by bilateral relationship rather than by balancing behaviors in consideration of broader security environments.

The article deals with the qualitative changes that have taken place in the course of Japan in the field of military security in December 2012 after the rise of the second Abe Cabinet. These changes include tightening of the policy towards China, stronger defense policy coordination with the countries concerned with the growth of Beijing's military ambitions, as well as the revision of the basic strategy of defense capacity-building.A special place in Tokyo’s new policy was taken by the moves aimed at revising the Constitution. Constitutional reform is seen in Tokyo as a sort of milestone marking the end of the postwar Japanese history when Japan held the position of the "junior partner" of the United States. However, even within the framework of the Constitution the Abe Cabinet strives to achieve a full legitimization of the self-defense forces’ missions outside Japan, formally to maintain peace and security, but essentially to meet the requirements of the Security Treaty.The author concludes that the future policy of Japan in the field of military security will be to a large extent determined by the situation around the territorial dispute with China. Apparently, the Chinese ships’ patrolling of the areas around the Senkaku will become a routine practice, and Japan will have to if you do not accept, but at least to get used to a permanent Chinese presence in the disputed waters. Thus, the question is how to establish bilateral mechanisms of preventing escalation of tension to the stage of an armed conflict.Key words: Japan, the Constitution, the National Security Council, the restrictions on the export of arms, the right of collective self-defense, territorial dispute, the UN Convention on the law of the sea, the Shangri-La dialogue.

This article examines the historical importance in the settlement of border issues and identifies the main difficulties of the process of solving problems related to the SinoRussian border. The article emphasizes that since the formation of the modern national state, borders have become an important part of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the state, and during the formation of modern states, the process of establishing a border between the two countries has almost always been accompanied by controversy, even large-scale wars or the threat of war. The formation of the russian-chinese border also took place in similar conditions. The author traces in detail the history of RussianChinese relations in terms of resolving border problems, comments on the main stages of China-Russian negotiations on border delimitation issues, characterizes the main border agreements concluded between China and Russia (Nerchinsky, Kyakhtinsky, Aigong and Beijing), assessing the difficulties in signing agreements from the positions of the Chinese and Russian sides. The article justifies the importance in the settlement of the China-Russian border issue: the creation of new conditions for cooperation in many specific areas, such as economic and trade exchanges, environmental protection, rational use of resources, shipping and the joint fight against crime in the border areas; improving the external situation and maintaining national security in the both countries. The article concludes that today Russia and China as a whole have reached a settlement of border issues, which made it possible to create conditions for long-term relations of strategic partnership and mutually beneficial cooperation

AbstractWith the future of liberal internationalism in question, how will China's growing power and influence reshape world politics? We argue that views of the Liberal International Order (LIO) as integrative and resilient have been too optimistic for two reasons. First, China's ability to profit from within the system has shaken the domestic consensus in the United States on preserving the existing LIO. Second, features of Chinese Communist Party rule chafe against many of the fundamental principles of the LIO, but could coexist with a return to Westphalian principles and markets that are embedded in domestic systems of control. How, then, do authoritarian states like China pick and choose how to engage with key institutions and norms within the LIO? We propose a framework that highlights two domestic variables—centrality and heterogeneity—and their implications for China's international behavior. We illustrate the framework with examples from China's approach to climate change, trade and exchange rates, Internet governance, territorial sovereignty, arms control, and humanitarian intervention. Finally, we conclude by considering what alternative versions of international order might emerge as China's influence grows.

Problems of building a new democratic Russia based on federative principles and the region's long-refractory “national question,” forming a knotty tangle of complicated issues, have steadily remained in the political limelight. In a number of regions worldwide dramatic changes have occurred, related in one way or the other to the processes of national-territorial self-determination. As a result of this, the Eurasian political landscape has been marked by the emergence of some twenty newly independent states. Suffice it to say that the Soviet Union, a preponderant superpower feared by all, collapsed; and in Europe the Federative Republic of Yugoslavia ceased to exist, bringing on a long-term national conflict threatening not only regional but even global security. In East Central Europe binational Czechoslovakia split up into two independent nation states. Elsewhere, even in the absence of militarized national conflict, political processes have dramatically intensified. In Asia, for example, the multinational Chinese Republic with its Tibetan and Uighur problems, and ethnically heterogeneous India with its population speaking more than 400 languages and dialects have long attracted public attention as sources of potential instability in the region. The “Sikh issue” alone, for instance, continues to pose a threat to India. Even the North American continent, a peaceful region in terms of its political and ethnic stability, is confronted with similar problems. The integrity of Canada is still in question with the franco-lingual province of Quebec striving for independence.

This single-case study seeks, first, to analyse the Pelješac bridge project’s EU dimension, and the impact on the bilateral relations between Croatia and Bosnia- Herzegovina. The bridge is part of the so-called Road Connection to South Dalmatia, an infrastructure project linking the southern exclave of Croatia with the rest of the country. This article is going to reconstruct the considerable controversy between Sarajevo and Zagreb over the project. Second, this piece of research aims at highlighting the context of the bridge being built by a State-owned Chinese company and why the EU has been paralysed over the question of third-country bidders in national EU-wide public tenders. Lastly, this paper presents a recommendation on how the problem of maritime access to and from the territorial waters of Bosnia-Herzegovina through Croatian internal waters can be solved. The article demonstrates that the three issues of controversy related to the Pelješac bridge project can and must be unbundled to arrive at sustainable solutions for the region as a whole. The method employed in this article is process-tracing covering the period between 1999 and today based on interviews, documents, and secondary literature.

The article aims to analyze the role of economic sanctions in the People’s Republic of China’s overall approach to achieving its security objectives in the international arena. During the last two decades, Beijing used this instrument on numerous occasions to exert pressure on a varied group of actors. China’s current strategy toward a range of disputes and conflicts it is engaged in (the South China Sea territorial disputes most prominently stand out) is often described using the popular vocabulary of “hybrid warfare” or “grey zone conflicts”. Putting the conceptual complications aside, the author agrees that the PRC’s approach can be viewed as part of a growing trend for great powers to employ what can be called “hybrid strategies” toward its opponents. As part of a broader category of economic statecraft, economic sanctions form an important element of this approach. Considering current scholarship on both “hybrid” (or “grey area”) warfare and economic sanctions, the article answers the question of why the PRC increasingly resorts to hybrid strategies (including economic coercion) and identifies the main characteristics of Chinese economic sanctions. It also provides preliminary conclusions on their effectiveness.

Much has been made over the past few years of China'vs ambitions of regaining control of its irredentist claims in the East and South China Seas. While some of this speculation focuses on the massive amounts of money the People's Republic of China (PRC) has funneled into its naval modernization program, other analysts are more interested in the drivers behind the increasingly popular sentiment that the country must “reclaim” its lost territories. The Chinese Communist Party can ill afford to ignore the voice of an already disenchanted population if it hopes to stay in power, particularly in regard to matters of national pride. As a result, in dealing with China's irredentist claims, nationalism in particular can be a powerful ideological factor in shaping the nation's foreign policies. This is especially apparent in the case of irredentism, where nationalism can often override diplomatic and strategic imperatives. This paper addresses the question of how does the nationalist discourse vary between two territorial disputes, the East and South China Seas. It uses discourse analysis to examine developing trends among online social media and news sites. This in turn allows for the construction of a framework of how nationalism develops among both elite and grassroots audiences.

The government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has strongly protested Indonesian fishing in the South China Sea, stating that it considered these waters to be a traditional Chinese fishing area. In fact, however, the area in question is within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of Indonesia. This study aims to determine whether the determination of the boundaries of that EEZ was in accordance with the rights and obligations of Indonesia. The research method used was a normative law research, applying statutory and conceptual approaches. This article determines that a State’s right within its EEZ is a sovereign right and that the claims of the traditional fishing ground of the South China Sea is not justifiable, from the perspective of international maritime law. The term “traditional fishing ground” is not used in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The determination of fishing rights in a country’s territorial waters or EEZ should be based on license by the State that has declared the EEZ. This analysis concludes that China’s claims to the South China Sea as a traditional fishing ground has no legal basis. It also states that where a coastal country’s EEZ includes a sea border with another country, the two should negotiate a bilateral agreement in accordance with applicable international law and make a commitment to mutual understanding and cooperation.

The gulf between intellectuals and peasants, in which the latter are perceived to be a drag on the modernization led by the former, is usually selfaggrandizement. When, as in China, peasants have the ambivalent status of being the base of revolution and the drag on political reform in the direction of democracy, anthropologists are in a good position to challenge the intellectuals’ pretensions. But we don’t. This article asks why, points out the ways in which we can, and then refutes the notion that Chinese peasants have no democratic tradition with an example. It is an example of self-organization around an incense burner, a religious tradition of territorial association. I put it to the test of a number of concepts of democracy, most of which it passes. But its leaders are chosen by divine selection, raising the question whether this is a form of benign charisma rather than standard electoral democracy. The institution persists into the present of the People’s Republic of China and the government of Taiwan, where it functions as a public good, a test of local loyalty, and a moral basis by which the conduct of state officials and elected representatives are judged. It is a civil institution, but now the issue is whether it will last or be soaked up by central state cultural policies. Whatever the answer, the example also throws down a challenge to anthropologists in other regions to explore ‘peasant’ self-organization and cultural resources for democracy and civil judgement.

The term “cultural cluster” in recent years has been used extensively in the academic literature in the context of such areas as urban planning, cultural and economic geography, regional development, etc. However, the interdisciplinary aspect has deprived this term’s academic scope of a clear definition. The situation is complicated by the fact that the discussed concept implies an international component; therefore, its interpretation becomes even more specific. To solve this problem, the article presents a comprehensive review of the theoretical concepts of Russian and Chinese scholars. Based on the review, the author made a conclusion about a similar interpretation by Western and Chinese schools of thought of the sociocultural characteristics of a cluster with its sustainable competitive advantages, and also raised the question of the absence of a unified method of their measuring and evaluating. The author’s position is that the border sociocultural cluster is considered as a border formation of units with similar sociocultural characteristics (establishments of science and culture), which, through innovative mechanisms, raise the level of regional competitiveness. Proceeding from the intensification of clustering processes in the Russian-Chinese borderland, the author defines the features of the initial concept using the method of comparative studies, analyzes its specifics, focusing on the cultural and philosophical content (border ontological status, regional culture values, population’s similar ideological attitudes). The author compares Russia’s and China’s border areas clustering processes and determines their features. Thus, the clustering processes in the border areas of Russia and China as an innovative mechanism of the territories’ development are based, firstly, on the existing potential of regional cultures, which allows speaking about the sociocultural basis of this formation. Based on the above, the article substantiates the importance of including the scientific and educational component as a part of the sociocultural in forming the “border sociocultural cluster” concept. In conclusion, the author’s definition of the “border sociocultural cluster” is formulated, which, first of all, rests on cultural-philosophical reflection. Thus, the “border sociocultural cluster” is considered as a specific sociocultural formation, structured by the regional cultures of the border administrative-territorial units, but at the same time conditioned by the existence and functioning in three cultural dimensions – foreign, national and local. In this connection, the author proposes some recommendations for the border cluster policy development with an emphasis on the resources of a regional culture, which will contribute not only to strengthening the Russian cultural presence in the world, but also create favorable conditions for promoting the cultural and spiritual values of our country abroad.

This article considers China’s political manoeuvers between February and October 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to devastate many parts of the world. It argues that the pandemic has exacerbated geopolitical tensions between China, the United States and the West. Consequently, Chinese policy-makers perceive the existence of a broad Western front which seeks to contain its global ambitions, as well as to de-legitimise the rule of the Chinese government domestically. In response, the Chinese government has attempted to shore up its territorial claims while embarking on a global diplomatic offensive to cast itself as a responsible power and at the same time call into question the West’s ability to practice global leadership. Taken together, these narratives have emboldened China to attempt and seize the moral high ground while at the same time undermine Western criticism that it was an uncooperative and opportunistic power that had taken advantage of the pandemic to pursue its own selfish agenda.

Education always remains at the heart of political and economic debates in Morocco. The essential questions that arise for Morocco are: How to generalize and standardize the education system throughout its territory? How to improve the quality and efficiency of education in Morocco? The level of economic development remains fragile and sensitive, marked by an inequitable development between the 12 Moroccan regions. For this purpose, also treated what supposedly unequal is unfair. We must abandon the principle of equal treatment of pupils across the country. It is obviously a question of compensating for the initial inequalities. Putting this policy in the name of equity seems socially just. Educational justice means not only the same educational policies but having equal access and results. An egalitarian system must focus on improving the quality of the schools that serve the poorest regions of the country and the poorest classes in society. The reason is simple: a well-educated and well-groomed population will be more productive, which is a source of continuous growth that can benefit everyone. For this reason, the starting point is to establish a single school, carrying the ideals of freedom, equality, solidarity, the principles of citizenship, secularism, respect for others, universalism and unit. In addition, it is necessary to introduce digital into the education system and to diversify and encourage the learning of languages ​​(in addition to two official languages) such as English, Japanese, Chinese, we do not know who owns The world of tomorrow ?

AbstractSince the 1960s China and India have engaged in a dispute about the demarcation of their shared border. This territorial dispute led to a brief war in 1962, and recurring flare-ups over the following decades, including during the summer of 2020. The potential for further escalation of this dispute poses significant risks to Indian and Chinese civilians, US foreign policy objectives, and the stability of the international economic system. Despite the importance of this dispute, there have been relatively few attempts to understand the correlates of Chinese incursions. This paper addresses this important question by leveraging past work on the study of conflicts between states to derive a set of testable explanations about the impact of China–India relations, internal political affairs, international political issues, and domestic economic factors on the likelihood of incursions. The study uses 15 years of original data on monthly Chinese incursions into India along with a monthly dataset containing 18 independent variables, to develop a detailed statistical understanding of the factors that trigger Chinese incursions across the Indian border with a lead time between 1 and 6 months. The quantitative study finds that Chinese incursions are more likely when Chinese leadership is early in their tenure, but more likely when Indian leadership is in the later stages of their tenure. The results also show that closer cooperation between India and the US may trigger additional Chinese incursions into India. Finally, lower consumer confidence in the Chinese economy is consistently related to an increased likelihood of incursions. These findings have implications for the maintenance of peace and India’s national security policies. Periods of Chinese uncertainty, particularly when their economy exhibits weakness and when Chinese leaders are in the early stages of their tenure are more likely to experience incursions. Further, the strengthening of the US–Indian alliance, as well as increased conflict between India and Pakistan, create the potential for an elevated risk of incursions. During these periods India should likely be on higher alert, while India and Indian allies should signal the importance of diplomatic solutions for the dispute.

IntroductionThe perception of the archive as the warehouse of tradition is inflected with the notion that what it stores is also removed from the everyday, at once ancient but also irrelevant, standing still outside time. Yet, if the past is of any relevance, the archive cannot maintain a rigid fixity that does not intersect with the present. In the work of the Atlas Group, the fabrication of “archival material” reflects what Hal Foster has termed an “archival impulse” that is constructed of multiple temporalities. The Atlas Group archive interrogates forms that are at once still, excavated from life, while still being in the present. In the process, the reductive singularity of the archive as an immobile monument is opened up to the complexity of a radical stillness through which the past enters the present in a moment of recognition. What is still, and what is still there, intersect in the productivity of a stillness that cuts through an undifferentiated continuity. This juncture echoes the Benjaminian flash which heralds the arrival of past in the presentTo articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. (Benjamin, Theses)Klee’s Angelus Novus stands still between past and future as a momentary suspension of motion brings history and prophecy into the present. For “the historian of the dialectic at a standstill”, Walter Benjamin, historical materialism was not simply a means of accessing the past in the present, but of awakening the potential of the future (Tiedemann 944-945). This, Rolf Tiedemann suggests, was the revolution of historical perception that Benjamin wanted to bring about in his unfinished Arcades Project (941). By carrying the principle of montage into history, Benjamin indicates an intention “to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event” (Benjamin Arcades 461). This principle had already been alluded to in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” where he had written that a historical materialist cannot do without a present in which time stands still, and later, that it is in the arrest of thought that what has been and what will be “crystallizes into a monad” (Benjamin “Theses” 262-263).Everywhere in Benjamin’s writings on history, there is something of the irreducibility of the phrase “standing still”. Standing still: still as an active, ongoing form of survival and endurance, still as an absence of movement. The duality of stillness is amplified as semantic clarity vacillates between one possibility and another: to endure and to be motionless. Is it possible to reduce “standing still” to a singularity? Benjamin’s counsel to take hold of memory at the “moment of danger” might be an indication of this complexity. The “moment of danger” emerges as the flash of the past in the present, but also the instant at which the past could recede into the inertia of eternity, at once a plea against the reduction of the moment into a “dead time” and recognition of the productivity of stillness.Something of that “flash” surfaces in Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Michel Foucault: “a first light opens up things and brings forth visibilities as flashes and shimmerings, which are the ‘second light’” (Deleuze 50). The first flash makes “visibilities visible” and determines what can be seen in a given historical period, while the second makes “statements articulable” and defines what can be said (Deleuze 50). These visibilities and statements, however, are distributed into the stratum and constitute knowledge as “stratified, archivized, and endowed with a relatively rigid segmentarity” (Deleuze 61). Strata are historically determined, what they constitute of perceptions and discursive formations varies across time and results in the presence of thresholds between the stratum that come to behave as distinct layers subject to splits and changes in direction (Deleuze 44). Despite these temporal variations that account for differences across thresholds, the strata appear as fixed entities, they mimic rock formations shaped over thousands of years of sedimentation (Deleuze and Guattari 45). Reading Deleuze on Foucault in conjunction with his earlier collaborative work with Felix Guattari brings forth distant shadows of another “stratification”. A Thousand Plateaus is notably less interested in discursive formations and more concerned with “striation”, the organisation and arrangement of space by the diagrams of power. Striated space is state space. It is offset by moving in the opposite direction, effectively turning striated space into smooth space (Deleuze and Guattari 524).Whether on striation or stratification, Deleuze’s work exhibits more than a cautionary distrust of processes of classification, regulation, and organization. Despite the flash that brings visibilities and statements into being, stratification, as much as striation, remains a technique of knowledge shaped by the strategies of power. It is interesting however, that Deleuze sees something as indeterminate as a flash, creating structures that are as determined as stratum. Yet perhaps this is a deceptive conjecture since while the strata appear relatively rigid they are also “extremely mobile” (Deleuze and Guattari 553). Foucault had already given an indication that what the archaeological method uncovers is not necessarily suspended, but rather that it suspends the notion of an absolute continuity (Archaeology 169). He suggests that “history is that which transforms documents into monuments” (7). The task of archaeology, it would seem, is to recover documents from monuments by demonstrating rather than reversing the process of sedimentation and without necessarily relying on a motionless past. While there is a relative, albeit interstratically tentative, stillness in the strata, absolute destratification proceeds towards deterritorialisation through incessant movement (Deleuze and Guattari 62-63).If A Thousand Plateaus is any indication, the imperative for the creative thinker today seems to be stirring in this direction: movement, motion, animation. Whatever forms of resistance are to be envisioned, it is motion, rather than stillness, that emerges as a radical form of action (Deleuze and Guattari 561). The question raised by these theoretical interventions is not so much whether such processes are indeed valuable forms of opposition, but rather, whether movement is always the only means, or the most effective means, of resistance? To imagine resistance as “staying in place” seems antithetical to nomadic thinking but is it not possible to imagine moments when the nomad resists not by travelling, but by dwelling? What of all those living a life of forced nomadism, or dying nomadic deaths, those for whom movement is merely displacement and loss? In Metamorphoses Rosi Braidotti reflects upon forced displacement and loss, yet her emphasis nonetheless remains on “figurations”, mappings of identity through time and space, mappings of movement (2-3). Braidotti certainly does not neglect the victims of motion, those who are forced to move, yet she remains committed to nomadism as a form of becoming. Braidotti’s notion of “figurations” finds a deeply poignant expression in Joseph Pugliese’s textual maps of some of these technically “nomadic” bodies and their movement from the North African littoral into the waters of the Mediterranean where they eventually surface on southern European shores as corpses (Pugliese 15). While Braidotti recognizes the tragedy of these involuntary nomads, it is in Pugliese’s work that this tragedy is starkly exposed and given concrete form in the figures of Europe’s refugees. This is movement as death, something akin to what Paul Virilio calls inertia, the product of excessive speed, the uncanny notion of running to stand still (Virilio 16).This tension between motion and stillness surfaces again in Laura Marks’ essay “Asphalt Nomadism.” Despite wanting to embrace the desert as a smooth space Marks retorts that “smooth space seems always to be elsewhere” (Marks 126). She notes the stability of the acacia trees and thorny shrubs in the desert and the way that nomadic people are constantly beset with invitations from the “civilising forces of religion and the soporific of a daily wage” (Marks 126). Emphatically she concludes that “the desert is never really ‘smooth’, for that is death” (Marks 126). On this deviation from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the desert as smooth space she concludes: “we who inherit their thinking need to stay on the ground: both in thought, moving close to the surface of concepts, and literally, remaining alert to signs of life in the sand and the scrub of the desert” (Marks 126). In Marks’ appeal for groundedness the tension between motion and stillness is maintained rather than being resolved through recourse to smoothness or in favour of perpetual movement. The sedentary and still structures that pervade the desert remain: the desert could not exist without them. In turn we might ask whether even the most rigorous abstraction can convince us that the ground between radical nomadism and perpetual displacement does not also need to be rethought. Perhaps this complexity is starkest when we begin to think about war, not only the potentiality of the war-machine to destabilize the state (Deleuze and Guattari 391), but war as the deterritorialisation of bodies, lives and livelihoods. Is the war of nomadism against the state not somehow akin to war as the violence that produces nomadic bodies through forced displacement? One of the questions that strikes me about the work of the Atlas Group, “an imaginary non-profit research foundation established in Beirut to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon” (Raad 68) through the production and exhibition of “archival” material, is whether their propensity towards still forms in the creation of documentary evidence cannot be directly attributed to war as perpetual movement and territorial flexibility, as the flattening of structure and the creation of “smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari 389). One need only think of the reigns of terror that begin with destratification – abolishing libraries, destroying documents, burning books. On the work of the Atlas Group, Andre Lepecki offers a very thorough introduction:The Atlas Group is an ongoing visual and performative archival project initiated by Walid Raad …whose main topic and driving force are the multiple and disparate events that history and habit have clustered into one singularity named “The Lebanese Civil Wars of 1975-1991”. (Lepecki 61).While the “inventedness” of the Atlas Group’s archive, its “post-event” status as manufactured evidence, raises a myriad of questions about how to document the trauma of war, its insistence on an “archival” existence, rather than say a purely artistic one, also challenges the presumption that the process of becoming, indeed of producing or even creating, is necessarily akin to movement or animation by insisting on the materiality of producing “documents” as opposed to the abstraction of producing “art”. The Atlas Group archive does not contribute directly to the transformation of visibilities into statements so much as statements into visibilities. Indeed, the “archival impulse” that seems to be present here works against the constitution of discursive formations precisely by making visible those aspects of culture which continue to circulate discursively while not necessarily existing. In other words, if one reads the sedimentary process of stratification as forming knowledge by allowing the relationships between “words” and “things” to settle or to solidify into historical strata, then the Atlas Group project seems to tap into the stillness of these stratified forms in order to reverse the signification of “things” and “words”. Hal Foster’s diagnosis of an “archival impulse” is located in a moment where, as he says, “almost anything goes and almost nothing sticks” in reference to the current obliviousness of contemporary artistic practices to political culture (Foster 2-3). Foster’s observation endows this paper with more than just an appropriate title since what Foster seems to identify are the limitations of the current obsession with speed. What one senses in the Atlas Group’s “archival impulse” and Foster’s detection of an “archival impulse” at play in contemporary cultural practices is a war against the war on form, a war against erasure through speed, and an inclination to dwell once more in the dusty matter of the past, rather than to pass through it. Yet the archive, in the view of nomadology, might simply be what Benjamin Hutchens terms “the dead-letter office of lived memory” (38). Indeed Hutchens’s critical review of the archive is both timely and relevant pointing out that “the preservation of cultural memories eradicated from culture itself” simply establishes the authority of the archive by erasing “the incessant historical violence” through which the archive establishes itself (Hutchens 38). In working his critique through Derrida’s Archive Fever, Hutchens revisits the concealed etymology of the word “archive” which “names at once the commencement and the commandment” (Derrida 1). Derrida’s suggestion that the concept of the archive shelters both the memory of this dual meaning while also sheltering itself from remembering that it shelters such a memory (Derrida 2) leads Hutchens to assert that “the archival ‘act’ opens history to the archive, but it closes politics to its own archivization” (Hutchens 44). The danger that “memory cultures”, archives among them, pose to memory itself has also been explored elsewhere by Andreas Huyssen. Although Huyssen does not necessary hold memory up as something to be protected from memory cultures, he is critical of the excessive saturation of contemporary societies with both (Huyssen 3). Huyssen refers to this as the “hypertrophy of memory” following Nietzsche’s “hypertrophy of history” (Huyssen 2-3). Although Hutchens and Huyssen differ radically in direction, they seem to concur nonetheless that what could be diagnosed as an “archival impulse” in contemporary societies might describe only the stagnation and stiltedness of the remainders of lived experience.To return once more to Foster’s notion of an “archival impulse” in contemporary art practices, rather than the reinstitution of the archive as the warehouse of tradition, what seems to be at stake is not necessarily the agglutination of forms, but the interrogation of formations (Foster 3). One could say that this is the archive interrogated through the eyes of art, art interrogated through the eyes of the archive. Perhaps this is precisely what the Atlas Group does by insisting on manufacturing documents in the form of documentary evidence. “Missing Lebanese Wars”, an Atlas Group project produced in 1998, takes as its point of departure the hypothesisthat the Lebanese civil war is not a self-evident episode, an inert fact of nature. The war is not constituted by unified and coherent objects situated in the world; on the contrary, the Lebanese civil war is constituted by and through various actions, situations, people, and accounts. (Raad 17-18)The project consists of a series of plates made up of pages taken from the notebook of a certain Dr Fadl Fakhouri, “the foremost historian of the civil war in Lebanon” until his death in 1993 (Raad 17). The story goes that Dr Fakhouri belonged to a gathering of “major historians” who were also “avid gamblers” that met at the race track every Sunday – the Marxists and the Islamists bet on the first seven races, while the Maronite nationalists and the socialists bet on the last eight (Raad 17). It was alleged that the historians would bribe the race photographer to take only one shot as the winning horse reached the post. Each historian would bet on exactly “how many fractions of a second before or after the horse crossed the line – the photographer would expose his frame” (Raad 17). The pages from Dr Fakhouri’s notebook are comprised of these precise exposures of film as the winning horse crossed the line – stills, as well as measurements of the distance between the horse and the finish line amid various other calculations, the bets that the historians wagered, and short descriptions of the winning historians given by Dr Fakhouri. The notebook pages, with photographs in the form of newspaper clippings, calculations and descriptions of the winning historians in English, are reproduced one per plate. In producing these documents as archival evidence, the Atlas Group is able to manufacture the “unified and coherent objects” that do not constitute the war as things that are at once irrelevant, incongruous and non-sensical. In other words, presenting material that is, while clearly fictitious, reflective of individual “actions, situations, people, and accounts” as archival material, the Atlas Group opens up discourses about the sanctity of historical evidence to interrogation by producing documentary evidence for circulating cultural discourses.While giving an ironic shape to this singular and complete picture of the war that continues to pervade popular cultural discourses in Lebanon through the media with politicians still calling for a “unified history”, the Atlas Group simultaneously constitute these historical materials as the work of a single person, Dr Fakhouri. Yet it seems that our trustworthy archivist also chooses not to write about the race, but about the winning historian – echoing the refusal to conceive of the war as a self-evident fact (to talk about the race as a race) and to see it rather as an interplay of individuals, actions and narratives (to view the race through the description of the winning historian). Indeed Dr Fakhouri’s descriptions of the winning historians are almost comical for their affinity with descriptions of Lebanon’s various past and present political leaders. A potent shadow, and a legend that has grown into an officially sanctioned cult (Plate 1).Avuncular rather than domineering, he was adept at the well-timed humorous aside to cut tension. (Plate 3).He is 71. But for 6 years he was in prison and for 10 years he was under house arrest and in exile, so those 16 years should be deducted – then he’s 55 (Plate 5). (Raad 20-29)Through these descriptions of the historians, Lebanon’s “missing” wars begin to play themselves out between one race and the next. While all we have are supposed “facts” with neither narrative, movement, nor anything else that could connect one fact to another that is not arbitrary, we are also in the midst of an archive that is as random as these “facts.” This is the archive of the “missing” wars, wars that are not documented and victims that are not known, wars that are “missing” for no good reason.What is different about this archive may not be the way in which order is manufactured and produced, but rather the background against which it is set. In his introduction to The Order of Things Michel Foucault makes reference to “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia” in a passage by Borges whereanimals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable… (xvi)“The uneasiness that makes us laugh when we read Borges”, writes Foucault, is the sense of loss of a “common” name and place (Order, xx). Whereas in Eusethenes, (“I am no longer hungry. Until the morrow, safe from my saliva all the following shall be: Aspics, Acalephs, Acanathocephalates […]”) the randomness of the enumerated species is ordered by their non-location in Eusthenes’ mouth (Foucault, Order xvii), in Borges there is no means through which the enumerated species can belong in a common place except in language (Foucault, Order, xviii). In the same way, the work of the Atlas Group is filtered through the processes of archival classification without belonging to the archives of any real war. There is no common ground against which they can be read except the purported stillness of the archive itself, its ability to put things in place and to keep them there.If the Atlas Group’s archives of Lebanon’s wars are indeed to work against the fluidity of war and its ability to enter and reshape all spaces, then the archival impulse they evoke must be one in which the processes of sedimentation that create archival documents are worked through a radical stillness, tapping into the suspended motion of the singular moment – its stillness, in order to uncover stillness as presence, survival, endurance, to be there still. Indeed, if archives turn “documents into monuments” (Enwezor 23), then the “theatre of statements” that Foucault unearths (Deleuze 47) are not those recovered in the work of the Atlas Group since is not monuments, but documents, that the Atlas Group archive uncovers.It is true that Benjamin urges us to seize hold of memory at the moment of danger, but he does not instruct us as to what to do with it once we have it, yet, what if we were to read this statement in conjunction with another, “for every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Benjamin, “Theses” 255). By turning monuments into documents it is possible that the Atlas Group reconfigure the formations that make up the archive, indeed any archive, by recognizing images of the past as being still in the present. Not still as a past tense, motionless, but still as enduring, remaining. In the work of the Atlas Group the archival impulse is closely aligned to a radical stillness, letting the dust of things settle after its incitation by the madness of war, putting things in place that insist on having a place in language. Against such a background Benjamin’s “moment of danger” is more than the instant of sedimentation, it is the productivity of a radical stillness in which the past opens onto the present, it is this moment that makes possible a radical reconfiguration of the archival impulse.ReferencesBenjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard U Press, 2002.———. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. New York: Continuum, 1999.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. 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