VTechWorks Repository :: Browsing by Author "Toal, Gerard"

Browsing by Author "Toal, Gerard"

Now showing 1 - 20 of 39

Constructing a Politics of Knowledge in the Age of the Internet
Hunsinger, Jeremy W. (Virginia Tech, 2009-09-22)
The politics of knowledge in the age of the internet is concerned with many overlapping elements. From the reimagining of research in relation to the new infrastructures to the development of new technologies and their social, cultural, ontological, and epistemological implications, here the politics of knowledge centers around questions of information technology infrastructures in late capitalism, the control society, and reflexive modernization. As these social and political theories operate across academic disciplines and organizational systems, new formulations of knowledge production arise such as transdisciplinary research. Transdisciplinary research can be considered as a model for knowledge production that is still capable of recognizing the shared and processual nature of knowledge that operates contrarily to the objectified and commodified understanding of knowledge in late capitalism. Using critical analysis centered in considerations of reflexivity and the control society, I argue for the possibility of alternative cyberinfrastructures for the e-sciences and virtual learning environments as systems of cultural reproduction. These alternatives privilege constructions of science understood as creative, social, and processual following the findings of actor-network theory and the theories of Deleuze and Guattari. Finally, I argue that we are co-constructing a politics of knowledge within and through the infrastructures that we are building, and within these politics there is a conception of the practices of science and research that could be informed by a reconsideration of social theories of technology and our contemporary social and political theory in relation to the development of future technologies and future ways of understanding those technologies.
The Crisis in Darfur: an Analysis of Its Origins and Storylines
Quach, Thu Thi (Virginia Tech, 2004-12-07)
The research for this paper evolved from information that can be found in Lexis Nexis Academic and in the public domain, including newspapers and other media on the situation in the Sudan's western region of Darfur. This paper argues that the Darfur crisis is an outcome of Khartoum elites' attempt to obtain absolute control of national wealth and power over the entire Sudan. Structural violence, in the form of pervasive discrimination, marginalization and inequality, created resentment and resistance that triggered overt violence. Secondly, it argues that the situation is described differently, therefore, is subscripted to different storylines which are open to the manipulation of practical geopolitics. There is a gap between naming and acting toward the situation. As the result, the strategic significance in resolving the crisis is undermined, and human security in Darfur remains dire.
A Crisis of Influence: The American Response to Soviet Sphere of Influence Geopolitics
Schneider, Jasper David (Virginia Tech, 2023-10-11)
American Geopolitical Culture strongly rejects the concept of spheres of influence, but great power competition often dictates a tacit acceptance of rival powers' privileged zones of control. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union sought to maintain a sphere of influence along its border, and on multiple occasions resorted to the use of force to maintain control over foreign states. How did the United States react to the Soviet use of force in sovereign territory that fell within the Soviet privileged spheres of influence? This paper looks at three case studies, the Hungarian Revolution, the Prague Spring, and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan, and provides an analysis of the American foreign policy response, and the geopolitical and cultural values that informed policymakers' decision-making. Despite the limited interventions pursued by the United States, the United States constantly sought to undermine Soviet efforts to maintain a sphere of influence. In Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the United States prioritized long-term strategies on a global scale to weaken the Soviet Union in lieu of tactical interventions in opposition to the Soviet use of force. In Afghanistan, the United States continued to maintain its long-term strategies, while taking advantage of unique local factors to place additional strain on the Soviet Union. Across all three case studies the United States consistently pursued strategies that sought to weaken the Soviet Union as a whole, rather than just target individual spheres of influence.
Critical Geopolitics/critical geopolitics 25 years on
Koopman, Sara; Dalby, Simon; Megoran, Nick; Sharp, Jo; Kearns, Gerry; Squire, Rachael; Jeffrey, Alex; Squire, Vicki; Toal, Gerard (Elsevier, 2021-10-01)
Did Sarajevo's Multiethnic Spatiality Survive?: A Study of a Residential Building in the City through War and Peace
Kurtagic, Ira (Virginia Tech, 2007-05-04)
Sarajevo’s longstanding image has been one of a functioning multiethnic spatiality where diverse identities harmoniously co-exist and share common public spaces in their everyday life. The ethnically mixed urban population of prewar Sarajevo lived multiethnic spatiality as ‘zajednicki zivot’ (common life). This notion referred to neighborliness, cooperation and trust within and across groups. The structural factors which fostered this condition of neighborly spatiality are assessed through a study of a residential building in central Sarajevo. The thesis argues that the apartment building under study was a concrete manifestation of the ideology and political economy of Tito’s Yugoslavia. It was a space made possible by an authoritarian political system and an economic order subordinated to the interest of the Yugoslav League of Communists. However, the war shattered this world and dispersed the multiethnic spatiality that characterized it. The ensuing disruption of the social, institutional and economic fabric marked the state’s transition from a socialist to a capitalist society. It led to heightened ethnic awareness as well as isolation and alienation that altered the prewar multiethnic spatiality of the city in ways that are still unfolding.
The Essence of Desperation: Accounting for Counterinsurgency Doctrines as Solutions to Warfighting Failures in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan
Riddle, William Bryan (Virginia Tech, 2016-07-01)
Why does counterinsurgency emerge during periods of warfighting failure and in crisis situations? How is it conceptualized and legitimized? As the second counterinsurgency era for the United States military ends, how such a method of warfare arises, grips the military, policy makers, and think tanks provides a tableau for examining how we conceptualize the strategy process and account for geostrategic change. This dissertation takes these puzzles as it object of inquiry and builds on the discursive-argumentative geopolitical reasoning and transactional social construction literatures to explore the ways in which the counterinsurgency narrative captures and stabilizes the policy boundaries of action. It conceptualizes strategy making as a function of defining the problem as one that policy can engage, as the meaning applied to an issue delimits the strategic options available. Once the problem is defined, narratives compete within the national security bureaucracy to overcome the political and strategic fragmentation to produce consensus. A narrative framework is applied to study counterinsurgency strategy during the Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghan wars. This framework examines the symbolic power and positioning of COIN advocates, hegemonic analogies and commonplaces used to legitimize COIN, and the romanticized language and imagery associated with COIN doctrine. These elements define the "who, what, where, and why" of the courses of action. Together these discursive resources serve as the building blocks for the counterinsurgency narrative and enable it to capture the geostrategic debate space. This narrative further defines how COIN is conceptualized in particular geostrategic contexts and how it is to be executed. The study concludes that by empirically tracing the ways in which the actors, analogies, and narratives are produced and deployed into war strategy debates the reasons for COIN's emergence in crisis periods can be determined. This allows for a thicker analysis of wartime and crisis decision making and a broader view of the ways in which strategy and policy are actually produced within the national security bureaucracy. In conceptualizing military strategy and policy in this way, we are better able to understand how dramatic changes in strategy occur and map the dynamics which enable that change to occur.
Foreigners and the Bio-Political State: Case Studies of Hungarian and Bosnian Refugees in Switzerland
Smith, Nina Sophie Overney (Virginia Tech, 2009-05-19)
In modern societies foreigners are implicated in the resolution of the problem of state sovereignty. This paper clarifies how foreign groups can be used by the state to reconstitute the nation in such a way that vulnerabilities are mended. Michel Foucault's racism and bio-politics are used as conceptual tools to gain insight on how the perpetually open question of who belongs and who does not belong to the population might be settled. This theoretical problem is illustrated with the help of case studies on two significant "crisis moments" for the Swiss state: the arrival of the Hungarian refugees in the late 1950s and the arrival of the Bosnian refugees in the early to mid 1990s.
Framing Islam as a Threat: The Use of Islam by Some U.S. Conservatives as a Platform for Cultural Politics in the Decade after 9/11
Belt, David Douglas (Virginia Tech, 2014-12-12)
Why, in the aftermath of 9/11, did a segment of U.S. security experts, political elite, media and other institutions classify not just al-Qaeda but the entire religion of Islam as a security threat, thereby countering the prevailing professional consensus and White House policy that maintained a distinction between terrorism and Islam? Why did this oppositional threat narrative on Islam expand and even degenerate into warning about the “Islamization” of America by its tiny population of Muslim-Americans—a perceived threat sufficiently convincing that legislators in two dozen states introduced bills to prevent the spread of Islamic law, or sharia, and a Republican Presidential front-runner exclaimed, “I believe Shariah is a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and in the world as we know it”? This dissertation takes these puzzles as its object of inquiry. Using a framework that conceptualizes discourses and their agents as fundamentally political, this study deepens the literature’s characterizations of this discourse as “Islamophobia,” the “new Orientalism,” the “new McCarthyism,” and so on by examining how it functioned politically as a form of cultural politics, and how such political factors played a role in its expansion in the decade after 9/11. The approach is syncretic, blending Foucauldian genealogy with its emphasis on power, a more interpretive Bourdieuan relational sociology, and synthetic social movement theory. First, it examines the discourse at its macro-level, in the historical and structural factors that formed its conditions of emergence; specifically: 1) the culturally-resident political framing structure that rendered this discourse meaningful and credible; 2) the politically-relevant social-structural resources that rendered it influential; and 3) the more historically contingent or eventful political openings or opportunity “structure” that otherwise enabled, supported, or incentivized it. Then, it examines this threat discourse at its micro-level, biographically profiling three of its more influential polemicists, analyzing their strategies of cultural politics. The study concludes that this threat discourse functioned as a distinctive strategy by the more entrepreneurial segments of the U.S. conservative movement, who—in the emotion-laden wake of 9/11—seized Islam as another opportune site to advance their ongoing project of cultural politics.
From Community Blight to Community Asset: The Renovation of the Historic Whitelaw Hotel into Affordable Housing
Renneckar, Patricia L. (Virginia Tech, 2001-12-17)
The intent of this thesis is to investigate whether there is a place for low-income residents in gentrified neighborhoods by examining how the housing needs of these households are provided. Affordable housing development and maintenance are key components for preserving a place for low-income residents in gentrified communities. This paper investigates the provision of affordable housing through the renovation of the historic Whitelaw Hotel in Washington, D.C. by recreating the renovation events from interviews with participants in the project to document the obstacles to and benefits of the success of these projects. The paper also examines the issue of affordability and sustainability of affordable housing projects. Affordable is a subjective term. Local jurisdictions determine the income criteria that establish eligibility for affordable units. In many cities such as Washington, D.C., the area median income (AMI) used to determine eligibility is higher than the median income of the neighborhoods in which the affordable housing is located. A high AMI increases the number of households eligible for subsidized housing, which heightens competition for these units pitting very low-income households against households earning almost twice their income. Also, the sustainability of affordable units is contingent on many factors. There are mechanisms for preserving affordability and many limitations, including personal decisions, which impact their longevity. This paper found that while the renovation project successfully created affordable housing there was little consensus by interview participants on the definition of affordability or whether the project is sustainable as affordable housing after the low-income housing tax credits expires.
The geopolitical orientations of ordinary Belarusians: survey evidence from early 2020
O'Loughlin, John; Toal, Gerard (Routledge, 2022-03-20)
Examining geopolitical orientations in a representative survey of Belarus in early 2020, we adopt a critical geopolitical perspective that highlights geopolitical cultures as fields of contestation and debate over a state’s identity, orientation, and enduring interests. We examine support among 1210 Belarusians to four foreign policy options for the country–neutrality as the best foreign policy, joining the European Union, staying in the Eurasian Economic Union, or developing close relations with both these organizations. We also analyze responses to where Belarus should be on an 11-point scale from aligned with the West to aligned with Russia. In early 2020, Belarusians indicated divided geopolitical preferences in the same way as other post-Soviet societies along demographic, ideological, and attitudinal cleavages. Lukashenka’s quarter-century dictatorship has left Belarus in a condition of nascent (geo)political polarization. The 2020 electoral crisis alone did not polarize Belarus; it was already a dividing polity.
The hermeneutics of airphoto interpretation
Whittemore, Martin P. (Virginia Tech, 1996)
This thesis examines the cultural and political applications of aerial photography. The thesis emphasizes the historical development of aerial photography technologies and the incorporation of these systems into national policy. The Majority of the discussion details the U-2 reconnaissance program. There is an account of the evolution of the system under Eisenhower, explanation of its selection over other intelligence programs, development of photographic equipment, and the formation of a professional staff to analyze the U-2 imagery. This thesis analyses the use of U-2 imagery under Kennedy to precipitate and then monitor the resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The analysis of the technologies and historical record utilizes a methodology defined as hermeneutical. Hermeneutics is the study of communication, or the exchange of knowledge accomplished through a text. The treatment of aerial photography as a text provides insight into the multiplicity of roles it played in national policy. Normative logic has knowledge emanating from photography, deciphered by science, and passed on to policymakers. There has been no concerted effort to integrate the politics and the science of aerial photography. This thesis challenges that discursive separation of science and politics. By examining the entire process, from flight planning to analysis to briefing of policymakers and finally, to the formation of policy, a different model of information exchange emerges. The science and politics of airphoto interpretation share a co-dependency where knowledge transfer is not a one-way street, but an interactive, co-dependent exchange.
Home-Body-Shopping: Reconstructing Fitness Environments
McCormack, Derek (Virginia Tech, 1997-06-13)
This thesis attempts to problematize and rethink the inter-related construction of the categories of "environment" and "fitness". It argues that environments are materially and discursively constructed through the mutually constitutive mobilization of networks of human and non-human actors by particularly powerful centers of translation, and that these processes increasingly involve the construction of environments configured to the requirements of an ideal of fitness - a fitness defined in terms of risk, flexibility, response-ability, responsibility, mobility, and consumption. In developing this argument particular attention is given to the relations between bodies and technologies as actors constitutive of the networks from which environments are constructed. As a specific illustrative example of this, the efforts of the fitness equipment manufacturer NordicTrack to mobilize and translate diverse networks of actors in the space of the home and then represent these hybrid networks as ontologically purified, meaningful and marketable environments are examined. The ontological and spatial ambiguity of the types of environments constructed by corporations such as NordicTrack is then discussed, this ambiguity being registered in the difficulty of positioning the boundaries between categories such as subject and object, nature and culture, human and machine, real and virtual. Finally, having illustrated that these ambiguous environments are perhaps constituted by communities of human and non-human actors, this thesis then suggests that such a recognition might open up space for critical geographical imaginations that are responsive to the possibility that political, ethical, and moral community and agency are co-constructions of humans and non-humans.
The Logic of Occupation in the Nagorno-Karabakh War: The Cases of Agdam and Shaumyan
Sanamyan, Emil (Virginia Tech, 2016-07-05)
Why do warring parties sometimes end up occupying territories they do not claim while not occupying territory they do? How do they explain this and how can we, from this explanation, understand the logic of occupation at work in these cases? This is the puzzle and the research questions at the center of this thesis. Using a case study of the Karabakh War (1991-94) it seeks to understand the rationale behind the Armenian occupation of previously undisputed Azerbaijani-populated territories around the contested entity of Nagorno Karabakh (NK). To achieve this objective the thesis considers one of these districts – Agdam – and contrasts its occupation to the lack of a concerted effort to return control over previously Armenian-populated district of Shaumyan, a territory Armenians view as under Azerbaijani occupation. The thesis presents the circumstances and rationales provided by the Armenian leaders for these counter-intuitive policies of occupation they pursued during the Karabakh war. This necessitates examining the prior meanings of these places, the contested and changed significance of Agdam and Shaumyan since the Karabakh war. There are five distinct explanatory accounts of logics of occupation. These are accounts based on 1) military/security needs; 2) political elite-driven decisions, 3) economic gain, 4) psychological and 5) identity-related factors. Process tracing and archival research points to primarily security and psychological rationales for the original actions, whereas economic gain played a secondary role. While these factors remain significant in justifying continued occupation, today they are also strongly augmented by newly-constructed identity markers and political elite-driven considerations.
A Lost Cause Found: Vestiges of Old South Memory in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia
Bohland, Jon Donald (Virginia Tech, 2006-09-22)
This dissertation examines issues of neo-Confederate collective memory, heritage, and geographical imagination within the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I analyze a whole range of material cultural practices throughout the entire region centered on the memory of the Civil War including monuments, battlefields, museum exhibits, burial rituals, historical reenactments, paintings, and dramatic performances. These mnemonic sites and rituals throughout the Great Valley of Virginia serve to circulate a dominant and mythologized reading of the Civil War past, one that emphasizes the Lost Cause myth of the Confederacy. In addition to uncovering neo-Confederate forms of memorialization, I also examine how normative lessons of morality, honor, patriotism, masculinity, and hyper-militarism become naturalized as a result of Lost Cause remembrance. The dissertation combines qualitative, practice-based modes of research with a Foucauldian influenced archival methodology that attempts to uncover particular silenced and alternative versions of the past that do not fit with normative version of heritage.
Mobilizing for Ethnic Violence? Ethno-national Political Parties and the Dynamics of Ethno-politicization
Maksic, Adis (Virginia Tech, 2014-12-29)
On July 12th, 1990 the Serb Democratic Party of Bosnia-Herzegovina (SDS BiH) held its founding assembly. Less than five months later, it participated in the November 1990 elections in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), winning a decisive majority of the vote of ethnic Serbs. Yet, SDS BiH was not an ordinary political party. In the sixteen months that followed the elections, it initiated a series of activities that eroded the power of BiH institutions to which it had been elected. SDS BiH declared its own organs superior to those of BiH and established exclusive control in Serb-majority areas. In early 1992, it united these areas into a single Serb Republic, formed an exclusively Serb armed force, and set out to violently expand the territory that would be incorporated into the new statelet. This study seeks to advance an understanding of the role of ethno-nationalist agents in the outbreak of violent conflicts fought in the name of ethnic nations by analyzing the activities of SDS BiH on the political homogenization of Serbs in the two years leading up to the 1992 onset of violence in BiH. It incorporates the tools of discourse analysis and the recent findings in the studies of human cognition, identifying the agency of SDS BiH in the power of the Party's discourse to produce affective sensibilities that served its nationalist agenda. It argues that this engineering of affect was crucial for constituting the dispersed individuals of Serb ethnic background as a palpable political group, and preparing them for armed mobilization. The analysis also argues that ethno-nationalist agency can be properly understood only by considering the case-specific structural factors with which all agents interact. Toward this point, it draws contrast between the agency of SDS BiH and that of the National Movement in the Republic of Georgia, showing that ethnic structures hold a greater explanatory value in the Georgian case. Rather than departing from pre-given ethnic groups, both case studies suggest that conflict analyses should problematize the dynamic interaction between the dominant ethno-nationalist agents and ethnic structures, which produce ethnic groups, ethnic interests and sides to armed conflicts.
Mobilizing in Uncertainty: Collective Identities and War in Abkhazia [Book review]
Toal, Gerard (Wiley, 2023-01-19)
Negotiating Acceptability of the IUD: Contraceptive Technology, Women's Bodies, and Reproductive Politics
Takeshita, Chikako (Virginia Tech, 2004-04-30)
In this dissertation, I deconstruct the commonly held assumption that the intrauterine device (IUD) is an unsafe and/or obsolete contraceptive method that has been used mostly to impose population control on women in developing countries. Simultaneously, I explore the changing meaning of the device over the last 40 years in varying socio-historical contexts. Capitalizing on the analytical tradition of science and technology studies that regards technology as socially constructed, I analyze the IUD as a technology that transformed through a series of material and discursive negotiations. Negotiations over the IUD took place in multiple layers, most notably in the social and political domains that defined the meaning of the contraceptive technology, but also in the domain of science, in which claims about the device's technical features and its relationship with the biological body were made. This work is divided into the examination of four major domains – global population politics, American contraceptive market, American antiabortion politics, and scientific research – within which the IUD took shape both materially and discursively. The historical development of the scientific research and discourse of IUDs are juxtaposed with the prevailing socio-political background to illustrate the intricate relationship between scientific research of contraceptive technology and the politics of fertility control. The final chapter addresses the agency of IUD users, introducing the ways in which women in developing countries have manipulated the IUD to achieve reproductive self-determination.
Neopatrimonialism and Regime Endurance in Transnistria
Owen, Jeffrey Daniel (Virginia Tech, 2009-09-10)
This thesis argues that neopatrimonialism is vital to understanding the power structure of the secessionist Transnistrian Moldovan Republic (TMR), and that neopatrimonial structures have been manipulated by Soviet-era elites to sustain the unrecognized separatist state's independence. The thesis also argues that neopatrimonialism is not a stable structure and its effectiveness in retaining support for the regime has changed over time. The paper provides an empirical analysis of the TMR in order to answer two questions: "To what extent does neopatrimonialism explain the regime endurance of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic?" and "What does the case of the Transnistrian Moldovan Republic reveal about neopatrimonialism and regime endurance over time?" The analysis examines the TMR regime's use of Soviet-era industrial and bureaucratic structures, media, party networks, and worker committees to assert and maintain control, distribute patronage, maintain support for secession, and co-opt important interest groups. The paper concludes that although neopatrimonialism is only one of several elements that support the TMR regime's endurance, the analysis of neopatrimonial systems in states with significant neopatrimonialism provides a framework for examining disparate but interwoven elements of a state's political economy.
The Non-Governmental Organization Coalition for an International Criminal Court: A Case Study on NGO Networking
Bann, Amy Jeanne (Virginia Tech, 2000-03-05)
The aim of this project is to examine the emergence of non- governmental organization (NGO) networking by conducting a case study of the NGO Coalition for an International Criminal Court (CICC). It explores the role of this Coalition in the context of the growing movement towards a "global civic politics." An in- depth look at this Coalition is unveiled through primary sources, interviews, and observations. Using a three- tiered model of networking, one can better understand NGO collaboration and networking that are unique in the field of international human rights law and indicative of a new trend in international politics. This model is developed from Timothy Luke and GearÃ³id Ã Tuathail's conception of geopolitical nature, Castells' conception of networks, and then modified to apply to political mediation. NGOs have acted as part of the engine behind the creation of an International Criminal Court in numerous ways. They have amassed over 900 organizations in support of a strong permanent court, as well as fostered relationships with the United Nations, and state governments, and regional blocs. By using this three- tiered framework, I will investigate the networking capacity and functions of the Coalition. The basic research question to be answered is: How does the CICC explain the role of NGOs as mediating agents between states and institutions within the context of contemporary global society?
The Northern Territories dispute between Japan and the Soviet Union: from rivalry to rapprochement
Clements, John Patrick (Virginia Tech, 1990-05-15)
A restrained relationship between the Soviet Union and Japan, great military and economic powers and geographically close neighbors in Northeast Asia, is an international anomaly of considerable magnitude. Resolution of this anomaly has been delayed for the last forty-five years by several factors, but none more so than that of what has commonly been referred to as the "Northern Territories" dispute. The territorial dispute of the Northern Territories, otherwise known as the four islands of Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan and the Habomai group is discussed in relation to both the historical and contemporary policies of Japan and the USSR. According to the Soviet’s perspective these islands belong to them on the basis of their military annexation in 1945. Japan fails to recognize this sovereignty, hence, leaving Japan and the USSR in a technical state of war, impeding normal Soviet-Japanese relations. Presently, Gorbachev’s policy of Perestroika has indicated the possibility of concessions and rapprochement over the islands after forty-five years of consistent deadlock. This new Soviet policy is aimed at improving relations with Japan and moving toward more economic and political cooperation, allowing the Soviets to participate in the economic prosperity of the Pacific Basin. However, Japan refuses to comply with such concessions, and demands Soviet recognition of the territorial issue prior to negotiations. Furthermore, opposition toward such conciliation exists in the USSR since any concession might lead China and other nations to press their own territorial claims. Thus, the political, economic and strategic implications of the Northern Territories problem ensures that it will remain a critical contemporary geopolitical issue in Northeast Asia.

Browsing by Author "Toal, Gerard"

Results Per Page

Sort Options