The Mytho-Logics of Othering and Containment: Culture, Politics and Theory in International Relations

Abstract

In this article, we adopt a socio-anthropological approach to understand how hegemonic international representations are constructed in the politics and theory of international relations, specifically how Southeast Europe is perceived in West European imagination. We focus on various forms of travel writing, media reporting, diplomatic record, policy making, truth claims and expert accounts related to different narrative perspectives on the Balkan wars, both old (1912-1913) and new (1991-1999). We show how these perspectives are rooted in different temporalities and historicizations, and how they contribute to international representations that affect international politics, particularly in relation to perpetuating othering and containment of Southeast Europe. We demonstrate through a detailed analysis and problematization how these international representations are culturally and politically constructed. They do not neutrally refer to a reality in the world; they create a reality of their own. As such, how international representations are constructed is itself a form of power and hegemony in both the practice and the theory of international relations.

Computational challenges to test and revitalize Claude Lévi-Strauss transformational methodology

“…Namely, a comparative analysis of transformations resulting from intercultural dynamics, especially in processes of identity construction and identity politics (Doja, 2014), could make it possible to convey such a conceptual extension. In particular, this is the case with morphodynamic analyses substantiated in actual instances of women's agency (Doja, 2008c), family structures and fertility rates (Doja, 2010b), mass rapes in ethnic conicts (Doja, 2019), transformational history from a religious movement into established religion (Doja, 2003), international representations in the European context (Abazi and Doja, 2016), or mytho-logics in international politics (Doja and Abazi, 2021). They all provide some illustrative examples of an instrumental agency of hidden politics, revealing the workings of the respective cultural ideologies of gender, familism, honor and blood, religious mystification, corporate identity, and strategic othering.…”

The New German-speaking School of Balkankompetenzen: Knowledge production and truth claims in post-colonial post-communist context

“…In particular, the discourse on the accession of the “Western Balkans” to EU membership reintroduces a region that has been traditionally understood as Europe’s periphery, in need of supervision, guidance, and training provided by the West (Hammond, 2007; Petrovic, 2009). This context re-actualizes long-established patterns of German and Austrian colonial practices in the region (Doja, 2014a, 2014b), or the colonial discourse of West European domination more generally (Abazi and Doja, 2016, 2017, 2018; Doja and Abazi, 2021). It also enables the political elites in both European Union states and Southeast European countries to openly articulate and appropriate a new colonial discourse of Balkanism, legitimated in the accession process to EU membership.…”

“…Above all, she failed to acknowledge the interactionalist and constructivist approach used for analyzing the instrumentality of religious shifting, since Albanian identity and cohesion are not postulated for pre-national periods and have nothing to do with later national interests, as she claims, but they are argued as action strategies for the social organization of cultural and religious similarities and differences (Doja, 2000b), better known in anthropology as ethnic boundary processes (Barth, 1969). A tendency is again in evidence here towards patronizing Albanian-born scholars with fashionable “international theories,” and failing to take into account how they might have examined the genealogies of poststructuralist takes (Doja, 2006d) that have misrepresented actual theoretical contributions of structural anthropology to general knowledge (See, for instance, Doja, 2005b, 2006f, 2006e, 2008a, 2008b, 2010a, 2018, 2019b, 2020; Doja et al, 2021; Doja and Abazi, 2021; Santucci et al, 2020). As part of a wider pattern of international scholarship, the tendency of Balkankompetent experts of the New German-speaking School to overlook or ignore Albanian scholars in academic debates may result from a simple insider/outsider classification of their biographies along eastern/western lines.…”

“…Anthropologists needed different, distant, exotic others as the basis for their explanatory models, and it seemed natural that new primitive others could be found on the margins of Europe, in the Balkans where culture did not seem an obvious attribute. In particular, the discursive elaboration of prejudiced international representations and their political implications in this area, as examined elsewhere (Abazi and Doja, 2016, 2017, 2018; Doja and Abazi, 2021), reveal that the main effect of the mytho-logical construction of a geographically close but conceptually distant identification of a “non-European Europe” is to represent in contrast a higher image of “European Europe” within a civilizational hierarchy.…”

Geopolitics in the Western Balkans: linkages, leverages and gatekeepers

“…This is even more evident if we consider that the Western Balkans collectively could bring only a 3.2 percent increase in the Union population and 1.3 percent increase of GDP for the EU27 (Marazopoulos 2013, 216). Yet, under the banner of "fatigue", the conflict of interests between EU member states or imperatives of domestic politics are often conveyed as a question of either deepening enlargement or containment, which becomes an object of contention within the Union, leading to incompatible positions and disruptive practices that minimize its leverage in the region (Doja and Abazi 2021).…”