Ondrej Ditrych

The Internationalisation of the Russian–Chechen Conflict: Myths and Reality

Abstract The article provides a critical reading of various related discourses, depicting the political motives behind the conflict in Chechnya as a battlefield of the global jihad. These narratives have sought to present the involvement of external Islamist groups as a major factor in the conflict, and to portray many of the main groups within Chechnya as subscribing to a jihadist ideology. The authors suggest an alternative narrative focusing on the significance of the blood feud in the societies of the North Caucasus. It is argued that it is necessary to differentiate between the radicalisation of the resistance as such and the strengthening of the ideology of jihad. It is concluded that the resistance currently assumes a supranational character, yet one which is delimited regionally rather than globally.

Tracing the Discourses of Terrorism

Ditrychs analysis in particular explores the constitutive role of the present discourse on the global power apparatus (dispositif) in which the concept of terrorism strategically orients a broad set of practices – punishment, discipline and surveillance – that bear on states, populations and individual human bodies. Instead of creating a new theory of the terrorist, the book historicizes terrorism, highlighting the invisible practices of power and knowledge which constitute it.

From discourse to dispositif: States and terrorism between Marseille and 9/11

This article is a historical study of how states have articulated statements about terrorism since the 1930s; under what conditions these statements have been articulated; and what effects the discourses made up of these statements have had on global politics. This includes the constitutive role of the present discourse on what is posited as a terrorism dispositif. The inquiry is inspired by Foucault’s historical method, and comprises the descriptive archaeological analytic focused on the order of the discourse (including basic discourses in which the terrorist subject is constituted) and the genealogical power analysis of external conditions of emergence and variation of discursive series, whose treatment benefits also from Carl Schmitt’s concept of the nomos.

Bracing for Cold Peace. US-Russia Relations after Ukraine

The crisis in Ukraine has turned the tables of the post-Cold War relationship between the United States and Russia. The ongoing transformation can result in a number of outcomes, which can be conceived in terms of scenarios of normalisation, escalation and ‘cold peace’ – the latter two scenarios being much more probable than the first. NATO ought to shore up its defences in Central and Eastern Europe while Washington and its allies engage in a comprehensive political strategy of ‘new containment’. This means combining political and economic stabilisation of the transatlantic area with credible offers of benefits to partners in the East and pragmatic relations with Russia which are neither instrumentalised (as was the case with the ‘reset’) nor naïvely conceived as a ‘partnership’.

Security community: A future for a troubled concept?

This article offers first a brief commentary on Karl Deutsch and his collaborators’ development of the concept of security community, before moving to a critical review of constructivist attempts by Adler, Barnett and their colleagues at resurrecting it. The article makes the case that while the serious effort to give security community a new life is laudable, the appropriation also renders the concept at once theoretically complex and methodologically superficial. Drawing constructive lessons from the previous research, it seeks to demonstrate the potential of the security communities research provided that it (1) restores the Deutschian ethos of rigorous, transparent, collective and transdisciplinary research; (2) takes seriously the challenge to the realist paradigm by zooming in and out of the modern state when thinking about security community; and (3) in addition to processes of integration investigates more thoroughly also the processes of disintegration.

“International terrorism” in the League of Nations and the contemporary terrorism dispositif

This article recovers states’ discursive practices regarding “international terrorism” in the 1930s. It examines the internal conditions of the discourse of terrorism among states in this period with a particular focus on its conspiratorial elements and suggests external conditions for this discourse’s emergence and order. Furthermore, it points to continuities and discontinuities between the 1930s discursive series and the constituent discursive forms of the contemporary global terrorism dispositif – an assemblage of power practices which bear on individual human bodies, populations or (rogue or fragile) states and which are all strategically oriented through the concept of terrorism. The purpose of such a genealogical history is to expand the space of dissent to power practices in the dominant structures of (terrorism) knowledge by problematising their object and the ways in which these formations are productive of human subjectivity.

Czech Reflections on the Chechen Conflict: From Morality to Mainstream?

World opinion sees Chechnya as a case of Islamic terrorism, but Czech elites have persistently condemned Russias human rights violations there.

The more the merrier: Time for a multilateral turn in nuclear disarmament

At three minutes to midnight on the Bulletin’s Doomsday Clock, the time has come to consider constructive steps on the multilateralization of nuclear arms control negotiations that lead toward disarmament. After explaining the context of and existing obstacles to such a multilateral turn, the authors propose constructive but realistic steps: first, initiating a debate on a reduction-cum-freeze deal that would include unilaterally declared moratoria on new nuclear weapons by lesser nuclear-armed states alongside further arsenal reductions by the United States and Russia; and second, preparing the institutional ground by moving forward with debates over arms control terminology, trust-building, and development of verification measures, not only by the nuclear weapon states but by non-nuclear weapon states and civil society organizations as well.

Emergence/y (1930s)

‘Europe shocked, fears grave complications,’ read the headline of the New York Times the day after King Alexander I Karadordevic, the king of Yugoslavia, was slain on Oct. 9, 1934, less than an hour after he arrived at Marseilles aboard the cruiser Dubrovnik for a government visit. (The second victim of the attentate was the French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou, who possibly fell by the hand of the French police in the chaos that ruled the scene.) The king’s assassin, armed with a Mauser gun, had gone by many names – Cernozemski, Georgiev or Vlada the Chauffeur. He had once been a hired gun for the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), but at the time of the assassination he was working for the Croat revolutionary movement, the Ustasa. Cernozemski was not acting alone. On the steps of the Bourse, near which the assassination took place, was another conspirator, Mijo Kralj, who was armed with a bomb which he did not throw. Two other accomplices, Pospisil and Rajic, were ready to strike in Versailles should the Marseilles attempt failed. They were all Ustasa members, and the group was supplied with weapons and instructions by an Ustasa leader, Ante Pavelic and his associate, Eugen Kvaternik. All had come to France using Hungarian passports. Cernozemski was killed on the spot. Kralj, Pospisil and Rajic were sentenced to life in prison by a court in Aix-en-Provence (1936).