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Dr. Kevork Oskanian Profile picture
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Apr 28 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
How about the United States, since we’re at it?
It really is something to make such a sweeping claim, and leave out the one country built on a lasting legacy of genocidal conquest.
Not to mention this recent incident….

Or should we now engage in intellectually lazy and empirically selective takes because #WeAreNATO?
Reminder that the role of ethnic cleansing and genocide as original sins of modernity - including liberal modernity - is often forgotten.

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More from @DrKevorkO

Dr. Kevork Oskanian Profile picture
Apr 29
So, why was postcolonial scholarship so slow in waking up to Russia’s empire(s)?

The reasons are complex, and have to do with the nature of postcolonial scholarship itself, and Russia’s specific position in the modern global order.

A thread 🧵
To start with, postcolonial thought first aimed its arrows at its most obvious target:

the Western empires at the core of the global international order that emerged with modernity. /2
Two points are important here:

Firstly, that Russia was a late entrant to that modernity.

Secondly, that postcolonial thought emerged when Russian empire was in its Soviet guise, and, therefore, ‘credibly deniable’. /3
Read 22 tweets
Dr. Kevork Oskanian Profile picture
Apr 28
I’m not quite sure whether Liz Truss’ speech was based on electioneering or irrational exuberance (possibly both), but it is certainly steeped in an absolutist liberal messianism that most of the UK’s major allies likely won’t share, and rightly so. - A thread 🧵
The idea that there is a great era of peace and security on the other side of this, if only we go ‘all the way’ and ‘show resolve’ is one of the pathologies of post-Cold War liberal interventionism writ large./2
Didn’t we hear the same blinkered optimism in any number of other liberal interventions in the recent past?

It led to the kind of well-intentioned disasters seen in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.

And to the kinds of overcommitment that change liberal societies for the worse./3
Read 9 tweets
Dr. Kevork Oskanian Profile picture
Feb 23
So, has NATO expansion ‘nothing to do’ with Russia’s fears? Is it ‘all about democracy’ or ‘all about Putin’?

A thread, also with a few ‘facts’ 🧵.
There is, actually, a well-established approach to gauging a state’s existential fears through discourse. And while it might not be prevalent in the United States, it is fairly well established on this side of the Atlantic.

I am, of course, referring to Securitisation Theory.
Securitisation Theory captures moments where opinion leaders make claims on existential threats (‘securitising moves’); an audience then accepts, or rejects these claims.

In case of acceptance, ‘exceptional’ measures are taken; the securitising move becomes a securitising ACT.
Read 20 tweets
Dr. Kevork Oskanian Profile picture
Aug 31, 2021
Why did state-building in #Afghanistan fail?

Perhaps it was because, when diagnosing ’failed states’, state-builders ignored traditional, cultural aspects of political organisation, in favour of deeply held Western, institutionalist, Weberian assumptions? (Thread 🧵)
As I argue here, much of the state exists in its citizens’ minds - and resulting discourses and practices - its strength or weakness determined by the extent to which its presences or absences are securitised by its inhabitants /1

cup.org/3k8aeNI
Plenty of authors - including Bourdieu, Buzan, Holsti and Migdal - have stressed the importance of the ‘idea of the state’, as a habitus underlying practice, a set of ideological precepts, or of ‘strategies of survival’. /2
Read 25 tweets
Dr. Kevork Oskanian Profile picture
Aug 30, 2021
Arguing the Democratic Peace is more antidote than virus ‘because Central and Eastern Europe’ is like basing your opinion regarding Covid-19 on its effects on the young and healthy.
As I outline here, belief in a utopian, activist version of the Democratic Peace - and liberal ideologies more broadly - played quite a role in Saakashvili’s miscalculations leading up to the 2008 war. academic.oup.com/fpa/article-ab…
And this is not the only instance of irrational exuberance in the Caucasus.

See: expectations of peace between Armenia and Azerbaijan following the velvet revolution of 2018.
Read 4 tweets
Dr. Kevork Oskanian Profile picture
Aug 30, 2021
Pro-Baku voices making the case for Western pushback against Russian peacekeepers in Nagorno-Karabakh, over and over again, not having realised that train left the station a long time ago.

Washington and the EU will have much bigger fish to fry in coming years. /1
Besides, chanting ‘pro-Western Azerbaijan’ on endless loop in spite of the Baku dictatorship’s professed strategic partnership with Moscow - not to mention its at times aggressive rejection of Western liberal values - is becoming a tired, and increasingly unconvincing mantra./2
Aliyev himself signed the ceasefire providing for those peacekeepers.

His regime did nothing but reinforce the arguments for their presence with a heavy dollop of erasure and dehumanisation during the months following the ceasefire. /3
Read 4 tweets

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