Coming dissertations at Uppsala university
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Any Witness Competent to Testify : Witnessing Practices at the 1967 Russell Tribunal on American War Crimes in Vietnam
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-535996
In 1967, an array of prominent intellectuals, artists, politicians, and activists from across the world came together to investigate the ongoing war in Vietnam. Modelled on the post-Second World War Nuremberg trial but with no official mandate or legitimacy, the Russell Tribunal appropriated the form and language of international law to document, judge, and dramatically publicize American actions in Vietnam. The Russell Tribunal’s immediate aim was to incite mass resistance against the war and thus exert political pressure on Washington. The ultimate aim was to stop the war and advance national self-determination in Vietnam and elsewhere. To achieve these ends Tribunal organizers assembled a diverse plurality of witnesses who gave testimony at public sessions in Scandinavia. Although the Russell Tribunal pioneered new protest tactics and generated a vast body of testimonial evidence, it is largely overlooked in antiwar movement research and in witness studies. When mentioned, the Tribunal is often described as a failure, while its witness testimony has remained unexamined.
This dissertation reconsiders the Russell Tribunal’s impact and legacy by delving into its witnessing practices. It analyzes how witnessing was deployed as a form of antiwar knowledge production and as a political device for anti-imperial resistance, and shows how tactics and tools now often associated with human rights work emerged in a wholly different ideological framework – one in which freedom and rights, violence and complicity, harm and victimhood were conceived in a collective register. The dissertation also proposes that the Russell Tribunal’s often contradictory rhetoric and practices stemmed not from its mixing of the political and the legal, as scholars have previously suggested, but from its simultaneous pursuit of mainstream legitimacy and radical clout, leading to a tension between respectable and revolutionary tenors that pervaded all Tribunal activities.
The dissertation identifies four main witness categories to testify before the Russell Tribunal: experts, on-site investigators, perpetrators, and victims. It unpacks their functions and effects at Tribunal hearings while also tracing their histories and logics in war crimes trials, political activism, transitional justice initiatives, and human rights work across the global twentieth century. In so doing, the dissertation sheds light on why, how, and to what effect different types of witnesses are deployed in response to mass violence – whether to prosecute war criminals, counter state narratives, or mobilize resistance to war, atrocity, and injustice.
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Reclaiming The Inner Chambers : Song Lyrics Set in The Boudoir by Women Writers of Late Imperial China
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-535233
This dissertation centers on the song lyric, a genre known for its femininity in classical Chinese literature. This feminine aesthetic quality, characterized by the theme of love and the image of a lovelorn woman, derives from the song lyric’s inherent association with the boudoir poetics, which was created, practiced and developed by male literati to represent and appreciate feminine beauty. As women writers appeared in unprecedented number and constituted an important of the literary landscape from the seventeenth century, the song lyric became one of their most adopted genres. It is therefore of interest and significance to investigate how the women writers interacted with the male-constructed boudoir poetics in their song lyric writing.
To explore this question, this study draws on the concept of negotiation, which was first introduced into the field by Maureen Robertson in her analysis of women’s shi poetry. The act of negotiation is a contestatory process where the dominant convention established by male writers was accepted in general, but crucially also adjusted by women writers to assert their own subjectivity. Based on Robertson’s definition, this dissertation seeks to examine the concept’s applicability and adoption in the context of women’s song lyric writing. The study also borrows from Rosi Braidotti the notion of the nomadic feminist subject, which emphasizes both the difference among women and the multiplicity of the individual subject without a fixed inner core, to better elucidate the reason for, as well as the goal of women writers’ negotiation.
Through a comparative and gender-sensitive reading of 55 song lyrics by 19 poets from the late imperial China, it is demonstrated how women writers broke away from the literati boudoir convention through negotiation, how they reconstructed their inner chambers as a space of diversity based on their lived experience and situatedness, and how they represent the female subjects in their poems as an entity of multiplicity and subjectivity.
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Foreign Policy After Empire : Explaining Georgia’s and Ukraine’s International Orientation from Independence until 2021
Link: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-536002
What explains the foreign policy orientation of states with a background within empires? The dissertation explores this vital question by examining the foreign policies of Georgia and Ukraine – two states that became independent in 1991 after long periods within the Soviet Union. The dissertation develops a theory of foreign policy in post-imperial states, in conjunction with an empirical study that covers foreign policymaking in Georgia and Ukraine from independence until 2021.
Drawing on a rich body of sources, which includes elite interviews conducted by the author, news articles, primary documents, diplomatic cables and secondary sources, the dissertation’s comparative approach sheds new light on almost 30 years of foreign policymaking in Georgia and Ukraine. The study finds that from the late 1990s, Georgia developed a surprisingly stable pro-western foreign policy that remained intact until 2021. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s foreign policy was vague and incoherent in the 1990s, oscillating between the West and Russia, and remained so until 2014. Only in 2014 did Ukraine start to pursue a firm pro-western orientation, in a shift that contradicted the expectations of leading scholars of international relations, especially realists.
To explain these foreign policy dynamics, the author argues that the structure of the political arena that crystallizes in a country after an imperial break-up is vital to determining a state’s ability to develop a coherent foreign policy. Furthermore, inspired by historical institutionalism, the author claims that formative moments, and whether they are violent, as well as the role played by the former imperial metropole in these periods are crucial to the foreign policy that is later developed by a state.
Taken together, the dissertation emphasizes the need for scholars to engage more deeply with the multifaceted challenges faced by post-imperial states. The study also highlights the limitations of realist and liberal approaches to explaining Georgia’s and Ukraine’s foreign policies. Finally, the book contributes to a shift in perspective from great powers and imperial hegemons to focus on smaller powers in post-imperial relations – a necessary shift, not least among the countries that once belonged to the Soviet Union.