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International Dialogue

International Dialogue

Notes from the Editor

The North American Editorial Office of ID: International Dialogue is my office at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, located in a very small room in the old Arts and Sciences Hall. To reach it, you simply walk the halls until you find 205C. There is nothing special about it. Not even a sign designating it as such. It just is. And, as I have noted in past volumes, this time of year is when my leather chair, allocated for my occasional lone visitor, is covered with stacks of manila folders, each labeled with a contributor’s name or some generic tag or other. Students, colleagues, and even the Dean must stand, or else someone must fetch another chair from the common area.

There is another room, one that serves as ID’s European Editorial Office. It is the office of my colleague, friend, and associate editor, Jasminka Babić-Avdispahić. Her office, which has a much more Spartan look to it than mine, lies off a dimly lit corridor in the Philosophy Building at the University of Sarajevo. At one time, years ago, I occupied an office catty-corner across the corridor from hers. That empty space has given me a Kafkaesque experience from the first time I set foot in it. Whenever I have pushed through the heavy swinging doors to enter the corridor, any person wandering farther down the hallway would be cast as a dark non-descript figure against the bright background of the windowpanes. Entering Jasminka’s office, however, is a different experience. Her visitors find a room endowed with plenty of light for seeing and chairs for sitting.

My building and office show their natural wear and tear—they are simply old. My colleagues building and office are the remnants of a bygone socialist era that survived the most recent war in that Balkan country. All this is, in a way, quite separate from what makes ID what it is today—an academic journal that keeps on resurfacing from one year to the next. It survives because of a small group of interested and committed individuals who believe there is a place for “the serious little on-line journal.” As the economist E.F. Schumacher wrote in his delightful Small is Beautiful (1973): “Today, we suffer from an almost universal idolatry of giantism. It is therefore necessary to insist on the virtues of smallness—where this applies.” That bit of wisdom applies to ID.

I have nudged this volume in the usual theory oriented direction, though even that has its lapses. Review essays once again show a proclivity towards political theory, and of the continental variety (including another dose of Žižek). Reviews of books cover a wide range of topics, including Bosnia, Iraq, human rights, law, and Islam.

Submissions chosen to be included in Volume 7 come from North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. The volume begins with an article entitled “The Glocal HIV/AIDS Epidemic and the Need for an Extended Theory of Power in International Relations” by Annika Hughes from Malmö University, Sweden. In this piece, Hughes extends the theory of power in International Relations to include the human body. She uses the glocal HIV/AIDS epidemic as an example. Hughes is followed by a pair of review essays that focus on European philosophers: Edward Sankowski and Betty Harris on Slavoj Žižek and Anthony Curtis Adler reviews K. Attell and S. Prozorov on Giorgio Agamben. Nine book reviews complete this volume.

I thank the editors, staff, and board members for their support in crafting another volume. I want to especially thank Kathryn A. Cox Schwartz, who continues to serve as editorial assistant, and Angela Brown, who continues as administrative assistant. There remains a need for additional editors, especially from Africa, Asia, and Central and South America, in order to get better geographical representation. Interested individuals should send a letter of interest and CV to rconces@ unomaha.edu.

I thank all those who reviewed manuscript submissions to ID over the past year. I am grateful for their adherence to deadlines and, most importantly, their insightful comments to both editors and authors. The following list includes board members and external referees who reviewed submissions for Volume 7:

  • Banu Bargu, New School for Social Research
  • David Chandler, University of Westminster
  • Lisa Ferrari, University of Puget Sound
  • Paul Kriese, Indiana University East
  • Benjamin Noys, University of Chichester
  • Simon Rushton, University of Sheffield
  • Jessica Whyte, University of Western Sydney
  • Jeremy Youde, The Australian National University

- R.J.C. -- Omaha

Table of Contents

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Table of Contents
Rory J. Conces

Notes from the Editor

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Notes from the Editor
Rory J. Conces

Article

Review Essays

Book Reviews

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Bosnia’s Paralyzed Peace
Oliver P. Richmond