On April 26, 1986, Unit Four of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in then Soviet Ukraine. More than 3.5 million people in Ukraine alone, not to mention many citizens of surrounding countries, ...are still suffering the effects.Life Exposedis the first book to comprehensively examine the vexed political, scientific, and social circumstances that followed the disaster. Tracing the story from an initial lack of disclosure to post-Soviet democratizing attempts to compensate sufferers, Adriana Petryna uses anthropological tools to take us into a world whose social realities are far more immediate and stark than those described by policymakers and scientists. She asks: What happens to politics when state officials fail to inform their fellow citizens of real threats to life? What are the moral and political consequences of remedies available in the wake of technological disasters?
Through extensive research in state institutions, clinics, laboratories, and with affected families and workers of the so-called Zone, Petryna illustrates how the event and its aftermath have not only shaped the course of an independent nation but have made health a negotiated realm of entitlement. She tracks the emergence of a "biological citizenship" in which assaults on health become the coinage through which sufferers stake claims for biomedical resources, social equity, and human rights.Life Exposedprovides an anthropological framework for understanding the politics of emergent democracies, the nature of citizenship claims, and everyday forms of survival as they are interwoven with the profound changes that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Havingexploded on the margins of Europe, Chornobyl marked the end of the Soviet Unionand tied the era of postmodernism in Western Europe with nuclear consciousness.The Post-Chornobyl Library becomes ...a metaphor of a new Ukrainian literature of the 1990s,which emerges out of the Chornobyl nuclear trauma.
The disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant was an event of obviously transnational significance—not only in the airborne particulates it deposited across the Northern hemisphere, but in the ...political and social repercussions it set off well beyond the Soviet bloc. Focusing on the cases of Great Britain and France, this innovative study explores the discourses and narratives that arose in the wake of the incident among both state and nonstate actors. It gives a thorough account of the stereotypes, framings, and "othering" strategies that shaped Western European nations' responses to the disaster, and of their efforts to come to terms with its long-term consequences up to the present day.
This book addresses the question of why a party system with a modest number of nationally oriented political parties emerges in some democracies but not others. The number of parties and ...nationalization are the product of coordination between voters, candidates, and party leaders within local electoral districts and coordination among candidates and elites across districts. Candidates and voters can do and do coordinate locally in response to electoral incentives, but coordination across districts, or aggregation, often fails in developing democracies. A key contribution of this book is the development and testing of a theory of aggregation incentives that focuses on the payoff to being a large party and the probability of capturing that payoff. The book relies on in-depth case studies of Thailand and the Philippines, and on large-n analysis to establish its arguments.
The essays in this book examine the arguments and rhetoric used by the United States and the USSR following two catastrophes that impacted both countries, as blame is cast and consequences are ...debated. In this environment, it was perhaps inevitable that conspiracy theories would arise, especially about the downing of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over the Sea of Japan. Those theories are examined, resulting in at least one method for addressing conspiracy arguments. In the case of Chernobyl, the disaster ruptured the "social compact" between the Soviet government and the people; efforts to overcome the resulting disillusionment quickly became the focus of state efforts.
The 1983shootdown of KAL 007 and the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident dramatically changedthe Soviet Union in unpredictable ways. The Communist Party, which struggled tomaintain control of political ...messaging after the KAL crisis, lost control inthe aftermath of Chernobyl.
Taking an innovative, postcolonial, feminist perspective on transformations in the Philippine nation in the context of globalization, Fantasy-Production provides a theoretical framework for ...understanding the nationalist and postcolonial capitalist logics
