Alex Danchev
Biographic Data
| ID | 3744320 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alex Danchev |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alex |
| FAMILY NAME | Danchev |
| SIGNATURE | DANCHEV A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Nottingham |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 68 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 43 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1987 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Our Brothers’ Keeper
This article considers the practice of witness in the world—witness to the world—in particular the character and temper, nature and purpose, significance and resonance of “moral witness,” a kind of ideal type, as conceived by the philosopher Avishai Margalit. It proposes that the artist plays an important role as a moral witness and that the work of art itself performs the same function, even after the fact—the phenomenon of “postwitness.” In thi…
On Good and Evil and the Grey Zone
Mixes art, thought, politics and ethics to explore the terrors of the modern age, from Auschwitz to Abu Ghraib How can works of the imagination help us to understand good and evil in the modern world? In this new collection of essays, Alex Danchev treats the artist as a crucial moral witness of our troubled times, and puts art to work in the service of political and ethical inquiry. He takes inspiration from Seamus Heaney’s dictum: ‘the imaginati…
The angel of history
Journal Article The angel of history Get access ALEX DANCHEV ALEX DANCHEV 1Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 90, Issue 2, March 2014, Pages 367–377, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12114 Published: 14 March 2014
Thoughtlessness
Journal Article Thoughtlessness: Rumsfeld in Washington Get access ALEX DANCHEV ALEX DANCHEV 1Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, and the recipient of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for 2014–17 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 90, Issue 5, September 2014, Pages 1181–1190, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12163 Published: 12 September 2…
War Photography, the Face, and Small Acts of Senseless Kindness
This article examines the moral work of war photography — the classic portraits of Don McCullin and also the latter‐day landscapes of Simon Norfolk — probing their moral depths. It focuses on "the face" as Emmanuel Levinas understood it, and argues that the photographers do the same; following Levinas, it makes use of Vasily Grossman's novel Life and Fate (1980) to adumbrate an ethics of small acts of senseless kindness, in Grossman's phrase. It …
Infidels and miscreants
This article reviews the fruits of a sustained collaboration between the writer and reporter Sebastian Junger and the photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington, embedded with the US Army in Afghanistan: Junger's meditation, War; Hetherington's photographs, Infidel; and the documentary film they co-directed, Restrepo. Taken together, these works offer perhaps the most significant insight into the nature of combat, and combat effectiveness, yet t…
The Artist and the Terrorist, or the Paintable and the Unpaintable
This article is offered as a small demonstration of what art has to say about terror and violence. It focuses on the German artist Gerhard Richter and his cycle of paintings on the life and death of the homegrown terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof group, October 18, 1977 (1988). Following Richter, it explores whether atrocity is “paintable.” It investigates the encounter between the artist and the terrorist and proposes that Richter's is a profound…
Flag Code
Journal Article Flag Code Get access Alex Danchev Alex Danchev University of Nottingham Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Political Sociology, Volume 4, Issue 1, March 2010, Pages 89–92, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1749-5687.2009.00093_4.x Published: 07 March 2010
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Bad apples, dead souls
Journal Article Bad apples, dead souls: understanding Abu Ghraib Get access ALEX DANCHEV ALEX DANCHEV 1Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham, and currently Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 84, Issue 6, November 2008, Pages 127…
Tony Blair’s Vietnam
This article examines Tony Blair’s policy and posture on Iraq through the prism of the special relationship in which he was reared. At the same time, it examines his policy and posture on the special relationship through the prism of Iraq. In this context it proposes a Vietnam analogy of a kind, with reference to Blair’s white-hot predecessor Harold Wilson: a curious affinity of fate – disenchantment, disgrace, and moral ruination
The hospitality of war
Journal Article The hospitality of war Get access ALEX DANCHEV ALEX DANCHEV 1Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 83, Issue 5, September 2007, Pages 961–967, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2346.2007.00666.x Published: 01 October 2007
Accomplicity
Britain has been chief accomplice in the ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) from the outset. This article examines the underside of that voluntary servitude—the complicity in torture and abuse, humiliation and rendition. It asks, inter alia, what we know, and how we know, and why we should care
The Cold War “Special Relationship” Revisited
This article focuses on one of the most potent ideas in world politics: the idea of an Anglo-American “special relationship.” It examines the use and abuse of this relationship, as cultural referent, rhetorical construct, and political imperative, during the long Cold War. It inspects the roots of specialness—the core conditions—in terms of belief and experience as well as need and opportunity. It warns of the hubris inherent in the presumption o…
Like a Dog!”
An examination of the disturbing practice of torture and abuse in the “global war on terror,” focusing on the methods and motivations of the United States. Proceeding from the imaginary yet all-too-real world of Kafka and the Kafkaesque, it highlights the themes of humiliation and shame in the waging of this war, noting that the damage so caused is reciprocal and indivisible: “Whoever degrades another degrades me.”
The Strategy of Still Life, or the Politics of Georges Braque
This article examines the politics, or rather the ethics, of the apparently apolitical but profoundly ethical artist Georges Braque, at a time of maximum ethical and political disturbance: the German occupation of France during World War II. It considers the response of the artist to “events,” invoking the notion of “active passivity” as expounded by the philosopher Jean Grenier, Albert Camus's teacher
England Your England
Provenance
This article scrutinizes the provenance of one of the great masterpieces of modern art, ‘The Guitar Player’ (1914) by Georges Braque, to uncover its life story: the narrative arc of a life peculiarly evocative of the terrible twentieth century. The provenance of a work of art is a kind of potted biography, and a proof of authenticity. These notions also find expression in politics. Prime ministers and presidents ransack their own biographies to c…
How Strong are Shared Values in the Transatlantic Relationship
Transatlantic relations are underpinned by common values. So prime ministers and presidents proclaim. This essay argues that they protest too much. It contends that a fog of rhetoric and generalisation obscures the fundamental fact that the ‘Atlantic community’ has dissipated; and that, surveying the terrain of transatlantic values, there is no prospect of its reconstitution
War Diaries, 1939-1945. Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke
The Real Waugh
A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse – indeed the writings of Herodotus could be put into verse and yet would still be a kind of history.... The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something m…
Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke
Alchemist of War
Liddell Hart and the Indirect Approach
Heroes
Warren Kimball has lived with FDR for almost as long as Eleanor did, and in some ways more intimately. He is the editor of the complete correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt, a model of its kind, and the author of a bountiful crop of penetrating essays on the artful dodger at war, felicitously collected in The Juggler, and already ripe for a sequel (The Dodger?).1 He has a magisterial command of the literature. The endnotes to The Juggle…
Introduction
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Like a Dog!”
An examination of the disturbing practice of torture and abuse in the “global war on terror,” focusing on the methods and motivations of the United States. Proceeding from the imaginary yet all-too-real world of Kafka and the Kafkaesque, it highlights the themes of humiliation and shame in the waging of this war, noting that the damage so caused is reciprocal and indivisible: “Whoever degrades another degrades me.”
On specialness
Journal Article On specialness Get access Alex Danchev Alex Danchev Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 72, Issue 4, October 1996, Pages 737–750, https://doi.org/10.2307/2624119 Published: 01 October 1996
How Strong are Shared Values in the Transatlantic Relationship
Transatlantic relations are underpinned by common values. So prime ministers and presidents proclaim. This essay argues that they protest too much. It contends that a fog of rhetoric and generalisation obscures the fundamental fact that the ‘Atlantic community’ has dissipated; and that, surveying the terrain of transatlantic values, there is no prospect of its reconstitution
The Cold War “Special Relationship” Revisited
This article focuses on one of the most potent ideas in world politics: the idea of an Anglo-American “special relationship.” It examines the use and abuse of this relationship, as cultural referent, rhetorical construct, and political imperative, during the long Cold War. It inspects the roots of specialness—the core conditions—in terms of belief and experience as well as need and opportunity. It warns of the hubris inherent in the presumption o…
Past as prelude
Journal Article Past as prelude: history in the making of a New World Order Get access Past as prelude: history in the making of a New World Order. Edited by Meredith Woo-Cumings, Michael Loriaux. Boulder, CO, Oxford: Westview. 1993. 254pp. Index. Pb.: .£16.95. ISBN 0 8133 1623 5. Alex Danchev Alex Danchev 1University of Keele Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 70, Issue 1, Janua…
Our Brothers’ Keeper
This article considers the practice of witness in the world—witness to the world—in particular the character and temper, nature and purpose, significance and resonance of “moral witness,” a kind of ideal type, as conceived by the philosopher Avishai Margalit. It proposes that the artist plays an important role as a moral witness and that the work of art itself performs the same function, even after the fact—the phenomenon of “postwitness.” In thi…
Infidels and miscreants
This article reviews the fruits of a sustained collaboration between the writer and reporter Sebastian Junger and the photographer and filmmaker Tim Hetherington, embedded with the US Army in Afghanistan: Junger's meditation, War; Hetherington's photographs, Infidel; and the documentary film they co-directed, Restrepo. Taken together, these works offer perhaps the most significant insight into the nature of combat, and combat effectiveness, yet t…
Bad apples, dead souls
Journal Article Bad apples, dead souls: understanding Abu Ghraib Get access ALEX DANCHEV ALEX DANCHEV 1Professor of International Relations at the University of Nottingham, and currently Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 84, Issue 6, November 2008, Pages 127…
Accomplicity
Britain has been chief accomplice in the ‘global war on terror’ (GWOT) from the outset. This article examines the underside of that voluntary servitude—the complicity in torture and abuse, humiliation and rendition. It asks, inter alia, what we know, and how we know, and why we should care
The Strategy of Still Life, or the Politics of Georges Braque
This article examines the politics, or rather the ethics, of the apparently apolitical but profoundly ethical artist Georges Braque, at a time of maximum ethical and political disturbance: the German occupation of France during World War II. It considers the response of the artist to “events,” invoking the notion of “active passivity” as expounded by the philosopher Jean Grenier, Albert Camus's teacher
Thoughtlessness
Journal Article Thoughtlessness: Rumsfeld in Washington Get access ALEX DANCHEV ALEX DANCHEV 1Professor of International Relations at the University of St Andrews, and the recipient of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for 2014–17 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 90, Issue 5, September 2014, Pages 1181–1190, https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2346.12163 Published: 12 September 2…
The Artist and the Terrorist, or the Paintable and the Unpaintable
This article is offered as a small demonstration of what art has to say about terror and violence. It focuses on the German artist Gerhard Richter and his cycle of paintings on the life and death of the homegrown terrorists of the Baader-Meinhof group, October 18, 1977 (1988). Following Richter, it explores whether atrocity is “paintable.” It investigates the encounter between the artist and the terrorist and proposes that Richter's is a profound…
Tony Blair’s Vietnam
This article examines Tony Blair’s policy and posture on Iraq through the prism of the special relationship in which he was reared. At the same time, it examines his policy and posture on the special relationship through the prism of Iraq. In this context it proposes a Vietnam analogy of a kind, with reference to Blair’s white-hot predecessor Harold Wilson: a curious affinity of fate – disenchantment, disgrace, and moral ruination
Liddell Hart's Big Idea
Basil Liddell Hart is the most influential military writer of the modern age, revered and reviled by three generations of strategists, armchair and armipotent. This article focuses on his master thesis, ‘The Indirect Approach’, in relation to another coinage of Liddell Hart's, ‘The British Way in Warfare’, a parallel gestation. Both concepts smack of the invented tradition; both continue to resonate. They are in every sense characteristic of thei…
On friendship
Where stands the ‘special relationship’ now, at the lowering end of the century? Lost at sea, if we but knew it, according to Alex Danchev, in this companion piece to his earlier reflections, ‘On specialness’, International Affairs 72: 4, 1996
Life and death in the South Atlantic
Hold hard. Ten years on, the second wave is about to break. The ultimate Channel 4 documentary series is already in the can. It seems that the tributary of personal reminiscence from high and low (but chiefly high) has not run dry after all Recollected in tranquillity, it turns turbulent once more—as witness the fascinating collective testimony elicited by Michael Charlton in The Little Platoon (1989), at once pointer and landmark for the new wav…
Dilly-Dally', or Having the Last Word
Wartime
Establishing the Anglo-American Alliance
Tiger Shooting Together
Taking the Pledge
In March 1949, with its text published and its signature imminent, the North Atlantic Treaty and the relationships it implied gave rise to an official State Department joke. It was the story of Anna Pauker, Communist foreign minister of Romania, who ventured out with an umbrella overhead on a beautiful day in Bucharest. "But Anna," one of her friends protested, "it isn't raining." "It is in Moscow," she replied. There followed, for the uninitiate…
Life and death in the South Atlantic
Hold hard. Ten years on, the second wave is about to break. The ultimate Channel 4 documentary series is already in the can. It seems that the tributary of personal reminiscence from high and low (but chiefly high) has not run dry after all Recollected in tranquillity, it turns turbulent once more—as witness the fascinating collective testimony elicited by Michael Charlton in The Little Platoon (1989), at once pointer and landmark for the new wav…
The Big Three
Oliver Franks, Founding Father
The Chief of Staff
International Perspectives on the Gulf Conflict, 1990–91
International Perspectives on the Gulf Conflict is a collection of important new work on the conflict by the leading authorities in the field. Unusually, this is an international investigation of an i
The Anschluss
Historical analogies On 2 August 1990, much to everyone's surprise, Hitler invaded Kuwait. The ensuing conflict was mired in history—as Francis Fukuyama might say—or at least in historical analogy. The ruling analogy was with the Second World War; more exactly, with the origins and nature of that war. George Bush's constant reference during the Second Gulf War was Martin Gilbert's Second World War , a monumental construction well described as ‘a …
Past as prelude
Journal Article Past as prelude: history in the making of a New World Order Get access Past as prelude: history in the making of a New World Order. Edited by Meredith Woo-Cumings, Michael Loriaux. Boulder, CO, Oxford: Westview. 1993. 254pp. Index. Pb.: .£16.95. ISBN 0 8133 1623 5. Alex Danchev Alex Danchev 1University of Keele Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 70, Issue 1, Janua…
Shorter Notices
Waltzing with Winston
On specialness
Journal Article On specialness Get access Alex Danchev Alex Danchev Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 72, Issue 4, October 1996, Pages 737–750, https://doi.org/10.2307/2624119 Published: 01 October 1996
To hell, or, basil hart goes to war
On friendship
Where stands the ‘special relationship’ now, at the lowering end of the century? Lost at sea, if we but knew it, according to Alex Danchev, in this companion piece to his earlier reflections, ‘On specialness’, International Affairs 72: 4, 1996
Alchemist of War
Liddell Hart and the Indirect Approach
Heroes
Warren Kimball has lived with FDR for almost as long as Eleanor did, and in some ways more intimately. He is the editor of the complete correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt, a model of its kind, and the author of a bountiful crop of penetrating essays on the artful dodger at war, felicitously collected in The Juggler, and already ripe for a sequel (The Dodger?).1 He has a magisterial command of the literature. The endnotes to The Juggle…
Cross-Dressing”
Liddell Hart's Big Idea
Basil Liddell Hart is the most influential military writer of the modern age, revered and reviled by three generations of strategists, armchair and armipotent. This article focuses on his master thesis, ‘The Indirect Approach’, in relation to another coinage of Liddell Hart's, ‘The British Way in Warfare’, a parallel gestation. Both concepts smack of the invented tradition; both continue to resonate. They are in every sense characteristic of thei…
War Diaries, 1939-1945. Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke
The Real Waugh
A poet's object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse – indeed the writings of Herodotus could be put into verse and yet would still be a kind of history.... The real difference is this, that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something m…
Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke
Political science (31 works) · History (27 works) · Law (25 works) · Law (20 works) · Politics (18 works) · History (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Art (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works)