Bücher von Mary Manjikian

Part Two shows how the intelligence community plays a key role in enabling leaders of democracies to conduct covert activities running counter to that mission and ideology, in this way allowing a leader to have two foreign policies-an overt, public policy and a second, closeted, queer foreign policy.

In the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, military planners speak at great length about the importance of rebalancing our armed forces. As a result of the Budget Control Act of 2011, our U.S. Armed Forces have absorbed significant budget cuts, which are projected to continue into 2016. Not surprisingly, a major theme of the Quadrennial Defense Review is the necessity of making tough choices in a period of fiscal austerity.1 As Dr. Manjikian's analysis points out, however, many of the themes raised by policymakers, military analysts and the general public in relation to this new politics of austerity are not actually new. Rather, such conversations have taken place at the end of U.S. military actions after the Korean War, in Vietnam, and at the end of the Cold War.

Mary Manjikian's Apocalypse and Post-Politics: The Romance of the End advances the thesis that only those who feel the most safe and whose lives are least precarious can engage in the sort of storytelling which envisions erasing civilization. Apocalypse-themed novels of contemporary America and historic Britain, then, are affirmed as a creative luxury of development. Manjikian examines a number of such novels using the lens of an international relations theorist, identifying faults in the logic of the American exceptionalists who would argue that America is uniquely endowed with resources and a place in the world, both of which make continued growth and expansion simultaneously desirable and inevitable. In contrast, Manjikian shows, apocalyptic narratives explore America as merely one nation among many, whose trajectory is neither unique nor destined for success. Apocalypse and Post-Politics ultimately argues that the apocalyptic narrative provides both a counterpoint and a corrective to the narrative of exceptionalism. Apocalyptic concepts provide a way for contemporary Americans to view the international system from below: from the perspective of those who are powerless rather than those who are powerful. This sort of theorizing is also useful for intelligence analysts who question how it all will end, and whether America's decline can be predicted or prevented.