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Jeffrey W. Jones’ fine book Smoke, Mirrors, and Memories: Legacies of the Soviet-Afghan War is the latest addition to a series of recent monographs about the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan (1979-1989). It takes its place on the shelves next to Yaacov Ro’i’s A Bleeding Wound (2022), Vassily Klimentov’s A Long Reckoning (2024), Liliane Stadler’s Between Neutrality and Solidarity (2024), Elisabeth Leake’s Afghan Crucible (2022), and Anna Reich’s I Try Not to Think of Afghanistan (2024). It is yet another example of the continued interest that scholars take in this conflict that began almost half a century ago.

Where other recent research has examined the impact of the war on the collapse of the Soviet system (Ro’i), the experiences and memories of Lithuanian veterans of the war (Reich), and the Soviet Union’s and the Afghan socialist regime's grappling with Islam in Afghanistan (Klimentov), Jones has turned his pen to the discourses that unfolded about the war in the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In his book, he looks at antiwar protests, soldiers’ accounts, Soviet and Mujahideen propaganda, films, documentaries, novels and much else. His aim, he writes, is to understand the culture of the war—the stories that the participants told themselves and those that were told by others about them.

The article examines the Hungarian government’s rhetoric on Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine during the early months of the invasion, drawing on the literature on state security identity. It finds that the Hungarian government portrayed the war as an impersonal force, a kind of maelstrom on its doorstep into which Hungary might “drift” if heedless policy proposals by Western states and the Hungarian political opposition were put into practice. According to this rhetoric, it was the Hungarian government’s judicious and patriotic leadership that enabled the country to steer clear of drifting into the war. In contrast with the pro-Western rhetoric of Hungarian governments of the 1990s and 2000s, Hungary was now explicitly identified as a “Central European” state with its own security interests, but one that was threatened by the self-interested and reckless actions of Western states and the Hungarian political opposition

This study examines how the social media practices of acculturating migrants are integral to their temporal identity work and experiences of self and belonging. Based on 30 interviews with Syrian migrants who arrived in Sweden between 2015 and 2017, our analysis identifies three temporal identity practices: restoring lifelines, adapting to dual timelines, and compartmentalizing life and self. Migrants use social media to sustain continuity with their past, navigate between cultural timelines, and curate distinct digital personas for different audiences. These practices help them cope with temporal dislocation and experiment with new forms of self-expression, but they also generate feelings of inauthenticity and guilt. Beyond the migrant context, the study contributes to research on digital identity work by moving beyond platform-centric perspectives and showing how multiple, lived temporalities are reproduced and experienced in everyday life, both on- and offline. It also extends research on identity fragmentation by demonstrating that fragmentation arises not only from conflicting norms and self-presentations across platforms and time, but also from temporal disjunctions such as unsynchronized rhythms, conflicting time orientations, and fragmented timelines. This broader view is crucial for understanding the conditions and consequences of temporal identity work in today’s fast-moving and fragmented social environments.

This article examines sources of social capital of Syrian refugees in informal tented settlements (ITSs) in Lebanon, using the division of social capital into bonding, bridging and linking social capital. It argues that refugees in ITSs possess all three forms of social capital, with important relationships existing between the three. Based on 45 interviews with refugees, the article shows that Syrians in ITSs sometimes convert bridging social capital into bonding social capital and vice versa, often with the help of smartphones. Over time respondents have built relationships to access linking social capital and with it new opportunities for livelihoods

Russia’s poor military performance in the early stages of the full-scale war in Ukraine (2022-) has been attributed to various causes. This article considers possible intellectual causes of Russia’s poor performance. Reviewing public Russian military and security discussions on new wars in the years prior to Russia’s full-scale invasion, it argues that Russian operational planning on Ukraine aligned with key assumptions about new wars. In particular, the Russian leadership's failure to acknowledge Ukrainian agency, its misguided emphasis on non-kinetic means and its mistaken assumption that Western states would be unwilling to respond forcefully to Russian aggression followed key tenets of Russian new war thinking. The article raises questions about the relationship between Russian military theorizing and Russian military action, and how a prevailing intellectual paradigm shaped Russian perceptions about the reasonability of the invasion plan.

The Soviet collapse in the early 1990s left a security vacuum in Tajikistan, where the regime retained few instruments of coercion after Moscow’s rule melted away. One potential source of informal coercive power was Soviet-Afghan War veterans, or afgantsy, who were militarily trained and in many cases combat-experienced and represented what Charles Tilly has termed ‘violent specialists’. This article argues that organized afgantsy initially offered security functions to the Tajik regime but that, as state authority crumbled, their relationship to state bodies became increasingly tenuous. Eventually, many veterans aligned with non-state violent actors during the civil war, performing several coercive functions on their behalf, including establishing, training, and commanding armed formations. The trajectory of the veterans, hence, paralleled that of the state collapse and the informalization of coercive power in Tajikistan. The changing relationship between veterans and political authority offers a point on which to explore wider shifts in the control and deployment of coercive power in the context of the Soviet collapse in Tajikistan.

This chapter considers the role of Russia’s ground-based contingent in the Russian military operation in Syria. The chapter, which covers the period 2015-2021, identifies six key strategic functions of the contingent, which is small in size but diverse in its composition. The functions reach beyond base security and support to the aerial forces that have spearheaded Russia’s operation, and include also the ability to carry out high-value tasks, provide capacity building to allied forces, facilitate ally coordination, and support escalation management. Importantly, Russia’s ability to operate forces with different degrees of deniability/officiality has lent it greater flexibility in managing allies, adversaries, and third-party actors.

In the 1970s, communities of the Kalinga sub-ethnic group in the Cordillera Mountains in northern Philippines successfully halted the construction of a series of hydroelectric dams along their main waterway, the Chico River, which would have caused their displacement. Based on interviews and archival research, the article examines the role played by a Kalinga political institution known as the bodong or peace pact in the Kalingas’ mobilisation against the dam project, using an analytical framework drawn from Charles Tilly's and Sidney Tarrow's work on contentious politics.

How is it possible to gain a sense that you have a voice and that your life matters when you have lost everything and live your life as a ‘displaced person’ in extreme precarity? We explore this question by examining the mundane everyday organizing practices of Syrian refugees living in tented settlements in Lebanon. Contrasting traditional empirical settings within organization studies where an already placed and mattering subject can be assumed, our context provides an opportunity to reveal how relations of recognition and mattering become constituted, and how subjects in precarious settings become enacted as such. Specifically, drawing on theories on the relational enactment of self and other, we show how material-discursive boundary-making and invitational practices – organizing a home, cooking and eating, and organizing a digital ‘home’ – function to enact relational host/guest subject positions. We also disclose how these guest/host relationalities create the conditions of possibility for the enactment of a subject that matters, and for the despair enacted in everyday precarious life to transform into ‘undefeated despair’.