The German Military Entrepreneur Ernst von Mansfeld and His Conduct of Asymmetrical Warfare in the Thirty Years War

The dissertation examines aspects of asymmetrical warfare in the war-making of the German military entrepreneur Ernst von Mansfeld during his involvement in the Thirty Years War. Due to the nature of the inquiry, which combines history with military-political theory, the methodological approach of the dissertation is interdisciplinary. The theoretical framework used is that of asymmetrical warfare. The primary sources used in the dissertation are mostly political pamphlets and newsletters. Other sources include letters, documents, and contemporaneous chronicles. The secondary sources are divided into two categories, literature on the history of the Thirty Years War and textbooks covering the theory of asymmetrical warfare. The first category includes biographical works on Ernst von Mansfeld, as well as general histories of the Thirty Years War and seventeenth-century warfare. The second category combines military theory and political science. The structure of the dissertation consists of eight lead chapters, including an introduction and conclusion. The introduction covers the theoretical approach and aims of the dissertation, and provides a brief overlook of the sources and previous research on Ernst von Mansfeld and asymmetrical warfare in the Thirty Years War. The second chapter covers aspects of Mansfeld s asymmetrical warfare from the perspective of operational art. The third chapter investigates the illegal and immoral aspects of Mansfeld s war-making. The fourth chapter compares the differing methods by which Mansfeld and his enemies raised and financed their armies. The fifth chapter investigates Mansfeld s involvement in indirect warfare. The sixth chapter presents Mansfeld as an object and an agent of image and information war. The seventh chapter looks into the counter-reactions, which Mansfeld s asymmetrical warfare provoked from his enemies. The eighth chapter offers a conclusion of the findings. The dissertation argues that asymmetrical warfare presented itself in all the aforementioned areas of Mansfeld s conduct during the Thirty Years War. The operational asymmetry arose from the freedom of movement that Mansfeld enjoyed, while his enemies were constrained by the limits of positional warfare. As a non-state operator Mansfeld was also free to flout the rules of seventeenth-century warfare, which his enemies could not do with equal ease. The raising and financing of military forces was another source of asymmetry, because the nature of early seventeenth-century warfare favoured private military entrepreneurs rather than embryonic fiscal-military states. The dissertation also argues that other powers fought their own asymmetrical and indirect wars against the Habsburgs through Mansfeld s agency. Image and information were asymmetrical weapons, which were both aimed against Mansfeld and utilized by him. Finally, Mansfeld s asymmetrical threat forced the Habsburgs to adapt to his methods, which ultimately lead to the formation of a subcontracted Imperial Army under the management and leadership of Albrecht von Wallenstein. Therefore Mansfeld s asymmetrical warfare ultimately paved way for the kind of state-monopolized, organised, and symmetrical warfare that has prevailed from 1648 onwards. The conclusion is that Mansfeld s conduct in the Thirty Years War matched the criteria for asymmetrical warfare. While traditional historiography treated Mansfeld as an anomaly in the age of European state formation, his asymmetrical warfare has begun to bear resemblance to the contemporary conflicts, where nation states no longer hold the monopoly of violence.

Hyvinvointivaltion läpimurto : Pienviljelyhegemonian rapautumisen, kansalaisliikehdinnän ja poliittisen murroksen keskinäiset suhteet suomalaisessa yhteiskunnassa 1950-luvun loppuvuosina

A Breakthrough of Welfare State. The inter-relationships of the civic movement, political transformation, and eroding of a hegemony based on small scale farming in the Finnish society in the late 1950's. The unusually rapid and powerful structural change; the non-parliamentary civic movements of 1956 - 1963; and the left majority in the Finnish parliament between 1958 - 1962 all took place as the Finnish welfare state started to develop. The aim of my research is to analyse the inter-relationships of these processes. The research describes the way the former semi self-sufficient, semi-proletarian and labour-intensive form of production - a simple and discriminatory system in itself - made it possible for the majority of the population to survive through hard work. For some it even provided a possibility to prosper. The waning vitality of semi self-sufficiency and small scale agriculture triggered a political ferment and started a period of searching for something new. The process was so intense that it broke up most of the parties and tore down the old consensus that was based on the power of economic and political elite. The most crucial battle of the great transformation was waged over the nature of the state: Should we build a welfare state and construct social security systems, or should we revert to the old night watchman state and, for example, cancel the modest forms of redistribution of income carried out in the 1950's? The people joining the civic movements were either cottagers of the impoverishing countryside or, quite often, people who had come from the countryside and thus had grown up under conditions of some form of solidarity that included taking care of one's own family. The Finnish social insurance developed in the midst of a change in the structure of production of the society, and it became a compromise to satisfy the needs of both the waning society of small scale agriculture and the rising proletarian society based on wage labour. The hodgepodge of political schemes and use of power became a battle between different notions of the economy and the state; the distribution of national income; and the position of Finland in the international context. This battle created a shape of an interregnum - a period of transformation including two notions of society, two alternative paths for the future and the logic of a correctional move. The transformation of Finland from a poor developing country into a prosperous society has been praised as a success story. In 1956 - 1959, when the old form of governance based on the interests of small scale agriculture and wood processing industry was in decay, and when the future seemed uncertain, the projects to reduce social benefits and efforts to distribute national income even more unequally than before led to a powerful counter-movement by citizens and started an hegemonic change and a equal socia development.

Ale jaskkot eatnigiella : Alkuperäiskansaliikkeen ja saamen kielen merkitys saamelaisten identiteetille

This study examines the Sámi people and the construction of the Sámi identity and the role of language in the cross-border Sámi movement within the context of the international indigenous movement and discourse between 1962 and 2008. The Sámi movement began as a reaction to state assimilation policies. This led to the birth of indigenous processes strengthening the Sámi cultures and languages. Activities across borders and the ethnopolitical processes in each of the Nordic countries in question also formed the basis of the internationalization of the Sámi people. The discourse on indigenous peoples has grown into a question of human rights, which is examined in different national and international contexts. The study is based on ethnographic data that has been collected via interviews, questionnaires and participant observation with the researched people in different meetings and events. Archive and newsprint material are also used. The approach of the study is auto-ethnographic. The post-colonial theories used in the study strive to destabilize power relations and the distinctions of otherness produced by colonialism, and to reclaim both one's own culture and language in the context of the indigenous movement. A standard model for this type of approach was created by Edward W. Said in his 1978 work Orientalism. The central concepts of the analysis are decolonization, otherness, ethnicity and identity. The dissertation consists of four published articles and an introduction. The subject matter is analyzed on three levels: global, European and Nordic. On the global level, the results demonstrate that the indigenous movement has constructed a new understanding of indigenousness with new rights. International treaties have facilitated the unification of new concepts and rights, such as the right to self-determination and language, also helping in transforming them into rights of the Sámi people on a national level. On the Nordic level, aligning the Sámi culture with indigenous discourse became significant for the process of developing the Sámi identity in the Sámi movement. In this process, the Sámi movement made use of Sámi languages in order to mobilize groups of people and to construct relatedness between different Sámi groups. The realization that one s own language is significant to one's culture has resulted in recreating the vitality, visibility and the legitimation of language in society more generally. The migration of the Sámi people from their traditional territories to increasingly multi-ethnic urban areas alters one's relationship to one's own community as the relationship to cultural traditions changes. Among the urban Sámi, who form a group of ‘new Sáminess’, linguistic discrimination and assimilation continue because of the lack of legislative and other effective language policy measures to promote the learning and use of the Sámi language.

Arvoja näkyvissä : Kaunokirjallisuuden etiikka Ludwig Wittgensteinin filosofian valossa

The goal of this dissertation was to study whether it is possible and meaningful to apply Ludwig Wittgenstein s distinction between saying (Sagen) and showing (Zeigen) to ethically oriented literary criticism. The following questions were used as the primary guidelines: 1. Is it possible, in the context of literary criticism, to put in practice Wittgenstein s ethical conceptions, which are quite theoretical and metaphysical by nature? 2. If so, what practical literary devices do authors use if they want to demonstrate their ethical values within the frame of a fictional work? 3. Does philosophy offer useful ethical consepts that open us new and interesting readings in fiction? The philosophical background of Wittgenstein s distinction is clarified in chapter I. This clarification is based on his main works, Tractatus logico-philosophicus and Philosophishe Untersuchungen, the published correspondence between Wittgenstein and Paul Engelmann, and selected Wittgenstein research and papers. Analyzing ethics and it s expression in Georg Trakl s poetry further elucidates Wittgenstein s concept of showing. The concept that a literary work is an act of an author was used as a starting point. The presumption was that analyzing this act of an author will reveal how ethical values can be demonstrated in literature. Categorizing an author s act at different levels of literary expression provides the structure of this study. In chapters IV - XIII literary devices useful for demonstrating ethics are examined and explained using examples from the works of Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, Nikolay Leskov, Ludwig Uhland, Eino Leino, Pentti Haanpää and Maria Jotuni. The concepts and views of researchers and writers such as Mihail Bahtin, Peter Juhl, E. D. Hirsch, Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen are used. The concepts outlined in previous chapters are then applied in three case studies: Aeschylus s Oresteia trilogy, J-L. Runeberg s poem Sven Dufva and Sofi Oksanen s novel Puhdistus (Purge). On the whole, Wittgenstein s idea that ethical values can be demonstrated (shown) by means of literature is revealed as a fruitful point of departure for a more exact ethical reading, offering a new perspective on literary works.

Divergencies of Perception : The Possibilities of Merleau-Pontian Phenomenology in Analyses of Contemporary Art

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) has been known as the philosopher of painting. His interest in the theory of perception intertwined with the questions concerning the artist s perception, the experience of an artwork and the possible interpretations of the artwork. For him, aesthetics was not a sub-field of philosophy, and art was not simply a subject matter for the aesthetic experience, but a form of thinking. This study proposes an opening for a dialogue between Merleau-Pontian phenomenology and contemporary art. The thesis examines his phenomenology through certain works of contemporary art and presents readings of these artworks through his phenomenology. The thesis both shows the potentiality of a method, but also engages in the critical task of finding the possible limitations of his approach. The first part lays out the methodological and conceptual points of departure of Merleau-Ponty s phenomenological approach to perception as well as the features that determined his discussion on encountering art. Merleau-Ponty referred to the experience of perceiving art using the notion of seeing with (voir selon). He stressed a correlative reciprocity described in Eye and Mind (1961) as the switching of the roles of the visible and the painter. The choice of artworks is motivated by certain restrictions in the phenomenological readings of visual arts. The examined works include paintings by Tiina Mielonen, a photographic work by Christian Mayer, a film by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, and an installation by Monika Sosnowska. These works resonate with, and challenge, his phenomenological approach. The chapters with case studies take up different themes that are central to Merleau-Ponty s phenomenology: space, movement, time, and touch. All of the themes are interlinked with the examined artworks. There are also topics that reappear in the thesis, such as the notion of écart and the question of encountering the other. As Merleau-Ponty argued, the sphere of art has a particular capability to address our being in the world. The thesis presents an interpretation that emphasises the notion of écart, which refers to an experience of divergence or dispossession. The sudden dissociation, surprise or rupture that is needed in order for a meeting between the spectator and the artwork, or between two persons, to be possible. Further, the thesis suggests that through artworks it is possible to take into consideration the écart, the divergence, that defines our subjectivity.