zugzwang

plural zugzwangs · plural zugzwänge · alternative Zugzwang

1. countableuncountableboard gamesA situation in which a player is forced to make a disadvantageous move; a position where any legal move will worsen a player's situation.

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   In such a position his condition will get worse step by step until he is forced, by the necessity of making a move, to relax his hold on, or weaken, some key point, and his game collapses. A combination directed to bring about such a catastrophe is called by the Germans Zugzwang (compulsion to move), and the player who succumbs under it is said to have got into Zugzwang.

   1947, Aron Nimzovich, edited by Fred Reinfeld, My System: A Treatise on Chess, revised edition, New York: David McCay Company, Inc., →ISBN, page 36

2. countablefigurativelyuncountableA situation in which someone is forced to make a disadvantageous move.

   not only is there a lack of good alternatives concerning some particular policy decisions, but the whole Russian system is moving towards a zugzwang.

   2015, Veera Laine, Toivo Martikainen, Katri Pynnöniemi, Sinikukka Saari, “Zugzwang in slow motion? The implications of Russia's system-level crisis”, in FIIA Analysis, number 6, Helsinki: Finnish Institute of International Affairs, page 5

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   An explanation for this phenomenon may be that speech acts that include instructions (e.g., a command or request) show a higher level of activity than speech acts of assertion; the ethnomethodological analysis of conversation speaks of conversational Zugzwänge:²⁴ a request, a question or a command demands a reaction of the addressee.

   2002, Carl Friedrich Graumann, Werner Kallmeyer, editors, Perspective and Perspectivation in Discourse, page 174

   Here, too, it is Russia that, ironically, is in Zugzwang. Because the central rationale of Moscow's occupation of Crimea was the defense of supposedly threatened Russians, Putin and his minions must continue insisting that Ukraine's Russians are under threat and that their right are being systematically violated.

   2014, Alexander J. Motyl, “PUTIN'S ZUGZWANG: The Russia-Ukraine Standoff”, in World Affairs, volume 177, number 2, page 60

   "In chess terms, Putin is not in a stalemate, he's in a zugzwang: He is forced to make further moves even if they worsen his position, precisely because he must keep selling his 'war of civilizations' concept to Russians," Leonid Bershidsky, the self-exiled Russian political analyst wrote in Bloomberg recently.

   2015 June 11, Brian Whitmore, “Putin's Deadly Zugzwang”, in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

   Perhaps the Soviet Union under Gromyko could have persuaded him against attacking Kuwait, which as we know, unleashed irreversible consequences in the Middle East and the world as a whole, opening the door to U.S. interventions around the world. But the question of whether Gromyko would have been more open to dialogue with the West and China remains unanswerable. Would he have launched a new round of détente in international relations (without, of course, giving up the whole game as Gorbachev did) or would he have maintained the Zugzwang in Soviet-U.S. affairs that Reagan and Andropov had established?

   2016 November 9, Oleg N. Barabanov, “What If… the Soviet Union Had Not Collapsed?”, in Valdai Papers. Russia in Global Affairs

   the Soviet concessions at Madrid did not prove enough to prevent the stationing of US Euromissiles as part of NATO’s dual-track decision, and Moscow found itself in economic and political Zugzwang at the end of the Andropov era, as Vladislav Zubok has pointed out.

   2018, Douglas Selvage, “The Limits of Repression: Soviet Bloc Security Services vs. Transnational Helsinki Networks, 1976–1986”, in The CSCE and the End of the Cold War, New York · Oxford: Berghahn Books, →DOI, →ISBN, page 218

present singular third person zugzwangs · participle present zugzwanging · participle past zugzwanged · past zugzwanged

1. transitiveboard gamesTo force (a player) into a situation where they must make a disadvantageous move.