Search

The article discusses parallels between the economic policy of Chinese President Xi Jinping and that of 1930s U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Topics covered include an increase in the prospect for political conflict when the elite's needs began to diverge from that of the nation, how Xi and Roosevelt adopted options that aimed to realize national goals without antagonizing the elite, and the pursuit of strategies that centralized and widened national government power. Also mentioned are the need for Xi to cultivate popular opinion and military support, his cultivation of the ability to co-opt the leaders of state-owned enterprises, and China's reluctance to adopt confrontational politics.

Despite the Canadian Security Intelligence Service's recent concern with the growing threat from right-wing extremists nationwide, we have little contemporary scholarship on the far right movement in Canada and fewer attempts to systematically analyze their ideologies and activities. Drawing on a three-year study involving interviews with Canadian law enforcement officials, community organizations, and right-wing activists, as well as analyses of open source intelligence, this article examines the endogenous factors that facilitate and inhibit the right-wing extremist movement in Canada. Findings suggest that strengths and weaknesses of the groups themselves can be exploited as a means of debilitating them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We examine whether government ideology was correlated with the growth in military expenditure in Germany over the period 1951–2011. Using various measures of government ideology, the results do not show any effect. The exception is an ideology measure based on the Comparative Manifesto Project (left-right scale): using this measure, the results show that the growth in military expenditure increased by about 2.4 percentage points, when the ideology variable (right-wing) increased by one standard deviation. This effect, however, is based on observations until the early 1960s and cannot be generalized. The major political parties agreed on how to evaluate international risks and threats. Government ideology retired to the background. We conjecture that the consensus among the major parties will persist – even if military spending needs to be increased in response to new international risks and threats. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Throughout the 1920s, distrust and contention marked Anglo- Soviet relations, culminating in the diplomatic break in 1927. In 1929, the incoming Labour government successfully pursued its objective of re-establishing diplomatic relations with Moscow, but the follow-up in terms of ambassadorial appointments was far from routine for either side. This analysis shows that internal pressures complicated decisions about whether to appoint career diplomats or choose political figures. Resisting both claims from enthusiastically hopeful Labour backbenchers and criticisms from the left wing media, the British foreign secretary, Arthur Henderson, chose a Russian-speaking career diplomat. On the Soviet side, the first choice was a controversial politician, but then replaced by a financial expert, albeit one tainted as a defeated political opponent of Josef Stalin. Whilst both ambassadors could be considered "professionals," neither was able to have a deep impact on the relationship, which remained troubled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates on intervention and sovereignty since 1945 can be summarised as a tale of two cities, San Francisco and Bandung, and of two countries, Rwanda and Libya. All are symbolic of different phases of these debates. The UN was born in San Francisco in 1945 with very little substantive participation by Asian and African governments. The great powers established a system in which they would determine when, where and how military interventions could take place. The 1955 Bandung Conference saw Asian and African countries seek to use new norms of intervention to regain their sovereignty. The 1994 Rwandan genocide, however, forced African countries to dilute notions of absolute sovereignty to allow military interventions for human protection purposes. The 2011 NATO military intervention in Libya did potentially irreparable damage to future UN-mandated interventions and was widely seen in the Global South as an abuse of the responsibility to protect (R2P). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The essay presents criticism on the 2008 film "City of Life and Death" (or "Nanjing! Nanjing!"), directed by Lu Chuan. Particular focus is given to how the film depicts the Nanjing Massacre, a six-week period in December 1937 during which Japanese soldiers raped, tortured and murdered hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians in Nanjing, China. Additional topics discussed include Lu's intentions for the film and how the film aims to reintroduce the concept of Japanese humanity to China .

This paper argues that the first-person narratives of human trafficking that have been published since 1991 should be considered as the reemergence of the slave narrative. The paper outlines the contours of the slave narrative's revival, suggesting that the genre found fertile ground in the 1990s and 2000s through a confluence of diverse cultural forces – reinvigorated abolitionist advocacy, heightened public fluency in the discourses of slavery and rights, an expanded media terrain that encourages first-person testimony and post-9/11 cultural anxieties. This environment promoted the development of survivor testimony that would act as ‘flesh and blood' examples of the largely hidden and illegible human rights violation of modern slavery. Slave narrators face a crisis of legibility resulting from public scepticism regarding modern slavery, but what emerges from the public requirements for evidence is a generic tendency against the voyeuristic demands for the bodily detail and towards narrative strategies of displacement that direct attention towards external authorities and experiences. These strategies allow survivors to maintain control over their exposure in their life narratives, and thereby revise and interrogate the spectacular expectations promoted by many human rights projects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates how public employee unions mobilised to take advantage of Morocco's Arab uprising. Leveraging their positions as operators of public institutions, these unionists exploited the unrest to strategically advance their interests. Two points emerge from this account of state—labour relations in Morocco. First, a spike in labour contestation began in early 2010, presaging the unrest that rocked Moroccan cities in 2011. Second, the unions secured their demands through traditional tactics of labour mobilisation—joining street protests, exaggerating material demands, and threatening negotiation walkouts. This strategy, however, became more efficacious during the Arab uprising. Fearing urban riots that had historically grown from labour protests since the 1980s, regime elites conceded to union demands, many of which they had previously rejected in the 2000s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the German cultural diplomatic efforts in the Ottoman Empire between 1900 and 1918 and the example of the German so-called Propagandaschule in Baghdad. The article argues that contrary to recent scholarship, the German Empire had a considerable and well-designed secular-based cultural diplomacy programme, especially in the Ottoman Empire. This finding is important for the social history of the Arab provinces of the late Ottoman Empire, as it gives the local population, especially the Muslim part, a much stronger agency in daily life than recently argued. The finding breaks with the assumption that the local population only had the Ottoman state schools or western missionary schools to choose from. The Muslim population in particular favoured the possibility of secular education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the historiography of détente from an original viewpoint, namely the relationship between the United States and Greece. It substantiates the argument that the supposed spirit of détente did not help lessen American realpolitik considerations concerning Greece and its surrounding geostrategic region; in fact, the more Cold War antagonisms intensified in the region, the more Greece was locked in the morass of superpower rivalries. This tendency was also, ironically, re-invigorated following Greece's adoption of its own Ostpolitik largely thanks to the spirit of détente. This paradigm was reflected in the policy of the four successive American administrations between 1967 and 1979 during which détente had become the most popular notion in the Cold War lexicon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the life and work of the Argentinian artist Roberto Jacoby. Particular focus is given to Jacoby's understanding of art history and how it has impacted his work. The themes and topics presented in Jacoby's work are explored, including boars, viruses and zombies. Additional topics discussed include coverage of Jacoby's work in the periodical "Artforum," the beginning of Jacoby's career in Argentina during the 1960s and insights on his work in public art, printmaking and photography.

The aim of this paper is to investigate why some internal conflicts are terminated quickly, while others linger for several decades without a looming resolution in the horizon. In an attempt to achieve this objective, the role played by geopolitical factors in the Arab world's internal conflicts was investigated. More specifically, we used Kohonen self-organizing maps, an artificial intelligence-based neural network technique, along with event duration models to investigate the role played by distance from the capital, access to international borders, terrain, valuable natural resources such as oil, and rebels fighting capability in civil wars in the Arab world. Using recently validated data spanning more than 50 years of Arab civil wars (1948–2003), our findings indicate that previously ignored geopolitical factors seem to play an important role in the duration of internal conflicts in the Arab World. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates the business history of a major international manufacturing corporation, Fagor, which is also a workers’ co-operative, from its origins in the most difficult years of the Franco regime to its current success as a multinational company manufacturing the ‘white goods’ of the consumer revolution. It explores the distinctive ideological roots of this highly successful business, and the problematic evolution of its management strategies and workplace relationships within the changing Basque political and cultural environment during and after Spain's transition to democracy. It focuses on the company's adaptability and capacity for adjustment to changing circumstances, and on the issues and tensions arising from its development as a multinational corporation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Whereas milk production and consumption and the genes that allow for milk digestion throughout life are strongly variable across populations, historically only a minority of human groups valued milk as an important component of local foodways. By the early 21st century, however, milk consumption has become globally normative, and a spectacular rise in intake has been documented in countries such as China and India. Meanwhile, in the United States, consumption has declined markedly, especially among children. In this article, I argue that milk has been able to succeed in India and China by being positioned as a food with special qualities that enhance physical growth, which in turn serves as a powerful metaphor for individual and national power and wealth. Simultaneously, milk is being repackaged as a salve for the problems of modernity in the United States. Milk's unique history in each country provides an interpretive framework within which these meanings emerge, and milk's current success in local foodways depends on traditional modes of processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]