Ellen Key and Rudolf Kjellén on war,peace, and the future of post-First World War Europe

During the First World War, intellectuals in both combatant and neutral nations engaged in debates on the justification for the bloodshed and in envisioning solutions for a sustainable peace. In the latter regard, the issues of democracy and future forms of government were focal. This article examines two public intellectuals from Sweden, Ellen Key and Rudolf Kjellén, and their conflicting views. A comparative and transnational perspective on their thinking about war and peace sheds light on their political backgrounds and wider worldviews. The article further reveals the international contexts in which their ideas were embedded. Using the concept of ‘the ideas of 1914 versus those of 1789’, the conservative geopolitician Kjellén spoke for the justification of German expansion and Swedish military intervention, whereas the Left-liberal pacifist Key condemned all parties involved, defending the legacy of the French Revolution and Sweden’s neutrality. Based on his geopolitical tenets, Kjellén could not envision a future with peaceful cooperation between nation states, while, for Key, the solution lay in the development of democratic decision-making. In this respect, the granting of political citizenship to women, to whom she accorded a special competence for peace-keeping, based on their maternalism, was crucial.     

Commemorating dead ‘men’: gendering the past and present in post-conflict Northern Ireland

War is instrumental in shaping and negotiating gender identities. But what role does peace play in dispelling or affirming the gender order in post-conflict contexts? Building on a burgeoning international literature on representative landscapes and based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Northern Ireland between 2003 and 2006, this article explores the peacetime commemoration of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ in order to explore the nuances of gender. Tellingly, the memorial landscapes cultivated since the inception of the paramilitary ceasefires in 1994 privilege male interpretations of the past (and, therefore, present). Gender parity, despite being enshrined within the 1998 Belfast Agreement which sought to draw a line under almost three decades of ethno-nationalist violence, remains an elusive utopia, as memorials continue to propagate specific roles for men and women in the ‘national project’. As the masculine ideologies of Irish Nationalism/Republicanism and British Unionism/Loyalism inscribe their respective disputant pasts into the streetscape, the narratives of women have been blurred and disrupted, begging the question: what role can they play in the future?     

Collective memory and its images: Popular urban painting in Zaire — a source of “present past”∗

Based on the example of Zaïre's popular urban painting, the author analyzes the relationship between the collective memory and the social imaginary. The pictorial dissertation on the past and the present of the population of a mining town — Lubumbashi — is an autonomous historical account mostly intended for the petite bourgeoisie. The analysis focusses on two levels of the discourse: (1) the images of the past, in relation to the present, which reflects the collective memory of the group, and (2) the discourse on the balance of power between the state and the civil society. The author compares this urban painting to urban song and to some life stories.     

Branch age and diameter: useful criteria for recognising woodland management in the present and past?

When prehistoric archaeological sites yield non-carbonised wood, one of the ways to test for management practices consisting of pollarding and coppicing is analysis of branch diameter and age. However, the interpretation of such data is often based on assumptions. To test whether it is in fact possible to identify past woodland management on the basis of age/diameter analysis in archaeological wood assemblages, this paper presents models that predict the expected age and diameter distribution of branches from unmanaged and managed trees. The models have been tested using data on modern-day Alnus glutinosa, Fraxinus excelsior and species of the genus Salix. Branches of modern-day unmanaged and managed trees with a diameter up to approx. 2 cm (not an absolute limit) have a comparable age. Branches with a diameter of approx. 2–6 cm from unmanaged trees are older than similar branches from managed trees. The age distribution in the latter also ends abruptly. The age/diameter data from the modern-day trees indicate that the models can be used to discern management in the past, if branches up to approx. 2 cm in diameter are avoided and if, critically, taxon, sample size, growing conditions, natural disturbance/opportunistic wood collection and the possibility of diameter selection are taken into account. Archaeological datasets mainly from prehistoric sites are then reinterpreted by means of comparison with the models. Indications of management in prehistory as demonstrated by age/diameter are scarce but available. There is thus a clear need for further research in this field. Practical suggestions are provided for improving the quality of future research on woodland management practices by means of branch age/diameter analysis.     

Unemployed Workers’ Centres (1978–): Spatial Politics, “Non-Movement”, and the Making of Centres

This paper revisits the histories of Unemployed Workers’ Centres to consider the politicisation of unemployment in the UK. Drawing upon archive material and over 50 oral histories, it considers the emergence of centres as a response to a crisis of increasing unemployment and retrenchment of the welfare state. The paper indicates how Asef Bayat’s concept of “non-movement” proves useful for capturing a wider sphere of labour organising, moving beyond more conventional spaces and actions. This approach critically revisits the role of centres in conversation with emerging work in labour geography and social movements studies around the fostering of solidarities. It reveals tensions around their making, whilst also stressing the potential of seemingly small acts when held alongside campaigns. Revisiting this repertoire of activity reveals the persistence of trade union engagements with communities beyond the workplace, as well as a critical insight into the politics of space in forging such alternatives.     

World history—for africa,against europe

Navigating World History: Historians Create a Global Past. By Patrick Manning (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 384 pp. £50.00 cloth; £18.99 paper.     

‘But we're only talking,maybe’: language,desire, and the arrival of the present in Synge's Playboy of the Western World

This essay examines the relationship between language, desire, and reality found in J.M. Synge's The Playboy of the Western World. In this play, Synge suggests that language which is too infused with desire has the potential to outrace events, and will always fail to describe a reality that can actually form itself. With this, Synge is asserting that Revivalist myths are hopelessly out of step with Irish life and impede the formation of a sustainable political and cultural unit. Troublingly, however, Synge does not accurately gauge his own complicity in this process.     

A past and a future for diversification on farms? Some evidence from large-scale,commercial farms in South East England

Diversification has been identified as a common response to the agricultural crisis of the 1980s and to the changing ethos of agricultural policy in the closing decade of the twentieth century. In particular, farmers operating large-scale farms have been prominent in adopting this approach, just as they were innovative across a range of farming practices in the expansion and modernisation of their agricultural production in earlier decades. Can we identify serial diversifiers within this sector of the farming community, who are disposed to react in an entrepreneurial fashion to the changing fortunes of agriculture? The paper draws on results from a survey of large-scale commercial farmers in South East England and, by examining the sequence in which various forms of diversification were adopted, identifies a temporal pattern as farmers responded to the fluctuating fortunes of the agricultural industry over the past thirty years. But has the potential for diversification been exhausted? The paper also considers future prospects for diversification within the large-scale, commercially oriented sector of the agricultural industry.     

Was malaria present in the Amazon before the European conquest? Available evidence and future research agenda

Most of the evidence available so far suggests that malaria was not present in the New World before the European conquest. However, the timing of the introduction of the disease in the Americas is still a matter of controversy. In this paper we appraise the debate in the context of the Brazilian Amazon, where malaria is, at the present time and has been for several centuries, an important health problem. We review and summarize the available evidence in favor of the introduction of malaria after the conquest based on historical documents, studies in genetics and evolutionary biology, epidemiological issues, and archaeological discoveries. We argue that despite the compelling arguments provided by the extant body of evidence, a more definitive proof is needed. We suggest that archaeology, via analyses of existing skeletal remains from Amazonia using biomolecular techniques, may represent the best (and unique) approach to a definitive resolution of a long-standing debate. We anticipate that in the near future a multidisciplinary effort can be brought together to provide a clear answer to a long standing epidemiological question: Was malaria present in the Amazon before the European conquest?     

Preserving which past for whose future? The dilemma of cultural resource management in case studies from Tunisia,Cyprus and Jordan

Abstract

Cultural resource management the world over confronts the perpetual dilemma of deciding which part of the past to preserve for whose future. This dilemma arises from the perpetual tension between the insistent drive to develop for the future and the presumptive need to preserve the past. In the face of constraints imposed by limitations of time, money and personnel, advocates of preservation face difficult choices of which sites to rescue and which to abandon to destruction. There are also other aspects of the dilemma: choosing the criteria on which preservation decisions are to be based; determining who in the end will apply these criteria; and deciding on whose behalf the chosen sites will be preserved and maintained. The dilemma resolves itself into three questions: ‘Which sites?’, ‘What public?’ and ‘Who decides?’. The answers are found, at least provisionally, in an examination of case studies, from Tunisia, Cyprus and Jordan, that typify the dilemma and illustrate the various strategies, successful and otherwise, deployed to confront it.     

Is there a future for the past? An overview of archaeology in western Russia and Ukraine

The current political and economic situation in Russia and Ukraine poses grave dangers for the archaeological and museum professionals who guard these nations' legacies. At the moment that political barriers to Western collaboration were removed, new problems have crippled the post-Soviet archaeological community. Concurrently, Westerners tend to misunderstand Soviet and post-Soviet archaeological theory, forgetting that techniques such as lithic microwear and taphonomic analysis were introduced by Soviet scholars. New discoveries are described in three general categories: the origins of food-producing economies in western Russia and Ukraine, the evolution of surprisingly large towns in Copper Age Ukraine, and the origins of pastoralism in the Russian and Ukrainian steppes.