Coercion,vengeance, feud and accommodation: homicide in medieval Iceland

Quantitative methods were employed to situate medieval Icelandic homicide in comparative context. Estimates of homicide rates were derived from samtíðarsögur, and found comparable with European rural medieval homicide estimates: late twelfth‐century Iceland was probably not as violent as a qualitative reading of the sagas might suggest. There were significant differences in patterns of vengeance between íslendingasögur and samtíðarsögur. In íslendingasögur, farmers committing homicide faced flight, outlawry or death; chieftains who initiated homicide might escape justice, although most became embroiled in feud. In samtíðarsögur, lethal vengeance following ordinary homicide was less common, and not a source of feud. These results generate a critique of previous notions of reciprocity in Icelandic vengeance, and support more recent interpretations of early medieval Icelandic society as a highly unequal, divided society. Both sources suggest that, although vengeance may have been legitimated in the language of ‘repayment’, vengeance is best understood within a cross‐cultural context as competitive behaviour designed to achieve superiority rather than parity.     

Feminism,Gender, and Women's Peace Activism

United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on ‘Women, peace and security’, passed in 2000, reflects a recent growth in women's peace activism. Women's resistance to violence is widely believed to be a mobilizing factor in both local and international peace movements. This provokes questions around essentialism and violence of concern to feminists: are men inherently territorial and aggressive, and women naturally nurturing and peaceable? Or is the behaviour of both conditioned by particular local configurations of social relations of power? This contribution reviews these questions in the light of the experiences of women's peace organizations. It concludes that essentializing women's roles as wives, mothers and nurses discourages their inclusion as active decision makers in political arenas, as well as overshadowing the needs of other disadvantaged groups. Rather than seeing war as the violation of women by men, we should recognize that men and women are each differently violated by war.     

Pursuing a World of Law, Justice, and Peace

Book reviewed:
Dorothy V. Jones. Toward a Just World: The Critical Years in the Search for International Justice . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. 285 pp. Notes, bibliographic note, index. $30.00 (cloth).     

The futures past of the Women,Peace and Security agenda

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has developed at the United Nations over the course of the past 15 years, and there have been critical engagements with it for nearly as long. In this article, we first take stock of the operationalization of the WPS agenda, reviewing its implementation across a number of sectors. In the second section, we expose the tensions that have marked the WPS agenda from the start. With others, we argue that there has been a narrowing of the agenda's original scope, reducing it to the traditional politics of security rather than reimagining what security means. We highlight this reduction primarily through an analysis of the tension between the ‘participation’ and ‘protection’ pillars of the agenda. Further, we argue that the WPS agenda faces a current challenge in terms of the actors entrusted with it. Although in some ways involving civil society, the consolidations and implementation of WPS principles at the national and international levels have become increasingly state‐centric. Third, we imagine some possible futures of the agenda, from a trajectory characterized by increasing marginalization or even irrelevance, to new avenues like the emergent, albeit tentative, ‘Men, Peace and Security’ agenda. We close with an argument for a revival of the WPS agenda beyond a fixation on states, beyond a narrow heteronormative or essentialist focus on the ‘Women’ of the WPS resolutions, and moving towards the radical reimagining of security as peace that inspired the original architects of these important resolutions.     

中共中央对战后中国和、战问题的盱衡与抉择

随着全面抗战胜利的到来,国内阶级关系发生了重大变化,以蒋介石集团为代表的大地主、大资产阶级同以中国共产党为代表的人民大众之间的矛盾,上升为中国社会的主要矛盾。和平与战争,民主与独裁两种力量的斗争,成为战后国内政治的显著特点。依据中国共产党七大对战后国际国内形势的科学分析,中共中央高举“和平、民主、团结”的旗帜,确定了和平建国的战略方针,极力推进和平建国构想的实施。中国共产党通过自己追求和平、民主的真诚努力,揭破了国民党蒋介石内战独裁的真实面目,极大地团结和教育了全国人民,从而把政治主动权牢牢掌握在自己手里,为最终用战争手段解决问题准备了必要条件。如果没有争取和平建国的斗争,也就没有广大人民群众的广泛觉悟和国民党的彻底孤立。