Doing Italian history: Pleasure and politics

This is the second part of a general historiographical review of recent studies on the formation of a modern Italian nation and national identities. The review is organized chronologically, and this second part covers literature on the development of the Italian state and society from Fascism to the birth of the Republic. Si tratta della seconda parte di una articolo dedicato al tema del proceso di 'nation and state building' e modernizzazione in Italia, con particolare attenzione per i temi della costruzione della macchina statale e dell'identità nazionale. La prima parte si era soffermata sul periodo risorgimentale e sull'Italia liberale fino alla prima guerra mondiale e all'avvento del regime fascista. L'articolo tenta di ricostruire in maniera critica i nuovi contributi interpretativi di un dibattito come quello sul processo di costruzione dello stato nazionale unitario, che di recente sembra essersi riacceso, collocandoli nel solco di una tradizione storiografica sul tema, oramai consolidata. Accanto a questa, infatti, sembra farsi strada una nuova stagione di studi, molto meno ancorata al peso che per lungo tempo hanno esercitato i differenti condizionamenti ideologici. In questa seconda parte vengono analizzate le interpretazioni storiografiche, basate su nuove ricerche recentemente condotte, sul ventennio fascista e sulla nascità e lo sviluppo dell'Italia Repubblicana.     

Urban politics: Theory and practice

Blair Badcock, Unfairly Structured Cities, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1984, pp. 395, $17.95 (paper).

John Halligan and Chris Paris (eds), Australian Urban Politics: critical perspectives, Melbourne, Longman Cheshire, 1984, pp. 247, $12.95 (paper).     

Thirty years of modern Chinese history studies: past experiences and prospective trends

This paper presents an overview of and comments on a symposium concerning modern Chinese history held in Beijing, China in October 2009. It is composed of four parts: first, the paradigm issues of modern Chinese historical studies; second, indigenous reorientation and the study of regional social history; third, the relationship between social history and regional social history; fourth, the history of scholarship on the Chinese revolution. All the conference participants were prestigious scholars in the fields of modern Chinese history and Ming–Qing historical studies in Mainland China. The attending scholars provided in-depth and well considered views about the macro issues of this discipline. Furthermore, the discussion was very active and productive. This paper reflects the latest trends in the field of modern Chinese historical studies in Mainland China.     

Ethnicity,politics, and history in Mexico and Central America

Wilson, Richard. Maya Resurgence in Guatemala: Q'eqchi’ Experiences. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. xiv + 373 pp. including tables, figures, photographs, appendices, notes, glossary, bibliography, and index. $32.95 cloth.

Frye, David. Indians into Mexicans: History and Identity in a Mexican Town. Austin; University of Texas Press, 1996. viii + 250 pp. including figures, photographs, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $40.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Hale, Charles R. Resistance and Contradiction: Miskitu Indians and the Nicaraguan State, 1894–1987. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994. ix + 296 pp. including tables, figures, photographs, appendices, notes, bibliography, and index. $42.50 cloth.     

How elections are fought in Ascoli: kinship,politics, history and culture

Based on fieldwork and archival study in a small north Puglian town, this article explores the complex interrelationship between kinship and politics. In the context of a recent local election, it seeks to show how ties of kinship and affinity provide a moral framework and idiom for civic cooperation, and how shared political ideologies and a common political heritage define and reinforce a sense of lineage identity. It argues that a failure to engage with the implications of 'kinship beyond the household' has both detracted from the analysis of Italian local politics and impeded our understanding of the long-term resilience of wider kinship forms,especially in periods of acute system change.     

NATO: the practice and politics of transformation

The Iraq crisis caused a deep rift in US–European relations and within Europe. NATO seemed sure at least to be damaged, if not fatally undermined. But to the dismay of those who have been waiting for many years for NATO finally to unravel, the Atlantic alliance spent 2003 proudly showing off its transformation project, and looking forward to its next enlargement in 2004. Yet these necessary improvements to NATO's political and military structures, and to its deployable capability, cannot alone secure the alliance's future. This article argues that what is needed, as ever, is a shared determination among governments that NATO can continue to serve their needs. There has been no better opportunity since the end of the Cold War to place the US-European security relationship on a firm footing through NATO. There has also been no moment when the penalties of failure have been higher. If NATO's transformation agenda, together with the NATO–EU 'Berlin Plus' arrangement, are not exploited to the full, then US-European security relations are unlikely to recover from Iraq.     

Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck and the foundations of history and politics

This article explores the intellectual relations between Carl Schmitt and the German historian Reinhart Koselleck with a focus on the inspiration that Koselleck found in Schmitt's work in the early 1950s. The article goes beyond earlier contributions in the field by illuminating how the most important discursive features that Koselleck drew from Schmitt were utilized toward a very independent intellectual project. This project concerned an attempt to revise modern political thought by means of outlining a new concept of history. Koselleck's concept of history was to depart from all utopian notions of history as a singular, unified and goal-directed process. Instead, it aimed to outline certain fundamental existential structures of the human condition and to take account of the social relations existing among human beings in order to understand (historically) and contain (politically) the potential conflict in human societies. Hence Koselleck believed that his new concept of history would lead to a more responsible foundation of political order and decision making. Following an analysis of how Koselleck developed his project in a dialogue with the work of Schmitt and a number of other scholars, first of all Friedrich Meinecke and Martin Heidegger, the article presents a brief perspective on how his new concept of history was received in the 1950s and on how it came to provide his work with a certain analytical, thematic and argumentative unity.     

Unsettling sovereignty: Violence,myths and the politics of history in the Ethiopian Somali metropolis

An increasingly consolidated anthropological scholarship has moved from a legal notion of sovereignty towards an analysis of its violent enactment. Yet, it has paid insufficient attention to the ways in which the idea of sovereignty forms and operates in localized political struggles. Taking seriously Bonilla’s (2017) call for the “unsettling” of sovereignty, this article scrutinizes how ideas of legitimate rule have formed around myths of violence in the capital of the Ethiopian Somali region. It uses ethnographic material to examine the politics of history around material constructions through which myths of violence are entangled with the city's landscape of memory. It reveals sovereignty in the process of formation, becoming culturally and materially grounded in the myths of violence of an emerging Somali nation within the ethnic federal Ethiopian state. This article argues that past claims to sovereignty continue to affect the politics of history, with profound consequences for ongoing nation-state building projects and the corresponding territorial imaginations. It thus highlights the inherently fragile nature of ideas of state sovereignty in the frontier metropolis. On this basis, it contributes to a geographically differentiated anthropology of sovereignty and to an understanding of its co-constitution through violence in the frontier and myths in the metropolis.     

Ten years on: Obama's war on terrorism in rhetoric and practice

Ten years after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington DC on September 11, 2001, the United States remains embroiled in a long‐term struggle with what George W. Bush termed the existential threat of international terrorism. On the campaign trail, his successor as US President, Barack Obama, promised to reboot the ‘war on terror’. He claimed that his new administration would step back from the rhetoric and much of the Bush administration policy, conducting a counterterrorism campaign that would be more morally acceptable, more focused and more effective—smarter, better, nimbler, stronger. This article demonstrates, however, that those expecting wholesale changes to US counterterrorism policy misread Obama's intentions. It argues that Obama always intended to deepen Bush's commitment to counterterrorism while at the same time ending the ‘distraction’ of the Iraq War. Rather than being trapped by Bush's institutionalized construction of a global war on terror, the continuities in counterterrorism can be explained by Obama's shared conception of the imperative of reducing the terrorist threat to the US. The article assesses whether Obama has pursued a more effective counterterrorism policy than his predecessor and explores how his rhetoric has been reconstituted as the actions of his policy have unfolded. By addressing his policies toward Afghanistan and Pakistan, Guantánamo Bay and torture, the uses of unmanned drone attacks and domestic wire‐tapping, this article argues that Obama's ‘war’ against terrorism is not only in keeping with the assumptions and priorities of the last ten years but also that it is just as problematic as that of his predecessor.