State budget outcomes and Australian state politics revisited: The impact of parties

This research note reviews work by Gerritscn on budget outputs in Australian States, and more specifically on the explanatory significance of Labor and non‐Labor parties in office. It also extends his work by introducing a comparative dimension across time. This consists of comparison of the findings for the period Gerritsen saidied (1979/80–1982/83) with a later period (1985/86–1987/88) to assess the impact of partisan change in Slate governments on their relative budget efforts. The findings offer more support for the partisanship hypothesis than Gerritsen's allowed, by virtue of the findings for Western Australia and Tasmania. It concludes that though budget efforts are structured by a number of factors, partisanship nevertheless appears a potent explanatory variable.     

Radicalization revisited: violence,politics and the skills of the body

For more than a decade, ‘radicalization’ has been a keyword in our understanding of terrorism. From the outset, radicalization was conceived of as an intellectual process through which an individual would increasingly come under a spell of extremist ideas. This ideological understanding of radicalization still prevails. In a 2015 speech on extremism, British Prime Minister David Cameron, for instance, claimed that the ‘root cause of the threat we face is the extremist ideology itself’. But the way we understand radicalization has specific consequences for the way we manage and fight the scourge of terrorism. Considering recent events, including the November 2015 Paris attacks, the present article sets out to reassess the above‐mentioned intellectualist understanding of radicalization and come up with new suggestions as to how radicalization may be understood today. Initially, the article suggests that ideology is not necessarily a precondition for violence, but that a prior experience with violence is more often a precondition for engaging an extremist ideology. Such experience with violence can be both domestic and international, obtained in Europe or Syria and other conflict zones. In the second part of the article it is argued that although radicalization is often conceived of as an individual process, pathways towards terrorism are inherently social and political. Finally, the article argues that by stressing the importance of ideology and ideological processes, concepts of radicalization have abstracted away from another factor that is pivotal for understanding pathways towards terrorist violence: the skills and capacities of the body.     

中国的文艺复兴——胡适以中国文化为题材的英文作品解析

胡适的大部分英文作品都以中国文化为主题.从他博士论文所表现的主旨看,从他对"中国文艺复兴"的历史诠释看,从他中西文化观前后期的演变看,从他在英文语境中与西方汉学家的对话看,他在英文作品里倾注的核心主题是"中国的文艺复兴".胡适的这一历史观既表现了他的民族主义情怀,也反映了他对现代化的基本认识,有着丰富的文化内含和复杂的历史境遇.