China,Natural Resources,Sovereignty and International Law

Abstract

This article explores China’s attitudes towards the regulation of key natural resources by international law, domestically and at the trans-boundary and international levels. It considers the impact of international law on China’s own practices, and the contribution of China towards shaping international law. The article suggests that popular conceptions of a relatively isolated, sovereign absolutist China do not accord with contemporary legal realities, including in its dealings with natural resources. While China’s construction of strong sovereignty shapes its attitudes towards legal regulation, practice also suggests that China adopts a nuanced approach which includes legal compromise, and a commitment to multilateral regulation or bilateral diplomatic settlement of issues previously within the competence of national governments. China is often an active and constructive participant in contemporary law-making, even if – like all countries – it also seeks to instrumentally use international law.     

At Once Human and Not Human: Law,Gender and Historical Becoming in Colonial Egypt

This article explores two approaches to the gendered human that occupied the historical stage of colonial Egypt. The first was juridical, the second was Islamic and mystical. Elaborating on the first, ‘juridical humanity’, this article probes the constitutive force of modern law in cementing the human as its teleology as well as the colonial operations of this force. Fashioning itself as an answer to the question ‘who is the human?’, juridical humanity took on particular salience in relation to women while engendering disciplinary operations: the humanising powers of colonial law instituted a system of bondage between the law and the woman‐human. The mystical articulation, on the other hand, offered a competing vision for the human, one that constituted an answer to the question ‘where is the human?’, thereby making impossible the unleashing of colonial humanising powers.     

Women,Gender and Migration along a Mediterranean Frontier: Pre‐Colonial Tunisia,c.1815–1870

This paper investigates gendered mechanisms for regulating migrants and migration in a pre‐colonial Muslim state, Tunisia, from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the eve of colonialism. Trans‐Mediterranean migration to, and permanent settlement in, nineteenth‐century Tunis, the capital city, constituted a major stimulus for political, cultural and social transformations that endured into the colonial period. Employing diverse documentation, the case study analyses this Mediterranean migratory current of ordinary women and men to test the theoretical literature based primarily on trans‐Atlantic movements, which has emphasised the ‘diversity of social positioning’ for women migrants. The paper argues that for pre‐colonial Tunisia, a state that was both an Ottoman province and a part of the larger Mediterranean world, the system of diplomatic protection represented a critical form of positioning. Moreover, Mediterranean states, both European and Muslim, had a long tradition of controlling the movements of women in port cities. Two distinct historical moments in the settlement of women from the Mediterranean islands in pre‐colonial Tunisia are compared. This approach not only enables an assessment of whether women's movements across international borders can attenuate, if only momentarily, patriarchal authority, but also encourages reflection on how gender explains historical variations in global migratory displacements as well as to what extent colonialism serves as an satisfactory explanatory framework for the gendering of communal boundaries.     

Infrastructural territorialisations: Mega-infrastructures and the (re)making of Kenya

This paper, based on historical and contemporary dynamics of railway infrastructures in Kenya, analyses how mega-infrastructures are central in state practices of infrastructural territorialisation – an infrastructure-based production of territoriality as a historically and geographically specific form of spatio-political order and organisation, imbued with social tensions, stemming from the state-led imposition of a techno-politics onto its territory. Focusing on territorial and political objectives of the state advanced through the Uganda Railway and the Standard Gauge Railway, the paper demonstrates how both of these projects have been central in colonial and contemporary practices of infrastructural territorialisation, albeit in mercurial ways that do not fully represent original techno-political intensions of the state. This discussion, first, highlights how megaprojects – although primarily analysed by recent geographical scholarship as advancing contemporary geographies of global capitalism – also contingently coalesce with state (re)territorialisation practices. Second, undertaking these analyses in the Kenyan context, the paper shows how, despite shared historical dynamics of contingent state territorialisation – and the reconstitution of racial and socio-economic inequalities, advanced through megaprojects that in Kenya are socially interpreted through historical experiences of colonialism – current infrastructural territorialisations are also different; whilst the colonial territorialisation of Kenya emerged as relatively unchallenged, its present state territory-making is undermined by both the global character of megaprojects and the external actors that the state relies on for its practices of infrastructural territorialisation.     

Creating environmental subjects: Conservation as counter-insurgency in Aceh,Indonesia, 1925–1940

This article examines the creation of Gunung Leuser Wildlife Reserve in the highlands of Aceh, Indonesia within the context of the Dutch-Aceh War in the early twentieth century, arguing that conservation was used as a form of counter-insurgency. While the agendas of the colonial military and conservationists diverged at times, they overlapped in their goals to secure Leuser from resident communities, whom they viewed as a threat to colonial order and the ecologies of the region. This article draws together the discourses of militarized conservation with their material implications. It does so by examining the nexus of military and conservation discourses, the historical context of park creation, and the processes by which colonial actors stole rights to land and created new laws and regulations dictating the people's relationships with and access to land. Scholars have shown that conservation discourses continue to normalize human rights abuses, Indigenous dispossession and displacement, and deadly violence against local peoples. These discursive tactics frame expertise and responsibility as residing in the hands of white elites who are tasked with saving imperiled environments from the people who depend on them for subsistence. I suggest that the military and conservation agendas were both operating within overlapping, constructed frameworks of crisis and emergency that constituted the resident communities as anti-environmental subjects. Discourses of environmental crisis in Leuser held a power that justified militarization while concealing the violence from international constituencies at a historical moment when an ideology of Western responsibility for threatened species around the world was growing. Moreover, the history of Leuser as viewed through the analytical framework of militarized conservation helps us rethink the history of Aceh. Through this framework, it becomes evident that the Dutch-Aceh War did not end in 1913, as many historians suggest, but instead continued throughout the colonial period.     

Language identity,linguistic diversity and political cleavages: evidence from Ukraine

ABSTRACT. This article revisits the notion of linguistic diversity and its function as a political cleavage. It argues that people's linguistic and cultural attitudes are influenced not only by their communicative practice but also by their identification with particular language(s) – even though they may not always communicate in that language. In Ukraine, from which my empirical data is drawn, language identity is embodied in the concept of native language that was imposed by the Soviet institutionalisation of ethnicity and came to mean ethnic belonging as much as linguistic practice. My analysis of survey data demonstrates that native language is a powerful predictor of people's attitudes and policy preferences with regard to both language use and other socially divisive issues, such as foreign policy and historical memory. This finding should also be applicable to other societies with a large‐scale discrepancy between language practice and identity.     

Colonial rule,colonial repression and war crimes in the Italian colonies

A strange silence has long reigned in the public memory as well as in Italian historical studies regarding possible crimes committed by Italy in its colonial territories. The aim of this article is to reflect on the reasons for this silence through an examination of the major historiographical questions and a review of the few studies available on the subject. The historiographical use of the judicial category of ‘crimes’ or ‘war crimes’ should not be taken for granted, above all in examining the history of the colonial experience. The most important authors have ignored the risk that the sensationalistic use of the category ‘crime’ – in itself an extraordinary and exceptional event – can make one forget the weight of the ordinary running of a colonial power. With these precautions, the article offers a list of the principal episodes historians now unanimously define as crimes. These episodes eliminate any possibility of taking refuge in the self-absolving and vague appeals to stereotypes of Italians as ‘good people’. The article concludes by defining precisely the triple order of silences that together produced the general silence that the author considers an obstacle and a post-colonial stain on the memory of colonial Italy.     

‘I Felt Connected to a Past World’: A Survey of Visitors to Colonial Archaeological Sites Conserved In Situ in Australia and New Zealand

Abstract

While there is extensive international literature on the technology and techniques of archaeological conservation and preservation in situ, there has been only limited discussion of the meanings of the places created and the responses they evoke in visitors. Experience in Australia and New Zealand over the past decade suggests that the conservation of colonial archaeological remains is today seen as a far more desirable option, whereas previously many would have suggested that this kind of conservation was only appropriate in ‘old world’ places like Greece and Italy; and that the archaeology of the colonial period was not old enough to be of value. This paper discusses a recent survey of visitors to colonial archaeological sites which reveals some of the ways in which these archaeological remains are experienced, valued, and understood, and gives some clues as to why conservation in situ is an expanding genre of heritage in this region. The visitors surveyed value colonial archaeological sites conserved in situ for the link they provide to place, locality, and memory; for the feeling of connection with the past they evoke; and for the experience they provide of intimacy with material relics from the past. This emphasis on the affective qualities of archaeological remains raises some issues in the post-colonial context, as it tends to reinforce received narratives of identity and history, and relies on the ‘European’ antiquarian appreciation of ruins — making the urban environment more like Europe by creating evidence of similar historical layering.     

History lessons for gender equality from the Zambian Copperbelt, 1900–1990

This article explores the historical causes and consequences of gender divisions of labour in the Zambian Copperbelt. Male breadwinner and female housewife stereotypes appear to have emerged as a product of imported Christian ideologies, colonial–capitalist concerns and an economic climate that largely enabled men to financially provide for their families. Reliant upon husbands for status and economic support, many urban women had little conjugal bargaining power. Gender divisions of labour also meant that people lacked first-hand evidence of women’s equal competence in employment and politics, who they thus often underrated and overlooked. Such perceptions seem to have perpetuated women’s exclusion from prestigious positions – a pattern sustained by macro-economic circumstances in the early decades of Independence. Compliance with the gender status inequalities promoted in pre-marital traditional initiation thus became necessary to marital and economic security, as well as respectability, which was not previously the case. While there were exceptions to these trends, the historical record illustrates the interplay between patterns of resource access, internalised gender stereotypes and cultural expectations.     

Beyond race: constructions of ‘Europeanness’ in late-colonial legal practice in the Dutch East Indies

This article proposes to introduce the study of European identity into colonial history and vice versa. It analyses the ways in which the legal classification of the population functioned in late-colonial Indonesia. A close inspection of this case reveals that the oft-cited fundamental colonial difference between ‘ruler’ and ‘ruled’ was in reality not nearly as clear-cut. The concept of ‘Europeanness’ – as opposed to ‘Whiteness’ – is highlighted as the category at the center of colonial hierarchy. This leads to a re-evaluation of the relative significance of various differentiating categories in the colonial context, most importantly race and class. The author concludes that by not taking ‘Europeanness’ seriously as an independent category, scholars of ‘cultural racism’ have tended to overemphasise ‘race’, with the consequence of oversimplifying the complex, multi-layered nature of the colonial social hierarchy.     

Emperors,bishops, art and jurisprudence: the transformation of law in Eusebius of Caesarea

This article analyses the collection and repurposing of legal documents in the early fourth‐century historical writings of Eusebius of Caesarea. Some of these individual documents have been the object of repeated study; others are still largely neglected. But they are even more interesting, I suggest, when considered as a collective, as Eusebius’ careful editing reveals they were intended to be. This mobilization of collated and embedded law was, I argue, the meeting of two separate wider trends that took off in this early fourth‐century watershed moment – the so‐called late antique artistic aesthetic, and the gradually changing legal dynamic between government and governed. Eusebius used both as strategies to resist imperial dominance in the uncertain times in which he wrote, constructing an image of the bishop capable of going toe to toe with emperors. In doing so, he anticipated not just the growing conflict between church and state in the centuries to come, but the rhetorical strategies that would come to be employed.     

Interning the Serpent: Witchcraft,Religion and the Law on Montserrat in the 20th Century

This article is an examination of the uneasy relationship between religion and witchcraft (the worship of the serpent/obeah) on the British colony of Montserrat in the Eastern Caribbean. It looks at obeah in the 20th century as practised by colonial British subjects and prohibited by British law imposed by British expatriates. Colonial governance is examined first through correspondence at the start of the 20th century, and then through newspaper archives and fieldwork reports and experiences throughout the century. The continued use of anti‐obeah laws by the British is shown to be an irrational but effective colonial technology of control.     

Reseau urbain et diffusion de l'innovation dans la France pre-industrielle: La creation des caisses d'epargne (1818–1848)

This paper discusses the paradigms of European history and of European civilisation defined in the main histories of Europe written from the Enlightenment to Guizot.

Voltaire, Robertson, Gibbon, and Guizot consolidated a model of the history of Europe which has its origins in the fall of the western Roman Empire and the invasions of the Barbarians. The other main steps of this history were the Christianisation, the creation of a vital economic centre in western and northern Europe, the development of the cities, the rediscovery of Roman law, the creation of a complex system of states, the colonial expansion and again the birth of a society of “good manners”.

A common civilisation which did not ignore the differences which existed between one country and another – the “national characters”, discussed by David Hume in 1748. Instead the different national characters – the variety of Europe as Guizot wrote – represented an important element of the European civilisation.     

Settler nationalism: Ulster unionism and postcolonial theory

Despite the capacity of postcolonial theory to accommodate a wide variety of situations, one area of postcolonial experience still has not received much attention – the experience of non-hegemonic settler colonies, that is settler colonies that did not in the end succeed in dominating native populations politically or culturally. Analysis of the unionist community in Northern Ireland offers a number of refinements to postcolonial theory at the same time that it demonstrates how postcolonial theory can enrich our understanding of non-hegemonic settler populations. While every postcolonial culture, native or settler, is uniquely structured by specific historical circumstances, there are features that many of these cultures share, such as hybridity, estrangement, incommensurability, contradiction, mimicry, miscognition, ambivalence, resistance, and the construction of mythical/historical narratives. The structure of these features, however, differs between native and settler cultures, and it differs in a way that makes one culture the mirror image of the other. This should not be surprising since the same colonial situation produces both native nationalism and settler nationalism, and they are both subject to similar colonial contradictions. Recognising settler nationalism as a legitimate part of postcolonial studies opens up the possibility of exploiting the in-betweenness of settler cultures. Emphasising this in-betweenness, and thus its affinities with native nationalism, suggests that settlers, particularly non-hegemonic settlers, are likely to find more in common with the natives they see themselves in opposition to rather than with the colonisers they identify with.     

Science for Competition among Powers: Geographical Knowledge,Colonial-Diplomatic Networks,and the Scramble for Africa**

Historical studies on the relationship between science and diplomacy tend to focus on events since World War II and on initiatives for the maintenance of peace or to achieve cooperation over contentious matters. This article presents the case of José Vicente Barbosa du Bocage (1823–1907), a Portuguese zoologist who had formal diplomatic responsibilities in a context of competition for the colonization of Africa in the nineteenth century. He used his knowledge in African geography to implement colonial and diplomatic strategies that aimed at outcompeting rival powers. The development of a network of actors with scientific, colonial, and diplomatic expertise was crucial for the negotiations that involved the partition of the Congo basin, which resulted in victories for Portugal that surpassed the country's marginal political relevance at the international level and had long-lasting consequences.     

Settler colonialism and cultural policy: the colonial foundations and refoundations of Canadian cultural policy

This article aims to reintegrate the colonial history of Canada as part of the grids of analysis for understanding the evolution of its Federal cultural policy. Building on the notion of settler colonialism and its implication for Indigenous population (For the purposes of this paper, the term ‘Indigenous’ is used in place of, perhaps, more popular or familiar terms – such as ‘Aboriginal’ or ‘Native’ – in order to remain consistent with current Indigenous politics. In particular, some Indigenous scholars are reluctant to accept the label Aboriginal because they feel it is consistent with the colonial order imposed by the Canadian government [Alfred and Corntassel 2005, p. 599]). The term Indigenous also alludes to a global political awareness and to forms of alterity between different populations from North America, South America, Asia, and the Pacific. in Canada, this paper documents different transformations in cultural policy and illustrates some of its paradoxes and challenges. Building on principles developed by Indigenous scholars, this article highlights some of the components for decolonizing cultural policy in Canada. It is argued that a post-colonial cultural policy must build on the grounds of ethics (and ethos).     

Nationalism,international factors and the ‘Irish question’ in the era of the First World War

Abstract. The ‘Irish question’ encompassed negotiations leading to the partition of Ireland in 1921. The paper considers factors that contributed to the growing tendency for the major players involved in the struggle – Irish nationalists, unionists and British officials – to adopt postures that were mutually irreconcilable. Conceptualising the problem in terms of Rogers Brubaker's ‘triadic nexus’ model of nationalisms reveals that the rigidity was encouraged by the dynamic interaction of nationalist representations employed by the three parties in response to the postures adopted by their rivals. Further, international factors – specifically, the prevailing international definition of nation and the position taken by the authority in place to adjudicate claims of nationhood – combined with regional pressures to consolidate Irish, Ulster and British nationalisms in such forms that militated against a compromise solution. By amending Brubaker's model to include international as well as regional forces, the analysis shows how understanding of the Irish contest can be enhanced if conceived as issuing from the continuous and reflexive interaction of three distinct nationalisms with and within an international context that itself was structured with respect to questions of nation.     

Hobbes's Contribution to International Thought,and the Contribution of International Thought to Hobbes

Summary

The aim of this article is to explore in what respects Thomas Hobbes may be regarded as foundational in international thought. It is evident that in contemporary international relations theory he has become emblematic of a realist tradition, but as David Armitage suggests this was not always the case. I want to suggest that it is only in a very limited sense that he may be regarded as a foundational thinker in international relations, and for reasons very different from those for which he has become infamous. In the early histories of international thought Hobbes is a cameo figure completely eclipsed by Grotius. In early histories of political literature, the classic jurists were often acknowledged for their remarkable contributions to international relations, but Hobbes is referred to exclusively as a philosopher of a positvist ethics and absolute sovereignty. It is among the jurists themselves that Hobbes is believed to have made important conceptual moves which set the problems for international thought for the next three centuries. He conflates natural law and the law of nations, arguing that they differ only in their subjects—the former individuals, the latter nations or states. This entailed transforming the sovereign into an artificial man, not in the Roman Law sense of an entity capable of suing and being sued; rather, as a subject not party to a contract, but created by a contract among individuals who confer upon it authority. This subject is not constrained by the contractors, but is, as individuals were in the state of nature, constrained by the equivalent of natural law, the law of nations in the international context. Throughout, the methodological implications are drawn for modern historians of political thought and political philosophers who venture to theorise about international relations.