Becoming a conservation ‘good power’: Norway’s early World Heritage history

Abstract

States stand at the core of the World Heritage Convention and their multifaceted interstate relations have been a central subject in contemporary World Heritage research. Less research has been directed towards intrastate relations, that is relations between organisation-agencies and individual agents within a State Party. Spurring from the 40th anniversary of Norway’s ratification of the World Heritage Convention, this paper utilises archival records to explore the intrastate relations and transactional authority at play within the State Party of Norway. Inspired by recent research in international relations and political science, it analyses Norway’s ratification process (1972–1977) through its early years as an observer (1978–1983) to its first committee tenure (1983–1989). Currently known as one of the spokespersons for scientific advice, returning to the 1980s provides an opportunity to reflect on how Norway laid the foundations for becoming a conservation ‘good power’ through its actions and responses to other states’ lobbying efforts.     

The Shaping of John Lambert's Allegiance and the Outbreak of the Civil War

Abstract

'Sir Philip Musgrave and the Re-Establishment of the "Old Regime" in Cumberland and Westmorland c. 1660–1664: Local Loyalty and National Influence'. This paper examines the career of Sir Philip Musgrave in Cumberland and Westmorland during the period 1660–64, and illuminates the continuing integration of outlying English regions and their gentry families into a national polity, wherein gentry horizons frequently stretched beyond the boundaries of their native counties, and in which their local and national political 'worlds' were often inextricably linked. Musgrave was eager to consolidate the newly restored authority of the monarchy and Church of England, as well as his own influence within the returning 'old regime'. In cooperating with central government against Protestant Nonconformity, Quakerism and political insurrection in the Lake Counties, Musgrave and other local government officials highlight how local and central interests could dovetail. On one level, Sir Philip had little difficulty in perceiving himself as a straightforward servant of the State, declaring himself a 'State physician' during the application of the Corporation Act in Cumberland and Westmorland. Yet, as this paper will demonstrate, Sir Philip Musgrave was more than a mere compliant Royalist yes-man. As servants of central government, Musgrave and a number of his local associates were extremely important as agents of political innovation. In interpreting, applying and calling for changes in policy, they demonstrate that the exercise of political power in the developing British State was not simply a top-down process.     

‘Beyond anything we have ever seen’: beheading videos and the visibility of violence in the war against ISIS

This article examines the role of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria's (ISIS's) beheading videos in the United Kingdom and the United States. These videos are highly illustrative demonstrations of the importance of visual imagery and visual media in contemporary warfare. By functioning as evidence in a political discourse constituting ISIS as an imminent, exceptional threat to the West, the videos have played an important role in the re‐framing of the conflict in Iraq and Syria from a humanitarian crisis requiring a humanitarian response to a national security issue requiring a military response and intensified counterterrorism efforts. However, this article seeks to problematize the role and status of ISIS's beheadings in American and British security discourses by highlighting the depoliticizing aspects of reducing a complicated conflict to a fragmented visual icon. The article concludes by emphasizing the need for further attention to how the visibility of war, and the constitution of boundaries between which acts of violence are rendered visible and which are not, shape the political terrain in which decisions about war and peace are produced and legitimized.     

THE POLITICS OF COURT REFORM:d IN A NUTSHELL

State court reform is proceeding at an ever-quickening pace. A major theme is centralized state judicial leadership and management in court organization and funding, and improved methods for the selection and discipline of judges. Trends in court reform, groups supporting and opposing change and a brief evaluation of some court reform efforts are examined. Court reform is viewed as a political process.     

The Matabeleland Massacres: Britain's wilful blindness

This article explores an episode of post-colonial state violence in the newly independent Zimbabwe, namely state-sanctioned atrocities by the army unit known as Fifth Brigade, perpetrated against the Ndebele of Matabeleland and Midlands region. This episode of political and ethnic violence that occurred between 1983 and 1987 is referred to as both the Matabeleland Massacres and Gukurahundi. Members of the British government in Zimbabwe, which included a British Military Advisory Training Team (BMATT) on the ground, were intimately aware of the violence that resulted in the death of between 10,000 and 20,000 people. This article analyses official British and US government communications between the British High Commission, Harare, and the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Cabinet Office, the Prime Minister's Office and the Ministry of Defence, London, as well as between the US Department of State and the US Embassy in Harare. Analysis of the documents dated between January and March 1983 sheds a critical new lens on Gukurahundi, establishing what knowledge was available to the British and US governments about the persistent and relentless atrocities taking place; the diplomatic approaches pursued by both governments in response; and their rationale for same. The hitherto unavailable material presented here was obtained by Freedom of Information requests to various British Government offices and to the US Department of State. Analysis establishes that the British High Commission, Harare, had detailed knowledge of events unfolding in Matabeleland from an early stage of Gukurahundi, yet senior members of BMATT and the British diplomatic team in Harare, in contrast to their US counterparts, were consistent in their efforts to minimise the magnitude of Fifth Brigade atrocities. That the British government chose to adopt a policy of wilful blindness towards the atrocities undoubtedly constituted naked realpolitik.     

The limits of control: Technological agency,urban terrain,strategy and the state in the 2014 Gaza War

This article reassesses of the role of military technologies both in normative strategic thought and in the critical geopolitics literature by problematising their shared tendency towards representing the power of military technologies in a binary and sometimes hyperbolic way in relation to the complexity of terrain and the emergent intensity of war. In order to do so, it borrows theoretically from Object-Oriented-Ontology, using Harman's concept of “duomining” in dialogue with other understandings of material agency from assemblage theory and Actor-Network-Theory. This interstitial epistemology is applied to analyse the political implications for the State of Israel of its military's decisions on the use of weapons in urban warfare during the 2014 Gaza War. Through this framing, the paper argues that technological agency is ambivalent to the project of state stabilisation, and can act across spatial and temporal boundaries in ways unanticipated by political and strategic decisionmakers. It also demonstrates, counterintuitively, that technological objects can exercise agency as much by their absence as their presence in an event. These findings foreground the need for a more accurate accounting of what technological objects are, not just what they do, alongside a more nuanced consideration of the contingency of their power to shape politics in relation to the complex milieu of human and non-human factors that comprise geopolitical phenomena.     

The political significance of the coinage of the Irish Free State

This article examines the political context of the new Irish coinage that was introduced in 1928. It attempts to illustrate how the coins of the Irish Free State were products of the political circumstances of their time. The article also analyses the political negotiations concerning the future of the large quantity of British coins that remained in circulation in the Irish Free State. The conclusion will argue that the Irish coins issued in 1928 were of considerable political importance as symbols of national identity visible to the general public on a daily basis. Symbols of this nature were of particular significance to the Irish Free State because its status as a sovereign state was open to dispute in the 1920s and 1930s. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 made it clear that the Irish Free State was a Dominion of the British Empire. This article will argue that the political background to the introduction of the new Irish coins reflects wider controversies that dominated Irish politics and external relations in the years between the two world wars.     

Africa after the Cold War: New Patterns of Government and Politics

The state-system of Africa is still essentially the one created by the colonial powers and passed on intact at independence. But the political economy of these states — the substance of political life within fixed territorial boundaries — is changing very profoundly as a result of the breakdown of the style of government of recent decades and the decline of economies based on the export of primary commodities. The political economy which is emerging, still within the same territorial boundaries, is best understood by reference to Africa's history over a long period.     

Producing North and South: a political geography of hydro development in Québec

Since the 1970s, the tapping of James Bay's hydroelectric potential has been synonymous with the tapping of divergent national imaginaries for native and non-native people in Québec. Exploitation of natural resources in the region has activated different narratives of political identity for each community. I explore this evolving political context by examining how, for each group, water has emerged simultaneously as a physical entity possessing economic value and a social artefact supporting the consolidation of national boundaries. I do so by analysing three phases of changing relationships around resource management, namely: hydroelectric development on the La Grande river in the 1970s; the Cree opposition to Great Whale in the 1990s; and the recent agreement concerning a new relationship between the two parties. In each of these phases, nature has been both the symbolic and material tie that binds different national identities and materialises their boundaries. While these are not boundaries in the traditional geopolitical understanding of the term, the forging of an equitable framework of development in the region depends on the recognition of nature as a historical and political formation that answers to different sets of national preoccupations.     

Leadership and voting: the connection at the state level

While it is now well established that Australian party leaders at the national level influence political choice in federal elections, little systematic study has been undertaken of the equivalent role that State Premiers and Opposition Leaders might play. In the 2001 Australian Election Study (n=2010), questions were asked of a national probability sample of voters about respondent feelings towards their State Premier and State Opposition Leader, in addition to equivalent questions about Prime Minister John Howard, Opposition Leader Kim Beazley and other major political figures in federal politics. The data generated by this survey thus provide an opportunity to investigate the impact that contemporary State political leaders have on electoral choice. The analysis produces mixed results, but the findings show that State leaders generally do have an impact on voting behaviour in State elections, although in some cases this influence is eliminated when account is taken of voter attitudes towards the federal leaders. The analysis also affords an opportunity to test the extent of crossover between State and federal politics, in terms of how much State leaders influence federal voting and vice versa. While the results are somewhat uneven, they do indicate that some State leaders influence federal voting and that the federal leaders do influence voting in some States.     

Roi mineur et naissance de la majesté dans les discours auliques

The numerous treatises on reason of State are part of a genre which theorises political actions a posteriori. It is not possible for reason of State to be expressed directly and publicly ? How is it staged by the State itself ? Courtly literature, with its subtle dialectic of imitation and idealization, contains abundant material exemplifying this manifestation as representation, all the more significant when it concerns an interregnum. The minor age of the prince, his crowning and the ceremony of his coming of age are essential moments which are surrounded by the rhetoric of praise and during which the State institutes in the prince both the faculty of reason and its own reason: a panegyric reason of State.     

International migration and the politics of admission and exclusion in postwar Europe

"Although nation-states assume territorial, political and cultural boundedness, their boundaries are not uniform barriers, but rather are characterized by varying degrees of openness and closure to international migrants. The manipulation of the permeability of these boundaries constitutes the politics of admission and exclusion....This paper provides a discussion of the complex economic, political and social forces impinging on the politics of admission and exclusion and an analysis of how these forces have been operating in a particular historical and geographical context to determine the admission of international migrants into national territory and community....There are signs that the integration of nation-states into regional blocs such as the EC is shifting the politics of admission and exclusion practised by the dominant member countries to the supra-national scale."     

The Rhetorical Framing of Policy Intervention

When prime ministers speak, the nation usually listens. In the Australian federation, prime ministers have consistently used the power of their political pulpit to launch policy interventions into areas of traditional State responsibility. This article suggests that there is an emerging rhetorical pattern to the way these policy interventions are presented. Prime ministers of both major parties have used rhetoric to portray the Commonwealth as acting on behalf of the legitimate interests of constituents who have been ignored by State governments. Occurring in close proximity to federal elections, policy interventions are shown to be weapons which favour incumbent prime ministers in their battles with State governments and federal oppositions alike.     

Mapping the nation: street names and Arab‐Palestinian identity: three case studies

The naming of streets is part of the ongoing process of mapping the boundaries of the nation. This article examines three sets of Arab‐Palestinian street names – pre‐1948 Haifa and Jerusalem and post‐1948 Umm el Fahm – as locally constructed ‘texts of identity’ in the historical and political context of their official creation. The investigation aims at charting the ideological orientations represented and the political messages entailed in these three different textual manifestations of Arab‐Palestinian national identity. The analysis focuses on notions of historical and cultural heritage as expressed in the choice of street names. Finally, it offers an interpretative evaluation of this process, placing it within broader ideological and historical contexts.     

Political Correctness and Political Science: An Exploratory Study of New York State

Abstract

The term political correctness identifies a controversy that has gained wide coverage in the press over the last several years concerning academic policy in higher education in the United States. In an effort to obtain some preliminary indication of how widespread perceptions of political correctness are among political scientists, a survey of political scientists in New York State was conducted in December 1991. The survey revealed that at least in New York, political scientists are likely to perceive political correctness as an issue on their college campus and in the discipline but generally not in their departments.     

地域文化与国家文化——三晋文化与山西文化关系辨析

战国时代在"争于市朝"的政治策略下,韩、赵、魏的发展重点先后离开山西,同时使三晋文化带有强烈的经世致用和急功近利的色彩。处于政治冲突中心的国家所承载的文化往往直接体现时代的风貌,与山西在历史变迁中自然形成的地域差异和自身文化特质有本质的区别。将三晋文化视为山西文化的直接源头甚至发展巅峰的观点是值得推敲的。     

Welsh Office exceptionalism,economic development and devolution, 1979 to 1997

Between 1979 and 1997, five successive Conservative Secretaries of State headed the Welsh Office, the government department responsible for administratively devolved activity. The extent to which these ministers developed their own ‘exceptional’ policies at variance with those of central government was much debated, most commonly in relation to economic development. This paper examines such activity to make three arguments. First, exceptionalism took place, but was constrained by the nature of administrative devolution. Second, it often reflected the individual political philosophies of Secretaries of State and their ambitions on the UK’s political stage, as opposed to any desire for autonomy. Third, it was a crucial if inadvertent factor behind convincing the electorate that political devolution was both feasible and desirable. Overall, exceptionalism was driven by the Secretary of State’s ability to marshal the public sector behind his policy objectives, the momentum of existing institutions and the characteristics of each minister.     

Self‐determination and a shattered star: Statehood and national identity in the Somali Horn of Africa

This article explores the articulation—in different forms, at different periods, and by different actors—of ‘national self‐determination’ in Somalia and across the Somali‐speaking regions of the Horn of Africa. It explores how this concept can be understood in the context of protracted political fragmentation in Somalia—considering unresolved debates over the ideological foundations of state reconstruction, disagreements about the suitability of federalism, aspirations for the recognition of an independent Republic of Somaliland, and the distinctive trajectory of the Somali Regional State in Ethiopia. Taking a comparative, cross‐border and wide‐angled historical approach, the article argues that ideas of an ethno‐linguistically, culturally and religiously defined Somali ‘nation’ continue to coexist (and be reproduced, updated and used) within an environment of extreme political fragmentation and across multiple ‘state’ boundaries. This argument is made through comparative analysis of contemporary examples of the performance of Somali state and nationalist identities within and beyond the region and the distinctive transnational Somali‐language media environment within which these ideas circulate and compete.     

Modern science and western culture: The issue of time

Histories of Britain and Ireland are still often written as if cultural and political influences were limited by national or insular boundaries. This article offers a broader perspective by tracing the impact of events, parallels and ideas from continental Europe on British opinion and policy towards Ireland since 1848. It demonstrates that these European influences have often been more threaded and complex than is commonly assumed, and that to review transnational connections can be to illustrate neglected possibilities and to liberate repressed historical potential. Indeed, the role of European referents in political discourse towards the contemporary Northern Ireland conflict retains considerable ambiguity and room for political manoeuvre.     

Layers of religious and political iconoclasm under the Islamic State: symbolic sectarianism and pre-monotheistic iconoclasm

This article examines the heritage destruction undertaken by the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria. To date, their iconoclasm has been mostly characterised either as acts of wanton barbarism devoid of religious or political justification, or as a cynical performance designed as a mass media spectacle. Drawing on a systematic analysis of two key IS propaganda outlets – their on-line magazine, Dabiq, and the various slick films released by Al-Hayat – this article argues that the heritage destruction perpetrated by the IS are not only situated within a carefully articulated theological framework and key to the creation of a new and ideologically pure ‘Islamic State’, but that they are also constituted by several complex layers of religious and political iconoclasm. To demonstrate, this article documents the iconoclasm undertaken by the IS along two key axes: Symbolic Sectarianism (Shia and Sufi mosques and shrines); and Pre-Monotheistic Iconoclasm (ancient polytheistic sites). Attacks on key sites within these categories, such as the Sayyida Zaynab shrine in Damascus or the Mosul Museum, not only adhere to their religious and political framework but also serve broader geo-political agendas and are attacked as proxy targets for their physical and ideological opponents.