Remaking the architecture: the emerging powers,self‐insuring and regional insulation

This article examines the interaction between the emerging and traditional powers in global governance reform, and asks whether we are heading towards an international financial system that is more fragmented, where power is more diffused and national and regional arrangements play a more prominent role, at the expense of global multilateral institutions. It begins with a brief discussion of the global systemic and country‐specific factors that motivate Brazil, China and other emerging countries to accumulate large currency reserves. We find that national arrangements for managing financial and currency crises will continue to hold sway for emerging countries in the wake of the global crisis. However, the actual capacity of regional arrangements in managing future financial crises is uncertain, and the significance of regional alternatives in the emerging architecture should not be overstated. The real capacity of East Asian regional arrangements to manage financial crises, payments problems or currency attacks is still untested, and key thresholds in multilateralization still lie ahead. In South America, multilateral lender‐of‐last‐resort support inside the region is largely confined to the sub‐regional level and is limited by Brazil's reticence. Enduring reliance on bilateral measures for financial crisis management is noted. Where there has been progress in regional solutions, since the global crisis, has been in the role of regional development banks in providing financing for developing countries to enact counter‐cyclical policies. Such support also provides insulation for states in the region against the contagion effects of international financial crisis. We are in the midst of transitioning to a more diverse and multi‐tiered global financial and monetary system. A reformed IMF could have a role to play in addressing global imbalances and encouraging a shift from national reserves to collective insurance, however, it would be preconditioned by significant shifts in the policy, lending operations, and internal governance of the Fund, and willingness among the G20 to strike a new consensus on how to deal with imbalances, and new accommodation on acceptable reserve levels.     

Poland in the ‘Paris system’: self‐determination,stereotypes, and decisions in 1919

One of the most important questions at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference was what to do about the newly re‐created state of Poland. The Paris peacemakers realised the importance of the settlement, thanks in part to dire warnings about Poland's future, and the leaders spent much time discussing the territorial settlement. Yet discussions of this important question regularly strayed from debates about policy to incorporate understandings of Polish national character. In particular, the leaders of the so‐called Big Three, Britain, France, and the United States, connected expert opinion and the broader political landscape to stereotyped understandings of national character, among other factors. With reference to scholarship on stereotyping, this article analyses how developing attitudes on Polish national character became integrated into the complex settlement of Poland's borders. The peacemakers' decisions, which were a compromise between different points of view, reflected interconnected understandings of the Polish settlement.     

Territoriality,self‐determination and Crimea after Badinter

The Arbitration Commission of the Conference on Yugoslavia provided the basis of the post‐Cold War territorial settlements in Europe. These included democratization criteria for the recognition of the new states in central Europe and a new territorial concept that allowed the internal borders of federated states to serve as international borders. In the process, the commission endorsed cultural nationalism within fixed borders and encouraged a significant degree of political self‐determination. The commissioners also supported identity nationalism as a genuine aspiration, giving rise to ‘an interesting direction of thought’ concerning the interpretation and meaning of the self‐determination of peoples, and these provoked an enhanced understanding and protection of the rights of minorities. This was to provide a basis for the legitimacy claims not only of Bosnian Serbs and Kosovars, but also of Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Crimea.     

Nationalism and self‐determination in contemporary Ethiopia

The 1995 Ethiopian Constitution envisions a multinational state with the right to self‐determination, including secession, given to the nations, nationalities, and peoples of the country. This remarkable document is a product of a unique combination of Ethiopia's history, Marxist‐Leninist debates of the 1974 revolution, and political circumstances of the time the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) took power in 1991. The subsequent 20 years witnessed a concerted attempt to implement measures for federal decentralization alongside continued political centralization in the ruling party, with several intended and unintended consequences. Since 2016, a combination of the manipulation of constitutional provisions for personal and factional advantage, and polarized perspectives over the identity and future of the country, have unveiled a chapter of political crisis. The 1995 Constitution is hardly a cause of this crisis, yet the fate of the Constitution has become central to the dynamics of the crisis.     

Market size,occupational self‐selection,sorting, and income inequality

We develop a monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous agents who self‐select into occupations (entrepreneurs and workers) depending on innate ability. The effect of market size on the equilibrium occupational structure crucially hinges on properties of the lower tier utility function—its scale elasticity and relative love‐for‐variety. When combined with the underlying ability distribution, the share of entrepreneurs and income inequality can increase or decrease with market size. When extended to allow for the endogenous sorting of mobile agents between cities, numerical examples suggest that sorting may increase inequality within and between cities.     

Standards of self‐determination and standards of minority‐rights in the post‐communist era: a historical perspective

Abstract. In the recent Yugoslav crisis, the decisions of the international community sparked off a sharp debate on the recognition of self‐determination claims, reminiscent of the debates in the aftermath of the First World War. This article compares and contrasts the principles and practices of the international community in these two periods. It draws a parallel between the simultaneous strengthening of self‐determination norms and minority protection norms, first at Versailles and then in the midst of the recent Balkan crisis. Though the processes showed many similarities, there was one crucial difference: by the time of the Balkan crisis, the international community had come to regard minority autonomies as the most appropriate form of protection for compact minorities in new nation‐states born of ethnic separatism. While in the Versailles system minority protection norms were meant as compensations for the denial of self‐determination, in the Balkan crisis the autonomies were regarded as the highest form of minority protection, which in turn increased the perceived risk of minority separatism in new states. It is in this context that the article presents the debate over the traditional and more recent approaches to the ‘unit question’, which has haunted scholars and policy‐makers ever since the concept of self‐determination emerged as an international norm.     

A 16th‐Century Ship‐Find from Amager Beach Park,Denmark: description and preliminary interpretation

When establishing the new Amager Beach Park near Copenhagen, Denmark, a small clinker‐built ship dating to the 16th century (dendro‐dated to 1560–70) was discovered. The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde excavated the wreck in 2004, and parts of the ship were later taken to the museum and recorded in 3D. This article describes the excavation and the documentation, and presents the preliminary interpretation of the ship‐find. The ship is interpreted as a small cargo vessel, probably carrying two masts. Its hull‐form indicates that the vessel was specially designed for navigating the waters of the Sound between Denmark and Sweden. © 2010 The Author     

The necessary indeterminacy of self‐determination: Politics,law and conflict in the Horn of Africa

This article frames a themed collection on Nationalism and Self‐determination in the Horn of Africa. It demonstrates how the praxis of self‐determination in the Horn of Africa has contributed to normative developments. On the basis of case studies of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan/South Sudan this article argues that nationalism and self‐determination have had different meanings in the political cultures across the different countries and have changed over time. We contend that such indeterminacy is unavoidable and should be welcomed. Nationalism is driven by historical circumstances that are contingent and often transitory. Self‐determination claims based on such nationalism are equally contingent and transitory. When the principle of self‐determination gets translated into concrete legal entitlements (for instance, a referendum on independence), it tends to solve one problem only by creating others. Instead, the pursuit and realization of self‐determination require constant political processes.     

Identity,class and civil society in Scotland’s neo‐nationalism

Civil society has become a central and contested concept in the study of Scottish nationalism. This article aims to scrutinise and qualify the concept by relating it to Weber’s model of classes, status groups and parties, and by exploring the development of Scotland’s civil society along with the welfare state in the twentieth century. It argues that civil society needs to be understood as a zone of status‐group formation, and that attempts to relate ‘class’ and ‘identity’ to support for constitutional change in Scotland need to be complemented by attention to the role of status groups in civil society. It concludes with the suggestion that such an approach might be fruitful in the study of other cases of neo‐nationalism.     

Style and self‐making: String bag production in the Papua New Guinea Highlands

The looped netbag or bilum is one the most culturally significant of everyday objects in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Made exclusively by women, bilum are also iconic of female productive and reproductive labour. In this article, I analyze how growing social stratification is expressed through the types of bilums young women produce and wear. I argue that the choices that young women make about what kinds of designs, shapes, colours, and fashions to incorporate into their bilums can tell us a great deal about their desires, experiences, and imaginings. While previous analyses have focused on the bilum as an ambiguously gendered object expressing complex ideas about sexual difference, I argue that bilum style increasingly indexes complex ideas about geography and social location, materializing contemporary Papua New Guinean ‘imaginaries’ of space.     

Alan Turing: Artificial intelligence as human self‐knowledge

This article explores the life and ideas of Alan Turing (1912–1954), commonly known as the father of artificial intelligence (AI), and highlights the process whereby the human self is reconceptualized in the development of Turing's ideas of machine intelligence. I will further illustrate how this process of self‐reconceptualization – composed of the pursuit, adaptation and transformation of self‐knowledge – is closely related to contemporary digital life. In doing so, I wish to reveal the ways in which Turing's underlying self‐transforming agenda of AI can contribute to our understanding of the human self, for AI, as I will argue, leads to questions of existence and existential anxieties.     

A Late Iron Age Boat‐Grave from Petersdal,Denmark

In 1921 a secondary grave was excavated in a Bronze Age burial‐mound on the island of Amager in the strait of Øresund between Denmark and Sweden. Recently the material was examined in detail and the result is presented here. This grave proved to be one of the few Late Iron Age boat‐graves in South Scandinavia. The boat, only preserved through a pattern of clench‐nails, was 10–12 m long. It contained traces of grave‐goods: sword, spear, riding‐gear, bucket and chest, but no trace of a body survived. The grave is contextually dated to the first half of the 8th century. © 2012 The Author     

The ambiguities of self‐determination: IGAD and the secession of South Sudan

This paper examines the 1994 Declaration of Principles (DoP) for the resolution of the Sudanese civil war, adopted by the Inter‐Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD). This was the only occasion on which an African inter‐state organization included separation as an option for resolving a civil war. It was the basis for South Sudan's independence in 2011. The DoP was drafted by the Ethiopian government, and imposed on belligerent parties, both of which were, at the time, unionist. The paper identifies two concepts of self‐determination within the DoP— independence for colonial territories and the Marxist‐Leninist idea of self‐determination for national groups. The rationale for including both arose from Ethiopian leadership within IGAD. The paper also examines the diverse Sudanese debates on self‐determination, including several strands of nationalism, Islamism, and the ‘New Sudan’ of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM). There was radical disagreement among Sudanese on national identity and self‐determination, creating ambiguities that ironically facilitated the exercise in southern self‐determination in 2011. Drawing on documentation of Sudanese negotiations, the paper examines how the DoP unlocked the Sudanese debate on the issue, and how the different concepts fared up to the time of the independence of South Sudan.     

The Ernest Gellner Nationalism Lecture: The Soviet Union,self‐determination,and the creation of the postwar human rights system

The USSR played a key role in the establishment of the post‐World War II human rights system despite its repressive and even murderous domestic record. It forged an alliance with the countries of the Global South in support of decolonization, self‐determination, and social and economic rights, policies opposed by liberal states like the United States, Great Britain, and France. These positions were deeply rooted in the socialist tradition. Moreover, when a human rights movement emerged in the mid‐1960s, its members—in its origins overwhelmingly from the intelligentsia—called not for the overthrow of the Soviet Union but for the fulfilment of Soviet law. The language of rights, proclaimed with such flourish in the 1936 constitution and its successor in 1977, served as the weapon hurled by dissidents as they called on the Soviet government to respect freedom of speech and assembly, and national rights, including the right to emigrate. In turn, the international human rights movement developed from the 1960s to the 1990s largely through support for the Soviet dissident movement, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch prime examples. The Soviet experience is critical to any global history of human rights.     

阿富汗难民:历史、现状及影响

阿富汗难民主要由三股难民潮造成,当前仍有数量众多的阿富汗难民滞留在国外.自塔利班政权倒台后,阿富汗难民的遣返工作进展并不顺利,这体现出在后冷战时期,国际社会尤其是西方对阿富汗难民问题的冷漠.阿富汗难民问题不仅会影响到阿富汗的重建,还会影响到阿富汗的对外关系,且难民营有成为恐怖主义滋生地、输出地的趋势,这是国际社会必须要认真对待的.     

The garden in Umayyad society in al‐Andalus

The majority of Arab sources concerning gardens and spaces dedicated to the cultivation of any kind of plant species in al‐Andalus date mainly from the eleventh century onwards and offer very little specific information about the Umayyad period (mid‐eighth to the beginning of the eleventh centuries). However, we do know the importance that gardens, understood broadly, had both in the material and daily life, as well as in the emblematic and symbolic life, of al‐Andalus during the Umayyad period. The present article reconsiders the early history of the Andalus garden in the context of the cultural history of the Umayyad period in order to understand better the foundations of the specific nature of Andalusī gardens and to show that, despite the influence of the reigning dynasty, the history of the garden in al‐Andalus has a notably collective dimension.