Global Patterns in Island Colonization during the Holocene

Journal of World Prehistory - Analysis of the spatial and temporal structure of global island colonization allows us to frame the extent of insular human cultural diversity, model the impact of...     

Explaining Nationalist Violence

Abstract. Nationalism often involves risky and violent action. This has led many scholars to believe that its roots must be irrational. This attribution is ambiguous, however, because it fails to distinguish between two quite different meanings of the term ‘irrational’. In principle, nationalism can emanate either from social or from individual irrationality. Only the latter kind of irrationality is theoretically provocative, however. The hallmark of rational individual action lies in its instrumentality. Whereas many aspects of nationalism have been analysed successfully using instrumental behavioral assumptions, nationalist violence has been a significant exception. This article offers a framework for the explanation of nationalist violence in instrumental terms. It concludes by suggesting that the temptation to view nationalism as an outcome of individual irrationality should be resisted.     

Explaining the Congo Wars

Abstract

From 1996 to 2003, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was the scene of two major regional wars. The second Congo war (1998–2003) was an especially complex formation of wars within wars, characterised by repeatedly changing alliances between various actors, both internal and external, and by the spread of ethnic conflicts across national borders. However, the recent troubled history of the DRC has often been understood from either a national or an international perspective. The terms of this debate centred on whether the continental wars were linked either to the weak or collapsing state of Zaire/Congo or outside interferences by neighbouring states. The two studies reviewed in this essay both suggest ways of addressing this dichotomy between the internal and external dimensions of the conflicts. By analysing the multitude of conflicts from a regional perspective, both authors can aptly illuminate the linkages and interdependencies among local and national conflicts that became inextricably intertwined and developed into regional and continental conflicts. Thus, this review argues that both comprehensive works on the multiplicity of recent crises in the Great Lakes region significantly contribute to an understanding of the causes and evolution of the Congolese wars.     

The Political Dynamics of Tobacco Control in Australia and New Zealand: Explaining Policy Problems,Instruments, and Patterns of Adoption

Recent comparative studies of the politics of tobacco control have ranked Australia and New Zealand as two of the most restrictive regimes in the world. Yet traditionally Australia and New Zealand were tobacco-growing countries in which the government supported tobacco agriculture with a variety of subsidies. Despite a slow start in comparison to some other countries, by the 1990s these two had developed strong tobacco-control regimes. This paper addresses the rise of tobacco as a policy agenda problem, what policy instruments were utilised to deal with it, the pattern of adoption of policies between the two countries, and what explains the rapid progress of tobacco-control restrictions in these two countries, based on a comparative perspective.     

Explaining the Intensity of the Arab Spring

Politicians and pundits are quick to say that the Arab Spring has been caused by everything from an ominous “youth bulge” in the region's population to the spread of social media like Facebook and Twitter. Other observers blame the recent unrest on high levels of unemployment or on the government corruption endemic to the region. While there is a certain logic or intuitive sense to any or all these explanations, they have yet to be rigorously tested. Moreover, we do not know if these same factors explain intraregional variation in levels of unrest, or if, instead, factors specific to each particular country have caused some regimes to succumb to the violence while others have emerged unscathed. This article tests the conventional wisdom of the Arab Spring. We find some support for the notion that perceptions of government corruption and sudden price increases correlate with higher levels of unrest, although our confidence in these findings is limited by the small number of countries in our sample. Meanwhile, we find almost no evidence that population pressure or other forms of economic hardship are significant causes of intraregional variation in the intensity of unrest. Most strikingly, despite being touted as the “Twitter Revolution,” we find no evidence that unrest correlates with Internet access, cell phone use, or the use of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. These findings, such as they are, invite political observers and social scientists to search for other, case‐specific causes of civil unrest and regime instability.     

Explaining stability and change of territorial identities

A significant body of work examines the presence and strength of territorial political identities (either subnational, national or supranational). A common assumption of this literature is that the presence and strength of these political identities are invariant over time. Given the importance of political identity, it is surprising that this assumption has not been empirically tested. We address this omission by testing this assumption through considering the question of who is most likely to exhibit variation in the reporting of territorial identities and why. We posit that one source of instability in territorially based political identity is rooted in cognitive dissonance which emerges through the interaction of partisanship and electoral outcomes. We explore these questions using panel data from the British Election Study (1997–2001), the Canadian Election Study (2004–2008). Results reveal that the territorial identities of Labour and Liberal partisans, in Britain and Canada respectively, are compatible with expectations.     

Elusive polis: Explaining the MFP

Walter Hamilton. Serendipity City: Australia, Japan and the Multifunction Polis. Sydney: ABC Enterprises, 1991. 228 pp. A$29.95 (hardcover).

Ross E. Mouer and Yoshio Sugimoto (eds.). The MFP Debate: A Background Reader. Bundoora: La Trobe University Press, 1990. 166 pp. n.p.g. (paper).

Gavan McCormack (ed.). Bonsai Australia Banzai: Multifunctionpolis and the Making of a Special Relationship with Japan. Sydney: Pluto Press Australia, 1991. 228 pp. A$16.95 (paper).

Ian Inkster. The Clever City: Japan, Australia and the Multifunction Polis. Sydney: Oxford University Press, 1991. xi + 180 pp. $17.95 (paper).     

How the Pueblos Became Global: Colonial Appropriations, Resistance, and Diversity in the North American Southwest

Theories of colonialism and modernity often present divergent ways of understanding how indigenous populations became global, yet there are several points of intersection. These points include: (1) the heterogeneity present within indigenous groups that led to varied experiences of colonialism, (2) the diversity in colonial programs, (3) how the colonized and the colonizers appropriated goods and labor from each other, and (4) the variable practices of indigenous resistance. These intersections are illustrated through a discussion of the Pueblos of the North American Southwest, from the late “precontact” period (ca. AD 1400) to the present.     

Explaining the Rise of Rural Governance in Europe

This paper develops a new institutional economics account of the broad issues of governance in European rural development. It is argued that rural governance is determined by rural development stakeholders' property rights which in turn reflect their interests in rural development. On this basis, rural governance is explained in terms of the property rights structures reflecting the growing commonness of interests of rural development stakeholders.     

Explaining Advocacy Coalition Change with Policy Feedback

Despite the prominence of exogenous factors in theories of policy change, the precise mechanisms that link such factors to policy change remain elusive: The effects of exogenous factors on the politics underlying policy change are not sufficiently conceptualized and empirically analyzed. To address this gap, we propose to distinguish between truly exogenous factors and policy outcomes to better understand policy change. Specifically, we combine the Advocacy Coalition Framework with policy feedback theory to conceptualize a complete feedback loop among policy, policy outcomes, and subsequent politics. Aiming at theory-building, we use policy feedback mechanisms to explain why advocacy coalitions change over time. Empirically, we conduct a longitudinal single case study on policy-induced technological change in the German energy subsystem, an extreme case of policy outcomes, from 1983 to 2013. First, using discourse network analysis, we identify four patterns of actor movements, explaining coalition decline and growth. Second, using process tracing, we detect four policy feedback mechanisms explaining these four actor movements. With this inductive mixed-methods approach, we build a conceptual framework in which policy outcomes affect subsequent politics through feedback mechanisms. We develop propositions on how coalition change and feedback mechanisms explain four ideal-typical trajectories of policy change.     

八一起义的地缘政治学解读

以生存空间论为核心的地缘政治学过去主要用于考察国际关系与研究国家的对外战略,并因此曾一度成为西方大国对外扩张与侵略的理论依据而受     

Explaining,and explaining with,economic nationalism

This article rejects the widely held view that economic nationalism is an anachronistic economic doctrine in the age of globalisation. Rather than being the opposite of economic liberalism, as the conventional view maintains, economic nationalism is better understood as a generic phenomenon that can accommodate almost any doctrinal content, including economic liberalism. Economic nationalism is not so much about the economy as it is about the nation, as illustrated by literature on economic nations and national economic cultures. Such a broader conception of economic nationalism is then placed in the context of a larger ‘nationalising mechanism’ that sheds new light on a variety of phenomena discussed in the globalisation debate, such as economic performance, state disintegration, or cultural conflict, and success or failure in post-communist systemic change.     

Explaining Shell-Tempered Pottery in Prehistoric Eastern North America

Explanations for the rise in frequency of shell-tempered pottery in the Eastern United States have vacillated between historical and functional accounts. Using evolutionary theory, the historical records of first appearance and diffusion are woven with physical properties of shell-tempered pottery that may have led to its selection. An appreciation of the scale at which change occurs and the units of analysis most appropriate for understanding that change is necessary for an explanation that can account for the widespread use of shell-tempering and the more-or-less coincident rise in its frequency. A hypothesis with empirical consequences is offered as a starting point for understanding this phenomenon.     

Explaining the Failure of Thailand's Anti‐corruption Regime

Despite the presence of strong anti‐corruption policies, state and regulatory capture may persist and thrive in the highest echelons of government. This article explores such a case, that of Thailand under former Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. The author argues that the primary explanation for this contradiction lies in Thailand's post‐1997 anti‐corruption framework. Because of the ascendancy of a business–politics nexus more powerful in blocking reform than Thai constitutional drafters had anticipated, and because of the decline in political contestability as a result of Thaksin's control of both the legislature and the executive, the stage was set for a dramatic increase in the levels of state capture. The author suggests that effective control of such political corruption calls for a strategy which extends far beyond the technocratic approaches used by Thai reformers in the mid to late 1990s.