HEGEMONY,IMPERIALISM, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF RELIGION IN EAST AND SOUTHEAST ASIA1

Edward Said's concept of Orientalism portrays the high tide of nineteenth‐century imperialism as the defining moment in the establishment of a global discursive hegemony, in which European attitudes and concepts gained a universal validity. The idea of “religion” was central to the civilizing mission of imperialism, and was shaped by the interests of a number of colonial actors in a way that remains visibly relevant today. In East and Southeast Asia, however, many of the concerns that statecraft, law, scholarship, and conversion had for religion transcended the European impact. Both before and after the period of European imperialism, states used religion to engineer social ethics and legitimate rule, scholars elaborated and enforced state theologies, and the missionary faithful voiced the need for and nature of religious conversion. The real impact of this period was to integrate pre‐existing concerns into larger discourses, transforming them in the process. The ideals of national citizenship and of legal and scholarly impartiality recast the state and its institutions with a modernist sacrality, which had the effect of banishing the religious from the public space. At the same time, the missionary discourse of transformative conversion located it in the very personal realm of sincerity and belief. The evolution of colonial‐era discourses of religion and society in Asia since the departure of European imperial power demonstrates both their lasting power and the degree of agency that remains implicit in the idea of hegemony.     

时移势变：论包世臣与常州士人的交往及经世思想的嬗变

嘉道之际,考据学仍在发展,经世思潮正在兴起.作为经世思潮初期中心人物,包世臣并非孤独的独行者,他与常州士人关系极为密切,自视"常州同党",他的用世精神得到常州士人的呼应,从而在江南形成了颇有声势的经世思潮.包世臣经世之道以取得实效为宗旨,故他不愿持论过高,而是主要针对具体时政而论,正因为如此,随着社会矛盾焦点的转移,他思考问题的重心也随之改变,相应的对策也发生变化.     

“通经”以何“致用”——龚自珍、魏源西北研究之比较

道成之际,经世致用之风重新兴起,西北史地研究渐成“显学”。龚自珍、魏源关于西北史地的研究以及开发西北、经营西北的思想体现了他们的经世意识,也具有一些近代意识。二人西北研究的经世目的、政策有很大的相似之处,也由于经历与时代的不完全相同而在经营西北、抵制侵略的策略上有明显差异。他们关于西北的历史、地理、风俗、制度、人17、文化的基础性研究,不仅对于历史、今天的西部开发有重要价值,而且为后世树立了榜样。     

晚明复社的社会活动与社会思想——兼论复社学术的经世取向

晚明文人结社,尤以复社规模最巨,影响最大,活动最频繁.复社的社会活动具有明显的时代特色和政治取向.与复社社会活动形成鲜明照映的是复社的社会思想和经世学术.社会思想在诸如经世济民、名节道义方面,都体现出强烈的社会历史意义;而学术体系中的经学、史学成绩皆有着深刻的经世内涵.复社的社会思想与学术取向,在明清之际的社会转变中,具有不可或缺的、承前启后的重大历史意义.     

Rethinking popular geopolitics in the Falklands/Malvinas sovereignty dispute: Creative diplomacy and citizen statecraft

For more than twenty years popular geopolitics has proven an intriguing and fruitful field of research. It has spurred a lasting interest in everything from movies to stamps as important cultural artefacts that reveal to their audiences the geopolitical visions of their producers. This paper, however, brings into question the ‘popularity’ of popular geopolitics. Using recent examples from the ongoing dispute over the Falkland Islands, we examine the influence of social media and the associated flourishing of ‘citizen statecraft’ which, through its production of geopolitical knowledges, hints at the possibilities of a genuinely popular geopolitics 2.0. We also examine how creative practices, understood in myriad ways in relation to ‘statecraft’, work to unsettle and complicate previously tidy geopolitical categories of the ‘popular’, the ‘formal’, and the ‘practical’. We suggest, by way of conclusion, that ‘citizen statecraft’ may be productive in the flourishing of new modes of international dialogue between communities in dispute.     

《四库全书总目》虚实论的辩证结构

中国古代的学术批评,往往以"虚""实"作为评价尺度,但是,何为虚,何为实,往往依批评者的主观认识而定。在《总目》的批评视野中,虚实概念存在不同层次,且呈现辩证结构关系。在学术内容层面,《总目》所谓之虚实,主要就内容状态充实与否,与内容性质切近人事与否而言;在学术方法层面,则主要就方法是否征实可据而言。内容与方法是一体两面关系,如二者均被认定为实,便可称为"实学"。但对《总目》而言,"实学"只是相对的实,其上仍有"致用"的进径。在学术致用层面,《总目》的虚实论仍存在三层辩证结构:就目的论,"实学"如无经世目的亦仅为"虚文";就效用论,有经世目的而无实效亦为"虚文";就实行论,有实效如不施诸实行,亦仍为"虚文"。由"虚实"这种变动不居的概念特征,以及《总目》虚实论的复杂性可见,近年兴起的"实学"研究,其"实学"概念的确当性值得商榷。     

Contested Cartographies: Empire and Sovereignty on a Map of Sistān,Iran (1883)

ABSTRACT

The papers of Malkam Khān (1833–1908), Iranian ambassador in London from 1872 to 1889, a staunch supporter of Iranian state modernization and a scholar, include an often-overlooked map of the Iran–Afghanistan border dating to 1883. Mirzā Mohammad-Rezā Tabrizi compiled this exceptional piece of nineteenth-century Iranian cartography. The map is an illustration of how quickly the Qajar administration was able to emulate European cartographical discourses to protect its own interests in the context of the so-called ‘Great Game’, that is, the often confrontational Russo–British relations over the control of Central Asia and Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. In this article we show that Iranian officials had developed a much more substantial articulation between cartography and statecraft than is conveyed by the stereotypes in nineteenth-century Western literature, when the capacity of local players to use counter-mapping to their own advantage was often underestimated by European agents. Mirzā Mohammad-Rezā Tabrizi’s map of Sistān exemplifies how the apparently all-powerful Western science that seemingly supported nineteenth-century imperial expansion was rarely left unchallenged locally. The genealogy and circulation of the map also reflects how overly simplistic the postulation of a polarization of ‘Western’ knowledge and ‘Eastern’ attempts at safeguarding local sovereignty can be.     

Frontiers of Urban Control: Lawlessness on the City Edge and Forms of Clientalist Statecraft in Zimbabwe

This article develops the concept of “urban frontier” to explore conflicts over state regularisation of city edge informal settlements in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare. It conceptualises the presence of “lawless” urban frontiers and “illegal” territorial authorities in capital cities as expressions of a permissive form of central statecraft. In so doing, the article takes forward debates over the politics shaping the margins of Africa’s rapidly expanding cities, redressing scholars’ tendency to neglect central party‐state strategic calculations and party politics in their analyses of unregulated settlements. Dominant interpretations generally hinge on state absence or weakness and emphasise localised influences. The case of Harare’s highly politicised city‐edge informal settlements reveals the inadequacy of apolitical approaches particularly clearly, as all were controlled by the ruling ZANUPF party. The conflicts provoked by regularisation provide a lens on disputes within the ruling party, which we interpret as disputes over different forms of clientalist statecraft. Analyses of urban frontiers can thus help move away from generic one‐size‐fits‐all explanations of informality and patronage politics in Africa’s expanding cities.     

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the South Sudan question: reconsidering moderation

This article examines the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) movement's stand on the South Sudan question. The aim here is to contribute to the ongoing debate over the MB's moderation. Throughout the civil war in Sudan, the MB consistently objected to South Sudanese secession. Yet, while it had traditionally framed its objection in religious terms, describing the South Sudanese struggle as a Christian conspiracy against Islam, in the decade preceding South Sudan's declaration of independence it moved to base its opposition on more practical grounds, revolving around issues such the absence of democracy, stability and infrastructure in South Sudan. This correlated with wider shifts in the MB. Since the 1990s, the movement has claimed to have undergone a transformation, adopting a moderate, pro‐democratic stance. These statements persuaded many scholars that the MB has come to represent political moderation in both its domestic and international agenda. More recent works on the movement, however, have come to question the MB's moderation hypothesis, suggesting that even though the movement has changed its discourse and some aspects of its activism, this could not be seen as a linear process of moderation. This article uses the South Sudan case to further support this critique from a foreign policy perspective. It demonstrates that even though the MB changed its tactics and discourse, its goals remained unchanged— even when the circumstances and the normative environment changed dramatically. Moreover, it shows that at times of crisis, the liberal discourse gave way to the old‐fashioned radical discourse of previous decades.     

“Only Strong States Can Survive in Turkey's Geography”: The uses of “geopolitical truths” in Turkey

Following Critical Geopoliticians' re-formulation of geopolitics as discourse, this article historically traces, politically contextualizes, and empirically analyzes the linguistic practices as found in myriad actors' formal geopolitical writings and public articulations in Turkey. It shows how the production and dissemination of a particular understanding of geopolitics as a “scientific” perspective on statecraft, and the military as an actor licensed to craft state policies (by virtue of its mastery over geopolitical knowledge) has allowed the military to play a central role in shaping domestic political processes. Subsequent to the erosion of bi-partisan consensus on foreign policy from the mid-1960s onwards, civilian actors also began to tap geopolitics but as a foreign policy tool. By the end of the 1990s, geopolitics had become rooted in the discourses of both military and civilian actors shaping (for “better” or for “worse”) Turkey's “foreign” relations with the European Union as well as “domestic” political processes.     

Blinded like a state? Urban sanitation,improvement and high modernism in contemporary Myanmar

This article explores urban sanitation in the city of Mandalay, upper Myanmar, as an entry point to better understand the issue of improvement in the country in the current era of political change. Based upon qualitative data gathered in Mandalay between 2015 and 2018, the article focuses on the state's ways of seeing urban improvement after 2016, when the National League for Democracy government led by Daw Aung San Suu Kyi took office. The article builds upon James Scott's work on statecraft to frame the analysis, and it uses this framework to argue that a localized form of authoritarian high modernism is emerging and shaping urban improvement in Mandalay today. The case is noteworthy as high modernism in Mandalay is not associated with attempts to render the city more legible; on the contrary improvement seems to be carried out by a state unwilling, or unable, to see and thus being blinded. The article develops this argument to make a twofold contribution, to discussions on statecraft and the “failure of development” in contemporary Myanmar from the perspective of political geography; and to debates on states' ways of seeing and the practice of improvement in postcolonial contexts.     

Analyzing frenemies: An Arctic repertoire of cooperation and rivalry

Intensive transnational cooperation and manifestations of the NATO-Russia security rivalry have endured for over 30 years in the post-Cold War Arctic. Drawing upon the concept of repertoires from the social movement literature, this article seeks to make a conceptual contribution as to how we might better analyse and articulate the simultaneity of these practices and narratives of cooperation and rivalry in the circumpolar region. Repertoires are typically defined as bundles of semi-structured/semi-improvisational practices making up a context-contingent performance (for example, by civil society towards the ‘state’). These repertoires are argued to be created and performed in ‘contentious episodes’, rather than structured by long-term trends or evidenced in single events. Translated to global politics, a repertoires-inspired approach holds promise for privileging an analysis of the tools and performance (and audience) of statecraft in ‘contentious episodes’ above considerations of how different forms of global order or geopolitical narratives structure options for state actors. The emphasis on the performance of statecraft in key episodes, in turn, allows us to consider whether the interplay between the practices of cooperation and rivalry is usefully understood as a collective repertoire of statecraft, as opposed to a messy output of disparate long-term trends ultimately directing actors in the region towards a more cooperative or more competitive form of Arctic regional order. The article opens with two key moments in Arctic politics – the breakup of the Soviet Union and the 2007 Arctic sea ice low. The strong scholarly baseline that these complex moments have garnered illustrates how scholars of Arctic regional politics are already employing an episodic perspective that can be usefully expanded upon and anchored with insights and methods loaned from social movement literature on repertoires. The 18-month period following Russia's annexation of Crimea is then examined in detail as a ‘contentious episode’ with an attending effort to operationalize a repertoires-inspired approach to global politics. The article concludes that a repertoire-inspired approach facilitates systematic consideration of the mixed practices of amity and enmity in circumpolar statecraft over time and comparison to other regions, as well as offers one promising answer to the growing interest in translating the insights of constructivist scholarship into foreign policy strategy.     

Structural Features of the Stone-Built T'ing-Pagoda

This article examines representations of Music Master Kuang in early Chinese historical and philosophical texts. Music Master Kuang was entirely blind, at a time when people with disabilities suffered serious discrimination. However, in spite of his handicap, he was able not merely to become a fine musician, but also served as a key advisor to two rulers of Jin, Lord Dao (r. 573–558 BCE) and his son, Lord Ping (r. 557–532 BCE), and in some texts is said to have acted as their prime minister. In achieving this transition, he is unique among Music Masters of the period. This article classifies the stories told about him into two main thematic groups, as a musician and as a statesman, to show the way in which music was related to statecraft through the persona of an individual who was both a highly respected government minister and a noted performer on the qin.     

FRIDRIK THORDARSON (7.3.1928–2.10.2005) IN MEMORIAM

This article looks at Horace's two Books of Satires, Books I-III of the Odes and the First Book of Epistles in the perspective of the following thesis. One of the most important themes of Horace's poetry is happiness, and measure and moderation are the means to bring about and secure a happy life. In the various poetry books this ethics of measure and moderation undergoes certain variations. The message of the Satires is that you are happy if you are content on the basis of moderation. The Odes of the first edition convey the idea that we are happy if we live in peace and friendliness, founded on the principle of moderation. The First Book of Letters is focussed on the central notion that I am happy if I am free and independent, and again, the precondition for that is moderation. The point of the article is thus, first, that it underscores an aspect of the unity of Horace's poetry: the search for happiness, and, second, that it offers an account of the diversifications of that unifying theme in the different genres of poetry and different phases of the poet's life.     

National maps, digitalisation and neoliberal cartographies: transforming nation-state practices and symbols in postcolonial Ecuador

The paper explores the connection between computerised techniques of mapping and the role of maps in modern nationhood, interrogating the ways that maps are naturalised and deployed in postcolonial neoliberal statecraft. A case study of Ecuador demonstrates how the relationship between cartography and the nation-state is being both altered and reaffirmed by new mapping practices and institutional processes. Despite neoliberalising moves to decentre state cartographers and the technological advances supporting the proliferation of national maps and map-makers, Ecuadorian cartographies are still authorised by the nation-state, as explored in relation to spatial information about the country, and in relation to the processes of land-titling. Under neoliberal governance and with advanced mapping techniques, land-titling produces small territories that replicate – in miniature – the jigsaw-like and modular quality of national territories. As such, mappings of individual private properties produce the reality of neoliberal statecraft.     

Talking to strangers (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The language used by politicians and its social effects have been of long‐standing interest to social anthropology. Opinion‐formers on both sides of the North Atlantic have recently argued that this language can inflame tensions and reinforce divisions. In the UK, the discussion has centred on relations between a white majority and a Muslim minority, while in the US, in the aftermath of the attempted assassination of a Democratic Congresswoman in Arizona, it has focused on the risk of political language provoking violence. The antidote to inflammatory language is often assumed to be moderation, defined as a (self‐) disciplined engagement with divided publics. Drawing on the insights of Danielle Allen's Talking to strangers, here I suggest that moderation might be re‐imagined, not as a vague commitment to centrism and the ‘middle ground’, but as a powerful resource for citizens and communities to challenge the ideological excesses of politics, religion and the market in the twenty‐first century.     

4. IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY IN MUGHAL AND BRITISH FORMS

Azfar Moin's recent work on millennial sovereignty in Mughal India prompts a consideration of the evolution of sovereignty in modern South Asia more broadly. Although the sovereign principles of the Mughals differed from those of the British Indian empire, which ultimately succeeded it, these empires shared important similarities in their linking of sovereign authority to visions of a cosmos in immanent interaction with human affairs. This article explores these similarities and differences and speculatively considers their implications for both similarities and differences in Mughal and British principles of statecraft. These similarities and differences provide an important backdrop for thinking about the meanings attached to popular sovereignty in modern India as well.     

Intimate bordering: Intimacy,anti-blackness and gender violence in the making of the Dominican border

This article proposes the term Intimate Bordering to explain the role of intimacy and social reproduction in the active process of border-making and statecraft. The concept contributes to understanding daily experiences of bordering among subaltern subjects who make and contest the border every day and yet are often unaccounted for. The concept sheds light on how racialized and gendered relations of power intrinsic to antiblackness and cis-hetero-patriarchy interweave and condition spatial politics and belonging. These arguments are developed by bridging border studies and black and feminist geographies, and by centering the experiences of Haitian women who work as domestic workers in Dominican border towns. The article is based on fieldwork carried out in four Dominican and Haitian border towns, including interviews, focus groups and participant observation focused on the everyday commutes of Haitian domestic workers who live in Haiti and work in the Dominican Republic (DR). It analyzes two sets of intimate border practices that take place at two official border crossings: the first set includes normalized forms of intimate violence and humiliation at the border; the second examines the failed attempt at institutionalizing the transborder mobilities of domestic workers based on colonial entitlements of control over the bodies of black Haitian women. Centering intimacy in bordering brings transnational livelihoods, social reproduction and racialization into the heart of the analysis of statecraft projects in the space of the Afro-Caribbean.     

A baffling experience: Technology transfer,Anglo-American nuclear relations,and the development of the gas centrifuge 1964-70*

The development of the gas centrifuge in the 1960s revolutionized the production of enriched uranium. More simple and efficient than gaseous diffusion, the centrifuge offered countries a means of producing enriched uranium independently of America. For Britain, the centrifuge possessed political as well as economic advantage. It provided the opportunity for Britain to share nuclear knowledge with its European partners, so improving the prospect of successful admission to the European Common Market. In Washington, the prospect of a joint European centrifuge project received an ambivalent response. The State Department, keen to foster a strong Europe as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism, welcomed collaboration. In contrast, the Atomic Energy Commission, charged with maintaining US nuclear security, sought to block the venture on the grounds that it infringed US law. This paper reviews this debate, examining Anglo-American nuclear relations in the context of Britain's entry into the European Common Market. It argues that Britain was determined to establish a purely European solution to the question of uranium supply even if this led to a breach in Anglo-American relations.     

An Item Veto for the President?

In their efforts to reduce federal deficits, national political leaders sometimes have embraced bold constitutional and statutory “reform” measures. President Reagan, for example, has campaigned for a constitutional amendment to permit the President to veto subsections contained within appropriations bills. This article describes the history and assesses the advantages and disadvantages of this proposed item veto. By pointing out potentially undesirable consequences of the item veto, we note that unintended side-effects may weaken Congress and provide more power than an effective president needs, and more power than an imperial president should ever have. We conclude the item veto is overrated and its effects not well understood. It would not greatly reduce deficits and it would disrupt the existing system of checks and balances. More important, it is an example of escapism from the basic tasks of statecraft and political decisionmaking that should be center stage in the legislative and executive branches.