Must secession be rebellion?

Some constitutional theorists claim that secession is necessarily rebellion and that there cannot be a constitutional right to secession. I (1) try to show that these claims are implausible, (2) explore the non‐legal assumptions about the nature of the state and the citizen which make the acceptance or rejection of these legal claims plausible, (3) consider the desirability of incorporating a provision for secession in the constitution of liberal democratic states.     

Neither Cyclops nor Sophist: Christian Formation Against the State

Abstract

This article identifies a deep paradox at the heart of the modern state—in its ability and professed purposes to form the moral characters of its citizens—and then offers a Christian response. Were it not for the manifest success of states in persisting in this paradox, it would delegitimize them on grounds of incoherence and duplicity. In an argument that is occasionally Aristotelian, the article shows how modern (secular, liberal) states morally form citizens who willingly submit to the state's formation on grounds that the state has legitimacy so long as it does not claim moral authority. This line of reasoning is explicated with reference to Sheldon Wolin on Alexander Hamilton and feudalism as well as Martha Nussbaum on Aristotle. In response, Christian freedom, ecclesial peoplehood, and poverty not only run counter to state formation but positively resist it.     

The Curious History of the Minerva Reefs: Tracing the Origin of Tongan and Fijian Claims Over the Minerva Reefs

ABSTRACT

This article explores the historical events relating to the competing claims over the Minerva Reefs by Tonga and Fiji. Tonga’s sovereign claim over the Minerva Reefs was prompted by a private group’s laying claim to a 'Republic of Minerva' in 1972. At that time, Fiji, as well as the South Pacific Forum, recognized Tonga as the only possible owner of the Minerva Reefs, but did not explicitly recognize Tonga's claimed sovereign title. Such a position reflected the legal uncertainty in relation to Tonga's claim in 1972. The establishment of the 200?nm Exclusive Economic Zone legal regime in the late 1970s gave rise to Fiji's claim to the Minerva Reefs, whereas subsequent developments in international law have significantly reduced the legal uncertainty in relation to Tonga's claim.     

The policy of non-discrimination and the protection of minority cultural heritage in Albania

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at the effectiveness of the policy of non-discrimination towards minorities in the preservation of minority cultural heritage, constructing a case study within Albania. After defining the key terms used, this paper examines the legal framework of non-discrimination towards minorities in its historical development and looks into the state of preservation of minority cultural heritage on the ground throughout the 2010s combining extensive field-work with interviews with key representatives of ethnic minorities in Albania. The poor state of preservation of minority cultural heritage is mostly attributed to under-financing and the insufficient policy of non-discrimination. As I demonstrate, in the case of minorities with a kin-state in the region, most notably Greece, as well as the heritage claimed by neighbouring states, primarily Turkey, the policy of non-discrimination and the practice of under-financing paves the way for external involvement in the protection of cultural heritage, in pursuit of international political agendas. The paper concludes that more needs to be done for the protection of minority cultural heritage in Albania.     

Sami subsistence activities—spatial aspects and Structuration

In the social sciences, spatial aspects of reality have been rediscovered. I will use certain concepts to describe and clarify the spatial organization of Sami subsistence activities. In this paper, ptarmigan trapping is taken as an example of “situated activities” which, according to Anthony Giddens, characterizes social systems. The siida as old hunting territory is also discussed. I will show that the Sami notions of place are not fixed in temporal and spatial terms. Moreover, I want to emphasize the dynamics of Sami subsistence activities. My claim is that they act as re/producers of Sami traditional ways. These traditions are undermined by the overall mission of the state and its agents of power. Still, the perdurability of the Sami subsistence hunters and their activities help to maintain and develop the old Sami ways in terms of spatiality and social organization.     

Resistance and radical democracy: freedom,power and institutions

ABSTRACT

In this article, I argue that resistance and radical democracy can be used to the good of representative democracy. I submit that resistance is about the popular power – the freedom as power – to create better institutions. I argue that the conflict and resistance that is at the core of radical democracy enables freedom and democracy and resists domination best if it is institutionalized. This counterintuitive claim is substantiated by an argument for freedom as power through representation and how the power to resist is linked to at least four domains of freedom. This builds on the work of Machiavelli, Marx and Foucault, amongst others, and insights drawn from resistance struggles across the globe. I end by proposing institutional changes to representative democracy that, I suggest, would allow us to conceive of democracy as both a form of government and a constantly destabilizing transgressive practice.     

Legislating the Melanesian Way: Bernard Narokobi and the Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea

Abstract

A common criticism of Bernard Narokobi is that his vision of the ‘Melanesian Way’ was vague and imprecise. This article argues against this claim by describing the activities Narokobi undertook as the head of the Law Reform Commission of Papua New Guinea (1975–8). Using the example of his suggested revision of adultery laws, this article shows that Narokobi realized his abstract vision of the Melanesian Way in the most concrete and specific way possible: by attempting to reform the law. Much of Narokobi's legal reform work was unsuccessful, but a full understanding of his philosophy can only be achieved by reading his legal work alongside his published writings like The Melanesian Way.     

Contemporary Irish theatre,the new Playboy controversy,and the economic crisis

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the economic crisis on contemporary Irish theatre. More specifically, I contend that the legal controversy surrounding Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s second production of Playboy of the Western World: A New Version in 2008 provides a case study of how professional theatre productions that dramatised stories of immigrant empowerment during the Irish economic boom were profoundly inhibited by the bust that followed. Their collaborative version of the new Playboy was widely regarded as Ireland’s most successful intercultural play and a commercial success when it was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in 2007. The subsequent breakdown in their relationship and ensuing legal dispute is more symptomatic of Celtic Tiger Ireland in economic collapse, I suggest, than the content of the play itself, or most other productions mounted in the period. I argue that this dispute did not simply reflect but also reinforced the social effects of the economic crisis, through its prolonged litigation, enormous expense, and especially the missed opportunity that it represented to position the multicultural and migrant themed Playboy within the Irish theatrical mainstream. More broadly, I suggest that the economic crisis has been marked by the disappearance of immigrants from the professional Irish stage, a void which was only partially filled by community theatre productions. A case in point is Adigun and Arambe’s most recent adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road in The Paddies of Parnell Street (2013), a play which I positively appraise as an example of successful “intercultural re-appropriation”.     

Australian Communist Party of Australia v The Commonwealth: Histories of Australian Legalism

Abstract

In this article I structure legalism as a device to interpret how 1951 is remembered in law, in order to show what legal orthodoxies meant in their own time, and how that shifts to a different form of legalism in our own. In doing so, I will argue that the idea of legalism famously produced by the High Court judgment in 1951 has shifted its meaning as much as the ideological support of and opposition to communism that were expressed in the case. I will suggest that this history requires conscious incorporation in the commemorative narratives of ‘democracy vs. communism’.     

Is Feminist geography relevant?

Abstract

As the whole point of feminism is to empower women and girls and to improve the circumstances of their lives, most feminist geographers would claim that indeed feminist geography is — or at least aims to be — relevant; they would then hasten to point to the contradictions and ambiguities inherent in this claim: what counts as relevant and relevant to whom are complicating questions. The work of feminist geography encompasses teaching, activism and scholarship — all potentially relevant activities. In considering what counts as relevant, I discuss the difficulties of equating relevant with applied and of knowing whether or not our teaching, research and activism will turn out to be relevant. Complicating any claim to relevance is our inability to know, and lack of control over, how others will use our work. Asking ‘relevant to whom?’ points to the difficult truth that what some women view as positive change others may see as harmful to their interests; in this senserelevance is specific to particular contexts, scales and places. At the same time, relevance can enter the intricate web of global interconnections and transcend particular contexts, scales and places. Relevance itself is therefore a geographic concept. Feminist geographers struggle to hold together these sometimes contradictory geographic dimensions of relevance. I close by arguing that the growing body of feminist geography work engages with a range of social issues around the world and certainly has the potential for relevance at a variety of scales. But the relevance question will remain a complex and ambiguous one for feminist geographers.     

When Torture is a Duty: The Murder of Imam Yapa Kaseng and the Challenge of Accountability in Thailand

Abstract

On 19 March 2008, Imam Yapa Kaseng was arrested in Narathiwat in southern Thailand and detained as a suspected insurgent by Special Task Force 39 under the provisions of martial law and the Emergency Decree on Public Administration in an Emergency Situation (hereafter Emergency Decree). Two days after his arrest, he died in the custody of the army. On 25 December 2008, the Narathiwat Provincial Court ruled that “the cause of death is that the deceased was physically assaulted by state officials … while he was in the custody of soldiers who were performing their civil service duties”. This ruling is paradoxical: Thai state officials are named as responsible for a death in custody, yet torture is categorised as a “duty”. Since the ruling, Imam Yapa’s family has pursued criminal, civil and internal state methods of redress, but the case has been stalled and the responsible state officials have not been held accountable. In response, I challenge this paradox by reading the inquest decision in light of both relevant national and international legal instruments and the testimonies given during the hearings. Drawing on the testimonies given during the inquest hearings, I construct an alternative narrative of suffering and state accountability.     

Convictions,Loyalties and the Secular State

Abstract

The article examines the relationship between communal religious identity and the secular, liberal state. It addresses the concern that religious allegiance undermines an individual's or group's political loyalty. The liberal secular state is threatened when a religious community participates in public discussion because this challenges the positioning of religious belief as personal and private. Currently this issue is brought into sharp focus by the identities of Muslim people although it is by no means restricted to this religious group. The early Christians negotiated the difficulties of loyalty to the empire and worship of the one true God as uniquely divine. The work of William Cavanaugh and Maleiha Malik is utilized to argue that religious communities can participate in public discussions in secular liberal states while living by narratives not shared by these polities. In fact religious communities can deepen the moral discussions of liberal secular states by bringing to its instrumental rationalism convictions established on alternate beliefs and narratives about the human condition. The recognition of the public role of religions need not induce panic in the liberal secular state and may secure religious communities sufficiently to allow mature, critical debate and discussion of their loyalties.     

Samuel Taylor Coleridge on ideas actualized in history

ABSTRACT

Situating Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s thought on historically actualized ideas with reference to a range of classical thinkers, this article examines his intriguing philosophical theory about how ideas become progressively actualized in history. This cultural growth can be understood as contemplation-in-action, although it occurs through mainly fumbling – or else overenthusiastic – human agents. I distinguish Coleridgean first-order, transcendent ideas (such as God, infinity, the good, the soul) from second-order, historical ones (such as church, state, the constitution). It has been argued that Coleridge’s theory of ideas develops from Bacon’s inductive method for discovering laws of nature through experiment and natural law through common law. I further claim that Coleridge upholds the reality of “Forms” in science, and of rights in ethics and politics; that his later political thought is inherently more progressive than is generally admitted; and that his account differs from Schelling’s and Hegel’s respective theories by maintaining the transcendence of ideas above the immanence of their evolving historical actualizations. Coleridge’s philosophy is therefore, whether political or metaphysical, ultimately an ontological defence of the transcendence of ideas above the immanence of their progressive but imperfect actualization.     

Old Wine in New Bottles: The Utility of Data Reanalysis in the Social Sciences

Abstract

The authors reconstruct processes of ethnic identification among residents of rural northeast China from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth through an analysis of naming behavior. They apply discrete-time event-history techniques to individual life histories compiled from longitudinal, nominative household-register data from state farms in what is now Liaoning Province to identify the individual and household circumstances associated with the adaptation of Han or Manchu names, focusing on the role of heredity and status. Ethnic identification in late imperial northeast China was potentially fluid. Many residents were descended from migrants from Shandong who became hereditary tenants on state land administered by a system of Manchu government known as the Eight Banners. As banner people, or qiren, these residents could legitimately claim to be Manchu. As descendants of Shandong migrants, they could also claim to be Han. They could express their choice of ethnic identity through their choice of names not just for their children but also for themselves. Names not only express ethnic self-identification, but their registration by state authorities in the analyzed data also implies official recognition and legitimacy. The authors' results demonstrate that ethnic identity was not hereditary but subject to individual and family choice.     

Political economy and social legislation in Germany,ca 1870–1890

Summary

This article examines the nature of academic political theory in Britain in the post-war period, examining in particular the degree to which theorists were able to mount normative theoretical arguments. Traditionally, commentators such as Brian Barry and Perry Anderson have argued that political theory in this period was largely dead between 1945 and 1970 due to the impact of positivism, but I argue this is mistaken for two main reasons. First, it fails to distinguish between the different forms that positivism took in the post-war era. Thus although it is true many theorists tended to claim that moral and political values could (or should) not be discussed rationally, their reasons for doing so varied considerably. For while theorists such as A. J. Ayer and T. D. Weldon justified their positions theoretically, with arguments drawn from behaviourist social science or innovations made in linguistic philosophy, others, such as Ralf Dahrendorf and Anthony Crosland, argued that it was the perceived success of post-war welfare states or the alleged failure of political ideologies that made traditional political theory irrelevant. Second, following on from this, I argue that delineating more accurately how positivism actually operated helps to explain how political theorists were able to pursue their discipline normatively—albeit that few reacted to all aspects of positivism. Thus if some (such as Karl Popper) were more concerned to insist that political philosophy had something to say in practice, others (such as Michael Oakeshott), reacted more strongly against the proposition that human behaviour can be understood purely causally. Finally, I examine the impact of ordinary language philosophy on post-war political theory, and argue that rather than simply damaging the cause of normative political theory by encouraging a myopic concentration on the linguistic analysis of particular moral and political concepts, over the longer term its effects were much more positive, since it helped to focus attention on the irreducibly normative dimension of political concepts.     

Russian-occupied Crimea and the state of exception: repression,persecution, and human rights violations

ABSTRACT

Since annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, Russian authorities there have introduced harsh repressive measures to silence opposition to the ongoing occupation, chiefly targeting the indigenous Crimean Tatars and others pro-Ukrainian individuals. From the legally subversive methods it employed to orchestrate the annexation to the rhetoric of anti-extremism with which it has continually justified its occupation, the Kremlin has inaugurated a new “state of exception” in Crimea, invoking the prerogative to circumvent normative legal and juridical procedures in response to a perceived emergency. While Crimea’s state of exception resembles those initiated elsewhere by some Western states and Russia itself as part of the global War on Terror, the state of exception has provided the pretext for a particularly severe degree of repression, persecution, and human rights violations in occupied Crimea. In conjunction with the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, this article discusses the theoretical groundings of the state of exception, its broader applications within the Russian Federation, and its troubling repercussions for residents of Crimea. Casting the Kremlin’s actions as belonging to a state of exception helps draw attention to its alarming human rights violations, and may bolster resistance to the creeping normalization of the Russian occupation of Crimea.     

Past continuous: archaeological representations on Israeli banknotes and coins

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the special role of archaeological representations on the legal tender in Israel. Money is one of the most pervasive symbolic instruments in daily life, frequently used for nation-building and carrying a political agenda. The use of archaeological representations on Israeli money has a clear political role: to revalidate the national Jewish-Zionist resurrection, to justify the nation’s claim for its historical land, and to draw the state’s borders through archaeological findings. This article sheds light on the centrality given to archaeology by members of the Bank of Israel Banknotes and Coinage Planning Committee and is based on its proceedings and correspondence from its inception in late 1955 to 2012.     

THE DORKING EMIGRATION SCHEME OF 1832

Abstract

Statistical records of British emigration for the I9th century are very poor. Therefore it is important that all information that can be produced on assisted emigration should be considered to enhance our knowledge of the process of migration. In I832 the Dorking Emigration Scheme facilitated emigration of a group of poor rural labourers and their families from Surrey to make a new life in Canada. These were people dependent for support on parish relief. This article discusses this scheme in relation to British emigration policy in the years I8I5-30. Investigating assisted emigration at a local level enables an assessment of the viability of Wilmont Horton’s claim that one great cause of distress at the time was redundancy of population.It is evident in Dorking that emigration was seen as a way to alleviate the growing problem of rural unemployment. But was it just a scheme for ‘shovelling out paupers’, or are there other important factors that must be considered?     

Incomplete Sovereigns: Unpacking Patterns of Indigenous Self-Governance in the United States and Canada

ABSTRACT

In the early 1970s, both the Canadian and United States federal governments introduced modern land claim agreements as a first step forward in the states’ recognition of Indigenous goals for self-determination. Since then, both the United States and Canadian federal governments have incrementally expanded their recognition of Indigenous rights to include Indigenous goals for political self-determination. Yet, despite the fact that both countries began implementing broadly similar policies at approximately the same time, the degree to which Indigenous political and economic self-determination has been realized varies considerably both within and between the two countries. The variation in Indigenous self-governing power and authority suggests that the policy shift towards Indigenous self-determination is incomplete and has faced important barriers to implementation. This paper investigates two key aspects of this variation in Indigenous self-determination in the United States and Canada: (1) institutional histories embedded in geography, and (2) the temporal nature of policy frameworks. I argue that the full realization of Indigenous self-determination has been shaped in different ways and, ultimately, is limited by the intersection of embedded institutional legacies and federal political dynamics.