Stages of War,Stages of Man: Quincy Wright and the Liberal Internationalist Study of War

American legal scholar Quincy Wright's 1942 A Study of War was a milestone in the study of warfare, and a monumental text in the history of liberal internationalism and the social sciences. Yet, it was quickly forgotten, and neglected ever since. This paper seeks to recover Study by elucidating its historical significance, and placing it within the intellectual and institutional contexts of its time. Study, I argue, encapsulated both an interwar liberal internationalist conceptualisation of warfare as well as a pre-Realist social scientific approach to war in international relations. Through the 1,500 page Study Wright attempted to take the emergent discipline of international relations in new directions by developing a multidisciplinary and multidimensional historical, theoretical and empirical approach to warfare. He incorporated sociological and anthropological approaches and developed themes found more broadly in existing Anglo-American studies of war. Study's multidimensional approach was framed by liberal internationalist concerns and concepts, and yet also reflected the development of the social sciences in the interwar period. Study points to the more realist direction liberal internationalism may have turned to if it had not succumbed to the power-political realist conceptualisations international relations which would ascend in the 1940s.     

‘The Sustenance of Salisbury’ in the era of Decolonization: The Portuguese Politics of Neutrality and the Rhodesian Oil Embargo, 1965–7

This article investigates Denmark's international legal status during the Second World War. In exploring this theme it brings together two emergent research perspectives on twentieth-century international political history: (1) a growing interest in small states as actors and active interpreters of international political events in times of crisis and war; and (2) a focus on international law as an independent and so far underexplored research theme. From this double perspective the article highlights and analyses the unprecedented and unparalleled character of the legal relationship between Denmark and Germany after the German occupation of Denmark in April 1940. In doing so it places particular focus on how this situation was viewed and conceptualised by Danish politicians and legal experts. Thus it explores the complex entanglement of politics and law that characterised Danish attempts to bring about and consolidate the particular peaceful and ‘normal’ relationship with Germany as well as efforts to change this relationship and make Denmark a belligerent state. By analysing the four concepts of neutrality, non-belligerence, peaceful occupation, and war the article shows how these legal concepts served as political instruments that were pushed forward by competing and changing understandings of Denmark's international position and interests during the war. But it also shows how these legal conceptualisations were fundamentally structured by the general international legal and political developments of the war (the deterioration of neutrality and the emergence of long-term military occupation and guerrilla warfare throughout Europe). And it demonstrates how they gradually took on a life of their own and came to frame and shape perceptions of Denmark's international position - both among Danish politicians and bureaucrats during the Second World War and among historians to this day.     

Plastic possibilities: Contrasting the uses of plastic ‘waste’ in India

This article draws on examples of inventive plastic reuse from India and personal anecdotes of elders as an anthropological reflection on possible plastic futures. It sketches the large-scale governmental reforms in the domain of municipal solid waste management, or MSWM (which, by legal definition in India, includes plastic waste). In this regard, it draws out some of the problematic socio-political and environmental implications of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ‘Clean India’ campaign, whose technocratic policy orientations towards standardized centralized MSWM echo his cultural nationalist agenda. These reforms contrast with home-based re-engineering methods and the redeploying of plastic discards (thereby making them notuner moton (‘like new again’), and their localized circulation through relatively local but uneven reputational and economic networks. Clean India sequesters and processes vast quantities of plastics through the wide-ranging adoption of a waste-to-energy techno-fix (in which plastics are incinerated). In contrast, the authors illustrate routine practices and relations whereby people reuse, repurpose and recycle plastics. While Clean India can detract from and disrupt these mundane practices and everyday relations, these are suggestive of alternative plastic futures – both socio-material and environmental.     

Introduction: Anthropology,Collecting and Colonial Governmentalities

This special issue contributes to an emerging literature on the materialities of colonial government by considering the changing relations between practices of data collecting, styles of anthropological knowing and modes of governing which target the conduct of colonial and metropolitan populations. Drawing on comparative studies from Australia; the Australian administered territory of Papua; France; French Indo-China; New Zealand; North America and the UK; the papers consider the implications of different forms of knowledge associated with practices of collecting—anthropology, archaeology, folklore studies, demography—in apparatuses of rule in various late nineteenth and early twentieth-century contexts. This introduction outlines the rationale for the volume and elaborates the concept of “anthropological assemblage” which helps focus the authors' explorations of the socio-technical agencements which connected museum, field, metropolis and colony during this period. In doing so, it points towards a series of broader themes—the relationship between pastoral power and ethnographic expertise; the Antipodean career of the Americanist culture concept; and the role of colonial centres of calculation in the circulation of knowledge, practices of collecting and regimes of governing—which suggest productive future lines of inquiry for “practical histories” of anthropology.     

License to judge: fleshing out expertise in cultural policy

This paper endeavours to examine different types of expertise in cultural policy. Unlike other conceptual studies, it focuses on the abstract notion of expertise i.e. the different forms of cognition and knowledge deployed in cultural policy, rather than the personage of an expert. The article proposes a distinction between arts expertise and technocratic expertise and employs five analytical categories within which they are discussed and compared with each other. Although a clear-cut differentiation seems impossible to achieve, the binary approach helps to shed light on how different forms of expert judgement in cultural policy can be framed and legitimised as well as how vulnerable they are to political influence and the concomitant pressure of the democratisation of policy-making.     

Implicaciones legales de las seis muertes en La Celestina: Un acercamiento histórico-literario

This article examines the different types of deaths in La Celestina from the point of view of their legal and sociological significance. The analysis builds on contemporary historical data on suicide, homicide, executions, and accidents. It is shown that, beside its literary value, La Celestina is also an important historical document that provides an accurate portrait of the legal system relative to deaths that were socially unacceptable at that time. This study also highlights the presence of social criticism in the text when it describes how the authorities did not comply with some legal regulations.     

Male clients of Thai transgender sex workers in Europe

Academic approaches to the topic of Thai transgender women (kathoey) working in the sex industry have hitherto typically focused on their sociocultural background and economic motivations. These have relied heavily on feminist theories. Meanwhile, such studies have typically also treated their clients as products of heteropatriarchy or as deviants. This article presents fresh insights into Thai kathoey sex workers' European clients in the UK, the Netherlands, Denmark and Belgium. This is a neglected field in sexual behaviour that involves fetishism and the reality of European men who prefer to buy sex from Thai transgender sex workers. With an anthropological understanding of power relations, the article questions the notion, common in studies of prostitution, that the entire story is one of vile human degradation and violence against transgender sex workers.     

Reconstruction of Socioeconomic Status in the Medieval (14th–15th Century) Population of Grevenmacher (Luxembourg) Based on Growth,Development and Diet

Numerous historical sources describe many aspects of the estate‐based society in medieval times; the detection of socioeconomic status within populations through skeletal remains is a topic of growing interest in anthropological studies. In medieval times, it was common for members of high social rank to be buried within or next to a church. This was certainly the case in Grevenmacher (Luxembourg), where remains of a church building and an adjacent cemetery from the 13th until the beginning of the 15th century were subjected to archaeological and anthropological analysis. By integrating archaeological and anthropological elements, as well as stable isotope analysis, we documented osteological manifestations as indicators of diet differentials in two subsamples (first group consists out of 56 individuals, second one out of 184 individuals) from the medieval cemetery of Grevenmacher. We could distinguish two subsamples that we assumed as different in their socioeconomic status with regards to the burials' position in the cemetery and burial characteristics. Differences in osteological traits such as bone length, stature and body mass indicated differences in diet between sample groups. To substantiate these outcomes, stable isotopic analysis (δ¹³C, δ¹⁵N) were made; the results displayed a clear separation between the sample groups on the basis of their diet. Therefore, we were able to confirm certain individuals in the medieval population of Grevenmacher in relationship to their socioeconomic status. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Indigenous Environmental Justice: Comparing the United States and Canada’s Legal Frameworks for Endangered Species Conservation

Canada and the United States are both committed to the protection of endangered species. This article examines how the legal frameworks created around the US Endangered Species Act (ESA) and the Canadian Species at Risk Act (SARA) intersect with Indigenous environmental justice (EJ). Specifically, the distribution of benefits and burdens is examined since critical habitat designations can limit activity on Native American and First Nation tribal lands. Legal documents and recent court cases also give insight into Indigenous inclusion and recognition in conservation approaches in North America. Overall, it is argued that Canada’s approach comes closer to EJ, but neither legal framework meets the criterion of genuine EJ for Native Americans and First Nations.     

Subverting Regulatory Protection of ‘Natural Commodities’: The Prunus Africana in Madagascar

This article explores the contradictions that have emerged along the commodity chain of the endangered medicinal tree Prunus africana in Madagascar. The study provides a unique opportunity to build on theories of access, highlighting in particular the themes of social relations, culture and power in mediating access to natural resources and benefits that derive from commercialization. Commodity chain analysis is employed to illustrate that property rights, based solely on formal rights, legal claims or customary rights to ‘natural commodities’ are insufficient to measure who is able to gain and maintain access to the species. The results show that power, regulation and exclusion have a much greater impact on who is able to tap into the benefits of P. africana commercialization. This article illustrates how extraction firms in Madagascar have over the years finessed their way, through ‘green conditionalities’ or conservation concessions, into continued extraction of P. africana — all in the face of widespread regulation.     

Midwives as expert witnesses in the 18th-century Finnish courts of justice

ABSTRACT

In this article, I will explore how legalized Finnish midwives acted as expert witnesses in court hearings before 1809, how they worded the statements they gave in court, on what grounds they decided a woman was pregnant or had given birth, and what signs they considered as indicating a miscarriage or the birth of a full-term infant. Their work as expert witnesses relied on their midwifery training as well as their learned knowledge of the anatomy of the female body and the physiology of birth. Ultimately, their knowledge was supported by contemporary guidebooks on midwifery and forensic medicine. As expert witnesses, the trained and legalized midwives of the eighteenth century can be seen as having been legally literate women, who had a duty to provide oral or written evidence to the court and other instances who demanded it. Midwives were capable of using understandable medical and legal terminology in terms of the processing of the court case in their testimony. The forensic examinations carried out by legalized midwives and the expert witness statements they gave also demonstrate the professional skills and expertise of these women.. Their testimonies also show that they were familiar with the characteristics of infanticide referred to in the Swedish medical and forensic literature.     

‘I am not a feminist but…’: women’s activism in post-1991 Albania

Abstract

This article examines the shape organized women’s activism took in Albania after the fall of the communist regime. It also analyses how gender and feminist studies have positioned themselves within the higher education system, the relationship between media and feminism and the new alternative spaces of women’s activism and feminist resistance to gendered power relations. The analysis follows the longue durée of the fraught relationship of debates around feminism during and after the fall of Communism starting with the communist top-down ‘women’s emancipation model’ as well as the lack of bottom-up women’s activism, the post-1991 neo-liberal frame and the generalized post-1991 stigma about ‘emancipation’, ‘equality’ or ‘feminism’, along with the need to resist post-1991 hierarchical gender regimes.     

AFTER POLITICAL ECOLOGY

This book review article probes present anthropological engagement with the environment through the prism of political ecology, placing political ecology in conversation with newer work in environmnetal anthropology. In situating this conversation, the reviewer draws on four recent anthropological monographs that, in one way or another, deal with aspects of ‘nature’. The four monographs are Tania Murray Li's (2014) Land's end: Capitalist relations on an indigenous frontier; Marianne Elisabeth Lien's (2015) Becoming salmon: Aquaculture and the domestication of fish; Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's (2015) The mushroom at the end of the world: On the possibility of life in capitalist ruin; and, lastly, Marisol de la Cadena's (2015) Earth beings: Ecologies of practice across Andean worlds. As I suggest, political ecology requires a radical remake, perhaps a political ecology 2.0, which brings in nature in a new way and makes the category of the political more inclusive.     

Into the Great Beyond: Ontology and the Non-Human

In the following essay I review three recent additions to the burgeoning ontology literature: Philippe Descola's Beyond Nature and Culture, Eduardo Kohn's How Forests Think, and Istvan Praet's Animism and the Question of Life. United by their shared goal of making anthropological inquiry less ethnocentric by avoiding the imposition of Western ontologies on non-Western societies, these works simultaneously exhibit considerable variation in theory and method, ranging from traditional structuralism to ethnographically-informed Peircean semiotics. I emerged from my engagement with these ambitious books unclear about how anthropologists should conduct ethnographic research that goes “beyond the human” and convinced that units of analysis that might seem anachronistic to certain people (such as language, culture, and collectives) remain key constituents of the foundation of anthropological inquiry.     

Moments of Proximity: Former Political Prisoners,Postmemory and Justice in Indonesia

This article builds upon recent anthropological engagements with postconflict transitional justice processes, suggesting that ethnography can illuminate the ways in which these processes involve the negotiation of both physical and symbolic space, and intergenerational, postmemorial identities and relationships. This is demonstrated through my fieldwork observations of a 2005 class action lawsuit filed by eks-tapol (former political prisoners) in Indonesia against current and former heads of state. Tracing the symbolic resonances and the sometimes confrontational relationships brought into play around the court case, the article examines how a significant aspect of the ways in which victims of state violence situate themselves after the violence has ceased involves locating themselves, other citizens and state actors in intergenerational relationships.     

France and its purgatory

This article compares the experiences migrants face in the banlieue of France to rites of passage in Papua New Guinea, where the author has performed long-term fieldwork. Seen from a Turnerian anthropological point of view, the banlieue resembles a rite of passage with its separation, liminality, reintegration and its ambiguous meanings. However, its liminality lacks a communitas characterized by equality, direct relations between its members and an absence of ownership.     

Balance of Power vs. Perpetual Peace: Paradigms of European Order from Utrecht to Vienna, 1713–1815

Over the course of the eighteenth century, two major models of European international order emerged as alternatives to universal monarchy: one was based on the balance of power; the other centred on the idea of perpetual peace. This article traces each back to its origins in debates around the moment of the Peace of Utrecht in 1713. In particular, it examines the evolution of the doctrine of balance of power in early eighteenth-century English political thought and then as a legal principle incorporated into the Treaty of Utrecht, before proceeding to the counter-proposal in the form of the Abbé de Saint-Pierre's Plan of Perpetual Peace and the objections it raised. It then shows how Saint-Pierre's paradigm of a league of European states found (albeit in altered form) its way into the Treaty of the Holy Alliance (1815) proposed by Tsar Alexander I after the defeat of Napoleon. It concludes by highlighting the fundamental soundness of the idea of European league, as well as the flaws inherent in the early model of Saint-Pierre.     

Memory Politics and Ontological Security in Sino-Japanese Relations

Most international relations (IR) research on the role of collective memory and representations of the past gives the impression that these primarily matter for states constrained internationally by their history as aggressors, such as Japan. How former perpetrator states represent the past is seen as important for bilateral relations because it may affect perceptions in previously victimised states. Representations of the past in the victimised states are seldom dealt with. This article argues that war memory in victimised states is also highly relevant for bilateral relations, since it is closely connected to “ontological security”, or the “security of identity”. By analysing Chinese official documents and Japanese parliamentary debates the article shows how the Chinese government has used representations of the past for ontological security purposes, and how in response Japanese political actors have politicised exhibits at Chinese war museums that are seen as a threat to Japanese identity and interests.     

Law,Principle, and the Theologico-Political History of Sovereignty

Abstract

This article takes it cue from the debate between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson regarding the possibility of political theology within Christianity, and in response, offers a conceptual-historical portrait of sovereignty and its juridical dimensions. Beginning with the introduction of Roman law into the medieval Church, the article traces the logic of “legal principle” as the basis of sovereign decision and how the form of legal distinctions adopted into canon law translate the Romanitas of law into the theory of papal sovereignty. By the Romanitas of law, that is to say the principle of sovereignty in law. The article then seeks to describe the conceptual translations of Roman politics and Stoic metaphysics into theological form and the logic of this translation into medieval natural law. The article concludes by evaluating how the civic theology of Rome is conceptually inherited by the politics and legal framework of sovereignty and returns to Peterson’s critique of Schmitt, arguing that political theology can be understood as a dynamic where politics is theologized, assuming that in the history of religion, theology and politics are never fully distinct to begin with.