Shattering the silence of violence against women

The UN Development Fund for Women has selected 23 projects in 18 developing countries to be beneficiaries of a $1.2 million trust fund dedicated to the elimination of violence against women. While the projects offer a variety of approaches to preventing and eliminating the domestic violence suffered by a third of the women in developing countries, all involve awareness-raising and advocacy, capacity-building, literacy, training, action research, and prevention/deterrence activities. A project in the Philippines will train women migrant workers who have been victimized by abuse to produce videos about their experience in order to raise consciousness about the rights of women and of workers. A South African project, which will address sexual assaults of high school students that occur in dating relationships, will involve a prevalence survey, a pilot project, an expansion of the project and curriculum development, a play on date rape, crisis intervention counseling, production of a video and manual, a national conference, and publication of essays produced by students who participated in the program. The Trust Fund was proposed by Japan in response to the urgent call for action issued by the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women and is funded by donations from governments and private sources.     

Unlikely Abolitionist: William Cushing and the Struggle Against Slavery

One of the striking differences between the federal Union established under the Constitution and the Confederation of States established under the Articles of Confederation is the creation under Article III of a judicial power of the United States and of a Supreme Court to exercise that power. Acting pursuant to its power to determine the structure of that Court, Congress determined that the Court should consist of one Chief Justice and five Associate Justices. The six lawyers President Washington named to the Court ¹ were leading members of the bar, yet none achieved lasting distinction by reason of his service on the Court. Chief Justice Jay, for example, is best remembered for the treaty with England which bears his name; and when he resigned in 1795 following his election as Governor of New York, local papers referred to his new office as "a promotion." ²     

Reimagined communities: Union veterans and the reconstruction of American nationalism

ABSTRACT. American commemoration of the Union dead and the role this played in the development of post‐war American nationalism is a topic of growing interest. Those who survived, however, are too often left out of the discussion: unsettling reminders of the sectional conflict at the time, the veterans' role in the reconstruction of American nationalism was rather more ambiguous than historians have made it seem. To trace the lineaments of American national identity after the Civil War requires some assessment of the ways in which the veteran was incorporated into or detached from the home front during the war itself and, later, from post‐war society. The evidence suggests that, in contrast to the ambiguity surrounding the veteran, the dead could, in many ways, be more easily accommodated by the new nationalist discourse emerging from the war. Positioning the veteran at the centre of the debate on war and nationalism, indeed, challenges the very concept of an imagined community emerging from or through civil conflict.     

Strontium Isotopes in the Investigation of Early Glass Production: Byzantine and Early Islamic Glass from the Near East*

⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ratios have been determined for glasses from four production sites, dated to between the sixth and the 11th centuries, in the Eastern Mediterranean region. On the basis of elemental analyses, the glasses at each location are believed to have been melted from different raw materials. Two glass groups, from Bet Eli‘ezer and Bet She‘an, in Israel, are believed to have been based upon mixtures of Levantine coastal sands and natron, and have ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ratios close to 0.7090, plus high elemental strontium, confirming a high concentration of modern marine shell (⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr ~ 0.7092) in the raw materials. The isotopic compositions of these two groups of glasses differ slightly, however, probably reflecting a varying ratio of limestone to shell because the sands that were utilized were from different coastal locations. Natron‐based glasses from a workshop at Tel el Ashmunein, Middle Egypt, have ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values of 0.70794–0.70798, and low elemental strontium, consistent with the use of limestone or limestone‐rich sand in the batch. High‐magnesia glasses based on plant ash, from Banias, Israel, have ⁸⁷Sr/⁸⁶Sr values of 0.70772–0.70780, probably reflecting the isotopic composition of the soils that were parental to the plants that were ashed to make the glass. Strontium and its isotopes offer an approach to identifying both the raw materials and the origins of ancient glasses, and are a potentially powerful tool in their interpretation.     

Stumbling Towards Union: Policymaking in the EU

Desmond Dinan (Ed.), Encyclopedia of the European Union .
Pierre-Henri Lament and Marc Maresceau (Eds.), The State of the European Union
John McCormick, The European Union: Politics and Policies .
Stelios Stavridis, Elias Mossialos, Roger Morgan, and Howard Machin (Eds.), New Challenges to the European Union: Policies and Policy-Making .
Helen Wallace and William Wallace (Eds.), Policy-Making in the European Union .     

Leadership coalitions and change: the role of states in the European Union

The role of states in the European Union has not diminished over the history of the organization's institutional development. On the contrary: since the fall of the Berlin Wall, member-state influence over Union affairs actually seems to have grown. This is attributable both to the weakening of the supranational elements and to the expansion of intergovernmental activity in key policy areas. Added to this, the growth in the number of EU member states, and the diversity that now exists in an EU of 25, have reinforced the network of relationships, both bilateral and multilateral, between member states. Consequently, the EU has both centripetal and centrifugal forces at work, with member states drawn together in a continuing formal integration process and driven towards building tactical associations among themselves.
This article discusses the relationship between the formal and the informal layers of integration in Europe, and points to the changing constellations and coalitions among the current member states. Special attention is given to the cleavages that emerged between the EU governments over the negotiations on treaty reform, from the Treaty of Maastricht to the Treaty on the European Constitution. With regard to the power structure within the EU, the article outlines the perspectives of a 'Big Three' core coalition as successor to the Franco-German motor.     

The African Union and the International Criminal Court: counteracting the crisis

In October 2016, South Africa became the first nation to withdraw from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), after Burundi began taking steps to leave it. Kenya is likely to follow, and other states, like Uganda, could take the same cue. The ICC is facing the most serious diplomatic crisis of its history, with the African Union (AU) denouncing double standards, neo‐colonialism and ‘white justice’, and regularly threatening to withdraw from the Rome Statute en masse. This article adopts both an interdisciplinary and a pragmatic policy‐oriented approach, with the aim of producing concrete recommendations to counteract the crisis. It firstly outlines the context of this crisis which, although not new, is becoming increasingly serious. It then responds to the AU's objections to the ICC. The court's ‘Afro‐centrism’ is explained by objective facts (the occurrence of mass crimes taking place on the African continent, the large number of African parties to the Rome Statute, the principle of complementarity) as well as by subjective decisions (a convergence of interest between the African leaders who brought the cases to the court themselves to weaken their opponents, and the prosecutor who needed quickly to find cases). Afro‐centrism should also be nuanced, as the ICC has already shown an interest in cases outside Africa and the extent to which it is a problem is a matter of perspective. The article also responds to the ‘peace vs justice’ objection, and emphasises that African states were instrumental in creating and sustaining the ICC. It finally formulates recommendations to ease relations between the ICC and AU, such as to investigate more outside Africa, reinforce African national jurisdictions, create intermediary institutional structures, promote regional‐level action, and rely more on ICC‐friendly African states and African civil society.