Wind Words and Fury: Canada and the Geneva Protocol, 1925–26

Abstract

Negotiation over the Geneva Protocol and its acceptance or rejection is placed in the context of Canadian domestic policy and its relationships both to the League of Nations, of which the Canadian government remained a strong support in principle, and the demands and expectations of its place within the British empire.     

From Private Library and Bookstore to Communist Party: Yun Daiying's Social Engagement and Political Transformation, 1917–1921

The early Chinese Marxist, communist leader and martyr, Yun Daiying was an avid reader and collector of books. His intellectual and political endeavors started with reading and collecting various books and magazines on current affairs and social sciences from home and abroad. Yun Daiying founded his own private library in 1917 and expanded it into a public library while he was a student of Wuchang National Normal University. Later Yun established a reading club christened the “Mutual Aid Society” under the disparate influences of Kropotkin, Mushanokōji Saneatsu, and the YMCA. Yun's founding of the Beneficent Group Bookstore in 1920 epitomized his ideal of combining reading and the book trade with the dissemination of new knowledge and the reconstruction of society from the bottom up. Yun kept his distance from the other Comintern-influenced Wuhan Marxists, and it was rather upon the organizational foundation of the Beneficent Group Bookstore that Yun Daiying co-founded a more radical “Co-Existence Society”, whose members were eventually converted to communism in 1921.     

After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics

Abstract:  This paper makes two central arguments. First, the popular language of geopolitics needs to be understood as historically emerging from and helping create a "geopolitical social", which both crosses and crafts traditional borders of internal and external to the national state. Second, we suggest that geoeconomic social forms are gradually supplanting this geopolitical social. After establishing the geopolitical social associated with traditional geopolitics, from Ratzel to Bismarck, we examine the erosion of geopolitical calculation and the rise of the geoeconomic. We trace emerging geoeconomic social forms in three domains: the reframing of territorial security to accommodate supranational flows; the recasting of social forms of security through the market; and the reframing of the state as geoeconomic agent. Neither an exercise in "critical geopolitics" nor an endorsement of Luttwakian style geoeconomics, this paper assumes no straightforward historical succession from geopolitical to geoeconomic logics, but argues that geoeconomics is nonetheless crucial to the spatial reconfiguration of contemporary political geography.     

From Moments to Histories: A Social Archaeology of the Mesolithic?

This contribution will provide a critical overview of the other papers within this special issue of Journal of World Prehistory (Elliott and Little 2018), identifying key aspects of the discussion and assessing potentials and problems in the development of Mesolithic archaeology in Britain and Ireland as a whole since 2006 (Conneller and Warren in Mesolithic Britain and Ireland: New approaches, Stroud, Tempus, 2006a). Reflections will include how the contribution of very high-resolution analyses to Mesolithic archaeology has changed since 2006 and the scale of our interpretations. The review will also identify areas which appear to be falling from analytical focus, including the role of analogies in Mesolithic archaeology and the nature of power and social relationships in Mesolithic communities.     

From Revolution to Dissolution: The Quai d'Orsay,the Banque Russo-Asiatique,and the Chinese Eastern Railway, 1917–1926

This article explores the use made of Christianity during the Second World War and the dilemmas created for the Allies by Stalin's religious record. It is particularly concerned with the way in which Christianity appeared for a while to become a bridge between East and West, with the explicit promise of continued post-war co-operation. However, in the immediate aftermath of the war, Anglo-American policies in particular switched from using Christianity to rehabilitate the adverse image of the Soviet regime to what had been the inter-war policy of using religion to demonise it. Inter-war demonisation held up the Soviet Union as a model not to be emulated. Post-war demonisation pointed to the Soviet Union as an expansionist threat bent on world domination. The article examines Stalin's responses, and Allied perceptions of those responses, to the changes in Western religious policy and propaganda from the Second World War to the emergence of the cold war. The article seeks to show how both sides used religion for political purposes, but that in the final analysis Western reluctance to relinquish what was perhaps its most emotive means of indicting and containing Communism meant that Christianity, instead of becoming a bridge, became a divisive factor that contributed to both the onset of the cold war and public acceptance of it.     

What Does the Somali Experience Teach Us about the Social Contract and the State?

Since 1991 the international system has struggled and failed to recreate a state on the territory of the former Somalia. Proto‐state systems have been formed by Somalis themselves in Somaliland and Puntland and alternative forms of governance and order exist in other parts of Somalia, but none enjoys international recognition. The polities of Somalia offer important lessons concerning our general theories about social contract, the role that states play in creating wealth, indigenous systems of governance, and the failure of existing international approaches to state reconstruction. Contemporary Somali politics is re‐explored here to extract these lessons. The article explores the assumptions embedded in the works of the classic Western social contract theorists in the light of Somali experience in order to show that the underlying conceptual structure of international state reconstruction work needs to be rethought. We conclude that it frequently is better to allow for bottom‐up, organic, disjointed negotiation of indigenous governance solutions (even though they probably will not conform to Western ideas of liberal democracy) than for the international system to impose top‐down answers. The former more closely tracks the history of state formation in Europe and the latter is troubled by the inconsistent and not necessarily benign interests of the international actors involved. Indigenous, local political systems are changed by the stresses of violent conflict, so prompt action to employ them in a post‐conflict situation is indicated.     

Vladimir Jabotinsky and the Split within the Revisionist Union: From the Boulogne Agreement to the Katowice Putsch, 1931–33

Although the leadership of the Revisionist Union originated in a similar socio-economic milieu, it was far from being homogenous. Different perceptions of the relationship with the existing Zionist Organization became the most prominent ideological impetus to disintegration. The years 1931–33 were the final stage of this process, marked by constant disputes and ambiguous interpretations of the various compromise formulas that were drafted. The article seeks to demonstrate that Jabotinsky's alliance with the extremist trends of the Revisionist movement was a by-product of his inability to dominate the moderate party apparatus, rather than a result of ideological proximity with the extremists.