The Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949: from the 1949 Diplomatic Conference to the Dawn of the New Millennium

In 1949 the Swiss government convened a diplomatic conference to update international humanitarian law in the light of the tragic experiences of the Second World War. Although the proceedings were largely dominated by the fear that the coup in Prague, the blockade of Berlin and the Chinese civil war would lead to a third world war, the conference succeeded in adopting the four Geneva Conventions that are still in force today. This was a major breakthrough from a humanitarian point of view as well as a significant political success. However, in the 50 years that followed, the new Conventions were applied to circumstances that differed widely from those that their framers had in mind. Since the threat of nuclear annihilation prevented any direct and open confrontation between the superpowers, their rivalry led instead to a proliferation of internal conflicts along the fault‐lines of the Cold War. What then was the significance of the new Geneva Conventions? What are the prospects for the future of international humanitarian law? These are some of the questions that deserve our attention as the twentieth century—scarred as it was by so many wars—givesway to the twenty‐first.     

The 1949 federal election: A reinterpretation

The 1949 federal election in Australia is widely regarded as one of Australia's most significant elections. This election ended eight years of ALP government and began a long period of unbroken rule by Liberal‐Country Party governments. Surprisingly, very little has been written about the 1949 election although various authors have addressed themselves to the question of why the Chifley government lost in December 1949. The orthodox interpretation is that Chifley's defeat in 1949 was to do with the issues of ‘bank nationalisation’ and ‘communism’. In this article, I offer a reinterpretation of the connection between political issues and voting behaviour in the 1949 election. Following the theory of Fiorina that voters tend to make their decision on the basis of how a party fares in handling problems in the past, I argue that the Australian electorate in 1949 responded negatively to Chifley's handling of the general economy and his policies on two crises in 1949 — the national coal strike and the dollar crisis.     

Washington's Response to the AIDS Epidemic: The Ryan White CARE Act

Passage of the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency (CARE) Act of 1990 followed a form familiar to students of policymaking in the American intergovernmental system: the provision of significant federal financing for policy initiatives located primarily at the state and local levels. The successes and failures of the Act, including its 1996 reauthorization, suggest both the strengths and the limitations of that design. This paper examines the structure of the Act as a vehicle for the federal government to fund AIDS service delivery at the state and local levels and the intergovernmental consequences of allocation policies associated with the Act. It concludes that perennial problems of equity and access cannot be resolved by the delegation of responsibility for significant policy or funding decisions to localities; rather, questions about the role of the federal government in overcoming intralocal and interlocal disparities remain to be addressed.     

The Comfort of Denial: External Assistance in Southern Sudan

Aid organizations profess universalist objectives, such as humanitarian principles and human rights, whilst operating in areas in which these objectives cannot be fulfilled. How do they deal with the disparity between the claims they make and what actually happens? How are parts of the story covered up, and what do the stated objectives achieve? This article argues that denial — at a personal, organizational and institutional level — is crucial for sustaining assistance, and is facilitated by the language of rights and principles. Drawing on research from southern Sudan, it explores how aid organizations construct an official version of events that fabricates clarity whilst maintaining a degree of tactical confusion. This establishes a political morality, a seemingly ethical position that has political and psychological returns.     

The Americans With Disabilities Act and Medical Providers: Ten Years After Passage of the Act

This article discusses the impact of the Americans With Disabilities Act (ADA) on health care providers in the last decade. Even though some ADA training has been provided for health care providers, more education will help to improve access to their offices, improve health care practices for their patients with disabilities, and be an incentive for the providers to help raise the consciousness of the rest of the community about the ADA.     

The migration response to the Legal Arizona Workers Act

The 2008 Legal Arizona Workers Act (LAWA) requires all public and private employers to authenticate the legal status of their workers using the federal employment verification system known as E-Verify. With LAWA, Arizona became the first state to have a universal mandate for employment verification. While LAWA targets unauthorized workers, most of whom are Latino immigrants, other groups could experience LAWA's effects, such as those who share households with undocumented workers. In addition, employers may seek to minimize their risk of LAWA penalties by not hiring those who appear to them as more likely to be unauthorized, such as naturalized Latino immigrants and US-born Latinos. Existing research has found a reduction in foreign-born Latino employment and population in response to LAWA. This paper asks a different question: have groups that are most likely to be affected by the law migrated to other states? We find a significant and sustained increase in the internal outmigration rate from Arizona of foreign-born, noncitizen Latinos – the group most likely to include the unauthorized – after the passage of LAWA. There was no significant LAWA internal migration response by foreign-born Latino citizens. US-born Latinos showed some signs of a LAWA-induced internal migration response after the law went into effect, but it is not sustained. The results indicate that local and state immigration policy can alter the settlement geography of the foreign born. This leads us to speculate about how immigrant settlement may adjust in the coming years to the intersecting geographies of post-recession economic opportunity and tiered immigration policies.     

1949～2002年:走向共同富裕的两条思路及其实践经验

1949年中国共产党执政以后,在领导中国人民奔向共同富裕目标的进程中,经历了1978年之前和之后的两个阶段.两个阶段都成功地解决了特定历史阶段面临的主要任务,也都留下了新问题.实践表明:在解决共同富裕的模式问题上,指导思想起决定作用;平均主义是共同富裕的对立物,两极分化也是共同富裕的对立物;找到既有效率又富公平的分配方式,是一个社会主义难题.正确地总结正面与反面的经验,有助于解决这个难题,并将实践推向新阶段.     

On the Relevance of Literature to Life: The Significance of the Act of Reading

What can literary education contribute to moral education? In this article the inherent practical, moral or political, relevance of literature and literary education is defended, which is opposed to a moralist approach to (children's) literature. A much debated danger in literature and the arts, viz. that it gives rise to a flight into a "promised land" instead of having relevance for real life and the real world, can be overcome by bringing to the fore the active part the reader plays in realizing the "world of the work." The classical idea of mimesis (i.e. of art mirroring reality) then makes room for a historicity of reading with an ongoing interplay of the (real) worlds of readers and the (fictive) world of the text. This idea is elaborated on from the point of view of Ricoeur's hermeneutics and from that of Iser's reception aesthetics, respectively. In realizing the world of the work the world of the reader is transcended and opened up towards the possible. In this reconfiguration lies the practical relevance of literature. Books, therefore, do not have to mirror the actual world in order to be morally or politically relevant. It is in the act of reading that the lasting significance of so-called classics is renewed time and time again.     

美国1882年排华法的前奏:1875年《佩奇法》实施的背景及影响

论文探讨了1875年《佩奇法》出台背景及其影响。在种族偏见、文化差异以及政治机会主义等因素的共同作用下,美国国会议员绕开中美之间自由移民的法律,将限制华人女性入境的立法解释成为一场维护美国传统家庭和婚姻道德的保卫之战。以加州联邦众议员佩奇名字命名的《佩奇法》,在美国国会开创了针对特定群体立法进行移民限制的先例。从法律出台到1882年《排华法案》之间的七年间,移民美国的华人超过了之前的任何一个以七年划分的时间段,《佩奇法》虽没有达到阻止苦力华工赴美目的,但在阻止华人女性移民美国方面相当成功,基本切断了华人女性赴美的渠道,也为七年后的美国全面排华铺平了道路。