Environment and leisure in Italy during Fascism

While vacation colonies, camps for children and young people, well-equipped beaches and playgrounds, and the first national parks were conceived in Italy during the Liberal period, it was not until the late 1920s/1930s that they were created and transformed by the Fascist regime. This article will analyse the purposes of the use of the environment and protected areas by Fascist organisations during the Fascist regime by different social groups and classes. It will try to answer several questions: how did Fascist mass organisations (youth organisations such as the Opera Nazionale Balilla (ONB) and Gioventù Italiana del Littorio (GIL), leisure organisations like the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro (OND), sports associations) relate to environmental space? Which popular activities were conceived for open-air, urban and national parks? How did the relationship between outdoor leisure and the environment develop in the ‘new’ middle class in the 1930s? How did Fascism conceive of the relationship between human beings and nature? The Nazi regime and the US New Deal were the strongest models at that time in terms of the politics of land conservation and leisure time. Did Fascism look to those experiments; did Fascism find its own modern ‘conservative’ relationship with the environment? This article will try to answer some of these questions, mindful of the lack of studies on Italy in comparison with the expanding historiography on the German and American cases.     

Morgan in Africa

Jack Goody. Production and Reproduction: A Comparative Study of the Domestic Domain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology #17,1976. xiii +157 pp. Figures, tables, appendices, notes, references, index. $14.95 cloth, $4.95 paper.     

走进非洲花花世界

世人皆知去南非买钻石,游览桌山和好望角,却远远低估了南非植物的魅力。实际上,南非地区是世界上六大植物区系之一,是一个令人骄傲的植物王国,被国际生态保护组织认为是地球上唯一的生物多样化干旱地区,并被列为世界上25个最具生态价值的地区之一。这里的植物花期极为短暂,留给来自全球各地游客的赏花期不到一个月,然后大地重归荒芜和干旱,似乎什么都没有发生过。     

Containers and mobility in West Africa

In West Africa, containment practices have long been localized in their production, moulded by environmental forces, and scaled to the human body. In the twentieth century, fossil fuels have changed how people keep and carry things. But newer technologies have tended to alter, rather than eliminate, older forms of storage.     

Human security and development in Africa

There has been a recent rise in optimism about Africa's prospects: increased economic growth; renewed regional and national political commitments to good governance; and fewer conflicts. Yet, given current trends and with less than eight years until 2015, Africa is likely to fail to meet every single one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Home to almost one‐third of the world's poor, Africa's challenges remain as daunting as ever. Despite highly publicized increased growth in some economies, the combined economies of Africa have, on average, actually shrunk and are far from meeting the required 7 per cent growth needed to tackle extreme poverty. A similar picture emerges from the analysis of Africa's performance on the other MDGs. In a world where security and development are inextricably connected in complex and multifaceted ways, Africans are, as a result, among the most insecure. By reviewing a select number of political, security and socio‐economic indicators for the continent, this analysis evaluates the reasons underlying Africa's continuing predicament. It identifies four critical issues: ensuring peace and security; fostering good governance; fighting HIV/ AIDS; and managing the debt crisis. In assessing these developmental security challenges, the article recalls that the MDGs are more than time bound, quantified targets for poverty alleviation–they also represent a commitment by all members of the international community, underwritten by principles of co‐responsibility and partnership, to an enlarged notion of development based on the recognition that human development is key to sustaining social and economic progress. In recent years, and often following failures, especially in Africa, to protect civilian populations from the violence and predation of civil wars, a series of high‐level commissions and expert groups have conducted strategic reviews of the UN system and its function in global politics. The debate has also developed at the theoretical level involving both a recon‐ceptualization of security, from state centred norms to what is referred to as the globalization of security around the human security norm. There has also been a reconceptualization of peacekeeping, where the peacekeeping force has enough robustness to use force not only to protect populations under the emergent responsibility to protect norm, but also enough conflict resolution capacity to facilitate operations across the conflict–development–peacebuilding continuum. This article opens up a discussion of how these ideas might be relevant to security regime building and conflict resolution in African contexts, and suggests how initiatives in Africa might begin to make a contribution to the theory and practice of cosmopolitan peacekeeping.     

我与非洲

我对非洲和野生动物产生兴趣的源头是CCTV的《动物世界》.从记事起,我就痴迷于《动物世界》,其中许多纪录片取材于非洲稀树大草原.从80年代初的黑白电视机到现在的液晶电视,30年来,我一集都没漏过.我最爱去的地方是动物园,北京动物园去了不下百次.我每到一个城市,其他景点可以不去,动物园是绝对要去的.从小学开始,我订阅了一些书刊,只要有非洲野生动物的文字和图片,就剪裁下来,整理在一个小匣子里.到上高中的时候,我集合了几乎所有市面上能见到非洲动物的资料,对非洲一些野生动物保护区和野生动物习性了如指掌.