Human rights and the development of a twenty-first century peace architecture: unintended consequences?

The ‘long peace’ of the last twenty-five years has linked various forms of intervention—from development to peacebuilding and humanitarian intervention—with human rights. This ‘interventionary system/order’ model has premised its legitimate authority on expanded versions of human rights, connected to liberal frameworks of democracy, rule of law, and capitalism in order to connect peace more closely with justice. Human rights offer a tactical way forward for those interested in conflict resolution, but this has led to unintended consequences. Unless conceptions of rights are continually expanded as new power structures and inequalities are uncovered and challenged, philosophical and material matters of distributive and historical justice will remain.     

The concept of ‘outstanding universal value’ in the World Heritage Convention

Abstract

The basic criterion for inclusion of a property on the World Heritage List is that of ‘outstanding universal value’, as defined in the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention. The paper demonstrates the problems encountered in attempting to apply the concept of universality to material culture; this is reflected in the cultural and regional imbalances in the present List. It is recommended that there be a moratorium on the addition of further properties already well represented on the List and that active steps be taken to include types of cultural property and geocultural regions that are currently underrepresented, such as industrial heritage, cultural landscapes and nonmonumental cultures.     

Overcoming the Creswell–Foster divide in Australian strategy: the challenge for twenty-first century policy-makers

This article examines the continuing influence of the contending twentieth century schools of Creswellian continental defence and Fosterite expeditionary defence in Australian strategy. A context for analysis is developed through an examination of the contemporary globalised security environment which is marked by bifurcation into state-centric and multi-centric threats. The demands of this new security environment have led to the evolution of twenty-first century manifestations of the Creswell–Foster divide in the form of the defender-regionalist and the reformer-globalist schools of strategy. The article analyses how differences between these two schools, especially over the value of geography, have been exacerbated by the new dynamics of globalised security. In the future, however, overcoming the contemporary Creswell–Foster divide between the defender-regionalists and the reformer-globalists in Australian strategy is unlikely to occur in the exclusive arena of defence policy. Rather, what is required is the creation of an overarching national security strategy beginning with the establishment of an Australian Commission on Twenty-First Century National Security. Such a Commission could be modelled on the US Hart–Rudman Commission of 1999–2001 and be suitably adapted to Australian conditions. An Australian commission should be charged with producing a long-term report on holistic and ‘best practice’ security policy options for upholding and protecting Australia's vital national interests in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.     

Should we Abstain? Spousal Equality in Twelfth‐century Byzantine Canon Law

Spousal equality was not an ideal to which medieval societies generally aspired. Discussions about social order advocated a strict hierarchical structure: the man was to be the head of the household and the master of his wife. Did this subservient state of the wife extend to all spheres of family life or was there a space where spouses could act as equals? In this article I focus on one aspect of Byzantine spousal relations: the marital bed. I argue that there was a difference between lay and clerical couples. Among the Byzantine laity, husband and wife were equally responsible for deciding whether to engage in sexual intercourse. Canon law addressed lay husbands and wives as a couple. Among the clergy, however, the husband's responsibilities towards his flock sometimes required him to decide unilaterally in favour of abstinence. According to the law, it was the cleric's duty to ensure that this happened. As such it was he who was addressed and asked to abstain from his wife. More generally, the clerical status of the husband complicated the situation and needs to be taken into account before any generalisations are made about gender inequality.     

‘Bringing international politics back in’: reconceptualising state failure for the twenty-first century

This article argues that the failed-state phenomenon is not unique to the post-cold war era, nor is it uniquely threatening in comparison with other historical periods. The article contends that state failure is not primarily a failure of formal institutions of governance but a subjective condition defined by the great powers. ‘Bringing international politics back in’ is essential to a clear understanding of the issue for an emerging multipolar international system of the twenty-first century. The article draws on classical realist and critical constructivist perspectives to define state failure before developing a theoretical framework to reconceptualise the issue in a historical and international systemic context. Interpretations of state failure are based on the interplay of contingent transnational threats with the distribution of capabilities in the international system, the pattern of order in the international society, and the sensitivity of the domestic polities of leading actors to risk. The article draws some implications of this for the coming decades of the twenty-first century.     

Resistances in the “Resilient City”: Rise and fall of a disputed concept in New Orleans and Medellin

Medellin and New Orleans were regularly presented as resilience flagships of the Rockefeller's 100 Resilient Cities (100RC) program. In this article, I will demonstrate how 100RC was embedded or abandoned in both cities' policies. The two case studies provide an opportunity to understand how the 100RC approach to resilience offered – or failed to offer – an appropriate space for the multiple deployments of resilience. 100RC initially promoted an integrative definition of resilience, aiming to address natural as well as social stresses and shocks. I argue that this holistic approach paradoxically contributed to limiting the multiplicity of resilience in both cities. In Medellin, the project came to a halt after political changes. New Orleans eventually developed a more reductionist and technical approach than that initially formulated, focusing on the effectiveness of infrastructures rather than social changes. Considering the importance of contextualizing resilience to local concerns, this analysis will thus demonstrate some of the challenges implied in the institutionalization of a global model of resilience. Moreover, it will also highlight the importance of contextualizing neoliberalism and question the widespread vision of resilient cities as being merely neoliberal.     

Service or Benefice? Officeholders in Poland and Sweden of the seventeenth century

Exploring the differential structures of social and political power in early modern Europe, this paper examines the contrasting experiences of Poland and Sweden by focusing on the growth of civil office in each country. Central to the study is an understanding of the books of disciplinary regulation imposed on office holders, and how and why these measures were enforced. As the author illustrates, the two case studies give very different conclusions. In Sweden, as exemplified in the trial of leading members of the Swedish Council in 1680, the holder of civic office was constrained by a ‘corset of bureaucratic routine’. Strict, and widely enforced, rules governed activities such as office hours, dress and rates of remuneration. In contrast, Polish office holders pursued appointments not in the name of civic efficiency but to grasp social and political privilege. At the end of the article Kopczyński discusses some of the factors involved in these differences, laying emphasis on the structures of political and military power in each state.     

Millennium development goals (MDGs) and indigenous peoples' literacy in Cambodia: erosion of sovereignty?

Nation‐building throughout Southeast Asia has been undertaken in contexts where minority groups, living on the margins of society, are being forced into recent state constructions, and have had their cultures eroded as a result. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) for education have provided international benchmarks for literacy. These have been adopted by the Cambodian state, and a number of donors and NGOs have funded and enacted policies with the explicit aim of improving the language skills of Cambodia's highland communities. However, these are being implemented in communities that do not speak Khmer (the Cambodian national language), and do not have indigenous systems of writing. Drawing on fieldwork in Cambodia, this paper argues that the impact of the MDGs has been to depoliticize an inherently contested terrain, and to ironically silence communities on fundamental issues by teaching them to read, write and speak the national language. This has limited their capacity to perform sovereignty by restricting the very voice they are entitled to speak.     

Family and influence to the south of Normandy in the eleventh century: the lordship of Bellême

The Bellême family were among the most important of the new families to emerge in the unsettled conditions of northern France in the tenth century. They illustrate well the manner in which those families extended their influence at the expense of declining central authorities. The nature of their relations with their overlords, the counts of Maine and the dukes of Normandy, is examined and a new chronology proposed for the complex divisions of estates among the family. It is suggested that family quarrels of the 1040s and 1050s seriously weakened their position and that the lordship was easily dominated by Geoffrey Martel, count of Anjou, the most powerful figure in mid-eleventh century northern France. A reversal is traced in the pro-Angevin sympathies of Bishop No of Sées, the last surviving male member of the family, after the failure of the coalition of Angevins and Capetians against the duke of Normandy in 1054. However, it was not until the estates of the family were eventually reunited in 1071 on the succession of Ivo's niece, Mabel, and her Norman husband, that the lordship came completely under the influence of the ascendant Normandy.     

The dossettiani and the concept of the secular state in the constitutional debates: 1946–7

It is now generally accepted that the members of the Constituent Assembly who were charged with drafting the Constitution concentrated their efforts on formulating the ideals to be expressed in it at the expense of the institutional arrangements of the new Republic. This has generally been viewed as resulting from a combination of two factors: their weak grasp of the liberal principles underpinning liberal parliamentary democracy, and a concomitant error of judgement in assuming that sufficient stress on the ideals of the Constitution would guarantee the basis of a healthy democracy. This article sets out to examine the input of the most influential Catholic group, the dossettiani, and argues, against the error of judgement thesis, that in fact their rejection of the concept of the secular state was a more fundamental denial of important principles of a pluralist democracy than has usually been supposed. The article also places their contribution within the context of the Church's aim to create a ‘Christian civilization’, and further suggests that the model of Catholic Action which inspired its collateral vision of Catholic forces was corrosive of a pluralist vision of correct institutional arrangements. The article ends by suggesting that these factors may have weighed more heavily on subsequent distortions of Italian democracy than has so far been supposed.     

How to justify a crusade? The conquest of Livonia and new crusade rhetoric in the early thirteenth century

This article addresses the issue of how it was possible to justify a crusade to a region, such as the eastern shore of the Baltic, where there were no sacred shrines to protect or Christian lands to reconquer. Adopting a pluralist perspective of crusades, it argues that the Livonian crusade of the early thirteenth century offers some interesting clues to the new developments of crusading ideology. Conceiving of the conquest and conversion of Livonia as a crusade, albeit not quite equal to the liberation of Jerusalem, its initiators and apologists employed legal and rhetorical devices to justify the occupation of a region under the auspices of a crusade. This article examines these strategies through the medium of contemporary chronicles and papal letters.     

The reshaping of Ibero-American cultural diplomacy in the beginning of the XXI century: the declining of the Spanish historical hegemony?

ABSTRACT

Francoist cultural policy in Latin America – itself based on Hispanist philosophy – and the Spanish activity in the Organization of Ibero-American States (1949) promoted the emergence of Ibero-American cultural diplomacy. The return of democracy to Spain in 1978 turned these projects into more horizontal instruments of cultural cooperation. After a process of institutionalization that led to the creation of SEGIB and the establishment of the Ibero-American Cultural Letter in 2006, this multilateral diplomatic system was called into question due to its economic asymmetries and its ideological basis. However, the relative influence of this process in reformulating the system and in creating a shared identitarian discourse within Ibero-America has never been properly weighted, nor has the importance of each actor within this process. This article analyses the multilateral Ibero-American cultural diplomacy in order to understand its recent transformations in terms of the importance of both national power and symbolic hegemony.     

Who marries whom?: Ethnicity and marriage pairing patterns in Indonesia

This paper examines regional, ethnic-specific patterns and individual-level correlates in same ethnic marriages (endogamy) and ethnic intermarriages in Indonesia. With data from over 47 million couples in prevailing marriages from the full enumeration of the 2010 Census, we outline the provincial variations in endogamy against development indicators and an ethnic fractionalisation index. We compare the prevalence of endogamy for major ethnic groups, and use network plots to examine pairing patterns in ethnic intermarriage. We use multivariate analysis to summarise the relationships between the likelihood of endogamy and migration status, ethnic group size, age group, and education for individuals in two selected provinces: North Sumatra and Jakarta. There is evidence to support negative associations between endogamy rates and provincial development indicators. Endogamy rates vary across major ethnic groups, and as expected, are higher in relatively large ethnic groups. In Jakarta and North Sumatra, individuals in urban areas, with younger age, and higher level of education have lower likelihood of endogamy. We found a positive relationship between ethnic size and endogamy, but conflicting results on the association between lifetime migration and endogamy in both provinces. By studying ethnic pairing patterns, this research provides a unique window to understand the dynamics of development, social change, and social stratification in an ethnically diverse emerging democracy.