Genocide documentary as intervention

Gifted filmmakers such as Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The act of killing, are attempting to use the power of documentary to provoke social and political change in post-conflict settings. What roles do interventionist filmmakers play in processes of national reconciliation and transitional justice? Can The act of killing really be a catalyst for change in Indonesia? This article contends that the genocide documentary is a form of antagonistic intervention that warrants systematic and critical re-evaluation. It holds that claims regarding the remedial impact of documentaries such as The act of killing are difficult to substantiate, the main problem being attribution, cause and effect. Intervention in the mind of the director seems to follow the logic of a synchronous circuit, where trauma based on revealed truth leads to transitional justice. Each component in the circuit has a corresponding political argument. This article will examine three interrelated arguments linking genocide documentary and political intervention: (1) re-traumatization, (2) power-laden truths and (3) the narrowing of impunity gaps. This article contributes to debates about genocide and intervention by presenting evidence from Indonesia, including rare interviews with the protagonists in Oppenheimer's award-winning film, surveys of Indonesian audiences and data gathered from a global online petition as well as Chinese microblogs in order to better understand how audiences respond to genocide documentaries and why it is so difficult to generate political action outside the theatre.     

THE CRISIS OF HUMANITY: OR,WHAT IF WE HAVE NEVER BEEN HUMAN?

This collection of nine essays brings together a variety of responses to the question of the “nonhuman turn” within the humanities and the social sciences, understood broadly as a developing concern with overcoming anthropocentrism in its diverse manifestations. Emerging from The Nonhuman Turn conference held at the University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee in 2012, which was hosted by the Center for 21st Century Studies, it represents the first attempt to account for and consolidate the many intellectual approaches and developments that may now be regarded as constituting the nonhuman turn. The nonhuman turn is contextualized as both “yet another” turn but also a necessary one, and as something critically distinct from “the posthuman turn”—whereas the posthuman turn is concerned with what comes after the human (ways of being, ways of thinking), the nonhuman turn insists (according to editor Richard Grusin) that “we have never been human.” My reading of this volume suggests that this claim is not borne out across the chapters it contains, and that the notion that we have never been human, though a noble gesture to Bruno Latour's widely lauded claim that “we have never been modern,” does not enable a new philosophy, nor does it advance the two primary streams of philosophical thought featured here: object‐oriented ontology (OOO) and new materialism.     

Counterterrorism policy in liberal-democratic societies: locating the ethical limits of national security

This article considers the moral limits to national security policies. While it may seem self-evident that there are, and ought to be, limits to counterterrorism policies, there is an increasingly widespread public opinion that political leaders can, and must, do everything they can to protect against terrorist acts. Liberal-democratic societies are facing the threat of domestic terrorism, and for a political leader to say that ‘we cannot stop all terrorist acts and, indeed, neither should we’ would sound the death knell for their career. This article seeks to specify the limiting conditions around counterterrorism policy by reference to policymakers’ public justifications offered for counterterrorism policy. This article presents three normative elements that underpin counterterrorism policy to show that there are important reasons to limit counterterrorism policy, and to suggest that these limits ought to be recognised by political leaders and citizens alike in liberal-democratic societies. Having set out three limiting factors on counterterrorism policy, the article then shows that these factors do indeed play a role in UK counterterrorism policy development—that is, in recognising the justificatory apparatus for national security policies, limiting conditions ought to be found that are sensible to, and accepted by, the proponents of such policies.     

New light on Roman census papyri through semi-automated record linkage

ABSTRACT

The census documents from Roman Egypt form the best documentary source of demographic information for the Roman Empire. Earlier collections (Bagnall and Frier 2006 Bagnall, R. S., and B. W. Frier. 2006. The demography of Roman Egypt. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [Google Scholar]; Bagnall, Frier, and Rutherford 1997 Bagnall, R. S., B. W. Frier, and I. C. Rutherford. 1997. The census register P. Oxy. 984: The reverse of Pindar's Paeans. Papyrologica Bruxellensia, Vol. 29. Brussels: Fondation égyptologique Reine Elisabeth. [Google Scholar]) have shown that some individuals and households appear more than once within this body of evidence. This article demonstrates how semi-automated record linkage provides an efficient and systematic way of producing linkages between early historical documentary sources that are fragmentary. The process yielded more linkages with generally high probability values than previously employed linkage-by-hand methods. As the added examples show, semi-automated record linkage also proved to be a useful method to fill gaps in papyri by transferring information from one record to the other. As such, it provides new opportunities for papyrologists and epigraphers working with fragmented materials pertaining to the ancient Greco-Roman world.     

A different way home: Resettlement patterns in Northern Uganda

After decades of civil conflict leading to massive internal displacement of people, Northern Uganda is peaceful again and hundreds of thousands of displaced people have returned to the area. Using data from maps and satellite imagery, we examine the placement of homes before, during and after the conflict. Examining two study sites, one that experienced a great deal of violence over an extended period of time and one where the experience of violence was more limited, we observe the clustering of home placement in the post-conflict period. As resettlement occurs, there is also evidence of increased location of homes in close proximity to roads at the site with high levels of violence. This research informs what we presently know about the choices of returnees and has implications for service provision and the reclamation of property rights after conflict.     

Book reviews

Thomas Dublin and Kathryn Kish Sklar, eds., ‘Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1830–1930,’ http://vvomhist.Binghamton.edu.

Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780‐1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). Pp.xii + 228. $39.95 (hardback); $19.95 (paperback). ISBN 0 8071 2537 7; 0 8071 2600 4.

Timothy S. Huebner, The Southern Judicial Tradition: Southern Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness, 1790–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press), 1999. Pp. xiii 4‐ 263. $45.00 (hardback). ISBN 0 252 0634 0.

Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). Pp.xii + 316. $35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0 6910 0130 8.

Joseph G. Dawson III, Doniphan's Epic March: The 1st Missouri Volunteers in the Mexican War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999). Pp. xii + 325. $35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0 7006 0956.

Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). $45.00 (hardback); $18.95 (paperback). Pp.xii + 311. ISBN 0 8078 2436 4; 0 8078 4741 0.

Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998). Pp.xxi + 303. $35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0 5202 0794 7.

Mark E. Neely Jr, Southern Rights: Political Prisoners and the Myth of Confederate Constitutionalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999). Pp.vii + 212. $35.00 (hardback). ISBN 0 8139 1894 4.

John C. Willis, Forgotten Time: The Yazoo‐Mississippi Delta after the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). Pp. xiv + 239. $55.00 (hardback); $19.50 (paperback). ISBN 0 8139 1971 1; 0 8139 1982 7.     

Partisan politics and the public sphere: The civil war north

The Civil War North presents an interesting case study of the relationship between a highly politicized public sphere and partisan electoral politics. Although the two‐party system remained intact throughout the war, the concept and practice of partisanship was challenged by the social experience of Northerners who ‘acted politically’ when they took part in the war effort. The creation of a mass citizen army and the mobilization of women and men on the home front meant that parties lost their function as the crucial mediating channel between citizen and government. The more that politics mattered, the less partisanship seemed to be relevant. The war exposed the latent non‐partisan political energies of Northern society. These conclusions bolster the arguments of those scholars who, questioning whether partisanship was as deep or as widespread as previously supposed, have begun to suggest that the ‘party period paradigm’ does not capture the entirety of the nineteenth‐century political experience.