How Can Liberal Democracies Defend Themselves against Tyranny?

Tyranny in the modern era turned toward totalitarianism through the idea that human nature needed to be “perfected”; communism's enemy was a matter of class, Nazism's a matter of race. Democracy would seem by definition to resist such ideologies, but even the modern democratic state now possesses mechanisms that can be turned in tyrannical directions: regulatory powers, social welfare systems, and the new tools of artificial intelligence and “big data.” American democracy has been trending toward the “direct” form of democracy that the Founders recognized in ancient Athens and were determined to avoid, a degree of popular sovereignty capable of producing demands upon government that, in turn, could transform a people's government into a government's people. The best defense may be found in classic American literature's examination of national character and identity.     

INTRODUCTION: PROCESSES OF CHANGE IN URBAN SYSTEMS*

ABSTRACT The twenty‐first century will be one of intensified urbanization, on a scale never before experienced. How do urban systems and individual cities change and develop? The social sciences have many different approaches to analyzing the economic, social, and spatial dimensions of urban change. We inventory some of these approaches and their implications for public policy toward cities, urban change, and economic development.     

Phylogeographic analysis of barley DNA as evidence for the spread of Neolithic agriculture through Europe

Results of analyses of the photoperiod response gene (PPD-H1) and simple sequence repeats (SSRs) in modern landraces of cultivated barley were used as evidence for the mechanism of agricultural spread in Neolithic Europe. In particular, we explored the usefulness of considering adaptive genes as indicators of past selective pressures acting on crops, during their spread through Europe. In some areas, such as the Alpine region, Britain and Scandinavia, we have evidence to suggest that the adaptation of crops to certain climatic conditions may have contributed to the timing of agricultural spread. At the northern fringes of Europe, and in higher altitude locations in central Europe, the introduction of more suitably adapted cereals may have facilitated successful agriculture to trigger agricultural expansion. This research opens up the possibility of investigating other genetic adaptations to climate, which would permit a fuller evaluation of the relative contributions of climate/crop and forager/farmer interactions in the process of agricultural spread.     

‘The Danger is Two-Fold’: Decolonisation and Cold War in Anti-Communist Asia, 1955–7

This article examines the intersection between the Cold War and decolonisation in anti-Communist Asia in the 1950s. Drawing on the papers of former South Korean President Syngman Rhee housed at Yonsei University, the article explores both the motivations behind as well as the constraints upon South Korea's efforts to cultivate a military alliance in what it called ‘Free Asia’. Articulating some of the concrete political differences between South Korea and its potential partners in Asia, the article argues that Rhee's hardline views of the Cold War were interwoven with his ambivalence about Japan's reintegration in the post-war world. As a result of this intersection between the Cold War and decolonisation, the South Korean President was unable to achieve consensus with the rest of anti-Communist Asia. In exploring this chapter of South Korean diplomacy, the article calls on Cold War diplomatic history to integrate non-Communist Asia and for the historiography of decolonisation to investigate the legacies of Japan's empire in post-war Asia. It also suggests that scholars ought to reflect more deeply on the interrelationship between the Cold War and decolonisation.     

Re-examining the Australian public's attitude to military casualties: post-heroic or defeat-phobic?

Australia, like most other developed democracies, is often alleged to suffer from ‘casualty phobia’. The perception that the Australian public will not tolerate casualties in foreign conflicts has shaped the decisions of both civilian and military policy makers. Measures taken to protect Australian forces from casualties may, for instance, also serve to increase the risk to civilians in the country to which they are deployed. The USA underwent a similar debate some years ago. Innovative public opinion research techniques—especially ‘survey experiments’ which allow researchers to establish causal relationships by consciously manipulating one variable while holding others constant—have established that the American public are not reflexively casualty-phobic and that the impact of casualties on public opinion can be outweighed by other factors, such as the public's confidence in the mission's overall success. In this article, the author replicates one of the key survey experiments from the US debate, suitably adapted to Australian conditions, with a nationally representative sample of Australian voters. The author finds that the same pattern holds in Australia as in the USA: casualties do lower public support for a given mission, but the mission's chances of success matter more.     

Iron isotope analysis of red and black pigments on pottery in Nasca,Peru

The Nasca culture of the south coast of Peru developed during the first millennium ad and is known internationally for its elaborately decorated polychrome pots. Despite decades of iconographic analysis, little is known about the more technological aspects of Nasca pigment production and application. We present results from a pilot study on iron isotopes as a potential line of inquiry into the differences between red and black pigments in Nasca pigments. As well, we conduct a small firing experiment to examine potential changes in isotope composition. Our analyses show three significant results. First, firing does not change the isotopic ratios of Fe in pigments. Second, red and black pigments show differences in their iron isotope composition, which relate to differences in the minerals used to make the different colors. Third, naturally available hematite samples show greater isotopic variation than pigment samples, suggesting that people selected a limited range of iron oxides to produce pigments.