Affluence,Poverty and the Idea of a Post-Scarcity Society

The ‘end of nature’ and the attenuation of tradition, associated with accelerated modernization on a global scale, increase the need for conscious reflection on many aspects of life formerly considered to be givens. Thus in developed and developing countries alike, new questions of personal choice and ethics form the basis for a kind of life politics which is different from — and supplements, but does not replace — the longer-established practice of emancipatory politics, concerned above all with issues of social justice. This essay invites us to consider how life politics can generate new strategies to reduce inequality and alleviate poverty.     

The politics of Antarctic minerals: The Greening of white Australia

On 22 May 1989 the Australian Government announced that it would not sign the Antarctic Minerals Convention that had been concluded in June 1988. Australia had been a strong supporter of the minerals treaty approach to regulating Antarctic mineral development. This case study in Australian foreign policy examines four well known approaches to foreign policy making in order to explain Australia's volte face on the minerals treaty. It is concluded that domestic politics best explains Australia's decision and that students of Australian foreign policy need to pay more attention to the domestic determinants of the policy making process.     

Postcolonial positioning and Japanese imperial affect in interwar Dada prose poems

Between the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) and the Mukden Incident (1931), Japan’s mounting colonial presence manifested itself in the activities of the South Manchuria Railway Company as well as in the Japanese forces’ skirmishes for control of the region. The poet Kitagawa Fuyuhiko (1900–1990) would draw on his memories of Manchuria, where he lived until attending college in Kyoto, to situate hyperobjects and colonial minutiae in counter-hegemonic anticolonial and antiwar prose poems. His subtractive poetic configurations – not Surrealist but certainly building on Dada precedents – isolate incongruous elements (evental traces) in Alain Badiou’s sense of being faithful to a critique of the ethics of a colonial apparatus. Having grown up within the colonial enterprise himself, and subject to high-minded Japanese media representations and instilled imperial affects, Kitagawa positions himself against the machinic drive for colonial profits and the abuse of labour and prostitutes. This article thus situates aesthetic strategies for displacing imperial affect as projected onto spaces of Japanese expansion so as to document radically anticolonial subject possibilities among Japanese nationals themselves. As postcolonial artefacts, these prose poems suggest the contradictions of European modernity writ in the Japanese rhetoric of cosmopolitan East Asian development and liberation as cultural production that aestheticises colonial extraction of labour and raw materials.     

The archaeology of the Eastern Sahel,Sudan: preliminary results

This paper reports the combined preliminary results of the Italian Mission to Kassala and the joint University of Khartoum/Southern Methodist University Butana Project. Both groups have been carrying out extensive survey and test excavations in the Southern Atbai of the East Central Sudan, between the Atbara and Gash Rivers. This work has led to the recognition of a previously unknown culture area and ceramic tradition which spans about 5000 years and, at its peak, probably covered about 100,000 sq. km east of the Nile. This ceramic tradition, the Atbai Tradition, is associated with the development of large villages (over 10 ha) during the 4th millennium bc.

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Résumé Le présent article rapporte les résultats préliminaires combinés de la Mission italienne à Kassala et du projet Butana entrepris en commun par les universités de Khartoum et Southern Methodist. Ces deux groupes ont réalisé des reconnaissances archéologiques extensives et des sondages dans le sud de l'Atbai, dans la partie centrale orientale du Soudan, entre les rivières Atbara et Gash. Leur travail a mené à la reconnaissance d'une civilisation et d'une tradition céramique auparavant inconnues qui durèrent quelque 5000 ans et qui couvraient à leur apogée environ 100,000 km² à l'est du Nil. Cette tradition céramique, la tradition Atbai, est associée au développement des grands villages (de plus de 10 ha) au cours du 4^e millénaire avant notre ère.

     

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMPHREY-HAWKINS*

Humphrey-Hawkins, enacted into law as the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, is the most important step the Federal government has taken for overall economic coordination since passage of the Employment Act of 1946. The centerpiece of the new law is specific goals for unemployment and inflation. All Federal programs and policies are to work toward achieving a 3 percent adult and 4 percent overall jobless rate within five years, and inflation rates of 3 percent by 1983 and 0 percent by 1988. The present article outlines the major changes made in Humphrey-Hawkins from its introduction in June 1974 to its enactment in October 1978, the contents of the Full Employment and Balanced Growth Act of 1978, and the politics surrounding its passage.     

Vegetation,land, and wood use at the sites of Bat and Al‐Khashbah in Oman (fourth–third millennium BC)

About 4200 charcoal fragments have been identified from the fourth‐ to third‐millennium BC archaeological sites of Bat and Al‐Khashbah in order to gain an understanding of plant resources available at the sites. Acacia sp., Ziziphus sp., and Tamarix sp. were the main taxa identified at both sites and indicate a similar vegetation composition as today. Phoenix sp. (date palm) charcoal also has been found at both sites. Whereas the cultivation of date palm for the 2700–2300 BC layers from Bat was likely, given other circumstantial evidence (i.e. local cereal cultivation and floodwater irrigation), it is unclear whether date palm was cultivated at Al‐Khashbah. Especially for the older periods (3300–2700 BC) it is possible that nomadic pastoralists were exploiting and/or managing wild date palms. The find of Avicennia marina at Al‐Khashbah indicates long‐distance contacts with the coast.     

Explaining Advocacy Coalition Change with Policy Feedback

Despite the prominence of exogenous factors in theories of policy change, the precise mechanisms that link such factors to policy change remain elusive: The effects of exogenous factors on the politics underlying policy change are not sufficiently conceptualized and empirically analyzed. To address this gap, we propose to distinguish between truly exogenous factors and policy outcomes to better understand policy change. Specifically, we combine the Advocacy Coalition Framework with policy feedback theory to conceptualize a complete feedback loop among policy, policy outcomes, and subsequent politics. Aiming at theory-building, we use policy feedback mechanisms to explain why advocacy coalitions change over time. Empirically, we conduct a longitudinal single case study on policy-induced technological change in the German energy subsystem, an extreme case of policy outcomes, from 1983 to 2013. First, using discourse network analysis, we identify four patterns of actor movements, explaining coalition decline and growth. Second, using process tracing, we detect four policy feedback mechanisms explaining these four actor movements. With this inductive mixed-methods approach, we build a conceptual framework in which policy outcomes affect subsequent politics through feedback mechanisms. We develop propositions on how coalition change and feedback mechanisms explain four ideal-typical trajectories of policy change.