‘The First Major Test’: The UN Secretary-General and the Palestine Problem, 1947–9

The Palestine problem was one of the first conflicts the newly formed United Nations (UN) was obliged to contend with. Secretary-General Trygve Lie played an active part in the proceedings, and his consistent support for the partition plan and Israeli UN membership has led to charges of Zionist sympathies and that his actions were based on this personal political bias. What explains the UN Secretary-General's actions in regard to the Palestine problem? This article argues that Palestine represented a threefold ‘test’ for the new world organisation: a test of its ability to solve regional conflicts; a test of its ability to bring about agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union; and a test of the Secretary-General's ability to protect and promote the UN. Due to the timing of the Palestine problem, as well as the attention it attracted from both the media and the general public, the UN's handling of the matter would have consequences for the organisation's standing in the world. In Secretary-General Lie's opinion, Palestine was ‘the first major test’ for the UN, and his perception of the high stakes inherent to the organisation's approach in Palestine provided the primary motivation for the Secretary-General's actions.     

Women in Suburbia

This research investigates the influence of a suburban lifestyle upon the attitudes of women. Specifically, a sample of suburban women are interviewed and information is ascertained concerning their attitudes toward commercial and social isolation in suburbia. Additionally, demographic data are acquired from the sample in order to describe the sample and compare it to the suburban female population that has previously been researched.     

Challenges to Neoliberal Hegemony in Bolivia

Since 1985, Bolivia has undergone three phases of the imposition of and popular resistance to neoliberal policies. This article charts the uneven course of neoliberal hegemony beginning with the structural adjustment program in the mid‐1980s through popular uprisings between 2000 and 2003 that ousted the national government. Even though the current administration may be unable to resist World Bank and IMF pressure to continue neoliberal policies, powerful and diverse popular movements will certainly continue to contest them. This article makes two contributions to discussions of neoliberalism as a hegemonic system: it identifies problems of scale in maintaining neoliberalism, and it reminds us of the importance of coercion in maintaining hegemony.     

Let no space go to waste: comparing the uses of space between two Late Classic centers in the El Paraíso valley,Copan, Honduras

Phosphorus analysis of earthen and plaster floors has been used in Mesoamerica to locate and identify activities at ancient sites. This study uses phosphorus analysis to discern if the inhabitants of two Late Classic coeval and proximal sites located in the El Paraíso Valley of Honduras were different culturally from each other. The buried earthen and plaster surfaces of both sites were systematically sampled and analyzed for phosphorus remains. The patterns of elevated phosphorus from these open spaces were subsequently compared to determine if differences in the habitual use and treatment of open spaces could be discerned. These differences are evaluated as a function of behavioral norms, functional responses, and cultural dispositions in order to evaluate the extent to which these two populations were indeed different from each other.     

Madness and Mother Ireland in the fiction of Patrick McCabe

This article explores the relationship between madness and the figure of Mother Ireland in the work of the Irish novelist Patrick McCabe. It situates his work in relation to contemporary feminist responses to representations of Ireland as a woman, by identifying different versions of the Mother Ireland figure as a cause of psychosis in McCabe's writing. It argues that McCabe, in contrast to writers such as Eavan Boland and Edna O'Brien, finds an alternative and radical means of contesting this historically troublesome literary motif.