Genocide and frontier violence in Australia

Did frontier conflict in Australia amount to genocide? Answers to this question have revolved around topics such as contemporary understandings of the conflict, intent, the applicability of the term to Australian history and considerations of Indigenous agency. In this historiographical article, we argue that ‘genocide’ is a useful framework with which to understand the frontier experience in the Australian colonies. From that perspective, we provide a critical review of the literature up to the present.     

‘An Utter Absence of National Feeling’: Australian Women and the International Suffrage Movement, 1900–14

In February 1902 the Victorian suffragist Vida Goldstein helped establish the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) in Washington, D.C. Four months later, the Commonwealth Franchise Act gave white women unprecedented political privileges. Despite these pioneer achievements, Australian women struggled to achieve prominence within the international suffrage movement before the First World War. Discounting traditional explanations that expense and distance kept Australians on the IWSA’s margins, this article reconsiders the concept of national representation – a central tenet of liberal internationalism. In the wake of Federation, deep colonial loyalties persisted and women remained ambivalent about assuming the responsibilities of national and international citizenship.     

The Cross or the Double-Cross: Roman Catholicism,Anti-Communism,and the Political Theology of Venerable Fulton J. Sheen

The Venerable and Most Reverend Fulton J. Sheen was an advocate of American Catholic patriotism and opponent to the spread of totalitarianism, especially communism. He grounded the two positions in what I call the “ecclesial foundation” in which he defined American citizenship in terms of membership in religious institutions. In Sheen's view, religious institutions provided the ultimate, spiritual ends for humankind. Therefore, the American government had to protect, above all, religious liberties at home and abroad. Totalitarian regimes, which Sheen believed sought to replace spiritual with material ends of the state, violently deprived their subjects of religious liberty and, therefore, embodied the spirit of the anti-Christ. Only the Vatican had the spiritual and moral authority to identify this spirit, and—especially after the Second World War—only America had the military and economic power to confront it. Ironically, this argument was an appropriation of the old Nativist arguments against the Vatican itself. The Nativist argument was that religious liberty of Protestant churches was the source for political authority of the American state to use against the absolute, arbitrary, foreign dictator in Rome. Sheen's appropriation and redeployment of the old narrative persuaded millions of Americans to oppose totalitarian ideologies and view, after centuries of distrust, American Catholics as loyal citizens.     

Conflictividad capitular y poderes locales en el Cabildo de Manila (1690–1697)

La mayoría de especialistas en la historia de la iglesia de las Filipinas reconocen el gobierno del arzobispo de Manila, fray Felipe Pardo (1677–1689), como uno de los más conflictivos de la historia del archipiélago. Sin embargo, poco o muy poco se ha escrito sobre las actividades políticas y económicas de sus capitulares, particularmente en lo que se refiere a los períodos de sedes vacantes. Frente a la imagen monolítica y triunfante que la historiografía modernista ha proporcionado del discurso tridentino, lo cierto es que hubo grietas, divergencias y conflictos derivados de su confrontación con la realidad local. Los prebendados no constituían un grupo socialmente homogéneo, sino caracterizado por intereses, identidades y lealtades móviles que dependían de contextos políticos y económicos. En este ensayo vamos a analizar las políticas civiles y eclesiásticas de los prebendados del cabildo catedralicio, haciendo especial énfasis en la conflictividad capitular que siguió a la muerte del arzobispo Pardo (1689) hasta finales del siglo XVII.     

What the Political Corruption Scandal of 2015 Reveals about Checks and Balances in Vanuatu Governance

A series of dramatic events occurred in Vanuatu in late 2015 involving the conviction of 15 MPs for bribery, purported pardons given by the acting president and a contested dissolution of parliament. This paper analyses the significance of these events from both a political and legal perspective, in particular, considering the extent to which they were unprecedented and exceptional in terms of Vanuatu’s history. Certainly, the trial and conviction of almost 30 per cent of Vanuatu’s parliament sets a new standard not only for Vanuatu and the rest of the Pacific, but quite possibly globally as well. The outcome of the various legal processes resulted in the first ever convictions under Vanuatu’s Leadership Code Act, setting an important precedent for more active use of this legislation in future. Politically, however, these events were by no means the most serious of the numerous dramas that have characterised Vanuatu’s history since independence. Indeed, the events of 2015 underline that constitutional power is distributed and exercised reasonably broadly in Vanuatu with the president, the speaker of parliament and especially the court system all playing key roles, alongside prime ministers and opposition leaders, in the outcomes of political contestation. While we have no wish to downplay the seriousness of such a large number of convictions, the events of 2015 nevertheless suggest a degree of underlying strength and resilience in Vanuatu’s governance framework.     

The Inconsistent City,Participatory Planning,and the Part of No Part in Recife,Brazil

This article engages with the trajectory of urban participation in Recife, Brazil, from its start as a governance system aimed at ensuring the right of the poor to the city, to the introduction by the Workers’ Party of participatory budgeting. I argue that participation is used by the state in order to include populations within governmental structures while the poor struggle for the right to belong to the city. Drawing on Alain Badiou's ontology of multiplicity I contend that the urban situation is grounded in inconsistency, as manifested in the existence of a category of people who “sit at the edge of the void”, that neither is included nor belongs. I conclude that the popular mobilizations in Recife in the 1980s constituted a true emancipatory event that exposed the divisions of the city, the existence of a fundamental wrong, and that proclaimed the right of the excluded to the city.     

Postclassic expansion of Mesoamerican biocultural characteristics into Sonora,Mexico

Recent excavations at the Postclassic period (circa a.d. 1000–1521) mortuary mound of El Cementerio (SON P:10:8), located along the Río Yaqui in central Sonora, Mexico, have documented 105 mortuary features (111 individuals) many of which display elongated intentional cranial modification and several cases of tooth filing. These constitute biocultural traits common across much of Mesoamerica throughout its Prehispanic cultural sequence, which expanded along West Mexico and into northwest Mexico beginning in the late Classic period. The examples from El Cementerio represent the northernmost concentrated expression of these traits and could represent the spread of Mesoamerican/West Mexican identity associated with macro-regional trade and the expansion of the Aztatlán archaeological tradition during the Postclassic period in the region.