When the personal becomes political: using legal reform to combat violence against women in Ethiopia

This article focuses on Ethiopia's first civil society organisation, the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association (EWLA), which has been campaigning for legal reform to secure women's rights and address violence against women. Implementing legal changes to benefit women in Ethiopia is impeded by difficulties in using the formal legal system, by poverty and deeply embedded gender inequalities, by plural legal systems, and by entrenched cultural norms. However, the article argues that the most significant challenge is the increasing degree of authoritarianism in Ethiopian state politics, that this is crucial in determining the space for activism, and that this shapes the successful implementation of legal change. The research shows how women's activism around personal rights challenges public/private and personal/political boundaries and can be seen as a political threat by governments in contexts where democracy and rule of the law are not embedded, leading to repression of women's activism and hindering the implementation of measures to protect women's rights when states become more authoritarian. Little is known empirically about the impact of democratisation on the implementation of measures to protect women's rights in Africa. This article shows how the emergence of democracy and legal reform intersects with the emergence of women's rights, especially with respect to gender-based violence. It shows how trying to secure women's personal right to be free from violence through the law is profoundly political and argues that the nature of democratisation really matters in terms of the implementation of measures such as legal changes designed to protect women's rights.     

Perpetual Alleluia and Sacred Violence: An Afterword

This paper re-examines Paul Schroeder's thesis concerning the new international order after 1815 and argues that the practicalities of power projection were as important in shaping foreign policy as were diplomatic principles and practices. Highlighting Wellington's role in policy-making, it re-assesses British interventions in Portugal in the 1820s to argue that the exercise of British power resulted from a range of influences apart from the adherence to the Concert system. British interventionism was constrained by the limitations of military and naval power, difficulties in securing co-operation with the Portuguese, and the nature of Portuguese politics and the Portuguese state. The experience and legacy of the Peninsular War also made British ministers sceptical about the potential impact of foreign interventions in the region during the 1820s. Interventions in Portugal demonstrated that Britain could not project power on a global or significant scale in areas where it did not locally command substantial war-making resources, as in India. Schroeder's emphasis on Concert diplomacy and C.A. Bayly's on global-reach fail, therefore, to capture the appropriate range of influences on power projection.     

An unsettling integration: Immigrant lives and work in Palermo

Giuseppe Garibaldi was the most enduring political hero of nineteenth‐century Italy. His political image was inspired by both the romantic movement and religion and, in turn, inspired a new kind of charismatic popular politics. The first part of this article explores the sources and assesses the impact of the cult of Garibaldi during the Risorgimento. The second part examines the use made of Garibaldi's image after Italian unification and, especially, after his death. It finds that government attempts to glorify Garibaldi were relatively unsuccessful while the parallel, republican cult of Garibaldi had a considerable impact. Thus, Garibaldi's extraordinary popularity highlighted the failed official ‘nationalization’ of Italians. At the same time, support for Garibaldi points to the emergence of an alternative sense of Italian national identity     

Site formation processes in caves: The Holocene sediments of the Haua Fteah,Cyrenaica, Libya

Caves have yielded some of the most globally important archaeological sequences, but often their interpretation has suffered from assumptions about cave sedimentary processes. Caves contain distinctive sedimentary environments: this has major implications for the understanding of contained archaeological materials. This paper describes and analyses the Holocene sediments in the Haua Fteah, a sequence regarded as essentially continuous by the original excavator. 50 years after it was first excavated, the Haua's Epipalaeolithic to post-Classical chronological range and rich finds make it still the key Holocene archaeological site in North Africa. The reassessment shows, however, that the sequence is strongly discontinuous and this has major implications for the reinterpretation of the site, as the highly-resolved archaeological record is thus likely to reflect a series of brief occupations, rather than continuous human activity. As with many caves, the sedimentary record in the Haua Fteah is an extremely sensitive indicator of environments and processes in the wider landscape. Secure understanding of sedimentary process, from analysis of the highly individual records found in caves, is essential for full understanding of their contained archaeology.     

The Traditional Boats of Vietnam,an Overview

This paper addresses the material boat culture of Vietnam both in its current context and more specifically through an assessment of how the boats of Vietnam have been studied in the past. It presents a comprehensive summary of past publications describing the construction, use and variety of boats in the region, from the earliest volumes to modern research projects, including the work of the US military. It highlights the rich diversity of construction approaches and boat‐types that are still built and used, and demonstrates the need for further field research to record the fast‐disappearing traditional boats of Vietnam. © 2010 The Authors     

From war service to domestic service: ex-servicewomen and the Free Passage Scheme 1919-22

At the end of the First World War, the British government put into operation a Free Passage Scheme for ex-servicemen, ex-servicewomen and their dependants to emigrate to the colonies and dominions of the Empire. This scheme was driven by a complex network of interlinked beliefs and policies concerning both the relationship between the metropole and the Empire, and the perceived necessity for social stability in Britain and in the dominions and colonies. This article examines the Free Passage Scheme, paying particular attention to the ways in which it was envisaged as a means of restoring a gendered balance of the population in Britain, where young women outnumbered young men at the end of the war, and in the dominions, where men outnumbered women, and was also seen as a way of emigrating women whose wartime work experiences were understood to be in conflict with gendered identities in the post-war period. The article argues that the Free Passage Scheme needs to be understood as gendered, as it envisaged the transformation of female members of the auxiliary wartime services into domestic servants for the Dominions. The scheme's failure, it is argued, prefigures the failure of the far larger Empire Settlement Act of 1922 to emigrate large numbers of British women as domestic servants.