Homeland,territory, property: Contesting land,state, and nation in urban Timor-Leste

This article considers contestations over land, state and nation in Aitarak Laran, an urban settlement in post-independence Timor-Leste. Since 2010 the settlement has been resisting eviction by the East Timorese state, which wishes to use the land it occupies to build a National Library and Cultural Centre. In exploring the contestation, the purpose of this article is two-fold. Firstly, it explores the nature of social connection to land within postcolonial state- and nation-building. Here, the contestation at Aitarak Laran reveals counter-posed imaginings of land as homeland, territory and property. Secondly, the article draws out the implications of these counter-posed imaginings for thinking about the ‘right to the city’, a notion first theorised by Lefebvre (1996 [1968]) and subsequently developed to encompass a range of modes of urban protest. In the settlement, the promises of independence—unity, equivalence, and inclusion within the sovereign nation-state—are at odds with residents' experiences of what independence has in fact brought. Land, in its multiple imaginings, becomes a crucible upon which this painful disjuncture plays out. Reading Aitarak Laran as an instance of ‘right to the city’ struggle, these tensions emerge as well not only in practice but also in theory, reflected particularly in the limitations and ambiguities of rights discourse.     

南朝女性墓志的考释与比较研究

南朝女性墓志是珍贵的献资料。其内容不仅反映了南朝时期的世族门阀制度、联姻制度、丧葬制度、侨郡制度和里坊制度,亦可补史之阙和正史之误,同时也填补了六朝学的空白。     

Accountability,Democratisation and the Right to Information in India

ABSTRACT

Accountability is a core democratic value. It envisages that citizens hold the powerful to account for omissions and commissions. Influenced by the global agenda for good governance, the Right to Information (RTI) Act in India was designed to build accountability through transparency. RTI is primarily a result of democratic politics. It emerged from intense grassroots activism – articulating poor and ordinary citizens’ discontent over corruption and other abuses of power. This study is based on six empirical cases of RTI usage in India’s West Bengal province. I argue that even though it is primarily designed to elicit accountability, RTI has emerged as a “seed right” because of its enabling, foundational and evolving dimensions push forward the process of democratisation. When operating individually, our respondents experienced negligible empowerment, but when the relatively powerless citizens organised collectively and were able to work through political institutions such as political parties and CSOs/NGOs, they could convincingly bargain with the powerholders, and elicit some cooperation, if not accountability.     

北京女性流动人口的家庭类型及其形成因素

本文通过国内外相关流动人口（移民）与性别研究和北京女性流动人口随机问卷调查,主要探讨女性流动人口在流动人口家庭中的身份和地位,并分析北京流动人口家庭类型及其形成要素。     

Political geography lecture: Social forms,spatial forms,and the New Right. Celebrating Capital at 150 and explaining the rise of the AfD

The federal elections of September 2017 that swept the authoritarian-nationalist political party with leanings toward the extreme right, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), into the national parliament marked a significant change in Germany's political landscape. The platform of the AfD is built on three pillars: nationalism/racism, sexism/homo-/transphobia, and neoliberal market-radicalism/utilitarianism. This lecture proposes a form-analytical approach to historical-geographical materialism that pays proper attention to both the social forms and the spatial forms of capitalism to shed light on how the principle of abstract equality is challenged by the AfD in a selective manner within these three pillars. Bringing together two branches of Marxist theory—form analysis in the tradition of the West German state derivation debate and Marxist theories of the production of space—it argues that the socials forms of capitalism are productive in that they both veil and make processable the fundamental contradictions of capitalism, but that this productivity faces substantial obstacles that are inscribed into the spatial organization of capitalism, i.e., its spatial forms—namely territory, scale, and (a reactionary understanding of) place. Drawing on these theoretical deliberations, the three pillars of the AfD platform are discussed. Although the abstract equality of market individuals is fully embraced by the AfD and its constituency, women and L.G.B.T.Q.I. people are denied the full realization of the potential of the principle of abstract equality. In particular, nonmembers of the ethnically and territorially defined demos are denied abstract equality altogether. Taken together, this lecture argues that the way in which the social forms of capitalism face substantial obstacles in the spatial forms within which they are organized helps to explain why a party with one core theme—a nationalist and racist position on migration, refugees, and Islam—can be so successful in the current conjuncture.     

身似断云零落——20世纪初期新加坡的妹仔

随着华人向新加坡移民的增多,妹仔也成为新加坡华人社会之一特殊群体。论文以社会性别为研究视角,在梳理妹仔研究现状和妹仔习俗流变的基础上,探究20世纪初期新加坡华人妹仔在社会转型过程中的历史境遇,进而解析中西文明冲突与交融背景下性别、阶级、种族等多重因素在政治、经济和社会层面的纠合。在近代社会新陈代谢的过程中,政府颁布废婢法令,妹仔习俗逐渐走向衰落。妹仔习俗作为内嵌于东方传统父权制社会形态的元素,在西方文明东渐的殖民背景下,不可避免地成为中西文明冲突与融合的一个角力点。     

Vico's science of imagination

I argue that despite the various ways in which Fichte separates right from morality in his 1796/97 Foundations of Natural Right, he nevertheless suggests in the writings from the period of his professorship at the University of Jena that there is a reciprocal relation between them. This requires, however, reading the Foundations of Natural Right in the light of The System of Ethics, which was published in 1798, especially the account of the ethical duties deriving from a person's membership of a profession that Fichte gives in this work. Although this approach allows us to attribute to Fichte a different conception of the state to the amoral one found in the Foundations of Natural Right, I argue that the separation of right from morality developed in this work remains valid and amounts to one of Fichte's main achievements, namely, his identification of the different dispositions that may characterize an individual's relation to the society in which he or she lives. This point is developed by comparing Fichte's amoral conception of the state to Hegel's account of civil society as the ‘state of necessity’. This does not involve an attempt to turn Fichte into Hegel but to show how the insights contained in Fichte's distinction between right and morality can be illuminated with reference to Hegel's theory of civil society and can be retained in the face of a powerful criticism that Hegel makes of the kind of contract theory of the state offered by Fichte.     

南朝禁卫武官组织系统考

南朝禁卫武官制度主要是对东晋制度的继承和变革。南朝同样有以领军将军/中领军和护军将军/中护军为核心的禁卫武官制度,其下有左、右卫将军等各级禁卫武官。刘宋还陆续恢复了前代卫尉、虎贲中郎将、武卫将军、积射将军、强弩将军等禁卫之职。南齐明确规定左、右卫将军以下禁卫诸职构成“西省”,与散骑诸职构成的“东省”相对。刘宋末年还出现了直将军,负责殿禁卫,极为机要。南齐直将军有了更大的发展,梁代又置位尊于直将军的朱衣直将军。南朝复置卫尉并具有“掌宫城管钥”的禁卫职能。《隋书·礼仪志六》所载大量低级禁卫武官名称,其中亦体现了梁天监旧制。     

清代中期的松陵女学

清代中期,松陵独特的人文地理条件,造就了众多的才媛闺秀,她们创作了大量丰富多彩的作品。