Exchange patterns,boundary formation,and sociopolitical change in Late Bronze Age Southern Caucasia: preliminary results from a pottery provenance study in northwestern Armenia

In the South Caucasus—roughly the territory of today's Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan—the transition from the Middle Bronze Age (MBA) to the Late Bronze Age (LBA) is equated with fundamental shifts in settlement patterns, subsistence economy, and political strategies. During the mid-2nd millennium BC, nomadic pastoral societies that had dominated the region began to settle down and construct stone fortresses along the foothills of the Lesser Caucasus; these fortifications largely replaced the expansive and often opulently adorned kurgan burials as the most prominent expression of political dominance on the landscape. After a decade of intensive archaeological study at various fortifications, very little remains known about the political and economic relationships among fortresses on a regional scale that might improve our understanding of the roots of these sociopolitical transformations. In this paper, we highlight the results of a recent neutron activation analysis (NAA) of ceramics from elite and non-elite contexts at a selection of LBA fortresses on the Tsaghkahovit Plain in northwestern Armenia, and offer some preliminary interpretations about political and economic organization and boundary formation. Most strikingly, the NAA data suggest that the fortresses on the Tsaghkahovit Plain appear to have isolated themselves economically from surrounding valleys, perhaps in an attempt to forge boundaries and legitimating ideologies attendant to new political formations that were quite distinct from their nomadic predecessors in the MBA.     

The wellsprings of candidate emergence: Geographic origins of statewide candidacies in the United States

Candidates and nominees for statewide office in the United States do not emerge from random locations within states. In this paper, we argue that densely populated areas are more likely to both foster political ambition and to afford the resources that enable candidates to wage an effective campaign. Candidates and nominees for major statewide office originate from populous counties in numbers significantly out of proportion to these counties’ share of their state’s population. Meanwhile, aspirants virtually never emerge out of rural areas or small towns. The pattern holds for all candidates and nominees for both Senate and governor and for both major political parties. Regional biases are more pronounced for institutionally strong gubernatorial offices than for weak offices and among high quality nominees for statewide office than among inexperienced candidates. Given the importance of urban/rural cleavages in the American electorate, these findings raise fundamental questions about political representation.     

政党现代化视域的选人用人论析

政党现代化是一个不断制度化、规范化、科学化的过程。选人用人是政党的重要功能。选人用人的合法性和科学性,是政党现代化的题中应有之义遥。只有在厘清公共权力、执政党和民众政治参与的逻辑关系的前提下,才能科学把握政党现代化的一般规律,并遵循这个规律来选人用人。     

A century of “Hate and Coarse Thinking”: anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism in H.G. Wells’ The New Machiavelli (1911)

Wells's The New Machiavelli (1911) offers an excellent case study of the use of anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism as both a philosophical and a rhetorical strategy. In Remington, Wells creates a protagonist who follows Machiavellian rules of behaviour and denounces those who do likewise. The novel is structured to show Remington's progress from an idealist refutation of Machiavellism, through a recognition of its necessity, to the formulation of a private and political method for the necessary pursuit of Machiavellian principles under the disguise of anti-Machiavellism, including trenchant criticisms of Fabians as anti-Machiavellian Machiavellians. These stages, culminating in complete personal and public failure, are reflected in Remington's party allegiances, and broadened by Wells into an account of British party ideologies around the turn of the twentieth century. Wells's rhetorical design for mapping and assessing anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism is paralleled by an exploration of that technique in himself, attested by the predominance of autobiographical elements in The New Machiavelli, and by similarities between Remington's and Wells's own deception of others and themselves. Far from incidental, anti-Machiavellian Machiavellism is the motif that unites the shifting party allegiances, political conceits and moral hypocrisies, and private and public failures of Wells, Remington, and of the period of British politics that they intend to encapsulate.     

Eco-socialism and the political ecology of forest conservation in the Greater Khingan Range,China

State-owned forestry enterprises (SOFEs) in China, established during the Maoist era for forest exploitation, have undergone significant reorganization under the Natural Forest Conservation Program (NFCP). In this study, drawing on the perspectives of political ecology and a case study from a SOFE in the Greater Khingan Range in northeast China, we develop an eco-socialist perspective to understand this particular approach to forest conservation. The concept of eco-socialism is mobilized to describe how, as a form of all-encompassing social organization with overwhelming political, social, and economic power in the forestry regions, the eco-restructuring of SOFEs is key to the success of forest conservation. Four eco-restructuring processes have been identified: (1) declining timber sales and increasing central subsidies; (2) restructuring of work-units; (3) creating redundancies; and (4) developing new sustainable economic activities. Furthermore, these eco-restructuring processes, both mandated and supported by the central government, have a significant impact on state-society relationship. While the resources given by the central government allow SOFEs to maintain a stable relationship with some workers by providing them a relatively stable livelihood, the laid-off workers are the major victims of the process, as they suffer from loss of income, economic stability, and social self-esteem. This study enriches the literature by incorporating eco-socialist governmentality into the political ecology of forest conservation and illustrating how the political ecology perspective can be a powerful tool in the collective effort to craft sustainable and socially just futures in China.     

Performed worlding: Political praxis of Sikh nagar kirtan assemblies in Canada

Nagar kirtans are street assemblies with Sikh spiritual music, political marches, and free food distribution. They are especially large in April during the Punjabi harvest festival of Vaisakhi but also take place in other months. This paper explores the political praxis of nagar kirtans in Canada to contribute to critiques of secularism and theorize the political ontology in the Sikh context. I conceptualize nagar kirtan as a mobile court of both poetic pilgrimage and politics, which engage an embodied and performative world-making process, termed performed worlding, that is at odds with the modern ontology of the secular state. The empirical study analyzes early 20th century nagar kirtans in Vancouver and contemporary ones in urban Canada in the 2010-decade. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out between 2017 and 2018 including analysis of interviews and archival and media content. Early nagar kirtans in Vancouver were aligned with the anti-colonial Ghadar Movement to protest the racial state of Canada. In the contemporary context, the study reveals competing ways of worlding the political ontologies of the mobile court. On the one hand, there is an increased commodification and state presence that refashions the practice at larger Vaisakhi nagar kirtan to be marketable to Canadian multiculturalism. On the other hand, the bottom-up assembling of participants align a spiritual politics of Sikh and Punjabi world-making, one that is grounded in practices of horizontal organizing and mutual care and sustain a form of embodied expression against racial Canada.     

Polyvocal articulations of climate justice and the commonality of loss

The political-intellectual project of climate justice (CJ) is diverse in its analyses and proposals. Recently, some sympathetic critics have worried that, together with its often-contentious tenor, this polyvocality renders CJ incoherent and/or ill-suited to legal and policy application. Divergent choices of framing and means do matter, since they entail implications for the development of constituencies, alliances, and political, legal, and/or policy action. This paper argues, however, that rather than incoherence, the variation, fluidity, and complexity of CJ evidence logical adaptations to differing positionalities and circumstances, made necessary by the multiple, geographically varying dimensions of climate injustice. Critical political geographic perspectives (which happen to complement those of many movement adherents) help to expose this adaptive logic. Correspondingly, diverse articulations of CJ and their implications help show how political spaces and ecologies matter in contesting the multiple inequalities and power moves with which climate injustice is intertwined. Moreover, recent public health analyses and testimonies from affected groups suggest that shared experiences of rising, disproportionate climate-related death and other forms of individual and collective loss increasingly underpin and motivate CJ's multiple forms. The trajectories of compounding loss, still-rising greenhouse gas emissions, and the growing hegemony of CJ in a variety of settings underscore the need for continuing development of extensive solidarities among dispersed and differently positioned affected groups and potential allies. Though other approaches – including those which address climate injustices without naming them as such – may bear fruit, such extensive articulations of CJ are crucial needs that intellectual labor can help to meet.     

试论初中政治课有效教学情境的生成

政治学科的所有问题都来源于社会实际,都是在研究、分析、探讨、总结的基础上形成其学说。政治课教学正需要依托周围环境挖掘大量的学习资源,让学生在与社会生活的对话中生成教学情境,促使学生自主、自由发展,培养学生的创造能力。     

问责制中的政治责任检视

从政治多元涵义的角度来检视,政治责任的内涵可以界定为:掌握国家公共权力的政治责任主体应履行好对政治、经济、文化等事项的管理义务,正确处理好人民内部矛盾,服务于经济建设的大局,最终实现人民群众的根本利益。反之,就要承担接受谴责、处罚直至丧失行使国家公共权力的消极后果。其中,掌握国家公共权力是承担政治责任的前提,有无违背人民群众的根本利益是是否承担政治责任的核心标准。     

Blaming the Medici: Footnotes, falsification, and the fate of the ‘English Model’ in eighteenth-century Italy

Franco Venturi famously emphasised the importance of the ‘English Model’ for Italian reformist culture in his Settecento riformatore. This essay contributes to the history of the development and evolution of the ‘English Model’ beginning with its influential appearance in Antonio Genovesi's 1757–1758 translation of John Cary's 1695 Essay on the State of England. The ‘English Model’ was not a stable concept and, in fact, one tradition inverted the model's meaning, rejecting the need for protectionism and instead embracing a providential faith in laissez-faire. This tradition began with an important, but falsified footnote in Carlo Denina's 1769–1770 Rivoluzioni d’Italia. In this note and the tradition that adopted it, Lorenzo de’ Medici's imagined English wool factories became the locus of this inversion, and, through a reading of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, blaming the Medici as agents of Italy's aberrant historical development became an alternative to blaming English economic imperialism in late eighteenth-century Italy. The narrative of Medici involvement in the decline of Italy was finally realigned with Genovesi's original intention under the auspice of Pope Pius VI in 1794.