Climate change,conflict, and cooperation: Global analysis of the effectiveness of international river treaties in addressing water variability

Climate-driven water variability is a natural phenomenon that is observed across river basins, but one that is predicted to increase due to climate change. Environmental change of this kind may aggravate political tensions, especially in regions which are not equipped with an appropriate institutional apparatus. Increased variability is also likely to challenge regions with existing institutional capacity. We argue that our best attempts to assess the ability of states to deal with variability in the future rest with considering how agreements have fared in the past. In this paper, we explore treaty effectiveness, or treaty resilience, by investigating whether particular water allocation and institutional mechanisms help mitigate inter-country tensions over shared water. We use water-related events from the Basins at Risk events database as a dependent variable to test particular hypotheses regarding the impact of treaty design on conflict and cooperation over time. A broad set of climatic, geographic, political, and economic variables are used as controls. The analysis is conducted for the years 1948–2001 using the country dyad as the level of observation. Findings pertaining to our primary explanatory variables suggest that country dyads governed by treaties with water allocation mechanisms exhibiting both flexibility and specificity evince more cooperative behavior. Country dyads governed by treaties with a larger sum of institutional mechanisms likewise evince a higher level of cooperation, although certain institutional mechanisms appear to be more important than others.     

China’s Evolving Policy towards the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea under Xi Jinping

Despite international pressure to condemn North Korea (DPRK), China’s successive leaderships have dealt carefully with Pyongyang, especially vis-à-vis its nuclear weapons program. This moderate stance reflects the two countries’ decades-long relationship, summarised in the Chinese idiom that Pyongyang and Beijing are “as close as lips and teeth”. Nevertheless, the DPRK’s third nuclear test in February 2013 raised enormous challenges for the new Xi Jinping leadership to maintain the previous DPRK policy focused on the status quo and stability on the Korean Peninsula. China’s attitudes and policies towards the DPRK after the provocative third test signified a possible reorientation of Beijing’s DPRK policy. This generated repercussions in the countries concerned and prompted debates among experts. This article asks how these events should be understood and what their implications are for the Xi leadership’s policy on the DPRK, the stability of the Korean Peninsula, and Northeast Asia. Given China’s competitive relations with other major powers, we conclude that the Xi leadership will not abandon the DPRK; indeed it will reinforce the policy of strengthening China’s influence over it. Nonetheless one aspect of doing so will involve China opening up to other – cooperative, multilateral – approaches to reinforcing stability on the Korean Peninsula and in Northeast Asia.     

History manifested: making sense of unprecedented change

An essential element usually passes unnoticed in recent discussion about how history as an academic discipline is supposed to be relevant for the shaping of our public life. It is the concept of history itself (history as both the course of events and historical writing) that underlies the whole discussion, which also configures the two currently most influential and fashionable efforts to reinstate the public relevance of history: The History Manifesto, co-authored by Jo Guldi and David Armitage, and Hayden White's The Practical Past. In advising to turn to the past in order to shape the present and the future, both books rely on the familiar developmental view that characterised nineteenth-century thinking in general, and on which the discipline of history became institutionalised in particular. The author's main contention in this essay is that turning to this notion of history is not the solution for the problem of the supposed public irrelevance of professional historical studies, but the problem itself. The developmental view, based on a presumption of a deeper continuity provided by the subject of the historical process that retains its self-identity amid all changes, certainly suited the discipline of history when it was engaged in the project of nation-building. However, it hardly fits our present concerns. These concerns, like the Anthropocene, take the shape of unprecedented change, and what they challenge is precisely the deeper continuity of the developmental view. The discipline of history can regain public relevance only insofar as it proves to be able to exhibit a thinking of its own specificity which can nevertheless explain such unprecedented changes. What such historical thinking could provide is what the developmental view can no longer: the possibility to act upon a story that we can believe.     

Children of Dutch Nazi collaborators

This article looks into what happened to the children of Dutch Nazi collaborators after the liberation of the Netherlands in May 1945. The author first outlines the historical context in which these children lived and the manner in which they recounted and recorded their memories much later. In combination with new archival research on social-welfare policy and ‘re-education’ of former National Socialist youth, this puts the discourse that dominated the Dutch debate, that is, the discourse of the ‘innocent child’ harshly punished by society, in a different light. The framework of the innocent child being punished by a cruel society obscured our view of experiences that did not fit this mould. Furthermore, it made the values and norms that were current during the reconstruction period disappear from the picture: the bad memories of children of collaborators partly originate in policy that was considered normal in those days. This, however, should not obscure the impact of the vulnerable social position which these children experienced after the war.     

Community Engagement in Historical Site Protection: Lessons from the Elmina Castle Project in Ghana

Abstract

Engaging communities in the protection of heritage means that the communities living around the heritage sites are involved in the process of identifying issues that affect the conservation of these sites and can propose ways by which they can be addressed. In Ghana, the Elmina Castle project shows close collaboration between the communities living around these slave forts and castles, the legal custodians, and other stakeholders. This case study unpicks the process to show how the existing traditional systems were approached and involved. The result of this participatory collaboration is a strategic document which will be implemented to ensure proper protection of these sites in the wake of development and modernization.     

The Architectural Reuse of Roman Marble and Stone Spolia in the Early Medieval Monte Sorbo Church (Sarsina,Central Italy)

We present the results of a multi‐method archaeometric study concerning the architectural elements reused in Monte Sorbo church (Sarsina, central Italy) between the eighth and ninth centuries AD . The provenance study has focused on classical marbles and stones, which clearly do not originate from the local Apennine geological formations and are thought to come from extra‐regional sources. A large fraction of the tested marbles is from Asia Minor, coming from both the Proconnesian district on Marmara Island and, probably, the Hasançavuslar site near Ephesus (Greco scritto). Of the four remaining marbles investigated, one is from the Carrara district and three are from different Greek quarrying areas, such as Mount Pentelikon (Athens) and the Thasos and Paros islands. The data also highlight the reuse of decorated gravestones made of Pietra di Aurisina as architectonic elements. This limestone is a fossiliferous carbonate stone outcropping in the Trieste Karst region (north‐eastern Italy), which was exploited by both the Romans and the Byzantines. The assignment of all of the columns of the central nave to the same source area provides an argument in favour of their provenance from a single monument, which was probably located in Sarsina or Ravenna, with the ‘colourful taste’ that is typical of the late Antonine and Severian periods.     

IN SEARCH OF NEW TIMES: TEMPORALITY IN THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND COUNTER‐ENLIGHTENMENT

Isaiah Berlin and other representatives of historicism have made the Enlightenment and the Counter‐Enlightenment into opposite cultures. The Counter‐Enlightenment is a criticism of the Enlightenment from within, so in many respects they overlap. However, with regard to perceptions of time they contradict each other. The times of the Enlightenment lean heavily toward chronology and can be labeled as “empty,” whereas the time perceptions of the Counter‐Enlightenment can be called “incarnated” and are identical with historical times. As a consequence the differences between the two temporalities lead necessarily to differences in synchronization.     

Arcangelo Ghisleri and the “Right to Barbarity”: Geography and Anti‐colonialism in Italy in the Age of Empire (1875–1914)

This paper addresses the work of early critics of colonialism and Eurocentrism within Italian geography in the Age of Empire. At that time, a minority but rather influential group of Italian scholars, influenced by the international debates promoted by the anarchist geographers Reclus, Kropotkin and Me?nikov, fumed publicly at Italy's colonial ambitions in Africa. Their positions assumed, at least in the case of Arcangelo Ghisleri, the character of a radical critique of both political and cultural European hegemony. These approaches were linked to a similar critique of “internal colonialism”, both Austrian in the Italian‐speaking regions of Trento and Trieste, and Piedmontese in southern Italy. Based on primary sources, and drawing on the international literature on imperial geography and colonial and postcolonial sciences, this paper conjures up the Italian example to discuss how some European geographers of the Age of Empire were also early critics of racism, colonialism and chauvinism, and how these historical experiences can serve current debates on critical, radical and anarchist geographies.