Peace through the lens of human rights: Mapping spaces of peace in the advocacy of Colombian human rights defenders

What kinds of peace do human rights defenders advocate? This question has become controversial in light of heavy criticisms raised against the scholarly paradigm that peace and human rights are co-constitutive universals. In this article, I explore how Colombian human rights defenders navigate potential tensions, erasures, and vested politics in their peace advocacy during the current peace process with the FARC-EP. I follow the trend in the geographies of peace literature to study the articulation of peace with human rights as situated and constitutive practices. My analysis of published activist statements maps out the discursivity of peace advocacy, that is, how human rights defenders articulate different political demands as interconnected conditions for peace and maintain a common activist space that cuts across the uneven geographies of violence in Colombia. The visualization of my results as discursive networks shows how activist practices open social and discursive spaces that integrate multiple understandings of peace, instead of obliterating differences in a single and homogenized, ‘local’ representation of peace. I further submit that elucidating how human rights defenders address peace beyond the end of guerrilla insurgency, the ambiguous role of the state, societal discrimination, and structural transformations helps us nuancing conceptual debates. We can learn from Colombian activists to move beyond rigid conceptual juxtapositions of human rights as either panacea or liberal fuel for conflict and to pay attention to how concepts are animated in political struggles to end violence.     

Some thought concerning education

This article discusses the development of German Social Democratic Party strategy in the fourth quarter of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth, as a result of the works of Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky. It ties the evolution of Marxist orthodoxy to the emergence of parliamentary democracy in different European societies. In particular, it discusses the way parliamentary conditions impacted on how the proletarian revolution was imagined. Revolution was newly defined as the establishment through parliamentary means of a new government representing a new social class. Also, the early Marxist strategy of ‘permanent revolution’, which had allowed proletarian-socialist minority rule, was abandoned.     

Enacting a Local Reform in the Age of Reform: A Salary for the Chairman of Middlesex Sessions

This article examines the unsuccessful attempts made from 1833 to 1842 by Middlesex's justices of the peace to obtain a local statute allowing them to pay a salary to their chairman. Instead of securing such an act, they had to settle for a statute enacted by the government, a statute authorising the government to appoint their chairman for judicial proceedings. The article uses the story of Middlesex's attempt to obtain a salary for the chairman to examine: justices' attempts to reform the office of chairman of county Sessions; the limited powers of justices in their county Sessions; and the centralising aspirations of central government. The statute that the government produced in 1844 originated as a public bill. In contrast, the statute that Middlesex had attempted to obtain originated as private bills. The statute enacted by the government contained defects that probably would not have marred a statute enacted under the rules governing private bills. So, this article uses the legislative misadventures of the government's bill to compare the procedures for enactment of public and private bills. The article therefore provides a case study of mid‐19th‐century legislative procedures governing enactment of local legislation, while arguing that, as of the mid 19th century, parliament had not developed procedures appropriate to both representative government and a centralising central government using public bills for local matters.     

辛亥革命与民族主义

辛亥革命的民族主义,是认同血缘的种族主义,不是一致对外的民族独立建国,而是排斥国内已经溶合了的少数民族.清朝的满汉矛盾,经二百多年的溶合,在文化上已成一体.鸦片战争以后,已形成中西对立,"满洲人"三字只表示一个特权阶层的存在.但在戊戌变法失败后,革命党人以"驱除鞑虏"为政纲,把政治革命变成种族革命,实是一种倒退,应重新评估其价值.     

A New Woman and Her Warlord: Li Dequan,Feng Yuxiang,and the Politics of Intimacy in Twentieth-Century China

This article proposes a new way of viewing Republican-era warlords. Through an examination of the life of Li Dequan, the second wife of warlord Feng Yuxiang, it displaces Feng from his typical military and political context, scrutinizing instead the ways that Feng and Li interwove the private intimacies of love, marriage, and family life into their public and political lives. In the Republic, Feng and Li, like many prominent figures of the time, shared elements of their private lives with journalists and, through them, a broader reading public, posing for photographs with their children on their way to school and inviting reporters to family events. Feng and Li utilized this newfound intimacy between public and political leaders to cultivate public sympathy and support. By the early PRC, Li—following Feng’s sudden 1948 death—was named the first Minister of Health of the People’s Republic of China and her roles as wife and romantic object fell away. Instead, she focused on mothering the nation. By the late twentieth century, emphasis on the Li and Feng romance reappeared in writings about the couple, and while these narratives drew on the Republican-era stories, it was made to seem that Li’s feminism rather than Feng’s modernity had facilitated their true love. Though the warlords have often been seen as destructive, exploring Feng’s and Li’s lives demonstrates that factional militarists and their families contributed to a new political culture grounded in a gendered national narrative that intertwined family and nation.     

革命的“病理学”——布林顿对“革命”的开拓性研究及其影响

布林顿的<革命的分析>是西方"革命学"(the study of revolution)中一部影响深远的著作.该书运用类似于"病理学"的自然科学方法对英、美、法、俄四国革命进行了深入的解剖和比较.布林顿认为旧制度的结构缺陷、知识分子忠诚的转移和统治阶级内部的分裂是这几场革命的共同原因;这几场革命都可以大致划分为旧制度的垮台、温和派统治时期、激进派统治时期和热月反动等四个阶段;革命的后果是政府效率的显著提高、财产的转移以及"成功革命传统"的形成.布林顿的理论对于后来的革命研究产生了深远的影响.     

人民共和国:中国人民的历史性选择

中华人民共和国的成立是中国共产党领导全国各族人民进行新民主主义革命所取得的最伟大的成果;把创建人民共和国作为中国革命的共同奋斗目标,是历史和人民的选择。新中国成立后,《共同纲领》对人民共和国的国体、政体等问题做出了具有法律效力的明确规定,其中的国体,即工人阶级领导的、以工农联盟为基础的人民民主专政的国家制度,具有最根本的意义和决定性的作用。这种制度,符合中国的实际情况和广大人民的切身利益,有着极大的优越性。     

胡适对苏联外交的评判——以对华政策为中心

胡适对苏联外交的评判大体是求是的.他高度评价苏俄初期的对华宣言,希望中国政府承认苏联,赞赏苏联在30年代中期的和平努力,认为苏联是维持世界和平的重要力量,充分肯定苏联对中国抗战的无私援助.胡适也谴责了苏联外交所表现出的民族利己主义和大国沙文主义.二战后,胡适以冷战思维判定苏联外交是侵略、扩张性的.     

周恩来与池田大作友情的基础

周恩来与池田大作的会见,是1974年12月5日在北京305医院进行的。这时的周恩来已重病在身,不是他想见的朋友是难以安排会见的。这之前,池田大作对周恩来心仪已久;而周恩来早在60年代初就已开始关心创价学会和担任创价学会会长的池田大作,他指示:一定要想办法建立同创价学会之间的渠道,一定要和他们交朋友。这之后,在池田大作的关心下,创价大学校园内先后植下了周樱、周夫妇樱。周恩来逝世后,池田大作成为在日本乃至