Money,Manipulation and Misunderstanding on Manus Island

The treatment of asylum seekers at the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has attracted much international attention, but there has been little analysis of its local and transnational impact. This article investigates the repercussions for the communities on Manus Island, on domestic affairs in PNG, and on the relationship between PNG and Australia. Overall, it concludes that the costs arising from the money, manipulation and misunderstanding generated by the centre seem likely to outweigh the purported benefits, particularly for Manusians and other ordinary Papua New Guineans.     

Reluctant liars? Public debates on propaganda and democracy in twentieth-century Britain (ca. 1914–1950)

The place of propaganda in a democratic society has been discussed long before the age of fake news, as the heated debate on this issue that took place in the UK and other democracies from around 1914 to 1950 clearly shows. Drawing upon a variety of published and archival sources, the article examines the changing views of British political elites, intellectuals, publicity experts and the public on the proper role of government in the public sphere, while discussing their influence on government policies and exploring the light they shed on British—and, more broadly, liberal democratic—culture and identity.     

Precious work: white anti-racist pedagogies in Southern Arizona

Social justice activists come to Southern Arizona to involve themselves in humanitarian aid projects that address human rights issues emerging from border securitization processes. Over time, many of these activists connect with other social justice projects, leading to the existence of rich and dedicated networks of activists in Tucson, Southern Arizona’s largest city. Subsequently, we see the development of activist ventures orienting themselves around racial justice, through which white people work to educate other whites about white supremacist society. This paper explores the ways that white activists negotiate whiteness and privilege within Tucson’s activist networks by employing deliberately anti-racist critical pedagogies. Through excerpts from interviews and reflections on experiences as a participant observer from 2013 to 2015, I discuss the figure of the white anti-racist activist. In particular, I examine the paradoxical process of becoming anti-racist, through which white activists work to address problematic aspects of their own and others’ socialization as white subjects within the hierarchy of white supremacist society, a process that necessarily coexists with the knowledge that one cannot ‘unwhiten’ oneself, and many problematic behaviors remain.     

The Model Arctic Council: Simulated Negotiations as Pedagogy and Embodied Diplomacy

This article draws on the perspectives of students and organizers involved in recent iterations of the Model Arctic Council (MAC), an experiential learning simulation designed to expand students’ knowledge and understanding of the Arctic and its governance. While much of the discourse related to simulations such as the MAC emphasizes its pedagogical and networking benefits, this article leverages participant-based ethnography to argue that the MAC also affects multi-track diplomatic outcomes in addition to serving as a site for diplomatic engagement. Applying an interpretive approach driven by the onset of practice-tracing in international relations, we demonstrate that the MAC both produces and constitutes diplomacy. Such a reimagination elevates the diplomacy of non-state actors and exposes false binaries between state diplomacy and non-state diplomacy.     

Marring the Memory: The 1967 Vimy Ridge Commemorations and Canada-France Relations

Commemorating Canada's legendary April 1917 battle of Vimy Ridge has normally proven an emotive event of national importance, symbolic of shared Canadian and French wartime trials and given mostly to remembrance of Canada's war dead. Since 1936, the ridge has been graced by the massive Canadian National Vimy Memorial, for decades the site of impressive and solemn annual ceremonies. But Canada's 1967 50th anniversary celebrations of the battle – a showpiece of the national centenary celebrations – became mired in controversy. French President General Charles de Gaulle was deeply offended that Canada had invited Prince Philip to the event without consulting Paris. It was a stunning diplomatic blunder, especially since Canada's relations with France already were tense as a result of de Gaulle's tacit support for the cause of Quebec independence. Consequently, an opportunity to commemorate a signal event in Canadian history devolved into a fractious bilateral debate and led to a shocking and much-deplored French boycott of the ceremonies. This article adds to the history of commemoration as foreign policy and argues that the Vimy incident had major consequences on France–Canada relations and played a role in France's growing encouragement of Quebec separatists.     

Anti-Ballistic Missiles and the Liberal–Conservative Internationalist Divide in Cold War Canada, 1966–1970

Shortly following Canada's controversial adoption of nuclear weapon roles in NORAD and NATO in 1963, the focus of nuclear debates shifted to the potential impact on Canadian and international security of the construction of US anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems. This article expands the focus of scholarship on the ABM issue from the political and policy-making settings to include members of the attentive elite and the news media, and finds these groups deeply divided between liberal and conservative internationalists. On the one hand, supporters of liberal internationalism believed that AMB systems would destabilise the international security environment and ultimately increase the likelihood of nuclear war. Conservative internationalists took the opposite position, arguing that the systems represented a necessary addition to the Western nuclear deterrent and would make nuclear war less likely. In other words, the ABM debate exposed deep divisions in Canadian society between those who preferred diplomatic and multilateral versus military means of achieving middle power goals in the international system.     

RACE AND ANIMAL‐BREEDING: A HYBRIDIZED HISTORIOGRAPHY

Because it associates animals with one of the most vital topics in human history, the historiography of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding is at once controversial and inspiring. This article wishes to position this historiography in a more systematic framework than has been done thus far by examining both its merits and failings along with the more and less appropriate ways to write on the subject. The article identifies two main narratives in race–animal‐breeding historiography: the influence narrative and the projection narrative. The first reveals how perceptions of animal breeds and livestock‐breeding practices influenced the rise of racialist and eugenic worldviews. By contrast, the second shows how conceptualizations of human racial segregation contributed to the construction of ideas about the subdivision of domestic animal species into different breeds. The article argues that despite the projection narrative's inherent anthropomorphism, this perspective renders it possible to draft a nonanthropocentric history of the cross‐connections between race and animal‐breeding with a focus on human–animal relations rather than on human society.     

Is “Threat” in the Eye of the Researcher? Theory and Measurement in the Study of State‐Level Immigration Policymaking

This study initiates a methodological critique of the state‐level immigration policy literature through the lens of the racial threat and group power perspectives. First, I highlight the conceptual problems related to the application of such theories to legislature‐level data analysis. Next, I demonstrate the methodological and analytical problems that raise concerns about ad hoc theorizing in this field. Using counts of hostile and welcoming immigration legislation (2005–2011), I demonstrate that outgroup size measures correlate positively with both dependent variables while measures of population growth rate yield null results unless used on their own. These results suggest that the use of legislature‐level models with demographic indicators does not allow us to gain a clear understanding of whether and how population dynamics influence immigration policymaking. Based on these findings, I recommend that when using demographic indicators as key explanatory variables, researchers provide evidence of result consistency across multiple model specifications and also test the models with both hostile and inclusive policy variables. Such protocols would help avoid ad hoc theorizing.     

中国对瑞典国最早的全面记述——述清末写本《瑞典国记略》之历史由来

本文从中国对瑞典认识和记述的历史这一角度,介绍并论述了作者收藏的孤本书籍《瑞典国记略》。文章指出,迄至清朝末年,中国对瑞典的认识经历了如下六个阶段:第一阶段,从明末到清代康熙中期。通过西洋传教士的介绍,对瑞典开始有初步的了解。第二阶段,从康熙晚期到道光初年。主要是清朝官方和个别出洋商人,通过出使他国偶然接触到的瑞典国民并向所在国探问相关情况;或是与瑞典来华商船的直接接触;或是海外经商听闻的间接传说,对瑞典有了中国人自己的记述。第三阶段,道光二十年鸦片战争爆发前短暂的若千年期间。西洋传教士开始重新向中国介绍包括瑞典国在内的世界地理知识。第四阶段,从鸦片战争之后到同治四年。在中国人自己撰述的全球地理总志中,对瑞典有了更为丰富和清晰的记述。第五阶段,从同治六年到光绪中期。留下了一批中国人考察游历瑞典的日记,对瑞典的认识变得非常具体明晰,但还很不系统。第六阶段,光绪中期至清王朝结束。《瑞典国记略》就是这一时期的标志性著述,它是中国对瑞典最早的全面系统的记述。这部书虽然没有在社会上正式刊布,但在中国认识瑞典的历史上,仍具有里程碑式意义。     

French economists and Bernese agrarians: The marquis de Mirabeau and the economic society of Berne

Physiocracy is still sometimes seen as an oddly archaic programme of agricultural development. The aim of this paper is to show that one of the Physiocrats’ prime concerns was to take the subject of agriculture out of international relations. The fiscal regime that was central to Physiocracy was designed to make every large territorial state self-sufficient and, by doing so, to break the connection between modern great power politics, the international division of labour, and the politics of necessity. From this perspective, the memorandum that Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, sent to the Berne Economic Society in 1759, contains an early indication of what, had the Physiocratic programme ever been implemented in full, a world reformed on Physiocratic lines might have looked like.