Indifferent but Mobilized: Rural Politics during the Interwar Period in Eastern and Western Europe

What did peasants discuss at party meetings? Were they mobilized by ethnic politics or indifferent to them altogether? The end of the First World War brought about universal male suffrage in much of Europe, and with it the process of mass politics began. The concept of national indifference is important in understanding interwar politics, because this period is often studied teleologically with attention focused on extremism and nationalism as the primary mobilizing issue

Agrarian movements have been under-researched, and when Agrarians have been studied, it has been through the prism of elite politics. This comparative paper seeks to redress this omission by looking at grassroots rural politics. The interwar countryside was marked by profound political, economic and social transformation but also in terms of what Robert Paxton has described as the ‘triple crisis of the countryside’ – worsening economic conditions, the declining status of the countryside and inadequate political representation. The paper will explore how reform and crisis impacted how agrarian politics functioned at a local level by asymmetrically comparing cases from Romania, Poland and Ireland, with the final case helping to contextualize Eastern Europe within the wider European experience This paper argues that the rural population was mobilized, but primarily in the context of local issues rather than national ethno-political questions. Local party organization was, to paraphrase James C Scott, the site ‘of an exchange of small arms fire’ in rural class conflict, as questions regarding the control of public space, generational conflict and power within the village mobilized peasants. Thus, I argue that it was the underlying socio-economic issues that mobilized the rural population, not nationalism. The dynamics of these conflicts were shaped by local economic, political and social power dynamics, and by using indifference as a concept, we can look more deeply at interwar politics from a grassroots perspective and develop a more nuanced understanding of local, national and European politics.     

Peace negotiations in the political marketplace: the implications of women's exclusion in the Sudan-South Sudan peace process

This article investigates the implications of women’s exclusion for the nature and durability of peace processes, and whether factors that undermine peace consolidation post-settlement might be prevented through more inclusive peacemaking. It examines the Sudan-South Sudan peace process that produced the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the roles women played in peacemaking and their exclusion from official negotiations, and the sources of insecurity post-CPA. South Sudan’s peace process shows that the exclusion of women can be understood as a canary in a coal mine: a highly visible marker of the broader exclusivity of such processes, and the complex dynamics of elite capture in war and peace processes. Women’s exclusion was the product of the region’s political marketplace, in which power and authority is secured by elites through violence and bargaining, to the exclusion of other groups. By understanding exclusion as a deliberate strategic tactic that extends from war into peacetime, I argue that the exclusion of women is not the reason why peace processes fail in and of itself, but rather the product of elite ownership of peace processes and the structure of many peace processes that facilitates and rewards such ownership, with serious consequences for the sustainability of peace post-settlement.     

Seductive Alienation: The American Way of Life Rearticulated in Occupied Japan

This article explores how the notion of American domesticity promoted by US occupation forces in postwar Japan was decoded and rearticulated by non-elite Japanese women, a social group that has been largely overlooked in studies of the global promotion of the American way of life during the early Cold War years. Specifically examined here is the case of Takehisa Chieko, an actress and the wife of an American officer, who enjoyed high visibility in popular women’s magazines as the embodiment of the idealised postwar American lifestyle. A reading of Takehisa’s magazine writings, interviews, and photographs suggests, however, that she was far from a passive recipient and transmitter of this cultural message. As such, a close unpacking of her rearticulation of the idea of American domesticity toward the particular socio-cultural fabric of postwar Japan reveals the particular nature of this supposedly universal American model. In demonstrating the various dilemmas that stemmed from confronting both the seductive and alienating features of the American way as promoted in occupied Japan, this study illuminates a point of rupture in the larger US global promotion of American domesticity as a means toward cultural hegemony and political containment in the early Cold War period.     

博物馆女性题材展览的类型与意义

女性题材的展览主要分为女性博物馆的基本陈列和专题展览、综合类博物馆的常设展览和临时展览,旨在以"物"为媒介来展示女性的生存状态和精神追求,与公众一起讨论有关女性的话题,甚至包括一些敏感的、有争议的现象或问题。博物馆以女性为题材,组织展览和教育活动,关注、探讨并传播女性文化,一方面反映出博物馆关注并回应女性广泛参与社会生活并贡献于社会变革与发展的现实,发挥博物馆作为时代潮流倡导者和引领者的作用;另一方面,女性观众数量增多,参观需求多元化且女性广泛参与博物馆事务,对博物馆展览理念也产生一定的影响。然而,博物馆的女性主题展览也存在数量少、展览和诠释活动中对女性价值和意义挖掘不够等问题,需要在理念和实践上进一步改变。     

Home divided,home reconstructed: children in rural–urban migration in contemporary China

This article is centred on the geographies of Chinese children in contemporary China – an area which has been problematically overlooked in geographical literature on childhood. In employing unique mobile research methods by tracking migrant children through the migration cycle, the author conducted an extensive ethnographic study of rural migrant children aged 8–17 in China. The article explores rural children's everyday lived experience of migration and how migrant children negotiate and articulate home and belonging while on the move. The study demonstrates the dynamic environment that migrant children inhabit, the fluid, contextual and mobile nature of their life in rural migrant households, their migrancy and their active involvement in homemaking.     

抗战时期的国统区农村金融--以农村合作金融事业为中心

抗日战争爆发后,南京政府认识到抗战将是持久战,持久抗战的关键之一在于农村能否持久地提供支持。因而,维持和发展农村经济就成为坚持抗战的重要一环。而维持和发展农村经济的关键又在于是否能够为农村提供金融支持。本文以台湾"中研院"近代史研究所档案馆藏有关资料为中心,特别是农林部中央农业实验所农业经济系所作的农村金融调查资料,辅以其他史料,对1939年至1944年间国统区15个省的农村金融借贷、放款利率、放款期限、借贷办法、放款机关等情况进行具体考察,分析和观察其成效与特点,并与抗战前后的情况进行比较,以期对抗战时期国统区的农村金融发展和演变情况,有一个较为清晰的认识。     

Gender equality: a core dimension in Rural Development Programmes in Austria?

The supranational gender equality regime of the European Union (EU), in place since the 1990s, affects gender-related social policy including the so-called ‘gender-neutral’ policy fields such as the common agricultural policy and rural development policy. Especially, the implementation of gender equality in all policy fields through the strategy of gender mainstreaming in EU Structural Funds and Rural Development Programmes has become a key challenge for political and administrative players and stakeholders. Analysis reveals that the existing institutional, political and social barriers for an effective implementation of gender equality in rural development policy are manifold. Instead of promoting rural women's agency and empowerment, Rural Development Programmes and processes in Austria are preserving and perpetuating traditional gender roles and patriarchal structures in rural society.     

Thinking Past Henri Lefebvre: Introducing “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology”

This introduction to the translation of Henri Lefebvre's 1956 essay “The theory of ground rent and rural Sociology” moves through three stages. First, it suggests that Anglophone appropriations of Lefebvre have tended to focus too much on his urban writings, at the expense of understanding his early work on rural sociology, and failing to recognise how his urban focus emerged as a result of his interest in rural–urban transformation. Second, it provides a summary of his wider work on rural questions, including his unfinished work on a major treatise of rural sociology; and outlines the key themes of the present essay in relation to these other projects. Third, it connects Lefebvre's issues to wider debates in political economy and geography about aspects of the rural, land and ground rent, not least including the work of Antonio Gramsci and José Carlos Mariátegui.     

Multiculturalism and the immigrant “Irish woman” after the Celtic Tiger: marginalisation,gender-based violence and family dysfunction in Ebun Akpoveta’s Trapped: Prison Without Walls

This article breaks new ground in examining how “new Irish” immigrant women have responded to the collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy and the different forms of gender discrimination and marginalisation they face both within their minority ethnic communities and the Irish host society. It approaches Ebun Akpoveta’s Trapped: Prison Without Walls (2013) as an exemplary work of fiction which exposes unresolved injustices and inequalities suffered by immigrant women. Akpoveta creates a narrative that complicates previous representations of cultural encounters between newcomers and long-established members of Ireland’s host society, not least because her Nigerian female protagonist arrives as a postgraduate student rather than an asylum seeker or refugee. She fictionalises female experiences of marginalisation, gender-based violence and family dysfunction within an all-Nigerian family that outwardly appears to be a model of integration and social inclusion in an open and welcoming Irish multicultural society.