Leveraging diplomatic power and influence on the UN Security Council: the case of Australia

ABSTRACT

There is scepticism about whether a state like Australia can secure its interests and exercise influence on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). A case study of Australia’s experience as a UNSC member in 2013–2014 shows that it directly influenced UNSC decision-making in a number of ways: first, in the response to the MH17 incident; second, pushing forward UNSC practice through the first-ever resolutions on both ‘small arms and light weapons’ and police in peacekeeping; and third, as chair of three sanctions committees, influencing the decision-making environment towards greater transparency. While Australia did not achieve all its objectives, it made its views well-known. A second case study demonstrates that Australia’s opportunities to influence UNSC decision-making are not limited to stints of membership. Australia was able to achieve many of its foreign policy objectives in East Timor in 1999 through strategically engaging with key UNSC players through an informal diplomatic grouping: the Core Group on East Timor. Both case studies show that Australia’s diplomatic engagement with the UNSC is desirable, necessary and strategic, whether or not it is a current or prospective member.     

Pour une Épistémologie de la Controverse Historiographique

The great historical debates were generally fought on different fields at the same time. The present article tries to analyze the actual debates in the context and perspective of different research experiences, aiming to highlight their theoretical and empirical results. In focussing on the controversies about the history of society and historical anthropology it questions in the same time the recurrencies recalling the crisis at the end of the 18th and the beginning of 20th century and their epistemological consequences.     

Le Métier de Juriste Entre Règle de Droit et Expérience de l’Histoire

The activities of jurists, they may be judges, lawyers or university teachers, occupy a central role in the maintenance of the political and social order of modern societies. In Germany the confrontation of the recent past provoked in the early 1960’s a large debate about the real foundations of the modern state and his role in the crisis of the modernity which have been pursuit in the course of the eighties issuing in the beginning of the century in the discussions about integration and a general order of values to be recognized by everybody.     

Zytoarchitektonik und Revolution ‐ Lenins Gehirn als Raum und Objekt

The investigation of Lenin's brain by the German neurobiologist Oskar Vogt from Berlin and his Russian collaborators in Moscow is one of the most exciting and simultaneously oddest chapters in the history of medicine. With the bizarre claim to be able to detect the material substrate of genius it provoked as much unrealistic expectations in the public as strong criticism by the scientific community of brain researchers. The present paper deals in a brief survey with the history of collecting and measuring the brains of famous persons in general and particularly with the historical, political and social circumstances of the performed investigation of Lenin's brain. In this connection the epistemological and technical prereqisites of architectonical brain research and its means of the topographical representation of complex histo‐anatomical and physiological differences in the brain cortex are shortly discussed. The opening of Russian archives after the socio‐economic turn of the year 1991 brought up new background facts in Lenin's pathobiography; together with the sources from German archives a rather extensive reconstruction of the historical events between Lenin's death in 1924 and the final report of the Moscow Brain Research Institute (Institute Mozga) to the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviki) in 1936 is possible now.     

Different staining substances were used in decorative and therapeutic tattoos in a 1000-year-old Peruvian mummy

From a 1000-year-old mummy, found unwrapped in the sand of the desert at Chiribaya Alta in Southern Peru, two different kinds of tattoos were investigated: decorative tattoos displaying different animals and symbolic ciphers were present on the extremities and tattooed circles on the neck region.