Feminist Perspectives on the Internationalization of The State

Abstract: The state is often described in transition: public spaces are rearranged by private companies, national social welfare is being privatized to some extent, and supranational institutions have more influence on national policies. “A view from the kitchen” (Diane Elson) is helpful for understanding the changing dynamics of states and societies because different women are affected by these policies in different and often ambiguous ways: women of the globalized South migrate to the North, creating global care chains, while women in Western industrialized countries are confronted with changing welfare regimes, leaving mainly highly educated women to profit from this situation. This article contributes to feminist debates on economic globalization and state internationalization. Our feminist materialist perspective allows a critical view on dominance and power in “governance”. Thus, the article adds to feminist debates on globalization from the perspective of state transformation and to debates on governance from the perspective of state transformation grounded in gendered social relations.     

The Roman invasion of Britain (AD 43) in imperial perspective: a response to Frere and Fulford

Few subjects have been more passionately discussed recently than the question of whether the invasion force in AD 43 landed in Kent or on the south coast or simultaneously in both areas. Recently Professor Frere and Professor Fulford joined forces to produce a series of arguments, each independently, supporting a landing in Kent. It is argued here that while archaeological or strategic considerations do not exclude either theory, some of the new 'evidence'– especially Frere's and Fulford's logistical and linguistic arguments – is demonstrably incorrect. Furthermore, the Kent hypothesis relies on the assumption of an unmentioned far–distance embassy and other non–straightforward interpretations of our main textual source, Cassius Dio. It is, however, not the aim of this paper to replace one one–sided hypothesis by another, but to point out the dangers of dogma.     

South Africa and the Italo-Ethiopian War, 1935–6

The Italo-Ethiopian War led to an extensive debate in the Union of South Africa about the future of the League of Nations’ system of collective security. The different political and social groupings in the dominion interpreted the meaning of the war for the Union from a diversity of perspectives. The Italian aggression in East Africa reverberated in the context of concurrent debates about the Union's position in relation to the British Empire. These debates were influenced by the tensions between Afrikaners and English-speaking South Africans but also by disagreement within the Afrikaner community about South African policies vis-à-vis the British Empire. The Afrikaner-dominated Union Government had to navigate between its commitments to the League on the one hand and criticism from the extreme nationalist Afrikaner opposition on the other, which claimed that South Africa's sovereignty was diminished by Britain's leading role in the League. As a mandatory power in South West Africa, the Union was also concerned to sustain League principles in order to safeguard its sub-imperialist aspirations on the continent. The public debates were strongly influenced by a discourse on ‘civilisation’, which not only reflected ambiguous views of the status of Ethiopia as a member of the League of Nations, but also raised questions about the stability of white hegemony in a segregationist state.     

Is it time to start worrying more about growing regional inequalities in Canada?

Much has been written recently about the rise of within-country inequality and growing imbalances of regional fortunes in the United States and the European Union. In this paper, we apply a novel geo-visualization technique that combines local indicators of spatial association with directional statistics to a unique dataset in order to explore the spatial dimensions of regional income inequalities in Canada from 1981 to 2016. After describing a pattern of growing spatial divergence among regions, we briefly discuss the need for the federal government to explore new types of place-sensitive development policies.     

Digital Management of Rock Art: the African Archaeology Archive Cologne (AAArC)

Archaeology is a costly and object-affine practice requiring sophisticated technical equipment, and therefore is largely initiated and run from industrialised countries. Accordingly, also data and objects are largely lodged in these countries. In rock art, this leads to the paradoxical situation that many motifs and sites with outstanding prehistoric art are better known and more often shown in northern hemisphere urban centres than in the global south rural areas where the art in fact is found. This paper will focus on the possibilities and benefits of a digital archive in making pictures, data and other archaeological source material accessible anytime from everywhere. An open online archive will in the long run flatten the hierarchical order of access to the results of archaeological research and heritage archiving. Today, this is still concentrated in the western metropoles and rarest in African hinterlands. The open access to thousands of pictures will facilitate dissemination of motifs in particular since the distribution of smartphones and network coverage are ever growing particularly in Africa’s rural areas. The African Archaeology Archive Cologne (AAArC), being licenced under Creative Commons, provides open access to tens of thousands of rock art photos and to the enormous Brandberg-Daureb Data Base that contains 39,000+ rock art figures. Additionally AAArC stores all kinds of digital archaeological products from across Africa (mainly Sudan, Algeria, Chad and Namibia), including audio and film documentary.     

The Aims of Knowledge: Emile Durkheim's Critique of American Pragmatism

The lectures on American pragmatism given by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim in 1913 in Paris were first published in French in 1955 and finally translated into English and published in 1983 as Pragmatism and Sociology. For obvious reasons they have attracted considerable attention from philosophers and sociologists, especially the latter, in both continental Europe and the English speaking world. Durkheim's motives in giving the lectures have been scrutinized, his interpretations of the pragmatists widely discussed and his criticisms of William James, John Dewey, and F. S. C. Schiller have met with mixed receptions. However, after years of scholarly discourse on his motives, interpretations and criticisms, there is no common agreement on the significance and meaning of Pragmatism and Sociology. We briefly address the disagreement over Durkheim's motives in the introductory section before turning to our interpretation in the body of the article. There we focus on his criticisms of the pragmatists’ views on the aims and nature of knowledge, which is a classic confrontation between French rationalism à la Durkheim and American pragmatism of the James/Dewey variant.