Hiriira Spatiotemporalities: Mapping Oromo Women’s Liberation in Post-Imperial Berlin

In September 2020, Oromo women marched through the streets of Berlin, Germany, demanding recognition for their struggle. This protest march, called a Hiriira in the Oromo language, offers a case study into the entanglements between settler colonial Ethiopia, Germany’s post-empire, and the forces of oppression which link them. This paper uses the spatiotemporal reckonings generated from the Hiriira perspective to understand violence and elucidate the practices of resistance that have emerged despite it. These contrasting ways of viewing space and time are expressed through the tension between imperial spatialising, a way of knowing the world that is imperial and oppressive in nature, and geography guraacha, a Black and Blackened way of knowing space with a particularly Oromo perspective. The result is a type of mapping, tracing the Hiriira route across Berlin while describing the histories that shadow these streets, and the pathways towards liberation that Oromo women are organising.     

Shifting narrative strategies: How monument advocates change their stories in response to conflict over time

This paper expands the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) by employing an exploratory case study approach to examine the construction of narratives temporally. A large-N Twitter dataset concerning the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments controversy is utilized to examine the question: how does the use of narrative strategies change over time? Through the application of change-point analysis, we determine time points of significant shifts towards use of the devil-angel shift, scope of the conflict, and causal mechanism strategies. Overall, we find that organizations do not vary their use of narrative strategies over the course of a policy conflict but instead demonstrate discrete changes in response to certain policy events. Based on our findings, we conclude with suggestions for refining and expanding NPF hypotheses. Specifically, we recommend a more contextual analysis of shifts in narrative strategy use in response to specific events over time.     

A Review of “Magnanimity and Statesmanship”

ABSTRACT

This article compares Eric Voegelin's contribution to political science to European émigré scholars of the same period: Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Hannah Arendt, Hans Morgenthau, and Leo Strauss. It highlights Voegelin's main contributions to the field, reviews The Eric Voegelin Reader, and how The Reader will help scholars in both the classroom and scholarship.     

Rich Pickings: An Analysis of Opportunistic Behaviour at Rangitoto Island,Aotearoa/New Zealand

Rangitoto Island, Aotearoa/New Zealand, is the location of a graveyard of abandoned vessels and three communities of baches (circa 1910s–1930s)—small and modest holiday homes. In 2014, an archival and archaeological investigation of 11 discarded watercraft located at Boulder Bay and the bach communities of Beacon End, Rangitoto Wharf and Islington Bay revealed evidence of salvage and reuse of abandoned vessel materials in the construction, modification and use of the island’s baches. This evidence in turn provides insight into opportunistic behaviours of communities unassociated with the maritime industries that created ships’ graveyards, and consequently affords a more well-rounded understanding of post-depositional site formation processes. Influenced by social and economic impacts, the Rangitoto Island bach communities’ resourcefulness enhances our knowledge of behaviours towards ships as sources of material.     

Internet freedom,human rights and power

Internet freedom is rapidly becoming understood as a normative framework for how the Internet should function and be used globally. Recently declared a human right by the United Nations, it also forms a central pillar of the USA's 21st Century Statecraft foreign policy doctrine. This article argues that although there is a clear human rights agenda present in this policy, there is also a power element which is much less discussed or acknowledged in the vast literature on Internet freedom. Through an exploration of both a short history and some important lessons learned about Internet freedom, this article demonstrates how the US Department of State has adapted to the information age in such a way as to harness individual agency (reconceptualised in policy terms as ‘civilian power’) for the promotion of state power. Although this is by no means as stable or reliable as some more conventional mechanisms, it is an expression of power that meets with few challenges to its legitimacy.