Where the violence happened matters. Geopolitical framing and assessments of collective responsibility for historical violence.

Mass violence always takes place in a particular geopolitical context, and how that context is understood influences perceptions of collective responsibility. As international borders shift, often in the wake of war, events that occurred within one geopolitical entity can be understood has having taken place in another. The influence of such geopolitical framing on judgments of collective responsibility remains understudied. Two studies examine how geopolitical frames lead to shifting assessments of collective responsibility for historical mass violence. By depicting historical violence within a particular geopolitical entity (e.g., a country), that entity was perceived as being more responsible for the violence. The studies are set within the contexts of German-occupied Poland and the British occupation of the Indian subcontinent. The ramifications of these findings are discussed for the teaching of history, the commemoration of historical victimhood, and for our understanding of assessments of collective responsibility and geopolitical framing more broadly.     

“Neither too much nor too little” France,the USSR and the Helsinki CSCE

In the early 1970s, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE) was the cornerstone of French foreign policy regarding East-West relations. It was considered by Paris as the best way to maintain dialogue with Moscow as well as an instrument to reach the Gaullist goal of overcoming the European status quo. This double objective explains why the French adopted an ambiguous attitude during the CSCE: even though their goal was to challenge the Brezhnev doctrine and initiate a process to meet the aspirations of peoples under Soviet domination, they knew that this would be a lengthy process. For them, it was necessary to avoid provoking the Soviets by putting forward expressively liberal proposals. The French leaders of the 1970s saw the CSCE as the multilateral prolongation of the Gaullist policy of ‘détente, entente, cooperation’.     

No Trinity: The tripartite relations between Agudat Yisrael,the Mizrahi movement,and the Zionist Organization

This article investigates the dynamics between the two major Orthodox political movements of the twentieth century – the religious Zionist movement Mizrahi and its non-Zionist opponent Agudat Yisrael – in the context of their tripartite relationship with the Zionist Organization. Due to its increased involvement in Palestinian affairs, the Agudah entered negotiations with the Zionists in the mid-1920s. These negotiations and the possibility of cooperation between Agudat Yisrael and the Zionist Organization threatened the position of the religious Zionists within the ZO. The resulting competition between the two Orthodox groups led to the refinement of party platforms and the crystallization of independent political camps.     

Climate change,conflict, and cooperation: Global analysis of the effectiveness of international river treaties in addressing water variability

Climate-driven water variability is a natural phenomenon that is observed across river basins, but one that is predicted to increase due to climate change. Environmental change of this kind may aggravate political tensions, especially in regions which are not equipped with an appropriate institutional apparatus. Increased variability is also likely to challenge regions with existing institutional capacity. We argue that our best attempts to assess the ability of states to deal with variability in the future rest with considering how agreements have fared in the past. In this paper, we explore treaty effectiveness, or treaty resilience, by investigating whether particular water allocation and institutional mechanisms help mitigate inter-country tensions over shared water. We use water-related events from the Basins at Risk events database as a dependent variable to test particular hypotheses regarding the impact of treaty design on conflict and cooperation over time. A broad set of climatic, geographic, political, and economic variables are used as controls. The analysis is conducted for the years 1948–2001 using the country dyad as the level of observation. Findings pertaining to our primary explanatory variables suggest that country dyads governed by treaties with water allocation mechanisms exhibiting both flexibility and specificity evince more cooperative behavior. Country dyads governed by treaties with a larger sum of institutional mechanisms likewise evince a higher level of cooperation, although certain institutional mechanisms appear to be more important than others.     

Policing mobilities through bio-spatial profiling in New York City

In 2003, the Bloomberg administration launched Operation Impact, a hot-spots policing program which identified high-crime areas in New York City and flooded them with high concentrations of new police officers. These hot-spots, labeled Impact Zones, are sites of mobility constrained and structured by biometric and spatial technologies borrowed from the military. This article analyzes the city's advanced police profiling technologies as they play out within Impact Zones. The profiling is racial, social, biometric, bio-political, and spatial, and works to demarcate dangerous people and places. Because this profiling technology is enacted spatially and governs residents' mobility, I argue for a new conceptual apparatus, which I call bio-spatial profiling. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in police hot-spots, policy analysis, and textual analysis of media articles, I argue that the lived experience of biospatial profiling is one of pervasive fear which governs mobilities in Impact Zones. Next, I trace the experiences of Northeast Brooklyn residents back to their sources, and find three bio-spatial practices: both biometric and spatial data collection, and police street-stops. These symbiotic practices inform and strengthen each other, congealing to produce fear and immobility for those they target. The article concludes with a discussion of the conflicting understandings of (in)security in Impact Zones that connects the practices with the experiences of bio-spatial profiling, to illuminate the human costs of militarized securitization of domestic urban life.     

Understanding the July 2016 Military Coup: The Contemporary Security Dilemma in Turkey

This study explores the link between religious identity and conflict in contemporary Turkey by examining the dramatic reversals in the relations between the country’s two prominent Islamic social forces, the ruling party AKP and the Gülen Organization. It shows how a particular trajectory of power and identity between the two religious forces transformed into a brutal security competition in the Turkish society and polity. It puts the analytical foci on the following puzzle: how did the Gülen community — once a confidential ally of AKP — turn into a coup plotter in the Turkish military to bring down the elected government? In order to explore the puzzle, the study offers significant departures from the standard approaches to religious identity and conflict by employing a distinct concept — the inter‐societal security dilemma.     

1902年中葡交涉述论

1902年中葡交涉过程中,葡方先后提出扩大澳门界址、在澳门及周围各岛范围内任建工程并协助缉私、修造广澳铁路等项要求,并以承认中外新定税则和协助清政府在澳门征税缉私作为交换条件.中方对葡方企图扩大统治区域等严重侵害中国领土主权的要求给以坚决抵制,使葡方的主要目标不能实现;但为了取得葡方承认新定税则和协助中方征税缉私的目的,在修造广澳铁路问题上对葡方做出一定让步.     

二十世纪二三十年代“上海模式”对重庆的冲击

民国重庆城市现代化起步于刘湘“军人干政”时期。而川江航运的繁荣,城市精英的觉醒以及刘湘政权的若干举措,为“上海模式”输入重庆提供了重要条件。作为后发外生型条约体系城市,重庆的现代化不仅依靠西方现代性要素的刺激,而且更直接地受到“上海模式”的辐射和拉动。“军人干政”的负面效应致使以“上海模式”为蓝本的重庆城市现代化呈现畸变态势。在“上海模式”的冲击下,在本社会还缺少现代性因素积累的情况下,重庆城市现代化于20年代末期启动。     

A trade balance: litigation and negotiation in the World Trade Organization's dispute settlement system

The establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been widely accepted as representing the legalisation of world trading rules. However, it is important to reflect on the limits of this legalisation thesis in terms of the interface between international and domestic policy processes. By locating trading disputes in a political analysis of policy implementation, it is argued that it is difficult to establish conceptually how the WTO dispute settlement system could have authority separate from and above the conventional international politics of trade policy relations. Instead, the article argues that case outcomes should be expected to be largely the product of domestic political institutions and policy processes, and how these intersect with developments in the WTO dispute settlement system. Brief studies of the Australian government's dispute settlement strategy and two high-profile WTO disputes—the US upland cotton and European Union sugar cases—serve to suggest that the authority of international trade law is not as significant as assumed by the legalisation thesis. Rather, domestic politics and institutions have an important impact on the outcome of trade disputes.     

Constituencies of conflict and opportunity: Land rights,narratives and collective action in Darfur

Grievance-based narratives are a primary component of civil wars. While present among the general population affected by conflict, the variants held by the segment of the population most proximate to the armed factions – constituencies – play a primary role in the development and conduct of a conflict. Such narratives can coalesce around specific volatile issues and enable non-combatant constituencies to participate in the conflict through the use of specific 'legalities' or legal precepts. These legalities facilitate the engagement of sets of collective action that are opposed to those derived by constituencies of the opposing side. However such constituencies and their narratives are also where potential opportunity resides for peace-building, both during and subsequent to hostilities. This article looks at the case of Darfur to examine these ingredients, with a focus on land rights as the volatile set of issues around which narratives have developed. In Darfur, opposed narratives which maintain how and why groups claim and deserve access to land and territory, and how groups were unjustly displaced or excluded from lands (and hence power), became solidified and acted upon prior to the conflict to become a primary driver in the current war. In certain cases however narrative change has led to interaction between members of opposed constituencies for the purpose of exploring cooperative arrangements.