Consociationalism and the politics of the census in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland

Population censuses have symbolic and instrumental importance for ethnic, national, linguistic or religious groups and their political representatives. This is particularly apparent in deeply divided societies, where political institutions are designed to accommodate groups through forms of power sharing. Existing literature posits that consociational power-sharing institutions, which are commonly employed to manage inter-group conflict, are likely to incentivise contestation and mobilisation in relation to the census, but this claim has not been tested empirically. Employing the case studies of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Northern Ireland, this article tests a proposition about the relationship between consociationalism and the politics of the census: that it is corporate consociational designs that are likely to result in contestation of the census and mobilisation of groups during enumeration, whereas liberal consociational designs will not. The analysis offers support for this proposition, but also suggests that other features of power-sharing settlements, such as the federal nature of the Bosnian state and the majoritarian provision for a ‘border poll’ in the Northern Irish settlement, also play an important role in shaping census politics. These insights contribute to political geographic debates about the census by highlighting the influence of institutional design on struggles over how and where populations get counted, which are applicable beyond the immediate context of deeply divided societies.     

Uxores,ancillae and dominae: women in thirteenth-century Hungary in the Register of Várad

Women’s history for Árpád-era Hungary (1000–1301) has generally been restricted to legal issues and the royal court. This study addresses these deficiencies by examining women in the Register of Várad in regard to three areas of investigation: marriage practices and the involvement of the Church, access women had to property and the access women had to authority. Evidence from the register indicates that by the thirteenth century, ecclesiastical ideas regarding marriage were barely making themselves felt. Ideas of consent and even the indissolubility of marriage were at times unimportant. Though priests were occasionally present at marriages, their role was not decisive. Women had three primary means of obtaining property. They could receive gifts or dower on the event of their wedding, and they could receive a portion of the patrimony. This inheritance was termed the quarta filialis as it amounted to no more than one-quarter of the father’s property. These gifts came under the control of the woman’s husband, and she could not access them until his death. Widowhood combined with guardianship of a minor son could allow women to exert considerable power and, just as elsewhere in Latin Europe, women’s access to public and private authority most approximated that of men’s as a widow. Not all women, of course, had access to such power. The Register of Várad shows numerous instances of women slaves who were under the complete control of their master.     

Performance-based Seismic Design of a Pendulum Tuned Mass Damper System

The study implements the performance-based analysis and design methodology to assess the seismic vulnerability of a coal-fired power plant and to optimally design its equivalent pendulum-type tuned mass damper system such that the direct losses are minimized. A building-specific total loss ratio is developed to link the component level losses with the total repair cost of the original structure. The optimal system configuration is finally derived for cases with the minimum loss. The study demonstrates a systematic way of achieving the optimal pendulum-type tuned mass damper design with considerations of uncertainties in earthquake inputs and the combined component level damages.     

"天高皇帝近":一个重要的中国思想史命题——雷戈《秦汉之际的政治思想与皇权主义》评介

雷戈所著《秦汉之际的政治思想与皇权主义》一书,认为从秦朝到汉初的思想史发展阶段是中国思想史上皇权主义意识形态的生成和确立时期,并将其概括为"后战国时代";采用独特的"历史-思想"研究法,从政治制度、官场规则和官吏的政治生活中,挖掘特定时期的政治思想共识,为政治思想史研究开辟了新的路径,并扩大了思想史的资料范围;认为秦汉时期生成的皇权主义秩序,把"天高皇帝远"的制度现实变为"天高皇帝近"的观念实存,实现了对人们思想的可控性,从此,思想成为皇权可以控制和规范的领域,达到了有效的思想专制。这是秦汉以降中国思想史发展的基本特征。该书在研究方法的创新和思想深度的开掘上,都做出了独到的贡献。     

论博物馆核心竞争力的建设

博物馆作为公共文化设施是当地社区的精神缩影和文明的窗口。作为一个公共产品,面临着市场经济的冲击,全国的各个级别的博物馆都在探索着自己的出路和发展的方向。在发展过程中也出现了一系列的问题,在调和经济效益和社会效益之间,在处理自身发展和观众的要求之间,在保护收藏和展示之间都出现了或多或少的问题。党中央在"两会"上一直提倡发展文化产业和创意产业,要求又好又快地发展,为构建和谐社会而努力。在这样的形势下,也要求我们的博物馆与时俱进,在科学发展观的指导下增强博物馆的核心竞争力。     

Power and the material arrangements of a river basin management plan: the case of the Archipelago Sea

The drive towards collaborative governance has raised critical questions about the hidden forms of power practised in consensual planning processes. In the field of water governance, the issue has been analysed in terms that treat power as an intrinsic property of actors or planning settings. Alternatively power is located in the discursive means mobilized by the human participants. Drawing from actor-network theory, this paper calls attention to the material arrangements constitutive for the practicing of power in target-driven, consensus-seeking planning. It sets focus on the obligatory passage points and factual closures through which a planning task links, for example, to ecosystems, policy principles and trajectories of governance. In the meantime, some other entities and issues may lose their planning-steering potentiality. As shown by the analysis of a river-basin planning process, the arrangements that end up steering consensus-seeking cannot be treated as merely discursive outputs operating upon a passive non-human reality. Materialities and living processes contribute to the outcome. However, the link is not deterministic. With different means of arrangement, the planning reality can – and, in the studied case, could have – end up different.     

川西古镇安仁印象

全面记述川西历史文化名镇安仁保护、利用、管理的新探索,充分发挥其社会效益与经济效益有机统一的文物功能及其所积累的可供借鉴的成功经验。     

从成吉思汗经略西北边疆的成败看文化力的作用——纪念成吉思汗登大汗位800周年

本文概括论述了成吉思汗经略西北边疆的出众文略,指出他组建新的依靠力量,经略中西驿路交通,短短几年便统一中国西北边疆,达到了建立欧亚帝国和促进人类古代最广大的一次“握手”的一代辉煌,以及成吉思汗处理西北民族关系和塑建开放性民族结构之成功。同时剖析了他因文化的局限性而造成的两大失误给他本人和子孙带来的悲剧。最后,剖析了领土观念、制度文化、利益依附关系如何成为边疆分裂的根本因素。     

论二次革命时期的省议会联合会

省议会联合会是在各省议会联合反对适用<谘议局章程>的斗争中产生的.二次革命前,省议会联合会激烈反对袁世凯政府独裁卖国行为;二次革命爆发后,又企图充当类似国会的角色,发挥国民党政治中枢的作用,但囿于事实和法理,该会既不能联合各省议会,又不能代表民意,作用有限,远不如清末的谘议局联合会.国民党在二次革命军事失败的同时,在政治、法律层面上也看不到任何胜利的希望.     

Geographies of asylum, legal knowledge and legal practices

Law and legal discourses are an integral part of social life, a central means of producing social identities and exercising social power in day to day life. Critically informed geographical perspectives on law have illustrated in a number of ways how the legal and social (and therefore the spatial) are mutually constitutive. This paper argues that perspectives from critical legal geography can offer insights into the operation of asylum and immigration law in the UK in the late 1990s. This paper argues that legal practices and relations are organised in hegemonic and counter-hegemonic ways in different places and institutional contexts in London. In addition law and legal practices comprise a particularly important way in which ‘community’ can be constructed simultaneously across a variety of different scales in ways that can marginalise and exclude relatively powerless groups like asylum seekers. Thus refugee identities offer a particularly clear example of how social realities are constituted by law and legal practice.