Intersectional solidarity? The Armagh women,the British left and women’s liberation

In 1980, three Republican women prisoners held in Armagh prison in Northern Ireland joined the hunger strike being conducted by male Republican prisoners in Maze Prison. Overshadowed by the fatal 1981 strike, the 1980 strike involved these women in Armagh, who challenged the traditional nationalist notion of the strong male warrior, while generating sympathy and solidarity across the globe, including with the far left and the women’s liberation movement in Britain. This article will look at how the left and the women’s liberation movement in both Britain and Ireland looked to portray these women within their competing narratives.     

A Portrait of Hunger,the Social Safety Net,and the Working Poor

In a study at the largest northeastern Iowa food pantry between 2004 and 2006, we found that neither working nor accessing government benefits has a meaningful impact on lessening the odds that a person will need long‐term food assistance. In other words, the working poor are at greater risk for making recurrent visits to the food pantry than those who do not work. Pantry clients who work are more likely to have sacrificed food to pay for other life necessities. Moreover, government benefits do not seem to provide an adequate food safety net. As a result, nonprofits are experiencing increased pressure to fill the gap. If we wish to maintain the government responsibility to alleviate hunger in our country, benefits for eligible citizens must be increased or food assistance nonprofits need more government support. Otherwise we should face the fact that as an undeclared public policy, our society tolerates hunger.     

“Punching Above its Weight”. The Mafikeng Anti-Repression Forum (Maref) and the Fall of Bophuthatswana

Abstract

This article traces the history of the Mafikeng Anti-Repression Forum (Maref) that operated in the former homeland of Bophuthatswana from early 1990 to late 1994. It was the only human rights organisation in Bophuthatswana. Maref's work was in five areas. Firstly, it monitored human rights abuses as a consequence of political repression in the homeland. Secondly, it responded to these abuses by means of disseminating the facts behind them. Thirdly, it attempted to defend the interests of the victims by means of seeking legal redress and relief from suffering and deprivation. Fourthly, it agitated for political change in Bophuthatswana in accordance with the changing nature of political reform in South Africa as a whole. Lastly it collated and published the information that formed an essential component of the negotiations that led to the new dispensation in 1994. For these activities, Maref members were severely harassed. The role the organisation played generally has received little analysis or comment, and is deserving of a place in the annals of human rights activities and activists during this period of transformation and upheaval in South Africa.     

The benefits of foreign policy bipartisanship revisited: lessons from two Canadian cases

Although foreign policy bipartisanship in Westminster systems is often heralded as a normative good, there is an emerging scholarship which suggests that a bipartisan approach to foreign and defence policy comes with considerable costs. This article seeks to join that debate. It does so by examining two contemporary foreign/defence policy issues in Canadian politics: the mission in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014 and the efforts to replace the CF-18 Hornet flown by the Royal Canadian Air Force. These two cases do not offer clear conclusions about the normative argument about foreign policy bipartisanship. The embrace of a bipartisan approach to the Afghanistan mission confirms the criticism that bipartisanship can suppress public debate and did indeed distort a consideration of policy options. But the case of the CF-18 replacement suggests that there are significant costs if government and opposition replace a search for bipartisan consensus on key policy issues with an overt politicisation that seeks partisan advantage by ‘playing politics’ with foreign and defence policy issues, concluding that the quality of partisanship is a necessary condition to avoid the dysfunctions and costs of bipartisanship.     

HOW CAN YOU PLAY WHEN YOUR HOUSE IS ON FIRE? THE NORWEGIAN SPORTS STRIKE DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR

The article considers the story of the Norwegian sports strike during the Second World War. What kind of resistance does the story reveal? What was the effect of a boycott of leisure activities like sports? The Norwegian sports organizations, unlike other international sports organizations, came to see themselves as part of the resistance movement against the Nazi regime during the German occupation from 1940 to 1945, using non-violent, civil disobedience as their weapon. Unprecedented historically and internationally, this meant that Norwegian sportsmen and women, for four and a half years, stopped participating in any way in sport. The boycott comprised sportsmen and spectators, regardless of whether the contestants were friends or foes, Allies or Nazis, Norwegians or German. Based upon previous and recent research the article contends that the sports strike can be considered an effective act of civil disobedience. It demonstrated in a visible way that civil resistance was possible, while the German and Nazi authorities sought to promote sports as a means of creating an impression of normality. Finally, the story of the sports strike can be read as a tale of the limitations of totalitarian regimes.     

Famine and the changing role of NGOs: an Irish perspective

The paper discusses how the recent history of famine has influenced the mission of relief-oriented non-governmental organisations (NGOs).     

肯尼迪与美国洲际导弹发展研究

火箭和导弹技术的突破使核武器的发展进入了一个新的时期。20世纪50年代末,苏联首先掌握了陆基洲际导弹,对美国的国家安全提出了新的挑战,从而引发了美国国内对“导弹差距”和基本国家安全政策的一系列辩论。肯尼迪执政时期,美国洲际导弹生存能力和进攻能力的改进,对其国家安全和外交政策产生了重要的影响。     

Vagrant,Convict, Cannibal Chief: Abel Magwitch and the Culture of Cannibalism in Great Expectations

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations opens with a jolt, as Abel Magwitch – an escaped convict – pounces on the narrator and protagonist, Pip. Despite this rather dramatic introduction, and the pivotal role that he goes on to play in the plot, Magwitch has never been given the sustained critical analysis that he warrants. More often than not he has been treated as one of Dickens’s infamous ‘flat’ characters; a kind of ‘pantomime wicked uncle’, in the words of George Orwell. This is a critical legacy that this paper seeks to redress. Seeing Magwitch as an essential element in Dickens’s critique of mid nineteenth-century society, this paper examines Magwitch’s largely ignored peripatetic and homeless past. By contextualizing Magwitch in his role as a vagrant outsider, and then exploring how this marginal position nuances the cannibalistic appetite he displays in the first pages of the novel, I argue that Magwitch’s violence and ‘savagery’ forms a foil for the more sadistic practices of civilized society. In doing so I position Magwitch at the dark heart of Dickens’s social pessimism, and re-evaluate the culture of cannibalism that we see in Great Expectations.     

Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts

Abstract

The Occupy Wall Street protest that has spread to other cities across the United States in the autumn of 2011 bears striking similarities to the American Railway Union's strike against the Pullman Palace Car Company near Chicago in 1894, led by Eugene Debs. That protest movement laid the foundations for progressive reforms in the early twentieth century.     

Becoming the ‘party of civil rights’: the Radical Party, 1962–1979

ABSTRACT

The article reconstructs how the Italian Radical Party became, from the mid-1960s, the party of ‘civil rights’, and what its main battles for these rights were between 1967 and 1979. In the Italian political system the Party played a crucial role in the process of re-institutionalization that took place in the 1970s, helping to transfer demands formulated in social and cultural terms since the 1960s to the legislative-institutional level. Making the battle for civil rights the object of their own political action had a systemic meaning for the Radicals – namely, to undermine the dominion of the Christian Democrats and redefine the relations between the political sphere and society. This was closely linked to the political strategy of the party and to the organizational form it gave itself from 1967 onwards. These aspects, however, did not remain unchanged between 1967 and 1979; rather, they fed on the Radicals’ evolving vision of Italian society (on its social turmoil) on the one hand, and on the other they reacted to the evolution of the Italian political scenario, in particular to the possibility of building a parliamentary alternative to the Christian Democracy.