The ICC pre-trial chamber decision on jurisdiction over the situation in Myanmar

The transfer and deportation of ethnically Rohingya people from Myanmar into Bangladesh is a crime against humanity demanding an international response. What role, however, should the International Criminal Court (ICC) play? On 6 September 2018 an ICC Pre-Trial Chamber ruled that the Court has jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute such crimes as they are completed on the territory of a State party, Bangladesh. Myanmar is not a party to ICC Statute and has invoked the principle that treaties do not bind third parties without their consent. The case put in this commentary is that while the Pre-Trial Chamber’s approach to the law was arguable as an interpretation of the ICC Statute, it was unwise as a matter of policy. The argument is threefold. First, the Pre-Trial Chamber’s ruling is as a matter of legal method only the first-move in a process of norm-creation and persuasion. Second, it does not follow that because territorial jurisdiction in international law includes ‘objective’ jurisdiction over transboundary acts completed on a State’s territory that such jurisdiction was delegated by member States to the ICC in all cases. Finally, it is argued that international criminal tribunals do not succeed when the cooperation of necessary territorial governments (here, Myanmar) is withheld. Proceeding in this case risks becoming a quagmire of the ICC’s own creation at a time when it can little afford further risks to its legitimacy.     

学术规范建设与世界史研究

学术规范建设关系到中国学术的发展和繁荣,对于世界史研究具有同样重要的意义。开展学术规范的建设,既要考虑学术规范自身的系统性,又要照顾不同学科的特点;既要引进欧美学术界的成功经验,又要结合中国学术的传统和实际。世界史作为中国学术的一个分支,其发展需要学术整体进步的带动,同时在学术规范建设中也能发挥某些独特的作用。世界史学科的特点是具有跨文化了解的性质,需要大量使用外文文献,其研究的难度较大,因此,在研究取向、资料运用、引用方式、标注形式、防止抄袭和剽窃各个环节,均有特别的要求。学术规范建设只有顾及世界史的这些特点,才能对其研究水平的不断提高产生有力的推动。     

学术著作翻译的几个问题——以汉译《草原帝国》为例

以汉译《草原帝国》为例 ,学术翻译应注意以下几个问题 :诠释性学术著作的时效性 ;学术著作的思想倾向 ;学术著作翻译应遵循专业的学术规范 ,包括人名、地名和专业术语的翻译 ;学术翻译的语言 ,要在于确切 ,同时也要合乎汉语习惯     

中外人文地理学论文写作之差别

对人文地理学者而言,论文的写作与发表至关重要。基于新世纪以来的个人学术阅读,认为国内人文地理学论文写作在不断进步,但与欧美人文地理期刊上的论文相比,还存在一些差距。这种差距主要表现在研究思路、理论框架、文献综述、引证、讨论等部分,笔者作了初步的探讨。在学术论文写作中,我们需要基于自己的方法论,认真交待研究问题和研究思路,阐明理论框架,完善文献综述,认真对待引证,并改进讨论部分的写作。     

The disturbance and endurance of norms in ASEAN: peaceful but stressful

Since the Cold War, South-East Asia has been marked by a period of relative calm and stability. Yet this peace belies ongoing tensions, mistrust and stress in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and among its member states. Within the scholarship on ASEAN, not enough attention is devoted to these underlying currents. How and in what way do tensions stress the ASEAN norms? What are some of the coping mechanisms adopted by ASEAN and its member states? Engaging with the scholarship on norms, the author contends that changes wrought in this relationship are both extra- and intra-mural. These have accelerated as contentious issues—particularly the South China Sea disputes—gain more visibility. The author argues that ASEAN is put under pressure, firstly, through a more muscular Chinese foreign policy that disrupts but does not yet break the fundamental norms of ASEAN and, secondly, through internal contestation over ASEAN norms that challenges the meaning of these norms. Essentially, the article gives an account of how internal and external pressures are burdening ASEAN norms but yet remain durable because of resistance against duress by the bloc and member states. This is done through an examination of instances where the established order and practices in the region were disturbed, and the response to this disturbance.     

Gender,empowerment, and cultural preservation at Topu Honis Shelter Home,Timor-Leste

Women's empowerment, the ability of a woman to make her own decisions and shape her own life, is a common goal for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating under the gender and development framework. This article examines the way that one NGO, Topu Honis Shelter Home, in Oecussi, Timor-Leste, facilitates the empowerment of its young women members and challenges gender norms in a patriarchal society. In doing six months of participant observation research at Topu Honis and semi-structured interviews, I discerned four sources of empowerment, which are explored in this article: (1) gender equality, (2) education, (3) agency and confidence, and (4) cultural preservation. The primary finding of this research is the suggestion that cultural preservation can be an important resource for empowering women, even in a patriarchal society. At first glance, this may run counter to the dominant western notions of empowerment, but in the case of Topu Honis, key cultural practices are preserved while oppressive gender norms are simultaneously dis-embedded. Development practitioners should explore how preserving and promoting local cultural practices may contribute to development and/or empowerment.     

Projections of China's normative soft power

Fuelled by unparalleled recent development, China has by necessity been reaching outward in search of foreign resources and international recognition. The three books reviewed in this essay all speak to China's spectacular global ascendency of the past two decades—and to the political consequences and international reactions that have followed. What unites these three volumes—Tongdong Bai's China: The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom (2012), Peter Nolan's Is China Buying the World? (2012) and William Callahan and Elena Barabantseva's edited volume, China Orders the World: Normative Soft Power and Foreign Policy (2011)—is their focus on the uniquely Chinese norms that now underpin China's soft power in the twenty-first century. How will China go about ordering the world and will it succeed? The answers to these questions, as these authors demonstrate, may have less to do with China's present than with its ancient past.     

A History of Normative Theory in Americanist Archaeology

Efforts in the 1960s to demonstrate the value of the new archaeology involved showing that the competing culture-history paradigm was inferior. One allegedly weak plank in that paradigm had to do with how culture historians viewed culture—as a set of ideas transmitted in the form of ideal norms or mental templates. Lewis Binford referred to this view as normative theory. In archaeology that view was manifest in the equation of artifact types with prehistoric norms—an equation that, according to Binford, the culture historians had made so that they could track the flow of ideas through time and thus write culture history. Culture historians regularly subscribed to cultural transmission as the theoretical backdrop for their artifact-based chronometers such as seriation and the direct historical approach, but with few exceptions they perceived only a weak relationship between norms and artifact types. It was not until 1960, in a paper by James Gifford, that what Binford labeled as normative theory appeared in anything approaching a complete form. Ironically, the first applications of normative theory were products of the new archaeologists, not the culture historians.     

美国人文地理学概论教材:内容、评价与特点

选取美国流行的几本人文地理学概论教材,对其内容、组织结构、表现形式、地图使用、网络支持等方面进行详细的评述。在此基础上结合以往的研究总结出美国此类教材的特点:(1)教材的主题大同小异,差异主要表现在教材结构和材料组织上;(2)教材内容基于已有的研究成果,对他人的相关研究成果表现出特别的尊重;(3)使用大量地图和照片,表格和案例丰富,使教材赏心悦目;(4)重视文化分析;(5)重视景观分析;(6)教材更新快,时代感强。这些特点值得我们今后编写或修改此类教材时参考。     

Book reviews

RODERICK STACKELBERG. Idealism Debased: From Völkisch Ideology to National Socialism. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 1981. Pp. XIII, 202, 3 plates. $18 (US). Reviewed by Lawrence D. Stokes

JEROME CH'EN. China and the West: Society and Culture 1815–1937. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. Pp. 488. $25.90 (Can.) Reviewed by David P. Barrett

FREDERICK W. MARKS ill. Velvet on Iron: The Diplomacy of Theodore Roosevelt. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1979. Pp. xiv, 247. $15.00 (US). Reviewed by Raymond A. Esthus

CRAIG L. SYMONDS. Navalists and Antinavalists: The Naval Policy Debate in the United States, 1785–1827. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1980. Pp. 252. $17.50 (US). Reviewed by Reginald C. Stuart

BERNARD RANSOM, Connolly's Marxism, London: Pluto, 1980. Pp. 126. Reviewed by Desmond Bowen

THOMAS A. BAILEY and PAUL B. RYAN, Hitler vs. Roosevelt: The Undeclared War. London: Collier Macmillan, 1979. Pp. 302. £7.45. Reviewed by Ronald W. Pruessen

M.A. HICKS, False, Fleeting, Perjur'd Clarence; George, Duke of Clarence, 1449–1478. Gloucester: Alan Sutton, and Atlantic Highlands, NJ. Humanities Press, 1980. Pp. 270. $22.00 (US). Reviewed by Robert Tittler

MURIEL ATKIN, Russia and Iran, 1780–1828. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980. Pp. xii, 216. $20 (US). Reviewed by M.E. Yapp

J.K. FEDOROWICZ. England's Baltic Trade in the Early Seventeenth Century: A Study in Anglo-Polish Commerical Diplomacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. Pp. XIII, 334. $35 (US). Reviewed by David S. Macmillan

MICHAEL CROWDER. Colonial West Africa: Collected Essays. London: Frank Cass, 1978. Pp. 341. $28.50 (US). Reviewed by John Flint

PETER GRAF KIELMANSEGG. Deutschland und der erste Weltkrieg. 2. Auflage. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980. Pp. XI, 755. Reviewed by Henry Cord Meyer

PIOTR S. WANDYCZ. The United States and Poland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. XVI, 465. $28.50 (US). Reviewed by Stanislaw Bobr-Tylingo

FREDERICK COOPER. From Slaves to Squatters: Plantation Labor and Agriculture in Zanzibar and Colonial Kenya, 1890–7925. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980. Pp. xi, 328. $25 (US). Reviewed by Mike Mason

DONALD E. QUELLER. Medieval Diplomacy and the Fourth Crusade. London: Variorum Reprints, 1980. Pp. 322. £22. Reviewed by Bernice M. Kacznski

CHRISTINE MOSS HELMS. The Cohesion of Saudi Arabia: Evolution of Political Identity. London: Croom Helm, &; Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Pp. 313. $25.00 (US). Reviewed by Ray L. Cleveland

CHRISTOPHER H.D. HOWARD, editor. The Diary of Edward Goschen, 1900–1914. London: Royal Historical Society (Camden Fourth Series, Vol. 25), 1980. Pp. xn, 315. £10. Reviewed by Briton C. Busch