Struggle for citizenship: interaction between political society and civil society at a Kurd refugee protest in Tokyo

This article analyzes a Kurd refugee sit-in protest staged in front of the United Nations offices in Tokyo in July–September 2004 and its implications for the interaction between political society and civil society. The refugees' protest is viewed as a moment where the line between citizens and non-citizens is redrawn. Citizens possess an exclusive right to political speech and action. Protests by refugees undoubtedly question citizens' monopoly of this right. By organizing protests, refugees, who do not have citizenship status, raise their voices, make demands, and thus request a right to speech and action. In doing so, they blur the line between citizens and non-citizens. In this process, how do citizens and refugees interact with each other? By using Partha Chatterjee's concept of political society, I examine the different tactics employed by the refugees, who are part of political society, and the citizens of civil society. The case shows that when different voices meet, the voice of civil society drowns the voice of political society: the refugees' tactics were de-legitimized by the citizens. This interaction suggests that encounters between citizens and refugees are not simply events where the refugees claim a right to speech and action, but that such encounters also involve citizens in effect struggling to secure their monopoly of the same rights.     

Organic purity and the role of anthropology in Cambodia and Rwanda

Straus investigates the ideology of two genocidal regimes in the developing world: the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Hutu Power in Rwanda. Although the regimes were quite different - one Communist, the other nationalist - he argues that their ideals converged around a notion of organic purity. Both regimes pursued extraordinary violence to meet the ideal: mass destruction was a method to achieve organic purity. Straus further contends that anthropological writings provided the necessary ideational building blocks for this ideal. In promoting a violent return to a mythic past, both murderous regimes embraced the images and concepts of European archaeology and ethnography.     

Diversifying British Political History

This article explores what the diversification of British political history might look like. Building on an expanded definition of citizenship and attention to ‘ordinary’ politics, it suggests several questions which might diversify political history's content and approach. Whom do we count as political actors? Who has access to democratic processes and where does politics happen beyond these processes? To what forms of political thought do we attend? Drawing on examples from my own research on refugees and asylum seekers in modern Britain, and on the wider field of modern British history, I demonstrate the possibilities of diversification as a way to enliven political history's future.     

‘Extremely valuable work’: British intelligence and the interrogation of refugees in London, 1941–45

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the compulsory questioning of over 30,000 refugees who escaped to Britain during the Second World War and who were detained in London’s Royal (Victoria) Patriotic School. It answers three questions: how did intelligence come to see non-British civilians as sources; what characteristics did refugees possess and how did these influence the information they shared; and who was interested in their accounts? It argues that, while this site was set up as an MI5 vetting camp for the identification of Axis agents, it quickly evolved into an intelligence-gathering centre, serving the interests of multiple departments and organisations.     

Why (not) arrest? Third-party state compliance and noncompliance with international criminal tribunals

Why do some states comply with their legal obligations to arrest suspects indicted by international criminal tribunals (ICTs) while others do not? Research on this question has mostly focused on “target” states, like the former Yugoslav republics, where ICTs have intervened. In contrast, this article offers the first test of theories regarding ICT arrest-warrant compliance and noncompliance by third-party states. I examine the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and 26 third-party states implicated in the pursuit of the court's 91 indicted suspects. Using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis, I find support for the procompliance influence of liberal democratic norms and foreign aid dependency on third-party states. I also find that noncompliance?—?something existing studies tend to leave untheorized?—?can be explained by the presence of either non- compliance constituencies or high official corruption. By testing several theories of compliance and noncompliance on a so far understudied class of cases, these findings provide support for the generalizability of a number of explanations in the broader literature on compliance with human rights obligations. The analysis also shows that problematizing noncompliance?—?and not merely reducing it to an absence of procompliance factors?—?can help us develop fuller explanations of compliance behavior.     

The Theory of Universal Human Rights: A Comment on Talbott

In this analysis of William Talbott’s important book, I note with appreciation his defense of universal moral principles and of moral justification as a “social project,” his focus on the critique of oppression, and his emphasis on empathic understanding in the account of human rights. I go on to develop some criticisms regarding: 1) Talbott’s traditional understanding of human rights as holding against governments and not also applying to nonstate actors; 2) his account of the interrelations among well-being, autonomy, claims for first person authority in moral judgment, and human rights; 3) his strongly rationalist and liberal individualist interpretation of moral judgment and autonomy; and 4) the lack of a role for intercultural dialogue about human rights, which nonetheless are held to apply to all human beings across cultures. In each case, I briefly consider what an alternative approach would look like.     

Becoming black,becoming president

ABSTRACT

Speculation about the relationship between Barack Obama's election to the presidency and race in the United States was rife prior to, during and after his successful campaign. King looks at three aspects of this issue. First, as a kind of outsider, Obama had to prove himself black enough for African Americans of the traditional sort and not too dangerous for Whites. How did he achieve this? Second, Obama's election was made possible by changes in the voting behaviour of white Americans, particularly in the North, and the way that African Americans like Obama gained a foothold in, and at times control of, urban political machines, such as, in his case, Chicago. How have American historians treated this shift in white voting behaviour? Finally, the central question of how race still impinges on President Obama's performance as president. King concludes with a look at issues such as colour blindness and whiteness, the nature of black political identity and solidarity, and the variety of political roles from which a black leader such Obama can choose.     

The 2003 and 2015 Constitutional Referenda in Rwanda: A Significant Change in Voter Turnout

Data on voter turnout and choice at the Rwanda’s 2003 and 2015 constitutional referenda were acquired and analyzed. The results revealed contrasting changes in voter turnout between diaspora and in-country electorate. Arguably, at home, lack of freedom on the part of registered voters to make independent choices may explain the 9.3 percent and 5.2 percent increase in voter turnout and “yes” vote, respectively. On the other hand, while the repressive arm of the regime can reach Rwandan citizens both at home and abroad so as to compel them not oppose its political agenda, voters in diaspora enjoy some level of relaxation, especially those staying in Western democracies, which could explain the 37.8 percent drop in voter turnout. The article further argues that the results of the 2003 and 2015 referenda could be used to support suggestions that the Tutsi electorate indeed stands more divided than it was a decade ago.     

The paradoxical effects of macluhanisme: Cazeneuve,Baudrillard and Barthes

In the mid-1960s the controversial ideas of media guru Marshall McLuhan hit France like a cyclone. ‘Macluhanisme’ is the summarization of the basic tenets of his theory and marks the paradoxical mire into which one was thrown by engaging with them. For to criticize McLuhan was to resist his truth by rationalization. Criticism. also put one in the position of being labelled a counter-revolutionary since McLuhan aligned himself, albeit rhetorically and despite his conservative politics, with counter-cultural tendencies. Moreover, he was condemned by university professors as a charlatan, but widely supported by media workers. This support exposed the political issue of who was, in French intellectual life, in a position to authenticate ideas. This study traces the effects of macluhanisme through the work of the sociologist of the media and administrator Jean Cazeneuve, the cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard, whose debts to McLuhan are well-recognized but little explored, and Roland Barthes, with whom McLuhan met in Paris to discuss (but never accomplished) a collaborative project.     

William Talbott’s Which Rights Should be Universal?

In this review essay, I first set out and then subject to criticism the main claims advanced by William Talbott in his excellent recent book, “Which Rights Should be Universal?”. Talbott offers a conception of basic universal human rights as the minimally necessary and sufficient conditions to political legitimacy. I argue that his conception is at once too robustly liberal and democratic and too inattentive to key features of the rule of law to play this role. I suggest that John Rawls’s conception of human rights comes closer to hitting the mark Talbott sets for himself and that Talbott incorrectly rejects Rawls’s view. I conclude that what likely divides Talbott and Rawls is that Rawls, but not Talbott, explicitly frames the inquiry into the minimally necessary and sufficient conditions to political legitimacy in terms of a liberal democratic people attempting to determine, as a matter of its just foreign policy, whether or not to recognize other organized polities as independent and self-determining within the international order.     

Alasdair MacIntyre: Social Practices, Marxism and Ethical Anti-Capitalism

Alasdair MacIntyre's concept of social practice sits at the core of his account of the virtue-fostering forms of resistance to capitalism, liberalism and the modern (un)democratic state. However, while this concept was articulated, in part, as a response to perceived weaknesses with Marx's analysis of working-class revolutionary praxis, and although MacIntyre has criticised Marx for the paucity of his theorisation of such practice, he has himself only gestured towards concrete instances of his alternative. This essay engages with one of these examples: MacIntyre's suggestion that Welsh mining communities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries should be numbered among those modern communities within which the virtues have flourished. I explore some of the ramifications of this example for MacIntyre's broader ethical theory through the lens of a discussion of the continuities and breaks between his youthful Marxism and his more mature thought. I suggest that this example problematises his concept of practice in a way that implies a space for reconciliation between his mature thought and his earlier Marxism.     

Do we need special,collective rights for immigrants and refugees in Western Europe?

Ethicists and political philosophers like Will Kymlicka and Charles Taylor have sensitized us to the need for recognizing the specific identity of minority groups. Once we stress the importance of group identities, the question arises how to protect those identities. Taylor and Kymlicka seek the answer to this question in granting special, collective rights to minority groups. In their analysis, Taylor and Kymlicka seem to have some specific, ‘historically settled’ minority groups in mind: the native Indian peoples of North America, and the French‐speaking community in Quebec, respectively. In my article, I want to examine whether this plea for special rights can be transferred to the Western European and, more specific, Dutch context. In this context, ‘minorities’ are not historically settled communities, but rather ethnic minorities, migrant workers and refugees, who have settled here only recently. Is it possible to maintain here, too, that special, collective rights are the best way to protect their identity? I shall answer this question in the negative. In the Western European setting, cultural pluralism may be best guaranteed by sticking to quite ordinary individual human rights. If these rights are implemented fully and effectively, we do not need special rights.     

Refugees,economic migrants and weak cosmopolitanism

This article takes issue with several features of David Miller’s account of justice with respect to refugees and to economic migrants, as outlined in Strangers in our Midst. It suggests that even within the terms of his own weak cosmopolitanism, the requirements of justice are more demanding than he acknowledges. In particular, the argument advanced criticizes Miller’s ‘fair shares’ argument concerning obligations to refugees and his recourse to ‘mutual advantage’ in theorizing economic migration.     

The Charismatic Body Politics of President Putin

Vladimir Putin's image and brand make sophisticated, culturally embedded use of his biography, martial arts expertise, and idiolect, with his physical self strongly privileged in the modes of his self-presentation. As a politically marketable product, his public persona enjoyed broad appeal among Russian voters in the period 2000–2011, when he and his United Russia party operated in an electorally uncompetitive environment. Since the urban protests of 2011–2012, Russia's political scene has become much more dynamic. Having initially configured himself as a charismatic leader whose very body symbolized a new and confident Russia, during his third presidential term, which began in 2012, Putin finds himself facing new presentational challenges that he may or may not be equipped to meet.     

The spy who never was: An intelligence myth in Palestine, 1914–18

Myths, like old soldiers, refuse to die, let alone myths about spies. The adventures of the daring German super‐spy, Fritz Frank (1873–1968), who operated behind British lines in Sinai and Palestine during World War I, disguised as a British officer, have fired the imagination of contemporaries as well as historians and scholars to date. This article shows that while Frank himself was a real, flesh and blood figure, the deeds attributed to him were almost entirely imaginary.     

Hedge Funds, the Deutsche Börse Affair and Predatory Anglo-American Capitalism

Boardroom trouble at Deutsche Börse, the company that operates Germany's main stock market, has recently provoked an important debate about competing capitalist models. Werner Seifert, Deutsche Börse's ousted Chief Executive, was eager to portray himself as the innocent victim of aggressive Anglo-American investors who had bought into his company but failed to understand its traditional operating ethos. In this, he was ably supported by key figures within the ruling Social Democratic Party, who, in order to shore up the party's core support, had increasingly come to blame overseas hedge funds for the development of German corporate governance models which prioritised profits over jobs. I review the SPD's structural reading of the Deutsche Börse affair, whilst comparing it to an alternative interest-based reading. The latter allows me to focus more closely on the issue which, more than any other, led to Seifert's downfall: his refusal to bow to the expressed interests of his own shareholders by pressing ahead, against their wishes, with a hostile bid for the London Stock Exchange. Seifert's eventual removal foreclosed the possibility of an integrated London-Frankfurt stock market and, somewhat ironically given the SPD's response to the affair, as a consequence it also prevented the entry of London's highly capitalised institutional investors into the German market for corporate control. The actions of Deutsche Börse's overseas shareholders might still be seen as evidence of a predatory Anglo-American capitalism. However, their successful removal of Werner Seifert may well have been responsible for temporarily keeping other financial predators at bay.     

Becoming flesh: refugee hunger strike and embodiments of refusal in German necropolitical spaces

The securitization of the EU’s external borders and repressive asylum policies biopolitically control and discipline the bodies of refugees. In Germany, these developments hark back to a longer colonial history of racialization that the state collectively disavows. To approach this continuity of racialized citizenship, I will analyse a series of hunger strikes that were staged by refugees from 2012 till 2014 in Germany. By asking which possibilities lie in staging the hunger strike, I will argue that Germany’s necropolitical geography of detention, asylum, and deportation marks the racialized refugees’ bodies as disposable within the logics of citizenship. I propose that hunger strike is a form of becoming flesh, which makes visible how racialized violence is enacted on the refugees’ bodies. Becoming flesh articulates a politics of refusal that subverts the logics of recognition, empathy and suffering liberal rights discourses rely on and, instead, performs an embrace of the refugees’ abjection.     

Writing about Rwanda since the Genocide: Knowledge,Power and ‘Truth’

This debate article reflects upon four articles recently published in this journal as part of a special Forum on Rwanda (Volume 8, Issue 4, 2014)—released to coincide with the 20-year commemoration of the 1994 genocide. In doing so it highlights what this author considers to be a crisis in contemporary ‘Rwanda studies’. This crisis—referenced and reproduced to some extent in all four articles—combines methodological (‘how can we write about Rwanda?’) and epistemological (‘how should we write about Rwanda?’) uncertainty against a backdrop of highly polarized, partisan and sometimes personalized research agendas. In exploring this phenomenon, the study explores not only the role of academics (mainly European and Rwandan) but also of the Rwandan government itself, highlighting the rise of ‘activist polities’ such as that in contemporary Kigali. These regimes consider knowledge production to be an aspect of their own sovereignty and this poses fundamental challenges, as yet largely unacknowledged, to parts of Western Africanist scholarship.     

The Consummate Comparative Public Administrationist: A Tribute to Ferrel Heady, 1916–2006

Ferrel Heady died on August 16, 2006, at his home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Together with Fred Riggs, he is widely known and respected as one of the founders of comparative public administration. In this tribute to our friend and colleague, we touch on the highlights of his distinguished career as a scholar, an academic administrator, and a person who lived up to his own high standards of honesty and integrity in every aspect of his life. We assess his body of work, attempt to summarize its significance, and reproduce comments about him sent to us by his friends and colleagues. This tribute is accompanied by reflections on Ferrel written by Fred Riggs.