Australia and the Secretive Exploitation of the Chatham Islands to 1842

The European discovery of the Chatham Islands in 1791 resulted in significant consequences for its indigenous Moriori people. The colonial Australian influence on the Chathams has received little scholarly attention. This article argues that the young colonies of New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land led the exploitation of the archipelago before its annexation to New Zealand in 1842. The Chathams became a secretive outpost of the colonial economy, especially the sealing trade. Colonial careering transformed the islands: environmental destruction accompanied economic exploitation, with deleterious results for the Moriori. When two Māori iwi (tribes) from New Zealand’s North Island invaded in 1835, Moriori struggled to respond as a consequence of the colonial encounter. Mobility and technology gained from the Australian colonies enabled and influenced the invasion itself, and derogatory colonial stereotypes about Aboriginal peoples informed the genocide that ensued. Hence this article writes the Chathams into Australian history and Australia into Chathams history, showing that discussions of the early colonial economy, environment, and genocide must consider the wider South Pacific context in conjunction with events internal to the colonies.     

Virtual war and repolitization in visual culture

This article discusses Andrew Hill's book Re-imagining the war on terror with a special attention to the unconscious mental dimension of the conflict. Clarifying this symbolic, signifying dimension can help us to traverse the fantasies that we are so easily trapped in. Thus it opens the way for introducing a moral and political position in the War on Terror and in visual culture in general.     

‘Pinstripes on the prairies’: examining the financialization of farming systems in the Canadian prairie provinces

Drawing on recent scholarship on the financialization of agro-food systems and the global land grab, this paper examines new forms of financial investment in agriculture in the Canadian prairie provinces. We examine the factors underpinning investor involvement in the sector, including its anticipated financial performance as well as processes of agricultural restructuring that, combined with government actions to liberalize farmland ownership, have facilitated the enrollment of land and labour into new financial vehicles. We focus in particular on the emergence of two new forms of investment vehicles – farmland investment funds and an exchange-traded farming corporation – comparing the business model and investment strategy of each. In doing so, we highlight the ways in which the new investment patterns may propel the restructuring of the agricultural sector, alter power relations among key actors, and introduce new logics into the farming landscape. Our findings allow us to comment on the relevance of the land grabbing frame for making sense of the financialization of agriculture in the global North.     

Ethical aspects of scientific progress

Ethics and science are much more closely connected than some people assume. Erroneous perceptions of the nature of ethics are the probable cause of this. Ethics is an intrinsic and productive component of scientific work, not some external or retrospective obstruction of “real” scientific research. The ethical component is positively influenced by a thorough knowledge of the discipline it belongs to. Science thrives in a climate of freedom, but this must not be used as an alibi to circumvent social responsibility and ethical concern. Ethical science has a direct bearing on science policy. Giving due attention to the ethical aspect of scientific work leads to several tangible results. It increases interdisciplinary openness, it promotes the communicability of science, and, ideally, it demonstrates the difference between knowledge and wisdom. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

An externally constrained hybrid regime: Hungary in the European Union

The paper focuses on the unique, role model characteristics of the Hungarian hybrid regime, the Hungarian political system’s new incarnation forged in the past years’ democratic backsliding process. Following the short review of the main hybrid regime literature and the key analyses putting the democratic quality of the Hungarian political system under the microscope, the paper argues that Hungary’s European Union (EU) membership, the competencies of EU institutions, and the scope of EU law have played a crucial role in the development of the system’s unique characteristics. Based on this argument, the paper qualifies Hungary as an “externally constrained hybrid regime”. However, the EU does not only fulfil system constraining functions regarding the Hungarian regime, but performs system support and system legitimation functions as well. Ultimately, the changing scope of these functions, determined by the European integration’s internal dynamics, influences first and foremost the Hungarian power elite’s strategic considerations about the country’s future EU membership.     

Civic Duty and Voter Turnout

We argue that two different sets of considerations shape the decision to vote or abstain in an election–ethical and non-ethical. First the citizen may vote out of a sense of duty. Failing that, she may vote because she has strong preferences about the outcome of the election. Abstention occurs when neither duty nor a sufficiently strong preference is present. The implication is that while duty and preference each have strong positive effects on turnout, they also have a negative interaction effect, since the impact of preference is much weaker among those with a sense of duty. We present a wide array of empirical evidence that systematically supports our claim that the turnout decision is importantly shaped by this causal heterogeneity. Thus a turnout model misses something fundamental if it does not take into account the effect of civic duty.

     

Why Federalism Does Not Always Take Shape: the Cases of Italy and Nepal

Federalism has been discussed as a potential system of governance in many countries, but in some it has failed to take shape. This has been the case in Nepal and, to a certain extent, in Italy. In fact, in Italy the federal option was rejected at the time of Risorgimento, and constitutional reforms in the 2000s never transformed the country into a federation as desired by political actors such as the Northern League despite some decentralization. In Nepal, the 2007 interim constitution specified that the country would be federal, but the first Constituent Assembly elected to write a new constitution was unable to produce a federal map acceptable to the major political parties and the second is wrestling with the same issue. In both cases, federal structuring was attacked by political actors who argued that it could promote disunity, undermine solidarity, and possibly lead to disintegration. This article argues that the idea of federalism held by prominent political actors as promoting division and conflict played strongly against its implementation.     

Why Muslims like democracy yet have so little of it

This paper explains the observed combination of relatively low levels of democracy and positive attitudes towards it in the Muslim world. It argues that this democracy paradox is understandable from the perspective of the principle of diminishing marginal utility: people value highly that of which they have little. This reasoning implies, however, that surveys like the World Values Surveys (WVS) elicit circumstance-driven marginal preferences rather than culturally determined attitudinal traits. Empirical evidence showing that individuals living in undemocratic societies have much more favorable inclinations towards democracy supports our argument.