‘This is a Prison…A Death in Life’: Reza Shah’s troubled exile on the Island of Mauritius

Reza Shah, the feared and powerful master of Iran for nearly two decades, spent the last years of his life in lonely exile, on the island of Mauritius, then in South Africa. His life in exile was hardly a happy one. The place and conditions of his exile were dictated not by himself but by the British, and the relationship between the two remained uneasy. Britain’s handling of Reza Shah – the degree and freedom and choice they were prepared to allow him and his family – were determined by the exigencies of war. Reza Shah sought to loosen the bonds of British control. In Tehran, his son and successor, Mohammad Reza Shah, also played a role. He used what leverage he had with the British to help ease the conditions of his father’s exile, while he endeavored to protect Iran’s interests under a difficult foreign occupation. The push-and-pull of cross-purposes entailed by this triangular relationship defined Reza Shah’s life in exile in both Mauritius and Johannesburg. This article examines the Mauritian period of his exile.     

关于加强职工代表培训与管理的几点感悟

（一）职工代表作用在新形势下已比以往任何时期都更为重要；（二）加强职工代表工作乃是事半功倍之为；（三）职工代表培训管理工作应力求“五结合”和“五个一”。     

Motivational Interviewing as Governmentality: Shaping Victims of Men’s Violence into Responsible Subjects?

Motivational interviewing (MI) is an evidence-based counselling method that has spread rapidly in Sweden during the last two decades. It is a technique designed to empower individuals to change an unwanted life situation. Through interviews with a strategic sample of persons engaged in work with men’s violence against women, this article critically examines the use of MI in this context. By analysing the interviews from a governmentality perspective, it is suggested that MI is a technique to produce a knowledgeable, strong, and self-animated feminine subject, capable of making the “right” choices and subsequently “choosing” to avoid violence. Although this may be beneficial to some, the analysis suggests that this places primary responsibility on the woman subjected to violence for her predicament and future. This may in turn increase the risk of self-blame for those who cannot follow through with their commitment, and obscure and renounce the role and responsibility of both the counsellor and the rationalized neoliberal welfare state. In addition, the one-sided focus on the individual largely ignores the surrounding context, which may obscure men’s responsibility for violence. This may ultimately undermine the collective formation of a political subject from women’s shared experience of violence.     

人民代表大会制度的复合优势与合力效能

人民代表大会制度是我国的根本治制度,是国家治理体系的重要组成部分。我国的人民代表大会制度具有一系列显著的制度优势。在国家治理实践中,人民代表大会制度逐渐形成了党的领导、人民当家作主、依法治国"三者统一"的复合治理结构,从而形成了治理主体的合力效应,能够将制度优势转化为治理效能。同时,我们也应该看到,人民代表大会制度的治理效能发挥还需要在实践中不断发展。其中,选举制度改革、会议制度改革、人大预算监督职能、发挥联系制度的作用等都是很好的思路。     

通向司法民主：人民陪审员法的功能定位及其优化路径

我国人民陪审员法的功能定位是在司法领域贯彻中国共产党的群众路线和实现司法民主，公民有序、有效地参与司法是司法民主的应有之义，也是实现司法民主的必由之路，陪审制的制度设计应体现“平民化”。人民陪审员制度属于参审制，陪审员和法官在审判权上无分工，都具有事实认定权和法律适用权。由于陪审员缺少法律知识和专业训练，难以实现有效参审，不能消除“陪而不审”的痼疾。为发挥陪审员参审实质作用，在制度设计和运行中着力提升陪审员法律素质，在选任上“精英化”，都使得陪审员“法官化”，偏离了司法民主的方向。人民陪审员法体现了陪审员“平民化”的倾向，有利于实现司法民主，但也存在适用范围过大、事实和法律区分不明等问题，应建立和完善配套制度，逐步实现人民陪审员只参与事实认定问题。     

Melancholia in Vita Sackville-West’s Hogarth Press Novels

Author Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) has been understood as an author who celebrates in both prose and verse the institution of the English country estate, in part because of her personal attachment to her family’s Kentish house, Knole. The four popular novels that Vita Sackville-West published with the Hogarth Press during the early 1930s—The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), Family History (1932), and The Dark Island (1934)—are no exception, save for their particular focus on the agnatic inheritance of both aristocratic title and estate along with the female subject’s exclusion from that system. While the first pair of novels entertain the possibility of mediated success in obtaining the loved object, either the estate itself or an effective substitute, the latter works become melancholically resigned to the restrictions that effectively disinherit the aristocratic eldest daughter. This escalating melancholia, often Freudian in its narrative presentation, directs the novels’ successive focus less toward the act of mourning the loss of the country house, of some version of Knole either real or imagined, and more to the vexing inability to both acknowledge the disinheritance and mourn the loss. In fact, the melancholic dynamic threatens to erase each of Sackville-West’s protagonists, and as her novels detail the advancing impact of this disinheritance, the female characters face literal extinction. Thus, the celebratory stance so often attributed to Sackville-West is, in these works, a far more critical and essentially abject perspective that demands compensation.     

Cold War brotherhood contested: KATUSAs,slicky boys,American G.I.s,and the Status of Forces Agreement in post-armistice South Korea, 1954–1966

ABSTRACT

As the largest contingent of Americans in postwar South Korea, the G.I. best represented the United States’ Cold War objectives. Their deployment was an emblem of hard power containment, but the G.I. also embodied soft power integration, and through both, G.I.s helped to promote Pax Americana. This article focuses on the militarized masculinity of these ambassadors of America and their people-to-people diplomacy in South Korea between 1954 and 1966. These American G.I.s constructed their militarized masculinity vis-à-vis the Korean male Other, their “lesser” counterparts – the hapless houseboy, the inferior partner soldier, and the menacing slicky boy. At the same time, this liberal imperialism did not go uncontested. Violent imaginaries of the American G.I. from the borderlands were used by Koreans to demand a new bilateral framework – the Status of Forces Agreement in 1966 – to replace the outmoded wartime extraterritorial jurisdiction wielded by the American military after cessation of hostilities on the Korean peninsula in 1953. The militarized masculinity practiced in everyday encounters, thus, became the basis of a critique of American liberal imperialism in one of the United States closest Cold War “brother” nations.     

Can twitter change the Iranian legal landscape for women?

ABSTRACT

This article explores the effectiveness of international social media (Twitter) campaigns, as a modern form of transnational advocacy networks, seeking domestic legal change in Iran for women’s rights. Using the spiral model of human rights change and second wave normative theories, the article critiques current thought on social media as an advocacy tool using evidence from two Iranian campaigns. Gathering empirical data from the #stopstoning and #letwomengotostadium campaigns, the research finds that Twitter campaigns may be linked to regression in some areas of women’s rights. Early evidence indicates that social media may lead to amplified government backlash, lack of campaign persistence and foreign overshadowing of domestic voices, which all contribute to the ongoing problematisation of the role of transnational advocacy networks in domestic human rights change.     

Islamism,secularism and post-Islamism: the Muslim world and the case of Bangladesh

This paper provides a historical overview of the emerging post-Islamist phenomenon in the Muslim world and discusses the scope for sustainable democratic politics in Bangladesh. In the process, a model is proposed that purports to exhibit a level of compatibility with the perceived political landscape in Bangladesh. The model adopts a version of the Hotelling–Downs principle of democracy and sets it within the ‘post-Islamist’ paradigm in such a way that, if it can be implemented, even if only partially, may lead to the sustained political stability of Bangladesh. The paper highlights illiberal and undemocratic practices of the two dominant Bangladeshi political parties as a major feature of the present status quo. These practices dominate Bangladeshi politics through the continuous attempts of their exponents to impose monopolistic views on the various symbols of national identity, despite the multi-racial, multi-religious nature of Bangladesh society. The paper concludes that a democratic system of politics, which accommodates aspects of secularism, language, Muslim identity and post-Islamist ‘Islamic ethical–moral–legal codes’, remains the feasible political discourse for forming and consolidating the country’s multi-racial, multi-religious national identity over the long run and its survival as a sovereign state.