Representing the periphery: Highland commissioners in the seventeenth-century Scottish Parliament,c.1612–1702

While a significant amount of work has recently been conducted on the procedure and practices of the pre-1707 Scottish Parliament, remarkably little is known about the nature of local representation within the chamber. This article seeks partially to address that gap through detailed analysis of the elected representation of one region – the Scottish Highlands – within the seventeenth-century Parliament. Considering attendance rates, the identity of Highland representatives (‘commissioners’), the means of their election and their activities once elected, the article argues that Highland engagement with Parliament was much more significant than is often assumed. This, in turn, suggests that further constituency-level studies are needed in order to provide a fuller picture of Parliament's relationship with the country at large.     

Inside the Karen Insurgency: Explaining Conflict and Conciliation in Myanmar’s Changing Borderlands

Since 2012 Myanmar’s oldest ethnic rebel group, the Karen National Union (KNU), has sought for considerable rapprochement with the government. To many, this seemed to be the direct outcome of wider political transition in Myanmar. This article proposes an alternative explanation. Based on extensive field research and an emerging literature on armed groups, it demonstrates that the group’s rapprochement with the government was driven by leadership struggles between two rival factions within the KNU. At the core of this contestation are shifting internal power relations, which resulted from military pressures and geopolitical transformations in the Myanmar-Thai borderlands. These findings point to significant shortcomings of Myanmar’s peace process. They also contribute to the field of Conflict and Security Studies with much needed primary source data on the internal politics of insurgency, which shows how dynamics of civil war are driven by an interplay between forces on different levels of analysis.     

1812–15: The debate about the High Court of the Sicilian Parliament

According to the Piano generale per l'organizzazione delle magistrature, the High Court of Parliament was one of the legal institutions provided for in the Sicilian constitution of 1812. Due to the fact that the Piano did not define in detail the competences and tasks of that institution, only referring to coming laws, the High Court became the subject of an important debate that developed in the reformed ‘assembly’ in the two years between 1813 and 1815. Documents uncovered in the Protonotaro del regno kept in the State Archives in Palermo regarding the parliamentary meetings and contemporary accounts outlined the heated argument between the Lords and the Commons about the function and powers of the Court that should have the right to try the highest officers of kingdom.     

Patriotism and neutrality. The Spanish Parliament and the Great War, 1914–18

Despite the pressure exerted by rival protagonists, the Spanish government chose not to be involved in the Great War. This decision converted Spain into a neutral state, formally outside of the conflict yet deeply involved in several ways. Espionage and smuggling conducted by the belligerents in Spanish territory called the sovereignty of the state into question. In an effort to reduce these violations, the Spanish government adopted measures limiting freedom and parliamentary powers that were constitutionally guaranteed. As a result of the research carried out in the historical archives of the Cortes of Madrid, this article will examine the parliamentary response to executive infringements on individual liberty and parliamentary rights, focusing on two main aspects. First, the manner in which the Spanish deputies attempted to preserve the authority and institutional primacy of the Parliament against executive power during the war will be examined. Second, special attention will be paid to the debates on legislation introducing ‘extraordinary powers’ of public authority in 1918. The results of this analysis allow for a further and more in-depth exploration of the conventional depiction of the Spanish Parliament as passive and irrelevant at the end of the Restoration era (1875–1923).     

Dynastic Politics: Family Ties in the Greek Parliament, 2000–12

Fluctuations in the presence of dynastic politicians in national legislatures are seen as an important indicator of political modernisation. Drawing on original biographical details of Greek Members of Parliament (MPs) from the six most recent parliamentary terms, we document the existence of a substantial and relatively stable pool of dynastic MPs. Their numbers only appear to shrink, albeit not too dramatically, in the 2012 elections, which also marked the collapse of the traditional party system. Findings highlight patterns of stability that have remained unnoticed under more visible shifts in party competition during the economic crisis.     

Women in the House (of Parliament) in Fiji: What’s Gender Got to Do with It?

Abstract

Women in Fiji have made steady, albeit slow, progress in terms of parliamentary representation, with women now holding 14% of seats in the lower house of parliament. Some of the progress has occurred as a result of improvements associated with increased socio-economic development, such as education, female employment and incremental changes in women’s standing in Fiji society. Much of this change, however, has been due to women’s movements and civil society activism becoming more astute to concerns of gender equality and lobbying for women’s political participation. In a country that witnessed four political coups, women have had to create their own path into the public sphere. Despite progress, with an increasing number of women in the 2014 parliament, patriarchy is still a major force hindering women’s political advancement in Fiji. This paper argues that a combination of cultural stereotyping and persistent gendered norms contribute to masculinisation of the political realm and eulogise women’s role in the private sphere. But gender intersecting with ethnicity, age and class create differential levels of political agency for different groups of women in Fiji.     

Defining ‘America’ from a Distance: Local Strategies of the Global in the Middle East

This article focuses on the policy of population dispersion and the plan that transferred new Jewish immigrants from North Africa to settlements in Israel's periphery during the mid-1950s. Populating the frontier was a national task. The lack of candidates among old-timers contributed to the idea of sending new immigrants to those areas. The first wave of immigrants, immediately after Israel's independence, came at such a speed that a direct connection to population dispersion was almost impossible. The transit camps, created as temporary accommodation for the immigrants in populated area of the country, became permanent. With the second wave of immigration, a policy of directing the immigrants to the frontier was adopted. This policy required tight control on the immigrants and very efficient processing. This second wave of immigrants included mostly North African Jews. However, this policy was abandoned when East European Jews immigrated to Israel. The population dispersion of the 1950s shaped Israel's spatial gaps, and had long-lasting influence on the creation of an ethnic gap in Israel.     

Syria,Saudi Arabia,the U.A.E. and Qatar: the ‘sectarianization’ of the Syrian conflict and undermining of democratization in the region

Understanding the Syrian conflict only in terms of sectarian politics amounts to dismissing a very modern effort at emancipation within the context of the country’s populace fighting for its civil, political and economic rights, and in the process robs Syrians of their agency and diminishes their humanity. A closer look at events and political alignments in Syria reveals a more complex picture better understood through the lens of regimes’ desire to counteract the dissident and reformist dynamics that emerged with the Arab Spring. And while this paper is most certainly not minimizing the fact that the sectarian discourse and animosity, once activated, acquired its own dynamic, it underlines that this is not a case of so-called ancient sectarian rivalries emerging unprompted and of their own accord. As a result, the Syrian crisis and the regional ramifications of it can be appreciated as not simply identity politics writ large, but as an example of the authoritarian resilience paradigm in action. In making these arguments, this paper examines the interplay of the domestic and regional policies of three actors involved directly in the Syrian conflict: the Syrian regime, Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. (considered as a unitary actor within the context of the Syrian crisis), and Qatar.     

Foreign Policy “On the Cheap”: Latvia’s Foreign Policy Experience from the Economic Crisis

This article assesses whether the reduction of budgetary allocations to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Latvia in 2008–2012 led to more modest foreign policy in the sense of both objectives and execution. After assessing four goals of Latvian foreign policy since 2008 – regional cooperation, bilateral development cooperation, facilitation of Latvia’s economic interests abroad, and relations with the Latvian diaspora – the authors conclude that the decrease in funding for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had little impact on Latvia’s ability to achieve foreign policy objectives.     

Modern weddings in Uzbekistan: ritual change from ‘above’ and from ‘below’

Under the new conditions of independence, wedding ceremonies in Uzbekistan have increasingly diversified along growing social and economic divides. Recent state measures to curb ritual expenditures follow the furrow of a long tradition of criticism against ritual prodigality which, however, falls short of its self-set target of enforcing more ‘rational’ rituals. Based on fieldwork conducted in the Ferghana Valley, this paper sheds a new light on the controversy around ‘excessive ritual expenditures’ by discussing tensions in local practices arising from changing livelihoods and consumption patterns, on the one hand, and, on the other, from an ambivalent state policy that aims at containing ritual expenditures and social polarization, while also promoting an ideal of modern wedding that undermines the very aim of the policy.     

Peeresses,Parliament and prejudice: the admission of women to the House of Lords, 1918–1963

SUMMARY

In this article Duncan Sutherland examines a subject that has been almost entirely ignored by British constitutional historians, the admission of women to the House of Lords. There had always been hereditary peeresses, their status as peeresses did not confer the right to sit in the House of Lords. The womens' suffrage movement had ignored the issue, and attempts to use the right of women to sit as MPs in the Acts of 1918 and 1919 to entitle peeresses to sit in the Lords failed. So did subsequent attempts to have them admitted by legislation: the political parties did not see it as an important issue, and it was inextricably mixed up with the wider question of general reform of the House of Lords. Only after the creation of life peerages, after 1958, were women admitted to the House, and even then the hereditary peeresses had to wait until 1963 for admission. The article concludes by considering the kinds of arguments advanced for continuing the exclusion of women. The long delay, in light of the feebleness and inconsistencies of the case for continuing the exclusion of women, seems to indicate the low importance that the political Establishment attached to the issue.