The De Rossetti Affair: Legal Pluralism and Levantine Identity at the Crossroads of Empires

In the nineteenth century, changes to Ottoman legal and financial structures upset the familial interests of the large Levantine clans that were an integral part of the Ottoman Empire from its centre in Constantinople to its peripheries. Many legal and political disputes involved influential individuals who were not strictly ‘European’ or ‘foreign’; rather they were long-term residents of the empire with strong ties to the Mediterranean basin. A forgotten part of Egyptian history, the De Rossetti family presented here exemplifies those families and individuals who transcended the ‘imperialist’ tag as part of a wider Levantine network. This article argues that extraterritorial legal claims had the direct, and generally unintended, effect of an imposed legal order that ensnared both Ottomans and non-Ottomans in disputes over juridical pre-eminence, a creeping institutional imperialism which case by case sought to undermine the Egyptian regime’s capacity to govern.     

中日东海争端及其解决的前景

中日两国间在东海问题上的争端主要包括东海海底油气资源、钓鱼岛及其附属岛屿的领土主权归属以及东海海域专属经济区和大陆架划界之争.这些争端之间虽然盘根错节、互相制约,但并非无解决良策.本文从历史与国际海洋法的角度,分析中日东海争端的缘由,阐释两国在东海划界问题上的不同主张以及钓鱼岛及其附属岛屿在划界中的效力问题,并结合目前中日东海争端的现状,探讨解决该问题的前景.     

Between the Dock and a Hard Place: Hazards and Opportunities of Legal Pluralism for Indigenous Women in Ecuador

This article examines the challenges and opportunities of indigenous justice for women in Ecuador. The legal recognition of indigenous justice is a major component of democratization in the region. Yet it also raises the risk of institutionalizing detrimental gender biases within indigenous forms of law. Taking the Remache case as a point of departure, this article identifies some of the fault lines in legal pluralism and women's conflicted relationship with it. Rather than rejecting customary law, however, women advocate for their rights within it—lobbying for gender parity within indigenous justice in the 2008 Constitutional Assembly. As women's support for indigenous justice relocates legal authority, it also challenges conventional practices of state sovereignty. To understand the attractiveness of legal pluralism for women and its impact on the state, this study explores the confines of feminist alliances, the accessibility of indigenous justice, and its implications for state sovereignty.     

东盟国家处理海域争端的方式及其对解决南海主权争端的启示

东盟国家在解决南海以外的海域争端时,基本上采用以下三种方式:对争议海域进行共同开发;通过提交国际法院裁决;武力对抗加政治谈判。从实践来看,不同方式取得了不同的效果。近年来,东盟部分成员国采用不同方式不断侵占中国的南海海域,使南海问题呈现越来越复杂的态势。中国在南海主权争端中,面临来自东盟国家的巨大挑战,如何解决南海海域争端已成为中国与部分东盟国家面临的最棘手问题。东盟国家解决海域争端的方式,对于解决南海主权争端提供了一定的启示。     

The Myth of Personal Security: Criminal Gangs, Dispute Resolution, and Identity in Rio de Janeiro's Favelas

This article examines the politics of how drug traffickers resolve disputes and maintain order in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Much popular discourse and some scholarly studies argue that drug traffickers play a major role in controlling crime and minimizing conflicts there. This article shows that traffickers enforce community norms under a variable political calculus in which well-connected and respected residents are less likely to be punished for rule violations than are individuals who are marginal to the life of the community. This allows many favela residents who conform to local norms to feel a degree of control over their own safety, a "myth of personal security" in otherwise violent neighborhoods.     

The Kurdish image in statist historiography: the case of Simko

This article focuses on the uprising in 1918–1922 of Ismail Agha of Shikak (a.k.a. Simko) in Iranian Kurdistan and how he has been portrayed in Persian historiography. Painting Simko simply as another Kurdish rebellious chief with no nationalist aspirations leaves important questions unanswered. Simko introduced a number of firsts in Kurdish political history to Iranian Kurdistan, yet his innovations have generally been overlooked. Simko was conscious of, informed by, and founded his politics upon the communal distinctions deemed to legitimize varying degrees of Kurdish self-rule. In addition to his political and military activities, Simko co-founded the first Kurdish school in Iran, published the first Kurdish–Persian newspaper, and made Kurdish the official medium of his reign. This article draws on memoirs, personal accounts, and other unexplored primary documents to show a more complex picture of Simko's resistance, problematizes some idées reçues about Simko and his ethno-nationalism, and explores inconsistencies in the existing literature on the subject.     

Resistance to centralisation in the Ottoman periphery: the Kurdish Baban and Bohtan emirates

Modern Kurdish historiography, which examines resistance to provincial centralisation in Ottoman Kurdistan, focuses largely on Bedir Khan’s Bohtan emirate and his revolt in the 1840s, while ignoring the rest of the other Kurdish emirates such as Baban emirate. While both states, Qajar Iran and Ottoman Empire, were endeavouring to solve their conflicts in the 1840s (a process which culminated in the treaty of Erzurum in 1847) the future of the Baban emirate and its territories emerged as one of the major issues during the course of negotiations. The Baban emirate was the last emirate to give up its struggle against the Sublime Porte’s centralisation reforms. The legacy of the Kurdish emirates is important to understand better the relations between the centre of the Ottoman Empire and its eastern periphery, a much less studied subject in Ottoman historiography. This article will highlight the impact of the centralisation policies in Kurdistan, more specifically on territories of the Bohtan and Baban emirates. It will be demonstrated that the changes wrought by the Tanzimat reforms were partially successful in transforming the Kurdish notables, who later became a part of the state bureaucracy. However, the reform-minded officials, who were appointed after the Kurdish emirs were removed from the region, failed to persuade the locals in favour of the new administration thus transforming their lives.     

Female Cousins and Wounded Masculinity: Kurdish Nationalist Discourse in the Post-Ottoman Middle East

This article scrutinizes a highly gendered nationalist discourse shaped by a group of Kurdish nationalist men who sought to break with their Ottoman past while exiled in Syria and Lebanon in the 1930s and 1940s. Based on a critical reading of publications edited by Jaladet and Kamuran Bedirkhan, this study elaborates how the vision of Kurdish nationalism put forward by the Bedirkhan brothers, despite its emphasis on the emancipation of women, held the same patriarchal aspects of their rival Kemalist Turkish counterparts. A gendered approach is clearly discernible in Kurdish nationalists' views regarding major issues such as the failure of recent Kurdish nationalist rebellions and the prescribed national duties of women and men. Their reflections on the Second World War during the war years reveal another aspect of the Kurdish nationalist discourse. Kurdish nationalists, admirably watching the Allied European soldiers' sacrifices and victories, unwittingly expressed a crisis of masculinity emanating from their perceived inability to do anything for their own country.     

The Nature and Resource Field of the Kurdish Resistance in Turkey: A Dormant Resource

Saudi Arabia is A.M. Vasil'yev's Istoriya Saudovskoy Aravii (1745–1973), History of Saudi Arabia, 1745–1973 (Moscow, Nauka Press for the Institute of Orientalism of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1982; 613 pp.)

Puritanye Islama? Vahhabizm i pyervoye gosudarstvo Sauditov v Aravii (1744/45–1818), The Puritans of Islam? Wahhabism and the First Government of the Saudis in Arabia, 1744/45 to 1818 (Moscow, Nauka Press, 1967; 264 pp.).

I.I. Proshin's Saudovskaya Araviya. Istoriko‐Ekonomichyeskiy ochyerk, Saudi Arabia: An Historical‐Economic Essay (Moscow, Nauka Press for the Institute of the Peoples of Asia of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1964; 303 pp.)

V.V. Ozoling's Ekonomika Saudovskoy Aravii, The Economy of Saudi Arabia (Moscow, Nauka Press for the Institute of Orientalism of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1975; 208 pp.)

V.L. Bodyanskiy and M.S. Lazaryev's Saudovskaya Araviya poslyeSauda. Osnovniye tyendyentsii vnyeshneypolitiki (1964–1966 gg.), Saudi Arabia After Saud: Basic Tendencies of Foreign Policies, 1964–66 (Moscow, Nauka Press, 1967; 116 pp.)

L.V. Val'kova's Saudovskaya Araviya v myedzhunarodnikh otnoshyeniyakh,Saudi Arabia in International Relations (Moscow, Nauka Press for the Institute of Orientalism of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1979; 224 pp.)

O. Gyerasimov's Saudovskaya Araviya, Saudi Arabia (Mos cow, Misl’ Press, 1977; 72 pp.) and Saudovskaya Araviya (Spravochnik), Saudi Arabia; A Handbook (Moscow, Nauka Press, 1980; 272 pp.)

Yakub Yusef Abdallah's Obyedinyenniye Arabskiye Emirati: Istoriya politiko‐gosudarstvyennogo razvitiya (xix v.‐nachalo 70‐ye godov xx v.), The United Arab Emirates: The History of Political‐Governmental Development (19th century to the early 1970s) (Moscow, Nauka Press for the Lumumba University, 1978; 152 pp.)

R.V. Klyekovskiy and V.A. Lutskyevich, is entitled Obyedinyenniye Arabskiye Emirati, The United Arab Emirates (Moscow, Misl’ Press, 1979; 159 pp.

‘Socio‐Economic Problems of Developing Countries’, which also includes a book by L. Zvyeryeva, entitled Kuveyt, Kuwait (Moscow, Misl’ Press, 1964; 112 pp.)

V.L. Bodyanskiy's Sovryemyenniy Kuveyt (spravochnik), Contemporary Kuwait: A Handbook (Moscow, Nauka Press for the Institute of Orientalism of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, 1971; 328 pp.)     

Politics in the Kurdish periphery: clan networks and local party strategies in a comparative perspective

Despite the return to violence and state repression in the Kurdish conflict, the ruling Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi (Justice and Development Party – AKP) has remained the only alternative to the Kurdish National Movement (KNM) for Turkey's Kurdish citizens. What local-level strategies did the AKP employ in Kurdish areas to reinforce its national-level appeal to Islamic values? Under what conditions did local vote-seeking strategies help the AKP to overcome its pro-Kurdish rivals at the ballot box? This article examines the politics of local coalition building in the periphery of the Kurdish landscape – Bingöl and Mu?. Despite their many similarities, the two cities voted for different political parties in national elections. This article examines how the AKP's local party organizations interacted with local authority structures, recruited influential local elites, and pursued new voters. The vitality of clan networks in parts of Bingöl enabled the AKP to build a reliable local coalition. The gradual weakening of clan networks in Mu? and their permeation by the KNM prevented a similar coalition. Instead, the parties of the KNM were able to take advantage of divided clan networks to win national electoral contests in the province.     

The Business of Peace: Raiding and Peace Work along the Kenya-Uganda Border (Part II)

Peace work is big business along the Kenya–Uganda border.Each year, new groups are created thanks to the generosity ofmajor donors while others disappear due to corruption and mismanagement.This cycle has continued for decades and, despite an absenceof tangible results, millions of dollars continue to flow intothe bank accounts of peace groups in the North Rift. As thefirst part of this article suggests, the focus on the so-called‘root causes’ of violence may well be responsiblefor the dismal performance of the peace industry. However, thebehaviour of peace NGOs in the field has been appalling. Peacemeetings are often only held so NGOs can display an engagementwith the conflict, despite the dangers created by such events.Other groups are dominated by politicians who use money earmarkedfor peace work to fund their political ambitions. Better monitoringis the obvious solution, but local groups have been able toavoid this by exaggerating the security risks of visiting theregion. Others argue that offloading peace work responsibilitiesto CBOs might lead to better results, but in the highly ethnicizedNorth Rift smaller groups are rarely able to transcend theirlocal roots. This article concludes that the peace industryis deeply flawed, and requires a complete overhaul in orderto have a beneficial impact on the region.     

The burden of Sisyphus: a sociological inventory of the Kurdish question in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the contradictory transformation process the Kurdish movement has been experiencing over the last two decades and discusses its structural paradoxes and political shortcomings from a critical sociological perspective. Based on participant observation and interviews with activist researchers, the paper argues that the moral and ideological unity of the movement is challenged by ever-increasing social and mental divisions that are in turn prompted by forced displacement, rapid urbanization and diversified forms of social and symbolic inequalities within the Kurdish society. The fundamental division is between the emerging educated middle-class subjectivity, which has become the prime intellectual force leading the democratic political institutions, and the socially impoverished and radicalized urban youth, who have been active in contentious politics. This social division manifests within the dual organizational structures of the movement as twin and frequently contradictory dispositions. This schism also prevents the movement from building a much broader popular subjectivity to decolonize the social and political life.