Agency and Terror: Evdokimov and Mass Killing in Stalin's Great Terror

This article presents an account of the history of Soviet repression, which integrates our current understanding of the scale and nature of repression with a history of the agents responsible for carrying out these operations. It notes that the major shifts in the nature of repression were accompanied by shifts in the operational leadership within the security forces, and that it was largely the same groups of individuals who were responsible for the mass killing operations during the civil war, collectivization and the Great Terror. These were the groups associated with Efim Georgievich Evdokimov, which operated in Ukraine during the Civil War, in the North Caucasus in the 1920s, and in the Secret Operational Division within OGPU in 1929‐1931. Evdokimov transferred into party administration in 1934 when he became party secretary for North Caucasus Krai. But he appears to have continued advising Stalin and Yezhov on Security matters, and the latter relied upon Evdokimov's former colleagues to carry out the mass killing operations that are known as “The Great Terror” in 1937‐1938.     

Soviet Economic Reforms Since Stalin: Ideology,Politics, and Learning

An American political scientist reinterprets the politics of economic reform in the USSR from 1953 to 1991. The paper offers an integrated explanation for three features of reform policies: their reappearance during periods of political succession; their persistent partiality; and their radicalization over time. The explanation focuses on the interaction over time among political competition, ideology, and collective learning. Reasoning leads to conclusions that a consensus on the superiority of a market economy finally emerged within the Soviet leadership in 1990, but that the learning process has not resulted in a consensus on strategies and costs of transition, journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 040, 052.     

全球结构冲突与美国霸权的合法性危机--解读伊拉克战争后的世界政治

本文以全球化为背景,分析了伊拉克战争的性质、特点及其与全球权力结构的关系.作者认为伊拉克战争不是海湾战争的延续,而是一场新型的全球化战争.伊拉克战争在一定程度上动摇了国际法体制,但不会出现所谓的战后新世界.伊拉克战争具有的特点及其体现的全球结构冲突,在今后一段时期内仍将决定世界政治的发展方向,而这种世界政治的发展方向将使美国的世界霸权遭遇更大的合法性危机.     

探析当今美国传播与政治的关系

传媒与政治有密切的关系,传媒的巨大宣传功能为政府提供了影响和引导舆论的工具。美国向来标榜“新闻自由”,但却打着信息传播的幌子对他国进行价值观的渗透,本文从美国传媒对北约轰炸南联盟的报道中剖析美国传媒与政治的关系,指出美国传媒并非它所自我标榜的那么“独立”和“公正”     

Arab Identity and Ideology in Sudan: The Politics of Language, Ethnicity, and Race

In what is now Sudan there occurred over the centuries a processof ta'rib, or Arabization, entailing the gradual spread of bothArab identity and the Arabic language among northern peoples.After the Anglo-Egyptian conquest of 1898, British colonialpolicies favoured a narrow elite from within these ‘Arab’communities. Members of this elite went on to develop a conceptionof a self-consciously Sudanese Arabic national identity, inthe process adapting the term ‘Sudanese’ (sudani),which derived from an Arabic word for blackness and previouslyhad servile connotations. At decolonization in the 1950s, thesenationalists turned ta'rib, into an official policy that soughtto propagate Arabic quickly throughout a territory where scoresof languages were spoken. This article considers the historicaldiffusion of Sudanese Arabic-language culture and Arab identity,contrasts this with the post-colonial policy of Arabization,and analyses the relevance of the latter for civil conflictsin Southern Sudan, the Nuba Mountains, and, more recently, Darfur.Far from spreading Arabness, Arabization policy sharpened non-Araband, in some cases, self-consciously ‘African’ (implyingculturally pluralist) identities. Arabization policy also accompanied,in some quarters, the growth of an ideology of Arab culturaland racial supremacy that is now most evident in Darfur. This publication was made possible in part by grants from theCarnegie Corporation of New York (Carnegie Scholars Program,2006) and the University Research Foundation of the Universityof Pennsylvania, but the statements made and views expressedare solely the responsibility of the author. The author wouldalso like to thank Benjamin F. Soares, Karin Willemse, VijayBalasubramanian, and two anonymous referees for their feedbackon earlier drafts of this article; the African Studies Centreat the University of Leiden for hosting the seminar (April 2007)where this work was first presented; and Tukufu Zuberi, EveTroutt Powell and the Africana Studies Center of the Universityof Pennsylvania for organizing a symposium on Darfur (1 March2007) that helped to bring ideas into focus.     

Legitimacy,Democracy and Rights: the Conservatism of Janet Albrechtsen

In recent years, media columnists have been instrumental in redefining Australian conservatism. One of the most prominent is Janet Albrechtsen. Using her critique of a bill of rights, this article examines how this new Australian conservatism rejects or reverses core elements of traditional conservatism. Utilitarianism exchanges the transcendent for the social. Equality and democracy replace elitism. Elites were minorities, albeit ones with leadership virtue. Now minorities of any sort threaten equality and undermine democracy. These changes reflect broader changes in society itself. In this sense, conservatism has made peace with modernity, hostility to which originally prompted its birth. Now the enemy is internationalism or postmodernity, the two often interchangeable. Albrechtsen's hostility to a bill of rights matches her rejection of international law and institutions that threaten the nation‐state and its guarantee of democracy and the rule of law.     

Who,Why and How: Assessing the Legitimacy of Secession

Since the breakdown of bipolarity, the international community had to cope with independence movements spreading in Eastern, Central and Southeastern Europe. Given the peculiar coercive character of the Soviet and Yugoslav Federations and the Soviet Union's hegemonial rule in Central Europe, the wish for independent statehood can be understood as a sum of single secessionist movements. This article investigates secession as a moral problem of public international law; it also attempts to define normative criteria for the assessment of secessionist legitimacy. What conditions are required for a legitimate secession? On what political, social or historical characteristics should a legitimate secession be based in order to obtain international recognition? The analysis is carried out on three levels: legitimacy of the actors (Who), legitimacy of the secessionist argument (Why) and procedural legiti‐macy (How). The analysis is illustrated by three examples of recent se‐cessionist movements: Slovakia, FYR Macedonia and Chechnya.     

机运与局限:发展型威权政体的政治合法性

发展型威权政体是第二次世界大战后新兴民族独立国家中最为常见的政体.这一政体没有太明确的意识形态,常把维护民族独立、发展经济等实用主义目标作为政府发展纲领.发展型威权政体在政治合法性方面大致经历了从正当到危机的过程.研究发展型威权政体与政治合法性的关系,有助于理解当代世界政治发展的潮流.     

Restructuring the Empire: The Nixon Doctrine after Vietnam

Abstract

Ever since Richard Nixon announced that the United States would adopt a “low profile” defense posture in Asia, American foreign affairs analysts have sought to construct an accurate model of the new policy. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, who analyzed the Nixon Doctrine in a 1969 report to the Congress, concluded that henceforth “The United States will avoid the creation of situations in which there is such dependence on us that, inevitably, we become enmeshed in what are essentially Asian problems and conflicts.” Lest this conclusion alarm any of our more insecure clients in the area, Vice President Agnew toured Asia in early 1970 to announce that the President had never intended such a sweeping reversal of policy: “Let me make it very clear,” he told newsmen in Canberra, “that despite a great deal of speculation and rumor, we are not withdrawing from Asia and the Pacific…. As a Pacific power, we will remain in the Pacific.” Nixon himself seems to have encouraged this dichotomy: thus the invasion of Cambodia in 1970 and the massive air attacks on Hanoi in 1972 suggested that he was committed to the interventionist stance represented by Agnew; while the cease-fire in Vietnam and the initiation of diplomatic contacts with China suggest that he leans toward the more restrained position of Mansfield.     

Reconciliation and Political Legitimacy: The Old Australia and the New South Africa

In both Australia and South Africa a state-sponsored discourse of reconciliation has been deployed as a tool of national integration and state building. This usage has tended to encourage a politics of selective memory that runs contrary to the spirit of reconciliation as recognition of different views of the nation. This article seeks to recover (and promote) a more positive concept of reconciliation by treating it as a discursive, democratic space in which different versions of the national story can be acknowledged and negotiated. The cases of Australia and South Africa are used in a mutually illuminating way to explore what "telling the truth" about the past might mean and how such "truth-telling" might help restore legitimacy to liberal states confronted with a "broken moral order".     

Hostile Receptions: Dilemmas of Democracy, Legitimacy and Supranational Law

The increasing resonance of international humanitarian law in the domestic sphere, primarily through the implementation of treaty obligations in domestic legislation, gives international law a relevance to local communities never before seen. Whilst the effects of this phenomenon defy generalisation in Australia today, it is possible to discern a range of responses from indignation at the overarching reach of international law to the domestic space, to vindication of historical claims of mistreatment at the hands of colonial oppressors. Recent shifts in Commonwealth legislation and policy have sparked debate on whether the federal government has breached its international obligations. Notwithstanding the importance and currency of this question, and irrespective of one's views on it, there is a broader issue raised by the question, which is more amenable to academic investigation. It may be framed in the following terms. How can, and should, the ideal of democratic control of legislation and the legal system generally be reconciled with the development of an autonomous international legal system? The article will approach this question from a comparative perspective, drawing on legal and political developments in the EU and Australia. It seeks to justify a comparative analysis on the basis that Australia (an established federation) and the EU (an emerging federation) are both dealing with issues of reception of supranational law within domestic systems. It concludes that there is a need to reaffirm the legitimacy of supranational law both as an expression of national sovereignty and as an outcome of rational discourse — i.e. it has come into being with right process and is considered binding.