Europeans of the Peruvian Andes: A Family History, 1860s–1940s

Liberal elites in nineteenth-century Peru were eager to attract European immigrants to help modernise their country. The majority arrived independently bringing commercial skills, while a minority, contracted as colonists, settled in the tropical lowlands. This article focuses on two European communities established in the central Andean region, where immigrants from northern Italy excelled as merchants and families from the Austrian Tyrol became smallholders. Through a reconstruction of one family's history, which draws on personal letters and a photograph, the article explores the experiences, character and socio-economic transformation of these communities and the significance given to European-ness and whiteness.     

The Trump-Kim Summit,Future Scenarios,and Japan’s Policy toward the Korean Peninsula

On June 12, 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (hereafter DPRK or North Korea) leader Kim Jong Un, Chairman of the State Affairs Commission, met in Singapore for the first time. The two men signed a joint declaration and pledged to work toward denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and improving bilateral relations. These developments raise several questions. What impact will this summit meeting between the two leaders have on regional security? What sorts of opportunities and risks will that impact produce for Japan? How should Japan deal with this fluid regional situation?     

Security,Nationalism and Popular Culture: Screening South Korea’s Uneasy Identity in the Early 2000s

By examining the cultural representations of the South Korean notion of the Self/Other in relation to its major traditional enemy — North Korea — this article aims to capture a picture of South Korea’s discursive economy of the North, and to problematise the South Korean identities implicated in that economy in the early 2000s. To achieve these aims, this article focuses on representations of a successful popular South Korean film which was released in 2000, just a few months after the first inter-Korean summit: Joint Security Area JSA. By analytically reading JSA, it is revealed that, in South Korea, the traditional discursive practices based on the Cold War thinking have been eroded. For the South, the North is part of the Self (Korean-ness; love for the North as the same nation) and, at the same time, is an Other (South Korean-ness; contempt for the North as an inferior state). Related to this, South Korea appears to be the uneasy Self without a firm Other in between Korean-ness and South Korean-ness.     

Party,State and the Control of Information in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic: Secrecy,Falsification and Denial

ABSTRACT

Since taking control of Laos in 1975, the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party and the government of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) have relied heavily on secrecy, denial and information management and control to govern. These tools have been used for presenting the Party and state as united in support of the country’s one-party communist political system and as being the only real political option. This article presents a number of examples of the particular ways the Party and state have done this. The following are discussed: the little-known rift between the “Red Prince” Chao Souphanouvong and Kaysone Phomvihane; conflict between the Lao PDR and Vietnam and China; the anti-Lao PDR insurgency; calls for political change via the “Social Democratic Club” in 1990; unsuccessful student protests for political change in 1999 and 2009; the forced disappearance of Sombath Somphone; and recent attempts to control social media to publicise anti-government viewpoints. Secrecy, falsification and information management and control have important implications, both with regard to conducting research about Laos and in relation to how outsiders tend to analytically frame the study of Party and state.     

The party,the Gama’a and the Tanzim: the organizational dynamics of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s post-2011 failure

Abstract

In April 2011, the Egyptian Muslim Brothers (MB) founded the first political party in their 83-year-long history, known as the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP). Yet the party remained under the control of its parent organization—the Gama’a (literally the ‘community’)—and its internal apparatus, the Tanzim. While both had been shaped during decades of MB’s semi-clandestine existence as a banned-yet-tolerated group, these did not adapt to the changing socio-political configuration and have resisted the transition to fully overt activity. Through an analysis of the FJP’s uneasy creation and with a grounding of extensive empirical research, this article argues that the party’s development was to a certain extent hampered by those pre-existing organizational structures. Organizational crystallization prevented the party from conforming to the emerging rules of the political field then under construction. Instead, the Gama’a’s undefined nature and opaque pattern of regulation were replicated within the FJP’s structure. Thus, the article seeks to uncover a hitherto hidden aspect of in the MB’s post-2011 failure, one which is rooted in organizational dynamics.     

Taiwan’s Pivot to the Indo-Pacific

This article analyzes the Indo-Pacific pivot currently being pursued by Taiwan. It moves from theory application to policy analysis. Theory is applied in the shape of classical and critical geopolitics, social constructivism theory, social identity theory, role theory, strategic narrative theory, and balance of threat theory. Disputed identity and perceptions run through such theory application. Policy analysis is applied to Taiwan’s reaching out to South-east Asia, Australia and India via its New Southbound Policy, to Taiwan seeking entry to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, to Taiwan reactivating the Austronesian Forum, and to Taiwan embracing the Free and Open Indo-Pacific framework being pushed by Japan and the US. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) emerges as the clear driver behind Taiwan’s Indo-Pacific pivot. The article concludes by judging the effectiveness of Taiwan’s pivot, against the shadow of increasing pressure from the PRC to curtail such regional space sought by Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific.     

Art History, ‘National Art’ and Iranian Intellectuals in the 1960s

The 1960s were undoubtedly the most culturally productive period in the contemporary history of Iran. During these years, artistic trends as well as art historical practices attempted to present the idea of national art, while the intellectual atmosphere was charged with the conflicting ideologies of the Cold War. The Pahlavi state's cultural policies, based on its pro-Western and at the same time nationalist visions, were in contrast with most intellectuals' attitudes towards art, which mainly followed leftist ideologies. Within such an ideologically charged space, the idea of combining Euro-American modernism and traditional views formed the dominant discourse of modern Iranian art. This article maps the interconnections among artists, art historians and cultural custodians in 1960s Iran, and explores the ways in which nationalist, nativist, modernist and communist-Marxist ideologies influenced the artistic trends as well as art historical narratives. After focusing on the ways art history was introduced through Orientalist viewpoints in Iran, the article will shed light on the role of visual artists within the intellectual community of the 1960s. The idea of ‘national art’, epitomised in the movements of Saqqa khanih and Talar-i Iran, will then be analysed. Finally, the article will evaluate these artistic activities within their ideological framework.     

Britain’s Place in the Contemporary World

This article offers a personal view of Britain’s place in the contemporary world, analysed in terms of five interlocking rings: the traditional three, i.e. relations with the United States, with Europe and the Commonwealth, to which are added the concepts of process and soft power.     

Reading the Trump Administration’s China Policy

The policy toward China under the Trump Administration is a rare combination of the toughest part of that of the Democratic Party, which is trade, and of the Republican Party, which is national security. The National Security Strategy by the Trump Administration defined China and Russia as competitors. It is the first time for the US Government to be harsh against both China and Russia (the Soviet Union included) since the late 1960s. Though trade is by far the most salient aspect of President Trump’s confrontational China policy, it is in fact a whole-of-the-government approach or pushback that the US government is taking with China, which means that not just the White House but various Departments and the Congress are tough with China, dealing with many issues from trade to human rights to national security. The President might actually be the softest link, almost exclusively focusing on trade. This might be a historic turnaround in US policy toward China.     

Asia’s Conservative Moment: Understanding the Rise of the Right

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship has identified a new era of post-democracy or democratic crisis in the West, characterised by the increasing resort to authoritarian measures and the erosion of mechanisms such as representative parties and unions that link citizens and social forces with the political process. Conservative political movements, right-wing governments and populism have also emerged in the democratic states of the Asia-Pacific. The existing literature, with its focus on the crisis of social democratic institutions and forms of representative politics, provides inadequate frameworks for explaining these trends in the region. This article suggests that a better way of understanding the emergence of these new forms of political regime in Asia is to locate the origins of democratic crises in processes of global capitalist transformation and political incorporation and disincorporation. The articles in this special issue show that previously dominant modes of incorporation are fracturing under the conditions of neo-liberal capitalist transformation. In the wake of this fracturing, political elites have struggled to created new forms of political incorporation. This has inadvertently resulted in the sharpening of the conditions that give rise to political crisis. The political responses to crises have predominantly been conservative and have led to attempts to restructure the state to limit dissent and electoral competition.     

The Beast in the Machine: Modernity,Aviation and the Legacies of Colonialism in Roger McDonald’s Slipstream

The expectation that a novel about a celebrity aviator will romanticise flight and glorify the pilot is a product of the mythologisation of aviation, which this essay understands is a response to the threat of technology and the alienating conditions of modernity. Roger McDonald’s novel Slipstream refuses to reproduce this mythology, expressing a literary aspiration to use the form of the modern novel to explore the entanglement of the subject under the conditions of postcolonial modernity. My argument will develop through three parts. The first section will explore the mythologisation of aviation as a symptom of modernity. The second will examine the ways in which the novel uses its modernist form to call into question the celebrity of the aviator and the spectacle of flight. This part of my argument is indebted to the critique by German philosopher Martin Heidegger of the technological mode of Being. Finally, I take up the postcolonial implications of the Heideggerian critique in a country in which many of modernism’s standard antidotes to the problems of its century are compromised by the legacies of colonialism.     

Coming of age in peace,prosperity, and connectivity: Cambodia’s young electorate and its impact on the ruling party’s political strategies

Cambodia’s youthful population is significantly responsible for a recent unexpected decline in the popularity of the Cambodian People’s Party, which has governed since the end of the Khmer Rouge regime. This increasingly young electorate has lived through an era of peace and openness with regular multi-party elections and impressive economic growth resulting in rapid structural change in the economy. Compared to their parents’ generation, this younger generation is better educated, highly mobile, aspires to salaried employment, and is well connected to new sources of information and technology. Because of this, their expectations, aspirations, opportunities, as well as challenges they face are remarkably different from those of older generations. However, Cambodia’s institutions of governance, dominated by personalized and patron–client networks that have been propped up by the ruling elite, has effectively marginalized this emerging youth population. This marginalization from political and economic resources has produced alienation and discontent, which represents a significant political problem for the ruling party’s political strategies.     

British Understandings of the Sanussiyya Sufi Order’s Jihad against Egypt, 1915–17

Abstract

This article considers the Sanussiyya Sufi order’s 1915–16 jihad on Egypt from a fresh perspective, analysing British understandings about the attack that soldiers and officials fashioned as the conflict progressed. By incorporating aspects of imperial and Islamic history and a focus on British perceptions, the article presents new directions in the study of the war in the Middle East that move beyond the concerns of older military histories. It analyses three key areas of British thinking in relation to this jihad. First, the belief that local fighters joined the campaign as a result of economic factors, chiefly the famine that swept the Western Desert from November 1915 as a result of an Anglo-Italian blockade, and that the order had little support from the local population owing to their policy of requisitioning goods. Second, the important set of perceptions that the Sanussiyya were pressured by the Ottomans to attack the British as part of their overall call for jihad against the Allied powers. Third, the divided nature of British views around the broader threat posed by the order to Egypt and the wider war effort. Finally, it examines the broader religious and ideological context of the Sanussiyya as an organised reformist Sufi order, engaged in a struggle for resistance to and survival against European imperialism—a struggle that collided with the changed strategic landscape of a region rent by conflict between the Ottoman and British empires from November 1914.     

Ecologies of relation: post-slavery,post-apartheid,and rethinking race across the Atlantic in Zakes Mda’s Cion

This article will argue that Zakes Mda’s 2007 novel Cion stages a dialog, one where two “Souths” – South Africa and the American South – speak to one another and give a critical voice to an under-acknowledged history of transatlantic discursive exchange on race and racial governance. Mda’s fictional South African critique, of an America still struggling with the cultural and political legacies of slavery, gestures towards a history of exchange between the two countries that in many ways is representative of a more global dialog on racial segregation during the first half of the twentieth century – of which both southern (US) segregation and apartheid are seminal examples. Moreover, this article explores various conceptualizations of race as well as the governance of racial relations as they have been articulated through ecological imaginaries, and especially between South Africa and the Southern United States over the course of the twentieth century. In this article, I argue that not only can apartheid (as well as pre-apartheid segregation) be rethought of as part of a global conversation on race and thus less as a South African anomaly, but also that the United States through its examples of various racialist technologies was highly influential across the colonial and apartheid worlds.     

Turkifying Poverty,or: the Phantom Pain of Izmir’s Lost Christian Working Class, 1924–26

This article shows that ‘Turkification’, a term widely used by historians of modern Turkey to refer to the forced transfer of property from Christian into Muslim hands, ought to be conceptualized not only in the sense of ‘enrichment’ but also, with regard to the working classes, as a process in which Muslim people inherited the poverty of their Christian predecessors. Taking ?zmir as a case in point, the article first describes the plight of the overwhelmingly Christian working class prior to 1922. It then studies reports and editorials that discussed the economic and social situation in ?zmir in the years 1923 to 1926, after the Turkish victory and forced migration of her Christian population. Over the course of these years, ?zmir experienced a serious economic crisis, and bread prices reached levels that led to widespread undernourishment and hunger among the city?s poor. Agricultural production was lagging behind pre-war levels, and positive effects of ‘Turkification? policies were failing to materialize. By analyzing the contemporary journalists? attempts at explaining the crisis, but also pointing out national and transnational factors that they were probably unaware of, the article makes an original contribution to the economic and social history of early republican Turkey.     

The First Time as Tragedy,the Second as Farce? Lebanon’s Nascent Petroleum Sector and the Risks of Corruption

This article analyses the risks of corruption in Lebanon’s nascent governance structures established in preparation for a thriving petroleum sector. Engaging with comparative theory on the ‘oil curse’, the article assesses the risks of corruption in the institutional and regulatory measures and policy tools that have thus far been developed down the sector’s value chain and including revenue management and expenditure. Lebanon’s political settlement, or the ways in which its political decision-making process evolved since the Ta’if Accord, consistently caused disappointing outcomes when it comes to sound institution-building and countering corruption; despite signs of awareness of the large stakes involved, this tendency is once again discernible in the country’s preparations for petroleum sector governance.