Denaturalisation and conceptions of citizenship in the ‘war on terror’

The threat of American and British nationals returning home after fighting with ISIS sparked calls in 2014 for legislation to allow the revocation of terror suspects’ citizenship. Using content analysis, this paper compares how citizenship was renegotiated during the debates that followed in both countries. For proponents of the new powers, acts considered prejudicial to national security did not simply constitute a ‘bad’ or dissenting citizen, but were incompatible with the status of citizenship itself. I find that republican discourses of citizenship conceived as loyalty to the state were used not as an alternative to liberal discourses that espouse individual rights and a more limited political arena, but precisely as means of discursively limiting of that arena, by selectively excluding particular undesirable or less desirable groups – terror suspects, naturalised citizens – from political life as we know it.     

The roles of foreign aid and education in the war on terror

This paper presents a theoretical framework and some empirical results showing that the level of foreign aid received reduces the supply of terrorist attacks by recipient countries, as does the recipient country’s level of education. Due account is taken of endogeneity problems in producing these results. They suggest that Western democracies, which are the main targets of terrorist attacks, should invest more funds in foreign aid with a special emphasis on supporting education.     

Evaluating intelligence oversight committees: The UK Intelligence and Security Committee and the ‘war on terror’

After a brief introduction giving a short history of legislative oversight, a number of criteria by which committees can be evaluated are enumerated, including their mandate, membership, resources and access to information. The development of parliamentary oversight in the UK culminating in the creation of the Intelligence and Security Committee in 1994 is outlined. Its performance between 2001 and 2006 is described and assessed. It is concluded that, while it has made some appropriate criticisms of the agencies, it can be faulted in that both the style and substance of its reports are essentially managerialist and have paid inadequate attention to questions of human rights and the need for public education.     

Of “other” histories and identities: partition novels from the Indian subcontinent

Ever since the Partition, novelists on either side of the India–Pakistan border have used fictional space imaginatively to formulate discourses on a humanistically-centred, multiplistically-defined Other identity, which writes itself into existence through the prism of the novelists’ contextual present. In this article, I will focus on three partition narratives: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's children (1980), Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice candy man (1988) and Amitav Ghosh's The shadow lines (1988). By employing different modes of knowledge, the novelists draw out the micro-history embedded within the historical event, and resonate the voice of the Other, a creation of partisan politics. Bapsi Sidhwa appears as a social historian who perceives the event through the eyes of an eight-year-old Parsi girl Lenny; Amitav Ghosh, akin to a modern historian, focuses on rigid and illusory territorial divisions from Thamma's (grandmother's) perspective; while Salman Rushdie emerges as a postmodern historian who draws attention to the ambiguity and opacity of both historical and fictional knowledge through Saleem Sinai, born on the day India won her independence. History, as it is perceived by the Other – each belonging to a different generation – is a palimpsest: it is always in a state of becoming, of being lived, evaluated and rewritten. Fiction, as it interprets the historical knowledge, fills in the fissures and absences between the history of the past and that of the present. The article will eventually study how fiction and history inform each other, and how the rhetoric of fiction and history together constitute a dialectical discourse on identity – mapped by borders – which sees a convergence of private and collective memories.     

Politics of prisoner of war recovery: SOE and the Burma–Thailand Railway during world war II

This article considers why SOE were given a prominent role in POW recovery in the Far East during the last months of the war and immediately after VJ Day. This was a task normally allotted to the International Committee of the Red Cross. It examines both strategic and humanitarian motivations as possible explanations of this policy. It reviews the means used to execute this policy along the Burma–Thailand Railway, including close cooperation with the Thai resistance movement. The success of SOE's operations are assessed and the impact of their testimony in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials is also reviewed against the background of a growing appreciation of the role of secret service in providing evidence to international tribunals.     

Comment on Carl Abbott's “The Portland region: Where city and suburbs talk to each other—and often agree”

Abstract

The Portland, OR, area's urban growth boundary is an idea whose benefits to the region may depend on a willingness to expand the boundary occasionally. The parable contained in this comment suggests that the declared unwillingness to expand the urban growth boundary could have contributed to Portland's recent sudden increase in housing prices. It further suggests that an inflexible attitude toward the boundary could cause long‐run losses in employment in the Portland region, with few if any offsetting environmental benefits. Other regions should be aware of the potential drawbacks of installing such a boundary.     

Public housing and the American dream: Residents’ views on buying into “the projects”

Abstract

This article examines residents’ attitudes toward homeownership in five large inner‐city public housing projects composed of multifamily apartment buildings. Based on 267 interviews with public housing residents in Boston, it contrasts their broad support for homeownership as a concept with their wholly mixed reaction to the idea of owning a public housing apartment. Interest in homeownership in public housing is shown to be independent of residents’ current employment status and closely tied to residents’ social investment in specific housing developments and to their perceptions about the quality of that development's management, maintenance, and security.

The findings cast renewed doubt on policies that would make public housing sales a centerpiece of national policy, but they provide qualified support for more modest efforts to increase homeownership in public housing developments and in low‐income neighborhoods around them.     

European defence and the new détente: The collapse of the cold war system

France in World Politics. Edited by Robert Aldrich and John Connell. London: Routledge, 1989. Pp. 229. £30.00.

Franco‐British Defence Cooperation: A New Entente Cordiale? Edited by Yves Boyer, Pierre Lellouche and John Roper. London: Routledge for the Royal Institute of International Affairs and l'Institut Français des Relations Internationales, 1989. Pp. xii + 194. £30.00.

The New Détente: Rethinking East‐West Relations. Edited by Mary Kaldor, Gerard Holden and Richard Falk. London and Tokyo: Verso and the United Nations University, 1989. Pp. 420. £34.95 (hardback) and £11.95 (paperback).

Strangers and Friends: The Franco‐German Security Relationship. Edited by Robbin Laird. London: Pinter Publishers in association with John Spiers for the Central Research Program of the Institute for Defense Analyses. Pp. 150. £29.95.     

“The Mother of Reason and Revelation”: Benjamin on the Metaphysics of Language

This paper is a reconstruction of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language, especially as it expressed in 1916's “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”. I read Benjamin's theory as a contribution to what Charles Taylor has called the “expressivist” tradition that includes eighteenth century thinkers like J.G. Herder and J.G. Hamann. Hamann's work and his interpretation of the theological concept of condescension are of particular importance. Although Benjamin's views are often regarded as impenetrable or mystical, they are relevant to and, in part, motivated by concerns of more mainstream twentieth century philosophy of language, in particular Russell's paradox. His “metaphysics of language” understands reference or designation, central to analytic theories of meaning, as derived from a more fundamental, aesthetic meaning.     

Weaponization of the Land and Property Rights system in the Syrian civil war: facilitating restitution?

The Syrian civil war has seen the weaponization of its land and property rights system by the primary combatant groups in the country. The government is the most robust in its use of the tenure system to locate, target, destroy, confiscate, cleanse and gain revenue by way of the institutions and attributes comprising the system. Based on fieldwork with Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey, this article describes seven ways the Syrian government is currently using the land and property rights system in its military-on-civilian engagements. While the objective of such use is presumably to permanently prevail over opposition civilian constituencies, the article describes how this actually creates evidence usable for effective restitution of lands and properties subsequent to the war.     

Commentary on Keane: “Eleven theses on markets and civil society”

The article analyses the evolution of civil society in Eritrea. It has two sections. The first section critically analyses the notion of civil society. It argues that the Eurocentric or conventional perception of the notion of civil society fails to capture the reality in Africa. The second section, the case of Eritrea (the empirical part), deals with a specific type of civil society. The Eritrean civil society is an outcome of colonial-, liberation- and post-liberation-induced societal reality. The article traces the emergence of civil society in Eritrea in its diverse forms through the historical trajectories of pre-colonial, colonial, liberation and post-liberation eras. It maps out the development of civil society in Eritrea.