Unspeakable Pasts as Limit Events: The Holocaust, Genocide, and the Stolen Generations

This article examines the role of testimony in the production of the memory of the Holocaust and the practice of forcible removals in Australia as "limit events". A "limit event" is an event or practice of such magnitude and profound violence that its effects rupture the otherwise normative foundations of legitimacy and so-called civilising tendencies that underlie the constitution of political and moral community. The references are the stories of removal collated in Bringing Them Home , and eyewitness testimonies from the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. By situating the stolen generations and the Eichmann trial as limit events, I argue that the effects of witnessing and story-telling exposed a cultural semantics of what was speakable and unspeakable in the narratives of judging historical injustice and remembering past traumas.     

Violence,the Subject,and the Beyond: Achille Mbembe and Violence in International Relations Theory

A double-barrelled question underpins this special edition: can International Relations (IR) be decolonised? If so, how? I argue that IR's insistence on more-or-less concretised subjects, which engage in dialectical relations of struggle, renders the discipline (and the practice it engenders) constitutionally blind to the origins of colonial violence. Traditional theory necessarily elides the violence which forges legible concrete actors and which culminates in colonialism and slavery. I offer a critique of this theoretical structure through Achille Mbembe's reading of Bataille, Fanon, Hegel, and Kojève, and I close by touching on the decolonising potential of Édouard Glissant's work for academic IR. I conclude that IR can indeed be decolonised, but it must become something quite unrecognisable if it is to do so.     

Democratization,Elite Transition,and Violence in Cambodia, 1991-1999

This article is concerned with elite management of democratic transition in Cambodia between 1991 and 1999. Itsurveys the manner in which various elites, dominated by Hun Sen in particular, have viewed the legitimacy of opposition in a political culture characterized by elite authoritarianism, narrow vested interests, and deeply entrenched systems of patronage and clientelism. This view is then located in the wider context of external pressures and mechanisms for the pluralization of their political society. While the paper reveals cultural insights drawn from primary material, it is also framed by a debate on when, why, and how elites do and do not reform away from self-interest and self-aggrandizement and move to fair and impartial representation of wider interest groups.     

Hamas in Politics: Democracy,Religion, Violence

Ahmed Midhat Efendi, a nineteenth century Turkish author, maintained that it was necessary to establish customs duties and other barriers against foreign sellers in order to convince them to produce locally in the Ottoman Empire. This would be a way to attract foreign direct investment (FDI) to a country in need of capital and technology. However, today, liberals around the world as well as in Turkey see a free trade environment as a prerequisite for FDI. This study tries to find out whether a relationship existed between free trade and FDI inflows in Turkey during a period when the Turkish foreign trade and financial markets were almost completely liberalized.     

The Aftermath of the 19th Conference of the CPSU: A Soviet Economy Roundtable

The aftermath of the 19th Conference of the Communist Party, held in Moscow from June 28 to July 1, 1988, is analyzed by eight Western observers. The discussion covers impacts of the Conference on Soviet society and abroad, General Secretary Gorbachev's speech at the Central Committee Plenum on July 29, 1988, and reviews results of his policies since 1985. It proceeds to look at the current transitional period of Soviet reforms, including the formation of new enterprise forms and horizontal links in the economy. Finally, the discussants view prospects for political and economic development in the future. journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 052, 124, 113.     

Under the gaze of the 'big nations': Refugees, rumours and the international community in Tanzania

In most academic literature refugees are portrayed either asthose who lack what national citizens have or as a threat tothe national order of things. This article explores the effectsof being excluded in such a way, and argues that Burundian refugeesin a camp in northwest Tanzania find themselves in an ambiguousposition, being excluded from the national order of things —secluded in the Tanzanian bush — while simultaneouslybeing subject to state-of-the-art humanitarian interventions— apparently bringing them closer to the internationalcommunity. The article explores the ways in which refugees in the camprelate to the international community. Ambiguous perceptionsof the international community are expressed in rumours andconspiracy theories. These conspiracy theories create a kindof ontological surety by presenting the Hutu refugees as thevictims of a grand Tutsi plot supported by ‘the big nations’.Finally, the article argues that refugees — being excludedfrom the nation-state and being subject to the government ofinternational NGOs — seek recognition from the internationalcommunity rather than any nation-state. This does not, however,destabilize the hegemony of the nation-state, as refugees perceivetheir own position as temporary and the international communityas the guarantor of a more just international order in the longrun.