Professor John Roskell,FBA: The re-birth of the British Sub-Committee of the Commission and the History of Parliament, 1948–1960

SUMMARY

In this article J. Agirreazkuenaga examines the events in the Basque provinces of Spain during the attempted Carlist coup d'état of 1833. Essentially the coup was a failure, although its partial early success did give the Carlists a territorial basis substantial enough to sustain six years of civil war. The result of the coup was not the intended instant displacement of the legitimate, constitutional authorities throughout the region. The Carlists had made their preparations in advance, in anticipation of the death of the absolutist Ferdinand VII, and the threat of the introduction of a liberal constitutionalist regime under his daughter. They had recruited a local militia, the ‘Armed Countrymen’ which carried out the actual coup. But although these units were mainly volunteers, and paid for their service, they proved unreliable in action, being unwilling to engage in serious combat. In consequence during the first 100 days of the uprising, the early successes, based on the absence of serious resistance from the constitutional authorities, were reversed when they were confronted by troops loyal to the government. The article presents some conclusions about the state of development of traditional Basque society which were revealed by the failure of the original coup and the beginning of civil war.     

Call for papers: Organizations, social inequality, and social justice conference of the workgroup sociology of organizations, the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg, and the Junior Research Group ?Interdisciplinary Social Justice Research“ at Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin, April 23–24, 2004.

Mitteilungen und Berichte

Call for papers: Organizations, social inequality, and social justice conference of the workgroup sociology of organizations, the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), Nuremberg, and the Junior Research Group „Interdisciplinary Social Justice Research“ at Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin, April 23–24, 2004.     

Kenya's political ‘transition’ through the eyes of its ‘foot soldiers’ for democracy and human rights (1997–2012)

This is a study of young human rights activists who provide a unique window on Kenya's recent and turbulent political history (1997–2012). The period includes the end of authoritarian rule and election of a ‘reform’ government in 2002 that expanded some human rights but abused others. Based on archival materials and periodic, multiple interviews by the author with key youth activists, the findings make three contributions to the study of human rights and democracy. First, it identifies the often overlooked role of secondary level activists in a human rights/democracy social movement, the so-called ‘foot soldiers’. Second, it explores the failure of Kenya to consolidate its democracy and quell police violence, including the assassination of two human rights investigators, an event which sent a chill through the activist community. Third, by tracing the trajectory of some ‘foot soldiers’ during this period, the study confirms a theory of a cycle of social movement activism but suggests modifications.     

“But how to speak of such things?”: decolonial love,the coloniality of gender,and political struggle in Francisco Goldman's The Long Night of White Chickens (1992) and Jennifer Harbury's Bridge of Courage (1994) and Searching for Everardo (1997)

This article presents an analysis of works by Francisco Goldman and Jennifer Harbury, which deal with “cataclysmic moments” of recent Guatemalan history. It explores gender relations in these works with reference to three themes: storytelling, communication and affective relationships. Conceptually, I draw on the notions of decolonial love, the coloniality of gender, and the world gender order as categories of analysis. I take Chela Sandoval's methodology of the oppressed as a guideline for my analysis, and look at the ways in which different types of storytelling perpetuate or question the coloniality of gender, at the consequences of intercultural misunderstandings produced by different readings of the coloniality of gender and the world gender order, and at the significance of a critical and liberatory practice of gender roles for decolonial love. The practice of decolonial love is an alternative to what Tzvetan Todorov has called “the dreadful concatenation,” which is a result of cultural encounters during the conquest of the Americas and which conceptualizes as “love” a feeling that sidesteps equality, an exercise in destruction and possession. The coloniality of gender and decolonial love are explored through their interactions with masculinities and femininities across the different case studies.