Writing history: flow and blockage in the circulation of knowledge

ABSTRACT

Historical writing in Tanzania has had highly serious goals from the early days of the history department at the University of Dar es Salaam. Historians have aimed at the decolonization of intellectual life, the construction of a national historical identity, and the achievement of a just society. This body of well-contextualized historical writing has circulated widely within the country, but does not reach readers outside east Africa as fully as it deserves. The article explores parallels with African genomic science as a way of getting at inequalities between northern and southern countries in access to resources for academic research and publication.     

Not All are Aboard: Decolonizing Exodus in Joon-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer

This article interprets Joon-ho Bong’s Snowpiercer (2013) as a political allegory. First, we compare Bong’s film to Danny Boyle’s Sunshine (2007) and Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), two contemporaneous films about ecological crises. We argue that Snowpiercer exposes the limits of technocratic environmentalisms that obscure the links between ecological degradation, capitalist development, and colonial domination. Second, we put Bong’s film into conversation with autonomist Marxist and postcolonial accounts of social domination and transformation. We argue that Snowpiercer is about whether or not contemporary political economy has rendered the emancipatory strategies of recent centuries obsolete. Framed this way, the film proposes that global order is still capitalist and colonialist, but that Left projects must surpass state socialism and anti-colonial nationalism. What we call Bong’s “decolonial exodus” is the demand for a real alternative to both the ideology that there is no alternative to the existing order and the pseudo-alternative of authoritarian populism.     

Economic Threats or Societal Turmoil? Understanding Preferences for Authoritarian Political Systems

Why do some individuals prefer to be governed in an authoritarian political system? One intuitive answer is that citizens prefer authoritarian rule when the economy and society are in turmoil. These are common explanations for democratic backsliding, and the emergence and success of authoritarian leaders in the twentieth century. Which of these explanations better explains preferences for authoritarian rule? Both types of threat coincide in small samples and high-profile cases, creating inferential problems. I address this by using three waves of World Values Survey data to look at individual-level preferences for different forms of authoritarian government. Using multiple macroeconomic and societal indicators, I find that economic threats, especially increasing income inequality, better explain preferences for authoritarian government. I conclude with implications for understanding the emergence of support for authoritarianism in fledgling democracies.     

Prison Conditions, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence

Previous research has attempted to identify a deterrent effectof capital punishment. We argue that the quality of life inprison is likely to have a greater impact on criminal behaviorthan the death penalty. Using state-level panel data coveringthe period 1950–90, we demonstrate that the death rateamong prisoners (the best available proxy for prison conditions)is negatively correlated with crime rates, consistent with deterrence.This finding is shown to be quite robust. In contrast, thereis little systematic evidence that the execution rate influencescrime rates in this time period.     

The Taiwan Strait: A Continuing Status Quo of Deadlock?

Relations across the Taiwan Strait have demonstrated over the past 50 years a cyclical nature, revolving between states of limited tension or conflict and generally peaceful and politically acceptable stalemate. Individual policy directions followed by all of the three main actors in cross-Strait relations--China, Taiwan and the United States--continue to be pursued with a high degree of ambivalence, as countervailing political imperatives mean that any policy contains within itself the seeds for its own reversal. Any equilibrium is consequently inherently unstable, yet also drives relations back to a status quo of deadlock from which a new cycle can again commence. Given the full range of objectives on all sides, there is little likelihood of the presently existing deadlocked status quo moving towards a stable resolution. The state of neither war nor peace will continue in the Taiwan Strait, but the margin for error in probable future cycles of tension and stability remains very small.