Syngman rhee: The pawn as rook the struggle to end the Korean war

Abstract

A quarter century ago, in 1951–53, while trying to end the Korean war, the Truman and Eisenhower administrations struggled to keep Syngman Rhee, the president of the Republic of Korea [ROK] , from undermining the negotiations, wrecking the armistice, endangering the United Nations forces, and extending the war. Often it was unclear whether or not he would abide by the armistice and whether or not he would leave the ROK troops under the UN Command, or imperil the UN forces by withdrawing his own. General Mark Clark, the American and United Nations commander in the last year of war, aptly summarized the problems, “I found myself engaged in a two-front diplomatic battle ... with the ... Communists and with ... Rhee [, and] the biggest trouble came from Rhee.” As Rhee's price for acceding to the armistice of July 27, 1953, he secured from the Eisenhower administration generous economic aid, continued military assistance, and a mutual defense treaty, which has endured to the present. Before the armistice, however, military and political leaders in both administrations seriously considered toppling Rhee and installing a more tractable government.     

Evidence of incomplete cortical modulation of autonomic responses in 11-to 16-year-old adolescents

This study examines response differentiation in the sympathetically innervated skin conductance response (SCR). Differentiation in such systems has been ascribed to cortical inhibitory control over subcortical autonomic centers. Developmental study of such differentiation thus provides information on cortical development and the maturation of cortical control over subcortical centers. Previous investigators have focused on the simple level of differentiation involved in discriminating response on one side the body from that on the other. In such studies several investigators reported more diffuse response among young children; some reported adultlike differentiation by approximately age 10. The present study examines a more complex instance of differentiation, the quantitative modulation of response from a given site in order to produce SCR amplitudes proportionate to the information value of the eliciting stimulus. Relatively large amplitude SCRs elicited by imperative PRESS-SIGNALS of varying information value were studied, together with smaller SCRs elicited by NONPRESS-SIGNALS also varying in information value, in two adolescent groups, aged 11–16 years, and in a young adult sample. In contrast to earlier work, the present study demonstrates a continuing difference between adolescents and adults. Adults showed consistent differentiation, with SCR amplitude reflecting changes in stimulus information values for both PRESS- and NONPRESS-SIGNALS. Adolescents displayed differentiation only for SCRs elicited by NONPRESS-SIGNALS: Response to PRESS-SIGNALS did not reflect stimulus information values, even though reaction time data demonstrated that PRESS-SIGNAL information was being registered cortically. The degree of cortical control present in these adolescents, enabling them to display differentiated SCRs to NONPRESS-SIGNALS, would likely be sufficient to allow simple left-right discrimination, perhaps accounting for the adultlike reactions previously reported for this age group. The inability of the adolescents to sustain SCR differentiation when large amplitude responses were elicited by the PRESS-SIGNALS might reflect the inability of still immature cortical controls to cope with sizable sympathetic output. A critical level of sympathetic arousal may exist for adolescents in this age range, above which cortical inhibitory controls may become ineffective.This study was supported in part by NIMH Research Grant 15633 to the first author.Received his Ph.D in psychology from the University of Buffalo. Major research interest is psychophysiological correlates of attention in both normal and pathological states.Received his M.D. from the University of California at San Francisco in 1955. Major research interest is cognitive developmental alterations in severely disturbed, retarded, and/ or brain-damaged children and adolescents.     

The politics of decarbonization and the catalytic impact of subnational climate experiments

The Paris Agreement of 2015 marks a formal shift in global climate change governance from an international legal regime that distributes state commitments to solve a collective action problem to a catalytic mechanism to promote and facilitate transformative pathways to decarbonization. It does so through a system of nationally determined contributions, monitoring and ratcheting up of commitments, and recognition that the practice of climate governance already involved an array of actors and institutions at multiple scales. In this article, we develop a framework that focuses on the politics of decarbonization to explore policy pathways and mechanisms that can disrupt carbon lock-in through these diverse, decentralized responses. It identifies political mechanisms—normalization, capacity building, and coalition building—that contribute to the scaling and entrenchment of discrete decarbonization initiatives within or across jurisdictions, markets, and practices. The role for subnational (municipal, state/provincial) climate governance experiments in this new context is especially profound. Drawing on such cases, we illustrate the framework, demonstrate its utility, and show how its political analysis can provide insight into the relationship between climate governance experiments and the formal global response as well as the broader challenge of decarbonization.     

Agrarian political economy and modern world capitalism: the contributions of food regime analysis

This paper provides a selective survey of food regimes and food regime analysis since the seminal article by Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael in 1989, and further traced through their subsequent (individual) work. It identifies eight key elements or dimensions of food regime analysis, namely the international state system; international divisions of labour and patterns of trade; the ‘rules’ and discursive (ideological) legitimations of different food regimes; relations between agriculture and industry, including technical and environmental change in farming; dominant forms of capital and their modalities of accumulation; social forces (other than capitals and states); the tensions and contradictions of specific food regimes; and transitions between food regimes. These are used to summarise three food regimes in the history of world capitalism to date: a first regime from 1870 to 1914, a second regime from 1945 to 1973, and a third corporate food regime from the 1980s proposed by McMichael within the period of neoliberal globalisation. Questions of theory, method and evidence are noted in the course of the exposition and pulled together in a final section which criticises the ‘peasant turn’ of the ‘corporate food regime’ and the analytical and empirical weaknesses associated with it.     

African peasantries: A theoretical framework∗

The paper seeks to contribute to a framework for the investigation of the specific historical conditions and contemporary manifestations of the agrarian question in sub‐Saharan Africa. The latter is distinguished, inter alia, by the timing and modes of incorporation of African social formations in the international economy, and by the forms of intervention of the colonial and post‐colonial states in the absence of features classically associated with the agrarian question elsewhere, such as large landed property, the political power of landlords, and the formation of an agrarian bourgeoisie. The forms and degrees of subsumption of peasant simple commodity production in the circuit of capital, a process in which the state plays a central role, are seen as moving towards a situation in which peasant producers are constituted as ‘wage‐labour equivalents’.