Development and Consequences of Referendum Campaigns in Switzerland, 1981-1999

Since the early 1990s, new forms of referendum campaigns have emerged in the Swiss political arena. In this paper, we examine how referendum campaigns have transformed in Switzerland, focusing on a number of features: their intensity, duration and inclusiveness (i.e., the variety of actors involved). These features are assumed to change in the long run in response to societal changes and in the short run as a function of variations in elite support. We further argue that public knowledge of ballot issues depends on the characteristics of campaigns. To formally test our hypotheses, we draw on advertisement campaigns in six major Swiss newspapers in the four weeks preceding each ballot from 1981 to 1999 and develop a structural equation model. We indeed find that the duration of referendum campaigns has increased over time, while their inclusiveness has decreased. Most importantly, we find that pub­lic knowledge is strongly related to the characteristics of campaigns.     

What is Black British Feminism?

Young looks at the place of black feminists in today's academy in Britain, and poses some questions for contemporary self-identified black and white feminists based in that country. There is a new confidence among some black, professional Britons but infiltration into the academy remains problematic for many. Black British feminists and writers are largely absent in so-called postcolonial literary canons developed in the Anglo-American institutions, and by and large black British feminists are only offered fragile support by white feminists. Although African-American feminism offers intellectual sustenance and networks, the situation in the United States is very different, particularly as, there, black feminism has had much more impact and recognition. Discussions of the intersections of race, class and gender are rare in Britain outside black feminism, and there has been much less attention than in the States to black women's writing. Perhaps some kind of 'provisional essentialism' is still needed, for it is difficult for black feminist academics ever to feel the question of race is optional. It can be argued that 'blackness' is used to describe women of very different origins, and can obscure differential histories, but 'blackness' is always a political concept, not a register of national belonging. Black women have transformed British culture, but white feminists have largely failed to understand their problems. Attention to the social history of black women in Britain, and particularly to the creative work of black women writers, filmmakers and other cultural workers, is the place at which a new analysis should begin.     

Auto-centered development and indigenous technics: Slaheddine el-Amami and Tunisian delinking

ABSTRACT

Until his early death in 1985, at age 51, the Tunisian agronomist Slaheddine el-Amami carried out a path-breaking research program at what was then the Centre de Recherche et de Génie Rural. He wrote technical studies ranging from the agricultural capacities of the unjustly-marked-as-barren Kerkennah Islands, to possibilities for drip irrigation, to attempts to quantify the energy use of Tunisian agriculture, to a wide-ranging investigation of indigenous hydraulic systems. There is little explicit mention in this work of a then-dominant strand of heterodox Arab and Third Worldist social science – the emphasis on delinking, or removal from Western commodity, technical and financial flows. Yet through an examination of his work in the context of the delinking paradigm, as put forth by scholars like Samir Amin, Fawzy Mansour and Mohamed Dowidar, I show the use and need for independent agronomic expertise to be deployed within analytical paradigms such as delinking, forged by heterodox political economists. Through delinking, countries could proceed on a path of auto-centered development. The possibility and time frame of delinking is necessarily a socio-technical question linked to indigenous capacities, technical and natural, and the social relations with which they are woven. It is also a question of creating and mobilizing a surplus in the agricultural sector. Through examining Amami’s life’s work, I show the use and need for interdisciplinary methods and research programs, which must braid the social and natural sciences – if not simply take threads from each to create a holistic knowledge – in order to arrive at appropriate developmental programs. Such knowledge and programs were appropriate in that they offered ways of working agriculture without capital-intense inputs – thus resolving rather than aggravating current account imbalances and labor surpluses. They also relied on a decentralization of planning, based on the skills and knowledges of the direct producers. In analyzing such knowledge, systematized in the work of Amami, I will also show how moving from underdevelopment to development requires a mélange of knowledges. Crucial and neglected are those knowledges which have been developed to inform sustainable ways of living on land-bases, in order to produce the rural surplus which is the sine qua non of a successful move beyond developmental malaise in the Global South. I will then link this to the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) Synthesis Report, showing this paradigm’s continuing relevance.     

高等学校毕业论文教学环节改革研究与实践

为了提高本科毕业论文的质量,可以在保证选题一致性的前提下,整合本科学年论文与毕业论文的写作时间,在学年论文阶段完成自主选题和资料收集的前期工作,毕业论文在此基础上进一步拓展和探讨.     

Quentin Skinner: From Historian of Ideas to Political Scientist

This article is an assessment of Quentin Skinner's contribution to the study of political change and to the contemporary debate in political philosophy. We argue that the significance of Skinner's work to a large extent has been neglected by political scientists, as they have tended to regard him solely as a historian of ideas rather than as a political scientist. However, Skinner's approach not only offers valuable methodological lessons but a historically grounded framework that accounts for the relationship between human agency and the structural language-context, that make actions meaningful. This allows for a conception of historical change that is neither narrowly structuralist nor exclusively focused on the individual agent. In his most recent historical works, Skinner has entered the main debate of contemporary political philosophy, i. e. the debate between liberals and communitarians. Here, his analysis of the classical republican tradition of political thought, attempts a revitalization of the debate beyond the stereotypes of liberalism and Aristotelianism. This work points towards the possibility of developing a radical reconception of modern liberal democracy.