Youth activism and dignity in post-war Mostar – envisioning a shared future through heritage

ABSTRACT

This paper looks at youth activism in Mostar through a specific action occurring in 2016, when an electric substation was overpainted in the neighbourhood of Rudnik. The project highlighted the rights of the miners to emphasize that other than ethnic identities can be brought forward through cultural heritage. The paper aims to broaden the spectrum of heritage values to encompass the concept of dignity. The monument served to induce a sense of dignity on two levels. Firstly, people were given the agency to influence the monument. Secondly, the monument emphasized workers’ identity, which is currently silenced in the public space.     

Teaching Experience: How to Make and Use PowerPoint-Based Interactive Simulations for Undergraduate IR Teaching

This article is about designing and implementing PowerPoint-based interactive simulations for use in International Relations (IR) introductory undergraduate classes based on core pedagogical literature, models of human skill acquisition, and previous research on simulations in IR teaching. We argue that simulations can be usefully employed at the early transition from “novice” to “advanced beginner” in a learning process, where the student begins to leave behind rational rules in favor of an own situational experience. However, currently available IR simulations for teaching purposes are often high-cost/high-tech and especially time-intensive: if they do not require custom-made software packages with difficult interfaces and expensive licensing fees, they are often targeted at course-long or at least day-long activities that demand extensive preparation of both teachers and students, with book-length manuals, intricate rules, integrated assessment tools, and specific secondary literature, and conventionally target more experienced students. This article explains how teachers can create an easily accessible and class-long (50 minutes) interactive experience for undergraduate IR students to encourage theoretical linkage with own in-class experience at a very low cost. We do this by employing PowerPoint, specifically in-built features such as hyperlinks, interactive pathways, or audio or video integration that can be used interactively rather than passively (as in a standard presentation).     

Longing for home: The Tosa Diary's funa uta and Heian popular song

Less discussed than its other noteworthy characteristics is the degree to which Tosa nikki marks the ways that song permeated Heian culture. A particularly valuable example is provided by the funa uta or ‘boat songs’ that are transcribed in the diary, which are the only extant examples of this genre. Moreover, they represent a rare instance of popular songs from the period that are sung by commoners rather than professional performers or aristocratic amateurs, making them truly distinctive within the corpus of Heian song-texts that have survived. This article seeks to flesh out our understanding of the diary's funa uta through a close reading of their formal features as they relate to other types of Heian song and their content as it relates to their historical context. In doing so, it will present new hypotheses about their characteristics as a distinct genre whose signature refrains expressing a desire to return home operated on the level of meaning as much as musicality in binding together their lyrics, and whose concern with the forms of alienation that extreme mobility engender is particularly suited to shipborne travel and the sorts of exchanges between unrelated parties that it entailed.     

Technology and democracy: validity in measurements of e-democracy

The use of information and communication technologies in democratic processes, often summarized by the term e-democracy, has seldom been analysed from a global perspective. Although the United Nations E-Participation Index provides one of the few examples of an international measurement of e-democracy, it has been thoroughly criticized; at the same time, however, a number of studies have broadened our understanding of the global determinants of e-democracy by using this very index. In this study, I approach this problem by considering (i) whether the UN E-Participation Index is a valid measurement of e-democracy and (ii) whether any alternative measurements of e-democracy present themselves. In answer to these questions, it would seem that the index, despite its flaws, is not necessarily as problematic as is assumed, although there are observations that violate essential theoretical assumptions and so reduce its validity. Furthermore, its use in combination with measurements of democracy agrees with the emphasis in the literature on e-democracy being embedded in democracy, and results in a measurement that better corresponds with theoretical ideas of e-democracy.     

“A Very Eden of the Innate Rights of Man”? A Marxist Look at the European Union Treaties and Case Law

In this paper I approach the European Union Treaties (Rome and Maastricht) and the European Court of Justice's jurisprudence from a Marxist standpoint. I argue that the treaties and case law of the European Union (EU) revolve around the rights of things (commodities), rather than of people. People primarily gain rights within the EU by demonstrating that they embody exchange value and are therefore personified commodities; people are not accorded rights merely for being human. In essence, the treaties and case law have enshrined Marx's notion of commodity fetishism, which Marx asserted to be a social mystification, into transparent law. Focusing on the grand scheme of the treaties' jurisdiction in this manner also illuminates the role of the court as it struggles to balance the demands of capital's self-valori-zation with fundamental human rights. I then consider the consequences of this balancing act for the EU integration process. I argue that this phenome'non as a whole also carries implications for EU civil society and for notions of legal equality among persons.     

Surveillance cameras and crime: a review of randomized and natural experiments

Research on the effectiveness of surveillance cameras in reducing crime suffers from potential threats to causal validity. This paper reviews seven studies that address some of these problems using the rigorous research designs of randomized and natural experiments. Included studies that reported changes in total crime found crime reductions ranging from 24 to 28% in public streets and urban subway stations, but no desirable effects in parking facilities or suburban subway stations. Moreover, surveillance cameras may help reduce unruly behaviour in football stadiums and theft in supermarkets/mass merchant stores. These findings indicate that video surveillance can reduce crime in several settings.