Destruction,Narrative and the Excess of Uniqueness: Reading Cavarero on Violence and Narration

In this article, I critically engage Adriana Cavarero’s account of uniqueness via an analysis of her work on narrativity and violence. I suggest there is an ambivalence in Cavarero’s account of uniqueness: Cavarero argues both that uniqueness is susceptible to destruction, and that it cannot finally be annihilated. To make this clear I use Cavarero’s account to read a narrative offered by Miklós Nyiszli, of a woman who survived an Auschwitz gas chamber. I contrast this to Cavarero’s reading of Eurydice and Orpheus, arguing that the ambivalence in Cavarero’s account can be resolved by thinking an excess proper to uniqueness.     

Asakusa ‘Newtown’: the transformation of outcaste space in early modern Edo/modern Tokyo

This paper examines the historical transformation of urban outcaste areas into commoner neighbourhoods in early modern/modern Japan. Focusing on Tokyo's largest early modern outcaste community, an Asakusa area referred to as Shinchō (literally ‘Newtown’), the paper argues that a combination of factors, namely the historical processes of urbanization, status group consolidation, labour specialization, capital accumulation, and inter-status group network creation, created an elite stratum of neighbourhood residents who were reasonably well-integrated into the broader social and economic landscape of Edo by the late Tokugawa period. This movement towards desegregation in turn laid important foundations for the later administrative and conceptual incorporation of the Shinchō area into the broader metropolitan area. Wide-ranging entrepreneurial activities by members of this elite class in the early Meiji period further built on and propelled these changes although they also facilitated their eventual exodus from the community. Proto-capitalist development, however, while clearly capable of inducing an emancipatory effect for some key elites figures and while enabling the neighbourhood itself to become more closely identified with an emerging working class Asakusa, also worked to create a substratum of people subjected to a compounded form of discrimination that took place along both traditional status and newly emerging modern capitalistic lines.     

(Re)Embracing Islam in Neidi: the ‘Xinjiang Class’ and the dynamics of Uyghur ethno-national identity

This Xinjiang Class is a four-year, national-level boarding school program established by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the year 2000. The overarching aim of the program is clear: the CCP intends to train a core group of young Uyghurs who have internalized the ideals of the Party. This article, which is based on interviews and regular interaction with over 60 graduates of the Xinjiang Class, casts doubt on whether the boarding schools have been effective in ‘interpellating’ young Uyghurs as compliant members of the Chinese Nation (Zhonghua minzu). This article contends that Uyghur graduates of the Xinjiang Class have instead embraced a non-Chinese ethno-national identity—an identity bound by Central Asian and Islamic cultural norms—and have largely rejected the Zhonghua minzu identity.     

Interventionism by Design or Failure: The Coalition and Humanitarian Intervention

The Coalition took office in 2010 in what seemed to be a relatively benign foreign policy environment. Since then, the international environment has become far more treacherous and the government has considered war on humanitarian grounds on three occasions. In light of the silence of early Coalition documents on humanitarian intervention, together with the two parties’ different positions on the issue, this article assesses the extent to which the Coalition has adopted a distinctive approach to humanitarian intervention. In so doing, it evaluates the relative importance of Conservative and Liberal Democrat traditions in determining the direction of Coalition foreign policy. The article also considers whether there are other, more pertinent factors driving foreign policy, and offers an explanation for its relative isolation from coalition tensions. It concludes by reflecting on the likely future of humanitarian intervention after the May 2015 general election.     

The political economy of stalemate: organised crime,corruption and economic deformation in post-Dayton Bosnia

‘The biggest security threat to this country is not nationalism; it’s criminality, corruption and unemployment'2 More than seven years after the end of the Bosnian war and despite some $5 billion in international reconstruction assistance, Bosnia's economy remains stagnant and dysfunctional, while the country is rapidly gaining a reputation not as an emerging market economy but as a lawless and ungovernable state dominated by organised crime and corruption. This paper assesses Bosnia's post-Dayton political economy, arguing that the nexus between organised crime and corruption, on the one hand, and nationalist political forces, on the other, represents the most significant obstacle to the development of a market economy in Bosnia and poses a growing threat to the country's peace process. This situation is the product of Bosnia's particular post-war and post-socialist environment, which has created a powerful class of elites with an interest in perpetuating the status quo of a largely unreformed economy. In this context, international efforts to impose economic reforms from above, and to encourage local authorities to embrace a reformist marketisation and rule of law agenda, have met with little success. The paper concludes by suggesting that international peace building efforts need to pay greater attention to the ‘enforcement gap’ that has en abled crime and corruption to flourish in Bosnia.