Iran and Turkey: not quite enemies but less than friends

The rise and subsequent erosion of friendly relations between Iran and Turkey was a result of their regional ambitions. While Turkey had long seen its secular system as presenting an alternative to Iran’s Islamic ideology, the alignment of their regional interests facilitated a rapport between the two states in the first decade of the twenty-first century. However, the Arab Spring proved divisive for this relationship as each state sought to advocate its model of government and secure a leadership role in the Arab world. The war in Syria widened the divide, as Iran’s long-standing support for the Bashar al-Assad regime could not be reconciled with Turkey’s desire to see President Assad out of office. Using a close reading of Persian and Turkish sources, the authors will analyse the Iran–Turkey divide, focusing specifically on how the Iranians have portrayed it as a clash of civilisations, citing Turkey’s so-called ‘neo-Ottoman’ ambitions as the primary cause.     

The CPGB,the Connolly Association and Irish communism, 1945–1962

This article examines the relationship between the Communist Party of Great Britain and Irish communists in both Ireland and Britain in the post-war era. It argues that the British party’s strategic interest in Ireland gradually waned as it became apparent that Irish communism would remain divided by the border. The article also argues how, in Britain, competition between the nationalist Anti-Partition League and the communist dominated Connolly Association led the latter to abandon cold war sectarianism and to adopt a ‘broad strategy’ championing civil rights in Northern Ireland. The article draws out the key role played by Charles Desmond Greaves in this process, whilst noting the importance of factionalism and external factors, notably the Irish Republican Army’s Border Campaign.     

Grasping the Syrian War,a view from Albanians in the Balkans

Reactions to the brutal Syrian War from European governments and Europe’s Muslims have been diverse and subject to many shifts over the past few years. This paper focuses on how Albanian political and Islamic religious figures living in the Balkans have come to interpret the war. I focus on discourse, the ways in which these different agents communicate with their audience, and the wider contexts they evoke. Government sources and religiously themed lectures delivered by prominent imams on the social networking site YouTube are used to assess these trends. The most obvious aspect of these debates is the ways in which these agents use the war to press their own agendas, the government to affirm their commitment to the “West” and an ethnicized view of Islam, while Islamic religious leaders use it to reconnect their audiences to a more cosmopolitan vision of their past. War thus becomes a catalyst for a resurgent contestation between different groups vying for control over what it means to be “Albanian” and “Muslim” in the twenty-first century.     

Authority in rebel groups: identity,recognition and the struggle over legitimacy

This article asks how rebel leaders capture and lose legitimacy within their own movement. Analysing these complex and often uneasy relations between elites and grassroots of insurgency is important for understanding the success or failure of peace processes. This is because internal contestation over authority between rival rebel leaders can drive a movement’s external strategy. Based on ethnographic research on the Karen and Kachin rebellions in Myanmar and insights from Political Sociology, the article suggests that leadership authority is linked to social identification and the claim to recognition among insurgent grassroots. If rebel leaders manage to satisfy their grassroots’ claim to recognition, their insurgent orders are stable. Failing this, their authority erodes and is likely to be challenged. These findings contribute to understanding insurgency and peace negotiations in Myanmar and civil wars more generally by showing how struggles over legitimacy within rebel groups drive wider dynamics of war and peace.     

One anthropologist’s answer to Glenn D. Paige’s question challenging peace studies

ABSTRACT

Glenn D. Paige pioneered in the revolutionary development of a far-reaching transformation of science, academia, and society from a killing to a nonkilling worldview, values, and attitudes. For six decades, anthropology has been accumulating scientific empirical evidence and rational arguments demonstrating that nonkilling societies exist, thereby rebutting the simplistic biological determinist myth that human nature inevitably and universally generates violence and war. Nevertheless, Hobbessians persist in their echo chamber advertising and celebrating the innate depravity of the human species as apologists for war and peace resisters. This systemic bias operates in synergy with the American industrial-military-media-academic complex and culture, the latter exemplified by a revealing comparison of war and football. With great intellectual courage and creative thinking, Paige critically challenges the anachronistic Hobbesian paradigm and offers a far more compelling and positive alternative for sustainable peace in the future.     

Wars of Succession

I analyze a model of bargaining, war, and endogenous leadership turnover in which (1) leader attributes affect war outcomes and (2) war can insulate settlements from renegotiation. Shifts in bargaining power caused by leadership turnover are endogenous and discontinuous, but sufficiently decisive war outcomes can solve the associated commitment problem. In contrast to other models where the shadow cast by a hawkish successor encourages moderation toward a dovish incumbent, the foreign state attacks instead—despite a dovish incumbent’s known preference for peace—using war to lock in a settlement that would otherwise be lost to future leadership turnover. I discuss the theory’s implications for widening the empirical scope of the commitment problem explanation for war to limited wars over relatively lower stakes and for integrating the politics of leadership turnover with the study of strategic rivalries.     

Regulation of armed conflict: critical comparativism

Abstract

This paper calls for comparative analysis of international humanitarian law and Islamic laws regulating armed conflict by focusing on the underlying assumptions and interests informing both systems (rather than on rule-based comparison). It argues that examination of the biases inherent to each legal system can potentially inform scholars to understand better the paradigms shaping each of them. In doing so, the paper builds on contextual and critical interpretations of both fields of law to assert the need for ‘critical comparativism’ rather than functionalist comparativism. Unlike functionalist comparativism, which treats international law as the ‘objective’ benchmark against which other legal traditions are measured, ‘critical comparativism’ treats the two legal systems examined as alternative manifestations of power structures which, when contrasted against each other, help shed more light on the inherent bias in each legal system.     

海洋命运共同体思想的内涵和实践路径

海洋命运共同体思想是人类命运共同体思想在海洋领域的细化,反映了国际海洋法的发展趋势和价值目标。它创造性的继承并发展了和而不同思想以及共同体思想,为全球海洋治理提供了新的价值指引。海洋命运共同体是共同体成员基于海洋共识和共同的海洋利益产生认同感和归属感,通过在海洋领域的共同合作形成的联合体,包括海洋政治、安全、经济、文化和生态命运共同体。中国在区域可以通过实施多边海洋行动,构建区域海洋命运共同体,实现区域合作关系的升级。海洋命运共同体是超越民族和国家的海洋观,中国在全球可以通过构建海上丝路命运共同体、提升国际制度性话语权和形成国际海洋法律新制度来践行海洋命运共同体思想。     

高校学生党员先进性教育途径的探索

作者针对学生党员的思想状况进行了系统分析,针对学生党员思想问题的多样化与复杂性,试图探索高等院校加强和改进学生党员先进性教育的途径,使得高校学生党员先进性得到充分展示,进而使之成为高等院校思想政治工作得一面旗帜。同时,促进思想政治教育工作切实有效的开展。     

九一一事件以来美国反恐过程中的主导性隐喻及其后果

九一一事件后,国际反恐行动似乎已陷入"越反越恐"的怪圈,这与人们对恐怖主义的"越描越恐"密切相关,而隐喻的存在及广泛使用是导致"越描越恐"的重要原因。在恐怖主义的治理中,作为必不可少的思维方式,涉恐隐喻具有启发性,但也因其随意性、凸显与隐藏的特征,限制了人们关于恐怖主义的思想和行为。在美国涉恐的政治、媒体和学术话语中,"恐怖主义是战争""恐怖主义是野蛮的东西""恐怖主义是疾病"和"恐怖主义是不受欢迎的植物"是占主导地位的隐喻。这些隐喻深植于历史、人们的恐惧、社会系统和舆论中,很大程度上代表了人们对恐怖主义的正统看法。进行隐喻分析,使用多种隐喻,一定程度上能缓解隐喻陷阱,但仍不能消除它。因此,在恐怖主义治理的过程中,坚持"犯罪"隐喻为主导、灵活使用多种措施、重建受损的政治秩序、减少对无辜平民的伤害和对穆斯林的歧视尤为重要。