Reloading the Armalite? Victims and Targets of Violent Dissident Irish Republicanism, 2007–2015

The centenary of the 1916 Rising marks a time of peaceful commemoration, across the island of Ireland. However, several violent dissident republican groups wish to seize it as an opportunity to re-organise in an attempt to bolster and legitimise their sustained paramilitary campaign. This study seeks to provide a greater understanding of how this paramilitary activity has manifested from 2007 to mid-2015. We do this by assessing target selection, through analysis of the Violent Dissident Republican (VDR) events database. The data suggest that civilian targets are the most regularly attacked. However, when exclusively analysing targets of detonated explosives, the data show that police, security personnel, and their infrastructure are more consistently targeted. The target selected can and does have an effect on attack method. These findings can both assist in protecting the potential targets of VDR attacks and contribute to the development of a strong nationalised, and localised, counter VDR narrative.     

Federal Implications of Northern Territory Statehood

Just over a decade since the failed referendum of 1998, statehood for the Northern Territory (NT) is back on the political agenda. The achievement of statehood would be a first for Australian federalism, where no new state has been created or admitted since Federation. Following a discussion of the concept of statehood and how it might be achieved, it traces the political development of the NT. The article then examines the implications of NT statehood for the Australian federation and finds that statehood would facilitate constitutional change in the federation by lowering the threshold required for success in a national referendum. Statehood may also raise questions about the equal representation in the Senate of less populous states. However, statehood would have no effect upon financial arrangements with the Commonwealth, the standing of the Northern Territory at COAG meetings, or the legal standing of the other states.     

The Future of Northern Ireland: the Role of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement Institutions

Since the 2016 Brexit referendum a series of crises has gripped Northern Ireland's politics. This has had a destabilising effect across society, which has arguably been felt most acutely by political unionism. The Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (B/GFA) of 1998 created a series of institutions to deal with political conflict in Northern Ireland, manage cross-border cooperation and normalise relations between the UK and Ireland. However, many aspects of it have been sparingly and ineffectually deployed, most notably the second and third strands dealing with north/south and east/west relations respectively. In this article, the authors argue that regular use of the institutional arrangements created by the Agreement would help to deal with the challenges currently facing Northern Ireland and help address unionist anxieties over the Protocol. Use of the North-South Ministerial Council (NSMC), the British Irish Council (BIC) and the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference (BIIGC) should be prioritised. The unresolved issues arising from Brexit require a recommitment to the intergovernmental logic at the heart of the 1998 Agreement, despite the obstacles.     

Brexit and Strand Three of the 1998 Agreement: The Three Faces of East-West

Under Strand Three of the 1998 Belfast ‘Good Friday’ Agreement, institutions were set up to promote the ‘harmonious and mutually beneficial development’ of the ‘totality of relationships’ between the peoples and governments of Ireland and the UK, including its devolved administrations and Crown Dependencies. According to the text of the 1998 Agreement this ‘east-west’ dimension was to have two elements with corresponding institutions: an intergovernmental one reflected in the British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference (BIIC) and an interjurisdictional one reflected in the British-Irish Council (BIC). These Strand Three institutions were designed to provide fora for, respectively, intergovernmental cooperation on ‘non-devolved Northern Ireland matters’ in the case of the BIIC and information exchange and cooperation ‘on matters of mutual interest within the competence of the relevant Administrations’ in the case of the BIC. Nowhere in the 1998 Agreement text is the concept of ‘east-west’ used to refer to relations between Northern Ireland and Great Britain. Yet, in the wake of Brexit, and in the midst of controversy over the implications of the Protocol on Ireland / Northern Ireland, relations between Great Britain and Northern Ireland (GB–NI) have been newly framed as ‘east-west’. The creation of this new discursive face of ‘east-west’ relations marks an important, but little discussed, impact of Brexit on the political and constitutional landscape of the UK and Ireland. Against this backdrop, this article considers the impacts of Brexit, and the Protocol, on three faces of ‘east-west’ relations—the BIIC, the BIC and, newly, GB–NI—and discusses their implications for the future of Strand 3 institutions and the ‘totality of relationships’ they represent.     

南朝法制的创新及其影响兼论“南北朝诸律, 北优于南”说不能成立

南朝法制继承了晋律令的内容和体例,但从刘宋时起即开始形成一些新规定。梁、陈二代都制定了律令法典;梁律令在法典编纂体例方面有重要创新,特别是对《晋令》篇目的删修,开后世令典30篇(卷)体例之先河;梁、陈在重要法律制度上亦有许多创新。南朝法制对北周、隋、唐有深刻影响,是隋唐法制的主要渊源之一,在编纂体例和重要制度创新、文明程度及对后世的影响上均不在北朝之下,学界流行的“南北朝诸律,北优于南”说与历史事实不符,不能成立。     

Gender differences in the dispersal of children in northern Sweden and the northern USA in 1850

In the course of time families disperse and kin relationships change. In this study gender differences in spatial dispersion of adult children from their fathers were investigated in two areas of the world in 1850: the Skellefteå region in northern Sweden and the northern part of the USA, both largely rural populations. The results from the Skellefteå region where data on both genders were available were used to estimate gender differences among a native born population in the northern USA where women were often not followed in the sources after marriage. Most adult children resided in the same place as their fathers, but the distances separating relatives were greater in the USA. However, the proportion of adult sons living in the same locality as their fathers was the same in both. More daughters than sons were located elsewhere in Skellefteå and probably also in the USA. Although sisters in Skellefteå joined each other in places separate from their parents, men lived in patrilineal clusters to a greater extent than women due, in part, to patrilineal inheritance and virilocal marriages. Various reasons for these patterns are discussed and their implications for kin networks discussed.     

‘Done to death by father or relatives’: Irish families and infanticide cases, 1922–1950

In February 1929 the Bishop of Ossory commented on the fact that in Ireland illegitimate infants were often ‘done to death by father or relatives’ (Irish Catholic, 16 February 1929). There were many instances where family members of unmarried women who gave birth were the sole defendants or co-defendants in infanticide cases in post-independent Ireland. Although illegitimate infants were ‘done to death’ by their fathers in a number of cases that were tried at the Central Criminal Court in Dublin between 1922 and 1950, this article will focus on cases where infants were murdered or suspected of having been murdered by relatives of the birth mother both in the Twenty-Six Counties and in Northern Ireland (Irish Catholic, 16 February 1929). For the purposes of this article I have referred to the murder of illegitimate infants as ‘infanticide’ even though there was no separate charge of infanticide in the Irish Free State until 1949. The English infanticide acts of 1922 and 1938 also applied to Northern Ireland. This article discusses the motives of the relatives of single mothers who played a part in the deaths of illegitimate infants. Unmarried motherhood was severely frowned upon in Ireland and the relatives of single pregnant women assisted their female kin in destroying the evidence of extra-marital conception in order to protect the family's honour and moral reputation in the wider community. The records of infanticide trials provide a great deal of insight into the ways in which mainly working-class families dealt with the strain of pregnancy outside wedlock in Ireland between 1922 and 1950.     

‘High Resolution’ Indicators in Peacebuilding: The Utility of Political Memory

This article explores the use of political memory in examining, and providing indicators for, everyday processes of peacebuilding in divided societies, using Northern Ireland as a brief case study. Adopting a position critical of many formal peacebuilding indicators, the article argues for the utility of informal, ‘high resolution’ indicators that can be supplied by examining localized and everyday forms of post-conflict memory. In so doing, the article views the ‘dealing with the past’ and reconciliatory paradigm of social memory in identity driven conflicts as being inadequate for this purpose, and instead posits a more nuanced form of examining memory as a political arena. A case study of political memory in east Belfast is introduced to illustrate both the need for nuance in highlighting localized activity, and need to better reflect a complex and ambiguous peacebuilding environment. Suggestions for methodological approaches geared to capturing processes of everyday political memory, and how these processes can inform praxis, concludes the study.     

Instituting Peace: Third Party Principles and the Mitchell Effect

Abstract

The notion of legitimacy in international peacebuilding is an assumed one; there is an expectation that the formal, Weberian state institutions advanced therein will automatically be condoned by those in whose name they are delivered. But such bodies have, since at least colonial times, been suspect in many postconflict spaces and have routinely been ignored, resisted and bypassed when their local propriety does not reflect social preferences, and the empirical evidence does not suggest this pattern has stopped. The persistence of this null legitimacy derives from the exclusionary nature of liberal interventionism, which neither seeks local knowledge from which to design institutions nor considers their requirements important in relation to popular legitimacy. This article uses survey data drawn from Southern Sudan to discuss how legitimacy is seen from within and what it might look like.     

日本民主党时代的对俄关系及战略性展望

2009年8月,民主党取代了长期垄断日本政坛的自民党,为国内的政治改革送来一缕清新之风。鸠山政权试图摆脱美国对日本的政治束缚,外交政策上强调与东亚国家及地区的合作关系,并暂时缓和了因领土争端而陷入僵局的日俄紧张关系。但是,随着鸠山政权的倒台,以及此后的民主党政权逐渐回归"向美一边倒"的保守主义政治态势,致使日俄领土争端急速升级,双边关系的维系也仅停留于经济窗口的沟通。