Rethinking the urban and rural divide in Latino labor,recreation, and activism in West Michigan, 1940s–1970s

During the 1940s–1970s, Latino labor experiences could not be confined to either urban and industrial or rural and agricultural settings. Unlike large metropolises, Grand Rapids, Michigan is a mid-sized, Midwest city wherein the urban center and industrial labor opportunities are located within thirty miles of agricultural areas. I argue that Latinos in West Michigan used both rural and urban areas for labor to meet their economic and social needs. Due to the gendered realities of labor from the 1940s to the 1970s, women played an instrumental role in planning and executing the movement of their families between spaces. In turn, this community’s activism was not limited to the boundaries of urban or rural space. This research shows how Latinos etched out an economic and social survival in places wherein they are not the majority or have a plethora of resources. As the Latino diaspora spreads into areas in the southern United States, we can look to how Latinos in Grand Rapids and the Midwest lived and worked to better understand the lived experiences of twenty-first century Latinos.     

司法判决中的正当程序原则

在法律、法规和规章对行政机关应当遵循的程序没有明确规定的情况下,法院能否根据正当程序原则去审查行政行为的合法性,是观察当前中国司法的实际职能和法律发展的一个窗口。通过统计《人民法院案例选》上行政判决所用的法律依据,分析田永案件、刘燕文案件、张成银案件等十余个有关行政程序的代表性案例,结合对法官所做的访谈,可以发现,在过去十多年中,正当程序原则在司法审查中获得了比较广泛的认可,开始成为中国法律的一部分。这一事实显示了中国法院在相对局促的空间里的能动主义立场,以及由个案判决所推动的一种法律发展的特殊路径。     

Counterpublic and counterprivate: Zoe Leonard,David Wojnarowicz,and the political aesthetics of intimacy

In this paper we explore the space that dyadic intimacy plays within the counterpublic world-building of political activism. We reflect on a particular encounter between the artists and ACT UP activists Zoe Leonard and David Wojnarowicz by offering two readings of what we call the “counterprivate” relation between the two. In the first part of our argument, we contend that the counterprivate couple form (found in our case study of Leonard and Wojnarowicz) occasions a space of provisional leave from the normative affective, aesthetic, and identity-based impulses which tend to emerge in social movement group formation. Despite established critiques of the private, dyadic intimacy of the couple within social movement theory and queer and feminist cultural studies, we highlight the value of counterprivate couples – not in place of the collective world-building that is made possible by political organizing and collective identity, but as a necessary aesthetic complement to collective, participatory politics. In the second part of our argument, we read the intimacy between Leonard and Wojnarowicz as a private moment of expressed doubt that has subsequently been institutionalized into a public discourse through the context of art. Here the counterprivate couple form in turn becomes a counterpublic mode of collective world-making once more. This transformation from counterprivate relation to public discourse occasions a practice of collective subject formation (in the institutional terrain of art) that affirms doubt, curiosity, and poetic beauty as part of the reproductive labor involved in political participation.     

Women’s international Democratic Federation,the ‘Third World’ and the Global Cold War from the late-1950s to the mid-1960s

ABSTRACT

This article examines the work of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) with women from Africa, Asia and Latin America. It analyzes their role in the WIDF’s decision-making process and activities during a period marked by decolonization and the intensification of women’s rights activism outside Europe. This analysis contributes to a better understanding of the extent to which the WIDF’s official position on support for the rights of women in the Global South was translated into the practical work of organization. The article is based on materials from Moscow archives that have hitherto not been explored in research on the WIDF. It shows that, in spite of the WIDF’s formal anti-colonial stance, women from the Global South were not always given a voice or able to insert their demands into WIDF policy.     

行政法结构失衡与行政诉讼功能变迁——一个结构功能主义的维度

结构功能主义者视角中，结构是社会系统的框架模式，功能则体现为社会关系的实际运行，结构的变迁必会导致功能的调整。合作理念与公共治理模式的出现打破了传统行政法结构的平衡，在消极立法、积极行政的情境下，司法理应发挥利益协调的社会整合功能来缓解这一结构的紧张关系，以维系结构的适应能力。     

Fighting the Hellhounds: Pro-democracy Activists and Party Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia

In the literature on post-Suharto Indonesia, an increasingly dominant stream has portrayed the political system as being hijacked by predatory elite interests associated with the fallen New Order regime. While such characterisations describe important elements of the post-1998 polity, they do not tell the full story. At the same time that patronage-driven career politicians have staked their claims in the newly democratic state, a large number of civil society activists also started to play an active role in formal politics. This article illustrates how human rights advocates, women activists and labour leaders have tried to promote their causes not from the margins of civil society, but from within the power centre of political institutions. To be sure, some activists-turned-politicians have failed in this effort, but others have initiated key pieces of legislation that led to ground-breaking reforms. In comparative terms, the article demonstrates that Indonesian activists have created an effective political niche for themselves, avoiding both the patterns of state co-optation so prevalent in South Korea and the anti-system attitudes of activist politicians in Malaysia.     

The “Imperial Minority”: An Interpretative Framework of the Russians in Kazakhstan in the 1990s

This article is the fifth and final in a Nationalities Papers series providing an overview of the development of Romani political group representation and administration, from the arrival of Roma to Europe up to 1971, the landmark year of modern transnational Romani politics. The article concentrates on the period between the Second World War and 1970 and the emergence of the following phenomena which distinguish this period from those covered in the previous articles: some limited Romani participation in non-Romani mainstream political or administrative structures, an international Romani evangelical movement, reconciliation between Romani political representation and the Catholic Church, national institutions created by various governments to aid the administration of policies on Roma and rapid growth of non-governmental organizations addressing Romani issues.     

Changing consciousness: autoethnographic mapping in a dialog group

This article introduces a pedagogical tool for raising critical consciousness and nurturing resistance to discrimination. ‘Autoethnographic mapping,’ integrating guided cognitive mapping and autoethnographies, has been implemented for a decade now within the framework of a college course occasioning dialogue between Palestinian Arab and Jewish students in Israel. Participants using the tool in an extended encounter between students from groups embroiled in political conflict have begun to theorize the microgeogrpahies and stories of their everyday existence, gaining nuanced, non-standard insights into how conflict informs lives and selves. Employing the technique in the contact zone of guided encounters, students tend to re-inscribe identities upon a socio-political context, discovering the fluidity of belonging and destabilizing discursive structures. The paper outlines the course, sketches the tool and its theoretical underpinnings and describes some of the results it’s achieved through a spectrum of illustrative instances.     

Disentangling legislative duration in coalitional presidential systems

ABSTRACT

The speed and actions that bills face in legislatures vary immensely, but we do not have a comprehensive framework to analyse legislative durations. Moreover, the absence of data detailing legislative activities and durations in distinct stages of legislative processes hinders analysis. This article presents a framework for analysing legislative delay in coalitional presidential systems and examines unique data on durations, attributes, and parliamentary activities in legislative processes at the level of individual proposals. The empirical analysis investigates executive proposals considered by the Brazilian Congress and seeks to disentangle when duration means legislative activism, when it is due to political conflict, and when it only represents inertia. Our analysis indicates substantial activities in both content-influencing legislative activism and politically motivated obstructionism. Hence, political conflict is as important a source as policy disagreement in accounting for legislative delay. By examining a hitherto untapped area with rich data, this study opens up new venues for rigorous analyses of legislative durations and gridlock.     

Urban Irregular Warfare and Violence Against Civilians: Evidence From a Colombian City

Defining terrorism and explaining how it occurs remains a contentious issue. This article attempts to generate new understandings on these topics by applying the work of Ehud Sprinzak's delegitimatization model to the Sea Shepherds. Evidence presented in the article suggests that the Sea Shepherd's present level of political violence passed through gradual phases. In this respect, it is possible to suggest that Sprinzak's model has applicability for maritime organizations, as well as terrestrial based groups. However, we also note that on the one hand, it may be possible to argue that in some respects the Sea Shepherds may constitute either a “blind spot” in the literature on terrorism and political violence, because its actions could in some circumstances be considered activism, militant direct action, piracy, vigilantism, terrorism, or eco-defense, which makes it very difficult to classify. On the other hand, that both the Sea Shepherds and the whalers may both engage in illegal activities, but are not prosecuted, may indicate that states and the international community may have neither the will nor the means to enforce laws against them. Therefore, they may be turning a blind eye to their actions. Throughout the article we maintain that the Sea Shepherds constitute an example of a gray area phenomenon. Despite the ambiguity surrounding their legal status and academic interpretations of their actions, the results of nearly three decades of the organization's activities, including its 2007 campaign to disrupt Japanese Antarctic Whaling, suggest that the Sea Shepherds may be best categorized as a vigilante group, because they claim they are seeking to enforce a legal status quo because of states' and the international community's inabilities or unwillingness to do so.