Looking from South Africa to the World: A Story of Identity for our Times

The article is a consideration of the question of identity in South Africa, and also in a global context. Just as South Africa has looked to the world in order to understand its place, so too the world might look to South Africa to illuminate patterns less immediately visible elsewhere. Far from being unrepresentative in the apartheid period, South Africa was the ‘state of exception’ that incarnated and concentrated global realities; equally in the current era the reciprocal relations between the South African and the global evoke haunting concerns. The article begins with a consideration of the ‘classic’ generation of anti-apartheid activists, including figures such as Nelson Mandela and Bram Fischer, as they fashioned a new sense of South African identity. Yet it goes on to consider what happens when the classic period is over, and older definitions and oppositions are no longer available. Here the navigations of fiction, both in South Africa and elsewhere, become significant, and the article examines the work of writers from Gordimer, Coetzee and Ndebele, to Caryl Phillips and W. G. Sebald. It ends with a contemplation of the current period, nearly twenty years after the democratic transition in South Africa. In the era of the Marikana massacre and other pressing developments, both music and fiction open up some of the ambiguities and obligations. Drawing on Agamben, I suggest the intrinsic mutuality of the ‘home’ and the ‘foreign’ in establishing a more promising—and challenging—sense of belonging and identity both in South Africa and the world.     

Exploring the Terrorist Nature of Political Assassinations: A Reinterpretation of the Orsini Attentat

This paper reassesses the suggestion, advanced among others by David George, that the 1858 failed attentat by the Italian patriot Felice Orsini against Napoleon III can be considered as a paradigmatic instance of “terrorist assassination.” Drawing on a new interpretation of the acts of Orsini's trial, the paper argues that Orsini's motivations were to a large degree “idiosyncratic”; however, it also discusses evidence suggesting that the significant collateral damage caused by the attack was, in Orsini's mind, one of the aims of the action and cannot be portrayed as unintended.     

Timothy E. Cook: 1954–2006

Abstract

This article describes the organizational and operational aspects of diplomacy's interplay with the news media in Britain. It examines the media's role as a source of information for ministers, officials, and the wider public; the media's effect on official and unofficial thinking; the media's roles in interdepartmental coordination and during international negotiations; and the uses of the media by the government as channels to mold public attitudes at home and abroad. It concludes by considering the implications of advancements in media technology, and greater public interest in international affairs, for media diplomacy.     

Long Peace or Long War: A Conflict Resolution Perspective

Since the end of the 1980s, both the incidence and severity of violent conflicts and of domestic and international wars have declined globally. These declines are attributable to the convergence of many developments that help prevent, limit, and stop large-scale violence, and the author suggests that those developments persist. Consequently, he suggests that the recent U.S. engagement in wars and recent surges in terrorist attacks are limited spikes in violence that can be overcome. The author discusses how the current violent events may be in part a consequence of behaviors of the U.S. government and other governmental and nongovernmental organizations that are contrary to the major developments that contribute to global peace and cooperation. Governments and peoples acting in concert with those ongoing changes can help reduce the current mass violence.     

Von den WE-Bewerbern in den Kaufverträgen vereinbarte künftige Lifterrichtung im WE-Haus – Aktivlegitimation der Eigentümergemeinschaft über Aufteilung und Ersatz der vorfinanzierten Lifterrichtungskosten

Die von den WE-Bewerbern in den Kauf- und WE-Vertr?gen vereinbarte künftige Errichtung eines Lifts im WE-Haus ist eine Ma?nahme der gemeinschaftlichen Liegenschaftsverwaltung. Deshalb stehen Ansprüche auf finanzielle Beteiligung der einzelnen Wohnungseigentümer (hier: anteiliger Aufwandersatzanspruch eines Wohnungseigentümers nach § 1014 ABGB, der die Errichtungskosten als rechtsgesch?ftlich bestellter Unterbevollm?chtigter des WE-Verwalters vorfinanziert hat) nur der teilrechtsf?higen Eigentümergemeinschaft zu, die organschaftlich durch den WE-Verwalter vertreten wird. Der vorfinanzierende Wohnungseigentümer hingegen ist dazu nicht aktiv legitimiert.     

‘Hope is a mistake,if you can’t fix what’s broken you go insane’: a reading of gender, (s)heroism and redemption in Mad Max: Fury Road

After a hiatus of 30 years since the first three films, the fourth Mad Max film was released in 2015, called Fury Road. It features the familiar eponymous character of Max, but this time alongside a female character, Imperator Furiosa. The gender dynamics of the fourth film are vastly different from those of the first three films and elicited much praise as well as criticism. It provides a new perspective through which to view the early films and the dystopian post-apocalyptic future world presented in the films. Fury Road introduces a corrective to the earlier films in terms of their reductive depictions of the relations between men and women, while avoiding an equally reductive representation of gendered shame and blame. The message is clearly about collaboration and cooperation as essential for the redemption of a world in which gendered inequities and abuses of power remain deeply disconcerting obstacles. This article considers some of the most salient aspects related to the depiction of women in Fury Road and of the relationship between the two main characters, Max and Furiosa.     

Evangelical Protestantism and foreign policy in the United States after September 11

Much that has been written on evangelicals in the United States concerns their impact on domestic politics. But the election of George W. Bush has resulted in a new importance for the relationship between evangelicals and US foreign policy. This has become particularly clear following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Three issues deserve further study. One is evangelicals’ attitude to Islam. The second involves the relationship between evangelicals and Israel. The third concerns the stance of evangelicals towards war with Iraq. Through an examination of these three issues, Durham explores a number of important ­questions, ranging from the relationship of evangelicals’ theology and their politics to their partly supportive, partly critical attitude towards an administration itself led by an evangelical. Many evangelicals see the ‘war against terror’ as a war against Islam and unreservedly approve of Israeli policy, and many supported the launch of war in Iraq. Yet evangelicalism is not a monolith and, with regard to its disputes over how to respond to the ‘threat’ of Islam or what view to take of the Israel–Palestine conflict, Durham offers new insights into a powerful voting bloc and source of pressure within US politics.     

The post-war paths of occult national socialism: from Rockwell and Madole to Manson

Kaplan takes an in-depth look at the religious and cultic aspects of American national socialism in the post-war era. Beginning with the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell, in the late 1950s, he follows the development of occult beliefs and practices in the tiny and fractious American neo-Nazi movement. He emphasizes as well the brief turn to revolutionary violence in the 1970s through an examination of the National Socialist Liberation Front, and, finally, examines the attraction of Charles Manson and his followers to the occult fringes of the national socialist 'movement'. The article is built primarily on fieldwork, in-depth interviews with adherents of occult national socialist beliefs, and primary source materials from the 1960s to the present.     

George Orwell and ecological citizenship: moral agency and modern estrangement

Theories of ecological citizenship seek to conceptualize political agency while taking into account humanity’s embeddedness in nature. This essay intervenes with contributions from an author distant from discourses about environmental politics, but with insights to offer them. George Orwell’s writings respond to a problem continuously articulated in the history of ecological thought: the estrangement from the conditions of one’s existence. In doing so, he provides a literary case study of ecological moral reasoning, a practice whereby the virtues of ecological citizenship are cultivated. Such virtues are cultivated by confronting the conditions of one’s existence in embodied terms, incorporating that experiential knowledge, and contributing to practices of self-government using it. This essay presents Orwell’s case, explains its relevance to the contemporary discourse on ecological citizenship, and concludes by suggesting that it also provides resources for empirical social scientists seeking to operationalize ecological citizenship theory by way of a moral sociology of the environment.