太平天国1860年嘉兴战事述评

太平天国1860年嘉兴战事是东征苏南战役的延伸,历时两个多月,是太平军东征战役中,清朝方面难得的一次局部战术反攻。清军将领张玉良表现了良好的战术素养和战场指挥水平。李秀成在嘉兴彻底击溃张玉良部后,为日后经略浙江打下了良好基础。     

‘Gross inefficiency and criminal negligence’: the Services Reconnaissance Department in Timor in 1943–45 and the Darwin war crimes trials in 1946

The post-World War II Australian military war crimes trials of Japanese from 1945–51 have been criticised for using a rule of evidence considerably relaxed from the ordinary requirements of a criminal trial, one that did not require witnesses to give evidence in person. Circumstantial evidence suggests that, in relation to a trial held in Darwin in March 1946 for war crimes committed in Timor, the secretive Special Operations Australia, otherwise known as the Services Reconnaissance Department (SRD), took advantage of the rule. This article argues that the SRD did not allow their members to give evidence in person in an attempt to control and limit the dissemination of information about their operational and security failures in Timor from 1943–45. The SRD operation was adjudged by its own official historian as displaying ‘gross inefficiency and criminal negligence’. While the SRD’s failures were known to select personnel at the time, access restrictions to archival records in the post-war period, including the war crimes trials, meant that the extent of its failures and how it appeared to manage knowledge of them has not been widely known.     

The problem of peace and the meaning of ‘post-war’

The literature on war endings and peace-building pivots on a concept that it in fact continues to struggle with: peace. I argue that we should abandon the conceptualisation of peace as a condition. By implication, we must also abandon the notion of war-to-peace transition and the underlying teleology that projects peace as a deferred and ambiguous end state. Instead, I propose the term post-war transition. Importantly, the prefix post should not be understood as a temporal breakpoint: a definitive after. Rather, it signals an ambition to address and move beyond, analogous to the term post-colonialism. I subsequently draw on the post-colonial literature to further elaborate my conceptualisation of post-war transition with three propositions, respectively concerning: the discursive politics of retrospectivity; the assertion of sovereignty as the foundational referent of law and political order; and the concept of articulation to juxtapose contingent change and constrained agency. I then apply these ideas to the Sri Lankan case to illustrate what angles and insights my conceptualisation of post-war transition could offer.     

‘We Will Revive’: addiction,spiritual warfare,and recovery in Latin America’s cocaine production zone

Abstract

Once a key site in the War on Drugs against cocaine, the Upper Amazon in northeastern Peru has lately seen an increase in addiction to coca paste, a toxic by-product of the cocaine manufacturing process. Unregulated and coercive Pentecostal ministries, founded and administered by recovered pastors, constitute the main form of addiction treatment in the Upper Amazon today. Based on ethnographic research in nine ministries and using the example of the ministry ‘We Will Revive,’ this article suggests that Pentecostal ministries re-articulate addiction as demonic possession. Accordingly, ministries treat addiction through spiritual warfare against the Devil. In so doing, Pentecostal ministries change the locus of the War on Drugs from trade networks to sinful bodies.     

Instrumentalizing the recent past? The new Cold War narrative in Russian public space after 2014

There has been much debate about whether the US and Russia are locked in a new Cold War, but much less attention as to how the term is used in Russian political discourse. Through a close analysis of public statements, I analyze how the Cold War narrative has been used in the Russian public space since 2014, and assess how the “resuscitation” of the Cold War paradigm has been used by Moscow’s political elites, in order to discuss its impact on foreign policy. I document a distinct shift in Russian policymakers’ use of the term in 2016 and trace this shift to domestic political considerations.