Women and the Labour Party: Gender and the Writing of British Political History

This article takes stock of the state of women's political history in the twentieth century and suggests new lines of enquiry, drawing on the authors’ own work on the Labour Party. It identifies a number of key themes which have enriched histories of women and gender in the nineteenth and early twentieth century and considers how these might be developed. Firstly, it examines the significance of the local, and more particularly, the neighbourhood, in women's political lives. Secondly, it asserts the value of focussing on the membership, including the economic, social and cultural shifts that shaped their lives, the intersection of gender with factors such as age or ethnicity, and their own political identities. Finally, it stresses the importance of interrogating masculine cultures to understand how gendered dynamics played out. It concludes with a reminder that inserting women into established political narratives is insufficient: the point is to transform those narratives.     

Signaling Resolve: Leaders,Reputations, and the Importance of Early Interactions

How do leaders develop reputations for resolve across repeated interactions? While scholars find that leaders can acquire individual reputations for resolve, we know relatively little about how these leader-specific reputations form to begin with. This article examines how leaders develop reputations for resolve from the very beginning of their tenures and present three key hypotheses regarding these leader-specific reputations. First, statements are more influential to reputational assessments during initial interactions. Second, statements create expectations of future behavior, which interact with a leader’s subsequent actions to influence reputation development. Third, initial perceptions of resolve significantly condition later assessments. Through a process tracing survey experiment, I find evidence that resolute statements are more substantively influential during early interactions. I also find early perceptions of resolve do significantly influence later perceptions. Furthermore, statements create expectations of future behavior, and it is by meeting or defying these expectations that a leader’s reputation for resolve is improved or injured within the experiment. These results remain robust even when controlling for contextual factors, including state characteristics. The implications of these findings for both scholars and policy makers are discussed, and this study illustrates how individual leaders develop these reputations for resolve across interactions.     

Boko Haram,bandits and slave-raiders: identities and violence in a Central African borderland

ABSTRACT

Boko Haram is a religiously motivated insurgency with a complex history in Nigeria and origins in urban Maiduguri. Through most of its existence Boko Haram has shown an affinity for border regions: the frontier zones between Nigeria and Niger, the Mandara Mountains on the border with Cameroon, and the shorelines and islands of Lake Chad. This paper argues that this is an historically mediated process. Boko Haram as a borderland phenomenon echoes the hijra of Usman dan Fodio, but also structured forms of violence and wealth creation that have historically united elites and their followers in the region. Moreover, there are continuities between the actions and actors associated with earlier phases of border violence and processes involving Boko Haram today. This suggests that Boko Haram will not be “defeated,” but rather that the region will see a reversion to forms of border violence that were prevalent as recently as the early 2000s.     

论辩诉交易对反贪工作之借鉴

在贪污贿赂等职务犯罪案件的侦查起诉工作中引入辩诉交易制度,可以加大反贪力度,达到遏制和预防腐败的目的。首先是辩诉交易的概念与特征;其次,引入辩诉交易可以从体现司法公正性、完善司法豁免体系和提高司法效益;最后是引入辩诉交易后的司法上如何运作及应遵循的主要原则。     

The Poet and the Poor Law. Reflections Upon John Clare's ``The Parish'

This article argues that the work of the hedgerow poet John Clare is invaluable for legal social history in illuminating the reality of the operation of the poor law as it affected the lives of the poor. Clare's poem,The Parish, written between 1823–6 was not published during the author's lifetime. Written as he first achieved fame, it consists of 2,202 lines of satire denouncing the cant and hypocrisy he himself had witnessed and experienced in local village life. His Parish was his settlement parish where he and his parents were subject to the power of the vestry and local officials. This piece considers the text within the context of the legal history of the poor law. The value ofThe Parish as a primary source for that legal history is not merely in the simple narrative of biographical events allied to the poet's words, evocative as they are. It lies in the subtleties of Clare's own ambiguity about being poor and in the way those ambiguities assist us today both in understanding Clare's times and values and in hearing Clare mediating the universal experience of poverty through his art. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Entangled history and politics: Negotiating the past between Namibia and Germany

The relationship between Namibia and Germany is marked by intense exchanges about the meaning and the consequences of the colonial wars of the early twentieth century in the erstwhile German colony. This engages various state and civil society actors including groups from across the political spectrum in Germany, whereas in Namibia the debate concerns the descendants of the victims on the one hand and German-speaking Namibians on the other.

The article explores this discursive situation and brings out a range of relationships and interactions to be understood as expressions of an entangled history that eschews attempts of appropriation on one side. The problems emerge most poignantly in terms of the still ongoing exchanges around the denial of genocide in 1904–8 which, given that the framework of the debate is predicated to considerable measure on German history, inevitably points to the Holocaust. A further strand of acting out and negotiating historical responsibility concerns the mode of apology and redress which remains a contended question. Not least, this involves an incoherent set of state and non-state actors on both sides. Here, the call for dialogue made particularly by Namibians raises the sensitive issues of intercultural communication.     

对英国集体谈判制度形成过程的历史考察

英国是资本主义的先行者,也是最早成立工会、最早进行集体谈判的国家。随着工人运动的发展,英国的集体谈判也经历了萌芽、非法到合法的过程,并形成了独特的传统：自由放任。这一传统既是英国资本主义经济政治特征的体现,也是工人与资本家斗争的结果,对英国劳资关系的发展有着深远影响。     

Strength in diversity: multiple memories of the Soviet past in the Russian Communist Party (CPRF), 1993–2004

This paper investigates collective memory of the Soviet experiment in the narratives of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF), in the period of 1993–2004. My research finds that ideological differences within the CPRF led to the creation of multiple and contrasting depictions of the Soviet past in the discourse of its leaders. Challenging dominant assumptions, I argue that these differences did not conflict and undermine one another, but were structured to strengthen the public appeal of the CPRF. The paper adds empirical findings to the study of the CPRF and of collective memory at the (so far underdeveloped) level of public organizations. The paper also challenges the prevailing assumption that diverging historical narratives necessarily imply conflict and contestation.     

Ethnicity and labour in Mauritius: assessing a cinematic account

We assess the sole substantial film documenting the history of socio-economic relations in Mauritius, a history stamped by long experiences of slavery and bonded labour. We argue that it represents an important crystallisation of a triumphalist ethnic interpretation of Mauritian history. We show the filmic devices used to underline the ethnic narrative and the marginalisation of slave descendants’ voices. We demonstrate that the film ignores the early and strong development of values of equity across racial groups. It obscures the linked creation of a significant labour movement and its contribution to Mauritian society in securing the degree of equitable success which the film makers celebrate.     

Sexual frigidity: the social construction of masculine privilege and feminine pathology

This study examines how mid-twentieth century physicians used the term ‘sexual frigidity’ to disempower women. Conceptualizing medical texts as accounts, I focus on how medical authors saw, described and explained sexual frigidity from the 1930s to the 1960s in both scientific writings and in those aimed at the general public as sex guides, marriage manuals and advice columns. The study concludes, that behind the pretext of treating a woman’s frigidity, psychiatrists and gynecologists, using the language and theoretical structures of psychoanalysis, constructed a narrative in which ‘normal’, non-frigid women always see their man through a lens of unlimited patience, tenderness and altruism. Their attitude is always welcoming, joyous, and worshipful. By contrast, women defined as sexually frigid see their man through a lens of bitterness and resentment, an attitude which reaches its apotheosis during the man’s attempts to engage them in intercourse. Through the frigidity narrative, mid-twentieth century physicians managed to pass judgment, not only on women’s sexuality, but on their autonomy, their character, and the success or failure of their marriage: they are to blame when their husband leaves them for another woman; they are to blame when their husband is impotent; and they only have themselves to blame if they are unable to function in a sexually ‘healthy’ way. The discourse that seemed preoccupied with a woman’s genitals, with their feelings and contractions, was also interested in a woman’s heart, her intentions and activities, with particular emphasis on how she performed as her husband’s housekeeper and companion. There was scarcely an attitude, feeling, or interpersonal activity known to women from which mid-twentieth century physicians did not impute some connection to frigidity.