Two Models of Monetary Redress: A Structural Analysis

Monetary redress is a developing area of human rights policy. The article examines how a redress program’s design affects the interests of program applicants. It distinguishes two program models, individual assessment and common experience, and explores their differing effects on applicants’ interests. Analyzing two Irish cases, redress for survivors of the industrial schools and the Magdalene laundries, the discussion is applicable to a wide range of redress programs including those in postconflict, transitional justice, and postcolonial contexts.     

Does nationalism promote democracy? Comparative analyses of Ukraine's ‘Maidan’ revolution and Poland's ‘Solidarity’ mass mobilisation

The increased number of ‘democratic revolutions’ around the globe has raised questions of how mass mobilisation contributes to democracy and of what role nationalism plays in this process. Mass mobilisation is viewed as the best option for breaking down communist regimes due to the rise of new political elites to positions of power within the state. On the other hand, the revolutionary character of mass mobilisation movements, together with the uncertainty of the link between democracy and nationalism, may lead such movements to impact negatively on democratisation. Ukraine's ‘Maidan’ revolution and Poland's ‘Solidarity’ movement allow for a comparison of two types of mass movements in terms of both causes and outcomes. This article claims that the mass protests in Ukraine, as opposed to those in Poland, did not lead to democratisation but rather to the opposite: the polarisation of both political elites and civil society. The role of nationalism, in this respect, was shaped and interpreted by political leaders.     

Modern poetry,popular song and their dangerous liaisons

Abstract

In this article, Tsuboi Hideto examines the mutually entwined pursuits of modern poetry and music in interwar Japan, focusing especially on the work of Nakahara Chūya, Kitahara Hakushū, and the People's Poetry group. Cutting across their respective distinctions within the poetry establishment, Tsuboi draws attention to these figures’ shared investment in symphonic, folk and popular music. In so doing, he identifies among them a prevailing concern for curating a poetic voice that might harmonize the conflictual registers of individual and collective expression and thereby attune the work of the poet to that of the ‘people’ more broadly. Meanwhile, the essay traces the currents of modernist and avant-garde thought in Japan and Europe that framed these poets’ engagements with music and sound. Tsuboi then illustrates the varying degrees to which these voices, forged within the cosmopolitan milieu of the Taisho period, bent toward the nationalizing project and later gave way to the chorus of wartime fascism and imperial expansion.     

Contesting Ideologies: Deconstructing Racism in African-American Fiction

Baillie's article is concerned with how African-American fiction seeks to define and shape an aesthetic in opposition to racial ideologies as diffused through science, education and popular culture. In an examination of Count Joseph de Gobineau's Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853-5), it traces the construction of racialized discourse in nineteenth-century America. Baillie examines Toni Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) in terms of Morrison's engagement with nineteenth-century racial theory and its implicit presence within ideologies of beauty and American popular culture of the 1930s. Through the figure of Shirley Temple, Morrison shows how the African-American community's internalization of cinematic images of beauty can lead to a psychosis that leaves identity fractured and the racial self all but erased. As well as reading The Bluest Eye as both a critique of scientific racism and as an historical novel in sustained debate with the cultural hegemony of the 1930s, Baillie examines its significance as a text in dialogue with the social and political milieu in which it was written. Here, The Bluest Eye becomes an intervention into the affirmative aesthetic of 1960s Black Power politics and its extreme proclamations of racial pride rooted firmly in black lower-class expression. She discusses the Black Power movement's appropriation of Frantz Fanon's theories and argues that Morrison's own articulation of a black identity eschews the nationalism of Black Power, and instead finds its focus in the political contestation of ideologies through the expression of African-American art forms. The Bluest Eye is an oppositional narrative that draws on western forms and yet privileges African-American vernacular as a counter-balance to language as a vehicle for ideologies of beauty and scientific racism.     

把握中韩关系发展的三个层面,开启互利共赢新时代

中韩关系自建交以来飞速发展,其动力来源于双边层面上两国经贸与人文交流的迅猛发展、半岛层面上双方共识的不断扩大以及地区层面上基于东北亚局势变化两国政府的选择。习近平主席访韩为中韩关系发展提出了新的要求并提供了新的契机。未来中韩关系要想进一步保持发展势头,需要在双边层面上增强沟通与合作,半岛层面上扩大交流与共识以及地区层面共同为东北亚乃至整个亚洲提供有效的公共产品,从而开启中韩互利共赢的新时代。     

How Single-Parent Children Speak About Poverty and Social Exclusion: Policy Implications From a Comparative,Qualitative, Cross-National Project

This article presents some of the key findings from a comparative, qualitative research study carried out in the United Kingdom, Greece, and Cyprus. The main goal of the study was to investigate single-parent children's experiences and understandings of poverty and social exclusion in their everyday lives and to make relevant policy recommendations. The article highlights children's voices and illustrates the utility of integrating them in efforts to develop sensitive policies which meet their needs as these stem from their own experiences of poverty and social exclusion while also making the case for the utility of comparative, qualitative, cross-national research.     

Dismissal of strikers and industrial disputes: the 1985–1987 strike and mass sackings at Silentnight

The 1985–1987 dispute at Silentnight bed factories in the north of England was an exceptionally long and bitter strike, lasting for 20 months from June 1985 until February 1987. A total of 346 workers were sacked for taking part in the strike, which gained a high profile with remarkable levels of support and solidarity action, largely due to its emblematic status as an extreme example of punitive treatment of workers taking industrial action in the period immediately following the defeat of the miners in 1984/1985. Workers took lawful strike action in 1985 over the non-implementation of agreed pay rises and compulsory redundancies counter to an existing agreement between the firm and the union, with the company responding to the dispute with mass dismissals. Pickets were maintained at the two factories in question for nearly two years, with the strikers gaining wide-ranging support from across the labour movement, but the company stood firm against the dismissed strikers who were ultimately defeated. Based on archival research and interviews with participants in the strike, the article analyses in detail how the dispute was sustained for so long, the legal context and the weakness of legal protections for strikers in the period, and the widespread political mobilisation and networks of support and solidarity that arose around the strike and in opposition to the policies of the Conservative government of the day.