The East Timor Conflict and Western response

Abstract

East Timor is a former Portuguese colony that was invaded and occupied by its neighbor Indonesia in December 1975. Since then the native population has been fighting the occupation under the leadership of Fretilin, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor, and to this day the struggle continues.     

Can charity and rights-based movements be allies in the fight against HIV/AIDS? Bridging mobilisations in the United States and sub-Saharan Africa

The activist-fuelled responses to HIV/AIDS around the world have resulted in unprecedented changes to the way infectious disease is defined and treated and in the mobilisation of resources for treatment in developing countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the communities that have been critical sources of response are widely divergent. In the United States, where the epidemic was first identified, the strongest response was within the gay community, with its attendant rights-based orientation. In sub-Saharan Africa, faith-based communities have been critical actors, and have generally taken a charity-based approach to their work. As globalisation and the successes of the global AIDS movement draw these groups into closer contact, the question of whether these divergent approaches can work in alliance becomes ever more important. In this paper I use the concepts of collective identity and framing to examine the development of both approaches and to suggest that the activity of frame extension may be a helpful tool in bridging divergent approaches.     

Religious change in a minority context: transforming Islam in Sri Lanka

Scholarly work exists on how Muslim minority positioning affects identity and politics, but what is less known is its impact on religion. Sri Lanka’s 9% Muslim population, the country’s second largest minority, has undergone a series of recent changes to religious identity, thinking and practice, which have been shaped by its relationship to the dominant and warring ‘ethnic others’. As Sri Lanka plunged deeper into armed conflict in the 1990s, Muslims experienced significant shifts in religious thinking and practice, identifying strictly with a more ‘authentic’ Islam. After the war ended in 2009, Muslims became the target of majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist violence, resulting in a reinterpretation of Islam and a counter process of change. Using the Sri Lankan Muslim case study to engage with scholarly critiques of majority–minority binaries, this article analyses how religious change is brought about through the interjection of minority status with ethno-nationalisms and conflict. Its focus on Islam in Sri Lanka contributes to area studies and to Islamic studies, the latter through a rare analysis of Islamic reform in a Muslim minority context.     

Values,Communication Behavior,and Political Participation

This article examines how communication patterns mediate the influences of values on political participation. We find that the positive effects of postmaterial values on participation are mediated through reading public affairs content in newspapers. In contrast, materialist values negatively affect participation through watching television entertainment. Interpersonal discussion in which disagreement occurs mediates both the positive effect of reading public affairs and the negative effect of materialism on political participation. We also provide what may be a better explanation of the influence of communication patterns on political participation by going beyond acquisition of factual political knowledge. We show that individuals' efforts to think about news and search for additional information and perspectives modify what people "get from" media. Reflecting about news and integrating information from various sources promote better understanding of the political world and may provide a stronger cognitive base for political participation than factual political knowledge.     

Political Constitutionalism and the European Union

What kind of constitution is emerging in Europe? There are two approaches to answering this question. The first, a ‘foundational’ approach, rejects the premise: there can be no real constitution in the absence of a ‘demos’, a foundation which exists only nationally. The second, ‘freestanding’ approach, depicts it as paradigmatic of a broader phenomenon of cosmopolitan constitutionalism, based on individual rights guaranteed through a transnational rule of law. Rejecting both for their failure to account for European constitutionalism as a historical process of polity‐building, a third approach, ‘political constitutionalism’, is proposed, capturing the dynamic quality of constitutionalisation in the EU. From this perspective, what is emerging in Europe is a constitution that reflects a common good (predominantly conceived in economic terms), albeit one which is legally, political and socially contested. It is by capturing this complex picture of the political formation of Europe that the constitutional question will be most fruitfully pursued.     

大国文化身份与当代文论创新

大国文学需要自我身份反省并坚持文论走近经典进而可持续创新。在中国文论经历了一个世纪的西化浪潮之后,应该重新检讨中国文论的精神价值取向,从全盘西化的文论盲视中走出来,重新以“走近经典”的文化高度和精神厚度,审视大众图像时代中的中国文论身份,从西方文论的中国化到中国文论经验的世界化的转型中,关注文化创新与文学理论创新的同步性,进而守正创新——“走近经典”并“创新经典”。     

Putting the medium back into mediation

Abstract

The dominant theoretical paradigm in contemporary South African media studies is one which encourages scholars to focus on questions of representation: on the content of media texts, on how accurately they portray the world, and on how individuals or groups react to those portrayals. While acknowledging the value of this orthodox approach, we argue that attention to the non-representational or material dimensions of mediated experience raises important new issues for the discipline, doing greater justice to the intimate material role the media play in the world and also serving as a first step towards reconceptualising human subjectivity in a way that goes beyond the traditional subject–object epistemology of modern humanism. We use an example from film melodrama to illustrate how the affective and phenomenological dimensions of the film-viewing experience can promote a positive pre-discursive engagement with (human) being – with what Deleuze characterises as ‘a life’. In this case we link affective engagement to the possibility of a regenerative politics that may begin to challenge and supplement the increasingly suspect modern political tropes of agency and identity.     

试论“地震天谴论”与“日本暧昧论”——两种截然不同的对日本“国家定位”和“未来走向”的诉求

石原慎太郎的"地震天谴论"和大江健三郎"日本暧昧论"代表了"三一一"巨大地震后日本两种截然不同的对"国家定位"和"未来走向"的诉求。前者的民族主义话语本意和后者的理想主义追求形成鲜明对照。它们的相同点是均要面对沉重的历史负资产和日美同盟关系等尖锐的现实问题,两者构成了极其矛盾即"暧昧"的两极。今后日本在"国家定位"等问题上将在这两极之间摇摆。在这样的情况之下,中国因素将起到重要的作用。     

移民政治认同对国家关系的影响——以东南亚一些国家为例

本文拟用政治学理论,以冷战时期的新加坡、印尼和缅甸等国为例,从移民政治认同、移民政治认同的建构入手,探讨移民政治认同对国家关系的影响。笔者认为,移民的政治认同,如同移民的文化认同一样,如果处理得不好,不能顺着时代的发展而有所变迁,不仅会给移民的生存和发展带来困难,而且也会引起国家之间的紧张,以致国家关系的破裂。