Resistance and Creativity in Social Interaction: For and Against Memory in Poland, Israel–Palestine, and the United States

In this paper, I present an analysis of Adam Michnik’s notion of “Amnesty without Amnesia”. His was a wise political judgment presented at a critical moment in the struggle to constitute a democratic polity in Poland. Mine is an appreciation of his political position, along with a sociological analysis that highlights the empirical difficulties of its realization in practical action. I will show how at critical moments of social change creative political action works to erase memories of the relevant past, which act as a repressive force, while “re-remembering” (to use Toni Morrison’s formulation). Three cases will be compared, Michnik’s, after the fall of the communist regime in east central Europe, and cases drawn from the Palestinian–Israeli conflict and the American presidential campaign. A paper prepared for presentation at Cerisy, France, Summer, 2008.     

国际礼法观:清代中国的朝贡与条约

朝贡与条约并不是平行无关也不是绝然对立,其背后是中华天下礼秩序与欧洲国际法秩序两种国际秩序之间在整个清代中国从接触碰撞到互动博弈,再到渗透兼容的漫长过程。清代中国最初在传统朝贡之外曾与俄国缔结的平等条约并未对中华天下礼秩序造成实质性影响;道咸年间因战败与列强加速缔结了各类不平等的条约、同光时期“有约国”逐步取代“朝贡国”,致使中国丧失“华夷”话语,中华天下礼秩序土崩瓦解。然而,中华天下礼秩序的道义精神却消融于欧洲国际法秩序的强力扩张中,在清末中国形成了义力并举的国际礼法观,进而催生了不平等条约概念,推动了国际法秩序在全球范围内的发展完善。     

东亚意识与东亚秩序

东亚意识的内涵包括共有的价值观念和共有的利益观念.东亚意识有两个主要的功能:"我们性"的认同和东亚意识的社会化.未来东亚社会秩序的构建根本上取决于东亚意识的社会化程度、中日关系的和谐发展和美国在东亚的影响力.东亚认同还处于萌芽状态,日本在历史问题上的"清算意识"还很缺乏,美国的经济和军事实力还将在东亚长期存在.因此,可以预见,东亚意识的社会化将会经历一个曲折复杂的过程,新的东亚社会秩序也不会在短期内实现.但是一个高度认同,以中日关系、东北亚和东南亚和谐发展为特征的新的东亚社会秩序将会为未来东亚地区的和平发展带来持久的动力,因此,东亚国家应该为实现这一目标共同努力.     

福建省明溪县新移民社会调查

本文在实地调查的基础上,分析了福建"旅欧第一县"明溪县内陆新侨乡的形成、发展过程.针对我国改革开放后不断涌现的新移民现象,注重从一个新兴侨乡的视角来剖析新移民产生的原因及对当地社会所产生的影响,并力图寻求伴随新移民现象产生的诸多问题解决的方式、方法.     

Political attitude estimation through Facebook like: a South Korean case study

Recently numerous studies are conducted to estimate the human personality from the online social activities. This paper develops a comprehensive model for political attitude estimation leveraging the Facebook Like information of the users. We designed a Facebook Crawler that efficiently collects data overcoming the difficulties in crawling Ajax enabled Facebook pages. We show that the category level selection can reduce the data analysis complexity utilizing the sparsity of the huge like-attitude matrix. In the Korean Facebook users’ context, only 28 criteria (3% of the total) can estimate the political polarity of the user with high accuracy (AUC of 0.82).     

Accountability mechanisms in community-driven reconstruction in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo

A lack of accountability is often considered a root cause of conflict. Many post-conflict reconstruction efforts therefore aim to enhance accountability between authorities and the population through community-driven reconstruction programmes. This article examines the accountability mechanisms in the Tushiriki community-driven reconstruction programme in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. The ethnographic research found little impact of formal programme accountability. Rather, accountability was shaped differently and had its own context-specific meaning. To make accountability more sustainable, stronger embeddedness in local institutions and more appropriate translations of abstract concepts into the local context are needed.     

Social history, (Neo-)revisionism and mapping the 1930s Spanish left*

Revisionist historians and their Neo-Revisionist/conservative fellow travellers identify the Spanish left as the main cause of the civil war (1936–1939) that culminated in the establishment of the Franco dictatorship. Such claims are possible because these historians distort both the history of the left and the nature of social protest and mass mobilisation during these years. In part, the reliance of Neo-Revisionist/conservative historians on the methods of traditional political history – combined with their stubborn aversion to social history – makes it impossible for them to understand the left. This article argues that only through social history is it possible to comprehend the complex and shifting nature of protest dynamics in the 1930s. Indeed, many of the conflicts that played out in the political arena during these years were conditioned by structural economic problems and social tensions that resulted in diverse forms of radical contestation among the grassroots of leftist movements. Social, and indeed cultural history, are, therefore, central to any analysis of the myriad forms of these protest energies that flowed from the bottom up to shape the orientation of the leftist organisations.     

Meeting development goals: evidence from the Civil Society Education Fund

In recent years, the Civil Society Education Fund has supported national education civil society coalitions (NECs) in low-income countries so that they put pressure on governments and donors to implement the Education for All agenda and the Millennium Development Goal on education. This article draws on literature on global governance as well as on an extensive evaluation of the CSEF to explore the actual contribution of this initiative to the activity of NECs. The article highlights the achievements and shortcomings of the CSEF and includes a set of practical recommendations on the role of global civil society in international development processes.     

Socio-economic determinants of the family history of pulmonary tuberculosis patients in Pakistan

This article aims to assess the role of important socio-economic factors in the family history of tuberculosis patients in Pakistan. Data were collected from 269 patients, and a logistic regression was used to determine the association between risk factors and the vicious circle of TB. Results of the logistic model show that significant risk factors associated with TB history in patients were education, household size, house structure, rooms in the home, room ventilation, monthly income, income food sufficiency, smoking, diabetes, and heart disease. The current TB control programme needs to formulate strategies to target specific risk factors and poverty reduction simultaneously to break the vicious circle of tuberculosis.