红色资源的抢救挖掘与利用——以《口述历史·延安的红色岁月》项目为例

《口述历史·延安的红色岁月》项目是干部教育培训资源挖掘开发的创新,是资源优势转化为教学优势的重组成部分,它以反映党中央在延安十三年史为基础,具有访问范围的广泛性、访问内容的针对性、访问流程的科学性、影像技术的独创性、媒资管理的先进性等特点。本文主论述了该项目的背景和意义、项目设计的基本思路、项目在运行过程中需处理的几个关系、项目实施的规范化和科学化、项目成果的转化和运用等五项内容。     

转型社会中防范公共权力异化问题思考

在社会转型的大背景下,一些政府部门存在的公共权力异化现象,会在一定程度上影响现阶段民主政治建设和社会主义和谐社会的全面构建。公共权力异化的一大表现就是公共权力的滥用和私用,进而滋生腐败,损害公民的合法权益。针对这些问题,应从法制层面、制度层面、伦理层面以及文化层面,探讨公共权力的合理规制和有效运用,进而完善权力运行机制,促使政府部门"权为民所用,利为民所谋"。     

The Fate of the State Revisited

The State, which during the three and a half centuries since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) has been the most important and the most characteristic of all modern institutions, appears to be declining or dying. In many places, existing states are either combining into larger communities or falling apart; in many places, organizations that are not states are challenging them by means fair or foul. On the international level, we seem to be moving away form a system of separate, sovereign, legally equal, states towards less distinct, more hierarchical, and in many ways more complex political structures. Inside their borders, it seems that many states will soon no longer be able to protect the political, military, economic, social and cultural life of their citizens. These developments are likely to lead to upheavals as profound as those that took humanity out of the middle ages and into the modern world. Whether the direction of change is desirable, as some hope, or undesirable, as others fear, remains to be seen.     

Are there Emerging West African Criminal Networks? The Case of Ghana

This paper situates discussions about emerging African Criminal Networks (ACN) within Ghana specifically, and West Africa generally, and seeks to present the initial results of an empirically based study on the activities of transnational organised criminal (TOCs) groups in Ghana. The paper argues that the nature of state and statehood in Africa and its inability to establish effective regulatory mechanisms contributes to the rise of these particular types of criminal groups. It begins by conceptualising the place of Ghanaian and West African criminal groups within the framework of international crime. Furthermore, it undertakes an in-depth analysis of three types of crimes; namely computer and internet crime, drug trafficking and (artisanal) small arms manufacture and smuggling in Ghana. By applying a set of standard variables and criteria, the paper evaluates the growth of TNCs in these three issue-areas and how such activities potentially undermine public institutions like the Ghana Police Service (GPS), customs, excise and preventive services (CEPS), judiciary, banking and political parties and political institutions in Ghana. Finally, it seeks to offer an explanatory framework for the growth and acceptance by local communities of the activities of organised crime in Ghana by situating this within a cultural ethos and the social welfare roles played by those involved in such crimes.     

Governing disorder: the Australian Federal Police and Australia's new regional frontier

Abstract

The Australian Federal Police has in recent years become an important actor in both the implementation and design of Australian-led state building interventions in Australia's near region of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific. The article focuses on the recent expansion of the Australian Federal Police as a way of understanding the emergence of a new partly (and strategically) deterritorialized, ‘regional’ frontier of the Australian state. Within this new frontier, whose fluctuating outlines the Australian Federal Police not only polices but also to a considerable extent shapes and reshapes, as one of the primary expert agencies on identifying and managing transnational security risks, Australian security is portrayed as contingent on the quality of the domestic governance of neighbouring states, thereby creating linkages between the hitherto domestic governing apparatus of the Australian state and those of other countries. This allows for the rearticulation of the problems affecting intervened states and societies – indeed, their very social and political structures – in the depoliticized terms of the breakdown of ‘law and order’ and the absence of ‘good governance’, which not only rationalizes emergency interventions to stabilize volatile situations, but also delegitimizes and potentially criminalizes oppositional politics. The Australian Federal Police, however, does more than merely provide justification for intrusive state transformation projects. Its transnational policing activities open up a field of governance within the apparatus of intervened states that exists in separation from international and domestic law. The constitution of such interventions ‘within’ the state leaves intact the legal distinction between the domestic and international spheres and therefore circumvents the difficult issue of sovereignty. As a result, police and other executive-administrative actors obtain discretionary ordering powers, without dislodging the sovereign governments of intervened countries.     

Nostalgias

Abstract

This paper launches a thought experiment the aim of which is to recover and defend an idea of nostalgia as something other than merely maudlin yearning after the days of yore. Much critical comment on nostalgia, in everyday parlance and in academic debate, begins from the standpoint that the time longed for was never really as it is now, nostalgically, imagined. The force and validity of this jibe is admitted in this paper, but it argues that the concept of nostalgia can be reshaped and turned in quite different less reactive directions. A distinction between Nostalgia and nostalgias is coined in order to introduce a plural and critical version of nostalgic memory. The play of memory in nostalgias is exemplified through a focus on four topoi of experience which are strained, possibly even shattered, by the digitalisation and rationalisation of contemporary culture and society. Nostalgias of and for the body, nature, thought, and modernity itself are explored by comparison to themes of melancholy and utopia which arise in Frankfurt School critical theory as responses to a similarly perceived trauma and triumph of instrumental reason. I argue that ultimately the distinction between nostalgias and Nostalgia cannot be maintained - nostalgias are rather types or tropes of Nostalgia. However, through thinking Nostalgia along the lines of this neologism (nostalgias) we might come to see its dynamic and critical mnemonic potencies. Hence, the paper concludes that nostalgia ought not be simply contemned and dismissed as the conservative freezing of memories and images of a fake past.     

The Hyper-Hermeneutic Gesture of a Subtle Revolution

Abstract

I argue that Shakespeare's Timon of Athens exemplifies the concept of mourning play that Walter Benjamin had in mind when he wrote The Origin of German Tragic Drama. While others have interpreted the play in various ways, no one has attempted to understand Timon in a Benjaminesque manner that seeks to show the emergence of baroque tragedy as a new aesthetic form at odds with, and liberated from, classical tragedy's mythical foundation and instead premised on historical time and progress. In my discussion, I question the view that Timon possesses inheritable or transmissible human social bonds that can be the subject of annihilation as is the case in Shakespeare's other tragedies. Rather, Benjamin sees in allegory, as illustrated by Timon of Athens, the social condition of modernity replete with suffering, chaos, and violence, but devoid of real human bonds; indeed, it is without human meaning.     

Innocents and Oracles: The Child as a Figure of Knowledge and Critique in the Middle-Class Philosophical Imagination

Abstract

This paper argues that the figure of the child performs a critical function for the middle-class social imaginary, representing both an essential "innocence" of the liberal individual, and an excluded, unconscious remainder of its project of control through the management of knowledge. While childhood is invested with affect and value, children's agency and opportunities for social participation are restricted insofar as they are seen both to represent an elementary humanity and to fall short of full rationality, citizenship and identity. The diverse permutations of this figure, as it develops in the middle-class imagination, are traced from the writings of John Locke to the films of Michael Haneke (via Charles Dickens and Henry James), to interrogate what this ambivalence regarding childhood reflects about middle-class, adult identity.     

A Common Future and a Common Identity： The Transformation Process of Political and Social Identities in the South Caucasus Countries

In reflecting on the case of the South Caucasus （Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia）, one of the most popular perspectives is its lack of a common identity. The main argument is that it is a culturally diverse region with old-fashioned, ethnically exclusive nationalism. From this point of view, the process of the formation of a European identity in the region acquires particular importance. A European identity could act as a catalyst for bringing the region together. This identity could be considered as based on much more than just political orientation but fundamentally grounded in common values. This comprehensive integration in the South Caucasus can be achieved through the formulation and acceptance of a common political identity based on the political orientations of the South Caucasian States and their citizens. The main question that this study tries to answer is how people in the South Caucasian countries identify themselves in terms of a European identity. A suitable analysis is increasingly important at both the micro and the macro levels. The author examines the people＇s attitudes in the three South Caucasian states toward Western culture, states, and organizations, drawing on opinion polls conducted by the Caucasus Research Resources Center （CRRC）. The author seeks to analyze attitudes toward the West in the South Caucasus on a macro as well as on a micro level. The author seeks also to provide a much-needed analysis for decision making, based on empirical data that help understand public opinion toward the European Union （EU） in the countries of the South Caucasus, and that can contribute to the refinement of integration strategies.