Defenders of Freedom or Perpetrators and Facilitators of Crimes? Beyond Progressive Retreatism in the Trump Era

ABSTRACT

Heavily influenced by broad definitions of crime developed by a few pioneering critical criminologists, the main objective of this article is to provide evidence showing that the current Trump administration is a regime that commits crimes of the powerful and facilitates some types of interpersonal violence in private places. Special attention is devoted to direct and in-direct state-perpetrated violent crimes against women.     

论“联俄制日”外交的形成及其对《中俄密约》的影响

19世纪末，面对日本对中国的侵略，李鸿章等人秉承“以夷制夷”的外交思想，采取了“联俄制日”的外交政策，即利用俄国和日本在华利益冲突，使之彼此制约，以达到抵制日本侵略、保护自己的目的。但是，由于清政府的腐朽，“联俄制日”不仅没有达到“制日”的目的，反而被俄所利用，同俄国签订了《中俄密约》，为俄国扩大对华侵略打开了方便之门。     

'I'm Proud of the British Empire': Why Tony Blair Backs George W. Bush

This article considers the three main reasons behind Tony Blair's support for the post-9/11 foreign policy of the George W. Bush administration, especially the war on Iraq: first, Blair is on a neo-imperial mission, with deep roots in his personal development, to re-order the world to better suit British interests; secondly, Bush and Blair independently agree that the post-1989 period represents wasted time, years of drift that could have been used to press home Anglo-American dominance; and thirdly, an agreement that 9/11 opened the space for a radical restructuring of international relations and the setting of a more interventionist global agenda.     

The effect of alliance membership on national defense burdens, 1953–88: A test of Mancur Olson's theory of collective action

Olson and Zeckhauser (1966) offered the first theoretical explanation for variation in the defense burdens of allies. Since then, the theory of collective action (Olson, 1971 [1965]) has been extensively tested using the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact (WTO). While most studies indicate that allied defense burdens (the ratio of military expenditures to gross domestic product) are correlated with economic size, this relationship has rarely been assessed for non‐allied states. Here we examine the association between national defense burdens and economic size, 1953–1988, for NATO, the WTO, the Rio Pact, and the Arab Collective Security Pact in a nested test using most of the non‐allied nations of the world as a control group. Our results generally support the theory. NATO and the Warsaw Pact consistently conform to theoretical expectations, and evidence regarding the Rio Pact, on balance, is positive. Defense burdens are not correlated with economic size within the Arab Pact, however. In addition, nations’ defense burdens are affected by the external threat, as indicated by arms races and war; but the effect of involvement in war is surprisingly small.     

The gender agenda: NGOs and capitalist relations in highland Cambodia

Cambodia’s mountainous northeastern province of Ratanakiri, which only twenty years ago was home to mainly indigenous minority groups largely focused on subsistence production, has undergone rapid ecological, social, and economic transformation. Deforestation and land alienation in the context of large-scale plantation agriculture, land speculation, and smallholder cash cropping have led to concerns that indigenous communities are being alienated from their land and not benefitting from economic changes. This has resulted in a significant number of NGO and government programs that attempt to protect and “empower” indigenous people, particularly women. This article examines a one-year research project which explored the relationship between indigenous women and land change in two indigenous villages. It discusses how indigenous women as well as Khmer and landless Cham immigrants have dealt with the commoditization of land and labor. It focuses on the differentiated way capitalist relations have pushed men, women, landless laborers, and increasingly wealthy landowners on increasingly divergent life trajectories. Compelled by donors to focus on gender and indigenous women as an object of governance, the NGO that directed this project struggled to keep up with the realities of capitalist relations on the ground.     

The Young-Girl in Theory

This essay situates Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl within a long history of leftist art and theory that uses the figure of the girl to respond to, reflect on, and even to attempt to subvert the various subjective crises of late capitalism. At the same time, and reading Tiqqun against the grain, it asks whether the Young-Girl might be of any use for thinking through the new questions about subjectivity and representation that neoliberalism has presented for feminism.     

盟书--春秋时代特殊的法律文书

盟书是我国古代的一种应用文体,随着会盟制度的兴盛而繁荣起来,其应用与创作在春秋时代达到了顶峰。从盟书的写定、结构、保存与援引来看,盟书是春秋时代的一种特殊的法律文书,具有规范行为、监督各方践履相关协约的作用。     

The elephant in the room: offshore companies,liberalisation and extension of presidential power in DR Congo

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, donors promoted rapid liberalisation and presidential elections in the aftermath of the war, and after two terms, President Kabila has not left office. This article engages with the question of how liberalisation and elections are connected, and how they are related to the extension of presidential power. It finds that the international market for minerals has shaped the domestic political economy but its nature has effectively been ignored in the formulation of donor policy; efforts at regulating trade have been concentrated on due diligence of origin in Congo but have not addressed the secrecy of international trade. Liberalisation has removed control of economic resources from Congo, provided returns for elite politicians and funded violence to control the disenfranchised population. The offshore companies are the elephant in the room; without acknowledging them, analysis of the liberalisation and its interaction with presidential tenure lacks assessment of the opportunities, interests and power that shaped the processes.     

Transatlantic Institutions: Can Partnership be Engineered?

The transatlantic alliance is widely viewed as being in a state of decline. Conflict over the war in Iraq highlighted a growing divergence between the Bush administration and European Union governments in their attitudes towards multilateralism. The rift severely tested institutions created to manage bilateral EU–US relations in the aftermath of the cold war. This article examines how well this institutional architecture has held up. It scrutinises the limitations of networked governance in transatlantic relations and acknowledges the quandary of trying to manufacture partnership using imperfect institutions. The Brussels–Washington channel is only one among many through which transatlantic relations flow, but we argue that it continues to gain in importance. Despite the limits of institutional engineering, we conclude that the US and the EU remain each other's most important ally.