Remembering the past to secure the present: Versailles legacies in a resurgent China

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In the century since the signature of the Treaty of Versailles, China's international status and material condition have been fundamentally transformed. The People's Republic has become powerful in ways that probably would have astonished the leaders of the early Republic of China, first established in 1911. These changes do not mean, however, that there are not potent legacies from China's nineteenth-century and Versailles-era experiences.

State-building after disaster: Jiang Tingfu and the reconstruction of post-World War II China, 1943-1949

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Post-World War II reconstruction in Europe and Asia is a topic of growing interest, but relatively little attention has been paid to the relief and rehabilitation effort in China in the immediate post-1945 period. This article reassesses the postwar program implemented by the Chinese Nationalist (Guomindang) government and the UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), not just in terms of humanitarian relief, but also as part of a process that led to new thinking about the nature of the postwar state in Asia. It focuses on the ideas and actions of Jiang Tingfu (T.

The case for a history of global legal practices

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The contextual understanding of treatises of great legal thinkers has become an important focus in the historical study of international law. This article argues for an alternative approach going beyond classics of legal doctrine to study the interlinked broader global legal practices that constituted actual patterns of social order. Dead practitioners can, however, only be accessed through texts that remain under-conceptualized. I argue that literary theory provides the most helpful insights for developing a framework for studying legal texts.

The coming realignment of ideology studies

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Ideology studies no longer conform to the conventional trajectories of the past century. If one indicator is the range of subjects submitted to the Journal of Political Ideologies, the traditional topics addressing the macro-political ideologies are thinning out, though not quite disappearing. The thematic predictability level of articles covering conservatism, liberalism, socialism, fascism, feminism and even green political thought has declined markedly, though of course it still persists.

The European Union and Unilateral Secession: The Case of Catalonia

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Events in Catalonia in October 2017 confronted the European Union with an attempt at unilateral secession by a region within an EU Member State. EU institutions and EU Member States have responded by affirming the illegality of the attempted secession and have refrained from attempting to mediate between the Spanish government and the Catalan authorities. This contrasts with the approach of the EU and its Member States in previous cases of unilateral secession occurring within the European space outside the Union, notably the former Yugoslav republics and Kosovo.

Can Cryptocurrencies Preserve Privacy and Comply with Regulations?

Submitted by joby.mullens on

Modern retail banking creates a kind of panopticon for consumer behaviour, ultimately promising to implement a mechanism that binds all of the financial activities undertaken by an individual to a single, unitary identity. In the age of Big Data, consumers have legitimate reasons to resist such surveillance, particularly in cases wherein monitoring is carried out without their knowledge and judgments based upon such monitoring are used to disincentivise or punish legitimate activities.

Dr González Ocantos on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights

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Many norms develop in the absence of clear templates for how to implement them. I argue that, even under these conditions, individuals and organizations can still successfully push for new norms, along with attendant changes in state practices. They do so through a mode of action that I term communicative entrepreneurship. Unlike norm entrepreneurs, communicative entrepreneurs do not project normative or technocratic certainty. They use nudges and networking strategies to trigger debates that define the contours of emerging normative scripts.

Professor Desmond King on "American Oligarchy? The Concealed Politics of the Federal Reserve Bank"

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Why study the Federal Reserve Bank? Political scientists analyzing US politics, with only a few notable exceptions, have largely ignored the question. The result is that we know precious little about the Fed even as it becomes an increasingly consequential feature of contemporary American politics amid rising economic inequality. This symposium is innovative in two respects. First, it treats the Fed as a political institution instead of adopting the common assumption among many of its observers that the central bank is a neutral technocracy.

Closing the Capability Gap: ASEAN Military Modernization during the Dawn of Autonomous Weapon Systems

Submitted by joby.mullens on

The procurement of autonomous weapon systems is on the rise in Southeast Asia, where, as in other parts of the world, interest in the military applications of unmanned systems is outpacing fractured international regulation efforts.

Before Military Intervention: Upstream Stabilisation in Theory and Practice

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This book explores the natures of recent stabilisation efforts and global upstream threats. As prevention is always cheaper than the crisis of state collapse or civil war, the future character of conflict will increasingly involve upstream stabilisation operations. However, the unpredictability and variability of state instability requires governments and militaries to adopt a diversity of approach, conceptualisation and vocabulary.

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