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The Idea of Democratic Governance

Baogang He

in Governing Taiwan and Tibet: Democratic Approaches

Chapter 1 serves as a conceptual introduction for the book. It defines the key concepts of the national boundary/identity question and democratic governance (or management, or approach, or solution) ... More

Chapter 1 serves as a conceptual introduction for the book. It defines the key concepts of the national boundary/identity question and democratic governance (or management, or approach, or solution) related to the national boundary/identity question. It develops an analytical classification of different kinds of national boundary/identity or membership issues, qualifies the project of democratic management, and spells out the concrete components of democratic governance. It explores why democratic management of the boundary issue is desirable, and defends the universal project of democratic governance. This chapter is an intellectual foundation for the quest for democratic governance with regards to the Taiwan and Tibet issues.Less

The Movement

Aryeh Neier

in The International Human Rights Movement: A History

This chapter explains that the driving force behind the protection of human rights worldwide, today and for roughly the past thirty-five years, has been the nongovernmental human rights movement. ... More

This chapter explains that the driving force behind the protection of human rights worldwide, today and for roughly the past thirty-five years, has been the nongovernmental human rights movement. Intermittently during the last two-and-a-half centuries, citizens' movements did play important roles in efforts to promote human rights, as during the development of the antislavery movement in England in the eighteenth century and the rise of the feminist movement in the United States in the nineteenth century. The contemporary human rights movement responds to victories and defeats by shifting focus from time to time, but it shows signs that it will remain an enduring force in world affairs. Efforts by those outside governments have been particularly important in extending the protection of rights beyond national boundaries, and it is in the present era that they have been most significant.Less

Big Bills Left on the Sidewalk: Why Some Nations Are Rich, and Others Poor

Mancur Olson

in A Not-so-dismal Science: A Broader View of Economies and Societies

The idea is advanced that it is the rationality of individuals in societies that makes them achieve their production potential rather than their per capita productive resources, and that the ... More

The idea is advanced that it is the rationality of individuals in societies that makes them achieve their production potential rather than their per capita productive resources, and that the low‐income countries of the Second and Third Worlds are poor mainly because they are much further below their potential incomes than are rich countries. If these countries were to improve their governance and institutions sufficiently, there would be huge gains from foreign investment and advanced technologies, which are for the most part, available at relatively modest cost to poor countries. The evidence for this view is taken from studies of the borders of countries and the flows of labour (migration) and capital that cross them, and data on per capita income in relation to population density.Less

The Motifs of Latinidad: Negotiating Nationalities and Struggling for Multiple Belongings (Elena, Mariana, José, Sara, Daniel, Vivian)

Frances R. Aparicio

in Negotiating Latinidad: Intralatina/o Lives in Chicago

The “motifs” of Latinidad refer to the specific tensions, obstacles, and boundaries underlying Intralatino/a struggles in cementing a sense of belonging to multiple national communities. In this ... More

The “motifs” of Latinidad refer to the specific tensions, obstacles, and boundaries underlying Intralatino/a struggles in cementing a sense of belonging to multiple national communities. In this chapter I focus on five interviews and examine the diverse ways in which each Intralatino/a grapples with both dominant and diluted nationalities. Deploying Mérida Rúa’s concept of “Colao subjects”, and the terms “aguao and cargao” identities (diluted and strong), I analyze how these Intralatino/as refuse to choose one or the other, how they reclaim the diluted identity, and how they unsettle the dominance of the cargao (strong) identity. I conclude that these negotiations not only illustrate the processual and temporary texture of Intralatino/a subjectivities, but also highlight their agency in resisting the contradictions and complexities of these multiple identity boundaries.Less

Globalisation and the knowledge economy

Graham Room

in The European challenge: Innovation, policy learning and social cohesion in the new knowledge economy

This chapter explains that the development of the new knowledge-based economy is intimately bound up with the process of globalisation. It defines globalisation as the organisation of economic, ... More

This chapter explains that the development of the new knowledge-based economy is intimately bound up with the process of globalisation. It defines globalisation as the organisation of economic, social, or other activity in terms which transcend national boundaries. It notes that globalisation is only one element in the reorganisation of space that has been under way in recent decades. This chapter focuses on globalisation and the new economy, with the additional dimensions of spatial reorganisation.Less

A Trial of Treason: Aisin Gioro Xianyu and Identity Dilemma

Dan Shao

in Remote Homeland, Recovered Borderland: Manchus, Manchoukuo, and Manchuria, 1907-1985

This chapter foregrounds individuals' experiences with community reconstruction and identity redefinition amid the borderland contestation over Manchuria. It examines how Aisin Gioro Xianyu, a Manchu ... More

This chapter foregrounds individuals' experiences with community reconstruction and identity redefinition amid the borderland contestation over Manchuria. It examines how Aisin Gioro Xianyu, a Manchu princess who tried to obtain Japanese support for the restoration of the Manchu regime, failed to negotiate her ethnic and national identities at her trial for treason after the Japanese empire collapsed. Living in an era replete with ethnic tension and international wars, Xianyu's repeated crossing of national boundaries puts her squarely within a generation of people who had complicated transnational and cross-ethnic profiles. Xianyu's trial reveals the political consequences for individuals of the deterritorialization of Manchuria and the ethnification of the Manchus.Less

Afterword

Michel Hogue

in Metis and the Medicine Line: Creating a Border and Dividing a People

This concluding chapter remarks on how the kinships and other social relations constructed from Plain Metis life continue to persist in the face of legal distinctions of race and nation. Metis ... More

This concluding chapter remarks on how the kinships and other social relations constructed from Plain Metis life continue to persist in the face of legal distinctions of race and nation. Metis economic power, military might, and cultural connections to neighbors and kin, so compelling in earlier decades, had lost much of their purchase in the altered contexts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The dispersal of these borderland communities ultimately exposed the connections between the marking of national and racial boundaries and the resettlement of the North American West. At the same time, the continued ability of individuals and families to move back and forth across the border suggests an unbroken (if diminished) sense of community that continues to transcend the international boundary even today.Less

Nationality and Responsibility

Henry Shue

in Basic Rights: Subsistence, Affluence, and U.S. Foreign Policy: 40th Anniversary Edition

This chapter explores the argument that it cannot be anyone's responsibility to fulfill the rights of strangers on the other side of the globe, however much responsibility one may have to the ... More

This chapter explores the argument that it cannot be anyone's responsibility to fulfill the rights of strangers on the other side of the globe, however much responsibility one may have to the deprived within one's own country. The core of this view can be called the thesis that compatriots take priority—take it at least in the case of duties to aid. The view need not completely deny that there are universal subsistence rights, but it does deny that any correlative duties to aid are universal, or even transnational. The view that compatriots take priority might accept the priority principle but restrict its application to the nation of the bearer of the duty. The chapter then surveys some of the major kinds of reasons offered for taking national boundaries so very seriously in what is fundamentally a moral issue, and indicates very briefly some reasons for doubt about each kind.Less

Globalisation, global ageing and intergenerational change

Chris Phillipson

in Ageing and intergenerational relations: Family reciprocity from a global perspective

This chapter explores the interaction between demography and globalisation. It observes that population ageing has been a major factor influencing changes in intergenerational relations, and such a ... More

This chapter explores the interaction between demography and globalisation. It observes that population ageing has been a major factor influencing changes in intergenerational relations, and such a demographic shift is firmly located in broader social and economic developments, including processes associated with globalisation. It also examines how demographic shifts and globalisation are currently influencing the nature of intergenerational relations by linking those two issues together, and asks, are any new forms of contact and reciprocity across generations emerging within and beyond national boundaries?Less

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

Annabel Patterson

in The International Novel

This chapter offers a reading of Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow, which chronicles the problems of Turkey. The novel utilizes the phrase “the silence of snow” to symbolize the enforced silence of the ... More

This chapter offers a reading of Orhan Pamuk's novel Snow, which chronicles the problems of Turkey. The novel utilizes the phrase “the silence of snow” to symbolize the enforced silence of the Turkish state about its genocidal past and ethnically exclusionist present. Aside from political censorship, Snow also tells the story of romance between the main protagonist Ka and a divorcée named Ipek. Another crucial theme in Snow is the head scarf issue, which, according to Pamuk, is part of the worldwide debate on nationalism and national boundaries.Less

Fields: Colonialism, Folklore, and Postcolonial Theory

Sadhana Naithani

in The Story-Time of the British Empire: Colonial and Postcolonial Folkloristics

This chapter discusses folklore studies and how the history of folklore research, critical studies on folklore collectors and their ideologies, and the socio-political implications of folklore ... More

This chapter discusses folklore studies and how the history of folklore research, critical studies on folklore collectors and their ideologies, and the socio-political implications of folklore studies have all been seen within national boundaries. The history of folklore as a subject and object of research is traced back to the early nineteenth-century romantic-nationalist movement in Germany. The global history of folklore research, on the other hand, is Eurocentric in its approach, to the extent that it is based on nineteenth-century European folklore collectors within Europe, although it is well known that in the same century a large number of Europeans collected folklore of countries on other continents. Much of this work outside the European continent was accomplished in the context of colonial relations and done by non-folklorists.Less

French and American Lawyers Define Sexual Harassment

Abigail C. Saguy

in Directions in Sexual Harassment Law

This chapter addresses the issue of how sexual harassment has traveled across national boundaries, in the case of France, drawing on a cross-national sociological study of how sexual harassment has ... More

This chapter addresses the issue of how sexual harassment has traveled across national boundaries, in the case of France, drawing on a cross-national sociological study of how sexual harassment has been defined in the United States and France. It describes sexual harassment law in action, drawing primarily from twenty in-depth interviews, conducted in 1996 and 1997, with ten French and ten American lawyers who have worked in the area of sexual harassment. The argument is further informed by an additional forty in-depth interviews, conducted between 1995 and 2000, with French and American activists, public figures, human resource personnel, and union activists; legal analysis of statutes and jurisprudence in the two countries; content analysis of more than six hundred articles published in the American and French popular press from 1975 to 2000; and twenty-three brief telephone interviews conducted during the summer of 1997 with the human resource or personnel departments in French corporate workplaces.Less

V. S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River

Annabel Patterson

in The International Novel

This chapter offers a reading of V. S. Naipaul's novel A Bend in the River, which chronicles the rapid changes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after independence. It first provides a ... More

This chapter offers a reading of V. S. Naipaul's novel A Bend in the River, which chronicles the rapid changes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after independence. It first provides a historical background on the arbitrary drawing or redrawing of national boundaries in Africa before discussing its implications for nationalism or internationalism in the region.Less

Introduction: What Do We Mean by the “Ryukyu Kingdom”?

Mamoru Akamine

Robert Huey (ed.)

in The Ryukyu Kingdom: Cornerstone of East Asia

A discussion of the Ryukyu Archipelago and its shifting historical boundaries is followed by an overview of the Ryukyu kingdom’s emergence as an important player in East Asian trade, concluding with ... More

A discussion of the Ryukyu Archipelago and its shifting historical boundaries is followed by an overview of the Ryukyu kingdom’s emergence as an important player in East Asian trade, concluding with a discussion of how recent historiography of the region has been changed by the emergence of previously lost ancient documents.Less