Suchergebnisse

Examination of the rise and fall of hegemons over the last 500 years reveals that each lasts about 100 years, with another 100 year period between hegemons that is characterized by rough balance among shifting powers frequent major wars. Can the future differ from the long and established pattern? Theories that causally link hegemony to uneven development succeed in explaining the perennial rise and fall of world leaders, but fail to explain the persistence of a leader who has become hegemonic. The explanation given here is the establishment of institutional inertia in the world order, which slows the diffusion of innovations, but also restrains the adoption of subsequent changes. An analytic model describes the cycle of hegemony as the historically and politically contingent interaction of long terms trends in the world-system. Recently, hegemony has come into interaction with the cumulative trends of market commodification, decolonization, and democratization. This has produced a rise in independent nations and decline of imperial states worldwide. In the conclusion, we speculate on how these new developments make possible such events as a multi-state hegemony, a shared world polity, and a democratic world government.

Over the ten years of its existence, the Social Science History Association has been a meeting place for groups in rebellion against the dominant orthodoxies of their disciplines. Thus it is fitting that an SSHA panel should assess the accomplishments and relationship of "social history" and "historical sociology," two movements that have grown up as critiques of formerly dominant orientations in (respectively) the disciplines of history and sociology.

A new approach to science has recently developed. It is called the complexity approach. A number of researchers, such as Brian Arthur and Buz Brock, have used this approach to consider issues in economics. This volume considers the complexity approach to economics from a history of thought and methodological perspectives. It finds that the ideas underlying complexity have been around for a long time, and that this new work in complexity has many precursors in the history of economic thought.This book consists of twelve studies on the issue of complexity and the history of economic thought. The

In his Azaro Trilogy, Nigerian writer Ben Okri describes a fantastic but painful world in the style of magical realism. Through the miserable life of Azaro's family against poverty and the political power struggle between the Party of the Rich and the Party of the Poor in pre-independence days, the trilogy traces the causes of Nigerian political chaos to the heritages of colonialism and regionalism, and foretells the impending nightmarish civil war. By exploring these historical issues, Okri reveals how Nigeria has been traumatized by British colonizers and how the dispossessed are oppressed by the rich, at the same time he attempts to search for some solutions to the present problems of Nigeria.Key words: Okri; Colonialism; Regionalism; The civil war; Trauma

Homeowners associations (HOAs) are quickly becoming the most common and fastest growing units of local governance in the United States. Like the cities to which they are often compared, HOAs provide services, regulate activities, levy taxes, and ultimately elect their governing bodies. Because the courts view HOAs as business enterprises rather than as governments, HOAs'governing provisions are not required to conform to basic democratic principles for participation. This article uses theories from the new institutionalism to compare the typical governing provisions of cities and HOAs to consider how these provisions shape civic life in urban areas.

Traces the history of the category of race in history & historiography from ancient Egypt to the present. It is observed that the extreme ethnic heterogeneity & ethnocentrism of ancient Egypt began to change around 500 BC, when darker pigmentation became associated with ugliness & slavery. At this point, blackness increasingly became associated with Muslims, who were generally reviled in the Christian world. Modern racism is described as beginning from the first 15th-century contact between Europeans & Africans in the context of the system of slavery. Modern historiography since the 17th century is shown to have been conditioned by the context of slavery & racism to exclude Africans & African history from the pantheon of great historical events. It is concluded that contemporary historians would do well to focus on the interaction & mixture of the races rather than their isolation if they are to develop responsible & accurate historical accounts of the past & present. D. M. Smith

This essay surveys the development of strategic theory from its emergence in the seventeenth century through the era of the world wars. Although the focus is on ideas, some account is taken of changing historical circumstances against which strategic thought has unfolded. The goal of theory in any field is to improve our understanding of reality, and our ability to act effectively. In the case of strategic theory, the interaction between thought and action is especially intense, because war is such an unforgiving enterprise, and because, until recently, serious thinking about how war should be conducted has been confined for the most part to those responsible for waging it. Because the advent of nuclear weapons, the work of theory in the military field was almost exclusively the concern of practitioners. Most have proceeded by way of historical inference, scrutinizing recent (and occasionally remote) experience in search of an underlying logic capable of explaining events. The result is a body of work displaying substantial intellectual continuity, despite much intervening technological and social change; but one whose basic outlook would eventually be called into question by the advent of nuclear weapons on the one hand, and by the rising prominence of guerilla insurgency, terrorism and other forms of irregular warfare on the other.

Abstract
Critics of 'identity politics' tend to assume that any exploration of subjective experience is tantamount to an affirmation of liberal individualism. This essay attempts to counteract that assumption through an analysis of case histories and research publications by twentieth-century psychoanalysts and psychologists. Such texts demonstrate the ways in which even the most ephemeral psychological experiences – dreams, fantasies, desires – are bound up with structural forms of oppression. Furthermore, these texts – through processes of abstraction, generalisation and classification – indicate ways in which interiorities clash up against externally-defined identity categories; oppression is lived but lived experience also exceeds and complicates identity.

"Generations, Contemporaneity, and Intersectionality in Literary History. While several traditional concepts of literary history, including literary periods, periodization itself, and genre, have been recently put into question and reframed in transnational, cross-temporal, and transdisciplinary ways, the notion of generation has received much less attention. At the same time, in various branches of cultural studies, and even more prominently in sociology, the problem of generations has taken center stage once again. In this article, the critic takes as her departure point Mihai Iovănel's 2021 History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 to discuss how the generational operator could be employed in post-Cold War literary history. Mironescu argues that a transversal and intersectional integration of generation into contemporary literary criticism could ensure a better understanding of intra- and transgenerational dynamics in terms of self-representations and group narratives, inclusions and exclusions, as well as gender and literary affiliations. Keywords: generation, generationality, literary history, postcommunism, intersectionality"