Suchergebnisse

This study analyzes the evolvement of tax system in colonial Indonesia and its social, politic and economic consequences. It focuses on the transformation of what was known as pachtstelsel or revenue farming, a tax collecting system involving the role of private party, mainly Chinese businessmen that was in practice throughout the nineteenth century, into a substitute system called regiestelsel or state monopoly and state collected taxes introduced at the turn of the twentieth century. Both taxation systems constituted a larger part of taxes introduced in Java, but also in Sumatra and other islands in the archipelago, which during the period concerned contributed a substantial revenue to the colonial finance. Built on a critical framework that views colonial tax system as an arena of power contestation between the government, its agents, and its tax-paying subjects, this study considers the changing taxation system in colonial Indonesia not merely an administrative process as part of the modernization process of the colonial state administration, but also a reflection of the changing nature of the colonial state and its changing relation with colonial societies as a whole. Therefore, this study investigates the social political process behind those changes, the impacts they had upon the life of different groups of society, the ways they shaped the nature of colonial state practice in Indonesia, and the reactions of various groups of society. Through a perusal of colonial archives and various historical sources, the book seeks to offer a fresh understanding of the colonial state, its practices in day to day basis and its institutional legacies in modern Indonesia.

There has been little academic focus on the build-up of the Dutch Air Force after the Second World War. The aim of this study is to identify the key developments in the build-up and sustainment of the Dutch air force between 1945 and 1973 and to answer the question as to which factors and actors shaped these developments. This study describes that process from the perspectives of foreign policy, domestic policy and the institutional perspective. At the level of multilateral dynamics, the Cold War created the parameters for the build-up of the Dutch air force. The founding of NATO was decisive for the direction that build-up took. To a greater extent than the other Services, the air force was embedded in NATO's structure and it was assigned an important role in the Allied defence plans. In terms of organisation, materiel and logistics, the air force was focused on international cooperation and integration. The close interrelationship with NATO meant that changes to the Alliance's strategic concepts had a tangible effect on the RNLAF. The Mutual Defence Assistance Programme played a key role in the build-up process. The aid programme's influence was far-reaching: it placed the air force in a position of dependency and paved the way to Americanisation. The advancing military technology created its own dynamics. The inclusion of technologies such as nuclear weapons and jet propulsion compelled the RNLAF to adapt in terms of organisation, infrastructure, logistics and personnel. In addition, this made weapon systems more expensive, which would lead to decisions being made in favour of quality rather than quantity. At the level of domestic politics, consecutive governments and parliaments found themselves having to weigh international wishes against money, employment and national prestige. In their eyes, NATO until 1951 primarily served a political interest. Even after the ar in Korea, financial considerations, concern for the national (aviation) industry, and the necessity to keep America on side all continued to vie ...

After 1989, with the end of communist rule in Central and Eastern Europe, narratives about rupture and change during a turbulent twentieth century have been told in many different forms, genres, and media alongside narratives of basic social and political continuities. Rupture and continuity emerged as two different narrative strategies that have sought to create coherence in these larger histories. Published histories and private narratives about the twentieth century in Central Europe share this characteristic: they both create cohesion between a multiplicity of processes and events by combining the two narrative strategies of emplotment. That is what this dissertation is about. Based on an extensive source material of narrative life interviews from the border regions of Romania (Northern Transylvania), Northern Serbia (Vojvodina), and Southern Hungary, I investigate how ordinary women in Central Europe, see the turbulent century which they have lived through. I analyze the different ways that they speak of historical transformation and how they place themselves into a sequence of change while maintaining their sense of integrity: how they talk at the end of their life about childhood in the Interwar era, their maturing during the Second World War, starting married life and work in socialism, and their retirement years after 1989. Throughout the analysis I address the forms that tropes of rupture and continuity take through the words of women who lived through several regime changes in the course of the twentieth century. The dissertation examines the relationship of personal life narratives to public narratives of history: how interviewees incorporate and appropriate public narratives and where they diverge from them in order to create their versions of historical narrative.

This thesis is based on field research in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and South Sudan and looks at the dynamics of security provisioning in post-settlement contexts. A particular focus is on international security interventions, which are constituted by Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes, Security Sector Reform (SSR) and Armed Violence Reduction (AVR), including Small Arms and Light Weapons (SALW) control. The thesis is guided by the question how international efforts to build or contribute to security in the hybrid political context of post-settlement countries in sub-Sahara Africa relate to national and local perceptions and practices of security. The first part presents the theoretical background and framework. It finds that underlying assumptions of international actors implementing security interventions are: the state is the best way to organise violence and enable stability and peace; the ideal state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence; and the primary task of the state is the provision of security. Then the most prominent critiques on this dominant intervention model are discussed, which are categorized into the 'context critique' and the 'intervention critique'. Among other things, they argue that there is an incomplete understanding of how violence is organised, of how and by whom what security is provided, and of how the state functions in a hybrid political context. Critiques also find that states do not necessarily develop towards an ideal model and that the implementation involves a multiplicity of actors with diverging agendas, which often results in unplanned outcomes. Based on the theories discussed throughout the first part an analytical model is developed that looks at multiple realities of security interventions. It focuses on three different arenas of interaction and looks at how international, national and local perceptions and practices of security relate to one another. The second part of the thesis presents the empirical ...

Feminism, documentary film and visual anthropology are the three domains that this study connects. The multifaceted relation between these three fields can be summarised as revolving around the debates on reality, truth, representation of the Other, knowledge production and power. Domitilla Olivieri's dissertation explores such intricate interrelations through the analysis of three films: Kim Longinotto's Sisters in Law (2005), Trinh T. Minh-ha's Reassemblage (1982) and Ursula Biemann's Europlex (2003). To different extents, and in multiple and overlapping ways, these films address the issue of representation(s) of non-Western, and especially female subjects, the relation between sign and reality and the power dynamics implicit in documentary filmmaking. The dissertation shows that the relation between reality and the documentary sign can be understood as one of 'haunting'. Haunting here refers to the specific indexical quality of the relation between sign and object, the manner in which the object affects or determines the sign (Peirce 1958, 8.177), or the way in which "the world presses on" the cinematic sign (Comolli 1999, 40). Borrowing and expanding upon Mary Ann Doane's definition of the indexical sign as one that is "haunted by its object" (Doane 2007b, 134), Olivieri presents several examples in which the filmed reality inhabits, intrudes upon, and makes itself continually present in the filmic documentary sign. As the particular focus of this research is on anthropological feminist documentaries, Olivieri considers them as films haunted by reality and regarding feminist issues to do with the politics of the Other and processes of Othering. These films are, to borrow Trinh's concept, "inappropriate/d" (Trinh 1986, 9). They cross labels and categorisation; explore and perform borders; let themselves be haunted by reality without falling flat into the hegemonic pitfalls of realism; they imagine and represent invisible realities while pointing attention to the power of vision and visuality; they escape ...

Once again, the award of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize focused our attention on the vital role women play in conflict resolution. However, what do we really know about their role in peace processes? Do women count, as declared by the Security Council in Resolution 1325 on women, peace and security? Moreover, does the small number of women participating in peace processes tell the whole story behind a peace process? This research 'Is peace not for everyone?' seeks to provide some answers to these questions in the context of building and making peace in Sudan; a country that suffered protracted war between the north and the south since 1955. The reader will note that Sudanese women emerge from this research as important actors in building and making peace. Following the signing of a peace agreement, they managed to benefit from their long struggle for peace, equality and development. Despite unimaginable losses, violence and disempowerment experienced by both men and women in the midst of war, positive change for women was and is possible. Central to this research is the study of a Dutch peacebuilding programme (1997 - 2007) that was created to support the participation of Sudanese women in the Sudan IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority for Development) Peace Process. IGAD mediation culminated in a Comprehensive Peace Agreement (2005) between Northern and Southern Sudan and led to the declaration of the independent state of South Sudan in 2011. Despite that, the Sudans still have a long way to go on peace. It also examines: 1) international support to efforts by Sudanese women to participate in peace processes; 2) social change and the empowerment of women in the midst and aftermath of war; 3) the role of policymakers and practitioners in turning declarations on women's participation in peace processes into action; and 4) the interaction between diplomats and women interested in building and making peace. To inform, guide and structure this research, relevant theoretical perspectives emanating from the academic fields ...

The investigation reconstructs and examines the processes of escalation and de-escalation of political violence in internal conflicts in Latin America. The study analyses and compares the urban insurgent campaigns of the Argentinean Montoneros, the Colombian Movement 19 April (M-19) and the Nicaraguan Sandinist National Liberation Front (FSLN) to point out the processes that explain the specific conflict developments and endings. In comparison to the mainstream research focus, this study focuses on examining the middle-phase of internal conflicts and looks especially into the interactions of the central conflict actors. Literature on political violence in Latin America focuses on insurgency rather than terrorism. This research, however, employs the analytical concept of terrorism to study political violence. Terrorism, in this approach, is understood as a strategy of irregular warfare in its own right similar to insurgency, and as an act. This approach permits to focus on the act and not the actor and to deal with the variety of violent political actors in the region, including insurgent organizations and the state. Additional, the investigation proposes a triangular model of interaction to explain the dynamic in which political violence develops in social revolutionary conflicts. Political violence in such conflicts is largely the product of the triangular interaction between state and insurgent forces and the civil society, or "social audience". In this triangular interaction, the social audience plays the decisive role for the development and outcome of the conflicts. This role, however, converts the social audience in the central target of state and insurgent activities, as both violent actors try to shape the behavior of the larger social environment. The study discusses the influence of national and international factors on the conflict development, such as the Cold War, the regime type and economic inequalities. Furthermore, it depicts forms of insurgent organization of opposition forces, as well as ...

The Cold War era has generally been represented as a moment of conservatism when it comes to women's activism. While women's political participation in the Second World War had been studied in detail, women's political and social activism in Cold War Europe has remained under-researched. In my dissertation, I show the liveliness of women's political and social activism in Italy and Yugoslavia in the early Cold War period (1945-1957), demonstrating that women's antifascist organizations played an important role in everyday Cold War politics, at the local and at the international level. The thesis studies in particular the local and international activities of the Union of Italian Women (UDI) and of the Antifascist Women's Front of Yugoslavia (AFŽ), two women's organizations founded during the antifascist Resistance in Italy and Yugoslavia, which continued to play an active political role after 1945. It also takes into account the activities of the Union of Italo-Slovene Antifascist Women (UDAIS) in the contested border city of Trieste. The dissertation is based on extensive fieldwork research in Italian and former Yugoslav archives. Oral history interviews and autobiographies represent a crucial complement to the archival research. Archival documents, and excerpts from oral history interviews and autobiographies in Italian, Serbo-Croatian and French are translated and organized into a single historical narrative, which demonstrates the entangled history of women's antifascist organizations in Italy and Yugoslavia after 1945. By writing this entangled history, I show that transnational connections were established by women across the Italo-Yugoslav border, and across Cold War borders. I explore the bilateral and multilateral relations of the UDI, AFŽ and UDAIS, and their shifting position towards the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF). This dissertation is founded upon three main theses. The first thesis is that antifascist women's organizations played an active role in everyday Cold War politics ...

Religious and charitable foundations are often held to have been a sub¬stantial presence in pre-industrial societies. One of their key tasks was the funding of public services, specifically social and religious services. This dissertation has tried to explain the regional variation in the extent to which foundations funded these public services. It was first documented that foundations funded their activities through returns on asset ownership, especially land. The religious and charitable sector owned up to forty per cent of the land in regions with weak territorial states and a strong nobilities. Large-scale asset ownership had economic consequences. High levels of institutional landownership resulted in significant distortions on lease markets for land. However, the ownership of financial instruments by foundations made them only a minor presence on late-medieval financial markets. The religious and charitable sector made modest, though significant contributions to social spending in the late-medieval period. Asset returns, a crucial aspect of the finance of foundations, were unimportant for the funding of education. Religious services were by far the highest priority of foundations. In terms of expenditures on the their primary purpose, religious and charitable foundations were efficient organisations, having about as much overhead as present-day charitable and public equivalents. The religious and charitable sector varied in size, reaching between three and fifteen per cent of regional GDP. The sector had grown at an annual rate of circa 0.4 per cent in the late-medieval period to reach this size. This means that as far as their economic weight is concerned, the literature probably overstates the importance of church and charity in the medieval period. The final task of this research was to find out what determined the levels of public service provision. High levels of per capita social spending by religious and charitable foundations were linked to open political systems. Alternative social insurance ...

This study deals with the rise and decline of the system of unelected representative bodies that accompanied post-war democracy in the Netherlands. After World War II, the number of these unelected representative bodies grew spectacularly, but from the seventies onwards, it started to decrease. How can we account for this remarkable political change? In traditional historiography, this change is associated with the pillarisation of Dutch society, the institutionalisation of corporatist arrangements, the emergence of new social movements or the deep-rooted practice of consensus building. As these accounts turn out to be problematic, this study focuses on the democratic character of unelected representative bodies. Chapter 1 introduces a framework for analysing the democratic character of these bodies, based on the criteria of a democratic political order as identified by R.A. Dahl. The framework encompasses the constitution of the domains represented by unelected bodies; the recruitment of their members; the tasks they fulfilled; and their internal decision-making process. Chapter 2 presents the cases used to analyse how the democratic character of the system of unelected representative bodies developed. These cases are the Sociaal-Economische Raad (1950), the Landbouwschap (1954 - 1995), the Nationale Raad voor Maatschappelijk Werk (1946 - 1989) and the Raad voor de Kunst (1955 - 1995). Chapter 3 shows that the represented domains were either constituted from above by the state or from below by interest groups. The involvement of interest groups led to the exclusion of rivals and, later on, to petrifaction, with the composition of unelected bodies remaining the same despite fundamental social changes. Chapter 4 highlights a similar pattern as the members delegated by interest groups managed to exclude a large number of newcomers. This resulted in a fierce critique of the involvement of interest groups in member recruitment and led to a new generation of unelected councils composed of independent experts. Chapter ...

Dutch-American relations in the post-war period have been inexorably intertwined with the Cold War. In the course of the 1960s the East-West struggle entered a new phase with the beginning of a period of détente, which had important consequences for the Dutch-American relationship. In this dissertation, which focuses on the governmental level, the following issues are dealt with: firstly, to what extent was the relationship affected by the complicating developments that took place in the years 1969-1976? Secondly, how did Dutch and American policy makers view the relationship? Finally, what did the asymmetry in the relationship mean and were the Dutch able to exert any influence? When taking into account both international and domestic factors, the picture that emerges is one of both change and continuity. What makes the period concerned stand out is the fact that the Atlantic Alliance was at a point where a redefinition of the common goals seemed unavoidable. Security concerns and preserving the American dominant position in the international arena were the foremost concerns of President Nixon and NSC-advisor Kissinger. These ideas clashed with those of Dutch politicians of for instance the Labour Party who wanted détente, an active human rights policy and development cooperation to be part of the Atlantic foreign policy agenda. The American embassy in The Hague was aware of these changes: it noticed a turn to the left in Dutch society and the political landscape. The Dutch cabinets in the period concerned faced domestic pressure to take a more critical stance towards the United States, where the Nixon administration faced problems concerning its image and credibility because of the Vietnam war and the Watergate scandal. On the other hand, unmistakable signs of continuity in the Dutch-American relationship were present. The Dutch governments in the years concerned did not turn away from Atlantic cooperation, as the Netherlands remained dependent on the American military commitment to Western Europe. Détente was ...

Nineteenth-century outlaw Ned Kelly is probably Australia's most famous historical figure. Ever since the start of his outlawry in 1878 his story has been repeated time and again, in every conceivable medium. Although the value of his memory has been hotly contested, he remains perhaps the national icon of Australia. This project explores the development of the cultural memory of Kelly over time, and the contributions it has made to constructions of national identity. Firstly, I show how the memory has functioned in both radical and conservative ways, sometimes both at once. It appears to exist in an eternally contradictory state. Secondly, this condition is linked to a series of complex and conflicting roles the Kelly memory has played in identity formation and negotiation. Ever since his outlawry, the identities invested in Kelly and those invested in the Australian nation have, in a two-way dynamic, fused into and strengthened each other, so that Kelly is in many ways a symbol for the national identity. Kelly has come to stand for an anti-establishment, working class subaltern Irish-inflected national identity. At the same time he has come to represent and enforce the whiteness, hyper-heterosexual masculinity, and violence of "Australianness". Thirdly, the identity-functions Kelly's memory has had are themselves brought about by specific sets of relationships that have composed the memory over time. Enduring cultural memories are never made by politicians, monuments, or individual media representations alone; they are formed and develop through tangles of relations that reach back and forth across time. I identify three sets of relationships in the case of Ned Kelly: medial, political, and temporal. Questions of media, temporality, and power have all been crucial to the emerging field of memory studies, and seem to be some of the main constituencies of all cultural memories, though their constellations are always different. The remembrance of Kelly provides a way in which to identify and analyse for the first ...

This Phd-thesis analyses three peace-support operations gone wrong. In Somalia (1992-1993) Canadian troops tortured a young Somali thief to death and shot another. In Rwanda (1994) ten Belgian soldiers were murdered, after which the Belgian government withdrew the battalion, giving free rein to Hutu-extremists and their genocidal plans. In Srebrenica (1995) Dutch troops (Dutchbat) could not prevent the murder of 8.000 muslim men by Bosnian Serbs. The dramatic events initiated laborious and emotial aftermaths in Canada, Belgium and the Netherlands. In each case the question of accountability was raised: who could be held responsible for what had happened in Somalia, Rwanda and Srebrenica? This Phd examines this question at both the political and military level, as well as at the level of the victims and their sympathisers (the 'agenda-setters', including critical journalists). A separate chapter is dedicated to the many 'fact finding' committees and the problems they encountered in reconstructing the facts. Their reports would often be 'hijacked' by other actors. Starting point of this dissertation is the premiss that the events were so dramatic as to necessitate a deep-probing and sensitive process of accountability. Somalia, Rwanda and Srebrenica could not simply be ignored. The Canadian, Belgian and Dutch democracies maintain extensive systems of accountability (ministerial accountability, military law, et cetera), at least on paper, so apportioning accountability ought to be possible. In reality, hoewever, nearly all players (politicians, soldiers, bureaucrats) - though admitting 'mistakes' and 'bad judgements' - refrained from accepting accountability as such, let alone guilt. All players used specific arguments (often contextual: 'The circumstances prevented me/us from protecting the local population') or instruments (whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, bureaucratic infighting et cetera). They soon constructed a static 'standard account' to explain their actions and decisions. In the end (in the ...