Search results

Scholars long have examined the early modern European business of war – the recruitment, supply, and payment of combatants by non-native contractors. With such attention on who conducted this commerce, however, scholars have ignored where the business of war took place. As Peter Wilson and Marianne Klerk recently have argued in this journal, war business was often conducted in politically autonomous cities. This article takes their findings further by showing how naval contractors and army victuallers conducted the business of war in substantially different spatial settings in one fiscal-military hub, Genoa, during one conflict, the War of Spanish Succession.

This short commentary reflects upon some of the current debates about qualitative methods within European psychology. It notes that the rebirth of qualitative methods towards the end of the twentieth century often coupled an epistemological challenge to the quantitative orthodoxy within psychology with a political challenge to social injustice. However, more recently there have been tensions imposed by the increasing state and institutional surveillance of research. Qualitative researchers need to reflect upon these wider pressures if they are to retain their original critical impulse.

The purpose of this article is to evaluate and analyse the politicization of the government administration in the South African context. This article challenges the view held by many scholars and practitioners of public administration and the public at large that there are available options dividing the politics and the administration of government, and that such is achievable in South Africa. In Africa and worldwide the citizens complain and associate the benefits of a government administration to be exclusive to a certain sector of individuals and their groups with sound political connections and inter-relationships. While today most government administrations claim to operate through systems that are fair, equitable and transparent, such claim remains relative because fairness, equity and transparency may only be a privilege to those within the circle of political friendship and ties in government. In essence, the general view held on the relationship between politics and government administration is that, there are alternative approachesto provide government administration that is neutral and objective to the politics ofthe country. The research question to be answered in this article is whether the South African government may have sound alternative approaches towards separating their government administration from their subjective party political agenda. This article argues, however, that South Africa's claim of fair, equitable and objectively practised public administration free from political persecution of the opposition is a myth which started with the Mandela's reconciliatory public administration through the Mbeki's depoliticized bureaucracy and the current politicized bureaucracy of the Zuma administration. A fair public administration free from political interferences and interventions is likely not to exist even in the most highly respected democratic states of the globe. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n7p208

Post-1945 decolonisation involved the universal acceptance of nation-statehood as the alternative to imperialism. Nationalism vanquished its transnational competitors, notably imperialism and Marxism. Alternatives to imperial rule that avoided sovereign states on national lines, such as federations in the later 1940s and 1950s, have received less attention from historians. Federations involved alternative ways of thinking about sovereignty, territoriality, and political economy. British interest in creating federations, for example the Central African Federation (CAF) in 1953, offers some new perspectives on the strength of imperial ideology and the determination to continue a missionary imperialism after the Second World War. Federal thinking and practice was prominent at this time in other European empires too, notably the French and Dutch ones. The federal idea was also an aspect of the emerging European community. This is suggestive of a wider "federal moment" that points to the importance of linking international, trans-national, imperial, and world historical approaches.

Parallel Session: Political Economy ; Program and Papers of the Conference at: http://www.sef.hku.hk/aslea2011/private/Program%20v20.pdf ; I study and compare preference aggregation in a simultaneous and a sequential multicandidate election. Voters have perfect information about their own preference but do not know the median voter's preference. A voter has an incentive to vote for her second choice for fear that a tie between her second and third choice is more likely than she would like. Therefore, a voter may want to coordinate with supports of her second choice. I show that when voters. preference intensity for their .rst choice is moderate, in the limit as the electorate increases, there is a unique equilibrium in the voting game within one voting round exhibiting multi-candidate support. In such an equilibrium, the ex ante probability that a candidate wins increases in her supporters. preference intensity and decreases in her opponents' preference intensity. There is too much coordination with supporters of a voter's second choice in that sometimes the median voter's second choice wins the election. A sequential election allows later voters to coordinate with earlier voters. Therefore, in the last voting round, votes are split between the two front runners. The voting outcome in the first round affects the voting behavior of the second round. A victory of a voter's favorite candidate in the first round may change the outcome of the second round from the voter's second choice to her favorite candidate or from her last choice to her second choice. When preference intensity is moderate, voters vote more for their first choice if they vote first in a sequential election than in a simultaneous election, and the probability that the median voter's first choice does not win a voting round is smaller if voting takes place sequentially. Using this model, I show that in a sequential election with ex ante identical states, no matter who the median voter in New Hampshire is, voting first is better than voting second if preference intensity is small. ; postprint

Theme: Where Are We Now? ; Writing about the history of women in the 19th century, the French historian Alain Corbin remarks: "Women's history is like an echo, perceived with the help of a whole range of male data, despite the efforts of historians (both male and female) to seek out women's words more directly, Almost all the documents in the public archives were written by men in positions of responsibilities."1 Such is certainly the case of French colonial history, which until recently has been dominated by an almost exclusively male cast. In this paper, I discuss some of the challenges I encounter in my own research on the lives of French women in Indochina in the early decades of the 20th century. One major issue has to do with the politics of selecting and cataloguing sources in the archives, which is heavily gender and class inflected. The second challenge lies in the reading and interpretation of the archival sources on and by women. ; postprint

Register will enable councils to target support, but they need help to assess pupil progress, says MP

Plato is one of the most influential thinkers since the Classical time of Greece. Most of the literary criticisms came after him were trying to reply Plato to defend the moral authority of poetry. This paper is an attempt to intertwine the two seemingly unparalleled stream of thoughts club into a common politico-critical space. Plato, the Athenian philosopher, who lived somewhere around 428/427 or 424/423 – 348/347 BC might be a strange figure in the socio-political context of the second half of twentieth century. But his critical thoughts, especially his literary criticism, find an interesting parallel in Postcolonial stream of literary criticism. It's an attempt to read Plato from a Postcolonial angle and positioning him as a critique in Postcolonial critical space. This paper analyses Plato's Book X of The Republic and the position taken by Socrates, the central character of Plato's Dialogues. Plato's ideas on Mimesis and his other major criticism against poetry are juxtaposed here with postcolonial criticism of Edward Said, Michel Foucault, Chinua Achebe and other major postcolonial critiques.