Central Reference Point Research Articles

CEDAW Right of non-discrimination and State Obligations in connection to Trafficking in Women

Trafficking in human beings as a practice mostly involves women and is gender determined. Discrimination against women is both a push factor and a product of trafficking in women. The CEDAW (Convention for the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination of Women)is the central reference point in the context of the right to be free from discrimination regarding trafficking in women, since it is an instrument that deals exclusively with gender discrimination in an encompassing way. In 1979, the CEDAW addressed the issue of trafficking in women. This pivotal Convention for the affirmation and implementation of women’s human rightssets out to assure respect for the human rights of women through elimination of all forms of discrimination against them, and thus it recognized trafficking of women as a product of the ongoing discrimination against women. CEDAW distinguishes between negative and positive obligations of states in addressing discrimination against women. It developed a typology of state obligations: the obligation to respect, fulfil and protect with respect to trafficking of women, and women victims. On the bases of the theoretical background the scope of application and the concept of the right affected by the practice of trafficking was established and analysed. The relevant state obligations with respect to the right to be free from discrimination affected by the practice of trafficking and the breaches of obligations in the context of trafficking that amounted to the violations of the right were identified, thus connecting it to the set of positive state obligations under CEDAW and the possible prevention and protections actions that derive from those international standards.

Guest Editor’s Column

Guest Editor’s Column Jens Brockmeier Under the title Narrative Hermeneutics, this special issue engages in a dialogue between two notions: narrative and human understanding—the latter often being examined under the heading of hermeneutics. Both narrative and hermeneutics stand for independent traditions of study rooted in various humanities, especially philosophy and literary and linguistic disciplines. Over the last few decades, both have attracted new attention by theorists and even scientists, as is reflected by novel multi- and transdisciplinary formations such as the narrative turn and the interpretive turn. It is thus surprising that the manifold links between these two traditions have not received more attention in Anglo-Saxon debates on literature, narrative, and philosophy. One reason might be that hermeneutical ideas for long have had a hard time, even if some of them might have already taken shape as part of the pragmatist program, as Rorty has argued (e.g., 1991). Still, there is a striking contrast with Continental traditions, particularly with what Rorty has called the post-Nietzschean tradition of Franco-German thought. Here, philosophers of hermeneutics such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Derrida, who have equally interrogated theoretical and literary texts to develop their arguments, have understood themselves [End Page ix] as embedded in overarching intellectual continuities that reach back to Greek antiquity. They have essentially contributed to the formation of twentieth- and twenty-first-century hermeneutics as a conceptual tradition offering an alternative to structuralist, empiricist, and positivist (including, more recently, cognitivist, neuroscientific, and materialist) philosophies of science, language, and the mind. What gives this tradition its alternative charge is the particular attention given to humans’ capacities of interpretive understanding, intersubjectivity, and meaning-making. The essays in this volume address a number of questions discussed in this tradition and connect them to present theorizing in narrative studies. Yet they have more in common than an interest in these two traditions and their intersections. There also is the assumption that interpretation and understanding is not only a philosophical concern but also a central dimension of narrative itself. Some even view the telling and understanding of stories as a hermeneutical operation sui generis, an interpretive act of meaning. On this view, hermeneutical operations are at the heart of every process of narrative understanding; in fact, narrative is interpretive meaning formation. This vision is complemented by a conception of interpretive understanding as a narrative process. One focus of this conception is on the understanding of complex temporal experiences—for example, of individual and historical changes. Mostly these scenarios include trouble. In fact, whenever we are to understand complex, troubled, and messy human affairs we conceive of them as something that happens in time; that is, we narrativize them. This argument is unfolded by Ricoeur in his magisterial study Time and Narrative (1984, 1985, 1988), in which he investigates the narrative fabric of basic forms of time experience. In doing so, Ricoeur has also pointed out in a more general sense how interpretive understanding is narratively organized once it has reached a certain level of intricacy. That this complexity is due to our unique historical and cultural being in the world is a point that has been made, perhaps, even more strongly in Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960/2004). Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is, besides Ricoeur’s, the second central point of reference for the papers in this issue. To examine the narrative organization of processes of understanding [End Page x] is one of the central subjects of narrative hermeneutics. Yet the seven articles in this issue also demonstrate that there is a broad and variegated range of studies inspired by these ideas. Scholars from several disciplines with various research interests explore a number of (oral and written) types and genres of narrative. They not only expand the traditional scope of hermeneutical investigations, which was focused on the interpretation or exegesis of texts, toward a concept of text that, in the wake of Ricoeur, extends to more general structures of human action. They also reinterpret the very meaning of understanding and interpretation itself. More than this, in his contribution to this collection, “Hermeneutics beyond the Species Boundary: Explanation and Understanding in Animal Narratives,” David Herman shows how telling and...

Lógica de la gestión ambientalmente adecuada y patrón de desarrollo sustentable en américa latina: el tema emblemático de las políticas de residuos peligrosos en Argentina en los años 90

This article presents a discursive-political analysis of the greening process experienced by the markets and Latin American States during the 90's through the study of the emblematic issue of the environmentally sound management policies of hazardous waste in Argentina. The perspective of this article is the post-Marxist analysis of policies that seeks to put emphasis on the founding moments of significant processes involved in public policies. To understand and critique such greening process, it was necessary to identify the logic of the adequate environmentally sound management as a category that allowed condensing a cluster of discursive practices aimed at: reducing the State to mere market operator, self-restrict its sovereign powers, and limit its work around hazardous waste to the information recording function towards favoring strategies of business self-control. The explanation of the research problem constructed from the logic of the environmentally sound management led, in turn, to the identification of a central explanatory hypothesis of the greening process in the 90's in Argentina and Latin America: sustainable development as development pattern and central reference point in the decade when it comes to signify environmental problems and their most adequate solutions. The idea of pattern implies in this case, rather than any supposed international humanitarian-ecological intervention for the technical protection of the natural environment, the most adequate, on one hand, for the radicalization of structurally heterogeneous conditions of peripheral economy such as the Argentinian economy and, on the other hand, to go deeper into the asymmetries between the North and South countries as well as the transnationalism of the national productive.

A noise delivery system for multi-animal multi-level whole body ototoxicity studies.

The Naval Medical Research Unit Dayton (NAMRU-D) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, in conjunction with the U.S. Air Force, studied ototoxic effects of JP-8 in rats. NAMRU-D used a multi-chamber whole body exposure facility for up to 96 test animals and 32 control animals at different exposure levels. The objective was to design a noise delivery system that could provide a white noise source one octave band wide, centered at 8 kHz frequency, delivered from outside the exposure chambers. Sound pressure levels were required to be within ±2 dB at all exposure points within each chamber and within ±2 dB over a 6-h run. Electrodynamic shakers were used to produce input noise in exposure chambers by inducing vibration in chamber plenums. Distribution of sound pressure levels across exposure points was controlled within a ±1.5dB prediction interval (α = 0.05) or better. Stability at a central reference point was controlled over 6-h runs within a ±1 dB prediction interval (α = 0.05) or better. The final system allowed NAMRU-D to deliver noise and whole-body aerosol exposures to multiple animals at different levels simultaneously and study the effects that ototoxins may have on hearing loss.

Dans l'atelier néoclassique: écrire l'Italie, de Chateaubriand à Stendhal

This impressive re-evaluation of neoclassicism viewed through the prism of early nineteenth-century French literary responses to Rome — the ‘terre d’élection du néoclassicisme’ (p. 12) — drives a coach and horses through commonly held assumptions about its ahistorical nature. Taking her cue from the work of Michel Delon, and using Winckelmann and Canova as her central reference points, Élodie Saliceto demonstrates that, paradoxically, it is a modernist discourse that looks backwards, an exemplification of Romanticism rather than the latter's binomial opposite. She decries approaches in terms of ‘taste’ and argues that it is as much a question of ideology as of aesthetics. Adopting an unexpectedly wide-angle vision, she provides ample evidence of ‘l'entreprise totalisante menée par le regard néoclassique’ (p. 407). Neoclassicism is thus identified in discourses, practices, attitudes, and sentiments that together go beyond the confines of art and literature to become a way of viewing the self in life and in death and of establishing a sense of the present through an insistence on its relation to the past. For Saliceto, understanding its significance is necessarily to embrace the period's concern with, for example, eloquence, genius, the commemoration of great men, and palingenesis, as well as ‘la réflexion muséographique’ (p. 400) and other features of what she terms ‘la pensée patrimoniale’, a dimension that incorporates a compelling discussion of funerary architecture. This duly gives a new potency to the kindred cultivation of the sublime. Not the least telling part of the author's analysis is provided by the extensive illustration of her claim that ‘[l]e rêve néoclassique d'une résurgence présente de l'Antiquité s'incarne encore en la personne même de Napoléon Bonaparte, géant des temps modernes façonné à l'antique par le concours des différents arts' (p. 49), although, as she notes, the Emperor never made it to ‘la città eterna’. The writers who constitute her principal focus, and who are consistently, and revealingly, compared and contrasted, are Chateaubriand, Mme de Staël, and Stendhal, with Staël's Corinne in particular being imbued with a new importance. If the works of the neoclassical artists and sculptors invoked are not subjected to similar scrutiny, it is because Saliceto's purpose is specifically to identify ‘des paradigmes transartistiques susceptibles de faire état de configurations néoclassiques en littérature’ (p. 16). There are, nonetheless, some apt observations on, for example, Tischbein's portrait of Goethe in the Roman countryside, in which ‘chaque élément […] s'insère dans un véritable système, élaborant un discours néoclassique’ (p. 329). Questionably, though, Saliceto's neoclassicism remains stubbornly chaste, despite her references to Girodet and her acknowledgement of the fascination of Winckelmann and Latouche with the hermaphrodite. The volume is frequently designated an essai but retains the format of its earlier status as a doctoral thesis. This is most visible in its organization, but also in the amount of space devoted at times to literary, artistic, and philosophical antecedents, and in the tendency in earlier sections for the author's fundamental purpose to be obscured by the wealth of information provided. Her volume is, nevertheless, a landmark study.

Relations of Production

Simondon’s concept of the transindividual has become a central point of reference for contemporary critical philosophy and social philosophy. Despite its importance in the work of such writers as Étienne Balibar, Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler and Paolo Virno, Simondon’s works have not been translated into English, and thus no comprehensive study has appeared so far. Muriel Combes’s book presents not only a study of Simondon’s thought, but an examination of what it makes possible in terms of rethinking social relations.

Enhancing 2D Cervical Length With 3D Cervix Imaging Emphasizing the Center Reference Point

Use of transvaginal ultrasonography for cervical length measurement at the 20-week anatomic examination has been suggested as a screening method to predict the risk of preterm birth. This article describes a three-dimensional ultrasonographic multiplanar imaging method of cervical length measurement by manipulating the center reference point and volume axes. This methodology should yield a more consistent, accurate measurement of the cervical length compared to conventional two-dimensional ultrasonographic methods. Also described are additional software image manipulation techniques to enhance visualization of the relational anatomy of the cervix. Precise utilization of the center reference point and available image reconstruction software augment current two-dimensional morphologic information of the lower genital tract.

Is Toronto obsolete?: Process and ambivalence in Marshall McLuhan’s urban studies

Abstract In this article I reflect on the obsolescence of Toronto in order to enquire into the fate of the city as a viable entity within the terms of Marshall McLuhan’s investigations of the late 1960s and their relevance for today. By 1968 McLuhan had pronounced the city obsolete in a universe of globe-extending news satellites and Bucky Fuller domes, that artefactualized and programmed nature. The city as obsolete was a ‘probe’ McLuhan offered to make sense of the enhancements of supersonic speeds of jet travel that he called Jet City. Using the Dew-Line Newsletter as my central point of reference, I want to develop McLuhan’s ideas that arose in the city’s wake; these are threefold: Jet City, mini-states and the application of the Joycean nostrum the ‘the urb… it orbs’. Indeed, in the 1970s McLuhan talked more and more about cities in terms of aviation-figures, as airports coordinating flights and passages, of corporate hijackings and crashes. McLuhan asked us to imagine ‘circulating cities’ in the forms of mass migrations, for business and pleasure, of populations on the move, anticipating the multiple mobilities of the present day. Yet at the same time, revealing the lived tension of his position, he acted against plans for the downtown Spadina Expressway, against the developers, as a homeowner who still lived in a neighbourhood worth protecting from development.

Securing Japan in the ‘West’: The US-Japan Alliance and Identity Politics in the Asian Century

Why has the military dimension of the US-Japan relationship remained the central point of reference for Japanese foreign relations, despite the demise of the Soviet Union? Why has Japan, deepening economic interdependence notwithstanding, remained politically distant from East Asia? Based on analysis of statements by Japanese and US political elites and academics regarding the US-Japan alliance, this article argues that the rise of China, coterminous with the rise of ‘Asia’, challenges the notion of the ‘West’ as, according to standards of industrial modernity, a superior social and political order. These moving ideational boundaries question Japan’s position as the most advanced Asian nation and member of the (Western) international society of states. Therefore, the US-Japan alliance has since the mid-1990s become increasingly important for securing Japan in the ‘West’ and the ‘West’s boundaries in East Asia.

Peripheral nasal-temporal corneal asymmetry in relation to corneal thickness: a Scheimpflug imaging study.

To investigate the asymmetry of the peripheral cornea up to 5mm nasally and temporally from the centre and to assess correlations with regional peripheral corneal thickness. Central and peripheral corneal thickness was measured by Scheimpflug imaging (Pentacam) in 113 eyes of 113 healthy, pre-presbyopic Caucasian subjects. Absolute and relative corneal thickness were analysed in 1mm steps up to 5mm to the nasal and temporal sides with the corneal apex as the central reference point. Nasal-temporal asymmetry was calculated as the thickness ratio between corresponding off-centre thickness measurements. The mean (±SD) central corneal thickness was 552±36μm. CT increased by 22% at 4mm temporally to 672±44μm, and 32% at 4mm nasally to 731±45μm. The nasal-temporal asymmetry became greater with increasing distance from the corneal centre, with a mean difference of 59±22μm at 4mm from the apex. The nasal-temporal thickness ratio, based on this difference, was significantly related to the relative temporal (r=-0.41, p<0.001, simple linear regression) and nasal corneal thickness (r=0.61, p<0.001). A substantial and progressively increasing nasal-temporal asymmetry in corneal thickness has been confirmed by Scheimpflug imaging, which is related to the magnitude of corneal thickness at peripheral locations. Pachymetry output data and models, including volume calculations, that assume symmetry to the corneal thickness profile may not provide optimum metrics for planning and predicting the outcome of corneal refractive surgery procedures.

Redrawing Europe’s Map

Redrawing Europe’s Map

How Benefits Recipients Perceive Themselves through the Lens of the Mass Media - Some Observations from Germany

Dominant cultural representations of ‘the typical benefits recipient’ – notably in reality television and the tabloids – have been marked by an increasing focus on the character and alleged moral defects of individuals. Drawing on interviews from a large-scale German qualitative longitudinal study, this article explores how benefits recipients respond to such negative media images. Our analysis of interviewees’ ‘identity work’ finds that they have internalised and replicate negative public discourses to a surprising extent. The figure of the ‘typical’ benefits recipient constructed in the media emerges as both a threat to recipients’ self-identities, and as a central reference point in the strategies through which they attempt to defend their respectability. The article concludes with some thoughts on the relationship between such negative representations and the political legitimacy of welfare reform.

Reversals of Exile: Williams Sassine’sWirriyamuand Tierno Monénembo’sPelourinho

Abstract:This essay examines two novels by exiled Guinean writers in which physical space functions as a central point of reference for very different, though related, considerations of traumatized memory, identity, and exile. In Williams Sassine’sWirriyamu(1976), a violent and violated rural landscape becomes emblematic of a specific traumatic event occurring within the time frame of the novel and of contemporary political reality; while in Tierno Monénembo’sPelourinho(1995), a present-day cityscape provides consistently uncertain territory for thinking through a trauma that transcends history, that of the transatlantic slave trade. This article seeks to examine some of the ways in which contemporary trauma theory may be useful in reading Francophone West African fiction as well as some of the limitations of this theory in its applications to this corpus.

P16.22: A novel methodology of 3D cervix imaging emphasizing the center reference point: a pictorial essay

<scp>P</scp>16.22: A novel methodology of <scp>3D</scp> cervix imaging emphasizing the center reference point: a pictorial essay

Narration and Experience: Looking at an Education based on “Poor” Pedagogy – an Analysis based on a Learning-to-Write Situation

With an approach that designates the classroom as its central reference point and a concrete classroom situation as its starting point, this paper attempts to reflect a perspective that may suggest a teaching practice that leads to poor pedagogy. To achieve this, this paper will work on inverting the logic we frequently employ when thinking about education and school. From this perspective, some axes become central: (1) to produce a view about the idea of knowledge and learning, (2) an awareness of a certain notion of “to teach” and finally (3) starting from a focus on the type of childhood that creates a necessity of “infantilizing” pedagogy, or in other words, we must aim towards a “poor” pedagogy. I will address this through a study carried out with children in the initial stages of their education and literacy learning.

Measurement of Ulnar Variance From the Lateral Radiograph: A Comparison of Techniques

To determine the reliability of measuring ulnar variance on lateral wrist radiographs and to compare this technique with previously described methods. Ulnar variance was measured in 100 normal wrist radiographs using the methods of perpendiculars, central reference point, and the lateral radiograph by 3 surgeons on 2 occasions. Intraobserver repeatability and agreement between raters and methods were assessed and compared. Intra- and interobserver reliability and agreement were both excellent using all 3 methods within a ± 1.0-mm cutoff. However, there was substantial pairwise disagreement in measures of ulnar variance between all 3 methods. This study demonstrates that, for measurement of ulnar variance, the methods of perpendiculars, central reference point, and lateral radiographic measurement each have clinically acceptable intraobserver repeatability and interobserver agreement. Despite their independent reliability, each method of radiographic determination of ulnar variance had considerable disagreement with the other methods, indicative of inherent inaccuracies in the techniques. The lateral radiograph uniquely allows for visualization of the amount of ulnar head protruding proximal or distal to the concave lunate facet and allows for a rapid estimation of pronosupination, which is known to affect ulnar variance. Determination of ulnar variance can be an important component of surgical decision making in various pathological conditions of the hand and wrist. Traditionally, it has been measured through methods using the posteroanterior wrist radiograph, but there are potential shortcomings with these methods, and use of the lateral radiograph may provide a more clinically relevant picture of ulnar variance. This study shows that measurement from the lateral radiograph provides similar reliability to previously accepted techniques.

Realismo e obbiettivismo: Alexius Meinong

Meinong has become a central reference point in the contemporary revival of realism. However, prima facie, it might seem paradoxical to call him a realist since he explicitly wanted to do away with any kind of bias in favor of reality. It is therefore worth asking in which sense the Theory of Object, as far as it resolutely goes beyond reality, can be characterized as essentially realist. As a Brentanist the Austrian philosopher endorsed a strong realism with regard to empirical reality; in his view, this is the proper object of metaphysics. However, it seems more difficult to make sense of his realism in respect of those objects that are not real - and, as a matter of fact, of every kind of object - which he calls ‘objectivism’. This paper investigates the real meaning of such ‘objectivism’ and sees in that stance, beyond its superficial (neo- )Kantian features, an anti-Copernican revolution in philosophy that proclaims the unconditional precedence of the object over thought. Reading Meinong thus helps us to understand better what realism is.

Stuyvesant Bound: An Essay on Loss Across Time by Donna Merwick

650 ■ NEW YORK HISTORY utes, Moravian records, and other sources spanning 1682–1785. While that appendix—and the work it could inspire—provide a fuller sense of the lives of Munsee Indians, they do little to elucidate another of the ledger’s mysteries: the identity of the bookkeeper whose handwriting is distinct from that recording transactions on colonists’ accounts. The unpublished remainder of the account book could conceivably contain clues to that identity as well as each bookkeepers’ relation to Indian affairs in the Ulster County region. But, the editors clearly chose to privilege the more exceptional contents of the manuscript over less unusual material documenting trade relations between colonists. That decision exemplifies Smith and Waterman’s central concern with making widely accessible for the first time an invaluable, detailed, intriguing primary source that raises as many questions as it answers, and that will undoubtedly serve as the basis for further studies. Stuyvesant Bound: An Essay on Loss Across Time. By Donna Merwick. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, 248 pages, $59.95 Cloth. Reviewed by D.L. Noorlander, SUNY Oneonta Donna Merwick’s new book on Peter Stuyvesant begins at the end: with the final frustrating months of his administration and the loss of New Netherland to English conquerors. This is no biography, but a threepart , eleven-chapter “essay” organized around the themes of duty, belief, and loss—or what the author calls “the trope of loss” (xii). The last of the three is most important, permeating the book from start to finish, providing a central reference point in a sometimes-muddled, sometimes-insightful exploration of the competitive, precarious times in which Stuyvesant lived. Merwick argues that one can only understand New Netherland’s most famous governor by abandoning our obsession with modernity and recognizing that he inhabited a pre-modern, post-Reformation world. Examples of this post-Reformation thinking abound. In the first section, on Stuyvesant’s oath and duties, the author explains the sacred meaning of the oath and the fuzzy boundary between secular and ecclesiastical author- Book Reviews 651 ity. Stuyvesant was simultaneously a servant of the West India Company (WIC) and protector of the public church, the man who paid the clergy and the soldiers. He had to worry about smuggling, border disputes, land sales, customs collection, and defense—but also about marriage law and religious confessionalism. He even oversaw the colony’s bakers and baking regulations , which Merwick describes as “a premodern system that looked to obligations not liberties, to the ethics of corporate obligation not individualism ” (23). In political conflicts with colonists over WIC government and disputes with Quakers and other non-conformers, he earned a reputation for severity, even tyranny. Yet she argues that his rhetoric and policies were typical for the time period: Other rulers also worried about sedition and loyalty; still others feared the anarchy and insubordination that Quakers purportedly inspired. Merwick again reminds readers to see and think like a seventeenth-century European when, for example, she writes about the governor’s efforts to obtain volunteers for the colonial militia. He failed not because the town magistrates disliked him or because of some precocious democratic impulse among the Dutch. Rather, a certain “prenationalist localism,” “premodern particularism,” and “civic corporatism” allowed communities (according to Dutch tradition) to act first in their own defensive self-interest (54). Merwick’s style will probably repel more people than it attracts. Quite admirably, she tries to make her sources real, she tries to help us see them and engage with them as any good teacher and historian would—almost like she’s encountering them herself for the first time as one reads. The result is a lot of first and second person, a good deal of I, me, you, and us. As she studies Stuyvesant’s journal, she is “with him,” and she wants us to be there too, wishing we could overhear more conversations and “go with him to church, have a look at where he was living” (61, 132). This desire is a natural extension of the argument about time and context. But one starts to feel that the author is trying too hard. Her artsy, literary flair sometimes does more to...

Russia before the ‘Radiant Future: Essays in Modern History, Culture and Society by Michael Confino (review)

SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 900 imperial predecessor, did not always get what it wanted out of the governmentsponsored intelligentsia. Platt ends his book with a sample of post-Soviet images that illustrate the on-going cultural richness of Russian myth-making about Ivan and Peter. Department of History E. K. Wirtschafter California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Confino, Michael. Russia before the ‘Radiant Future’: Essays in Modern History, Culture and Society. Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 2011. xiii + 296 pp. Notes. Selected bibliography. Index. $90.00. £53.00. Among the handful of historians of Russia whose work not only helped to shape the field but seems destined to remain a central point of reference, Michael Confino (1926–2010) ranks as high as any. Domaines et seigneurs en Russie vers la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1963), and Systèmes agraires et progrès agricole: L’assolement triennial en Russie aux XVIIIe–XIXe siècles (The Hague, 1969), are classic monographs. Even if it is confined to contributions in English, the appearance of a volume of Confino’s essays is therefore an event, tinged inevitably with sadness at the knowledge that the author received the copy-edited typescript two days before his death. (The book has been guided through the press by his son, Alon.) Confino’s demise deprived the field not only of one of its most distinguished practitioners, but also of one of the most trenchant. Having risen to prominence in the 1960s as a combative participant in a debate about the eighteenth-century Russian nobility, he lost none of his forensic power as his interests multiplied. It is worth the not inconsiderable price of this book just to re-read ‘Reinventing the Enlightenment: Western Images of Eastern Realities in the Eighteenth Century’ (pp. 187–205). First published as a review article in 1994, this coruscating demolition of Larry Wolff’s Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA, 1994), is one of six essays, here reprinted in revised and updated form, that originally appeared between 1973 and 2003. The remaining five are: ‘Alexander Herzen and Isaiah Berlin on Russia’s Elusive Counter-Enlightenment’, which suggests that Herzen anticipated Berlin; ‘Russian and Western Roots of Soviet Totalitarianism’, which concludes that ‘the modest lesson that may be drawn from the Russian experience is not one of the inevitability of evil’ (p. 52); ‘Traditions, Old and New: Aspects of Protest and Dissent in Modern Russia’; ‘On Intellectuals and Intellectual Traditions in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Russia’, a fertile think-piece exploring (among other things) the continuities between nihilism and modernism; and ‘Current Events and the Representation of the Past: Issues in Russian Historical Writing’. Alongside these stand four previously unpublished (and generally somewhat slighter) pieces: ‘The Nobility in Russia and Western Europe: REVIEWS 901 Contrasts and Similarities’; ‘Comparing Russian Serfdom and American Slavery’, which suggests, contra Peter Kolchin, that the differences between the two were more significant than the similarities; ‘Agrarian Crisis, Urbanization, and the Russian Peasants at the End of the Old Regime, 1880s–1920s’; and ‘Political Murder in Russian Culture: Comparisons and Counterfactuals’, a breezy dismissal of Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s The Russian Syndrome: One Thousand Years of Political Murder (Teaneck, NJ, 1992), perhaps too easy a target. These ten chapters are framed by an introduction, ‘The Discipline and I’, stressing the resilience and flexibility of historical research as a creative, critical synthesis of various methodological approaches to the past, and a briefer ‘Afterword’ (pp. 272–75) specifying Confino’s own ‘basic principles’. No reader of these essays could be left in any doubt about the strength of his unspoken assumptions. Committed to directness and precision, he pulled no punches. Since ‘historical contexts are always discrete and specific’ (p. 203), he saw ‘no benefit’ in a decontextualized history of ideas (p. 204). As one who believed that ‘truth exists and is attainable through a process of trial and error’ (p. 272), he had no time for the mixture of fact and fiction that goes under the title ‘l’histoire imaginaire’. Convinced of the objective, discoverable reality of both past and present, he found no room for...

A Critical Appraisal of the Margin of Appreciation Left to States Pertaining to 'Church–State Relations' Under the Jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights

In Europe the most central reference point concerning fundamental rights is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the related jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). This chapter starts with an identification and appraisal of problems with the margin of appreciation doctrine in general. It focuses on problems with the margin of appreciation doctrine as applied to church-state relations. The chapter highlights the special position of secularism and the protection of secularism as a legitimate aim of restrictions to the freedom to manifest one's religion. A connection is made with duties of reasonable accommodation on grounds of religion in terms of the prohibition of discrimination. Potential future developments in this respect are discussed. While the Court still tends to use the language of a broad margin of appreciation for states concerning church-state relations, in several contexts the margin is de facto reduced. Keywords:church-state relations; European convention on human rights (ECHR); European court of human rights (ECtHR); freedom of religion; margin of appreciation