Comparative Historical Perspective Research Articles

Auxiliaries in Old Dutch

Abstract This study explores the use of auxiliaries in the oldest text available for Old Dutch, the Wachtendonck Psalter, dating from the 10th century. Our aim is to understand why there are so few different auxiliaries in this text in comparison to other texts in Old Dutch. We tackle this question by taking a historical comparative perspective, using methodological insights and techniques from corpus-based contrastive linguistics and typology. More specifically, we build a diachronic parallel corpus of psalm translations and compare the contexts in which auxiliaries and inflectional alternatives are used in these parallel texts by means of multidimensional scaling. Our historical comparative method results in five proximity maps which allow us to explore and compare the inventory of verb constructions of the Wachtendonck Psalter both retrospectively, with its source text in Latin, and prospectively, with later translations in Dutch. Our analysis examines the role of grammaticalization as well as the specific nature of the text as an interlinear translation as possible motivations for the presence and absence of auxiliaries in the Wachtendonck Psalter.

Analisis Batasan Usia Capres: Antara Demokrasi, Meritokrasi, Dan Dinamika Politik Indonesia

The debate on the age limit for presidential and vice-presidential candidates is an important issue in the context of Indonesian democracy. Democracy emphasizes the principles of equality and participation, while meritocracy emphasizes competence and experience. Currently, the minimum age limit for presidential candidates in Indonesia is 35 years old. Debates have arisen over the relevance of this age in the current political context, with arguments in favor of the role of younger generations bringing innovation versus the need for experience and wisdom. This study aims to re-evaluate the age limit for presidential candidates in Indonesia from historical, constitutional and international comparative perspectives, and examine its impact on political dynamics and leadership quality. The research methodology involves literature analysis and recent case studies. The results are expected to contribute significantly to the discussion on the age limit for presidential candidates and its implications for democracy and meritocracy in Indonesia.

Trade unions and occupational health and safety in comparative historical perspective: a comment on South Africa and Britain

Trade unions and occupational health and safety in comparative historical perspective: a comment on South Africa and Britain

Половозрастные названия лошади в монгольских языках (с привлечением тюркского материала

Goals. The study seeks to introduce into scientific circulation and analyze in comparative and comparative historical perspectives — horse age-sex terms in modern Khalkha Mongolian, Buryat, and Kalmyk. By way of comparison, the work employs some material from Classical Mongolian to identify common terms and establish their general Mongolian character; it also attempts to reveal and describe some Turkic lexical borrowings associated with horse breeding, since Mongolic and Turkic languages had long contacted and interacted all across Central Asia. Materials and methods. The paper examines dictionaries of the languages involved, as well as field notes recorded from informants during the summer 2022 expedition to the Oka Buryats (Republic of Buryatia, Russia). The key research methods are the descriptive, comparative, and comparative historical ones; that of lexical/semantic analysis proves most instrumental in describing horse age-sex terms proper. Results. The analysis identifies some breed names of horses and related age-sex designations in Khalkha Mongolian, Buryat, and Kalmyk. The insight into collected materials concludes the horse breed and age-sex terms in modern Khalkha Mongolian, Buryat and Kalmyk are of generally Mongolic origin, and thus attest to common roots and great antiquity of the economic culture of Mongol ethnic groups. However, despite the horse breed and age-sex terms are specifically Mongolic, a number of lexemes of Turkic origin in different phonetic variants have still been traced, namely: x-Mong. Kh. Mong. азарга(н), Bur. азарга, Kalm. аҗрh ‘stallion’; Kh. Mong. жороо, Bur. жороошо, Kalm. җора ‘pacer’; Kh. Mong. агт(ан), Bur. агта, Kalm. агт ‘courser’; Kh. Mong. хүлэг, Bur. хүлэг, Kalm. күлг ‘courser, war horse’; Kh. Mong. аргамаг, Bur. аргамаг, Kalm. аргамак ‘argamak’.

Pandemics and their geographical distribution

Background. The relevance of the presented article is due to an increase in the incidence of COVID-19 and the pandemic getting out of control. In the current conditions, the experience of previous generations and ancient pandemics will be useful for further study of the situation. The purpose of the article is to compare and analyze the experience of overcoming and passing through pandemic states and periods in the history of mankind, as well as to draw up possible theoretical methods for influencing the current situation through this experience. Materials and methods. To reveal the topic, authors used the methods of comparative analysis, historical perspective, induction and deduction, as well as an appeal to archival sources and international authors. Results. Thanks to the derived statistics of the incidence of coronavirus, preventive measures have been created against the spread of the pandemic, the use of which in the future will significantly reduce the risks of morbidity. Conclusions. In the field of studying COVID-19, the experience of previous epidemic periods of history has not been applied on a global scale, which determines the novelty of the presented article.

The Crisis of American Conservatism in Historical–Comparative Perspective

Starting from the assessment that contemporary American conservatism is in a state of crisis, manifested in a dynamic of growing radicalization, this article seeks to identify the factors and actors that contributed to this trajectory and to thus elucidate its more fundamental drivers, assuming that Donald Trump and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movements are symptoms rather than causes of this radicalization. To this effect, a succinct and pointed history of modern American conservatism from its beginnings in the postwar era is presented, using a periodization into three broad eras. Particular attention is given to the internal heterogeneity and conflicts within the conservative movement on a political and an intellectual level that help explain how conservatism as a whole, or at least its dominant forces, has continued to move to the right over the decades. In order to put this trajectory into perspective, a parallel history of German conservatism is used as contrast. One conclusion that can be drawn from this account is that both German and American conservatism are experiencing a crisis, but for very different reasons and with highly different manifestations. While American conservatism is in a radicalization spiral, German conservatism suffers instead from an identity crisis and a loss of any meaningful ideological–political profile.

Theories behind Change of Land Expropriation Institutions in Cross-Strait: An Analysis from Historical Institutionalism Approach

Rapid urbanization in developing countries has led to an increasing demand for urban construction land. As a result, many farmers’ lands have been expropriated by local governments, exacerbating the imbalance between land supply and demand. This issue is particularly pronounced in Chinese Mainland, where land expropriation institutions have operated at a suboptimal level for an extended period. While existing research has explored the current practices and potential avenues for the optimization of the horizontal aspects of land expropriation institutions in Chinese Mainland, there remains a dearth of academic inquiry from a historical developmental and comparative analytical perspective. To address this gap, this article uses the analytical framework of historical institutionalism and combines it with the comparison case method and in-depth interviews to analyze the fundamental path, logic, and dynamic mechanism behind land expropriation institutional change in Cross-Strait and provide insights for similar developing countries. Research shows that Cross-Strait land expropriation institutions have gone through five different stages of development, and finally evolved in the direction of narrowing the scope of expropriation and increasing the compensation for expropriation. Cross-Strait land expropriation institutions show a triple logic in terms of change types, change paths, and change processes: in terms of change types, there are compulsory changes and mutual games between induced factors and actors pushing for compulsory changes; in terms of change paths, there are patterns of displacement, drift, conversion, and layering; and in terms of gradual change processes, path dependence characteristics become apparent within Cross-Strait land expropriation institutions. The synergistic interaction among the institutional milieu, ideas, and actors constitutes the dynamic mechanisms for the change of land expropriation institutions in Cross-Strait.

Possibly mad? Marital murder in the early twentieth century: a matched-case gender analysis of forensic psychiatric investigations in Sweden.

This study illustrates the impact on forensic psychiatric investigations (FPI) of time-specific scientific theories and moral normative considerations. A comparative historical perspective illustrates historical FPI procedures (i.e. methodology and focus), based on two matched FPI case reports from the 1930s: a man and a woman who had shot their respective spouses. First, in the analysis, a comparison was made between the two cases regarding assessment procedure and focus, applying a gender perspective, and second, stability and change in FPI praxis between the 1930s and the 2020s were identified. Similarities and differences were discussed based on changes in FPI praxis and influence of explanatory models within psychiatry. This can aid understanding of historical bias and indicate current bias and its risks to FPI reliability.

The moral economy of land: from land reform to ownership society, 1880–2018

Abstract This article offers a comparative-historical perspective on the moral economy of land. We reconstruct the moral economy of the popular land reform movement that opposed the illegitimate income streams of rentiers and speculators in the early 20th century, tracing the movement’s legacy through a long-run analysis of political party platforms since 1880 in the USA, the UK, Germany and Sweden. We find that the land reformers’ conceptualization of land as a moral good was a key topic in early 20th-century party politics. Parties across the political spectrum called for wide-ranging interventions in unregulated land markets. But despite the movement’s relative success, the new ideal of the ownership society soon gained ground as an alternative to the more radical politics of land decommodification. We find growing multipartisan support for small property owners over time, culminating in the rise of a new moral conceptualization of land as capital. With the recent comeback of the land question, both rural and urban, we conclude that an understanding of historical land reform debates should inform future research toward a much-needed sociology of land.

‘Wandering on a foreign strand!’ - foreign relations and trade policies of Malta and Iceland, 1964-2004

ABSTRACT The paper compares the foreign relations and trade policies of Iceland and Malta and policy reforms in 1964–2004, and the global economic and political context within which they evolved. In a historical comparative perspective, Malta and Iceland exhibited contrasting political processes and electoral systems, dissimilar economic structures and natural resource abundancies and antipodal locations with different foreign security considerations. Their economic structures, policies and institutions became more akin in the 21st century as a result of their participation in the growing economic and political cooperation of Europe.

Post-Nazi Germany’s Democracy: From a Comparative-Historical Perspective

Post-Nazi Germany’s Democracy: From a Comparative-Historical Perspective

REPRESENTATIVE BODIES OF LOCAL SELF-GOVERNMENT IN UKRAINE: NOMENCLATURE AND CONSTITUTIONAL REGULATION

Nowadays a lot of attention in Ukraine is given to the activity of the local self-government bodies. The aim of the article is to give the list of the representative bodies of local self-government (municipal bodies) in Ukraine and to propose how the relevant constitutional regulation might be improved. The author uses legal synthesis, legal analysis, deductive, inductive, comparative (historical perspectives – so called ‘vertical’ comparison) and hermeneutical methods; the article researches the issue based on the antropocentrical and axiological methodological approaches The author analyses Ukrainian constitutional developments in the democracy’s regulation, then pays attention to the theoretical aspects of democracy’s classifications. The last part of this article covers the current problems of the representative bodies of local government in Ukraine: namely, their nomenclature. The author argues that the Ukrainian self-organizes bodies of population can’t be recognized as “representative bodies” (despite the adjectives in the name of the analyzed institute of constitutional law and the analyzed group of bodies). But they probably have a public nature – because they are an element of the system of local self-government in Ukraine. The author invites municipalists to the discussion and argues the own directions of the future researches.

The politics around safe zones: a comparative perspective on return to Northern Syria

Safe zones, initially established as practical tools for refugee protection, have evolved into diplomatic instruments. Through the case of Northern Syria in a historical-comparative perspective, this article explains the link between border politics and host state-induced return to the safe zones; and questions the viability of return within this politicised environment. Considering the earlier experiences of six cases in Sri Lanka, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Afghanistan, it shows how safe zones and refugee return have become venues for power struggles, not only between the origin and host states but also amongst regional and global powers; established with respect to their economic, political and strategic interests. The Northern Syrian case is distinguished by Turkey’s pressure for returns during the conflict, which makes conditions for return dependent on Turkish military presence. Without international support or a UNSC decision, Turkey’s self-proclaimed safe zone lacks international legitimacy, and refugee returns remain dependent on unilateral efforts by the Turkish government. Lack of security, rule of law, access to basic services, reconstruction, and overall prospects undermine the feasibility of safe, voluntary and sustainable returns. And as all actors involved place their military objectives above civilian governance, conditions for security in the safe zone remain precarious.

Intersectionality and Fourth-Wave Feminism in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other

From the 2010s the feminist movement has gained new impetus through widespread transnational activism, fierce resistance to continuing misogyny and sexual violence as well as by fresh currents in feminist thought. Thus, journalists and scholars characterize the proliferation of both grassroots activism and renewed discourses on women’s rights in the media and in academic, political and public discussions as the emergence of a fourth wave of feminism. As a highly thought-provoking literary manifestation of these renewed discourses, Bernardine Evaristo’s verse novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) narrates the experiences of twelve (mainly) Black women in all stages of life, from young adulthood to late life. It highlights their concerns with issues of feminism, intersectionality and intergenerational relations and sets them in a historical-comparative perspective. By interweaving the experiences and memories of several generations of women and their repeated encounters with sexual harassment and gender discrimination throughout different times and places, the novel exposes the persistence of misogyny and sexism as a systemic problem. It is especially these intersectional and intergenerational perspectives that draw attention to deep-rooted structural inequalities. Thereby, and in opposition to any post-feminist stances, Evaristo’s writing gives momentum to the present, transnational feminist movement and can be considered one of the foundational literary texts of the fourth wave of feminism.

Private Insurance, Public Welfare, and Financial Markets: Alpine and Maritime Countries in Comparative-Historical Perspective

Contemporary capitalist societies use different institutions to manage economic risks. While different public welfare state and financial institutions (banks, capital markets) have been studied across coordinated and liberal market economies, the different worlds of private insurance institutions have been understudied. Building on new insurance data sets (1880–2017), we find that countries with a Maritime (USA, GBR, CAN) in contrast to the more backward Alpine (AUT, DEU, CHE) insurance tradition developed bigger life and nonlife insurance earlier, with less state-associated and reinsurance enterprises, but riskier investments steered toward financial markets. We argue that the larger and more “Maritime” the insurance sector, the more it made welfare states liberal and securities markets large. Insurance is thus a hidden factor for countries’ varieties of capitalism and worlds of welfare. The recent convergence on the Maritime model, however, implies that the riskier and risk-individualizing type of private insurance has added to privatization and securitization trends everywhere.

On resistance and pluriversal voices of subversive archaism

On resistance and pluriversal voices of subversive archaism

FROM REGIONS TO THE WORLD: GLOBAL CRISES FROM THE THIRD CENTURY TO TODAY

FROM REGIONS TO THE WORLD: GLOBAL CRISES FROM THE THIRD CENTURY TO TODAY

Struggling for girls’ education: coalition strategies of Norwegian and German women’s rights activists in comparative-historical perspective

ABSTRACT This paper explores how girls’ education developed in Norway and Prussia (and later North Rhine-Westphalia, NRW) during the first and second wave of women’s political mobilisation. It analyses how organisations and activists of the women’s movement were included in different cross-interest coalitions in education politics. The cases are interpreted in light of Rokkanian cleavage theory. In Germany, the women’s movement was split along class lines but also along denominational lines. The Catholic women’s movement became a part of the Catholic and later the Christian democratic political alliance. In Norway, influential sections of the women’s movement were linked first to the liberal movement and later to the social democratic movement. In both cases, women’s rights activists left a mark on education policy, but Norwegian women’s rights activists enjoyed successes earlier and more consistently. This is a result of the Norwegian women’s movement’s comparatively greater unity and related to the different cleavage structures.

Collective Identity Change under Exogenous Shocks: The Gülen Movement and Its Diasporization

: Diasporas do not arise from fixed connections to objective circumstances such as dispersion or relation to a homeland, but instead constantly are negotiated and re-constituted. Ranging from internal gradual change to sudden exogenous change, the re-making of a diaspora can take diverse forms. Despite the prevalence of constructivist and processual approaches, however, research on diaspora identity change has been limited. This paper takes a comparative historical perspective to the post-2016 diasporization of the Gülen Movement (GM) and discusses how the GM responded differently to sudden exogenous shocks in 1997, 2007, and 2016. In both historical institutionalism and rational choice theories, the sudden exogenous shocks do the heavy lifting to explain change; however, it is rather the endogenous parameters that account for the variation in the GM’s responses to those shocks.

Editors’ Introduction

As this issue of the Journal of Jewish Ethics goes to press, the editors (and a good portion of the editorial board) have just arrived home from the Society of Jewish Ethics annual meeting in Chicago. For the first time since January of 2020, SJE members met in person, alongside scholars and activists from the Society of Christian Ethics and the Society for the Study of Muslim Ethics. We heard presentations and panel discussions on religious freedom, reproductive ethics, natural law, the politics of repentance, and Jewish ethics in comparative historical perspective, among many others. And although the SJE is a relatively small scholarly society, the lively sounds of spirited conversation and debate at the end of each session suggested a much larger gathering.Like the SJE annual meeting, this journal features some of the most compelling, creative, or, indeed, controversial research in contemporary Jewish ethics—a field that includes serious attention to classical Jewish sources, history, and contemporary ethical and political thought, as well as an ongoing critical evaluation of the relationship between these.The first two articles in this issue consider ethical questions around Covid-19 vaccination, reflecting the amount of scholarship emerging on this most immediate of topics—recognizing too that the tragedies and controversies of Covid-19 may well be relevant to other, as-yet-unseen, future health crises. Ranana Leigh Dine’s essay, “Publicizing the Miracle of Vaccination,” focuses not on the ethics of vaccination itself, but the ethics of sharing one’s own vaccination status through the thoroughly contemporary phenomenon of the “vaccine selfie.” Dine creatively draws on the Hanukkah theme of pirsumei nisa, “publicizing the miracle,” alongside the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Mara Benjamin to argue that the vaccine selfie might contribute to a Jewish “visual ethics” of thanksgiving and embodied obligation. The essay by Zohar Lederman, Shmuel Lederman, and Ghada Majadli, meanwhile, offers a public health analysis of vaccination amid geopolitical conflict, arguing that the state of Israel has a specific ethical obligation to provide Covid-19 vaccines to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.The second pair of articles in this issue return to major thinkers in modern Jewish philosophy. Simeon Theojaya’s essay considers the source of ethics in Levinas and Kant, noting that both emphasize the pressing nature of ethics even as their philosophical foundations differ, and analyzing Levinas’s notion of “proximity” to the Other as a powerful foundation for ethical response. Vincent Calabrese performs a critical analysis of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s writings on halakhah, or Jewish law, and considers the relationship between such law and contemporary constructive work in Jewish ethics and thought.This issue also features three book reviews on a pleasingly diverse array of topics, from a sweeping overview of Jewish ethical and moral queries to a biography of an influential and violent rabbi. These works, and their thoughtful reviews, testify to the broad spectrum of scholarship that might fall under the category of Jewish ethics. Such ongoing scholarship allows our conversations to continue long after the academic conferences have finished.