October Crisis Research Articles

Not only Relational but also Structural: revisiting the resolution of the 1998 October crisis through elements of structural power

ABSTRACTThe 1998 October Crisis between Turkey and Syria has long been studied in various aspects. However, these studies are limited to an understanding that depicts the crisis as a relational power relationship in which Turkey forced Syria to cease its support for the PKK, which Syria would not have done otherwise. While not rejecting the relational explanation, this paper attempts to complement it with a structural approach, drawing on the post-positivist structural power conceptualization, by investigating how Syria’s structurally shaped subjective interests in the post-Cold War international structure and norms regarding international terrorism disempowered it resisting Turkey’s demands.

Constructing parenthood in times of crisis

ABSTRACT Iceland was hit by a financial crisis in October 2008 and in the following year the ceiling on parental leave benefits was significantly lowered. The subsequent drop in fathers’ uptake of parental leave raises questions on whether the crisis endangered gender equality when it comes to how parents arranged care for their new-born. The article explores changes in how parents arrange childcare with the use of paid parental leave and unpaid time off work by comparing findings from surveys among parents of firstborn children in 2003 and 2009. The results show that mothers of children born during the crisis were more likely to lengthen their time at home with the child, than those who had a child during an economic boom. This they did either by using the leave part-time, use vacation days or unpaid leave. It is argued that this could be a result of the fall in fathers’ leave use during the crisis.

Estados Unidos-Cuba: oito mitos de uma confrontação histórica

Neste ensaio se desmontam mitos dissimiles sobre o conflito Estados Unidos-Cuba que foram tecidos ao longo do tempo como parte das campanha midiáticas de manipulação da história e da realidade cubana, originadas fundamentalmente dos centros de poder do imperialismo. Desta maneira, o autor vai desde a origem do conflito e o impacto do processo revolucionário em sua evolução dentro do contexto da Guerra Fria até o papel que desempenharam os distintos sujeitos históricos, passando por alguns dos momentos mais críticos, como a Crise de Outubro (conhecida em outras latitudes como Crise dos Mísseis ou Crise do Caribe)

Toward “World Support” and “The Ultimate Judgment of History”: The U.S. Legal Case for the Blockade of Cuba during the Missile Crisis, October–November 1962

The immense secondary literature on the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 tends to overlook the U.S. government's promotion of a case in international law to legitimize and generate support for the naval blockade of Cuba. This article explores the development and presentation of the legal case and then gauges its success by looking at the response of various non-Communist governments. Those governments endorsed U.S. policy despite, not because of, the U.S. legal case, which they found highly questionable. The analysis here draws extensively on archival sources as well as on the latest published research and presents a fresh contribution to the historiography about the most dangerous confrontation of the Cold War.

La Crisis de los Misiles vista por la prensa española, octubre-noviembre de 1962

Este artículo tiene por objeto analizar la recepción en la España franquista de la llamada Crisis de los Misiles, episodio clave de la Guerra Fría que tuvo por protagonistas a las dos superpotencias del momento —Estados Unidos y la Unión Soviética— y a Cuba a finales de octubre y noviembre de 1962 y que no ha sido tratada previamente por ningún estudio específico. Así, este trabajo examinará la reacción de algunos de los principales diarios españoles ante las diferentes fases del acontecimiento, complementando esta fuente principal con la consulta de archivos españoles y norteamericanos. La posición de la prensa española ante la Crisis de los Misiles reflejó las paradojas del régimen franquista, el cual controlaba estos órganos de opinión directa o indirectamente. En todo caso, los diarios, mostraron una indudable inquietud al principio de la Crisis y no ocultaron su satisfacción ante el final de esta y la retirada de los misiles de Cuba. Sin embargo, su visión de la Crisis estuvo definida, esencialmente, por el anticomunismo primario del régimen y por su deseo de situarse en el mundo occidental como un adalid privilegiado de los Estados Unidos. De esta manera la mayoría de la prensa lamentó el desenlace que tuvo la Crisis, vista por ellos como una oportunidad perdida para derrocar al castrismo.

Yesterday’s Law: Terrorist Group Listing in Canada

ABSTRACTCanada’s approach to proscription differs from that of other Westminster democracies. After the negative example of listing in the October Crisis, 1970 and with the subsequent advent of a constitutional bill of rights, Canada does not ban organizations; instead it penalizes certain forms of conduct, above mere membership, with terrorist groups. “Terrorist groups” include entities listed proactively by the executive, but also entities that meet a functional definition in Canadian criminal law. In practice, the latter, functionally-defined terrorist groups have figured in most terrorism prosecutions—only a few cases have involved listed groups. With the new focus on Daesh (a listed group), that may begin to change. However, executive listing raises unresolved constitutional doubts in Canada, prompting concerns that reliance on proscription may be more trouble than it is worth. Listing has also been used with respect to individuals, but such listings in Canada have already produced false positives, perhaps because of the due process deficits of listing by the executive. In many respects, therefore, terrorist group listing is yesterday’s law, problematic and of marginal utility. There may be reasons of administrative expediency to preserve listing, but the tool is more doubtful when used as a precursor to criminal prosecutions.

The Italian Democratic Party from Merger to Personalism

The Partito Democratico (PD) was born as an original Merger Party on the cusp of the economic crisis in October 2007. The party’s genesis and formative years were critical to the party’s failure to institutionalise around a new common ideology or vision, as a result of the persistence of two party souls which could not find unity. Rather than a genuinely ‘new’ reformist party, the PD resembled an organisational vehicle through which the two former parties could continue their struggle. This weakened the organisational nature of the PD and made it a candidate for takeover by a dominant, personal leader such as Matteo Renzi. He set about establishing a personal party whose existence has in many ways confirmed the failure, if not exhaustion, of the PD’s mission to become the reformist party of the majority.

Does Financial Crisis Affect the Cost of Equity Estimation? Evidence from the Tunisian Stock Exchange

The aim of this paper is to study the impact of the recent financial crisis on equity cost estimation. We use a data of a 22 firms listed in the Tunisian stock market during the period from July 2006 to June 2011. The choice of this period is motivated by the occurrence of the financial crisis of October 2008, which divides the period into two equal sub-periods. In the first stage, we make abstraction to the crisis impact and we run the three specifications of the cost of equity: the CAPM, the Fama -French three factor model and The Carhart four-factor model. Empirical results confirm the explanatory power of the three specifications in the context of the Tunisian market. We also confirm the existence of a size effect, a book to market effect and a momentum effect. In the second stage, we show that the presence of financial crisis does not affect the cost of equity. However, we note a decrease in the coefficients of the explanatory variable after introducing the dummy crisis variable.

The Prophecy and Crisis of October

What does it mean to take revolution seriously in a postrevolutionary era? What relevance do twentieth-century revolutionary movements have for contemporary projects of liberation? This essay seeks to answer these questions by tracing the complex legacies and contributions of the Chinese and Russian Revolutions, considered as the two decisive revolutionary moments of the twentieth century. The author calls for us to reposition the Russian Revolution outside of a Eurocentric frame by examining the ways that Lenin and other revolutionaries thought about Russia through the lens of radical upsurges in China, as well as the possibilities the Russian Revolution opened for revolutionary nationalists in China and other colonized societies. Breaking from a Western Marxist discourse of failure, therefore, this essay takes the relationship between the Russian Revolution and global projects of self-determination and anticolonialism as a historical trajectory of emancipation, one that has been marginalized within existing accounts. In this sense, the Russian Revolution opened up a series of decolonizing possibilities whose repercussions echoed through the century. Drawing from the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution opened the possibility of a reconceptualization of the revolutionary subject itself, one in which the category of “the people” (renmin) performed the role of a revolutionary subject always in transformation, critically grounded in the peasantry as the appropriate base of revolutionary mobilization in non-European settings. It did so through the real political practice of “People’s War” (renmin zhanzheng), which, as a form of sustained rural insurgency, embodied a temporality and strategy of revolution very different from the urban insurrectionary model of the Russian Revolution. This essay allows us to situate these and other revolutionary processes at the center of the twentieth century and to study them anew as sources of emancipatory thought and practice, against attempts to banish revolution as such from the stage of history and political possibility. In doing so, this article enjoins us to dream that the world might once again be turned upside down.

Martin Luther King’s Reaction to the Cuban Missile Crisis

This research article deals for the first time with the reaction of Martin Luther King Jr. to the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962. In doing so, it also presents a document of special relevance: the draft of a previously-unknown private letter from dr. King to President Kennedy, in which the civil rights leader praised Kennedy’s management of that crucial nuclear confrontation between US and USSR and saw in it the potential for detente. The paper reflects on the elements currently available for the interpretation of this piece of evidence and, with regard to the relationship between the two leaders, it argues that the way Kennedy handled the Cuban crisis may well have played a role in Dr. King’s reassessment of Kennedy’s evolving qualities of leadership - a view that King will further develop over the course of 1963 (in the most fruitful months of their cooperation) and will express after Dallas.

Migrating Within “the Gender-equal Nordic Region”: Icelandic Migrants in Norway and the Gendered Division of Work and Care

Migration is a gendered process that shapes the lives of men and women differently, because they generally occupy dissimilar positions within the household, the labour market, and society. This article examines gender and migration within a Nordic context, between two countries that are often presented as gender-equal in cross-national comparisons. The focus is on how the gendered division of labour is manifested in the experiences of Icelanders who migrated to Norway in the wake of the Icelandic financial crisis of October 2008. The results are based on interviews with people who migrated to Norway both with and without their families. In our analysis, we show how the gender-segregated labour market and gender norms lead to different positions and opportunities for men and women at times of economic crisis and migration. For study participants who migrated with their families, the relocation was often organized around the labour-market position and opportunities of men. Those who migrated without their families emphasized their roles as providers for their families. However, only the women described how their absence was perceived as a failure to fulfil childcare responsibilities. The findings highlight the resilience of the notions of men as providers and women as primary parents within “the gender-equal Nordic region”, and indicate how these roles may facilitate or discourage the migration of men and women.

Painting Terrorism: The October Crisis Canvases of Dennis Tourbin and the Lessons of Art for Political Expression under Watchful Conditions

Painting Terrorism: The October Crisis Canvases of Dennis Tourbin and the Lessons of Art for Political Expression under Watchful Conditions

Painting Terrorism: The October Crisis Canvases of Dennis Tourbin and the Lessons of Art for Political Expression under Watchful Conditions

Painting Terrorism: The October Crisis Canvases of Dennis Tourbin and the Lessons of Art for Political Expression under Watchful Conditions

The Cuban Missile Crisis: Leadership as Disturbance, Informed by History

AbstractThe Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 cannot be over‐studied for the lessons it teaches about leadership. As documents have become declassified, it has now become known that President Kennedy and his team of advisors considered the crisis from multiple angles, ranging from a traditional response to perceived aggression to transactional leadership—in this case, secretly trading the removal of Soviet missiles in Cuba for the removal of American missiles in Turkey. The resolution of the Cuban missile crisis involved more than transactional leadership, however. In the complex negotiations that followed the discovery of the missiles, President Kennedy and his team of advisors experienced an evolution in their thinking, while operating under intense strain. The conceptual frameworks that best describe Kennedy's leadership in this context are Voegelin's notion of historical consciousness and Heifetz's conceptions of adaptive leadership.

Shakespeare in Québec: Nation, Gender, and Adaptation by Jennifer Drouin (review)

Jennifer Drouin. Shakespeare in Quebec: Nation, Gender, and Adaptation. Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 2014. 286 pp. $45.50. Taking up francophone Shakespearean adaptations that are rarely presented outside of Quebec, Jennifer Drouin's monograph is at once informative and quirky. In connecting francophone Quebecois creative material anglophone critical work, Drouin's goal is to bridge Canada's 'two solitudes' (vii), and she is largely successful in this pursuit. Noting that Quebecois authors have been busy adapting William Shakespeare's work since the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, Drouin counts over thirty relevant creative works written in French, not mention translations. While she points a Quebecois pride in maintaining 'la langue de Moliere,' the output of francophone Shakespearean material far outstrips any attention paid the former author (3). Importantly, Drouin suggests that while the Quebecois recognize Shakespeare's cultural cachet they do not venerate his work; this level of appreciation allows authors a great deal of flexibility in reworking the playwright's material. Weaving through the author's study of textual hybridity, adaptation, and appropriation is her recognition that Quebec itself is a cultural nexus. Indeed, the region has a long history of colonization and appropriation, changing hands from France Britain Canada, simultaneously exerting colonial control over First Nations groups and also witnessing influxes of immigration from specific international sites. The result is a region with colonial, anti-colonial, neocolonial, or postcolonial situations developing at various points in its history (13), and as a concept becomes at once textually, politically, and socially inflected. According Drouin, Shakespeare's works are capable of spurring new conversations of specific relevance modern Quebec. Indeed, since the Quiet Revolution, plays focusing on gender, sexuality, nationalism, the 1970 October Crisis, the referenda of 1980 and 1995, and aids have all been produced. Chapter 1 tracks postcolonial discourses in contemporary Que bec, comparing Quebecois nationalism iterations found in anglophone Canada and other English Commonwealth countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and Scotland. As she makes a case for differentiating postcolonial culture in Quebec from that in Canada, Drouin notes that Canadian anglophones often treat Shakespeare with what readers and playgoers take be an appropriate level of gravitas, yet anglophone productions and adaptations have also been more willing take up questions of culture, gender, and sexuality. At the same time, the author acknowledges that Canada's 'well-entrenched cultural institutions' may allow for more self-reflexive critique: 'a society that feels threatened by its marginality in a global context,' on the other hand, could feel pressure focus on a sense of nationalism before other concerns (15). Drouin's first chapter is an ambitious study of Quebec's national identity, and it tracks several relevant influences and concerns. This makes for an informative chapter but, unfortunately, one that also reads as slightly hodgepodge. The nationalist thread (or threads) in the chapter must hold together Shakespeare in Canada, Quebec, Australia, New Zealand, Scotland, Catalonia, and India; British colonialism as metaphorical cultural rape; clerical nationalism in the Catholic Church; the Quiet Revolution; and feminist and queer positive political initiatives. The number and scope of concerns is thoughtprovoking, but the larger nationalist study occasionally gets lost. Chapter 2 is more focused and takes up the issue of adaptation, analyzing the need alter what is alien, thus fitting older work within a new context and social use, and Drouin crucially connects this understanding of adaptation larger postcolonial processes (43). The author notes the capaciousness and plasticity in Quebecois, adaptation, and Shakespeare, the three terms that establish a foundation for her book. …

Sickness and sickness absence of remaining employees in a time of economic crisis: A study among employees of municipalities in Iceland

This article focuses on sickness and sickness absence among employees of 20 municipalities in Iceland who remained at work after the economic crisis in October 2008. The aim was to examine the impact of economic crisis on sickness and sickness absence of “survivors” working within the educational system (primary school teachers and kindergarten teachers) and the care services (elderly care and care of disabled people) operated by the municipalities. The study was based on mixed methods research comprising a balanced panel data set and focus groups. An online survey conducted three times among 2356 employees of 20 municipalities and seven focus group interviews in two municipalities (39 participants). The generalized estimating equations (GEE) were used to analyze the quantitative data, and focused coding was used to analyze the qualitative data. The main finding showed that the economic crisis had negative health implications for the municipal employees. The negative effects grew stronger over time. Employee sickness and sickness absence increased substantially in both downsized and non-downsized workplaces. However, employees of downsized workplaces were more likely to be sick. Sickness and sickness absence were more common among younger than older employees, but no gender differences were observed.The study demonstrates the importance of protecting the health and well-being of all employees in the wake of an economic crisis, not only those who lose their jobs or work in downsized workplaces. This is important in the immediate aftermath of a crisis, but also for a significant time thereafter. This is of practical relevance for those responsible for occupational health and safety, as most Western countries periodically go through economic crises, resulting in strains on employees.

Family firms, soft information and bank lending in a financial crisis

This paper studies differences in family and non-family firms' access to bank lending during the 2007–2009 financial crisis. The hypothesis is that the former's incentive structure results in less agency conflict in the borrower–lender relationship. Using highly detailed data on bank–firm relations, we exploit the reduction in bank lending in Italy following the crisis in October 2008. We find statistically and economically significant evidence that credit to family firms contracted less sharply than that to non-family firms. The results are robust to observable ex-ante differences between the two types of firms and to time-varying bank fixed effects. We show, further, that the difference is related to an increased role for soft information in some Italian banks' operations, following the Lehman Brothers failure. Finally, by identifying a match between those banks and family firms, we can control for time-varying unobserved heterogeneity among the firms and validate the hypothesis that our results are supply-driven.

Effects of Fair - Value Relaxation during a Crisis: What are the Costs and Benefits? Evidence from the Reclassification of Financial Securities

Fair value accounting (FVA) rules were relaxed through an ad-hoc amendment of IAS 39 at the height of the financial crisis in October 2008. The extent to which the trade-off between financial stability and transparency implied by this measure was reflected in the reaction of bond and equity markets is analyzed in an event study setting. For credit markets, there is at most inconclusive evidence that transparency concerns dominated potential financial stability benefits implied by the reclassification option. For equity markets, the evidence that the October announcement implied financial stability gains for a subset of regulatory constrained banks is weak. Overall, the results suggest that the financial stability benefits of the introduction of the reclassification option are contained.

Neo-Realism in Thai's Film after Political Crisis in October 14, 1973 and Political Crisis between 2005-2014

Neo-Realism in Thai's Film after Political Crisis in October 14, 1973 and Political Crisis between 2005-2014

En France ou en Grande-Bretagne ? Les réfugiés juifs d’Égypte en 1956

Following the Suez Crisis in October 1956, the French and British governments granted asylum to refugees from Egypt on the condition that they were nationals or that they were from predominantly French or British families. These similar policies were liberally interpreted in France, but strictly applied in Britain. This article interrogates the importance of the refugees’ national and ethnic origins and their influence on their reception in both countries. This article studies the question of nationality among the Jewish community in Egypt, the French and British immigration policies and its context, as well as the importance of the refugees’ origins.