Demands For Restitution Research Articles

Provocation, Public Opinion, and International Disputes: Evidence from China

Abstract What public pressures do leaders face in international disputes? Leaders often denounce foreign actions as provocations, triggering public anger and demands for restitution. Rather than generating a reflexive rally around the flag, we argue that leaders who invoke foreign provocations—whether hypothetical, remembered, exaggerated, or real—face heightened public disapproval if they fail to take tough action in the present. Across two survey experiments and a quasi-experiment involving US naval patrols in the South China Sea, we find that incidents construed as provocative increase public pressure on the Chinese government to respond or incur public disapproval. We discuss possible explanations, how government elites seek to mitigate public disapproval, and how such events can change the logic of coercion and deterrence.

Demands for restitution – a recent phenomenon? Early histories of human remains violations in Namibia

Current demands by Namibian families and communities for restitution of humanremains and so-called ethnographic objects in European collections are rooted inmuch longer traditions of restitution demands than is generally anticipated. In thispaper I discuss pre- and early colonial human remains violations and African protestand resistance, which triggered principal restitution, demands and fostered a critiqueof colonial scientific practices, all of which resonate in current restitution politics.

Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies edited by Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, and Raphael Schwere

Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies edited by Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, and Raphael Schwere

Motion to File Brief Amicus Curiae (with Brief in Support & Amicus Brief) Filed in Yale University v. Konowaloff, 09-466 [United Stated District Court (Connecticut)], of the University of North Dakota Center for Human Rights and Genocide Studies, Michael Berenbaum, Christian Defrancia, Edward M. Gaffney, Jr., Gregory S. Gordon, Michael J. Kelly, Jordan J. Paust, Pammela A. Saunders, Krista Sigler,

The brief was filed in a case failed by Yale University to preempt demands for restitution of The Night Cafe by Van Gogh by Pierre Konowaloff, whose family's property was confiscated by Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution on Lenin's orders in 1918. The Russian Revolution and rise to power of Josef Stalin resulted in the deaths of over 20 million people. Cold War politics and subsequent diplomacy never allowed for resolution of the vast majority of claims to confiscated property. The museum received the painting as a bequest in 1961. The deeply researched amicus brief counsels the court to analyze the legal defenses of the Act of State doctrine and New York time-bar principles in light of true historical context, rather than knee-jerk, broad assumptions about historical events.

Unsettled Landscapes: Czech and German Conceptions of Social and Ecological Decline in the Postwar Czechoslovak Borderlands

After the Second World War, Czechoslovakia expelled around three million Germans from the border region known as the Sudetenland. Close to two million Czechs and Slovaks moved from the country's interior to settle the region. Though cut off from their former homes by international borders soon hardened by the Cold War, expelled Germans vigorously engaged their homelands. They wrote odes to their lost Heimats, travelogues of trips through ‘Sudeten’ landscapes, critical essays on Czech management of the borderlands, and demands for restitution or return. For Czechoslovak settlers and communist officials, the specters of Germans past and present were persistent reminders of the shortcomings of resettlement and the need to consolidate conditions in the borderlands. This article traces an ongoing conversation from the 1940s to the 1980s among communist officials, Sudeten German expellees, communist reformers, and dissidents about the Czechoslovak borderlands. By the 1980s, most parties to the conversation had come to understand the borderlands in ecological terms, stressing the inter-relationship of mental, social, and physical geographies. Though communist officials and critics largely shared a diagnosis of borderland decline, there was a wide range of prescriptions for how to restore the region to ecological and social health.

Demands for property restitution of the former German minority in Serbia

The human rights and freedom corpus in contemporary international law has made topical property rights members of the German minority in Eastern and South-East European countries were deprived of during and after the end of World War II. The goal of dispossessing them of their property was to consolidate the demolished economy and plundered and destroyed national wealth on the part of the Axis powers and above all by, Nazi Germany and its satellites. Taking into account the fact that various categories of persons were dispossessed of their property and not only members of the German national minority that directly or indirectly participated in the occupation and the war of aggression against the states mentioned above, the demand for restitution of their property several decades after also opens the question of their legal and political rehabilitation and then revision of the legal and historical facts that could produce only limited institutional and legal effects within the changed sociopolitical circumstances. For the complexity of the restitution problem, an analysis should be done of the legal and historical heritage, which does not preclude examination of possible international implications, this also including negative effects that demands for restitution can have on the European integration process.

Writing Trauma: Emotion, Ethnography, and the Politics of Suffering Among Somali Returnees in Ethiopia

By comparing Somali narratives of emotion and suffering with literature about emotion in relation to trauma and "the refugee experience," this paper contributes to the understanding of emotion, suffering, and trauma in different cultural and sociopolitical contexts, and interrogates the roles and methods of ethnographies of trauma in situations of high political, social, and economic stakes. In the mid-1990s, emotional distress among Ethiopian Somali returnees was about social rupture and injustice and not simply about private suffering. Emotion is critical to creating, recognizing, reinforcing, and mobilizing the moral webs on which both individual and collective survival depend. In the aftermath of dispossession and war, and amidst ongoing hunger and destitution, certain expressions of emotion carry a particularly important valence: anger, passion, and rhetorics of demoralization revolving around a collective narrative of dispossession and demands for restitution. "Experience near" descriptions of Somali emotion expressions cannot be conflated with "psychological" analyses or "Posttraumatic Stress Disorder." Somali refugee narratives index and challenge the embodiment in lived experience of local, national, and global institutions' (in)action and inequality. To the extent that academic debates over emotion and trauma help to shape, reinforce, or challenge the assumptions and practices of institutions affecting millions of lives, we researchers must address in our analyses the practical and political implications of how we interpret and write about emotion, trauma, and politics.

The Bene[sbreve] Decrees and eu enlargement

The Bene[sbreve] decrees resulted in the expulsion of over three million Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia in 1945. Most of these expelled Germans settled in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Throughout the Cold War their demands for restitution and for the annulment of the Bene[sbreve] decrees disturbed relations between Bonn and Prague. In the 1990s German and Czech leaders tried to 'draw a line across history,' but the prospect of EU enlargement made it impossible to ignore the legal controversies surrounding the Bene[sbreve] decrees. In 2002 disputes over the Bene[sbreve] decrees upset Czech relations with Germany and Austria. The central question in these disputes was: can the Czechs be allowed into the EU without annulling the Bene[sbreve] decrees? This question created divisions between and within Germany, the Czech Republic and the European Union, but in December 2002 the Czechs were invited to join the EU without any modification of the Bene[sbreve] Decrees.

To Be Free and Independent: Crofting, Popular Protest and Lord Leverhulme's Hebridean Development Projects, 1917–25

The ‘land question’ occupies a central role in the history of Highland Scotland. The system of estate ownership and tenure introduced in the aftermath of the battle of Culloden (1746) commodified the land as private possession. In its wake came mass evictions of tenants in large-scale ‘Clearances’ designed to convert crofting-lands to other agrarian or sporting uses. During the main period of Clearances (1780–1855), protest by the crofters remained spontaneous and sporadic. It was not until the last part of the nineteenth century, especially during the so-called Crofters' War (1881–96), that a resurgent crofting community engaged in sustained protest. The threat of civil unrest prompted some ameliorative measures, most notably the Crofters' Holdings (Scotland) Act of 1886. This stabilised the situation and gave protection from further mass evictions but did not restore lands to the landless population from which their ancestors had been displaced. The demand for restitution, therefore, remained a powerful rallying cry.