Imperial Legacy Research Articles

Human Rights as a New Standard of Civilization in Weapons Control?

This article is an attempt to explore the intersecting dynamic of human rights and weapons control from a postcolonial perspective. It seeks to bring to the fore the contested terrain of human rights discourses within which grand proclamations of “Human Rights” as a “new standard of civilization” are being championed. At the same time in the field of security studies, an effort to rejuvenate “disarmament as humanitarian action” is mobilizing scholars and activists. It is in this context that this article seeks to problematize deployment of specifically human rights–based discourses to address the problem of weapons. In this effort, it encourages scholars and activists to take note of the imperial legacy of human rights–based and civilization-based discourses. It then expresses concern with how these civilizational discourses of differences between the West and the Rest are exploited to encourage a licentious use of human rights language to acquire and maintain weapons by state and nonstate actors. This article then proceeds to express concern with a shift from anthropocentric to anthropomorphic discourses on weapons that threatens to constitute and reinforce a stratified human civilization. These reflections are undertaken to encourage scholars to think more deeply about the pernicious nature of a human rights–based discourse in the context of weapons control. It is an invitation for postcolonial scholarship to think more deeply about the intersecting discourses of human rights and weapons control and its implications for the Global South.

African Drone Stories

The process of normalizing drones throughout Africa has received little scholarly attention. Discussions of drone proliferation tend to assume that the drone industry is a monolithic, geographically concentrated entity, and that drone use will look the same and engender the same controversies, regardless of geography. The article aims to think through African drone proliferation by analyzing how drones and Africa are being construed as solutions to each other’s problems, and by exploring the interface between images of Africa and the notion of the drone as a game changer for development and security. The article also reads the African drone in the context of the early deployment of surveillance drones in Africa in the 1970s, as well as the legacy of technological imperialism and colonial airpower. The perception of Africa as being in need of external drone intervention dovetails with the drone industry’s efforts to identify and promote good uses for drones—efforts that are central to increasing the legitimacy of drones in the eyes of the Global North. Hence, the article argues that the ‘African drone’ has become a vehicle for the production and distribution of norms, resources, and forms of legitimacy that have implications for drone proliferation, both within and outside Africa.

Turkey’s imperial legacy and the conflict potential in the Balkans

ABSTRACTTurkey is the only Eurasian state surrounded in almost a full circle by acute hot or “frozen conflicts,” ranging from low-intensity violence, terrorism to fully fledged wars. The prevailing pattern of intercommunal and interethnic conflicts in the continental Balkans and on Cyprus has long been different from those in the rest of Europe and in the Near East. This difference is closely related to the fact that these lands had experienced in the past centuries-long rule by the Ottoman Empire, whose legal successor is the Republic of Turkey. The intercommunal conflict potential in the rest of Europe used to differ substantially, but the difference has been greatly reduced as Western Europe has, in one respect, become “balkanized.”

Writing/Reading the Bible in Postcolonial Perspective

AbstractExamining the legacies of European imperialism, this essay traces how the Bible reflects strong affinities with empire and provides ongoing justifications for empire and concentrations of power, including the evolution of the Bible from its production in empires of antiquity and the Bible’s supportive role in the development of modern imperialism. The essay also engages the ambiguities of the Bible as anti-imperial tool. Set within an examination of postcolonial studies as a revolutionary and revisionary discourse, this essay presses for a more vigorous postcolonializing of the Bible in biblical studies. A description of the contemporary features and manifestation of empire forms the context within which further exploration of postcolonial biblical critical work can take place. Following an assessment of previous work in the field, the challenges of intersectional work with queer studies, terrorism studies, technology, and ecological studies are laid out as future tasks.

The origins of sectarianism in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent

This paper differs from previous studies in arguing that sectarianism has overwhelmingly been created consensually by/or as a result of the elites’ behavioral patterns. Religious or communal pluralism does not categorically lead to political sectarianism; The development of pluralism into political sectarianism can thus be adduced as dependent upon other factors—first and foremost the behavioural patterns of the elite. While the imperial legacy, theological controversies, and socio-economic gaps feed political sectarianism, in and of themselves they are insufficient to cause it. A survey of the history of Egypt and the other countries in the Fertile Crescent reveals that the development of political sectarianism or sectarian violence has been organically linked to elites' political behaviors and interests. sectarianism takes the form of the instrumental exploitation of a religious or communal identity or framework in order to enable political organization, the gaining of political legitimacy, the promotion of political change, or the preservation of the control held by interest groups. While in the eyes of many critics, sectarianism forms a striking example of the elites' intrinsic weakness, sectarianism is first and foremost a product of the elites’ quest for power.

Corporate heritage brands, augmented role identity and customer satisfaction

PurposeThe study aims to explore customer satisfaction towards the celebrated Tong Ren Tang (TRT) Chinese corporate heritage brand (established in 1669). This paper examines the multiple role identities of the corporate brand and, in particular, the enduring imperial identity (role identity) of the corporate brand. The study examines whether the corporate heritage brand’s imperial associations are still meaningful.Design/methodology/approachA indicative, survey-based case study methodology undertaken with Chinese customers informs this research.FindingsTRT’s corporate heritage brand identity and, moreover, its imperial role identity were salient in terms of customer satisfaction. TRT’s augmented imperial role identity not only was highly salient but also, moreover, meaningfully enhanced the organisation’s corporate reputation in terms of customer satisfaction.Research limitations/implicationThis study lends further support for the utility of the notion of corporate heritage/corporate heritage brands and in particular the saliency of the theoretical notion of augmented role identity within the corporate heritage marketing field.Practical implicationCorporate heritage brand managers should be appraised of which corporate role identities are meaningful for customers. At a practical level, senior corporate marketing managers of corporate heritage organisations should accorded importance to the additional P of Provenance apropos the corporate marketing mix.Social implicationAt a time, when China is reappraising its relationship with its past – including its imperial past (of which much has been destroyed) – this paper’s focus on TRT’s unsurpassed augmented role identity is pertinent and propitious. Seemingly, this corporate heritage brand’s imperial association provides a living and tangible link with China’s long and momentous imperial provenance and erstwhile imperial polity. In short, the corporate heritage brand is part of China’s patrimony and enjoys a unique place in this regard.Originality/valueThis paper is one of the first empirical studies examining a Chinese corporate heritage brand entity. The study marks new ground in examining customer satisfaction from the theoretical perspectives of corporate heritage brand and augmented role identity. It is believed that this is the first study to consider corporate heritage in the pharmaceutical sector and marks new ground in considering the saliency of China’s imperial legacy on an extant, highly successful and high profile-Chinese corporate heritage brand.

International relations and the critical history of International Law

Just as the contemporary global structure is a product of nineteenth-century economic and political developments, namely, industrial capitalism and global empires dominated by European metropoles, a misleading conception of the international system as composed of formally equal sovereign states is a product of the same period, as Vattel’s conception of states as equal moral persons was taken up and transformed in the early nineteenth century, especially in imperial Britain. This model continues to shape interpretations of global politics in International Relations (IR), despite the persistence of the imperial legacy in the form of a stratified globe. Historical work informed by postcolonial studies and recent scholarship in International Law can give IR greater analytical and critical purchase on the current global order.

Kujoni: South Africa in Malawi’s National Imaginary

This article recovers the literary and political value of Legson Kayira’s novel Jingala (1969), dismissed by earlier critics as lightweight. I argue instead for the seriousness of its engagement with a significant aspect of Malawian life, namely the country’s historical reliance on the export of migrant labour to its mineral-rich neighbours, especially South Africa. Between 1900 and 1988, the country was the second-largest supplier of contracted labour to the South African mines. Kayira’s novel offers significant new insights into the effects of migrant labour on Malawians’ consciousness of South Africa and themselves. In the light of South Africa’s current membership of the BRICS (the economic collaboration of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), as well as the BRICS’ claim to provide an alternative to the imperial legacy of Africa’s relationship with the west, a fresh look at Jingala will allow us to reconsider Malawi’s relationship with South Africa, that country’s historically imperialist role in the region, and the legacy of ‘kujoni’ – labour migration to Johannesburg, the city that represented South Africa’s opportunities. Using a broadly cultural materialist approach and Edward Said’s notion of imaginative geography, and a world-systems theory approach nuanced by recent work in globalisation theory, the article maps the imagined geography of South Africa represented in the novel and considers how it intervened in everyday life.

Sources of Societal Value Similarities across Europe

Focusing on Europe, this article aims to disentangle the patterns of cultural clustering and to throw more light on concepts such as ‘civilizations’ and ‘cultural zones.’ Cross-cultural analyses unanimously find that various historical background and socioeconomic indicators are strongly correlated to societal values, however, a systematic investigation on what makes societal cultures similar and different hasn’t been conducted. The author first outlines the factors and mechanisms that may explain value similarities, then the author tests their importance using dyadic data on 40 countries from thewvs. Multiple factors are associated to the cultural similarities: the historical background – i.e. countries’ political-institutional traditions, religion, language, and imperial legacies – and also socio-economic development, geographical distance, European integration, and climatic differences. The substantial overlap among them, however, diminishes the absolute importance of any of the explanatory factors. The multiple determinants of value differences speak against a classification of national cultures into cultural zones based on single formative factors.

Reparations and the Colonial Dilemma: The Insurmountable Hurdles and Yet Transformative Benefits

The Seventh Annual Latina and Latino Critical Race Theory (LatCrit) Conference held in May 2002 at the University of Oregon, not unlike other efforts in the movement, addressed a panoply of challenging, provocative, and controversial issues. Perhaps one the most intellectually interesting and yet troubling panels addressed reparations for the inhabitants of United States' colonial territories. Specifically, the panel was titled Reparations, Redress, and Remedies: Undoing the Legacy of Colonialism and Imperialism. Members of the academy as well as a representative of Puerto Rico's Independence Party participated in a lively discussion and debate. Although the articles resulting from this panel touch upon Puerto Rico's colonial dilemma, not all addressed the issue of It is the topic of reparations that is the focus of this cluster introduction. The topic of reparations provokes strong feelings because, among other reasons, it is a request of the dominant culture to atone for past wrongs, primarily through monetary relief. For many, the response to any request for reparations, but particularly for a request from the inhabitants of Puerto Rico, would be: Why reparations? Not unlike reparations claims for Native Hawaiians, opponents to a Puerto Rican reparations effort would probably deem the reparations claims unavailing because the opponents simply would fail to perceive that any legal wrong has occurred. This cluster introduction will address this question of why reparations. Before addressing the nascent Puerto Rican reparations debate, a brief description of LatCrit theory is in order.

Dead But Not Gone: Contemporary Legacies of Communism, Imperialism, and Authoritarianism

A profusion of recent research has focused on historical legacies as key to understanding contemporary outcomes. We review this body of research, analyzing both the comparative-historical analysis (CHA) and modern political economy (MPE) research traditions as applied to the study of communism, imperialism, and authoritarianism. We restrict our focus to the sizeable subset of arguments that meets a relatively strict definition of legacies, i.e., arguments that locate the roots of present-day outcomes in causal factors operative during an extinct political order. For all their differences, the CHA and MPE approaches both face the challenges of convincingly identifying the sources of historical persistence and of reckoning with alternative channels of causation. We find that mechanisms of persistence in legacy research generally belong to one of three main categories. While both traditions acknowledge the role of institutions in historical persistence, CHA research tends to emphasize the lasting power of coalitions, whereas work in MPE often argues for the persistence of cognitions. We argue that, at their best, CHA and MPE approaches yield complementary insights. Further progress in legacy research will benefit from greater cross-fertilization across research traditions and deeper recognition of commonalities across communist, imperialist, and authoritarian regimes.

Dead But Not Gone: Contemporary Legacies of Communism, Imperialism, and Authoritarianism

A profusion of recent research has focused on historical legacies as key to understanding contemporary outcomes. We review this body of research, analyzing both the comparative-historical analysis (CHA) and modern political economy (MPE) research traditions as applied to the study of communism, imperialism, and authoritarianism. We restrict our focus to the sizeable subset of arguments that meets a relatively strict definition of legacies, i.e., arguments that locate the roots of present-day outcomes in causal factors operative during an extinct political order. For all their differences, the CHA and MPE approaches both face the challenges of convincingly identifying the sources of historical persistence and of reckoning with alternative channels of causation. We find that mechanisms of persistence in legacy research generally belong to one of three main categories. While both traditions acknowledge the role of institutions in historical persistence, CHA research tends to emphasize the lasting power of coalitions, whereas work in MPE often argues for the persistence of cognitions. We argue that, at their best, CHA and MPE approaches yield complementary insights. Further progress in legacy research will benefit from greater cross-fertilization across research traditions and deeper recognition of commonalities across communist, imperialist, and authoritarian regimes.

The Four Ways of Eco-global Criminology

In charting out the ‘four ways’ of eco-global criminology, this paper discusses the importance of recognising and acting in regards to the differences evident in (1) ways of being (ontology), (2) ways of knowing (epistemology), (3) ways of doing (methodology) and (4) ways of valuing (axiology). The paper assumes and asserts that global study of environmental crime is essential to the green criminology project, and particularly an eco-global criminology approach. Specific instances of criminal and harmful activity therefore need to be analysed in the context of broad international social, political, economic and ecological processes. The article outlines the key ideas of eco-global criminology, a perspective that argues that global study must always be inclusive of voices from the periphery and margins of the world’s metropolitan centres, and critical of the social relations that sustain the epistemological as well as material realities and legacies of colonialism and imperialism. Yet, in doing so, there arise many paradoxes and conundrums that likewise warrant close attention.

Post-war Japan as a Sea Power: Imperial Legacy, Wartime Experience and the Making of a Navy by Alessio Patalano

Reviewed by: Post-war Japan as a Sea Power: Imperial Legacy, Wartime Experience and the Making of a Navy by Alessio Patalano James R. Holmes Post-war Japan as a Sea Power: Imperial Legacy, Wartime Experience and the Making of a Navy. By Alessio Patalano. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 272 pages. Hardcover £85.00; softcover £28.99. Japan operates a world-class if modest-sized navy, euphemistically named the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF) to conform to the nation's post–World War II constitution, which forswears the use of arms for political purposes. The JMSDF is part of a combined US-Japanese fleet that constitutes the enforcement arm of allied strategy vis-à-vis surging Chinese economic and military might. And yet little has been written in English about this close partner to the US Navy, a shortfall that is doubly striking in light of the profusion of studies on the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN), the JMSDF's institutional forebear. Chinese strategist Sun Tzu urged sovereigns and generals to know themselves and their foes to succeed in martial enterprises; he might have counseled them to know their allies as well. That's where Alessio Patalano's book comes in so handy. (One imagines it will be read avidly in China as well.) The compact community of Japan watchers in the West has long depended on a handful of works for insight into the JMSDF's past and present. Best known is James E. Auer's The Postwar Rearmament of Japanese Maritime Forces, 1945–71 (New York: Praeger, 1973), which appeared over forty years ago. Peter J. Woolley brought the story up to the turn of the century with Japan's Navy: Politics and Paradox, 1971–2000 (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000). Post-war Japan as a Sea Power supplies a sorely needed update founded on interviews along with primary-source research in the JMSDF archives. Japan's navy [End Page 354] now confronts a rising China as well as a renegade, nuclear-armed North Korea. On such pressing recent matters, Auer's and Woolley's books are silent for obvious reasons. This is not a narrative history of postwar Japanese sea power per se, and that constitutes one of its strengths. The treatise is thematic in outlook, with chapters reviewing, for example, the imperial navy's ethos and traditions; the JMSDF's interpretation of the imperial experience and its incorporation of that experience into its own service subculture; Japanese maritime policy and strategy; and the navy's pursuit of a balanced fleet. Japan's postwar navy studied the reasons for the IJN's downfall closely and fashioned policy and strategy to avoid committing similar mistakes. Antisubmarine warfare, for example, figured prominently in postwar strategy, doubtless because of painful memories of US submarines sending Japanese merchantmen and warships to the bottom. Logistics was another core takeaway. The imperial navy seized vast territories and sea space from 1941 to 1942, yet little thought was given to how to hold all that area once it had been seized. JMSDF commanders faulted their predecessors for neglecting sea-lane defense—a crucial oversight for any island empire dependent on resource imports. And on and on. Culture is the common denominator among these strands of inquiry. Patalano concentrates in large measure on organizational culture, namely, the habits of mind and deed that are imprinted on the bureaucracy and individual seafarers by an institution's founders and founding legends, and by which the institution acculturates newcomers—chiefly through naval education in any sea service's case. He thus puts the US Navy's part in the JMSDF's founding in perspective. He observes that while American seafarers such as Admiral Arleigh Burke were indeed key figures in the JMSDF's early history, Japan's navy is by no means a simple appendage of its US patron and ally. Nor is it a direct descendant of the World War II navy. Henry Steele Commager once wrote in The Search for a Usable Past (New York: Knopf, 1967) about the American founders' efforts to fabricate a "usable past" binding together thirteen disparate states clustered along the eastern seaboard of North America. A central point for Commager was that the...

Turkey’s imperial legacy and the conflict potential in the Balkans

ABSTRACTTurkey is the only Eurasian state surrounded in almost a full circle by acute hot or “frozen conflicts,” ranging from low-intensity violence, terrorism to fully fledged wars. The prevailing pattern of intercommunal and interethnic conflicts in the continental Balkans and on Cyprus has long been different from those in the rest of Europe and in the Near East. This difference is closely related to the fact that these lands had experienced in the past centuries-long rule by the Ottoman Empire, whose legal successor is the Republic of Turkey. The intercommunal conflict potential in the rest of Europe used to differ substantially, but the difference has been greatly reduced as Western Europe has, in one respect, become “balkanized.”

A Call for Healing: Transphobia, Homophobia, and Historical Trauma in Filipina/o/x American Activist Organizations

I argue that for those who migrate to other countries for economic survival and political asylum, historical trauma wounds across geographical space. Using the work of David Eng and Nadine Naber on queer and feminist diasporas, I contend that homogeneous discourses of Filipino nationalism simplify and erase transphobia, homophobia, and heterosexism, giving rise to intergenerational conflict and the passing‐on of trauma among activists in the United States. Focusing on Filipina/o/x American activist organizations, I center intergenerational conflict among leaders, highlighting transphobic and homophobic struggles that commonly arise in cisgender women majority spaces. I contextualize these struggles, linking them to traumas inherited through legacies of colonialism, feudalism, imperialism, hetero‐patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy. I inquire: how does historical and personal trauma merge and shape activist relationships and conflict, and what are activists doing to disrupt and work through historical trauma? I advocate for a decolonizing approach for “acting out” and “working through” trauma and healing collectively. By exploring conflict in organizations shaped by dominant Filipino nationalist ideologies, I resist romantic notions of the diaspora. Revealing the ways that dominant Filipino nationalism perpetuates a simultaneous erasure of nonnormative histories and bodies and epistemological and interpersonal violence among activists, I reject homogeneous conceptions of nationalism and open up possibilities for decolonial organizing praxis.

Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era by Angela A. Ards, and: Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy

Reviewed by: Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era by Angela A. Ards, and: Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction by Maria Rice Bellamy Caroline A. Streeter WORDS OF WITNESS: BLACK WOMEN’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN THE POST-BROWN ERA, by Angela A. Ards. Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2015. 230 pp. $26.95 paper; $26.95 ebook. BRIDGES TO MEMORY: POSTMEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY ETHNIC AMERICAN WOMEN’S FICTION, by Maria Rice Bellamy. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. 190 pp. $59.50 cloth; $24.50 paper; $24.50 ebook. At first glance, a study of autobiographical works and an examination of literary fiction might appear to have little in common. However, Words of Witness: Black Women’s Autobiography in the Post-Brown Era and Bridges to Memory: Postmemory in Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction resist polarizing classifications. Both Angela A. Ards and Maria Rice Bellamy deploy feminist theory and an intersectional methodology. Intersectionality, first articulated by legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, is the template for comprehending subjectivity on the part of women of color, for whom identity is constituted through multiple registers of experience. In Words of Witness, Ards considers a selection of black women’s life stories to construct a chronological counternarrative to the modern civil rights movement. In Bridges to Memory, Bellamy theorizes the way inflections of race and gender reconfigure the literature of postmemory. Bellamy’s reading of comparative ethnic literature captures how legacies of racism and imperialism engender repetitive cycles of traumatic memory among women of color. Ards and Bellamy incorporate textual indeterminacy in their analyses. Words of Witness addresses the increasingly ambiguous distinction between autobiography—fact-based documentation by historical actors—and the subjective recollection of memoir. Ards identifies the contested status of some works in her study. She also acknowledges potential influence on the part of publishers seeking to exploit the popularity of confessional writing. In Bridges to Memory, Bellamy makes a risky move by historicizing postmemory literature in social movements: “the critical historical moments of the civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and the ethnic empowerment struggles of the 1960s and 1970s” (p. 147). The hazard here entails reifying ethnic fiction as a kind of sociology or exercise in identity politics. The manifestation of political tensions internal to the studies are signposts of intersectional methodology. Ultimately, Words of Witness and Bridges to Memory emphasize multivocal testimony and collective memory as critical agents of transformation. The power of the collective voice is embodied in the structural similarities that link these works, each of which consists of five chapters. Each chapter in Ards features one author and one text. In Bellamy, one among five chapters focuses on two authors [End Page 236] and texts. (Bridges to Memory also ends with a conclusion incorporating a brief discussion of a film.) The phenomenon of overlapping methodologies and concerns is accentuated by the presence of Edwidge Danticat in both books—her memoir in Ards and a short story cycle in Bellamy. Ards calls the production of countercultural memory in black women’s autobiographies “the ethics of self-fashioning” (p. 4). Countercultural memory is powered by the holistic articulation of personal narrative and political discourse. The challenge of balancing the inner life with political activism animates Words of Witness. Ards examines works published between 1994 and 2009—four memoirs and one theatrical production based on an unpublished screenplay. The texts, “in dialogue with particular [political] legacies,” adeptly demonstrate the elisions in the master narrative of the modern civil rights movement (p. 5). Warriors Don’t Cry (1994) is Melba Beals’s harrowing story of her time as one of the “Little Rock Nine,” the group of black teenagers at the center of the 1957 campaign to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Little Rock epitomized the intransigence of Jim Crow, demonstrating the unapologetic resistance to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision desegregating public schools. Warriors Don’t Cry is the counter history to the continual citation of Brown as the earliest signpost in the triumphant narrative of civil rights. Although Warriors Don’t Cry provides an able template...

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"E" Is for Empire?: Challenging the Imperial Legacy of An ABC for Baby Patriots (1899)

Mary Ames's picture book An ABC for Baby Patriots (1899) has been persistently read as a quaint curio of imperialist propaganda. Sustained analysis of the verse and illustrations, however, reveals that it is a subtle, sophisticated critique of the very imperial ideology that it has so long been charged with promoting. Appealing both to adult and child readers, it is part of the 1890s satirical tradition. Acknowledging the text's complexity and contextualizing it alongside Ames's corpus and other representative period texts encourages scholars to reconsider how children's literature and juvenile forms have been appropriated for imperial ends.

The Traditions of Invention: Romanian Ethnic and Social Stereotypes in Historical Context, by Alex Drace-FrancisHeritage, Ideology and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe: Contested Pasts, Contested Presents, ed. Matthew RampleyImages of Imperial Legacy: Modern Discourses on the Social and Cultural Impact of Ottoman and Habsburg Rule in Southeast Europe, ed. Tea Sindbaek and Maximilian Hartmuth

The Traditions of Invention: Romanian Ethnic and Social Stereotypes in Historical Context, by Alex Drace-FrancisHeritage, Ideology and Identity in Central and Eastern Europe: Contested Pasts, Contested Presents, ed. Matthew RampleyImages of Imperial Legacy: Modern Discourses on the Social and Cultural Impact of Ottoman and Habsburg Rule in Southeast Europe, ed. Tea Sindbaek and Maximilian Hartmuth