Political Vacuum Research Articles

ANLAF GUTHFRITHSON AT YORK: A NON-EXISTENT KINGSHIP?

ALTHOUGH THE CHRONOLOGY of events in Britain in the four or so years following Athelstan’s victory at Brunanburh in 937 remains unclear and subject to some dispute, certain facts appear to have been universally accepted as established. There is, for example, a consensus among historians concerning aspects of the career of Anlaf Guthfrithson, King of the Dublin Vikings, subsequent to his defeat at that battle. This, in outline, is that he fled to Ireland and remained there until late in 939 when, consequent upon the death of his nemesis, Athelstan, he returned to England and assumed the kingship of York, ruling then until his death in 941. This consensus has persisted unchallenged despite there being no statement in the early sources — either Irish or English — that Guthfrithson went to York on his departure from Ireland, no evidence that unequivocally places him in the city at any time during the following two years and no source, including various obits, which describes him as King of York or even associates him with that city. Murray Beaven long ago pointed out the difficulty of distinguishing between Anlaf Guthfrithson and his cousin, Anlaf Sihtricson (sometimes referred to in the sources and hereafter in this article by his byname ‘Cuaran’) and that this together with ‘. . . the impossibility of reconciling the conflicting dates supplied by the various manuscripts of the (Anglo-Saxon) Chronicle, have combined to render this period, 939–46, one of the obscurest in our national annals’. 1 This article argues that it is precisely such a confusion in references to the two Viking leaders that has led to Anlaf Guthfrithson being wrongly identified as King of York. It further proposes that after Brunanburh Anlaf Guthfrithson returned to Ireland determined from the beginning to launch another expedition against the mainland, but that his ambitions were not focused upon the Kingdom of York. He was instead intent upon exploiting the military weakness of his former allies of Alba and Strathclyde following the war of 937, and quite possibly also that of his West Saxon opponents who may have temporarily retrenched from adventures in the far North consequent on heavy losses at Brunanburh. Taking advantage of a post bellum political vacuum, he likely sought plunder 1 M.L.R. Beaven, ‘King Edmund I and the Danes of York’, English Historical Review, XXXIII (1918), 1.

Victims of the Colombian Armed Conflict: The Birth of a Political Actor

A significant addition to the Colombian political landscape over the past ten years is the participation of victims in the debate over the country’s model of transitional justice. This stands in stark contrast with previous periods in Colombian history, when victims -- despite their already growing numbers -- were largely invisible both in the more than twenty successful and unsuccessful peace negotiations that have taken place in the country as well as in the overall political debate. This paper seeks to explain this shift in public attention to the plight of millions of Colombians. It also asks how the average Colombian population evaluates and in what way these opinions reflect tensions between the overall goal of repairing victims and other goals of the Colombian peace-building and development agenda. In brief, the paper argues that international and domestic factors combined to make visible the plight and number of victims in the country and to develop a vast and ambitious transitional justice institutional framework, which will set the tone of transformations for years to come. Like other policies, this has not occurred in a political vacuum: Victims as well as other actors concerned with the shape and scope of transitional justice in Colombia have become mobilized in the pursuit of their interests, endowed with political preferences and a more or less effective repertoire of political strategies. As a result, the discussion about the role of victims and the state and society’s responses to their needs is likely to become a central issue of public debate in the near future. However, the debate has occurred predominantly among a small group of experts, ignoring or underestimating some of the prevailing opinions and attitudes about transitional justice held by the general Colombian population. This may prove problematic as several features of the trade-offs and bargains involved in transitional justice mechanisms will impact large parts of the population via elections, taxes, and processes of community integration of victims and perpetrators, all of which are challenges to the ultimate viability and success of transitional justice mechanisms. For these reasons, this chapter argues that it is important to complement the normative statements of policymakers, activists and organizations with data on the overall victims’ population and on the opinions and attitudes of the average Colombian. In order to so, it resorts to data from the Registro Unico de Victimas (RUV) -- the first attempt to unify information on all types of victimization in the country conducted by the Colombian state -- and from a 2012 survey conducted by a consortium of public and private entities. The RUV data serve to underscore the extent of the suffering. The survey results illustrate some of the structural impediments faced by Colombian victims (such as poverty and little education). In addition, the survey shows that almost a decade of transitional justice pedagogy has paid off in the country: In general, the Colombian population is more aware and understands the magnitude of people impacted by the armed conflict as well as the plight of victims. As a result, a majority of Colombians endorse the wrongfulness of the victims’ experience and the need for reparations. At the same time, the long duration and the complex nature of the Colombian armed conflict -- especially the simultaneous presence of multiple illegal armed actors who have fought over territories over many years, and the similar socio-economic and often geographic origin of victims and combatants (referred to here as social proximity) -- have had an impact on people’s opinions and attitudes. Important fractions of the Colombian population, including victims, are fearful of opportunism in accessing state-provided privileges associated with the status of victims and are reticent to accept privileges for victimized populations to the detriment of larger development goals benefiting all Colombians, illustrating the classic peace-building versus development dilemma that has historically haunted the peace-building community. The chapter also explores the organizational dimension of the victims’ population: According to available data, 7 percent of the more than six million victims are organized in more than 3,000 organizations. This level of dispersion is a result both of heterogeneous experiences of victimization and, so far, of a severe incapability of producing collective action. The small percentage of organized victims raises questions about representation in the political debate. The findings presented here aim to contribute to the developing academic and empirical literature on transitional justice which is still incipient in Colombia, and provide elements for testing some of the prevailing opinions and attitudes about victims in Colombia. It also aims to provide useful insights for practitioners in the global field of transitional justice as many of the findings about the Colombian case are relevant to other transitional contexts around the world.

Iceland’s External Affairs from 1400 to the Reformation: Anglo-German Economic and Societal Shelter in a Danish Political Vacuum

The paper applies the assumption that small states/entities need economic and political shelter in order to prosper, to the case of Iceland in the period from 1400 to the Reformation in the mid-16th century. Also, it applies the findings from the first paper in this ‘hexalogy’ (a six-paper series) on Iceland’s external relations in a historical context, i.e. that Iceland enjoyed societal shelter in the Middle Ages, to this period. The aim is both to analyse whether or not Icelanders enjoyed economic, political and societal cover from their engagements with the Danes, English and Germans and to evaluate the validity of the ‘shelter theory’. The paper argues that Iceland enjoyed considerable economic and societal shelter from its encounters with English and German merchants and fishermen in a period in which Danish political cover was formally in place but was not effective in practice. Moreover, the paper claims that the shelter theory, and small-state studies in general, need to take notice of the importance of social communication with the outside world for a small entity/state. Also, the Danish political vacuum in our late Medieval Period provided the islanders with economic opportunities and social engagements with the wider world. This was at the cost of continued domestic clashes between the islanders themselves, on the one hand, and between them and ‘outsiders’ on the other. Our findings indicate that in the case of Iceland there might be a trade-off between the benefits of strict political cover by a single external actor, and the economic and societal opportunities accompanied by a lack of political affiliations.

"That Gesture of Recognition": An Interview with Salomón Lerner Febres

John E. Drabinski interviews Salomón Lerner Febres.

The Political Economy of Somali Piracy

There are two main arguments, one political and one economic, that can be used to explain the rise of Somali piracy. The first is that Somalia's political vacuum following the 1991 collapse of the government created an enabling environment for illicit activities. The second is that entrepreneurial Somali pirates have created a business model that successfully exploits the incentives driving international maritime trade. The reason the Somali piracy boom did not materialize until 2005 is that local Somalis did not realize the potential of piracy and were not desperate enough until economic conditions deteriorated sufficiently as a result of of illegal trawling and toxic dumping by foreign ships and damage caused by the Indian Ocean Tsunami. The last few years' decline in the number of attacks by Somali pirates is primarily due to the coordinated efforts of navies that police the Gulf of Aden. While these efforts have increased the risk of being caught, and hence the costs of engaging in piracy, they do not address the root causes of piracy in Somalia. Until effective political authority and improved economic opportunities permanently alter the cost-benefit calculations of Somali pirates, the underlying incentives driving Somali piracy will remain unchanged, necessitating extensive and indefinite naval operations.

Saudi-Iranian competition in the republics of Central Asia, the Islamic

The disintegration of the Soviet Union leave , a political vacuum and security in the region of Central Asia, at a time when the Islamic republics of the newly independent unprepared for independence, did not have the structures and experiences essential to enable them to shoulder the burdens of the modern state, making it vulnerable to competing countries, a global, regional, sought to attract more or less for influence on its future political and the pattern of international relations, and these competitions implicit competition between Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, which Tstkhaddman the religious factor to attract these republics in Central Asia. Being the vying for the leadership of the Muslim world. And took the Saudi-Iranian rivalry towards the republics of Central Asia, methods, and many activities are focused in working to promote religious and cultural relations as well as economic and political support of these republics.

ASEAN Role in Asia-Pacific Regional Architecture Building

The collapse of the bipolar system caused significant transformations in world’s political and strategic balance of powers, particularly had an impact on the Asia- Pacific nations and created “political vacuum” in the region. In Asia-Pacific crash of the bipolar confrontation stimulated internal processes. Mostly «vacuum» was filled by ASEANcentered new regional architecture.

Powering up the people? The politics of indigenous rights implementation: International Labour Organisation Convention 169 and hydroelectric power in Nepal

The article looks at the role of International Labour Organisation Convention 169 (ILO 169) in struggles for indigenous rights. Nepal is a particularly apposite example, where ILO 169 is currently being invoked and contested in a process of political and state restructuring. The article focuses upon one sector, namely, water resources pertaining to hydroelectric power (HEP) development, with data based upon interviews with key stakeholders at both capital and district and local level, and also visits to three HEP project sites. Two main lessons are imparted primarily about rights-based approaches in general and indigenous rights more specifically. First, while ILO standards can be used to identify a country-level political and institutional vacuum and to promote procedural and substantive standards, implementation is hostage to entrenched political patronage and political culture. Second, rights-based approaches have their own effects particularly when claims are interpreted as absolute group rights, especially in highly diverse societies. An overall dilemma remains for Nepal: while significant political gains have emerged from indigenous rights movement mobilisation there is still a striking absence of (new) constitutional provisions, concrete institutional mechanisms, policy guidelines and delivery of tangible local benefits and with indications of high caste and other groups backlash.

‘Not Ready for Democracy:’ Social Networking and the Power of the People–The Revolts of 2011 in a Temporalized Context

This essay argues that the rise of social networking is to the detriment of the democratic processes that come to us from at least the time of the Enlightenment. Analysed from the perspective of temporality, the essay argues that liberal democracy has its own indelible rhythms and temporal processes, based fundamentally upon the technologies of writing and on the print culture they created. Postmodern neoliberalism and the revolution in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has created a ‘destabilization of the word’ that traditionally gave rhythm to democracy—and to society more broadly. The digitalized word has accelerated economy and society to the extent that it has left the slower rhythms of democracy in their wake. Social networking, as an outgrowth of the neoliberal information society, has propelled political action into this accelerated digital domain. From this perspective, it is argued that the revolts sparked in North Africa and the Middle East in early 2011 were a dramatic example of a postmodern political process that has no roots, no ‘strong tie’ links, and leaves no time for the development of a programmatic politics of the traditional kind. Social networking, in short, creates a political vacuum into which forms of power, potentially less democratic than ‘people power’, will invariably flow.

Does climate change drive land-use conflicts in the Sahel?

While climate change scenarios for the Sahel vary and are uncertain, the most popularized prediction says there will progressively be drier conditions with more erratic rainfall. According to some, an increase in violent conflicts over scarce resources should also be expected. This article investigates the climate–conflict nexus in detail, focusing on a distinct area at the heart of the Sahel, the inland delta of the Niger river in the Mopti region of Mali. Two complementary analytical approaches are applied. The first consists of collection and analysis of court data on land-use conflicts, 1992–2009, from the regional Court of Appeal in Mopti. A comparison of the conflict data with statistics on contemporaneous climatic conditions gives little substance to claims that climate variability is an important driver of these conflicts. Second, we carried out a qualitative analysis of one of the many land-use conflicts in the region. Again, we find that factors other than those directly related to environmental conditions and resource scarcity dominate as plausible explanations of the violent conflict. We argue that three structural factors are the main drivers behind these conflicts: agricultural encroachment that obstructed the mobility of herders and livestock, opportunistic behavior of rural actors as a consequence of an increasing political vacuum, and corruption and rent seeking among government officials.

Arendt og Kafka

Isak Winkel Holm: “Arendt and Kafka. The Right to Rights in Franz Kafka’s ‘The Metamorphosis’”Franz Kafka experienced a legal and political vacuum opening up in the middle of civilized Europe, Hannah Arendt saw it culminating in the death camps. In this sinister historical situation both authors were not so much interested in the question of specific rights as in the more fundamental question of the right to have rights – to use Arendt’s famous formula. This essay explores the intricate relationship between Kafka’s and Arendt’s analyses of the “calamity of the rightless”. On the one hand, Kafka’s literary diagnosis of rightlessness will be reconstructed through a reading of his story “The Metamorphosis”; on the other hand, Arendt’s philosophical portrait of the rightless refugee will be developed in a discussion of her early Kafka essays and, first of all, of her Origins of Totalitarianism. The contention is that Arendt’s notion of the right to have rights and, hence, her reading of Kafka function as important corrections of modern Kafka research.

Democracy and Dissatisfaction

Democracy and Dissatisfaction

…To the Shores of Tripoli

…To the Shores of Tripoli

Holy War Redux: The Crusades, Futures of the Past, and Strategic Logic in the “Clash” of Religions

[G]reat devastation [was] inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance.…—World Islamic Front[T]here is a Zionist Crusader war on Islam. … I call on mujahedin and their supporters … to prepare for long war against the Crusader plunderers.…—Osama Bin Laden, “Bin Laden”This war is fundamentally religious. … the most ferocious, serious, and violent Crusade campaign against Islam ever since the message was revealed to Muhammad.…—Osama Bin Laden, “West”[T]his Crusade, this war on terrorism, is gonna take a while.—George W. BushThis is no less than a clash of civilizations—the … reaction of an ancient rival against our Judeo-Christian heritage, our secular present, and the worldwide expansion of both.—Bernard Lewis, “Roots”In a lead 1990 article for theatlantic monthly, bernard lewis, a well-known historian of islamic studies, conjured the catchphrase “clash of civilizations” to narrate what he saw as fundamental relations of enmity between Islamicate societies and the countries of “the West”—“the West” being shorthand for polities that bear the legacies of Christendom, the Crusades, and the European Enlightenment—since the seventh-century emergence of Islam. Three years later, Samuel Huntington, a well-known political scientist, picked up Lewis's theme and, in an article forForeign Affairs, embroidered it into a theory of global relations to fill what Huntington saw as the political vacuum that had materialized after the cold war's closure (“Clash”). (In 1945–90, the rhetoric of civilizational clash seemed to have been adequately, if temporarily, filled by superpower contests between the United States and the Soviet Union and their allies/surrogates.)

Orígenes del terrorismo global: una propuesta de análisis

El presente artículo pretende analizar las causas lejanas del terrorismo procedente de países islámicos. Los orígenes del terrorismo global de hoy en día están bien anclados en la guerra contra la ex Unión Soviética que se desarrolló en tierras afganas. La gestión de la posguerra por los diferentes actores políticos involucrados en el conflicto contribuyó en la consolidación del yihadismo que se propagó aprovechando el vacío político y el abandono de Afganistán después de la guerra. Por otra parte, la represión del islamismo moderado en los países árabes provocó un proceso de radicalización que se alimentaba directamente de un discurso violento que vino a sustituir el discurso tradicional del islam político. La gestión del campo religioso por los regímenes de los países árabes e islámicos no aportó ninguna solución al problema del radicalismo, pues los ulemas oficiales no estaban capacitados para contrarrestar el avance del extremismo ni para sustituir a un actor político importante como los islamistas, cuyo discurso necesita actualmente una reforma profunda.

Peasant-Based Societies in Chris Wickham’s Thought

AbstractThis engagement with Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages argues that Germanic kings settled as political authorities in fiscal lands, and granted districts to some of the loyal members of their entourage over which they exercised power. This process relates to the fact that kings preserved fiscus-taxes, but that system had already deteriorated and finally disintegrated in the sixth century. In the long run, the problem was expressed in an organic crisis of the ruling class. In consequence, popular revolts against taxation ensued. These revolts are an indicator that the collapsed ancient machinery of domination was not replaced by another in the short term, thus giving way to a political vacuum. The fugitive slaves or serfs reflected in the laws are an indicator pointing in the same direction. Under these conditions free peasant-communities multiplied. These events take us to the concept of peasant-mode societies that Wickham contributes to our understanding of the period. Despite the importance he attaches to this concept, he observes nuances; not in all regions, he claims, did peasant-logic prevail. The evidence allows us, on the contrary, to extend the scope of the concept and to establish a single theoretical basis for the construction of the feudal system on a European scale.

The Political Vacuum of Space and the Quest for Strategy

The Political Vacuum of Space and the Quest for Strategy

Iraqi Kurdistan: challenges of autonomy in the wake of US withdrawal

In August 2010, the United States officially ended the combat mission of its military forces in Iraq and withdrew all but 50,000 of its troops from the country. Iraqi Kurds now contemplate the implications of the looming withdrawal of the remaining 50,000, scheduled for the end of 2011. While Arab–Kurdish relations in Iraq face the risk of serious deterioration, the US military withdrawal will probably not greatly affect the internal politics of Kurdistan. Given the de facto autonomy the region has enjoyed since 1991 and the Kurds’ resulting experience with self-rule, Iraqi Kurdistan never suffered from the post-2003 security and political vacuums plaguing the rest of the country. As a result, no more than a few hundred coalition troops were stationed in Iraqi Kurdistan (and no coalition casualties have occurred there since 2003), with governance and security remaining completely in the hands of the Kurdish authorities. While important centrifugal tendencies do exist in Iraqi Kurdistan and are discussed here, the region will most likely continue to deal with Baghdad and the rest of the outside world with the united voice it cultivated after 2003. US civilian personnel and advisers will also remain in Iraq after the military withdraws, which offers the possibility of assisting Iraqi Kurdistan to overcome obstacles in order to achieve better, more transparent governance. A continuing American diplomatic engagement in Iraq also offers the possibility of helping Kurdistan further institutionalize its autonomy vis-a-vis Baghdad and neighbouring states.

Editor’s Preface. The Invisible Tradition: Avant-Garde Catalan Cinema under Late Francoism

Political cinema is about the absence of the people. This paraphrase of Gilles Deleuze could serve as an epigraph to this volume.' Avant-garde Catalan cinema thematizes not just the lack of visibility of a people but, more significantly, makes of such absence and silence a powerful cinematic trope with which to counteract the political vacuum created by late Francoism. The essays collected in The Invisible Tradition present instances of an urgent critical reengagement and symptomatic reading of these singular and littleknown cinematic interventions.The social and political imaginaries of Francoist Spain created a singular instance of dislocation in the Catalan filmic avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. The commitment to avant-garde practices, emerging out of a tradition dating back to the 1920s in the Catalan context, pushed the envelope of political possibility by establishing an elective affinity and an affective transfer between the political and the aesthetic. By addressing this productive double enunciation through a transnational lens, this special issue hopes to shed new light both on European peripheral cinematic avant-gardes and on the aesthetic articulation of political dissent. The films of the Barcelona School and of Pere Portabella bear the mark of their circumstances and put those circumstances to work by appropriating them conceptually and cinematically. Late Francoism proved to be an unstable and complex political conjuncture that challenged the use of straightforward cinematic narratives and called for a reimagination of the cinematic medium as an emancipatory practice.The conjunctures of Barcelona's cultural milieu were not without complexity either. Felix Fanes - whose contribution is the first article in Catalan to be published in Hispanic Review - teases out the implications of Pere Portabella's collaborative, interdisciplinary, and conceptual understanding of the cinematic medium by paying close attention to the legacies of the prewar Catalan avant-garde, still traceable in the Barcelona of the '60s and '70s. By foregrounding the centrality of Joan Brossa, a poet, visual artist, magician, and early-cinema aficionado, as a link between the historical avant-gardes and the emergence of Catalan conceptualism, Fanes situates his early collaboration with Portabella within a genealogy that begins with Miro, runs through Dau al Set, and culminates with the avant-garde politics of the Grup de Treball. Likewise, the influence of the avant-garde musician and conceptual artist Carles Santos brings to the table an emphasis on the materiality and discontinuity of film, together with a fascination with the role of labor in the artistic process, which we have come to regard as intrinsic to Portabella's distinctive filmic style. Dialogue, collaboration, and mixed media may have begun as characteristics of the Catalan avant-garde milieu, but in Portabella they were formalized into aesthetic choices.Rosalind Gait pushes the contextualization of the Barcelona School further by situating it within a transnational dialogue between critical theory and the political avant-garde, in its turn immersed in the aesthetic and political debates surrounding the events of 1968. The reconfiguration of an alternative cinematic culture would champion linguistic renewal over party alliances, and oppose both the legacy of neorealism and the hegemony of the NCE (Nuevo Cine Espanol) in favor of an elective affinity with the Italian Gruppo 63 and, to a lesser extent, the French Tel Quel. Thus the political impurity and the transnational conversations in which these films engage belie the isolationism of the Francoist cultural milieu, where being Spanish fundamentally meant not being European. Gait's research inextricably links the fate of European leftist cultures to the ascendancy of a critical theory that, via Roland Barthes and Umberto Eco for instance, championed a transformation of art cinema, and to which the filmmakers of the Barcelona School fully subscribed. …

THE RETURN OF EUROPEAN GEOPOLITICS

As the Eurozone wobbles and the United States retreats from the continent, Europe must look hard in the mirror. Into the current political vacuum has stepped a confident Germany; France has also upped its game, seeking new regional partners, including Russia. Luis Simón and James Rogers argue that the United Kingdom is the one player better placed than any other to ensure the maintenance of European order and security.