National Reconstruction Research Articles

Education and conflict: From emergency response to reconstruction and peacebuilding

Education for All (EFA) was a promise made by 155 countries and about 150 representatives of humanitarian organizations in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990. This promise was reiterated in Dakar, Senegal in 2000, where six broad goals and targets were set to be met by 2015. In 2011, the international community is far from achieving these goals; yet, as the 2011 Global Monitoring Report shows, considerable efforts have been made and achievements are visible. For example, some of the poorest countries are doubling their primary enrolment rates and narrowing their gender gaps. The articles published in this special issue on Education and Armed Conflict are based on selected background papers, which were commissioned for the 2011 EFA Global Monitoring Report. The 2011 report highlights one of the greatest barriers to reaching the EFA goals: conflict. Many countries suffer from continuous or spontaneous conflict, which creates unstable conditions for civilians, and particularly children, who are too often forced to leave behind the little education that they were receiving in order to escape from the conflict. Due to the nature of conflict, humanitarian efforts must, more often than not, focus on the immediate survival of victims, by providing shelter, water, food, and medical care. However, some of these conflicts are continuous, forcing people to live for years in temporary arrangements, where, without education, they may completely lose hope for a better future. The Global Monitoring Report stresses that education is life-saving, especially for those living in conflict, and should therefore be treated as such in the humanitarian response. As Ms. Irina Bokova, Director General of UNESCO, expressed it at the official launch of the report in New York on March 1st, ‘‘education cannot remain the poor cousin of international efforts to manage conflicts’’. Providing education in a post-conflict context helps national reconstruction, in a different and more profound way than meeting only basic needs such as food, water, and shelter. Furthermore, an education that promotes human rights and civic values can go a long way in helping the next generation to work towards a self-sustaining and peaceful society. In fact, more often than not, it is the populations affected by conflict that demand an education so they can actively create a better future for

Uneasy allies: China's evolving relations with Angola

By conventional accounts, following the so-called ‘Angola Model’, the Chinese government is heavily involved in the national reconstruction programme through various financial institutions as a means to ensure closer relations with Angola and thus access to oil. China's strategy is thus ostensibly to accumulate political capital through the provision of infrastructure, financed by oil-backed concessional loans extended by Chinese state-owned banks. This study briefly traces the history of China's relations with Angola before examining the various parallel structures involved in the two country's co-operation over infrastructure, loans and oil. It examines the so-called ‘Angola Model’ by looking at three key assumptions surrounding risk, access to oil and China's political access in Angola. The study also evaluates the nature of the so-called ‘strategic partnership’ for both Angola and China. Political posturing indicates that both China and Angola see each other as necessary strategic allies for the foreseeable future, but this may mask an uneasy marriage of convenience.

Liberation and Redistribution: Social Grants, Commercial Insurance, and Religious Riches in South Africa

South Africa's liberation, marked by the first democratic elections of 1994, ushered in an unprecedented expansion of large-scale redistributive arrangements. In the post-apartheid period, the collection of money into a central fund administered anonymously and bureaucratically has gained social and political importance, particularly for poor and lower-middle-class Africans. This is most evident in a rapid expansion of government social assistance—from 1997 to 2006 the number of beneficiaries of social grants increased from three to almost eleven million, and today at least a quarter of South African households receive welfare payments. Social assistance “has been the fastest-growing category of government expenditure since 2001, and now amounts to R70 billion [almost US$7 billion in 2006] a year, about 3.4 percent of gross domestic product.” The centrality of redistribution is clear in current debates over the establishment of a Basic Income Grant (BIG) for all South Africans. Political liberation has also brought an increase in redistribution through development projects such as the National Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) grants.

Olympic Aspirations: Reconstructed Images, National Identity and International Integration

The 2008 Olympic Games is so significant in reconstructing Chinese nationalism as well as reshaping the state-society relationship because in the single year of 2008 most of the political mobilization and social movements were driven by the games; most of the focusing events (e.g. accidents and disasters) are redirected or reinterpreted due to the games; most of the contradictions and conflicts are concealed or exposed under the name of the games. Both the authorities and the public faced more opportunities, challenges and pressures from the domestic and international community because of the games. The reconstruction of Olympic-mobilized nationalism then lies in such dynamic official and popular responses and also reflects transforming state-society relationships.

History, Ethics, Politics: Rethinking the Legacy of Truth Commissions

This paper investigates how truth commissions problematize and transform the ways in which citizens of contemporary societies think and speak about historical truth, memory, justice, reconciliation, recognition (of victimhood and violations), and official historiography. I initiate a dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche, Pierre Nora, Jurgen Habermas, and Hannah Arendt, whose insights into the public use of history, ethics of national reconstruction, collective memory, and the place of factuality in modern politics, provide new perspectives on how truth commissions preserve, question, and transform the ways in which societies articulate the relationship between history, ethics and politics. I argue that truth commissions have opened a critical space to resignify the complex relations between history and memory, the past and the present, ethics and practical considerations, nationalism and the post-national context. They produce critical, fact-based and national (yet not nationalist) histories to reconstruct the nation and the nation-state on the basis human rights ethics, and to restore the status of factuality in politics. They emerge in the context of a double failure of the nation-state: the failure of the state to provide protection from agents acting in its name and/or private combating groups, aggravated by the failure to stand up to a measure of honesty concerning the nature of the conflict and the accompanying violations. Consequently, commissions have produced a new dynamic whereby the state seeks to legitimize its central position between history and politics only by accepting a high degree of societal penetration into the production and diffusion of official national history. The problematization of the link between historiography and state sovereignty is evidenced by the incorporation of individual and social memory-narratives into the production of official historiography. However, the tremendous challenge of articulating an ethics of national reconstruction in a transitional context exposes many of the ambiguities and limitations built into the truth commission process. They seek to recuperate the status of factuality in politics, but their findings have limited or no legal sanction. They reference post-national legal norms to address the nation-state’s failures, but their national scope prevents them from advocating a post-national political project. Ultimately, their striving for a supra-political, ethical ‘founding moment’ for the nation falters in the face of their built-in vulnerability before traditional state bureaucracies and political actors.

Refugees, International Organizations, and National Identity: The Case of Palestine

Little has been written about the impact of The United Nations Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) on the reconstruction of Palestinian nationalism and identity in the refugee camps and beyond. UNRWA's socioeconomic services, however, played a key role in the reconstruction of Palestinian identity and nationalism. The creation of UNRWA in 1950 provided a huge bureaucracy that functioned as a quasi-state, bringing the Palestinian refugees under one umbrella. Although UNRWA's mission at the beginning was to help the refugees assimilate and integrate, the camps actually prevented them from integrating and promoted their identity as separate and distinct. As the research presented here shows, refugees began preserving their own culture and reinventing their old traditions, using oral history, narrative, and memories of the events of 1948 to reconstruct their identity and nationalism. The refugees' narratives were most commonly associated with the social-political realities of historic Palestine, especially those linked to political organization, civil society, strong traditions, and social solidarity. Refugees put great emphasis in their narratives on the new culture of dispossession and destitution imposed on them in the diaspora. The unintended consequences of UNRWA's activities and services supported the development of this oral history of displacement. This study highlights the extent to which UNRWA unintentionally linked the Palestinians through an unprecedented socioeconomic bureaucracy that helped in preserving their identity through its extensive programs and how the Palestinians' use of this structure contributed to the reconstruction of Palestinian nationalism and identity.

Revisiting New Right citizenship discourse in Thatcher’s Britain

The aim of this article is to examine the rationales that Thatcher’s Britain employed in dealing with immigration and multicultural policies. With a focus on the responsible political elite hypothesis, I trace the role of New Right citizenship discourse as a combined reflection of elite behaviors as well as mass concerns. I analyze various writings and remarks of Enoch Powell as a precursor of the New Right, and those of Margaret Thatcher as an executor of the New Right, discourses of the reconstruction of the British nation and the bringing back of the active citizen as the main campaign of the New Right, and the emergence of two nations and controversies over the cause of this cleavage as a probable policy outcome of the New Right. Through the theoretical account of New Right citizenship as an unstable combination of libertarian individualism and republican conservatism, I offer an interpretation of post-war Britain that can explain the relationship between the shift toward neo-liberalism and shifts in immigration conceptions and multicultural policies.

A research on transnational effect and context from below : Focused on a way of construction and reconstruction of nation by second generation of migrants from Mongolian

A research on transnational effect and context from below : Focused on a way of construction and reconstruction of nation by second generation of migrants from Mongolian

The New Life Movement in Jiangxi Province, 1934–1938

AbstractThis paper discusses the origins and the implementation of the New Life Movement (NLM) in the Jiangxi Province between 1934 and 1938. Based upon primary sources produced during this period, it explores how the Nationalist Party utilised the NLM for the purposes of national reconstruction and social mobilisation. The first section analyses how elements of anti-communism, Christianity and state Confucianism came into play in the NLM; the second section analyses how the Nationalists reinforced the idea of ‘hygienic modernity’ by projecting it into the realms of state building and mass mobilisation; the third section discusses the changes introduced in society by the Nationalists with the creation of semi-governmental organisations; and the fourth section examines the involvement of the NLM with preparation for the war against Japan (1937–1945). The paper argues that the NLM had a lasting impact on Chinese society, and it contributed to shape citizenship and national identity.

Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922-1943 * Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema

Fascism poses problems for historians of Italian cinema. While the work produced during that period is no longer entirely disavowed or discredited, it nevertheless provides an uncomfortable antecedent to the heroic moment of postwar neorealism and cinema's much-vaunted role in national reconstruction. Part of the problem is that fascism, like the advocates of neorealism, believed in the potential of the medium to create a common culture in its audiences. Debates around the political and aesthetic particularities of neorealist cinema uneasily negotiate any residual attachments to fascism, most evident in continuities of personnel in the industry. While it is now clear that feature films made with the support of the fascist regime were not overtly propagandistic in content, and were more thematically varied and technically accomplished than once had been allowed, they offer an unwanted inheritance to a body of work that sought to break from Italy's immediate past. Steven Ricci's Cinema and Fascism: Italian Film and Society, 1922–1943 and Noa Steimatsky's Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema ostensibly sit on either side of the divide created by the fall of Mussolini and the new republic. Ricci's attempt at clear periodization, however, contrasts with Steimatsky's reluctance to section off the past from the present. The contrasting sense of temporality is indicative of other differences between the two books. While in a broad sense both are part of recent attempts to reinterpret the cultural history of Italy during and after fascism, their methodological approaches are distinct. While Ricci is much more concerned with cinema's relationship with the state, and with its audiences, Steimatsky interrogates film as an element of a broad cultural field, drawing on an expertise in early painting, photography and architecture in order to offer a rich contexualization and detailed textual analysis of the works she studies.

“Jambanja”: Moral Paralysis and Postcolonial Politics in Zimbabwe

Events that have been unfolding in Zimbabwe in the past decade beginning 1998 to be precise to the present are reminiscent of a nation that has become sick and in need of moral therapy. The malaise or decay has been so constant and perpetual that there appears to be no immediate end in sight. This work focuses on the normative dimension of politics in Zimbabwe over the last decade and draws special interest to the post March 2008 historic harmonised elections, that is, the presidential runoff between president Robert Mugabe of the Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front( ZANU PF) and winner of the first round of ballot, Morgan Tsvangirai of the Movement for Democratic change (MDC). The work draws on theoretical consideration of morality and politics in general and African morality in particular to argue for the need for moral rearmament within the country as part of the important process of national healing and reconstruction. The work argues that the blatant disregard for humanity in its diverse manifestations shown over the past decade calls for moral reorientation across the whole country. A regime change in and of itself would never guarantee the peace and tranquillity that once characterised the nation.

Stabilization & Reconstruction of Nations after Military Conflict: Afghanistan and Chechnya Case Studies

This article focuses on an analysis of two very different approaches for stabilization and reconstruction (S&R) used by the United States in Afghanistan and the Russian Federation in Chechnya. The article discusses “Stabilization and Reconstruction” (S&R) according to military doctrines, the possibility of the S&R of the nation, the doctrinal framework for S&R processes. The Russian Federation focused its S&R policy on rebuilding the security structures in Chechnya in order to guarantee a stable security situation in the Chechen Republic. The U.S. S&R effort revolved around the reconstruction of all the security, social and financial structures of a society based on democratic principles The significant lesson from the Afghanistan and Chechnya experiences is that it is necessary to build-up the legitimate local security and social structures, which will control the situation.

Gender, nationalism, exclusion: the reintegration process of female survivors of the Armenian genocide

ABSTRACT. This essay focuses on the process of ‘rebuilding’ the Armenian nation in the newly constituted states of the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq) in the immediate aftermath of World War I. These efforts were centred on the two largest sectors of the population to have survived the Catastrophe, orphans and familyless (or widowed) women. The essay examines the ideology of ‘national reconstruction’ and some of its internal contradictions. It pays particular attention to both Armenian women who married Muslims during the deportations and the children born of these marriages, as well as to Armenians who turned to prostitution to survive in the complex conditions prevailing in this period. The author makes use of extensive, previously neglected archival material: for example, correspondence by some of the principal actors, reports written during the process of locating and rounding up Armenian orphans, and documents that shed light on life within the walls of orphanages and women's shelters. The author assembled this archival material in Paris, Beirut, Aleppo, and Cairo, after surveying the contents of various archives.

Educational Breakthrough in Eritrea: Some Expectations and Outcomes

The ongoing national reconstruction process of Eritrea is centered on the educational reformation. The Government of Eritrea has developed educational policy on top priority of national development which demands the emergence of new class of trained youth blended with disciplined mind with skill instead of raw graduation. In this line, it laid down new policies and curricula suit to the immediate national scenario. It had installed about eight colleges at tertiary level within a short span of time to build manpower resource required for present and future. This article analyses the strengths and weakness of the policies, planning and the infrastructure requirements to meet the intended goal. The outcome of the educational reformation is expected to have a profound effect on the development of the Nation. Hence, it becomes curious watch for the educational reformists around the globe.

Setting La diabla Free

An analysis of the literary representations of women and violence in three postwar Salvadoran narratives sheds light on El Salvador's new neoliberal reality and provides a basis for understanding the role of women in national reconstruction and democratization. By depicting female characters in traditional roles and as passive victims of violence, Castellanos Moya's La diabla en el espejo exemplifies attempts to disempower and exclude women from the public and cultural sphere. In short stories by Claudia Hernández and Jacinta Escudos, the female protagonists refute this victimization, becoming violent aggressors in their struggle to gain access to the public and cultural sphere.

`We Shall Rebuild Anew a Powerful Nation': UNRRA, Internationalism and National Reconstruction in Poland

This article evaluates UNRRA as one of the first international agencies established during the war to manage the transition from war to peace and to provide liberated countries with essential relief. It argues that this organization was a forum for debates on questions not only of internationalism, but also of the future of the nation-state, national reconstruction, national sovereignty, patriotism and citizens' relationships to their states. Moreover, the article explores this chapter of international history at the national level, by asking how the problem of Polish reconstruction after 1945 was framed, discussed and understood by UNRRA's diplomats and relief workers in Poland and in the DP camps. Problems of Polish sovereignty and reconstruction were interpreted differently in different sections of UNRRA, as a pragmatic interpretation of civic usefulness and patriotic responsibilities coexisted with an ethnological understanding of Polish cultural traditions, shared land and ancestry. But even as these different interpretations came into conflict, both models continued to be grounded in a world view which saw nation-states as unavoidable constituents of the international order, and international organizations as having to bind nations together without abolishing them.

Principles and Plans for National Reconstruction(1941) :The Constitutional Thought of Cho So-Ang andIts Meaning in Korean Constitutionalism

Principles and Plans for National Reconstruction(1941) :The Constitutional Thought of Cho So-Ang andIts Meaning in Korean Constitutionalism

The Disintegration of the British Empire and the Nationalist Cases of India and Israel: A Comparative AnalysisAllon Gal is Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History, and Co-Chairperson of the English-Speaking Countries Programme, Ben-Gurion University, Israel. Isaac Lubelsky teaches Modern Indian History at Tel Aviv University, Israel. This article is partly based on a paper presented by Professor Gal at the

The states of India and Israel gained independence in August 1947 and May 1948 respectively. Both pre-state communities were under British rule before independence, India for some two hundred years...

An economic analysis of national reconstruction at gunpoint

Can USA or other Western military forces establish self-sustaining liberal democracy in a country with a different type of politico-economic order? US government leaders believe they can do so, or so it appears, if we may judge by the dozens of attempts they have made since the late nineteenth century. From the Spanish– American War to the present wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, USA, British, and other Western leaders, relying on military force, have undertaken to remake defeated, subjugated, occupied, or colonized societies into market-oriented, democratically governed, rule-of-law systems. In the great majority of cases, these attempts have failed. In After War: The Political Economy of Exporting Democracy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), Christopher J. Coyne brings economic analysis to bear in explaining why this quest so often fails. He also points the way toward a policy stance more likely to meet with success. Coyne defines his terms early on. He focuses his analysis on national reconstruction, by which he means “the rebuilding of both formal and informal institutions....[This] involves the restoration of physical infrastructure and facilities; minimal social services; and structural reform in the political, economic, social, and security sectors” (p. 9). He distinguishes reconstruction from the related terms state building, nation building, and peacekeeping, which he treats as subsets of reconstruction. Success in national reconstruction implies “the achievement of a self-sustaining liberal democratic, economic, and social order that does not rely on external monetary or military support” (p. 10). He intends his analysis to be purely positive, neither requiring nor entailing any normative assumptions or conclusions. Coyne’s specific contribution is the application of economic tools to the analysis of reconstruction and related matters. He proceeds not by specifying a formal mathematical model or by estimating the coefficients of an econometric model, but by introducing, explaining, and applying a number of economic concepts, principles, Rev Austrian Econ (2008) 21:341–347 DOI 10.1007/s11138-008-0041-9

Nagata Tetsuzan and the Manchurian incident

Nagata Tetsuzan is known as one of the leading figures of the Imperial Army after the Manchurian incident. However, the full- scale research on him has not been done yet. This paper, therefore, as part of the research on the relations between Nagata and the Imperial Army, explores Nagata's action based on his vision and policies during the Manchurian incident. In 1929, just before the incident, Nagata gathered elite army officers and organized a group called "Isseki-kai." With the power of the group, Nagata influenced the central headquarters to cause Manchurian incident. Furthermore, he drove for the national reconstruction led by the Army. The background to his action was his own perspective on "total war."