Relations In Britain Research Articles

Nigerian Pentecostal Mission in Europe: Ecumenical and Secular Relations in Britain

African churches face diverse obstacles while attempting cross-cultural mission in the West. These include the influence of external forces such as racism, lack of understanding of European cultures, lack of worship spaces and various perceptions that many wider indigenous Europeans have about Africans and their churches, particularly their theological beliefs. These external factors impose real challenges, which are beyond the control of the leaders of diaspora African churches and interfere with the effort to build relations with the wider white indigenous European host population, whether spiritual or secular. This qualitative study explores the different ways through which Nigerian-initiated churches in London are engaging with British society, both ecumenically and as a social force within the communities. There are indications that a few of the larger churches are building ecumenical relations with mainline Britishchurches, although this is prevalent at leadership level. Similarly, they are well-enough resourced to embark on social community projects which are beneficial to nationals of all races and political activities to court the British royal and political elite and aretherefore establishing their presence within and creating pathways to British society.

The African Grounds of Race Relations in Britain.

'Race relations' became the most common way of conceptualizing the 'integration' of Commonwealth migrants and various obstacles to it in post-war Britain. However, interest in race relations did not centre initially on Afro-Caribbeans and other non-white migrants to metropolitan Britain as is commonly assumed. Before the 1960s, efforts to study and manage them centred primarily on British settler colonies in Africa. This article demonstrates how colonial Africa provided institutional models and much of the personnel and start-up capital for a race relations industry in Britain that depoliticized racism and delegitimated anticolonial and Black Power politics by attributing them to racial identification. Studies of and policies directed towards race relations in 1960s Britain emerged alongside and in connection with efforts to manage, co-opt, or divert the transformative potential of African liberation movements and to shape post-colonial futures with neoliberal solutions.

The Merits of ‘Moral Ecumenism’: Secularism, Suspicion and Jewish-Christian Relations in Twentieth-Century Britain

This article uses the history of Jewish-Christian relations in twentieth-century Britain to shed light on the theological and political changes which have shaped inter-faith dialogue, and explore religious responses to the perceived acceleration of secularism. In so doing it questions the centrality of antisemitism and the Holocaust as the key drivers of change in Jewish-Christian relations and highlights the importance of broader shifts in religious belief, and a growing perception of ‘common ground’ between faiths. While Jewish-Christian relations in Britain are now frequently presented as a model of inter-faith cooperation, this article argues that longstanding theological and political challenges have continued to problematise this role-model status.

Crossing the Threshold of General Public Relations Practices: Assessing Malaysia’s Experience in the First Quarter of the Millennium

Public Relations (PR) is nothing new to the present day global community. In fact, mankind had exercised PR since the day they first decided to live together. Since then, an essential beacon of wisdom in the history of mankind was planted. The birth of the modern PR began in 1948 when the Public Relations Society of America and the Institute of Public Relations in Britain were founded. Today, the influence of this communication field has engulfed almost all professions of global organizations. Majority of these organizations apply the PR principles and practices into their organizational structures. This paper begins with the historical backgrounds of the international PR culture, studies, and definitions. From there, the discussion penetrates deeper into the realm of the Malaysian PR culture. This analysis deals with many aspects of the PR, i.e. professional ethics, social and legal contracts, aimed at giving a considerably critical understanding of the Malaysian PR culture, which differs in definitions and practices. At the end of this paper, readers are presented with an overview of contemporary threats and challenges facing the field. This concept paper deals with the past, the present, and the future uncertainties of the PR field. Whether we are aware or not, PR today has been tremendously used for managing social stress in view of globalization. Yet, the forces of tolerance and brotherhood grant the country confidence in facing future challenges and threats. Indeed, the world of global PR is changing inconsiderately. Come what may, Malaysian has chosen to toughen up for a journey of her own in the wake of PR uncertainties.

Remembering the Falklands war in Britain: From Division to Conviction?

This article examines how the Falklands war has been remembered in Britain. By looking at how ideas of the Falklands war reached public audiences, the article traces changing British understandings of the composition of the conflict. In the 1980s, the war was regarded as politically divisive. Since the 1990s, political divisions faded, and the perspectives of veterans, particularly as represented in the memoirs of lower ranked soldiers, became prominent. This has resulted in focus on new themes, such as experiences of combat trauma and relationships with the Falkland Islands and islanders. These changes illustrate shifts in civil–military relations in Britain and encouraged new interpretations of what the Falklands war meant for Britain. In the contexts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly that of Iraq, Britain’s engagement in the Falklands came to be seen not only as politically legitimate, but also as the right choice to have made.

Protesting Populist Knowledge Practices: Collective Effervescence at the March for Science London

On 22 April 2017, 10,000 people joined the March for Science London, one of 600 events globally asserting the importance of science against post-truth. Here we report an online and on-the-ground observational study of the London event in its distinct, post-Brexit referendum context. We analyse the motives for marchers’ attendance, and their collective enactment of what science is and why and by what it is threatened. Drawing upon Interaction Ritual Theory and the concept of civic epistemology, we develop the notion of populist knowledge practices to capture the ‘other’ that marchers defined themselves against. We detail how this was performed, and how it articulated a particular vision for science–society relations in Britain. In closing, we argue that the March for Science is one in a chain of anti-populist activist events that retains collective effervescence while transcending specific framings.

Jeffrey Hill. Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire.

J<scp>effrey</scp> H<scp>ill</scp>. <i>Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire</i>.

The Munchetty controversy: Empire, race, and the BBC

AbstractIn September 2019, Naga Munchetty, a BBC presenter, was charged by the corporation as having breached its guidelines in sharing her personal experience of racism in reaction to Donald Trump's “Go Back” outburst at four female political opponents, an incident understood worldwide as a racist attack. The BBC, acting on complaints from some viewers, upheld that Munchetty had partially breached its journalistic guidelines in speaking about her experience of racism. This article, through a postcolonial critique of the incident, argues that the BBC guidelines and the censure of Munchetty have to be viewed through an organizational “dual consciousness” of the libidinal economy of the BBC as part of the British Empire and being an active broker of race relations in Britain through the national broadcasting space as a public service broadcaster. The BBC, both as an organization and a broadcaster, is inscribed through its historicity and a long trajectory of “fixing” the identity of the racial “Other.” In the Munchetty controversy, her racial subjectivity is made “uncanny” or alien to the racialized subject through the BBC's organizational ethos of “objectivity and impartiality” to reassemble race as fiction within its “regime of representation.”

Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire

Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire

Before BISA: the British Coordinating Committee for International Studies, S.H. Bailey, and the Bailey Conferences

The story of how International Relations in Britain was organised before the setting up of BISA in 1975 has been largely forgotten. This paper recovers that history and shows that it links directly back to the interwar years, when the British Coordinating Committee for International Studies was set up as part of the League of Nations-linked International Studies Conferences. S.H. Bailey, a long-forgotten junior scholar at the LSE, almost single-handedly pioneered what was after 1945 to become the norm of national academic associations and conferences for IR.

Jeffrey Hill. Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 228. $114.00 (cloth).

Jeffrey Hill. Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 228. $114.00 (cloth).

Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire by Jeffrey Hill

<i>Learie Constantine and Race Relations in Britain and the Empire</i> by Jeffrey Hill

Borrowed identities: Class(ification), inequality and the role of credit-debt in class making and struggle

Class analysis has re-emerged as a pertinent area of enquiry. This development is linked to a growing body of work dubbed cultural class analysis, that utilises Bourdieu’s class scheme to develop rich understandings of how culture and lifestyle interacts with economic and social relations in Britain, generating inequalities and hierarchies. Yet cultural class analyses do not properly account for the way individuals resist their relative class positions, nor the role of unsecured credit in facilitating consumption. This article contributes to this area by examining how unsecured credit and problem debt influences consumption and class position amongst individuals with modest incomes. Drawing on 21 interviews with individuals managing problem debt, this article details how class inequality emerges through affective states that include anxiety and feelings of deficit. It also shows how these experiences motivate participants to rely on unsecured credit to consume cultural goods and engage in activities in a struggle against their class position, with the intention of enhancing how they are perceived and classified by others. The findings indicate that cultural class analyses may have overlooked the symbolic importance of mundane consumption and goods in social differentiation. This article further details how these processes entangle individuals into complex liens of debt – which lead to over-indebtedness, default, dispossession and financial expropriation – illustrating how investigations of credit-debt can better inform understandings of class inequality, exploitation and struggle.

Relations between the Church of England Council on Foreign Relations and the Foreign Office in the Early Cold War

The paper looks at church-state relations in Britain during the Early Cold War through the relationship between the Foreign Office and the Church of England Council on Foreign Relations. It examines the conviction of government and religious elites that secular and spiritual power were complementary and of benefit to the national interest. Albeit marked by mutual empathy, subtle and discreet means, informal understandings and shared outlooks, cooperation between the two could prove problematic. The paper explores the Cold War tensions that derived from the influence of America's «spiritual-industrial-complex» on its Transatlantic ally when it conflicted with the ecumenical influences on the Church of England to reach out to the Russian Orthodox Church.

Global perspectives on Welsh Patagonia: the complexities of being both colonizer and colonized

AbstractThe nationalist Welsh colony in Patagonia, Y Wladfa, offers a peripheral vantage point from which to reconsider core assumptions about settler colonialism and the British World. Taking a fresh approach to settler colonial studies, this article both pays close attention to settler motives before embarkation and also analyses the case from a global perspective. It foregrounds the role of unequal power relations in Britain, the British World, and the global arena in shaping social relations at home and in the colony, as well as locating Y Wladfa within a constellation of Welsh sites and influences around the world. Analysis reveals the Welsh to occupy a complex position within such global hierarchies, and to be colonizing Patagonia from a colonized position. As such, this case at the margins of settler power reveals important ambiguities, tensions, and affinities that challenge assumptions in settler colonial theory, and open spaces that might enrich and deepen analysis of this fundamentally global relationship of power.

Internationalism between national questions and imperial considerations: Henry Noel Brailsford and the transformations of Central and Eastern Europe (1898–1919)

ABSTRACTThe article recovers Henry Brailsford’s reflections on south-eastern and east-central Europe in a transformative period in international politics. Although the British journalist has been considered as key influence in the development of international relations in Britain, his commentary on the national questions in eastern Europe has remained relatively unexplored. The article argues that in response to the international politics of the Eastern Question and to concurrent imperial questions in Britain, Brailsford articulated an imperial anti-imperialist vision of international order based on the support for local autonomy and self-government across eastern Europe and the colonial world. It then proceeds to chart his gradual distancing from the politics of self-determination during the Great War and argues that Brailsford’s international thought was influenced by a series of pragmatic considerations regarding the future of central and eastern Europe. The intricacies of Brailsford’s international thought offer an informative case-study of the symbiosis of liberal and socialist varieties of internationalism in early twentieth century Britain.

‘Mod Movement in Quality Street Clothes’: British Popular Music and Pantomime, 1955–75

From the late 1950s onwards, young rock ‘n’ roll musicians and popular singers were introduced into commercial Christmas pantomime productions. While this practice, which constituted an extension of their involvement in the broader sphere of variety theatre, has been previously noted, it is seldom accorded much sustained attention. In this article Gillian Mitchell explores the impact which such performers made upon pantomime, while observing the ways in which involvement in pantomime productions affected their careers and aspirations. ‘Pop stars’ brought much-needed revenue to struggling theatres, and, while their presence onstage alongside experienced pantomime performers sometimes attracted criticism, they also contributed in many ways to a reinvigoration of the medium, whether by offering fresh scope for topical gags, or by giving ambitious producers the chance to more more experimental types of production. The article also questions the notion that, by the late 1960s, pantomime had become a ‘last refuge’ for those popular musicians who were apparently unable to maintain a foothold in the increasingly ‘serious’ world of rock music. Gillian A.M. Mitchell is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of St Andrews. This article forms part of a larger project which explores adult reactions to popular music and inter-generational relations in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Book Review: The Military Covenant. Its Impact on Civil–Military Relations in Britain. Sarah Ingham

Book Review: <i>The Military Covenant. Its Impact on Civil–Military Relations in Britain</i>. Sarah Ingham

The Nuts‐and‐Bolts of Publishing in the BJIR II: Evaluation Criteria

The Nuts‐and‐Bolts of Publishing in the BJIR II: Evaluation Criteria

The Great War, military recruitment and the public relations work of the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, 1914–1915

Several historians have acknowledged the impact of the First World War on the development of public relations in Britain. However, while there remains a general recognition of the importance of the war in fostering new forms of public relations practice, few studies of major practitioners or organisations have been carried out. Focusing on the period immediately following the declaration of war and using the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee as a case study, this article seeks to fill in some of the gaps that have emerged in the literature. Tasked with boosting enlistment in the armed forces, the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee occupied a central place in the government’s wartime communications machinery. Though usually studied for its advertising and poster work, a case is made here for an understanding of the Committee as an early public relations organisation which boasted some of the features, and much of the spirit, of later ventures in the field. Its work, which involved an extensive programme of public events, a major campaign of public opinion research and an attempt to influence newspaper coverage of recruitment, suggests a need to revise traditional conceptions of Great War propaganda. Yet it also has significant implications for the history of public relations in Britain and the relationship the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee shared to similar organisations set up in other countries at the same time.