Revolutionary Forces Research Articles

Enhanced oxygen reduction kinetics by a porous heterostructured cathode for intermediate temperature solid oxide fuel cells

A novel porous heterostructured Nd0.8Sr1.2CoO4±δ/Nd0.5Sr0.5CoO3-δ (NSC214/113) cathode for intermediate temperature solid oxide fuel cells (IT-SOFCs) is developed to significantly enhance oxygen reduction reaction (ORR) kinetics. Compared to single-phase materials, the fabricated porous heterostructured NSC214/113 shows optimized electrochemical properties, including a better conductivity, 20 times faster surface oxygen exchange kinetics, and a comparatively lower area-specific resistance (0.065 Ω cm2 at 800 °C). The single cell with Ni-YSZ|YSZ-GDC|NSC214/113 configuration exhibits a high peak power density of 1.10 W cm−2 at 800 °C, superior to other cells reported in literature with similar heterostructured cathodes. Moreover, the underlying mechanism of the ORR performance enhancement is further investigated, revealing that the formation of heterojunction can lead to a narrowed energy bandgap and a decrease of Co oxidation state, which further induce better conductivity, more available electrons and oxygen vacancies to enhance the ORR process. Taken together, our research also provides new insights into potential application of artificial intelligence (AI) method involved in materials intelligent identification, cell state estimation, system diagnostic and optimization. The revolutionary force of AI, especially in the field of new electrode material development is now advancing in its full swing. More and greater breakthroughs are still expected.

The lumpen in Marx’s works and its relevance for contemporary political struggle

The role of class struggle in historical materialism and Marx’s works is central in explaining political, social, and historical phenomena. While the two main classes, the proletariat and bourgeoisie, drive the progress of capitalist society, Marx also includes references to other classes such as the lumpen that are historically relevant in class struggle. This article puts forward that Marx’s understanding of the lumpen continually changes throughout his works and is integral, not just peripheral, to class struggle. By examining the chronology of Marx’s definition of the lumpen, I argue that Marx’s later works break from his earlier indictments of the lumpen as counterrevolutionary when he concludes in Capital that the lumpen are an exploited class due to their relation to productive labor in capitalism. This approach to understanding the lumpen in Marx’s works leads me to argue that the lumpen can be a possible revolutionary force in revolutionary class struggle. Connecting Marx’s works to contemporary times, I show that traditional lumpen ways of production and life are becoming more ubiquitous, due to recent political and economic trends, and therefore more important to incorporate into political movements. I will contend that current political discourse has worked to discount the political actions of the lumpen in countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom, while at the same time the lumpen class has considerably grown in such countries. I conclude that the political left must incorporate an understanding of the lumpen into its struggles if it is to seriously create a radical class–based politics in the near future.

Staging Labor Renewal: An Application of the Theory of Interaction Rituals.

Once thought to be the only genuinely revolutionary force, the labor movement is in retreat worldwide. By way of example, this article argues that by reawakening our human capacity for solidaristic relationships, theatrical plays are one means of revitalizing the labor movement. This article uses the theory of interaction rituals to analyze a dramatic production that follows in the tradition of the workers' theater movement. The play focuses on the little-known historical role of women in the 1941 to 1942 strike in Canada's gold fields. Audience responses to the after-performance survey reveal the play's positive ritual effects. This study fills a gap in the empirical literature on interaction rituals.

Unrest in Iran: A Leadership Crisis

Iranians have participated in many protests since the inception of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Revolutionary forces usually respond to riots with arbitrary mass arrests and mass shootings. Alone during the recent uprising in Nov 2019, more than 1,500 unarmed protestors were killed and 7,000 arrested by the regime. The author commenced empirical research into the drivers of the recent events with over 20,000 people living in Iran. The results show that about two million Iranians proactively support the Islamic Republic now. The majority, regular citizens, with less financial dependency on the regime or moderate religious background, are highly dissatisfied with the cleric rulers. This high level of disapproval leads to five substantial leadership crises challenging Iran's political elite. Besides, data suggest that widespread dissatisfaction and unpopularity seem to have been the leading cause of the most recent unrest in November 2019. Although the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, claimed that the uprising was disturbed and halted, however, one can expect further consequences of the outcry for the regime. According to the findings of this study, an overwhelming majority of Iranians should have boycotted the parliamentary elections in February 2020 - Iranians generally say no to the Islamic Republic.

Entrenching Democracy: Education and Cultural Participation in the Spanish Republican Army, 1936–1939

This article examines the mobilizing and legitimizing function of educational and cultural activities in the Spanish Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939. Education and cultural participation played a crucial role in the Republican government’s attempts to co-opt left-wing revolutionary forces emboldened by the war and unite antagonistic constituencies in an inclusive, government-led war effort. Such attempts converged on the construction of a new conscript army, where investment in education was not solely a matter of military expediency but also a means to implement, in the crucible of war, important aspects of a reform programme initiated with the proclamation of the Spanish Second Republic in 1931. Consequently, the Republican Army did not only serve as the Republic’s armed defence force but also as a laboratory of political education in which both civil and military authorities could negotiate, articulate and disseminate new notions of Republican citizenship. Drawing primarily on army records and trench journals from the Army of the Centre, the article shows how Republican educators and cultural workers employed a diverse range of techniques to deliver a reform programme designed to profoundly change Spanish politics and society. It also examines largely neglected questions of reception. Where soldiers’ engagement was forthcoming, educational activities could equip individuals with experiences and skills that were – and were understood to be – empowering. Yet in quantitative terms, rank-and-file engagement with educational activities was uneven and often quite limited. Contextual factors on all levels – international, national and local – impacted in various ways on soldiers’ educational and cultural participation, but ultimately it was the impending defeat of the Republic that undermined most soldiers’ willingness to engage. As a positive progressive vision of a future Republic faded among the debris of destroyed buildings, enthusiasm for a Republican educational programme inevitably faded too.

Paris, Capital of the Debacle: Aragon, Jasieński, and Revolutionary Catastrophism

Expressions of desire for catastrophe, imagined as a remedy for bourgeois inertia, are common among writers of the interwar avant-garde. This catastrophism exerts a powerful influence upon their conceptions of political revolution. Whereas the dominant revolutionary force in the period—Soviet Marxism—understood revolution to mean the seizure and wielding of state power by the proletariat, sympathetic intellectuals of the avant-garde tend to conceptualize revolution as the wholesale destruction of the institutions and symbols of capitalist modernity. Here I explore the “revolutionary catastrophism” of the interwar avant-garde through two texts in which the destruction of Paris, an exemplar of the bourgeois order, is evoked: the Polish Futurist Bruno Jasieński’s 1928 novel Je brûle Paris (first published serially in the French Communist daily L’Humanité), and Louis Aragon’s 1930 collage-poem “Front rouge.” Each of these texts represents revolution as a blind, destructive force, akin to a natural disaster. But they also contrast interestingly with much apocalyptically-themed literature because of their utopianism. It has become a cliché to remark that today it is easier to envision the end of the world than a more modest end to capitalism; what these texts propose is that the two might not look so different.

On the uses and abuses of Gramsci’s hegemony

As formulated in classical Marxism, hegemony referred to the unique position of the working class as the only independent revolutionary force under capitalism, as well as its political and ideological relations leading other social groups. Today hegemony typically refers instead to a constellation of arguments that regard a revolutionary orientation as hopeless and deny the unique political position of the working class. I examine the theoretical and political significance of this change by reflecting on Gramsci’s elaboration of hegemony and its dubious appropriation by post-Marxism, broadly understood.

Press in System of Bolshevik Propaganda during the Civil War in the North-West of Russia in 1919

The issues related to determining the place of the regional Bolshevik press in the system of propaganda activities of the Bolsheviks during the Civil War in the North-West of Russia in 1919 are discussed in the article. The relevance of the study is due to the significant role of the media in the regulation of socio-political processes both in modern Russia and in its historical past. The novelty of the study is in the consideration of the Bolshevik periodicals as a purposefully used by the "red" tool in achieving victory in the military-political confrontation with the White Guards. A comparative analysis of the materials of Bolshevik publications published in 1919 in the North-West of Russia was carried out. It is concluded that the press occupied an important place in the Bolshevik propaganda system in the northwestern region. It was established that its keynote was the formation of a negative image of the enemy in contrast with the Bolsheviks and the Red Army. It is proved that in the local Bolshevik press the image of "Soviet power" as the only fair and the Red Army as a powerful and invincible force was consistently created. It is shown that the positions and slogans put forward in the Bolshevik press were called upon to provide massive support for the revolutionary forces in the region and the mobilization of forces to repulse the enemy.

KONSEP PENDIDIKAN ISLAM PERSPEKTIF H.O.S TJOKROAMINOTO

The values ??of Islamic teachings brought by the great prophet Muhammad SAW, according to him, if we further explore and learn about them in Islam they will be implemented in life and nationality, and can also help face all the problems faced by the Indonesian people . In essence, the main idea of ??Islamic socialism according to the understanding of HOS Tjokrominoto is how to position and function religion (in this case Islam) as a revolutionary force to liberate oppressed people both culturally and politically and politically. HOS Tjokroaminoto is the son of a priyai who started the struggle against colonialism through the Sarekat organization Islam which is based on Islamic ideology and Socialism. HOS Tjokroaminoto's Islamic education perspective is very significant in a country. Education in question is education based on Islamic teachings, because in that teaching humans can find national values.

Anglophilia and Sensibility in Late Eighteenth-Century Vienna: Prince Charles Antoine de Ligne's Testament and theIndissolubles

AbstractPrince Charles Antoine de Ligne, son of Prince Charles Joseph de Ligne, died fighting French revolutionary forces at Croix-au-Bois in the Argonne region on 14 September 1792. He left behind a last will and testament (a copy is held in the Kriegsarchiv in Vienna) that evoked the memory of his small circle of aristocratic Viennese friends called “les Indissolubles.” Each member received a personal legacy, and Charles directed that a “temple of friendship” be established in his rooms at Beloeil featuring portraits of group members and a bust of himself. This poignant document, in combination with Charles's correspondence with close friend and group member Prince Joseph Poniatowski (preserved in the Polish Academy library in Cracow), confirms in striking manner the group's affinity for two popular European trends: Anglophilia and sensibility. Although Charles's will was not published at the time of his death he could assume that, as with any final testament, his statements would become known to, and honored by, a limited “public” of their own.

Conflict and revolt in the name of unity: Florentine factions in the Consulte e Pratiche on the cusp of the Ciompi Revolt

We analyze public-policy speeches in the Florentine Consulte e Pratiche, immediately prior to the Ciompi Revolt, for signs of elite factional conflict, in the context of self-proclaimed unity. We employ three statistical analyses of these speeches in Latin: namely, scatterplots of word frequencies, Wordfish scaling, and regressions on speech-similarities. Plus we employ two qualitative analyses: a case study of the speeches of Lapo da Castiglionchio, leader of the Parte Guelfa faction, and a close examination of the rhetoric of unity in three important sets of meetings.Our main finding is this: The runup to the Ciompi Revolt was crystalization of “unity of citizens” in the room of the Consulte e Pratiche and, among the same actors, crystallization of “unity of Guelfs” in the room of the Parte Guelfa, with a lack of recognition in the multivocal speeches in the former of the obvious contradiction with actions in the latter. In our opinion, the tragedy of “the valiant failure of republicanism” in Florence was that intense wishful yearning for unity in speech induced, under background conditions of deep social-class contestation about “Who is Florence?,” an intensification in action of the very revolutionary forces that it most desperately wanted to suppress.

Perspectives on The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War

Perspectives on <i>The Soviet Union and the Horn of Africa during the Cold War</i>

Complete and Unabridged

Complete and Unabridged Michelle Lekas (bio) AMERICAN PULP: HOW PAPERBACKS BROUGHT MODERNISM TO MAIN STREET BY PAULA RABINOWITZ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014 And so we come to what is really what we write what we write is really a crime story. —Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America This extended moment of print media digitization and retreading over what counts as cultural education while assigning pedagogical status to figures from Bill Gates to Brad Troemel and beyond welcomes Paula Rabinowitz’s acute materialist history of the American paperback book, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street. In American Pulp, Rabinowitz, a longtime English professor, political activist, and feminist-materialist historical theorist, picks up from memories of her mother’s bedside table heaped with paperback books from which she borrowed and devoured Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago to relieve an early summer’s boredom. She goes on to trace that sort of intimate reading experience into a story that templates reading practice onto a market revolution that annotated American social life from the Great Depression to postwar decentralization. In this journey that interlaces retail, marginalization, and aesthetics with Marshall McLuhan’s conception of “interface,”1 Rabinowitz wisely does not attempt a sweeping chronicle of American cultural change from 1939 to 1960. That project that would echo one of her [End Page 189] more ambitious best-selling paperback authors such as James Michener rather than the pulp subjects she revitalizes. Instead, she employs a strategy more resembling that used by Walter Benjamin in his classic work, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” which she cites throughout her text. She contextualizes pulp as material (inexpensive, grainy, “pulpy” paper) in keeping with her literary studies, such as Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America in particular. American Pulp’s reading thus functions to summon the pulp novel phenomenon as a revolutionary social form rather than as a series of documents demanding analysis. Rabinowitz’s wide lens allows her to frame her discussion in terms of what the paperback revolution helped to capacitate: the popularization of public reading, which allowed for flaneur-esque private subjectivity in public spaces. This demotizing of literacy agitated both the marketplace and the practices of everyday life. Here, books became cheap, but not always easy: they allowed an accessible forum for African American voices to discuss the toll of racism on everyday, not excluding sexual, life; they provided “survival literature” (187) and some relief to proto-lesbian or simply dissatisfied women; offered trenchant commentary on the Cold War and US policy; and pushed the limits of censorship. But possibly above but including all else, they brought people to books that they most likely would not have otherwise even considered reading and to people who lived far from libraries, bookstores, or schools: after all, every town has a drugstore. Rabinowitz’s reconception of the demotic as allowing reading in previously unread spaces and across class boundaries (parsed in her title’s coda, Modernism to Main Street), proves crucial to her rethinking of cultural education as a revolutionary force that exceeds academe. Following this last point, and as is appropriate both to this volume’s title and for a history that culminates with the first graduates who benefited from the GI Bill, American Pulp asserts a place for these “pocket books” as marketing sleaze and high modernist fiction on the same carousels and often packaged in the same lurid cover art (267). This observation, illustrated by sumptuous color cover reproduction plates, lends Rabinowitz’s text some genuine humor, as in her recounting of Robert Jonas’s B-movie-style cover art for the George Garnow’s physics text The Birth and Death of the Sun, John Faulkner’s bawdy cornpone pulps on the sale rack next to his brother William’s novels, [End Page 190] and the saucy covers of Emile Zola’s Nana and Nana’s Mother, all posed to appeal to horny servicemen. The story begins by tracing the popular dime-store novel’s story to two of the its primary market innovators: the English publishing executive Allen Lane, who founded Penguin Press in 1935, and the American Robert De Graff, who launched Pocket Books...

Complete and Unabridged

Complete and Unabridged Michelle Lekas (bio) AMERICAN PULP: HOW PAPERBACKS BROUGHT MODERNISM TO MAIN STREET BY PAULA RABINOWITZ Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014 And so we come to what is really what we write what we write is really a crime story. —Gertrude Stein, The Geographical History of America This extended moment of print media digitization and retreading over what counts as cultural education while assigning pedagogical status to figures from Bill Gates to Brad Troemel and beyond welcomes Paula Rabinowitz’s acute materialist history of the American paperback book, American Pulp: How Paperbacks Brought Modernism to Main Street. In American Pulp, Rabinowitz, a longtime English professor, political activist, and feminist-materialist historical theorist, picks up from memories of her mother’s bedside table heaped with paperback books from which she borrowed and devoured Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago to relieve an early summer’s boredom. She goes on to trace that sort of intimate reading experience into a story that templates reading practice onto a market revolution that annotated American social life from the Great Depression to postwar decentralization. In this journey that interlaces retail, marginalization, and aesthetics with Marshall McLuhan’s conception of “interface,”1 Rabinowitz wisely does not attempt a sweeping chronicle of American cultural change from 1939 to 1960. That project that would echo one of her [End Page 189] more ambitious best-selling paperback authors such as James Michener rather than the pulp subjects she revitalizes. Instead, she employs a strategy more resembling that used by Walter Benjamin in his classic work, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” which she cites throughout her text. She contextualizes pulp as material (inexpensive, grainy, “pulpy” paper) in keeping with her literary studies, such as Labor and Desire: Women’s Revolutionary Fiction in Depression America in particular. American Pulp’s reading thus functions to summon the pulp novel phenomenon as a revolutionary social form rather than as a series of documents demanding analysis. Rabinowitz’s wide lens allows her to frame her discussion in terms of what the paperback revolution helped to capacitate: the popularization of public reading, which allowed for flaneur-esque private subjectivity in public spaces. This demotizing of literacy agitated both the marketplace and the practices of everyday life. Here, books became cheap, but not always easy: they allowed an accessible forum for African American voices to discuss the toll of racism on everyday, not excluding sexual, life; they provided “survival literature” (187) and some relief to proto-lesbian or simply dissatisfied women; offered trenchant commentary on the Cold War and US policy; and pushed the limits of censorship. But possibly above but including all else, they brought people to books that they most likely would not have otherwise even considered reading and to people who lived far from libraries, bookstores, or schools: after all, every town has a drugstore. Rabinowitz’s reconception of the demotic as allowing reading in previously unread spaces and across class boundaries (parsed in her title’s coda, Modernism to Main Street), proves crucial to her rethinking of cultural education as a revolutionary force that exceeds academe. Following this last point, and as is appropriate both to this volume’s title and for a history that culminates with the first graduates who benefited from the GI Bill, American Pulp asserts a place for these “pocket books” as marketing sleaze and high modernist fiction on the same carousels and often packaged in the same lurid cover art (267). This observation, illustrated by sumptuous color cover reproduction plates, lends Rabinowitz’s text some genuine humor, as in her recounting of Robert Jonas’s B-movie-style cover art for the George Garnow’s physics text The Birth and Death of the Sun, John Faulkner’s bawdy cornpone pulps on the sale rack next to his brother William’s novels, [End Page 190] and the saucy covers of Emile Zola’s Nana and Nana’s Mother, all posed to appeal to horny servicemen. The story begins by tracing the popular dime-store novel’s story to two of the its primary market innovators: the English publishing executive Allen Lane, who founded Penguin Press in 1935, and the American Robert De Graff, who launched Pocket Books...

Patrie, contrerévolution, romantisme. Xavier de Maistre et la Savoie perdue

Fatherland, counterrevolution, romanticism. Xavier de Maistre and his lost Savoy The literary works of Xavier de Maistre, savoyard writer and painter of the turn of 18th and 19th centuries, are strictly connected to the era in which the author has lived, particularly in the way of considering concepts of fatherland and nature, landscape. A trauma, related to the invasion of French revolutionary forces in Savoy pushed de Maistre into the counterrevolutionary camp and stimulated narrative reflections upon the themes of homeland, nature, and political change. His works, such as Voyage autour de ma chambre and Expédition nocturne autour de ma chambre, written between 1794 and 1825, show a particular evolution of the author’s point of view, starting from a classical, objectifying approach, inherited form the Enlightenment, to transform finally towards a subjective, individual scope, specific to the romanticism. To discover the motors and instru ments of this evolution of the author’s mind is the object of this paper.

Viaje a la revolución: vitalismo y cultura política en las crónicas chinas de Bernardo Kordon

This article examines the Chinese chronicles of Argentine traveler, writer, and editor Bernardo Kordon (1915–2002), produced during his three decades of travels to the Popular Republic of China and as a reflection of a larger network of contact between both regions beginning in the late 1950s. An enthusiast of Chinese millenarian culture and the Maoist Revolution, Kordon, distancing himself from the Communist Party of Argentina and the aesthetics of social realism, saw in China an alternative model for intellectual commitment and revolutionary solidarity. I argue that, rather than falling back on the exoticism of sinology or professing a complete support of Maoist ideology, Kordon’s approach to China, especially to its urban planning program and millenarian theater, is permeated by a vitalist atmosphere and sensibility. Vitalism, a philosophical experience significant for thinkers such as Nietzsche and Bergson, saw a constructive revolutionary force in the energy and creative potential of human beings, especially youth. In my reading, Kordon acquires this vitalist sensibility through his participation in political and cultural associations with ties to the Student Reform Movement of 1918. Kordon’s chronicles allow us to examine sites of revolutionary cultural production in Argentina and Latin America beyond party lines or hegemonic discourses.

Queer Times, Black Futures by Kara Keeling

Reviewed by: Queer Times, Black Futures by Kara Keeling Courtney R. Baker (bio) Queer Times, Black Futures by Kara Keeling New York University Press. Sexual Cultures series. 2019. 288 pages. $89.00 hardcover; $30.00 paper; also available in e-book. Queer Times, Black Futures examines and models the "'freedom dreams' that issue from Afrofuturist imaginings . . . so that those of us living today . . . can consider what in those freedom dreams might survive us and our limited perceptions."1 The book's prose and logic strive toward the poetic, in the senses intended by both Karl Marx and Audre Lorde, as "poetry has the capacity to deterritorialize language, making uncommon, queer sense available to thought."2 Kara Keeling's effort echoes Lorde's excavation of deep-earth Black wisdom that, as the late poet writes, becomes a "jewel in . . . open light" and that might service what historian Robin Kelley has termed freedom dreams—"the dream of a new world" entertained and envisioned by activists and artists that might form the "catalyst for . . . political engagement" in our time.3 Keeling enhances Kelley's principle by considering Nassim Nicholas Taleb's trope of the "Black Swan event," which is "characterized by 'a combination of low predictability and large impact'" and manifests as reliance upon what is known rather than the inevitable eruptions of the unknown.4 Keeling leverages Taleb's principle to explain how the long history of revolutions can still be narrated as surprises within the colonial mindset. The supposedly unforeseen Black freedom dreams that gain from disorder have appeared as, variously, the Haitian Revolution (which "proved that Black belonging, anchored in love of freedom and of Black people, could be an antifragile revolutionary force") and in "Black culture, as technē," characterized by "mobility, dispersion, disruptive [End Page 164] potential, and endurance."5 Freedom dreams are also, as Keeling demonstrates in her book, expressed in such layered texts as Grace Jones's video for "Corporate Cannibal" as well as C. L. R. James's 1953 study Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways.6 This orientation toward a more just future to come—one that "requires (recreation and imagination"—is recognized as "what Frantz Fanon referred to as a 'real leap.' "7 Keeling's interest in these potentialities, "(re)turns," and "the (im)possible" is constructed as anticapital; the resources she identifies are for the enactment of a sustainable, ethical world that is not just divested from but radically un-invested in property accumulation, and the injustices that follow investment in those capitalist, settler-colonial fictions.8 If poetry resists the lure of rendering the felt into material, so too does it effectively transmit queer dreams of a radical future because "[p]oetry is a way of entering the unknown and carrying back the impossible."9 Keeling's book resonates with Stephen Best's 2018 monograph, None Like Us: Blackness, Belonging, Aesthetic Life, in their shared concern about the character of Black study and the utopianism of queer thought.10 But whereas Best is invested in critiquing the Black history-bound subject of Afropessimism and the queer utopian subject who is alienated from an insistence upon a future bound up with narratives of reproduction, Keeling's approach seems much more expansive in its characterization of Black and queer radicalism. That is, Keeling targets not those subject to time and space but the subjectivizing functions of temporality and spatiality Black and queer ontologies are less recognizable sites of resistance in Queer Times, Black Futures than they are recurring surprises and disruptions of social orders. These radical breaks are what Keeling terms, after Marx, "poetry from the future."11 However, she enhances that phrase with the poetic theory of Lorde, whose injunction that "poetry is not a luxury" imbues functionalist Marxism with the Black-femme-wit of poetry's capacity to combat "the estrangement of the senses by Capital."12 As Keeling explains, "'poetry from the future' interrupts the habitual formation of bodies, and it serves as an index of a time to come when today exists potently even if not (yet) effectively, but escapes us, will find its time."13 This gesture deprivileges the present as well as the subject of the present, preferring "what Octavia...

Counteraction to propaganda activities of revolutionary organizations in the Russian Empire at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries

Introduction. Propaganda direction in the activities of Russian political organizations at the turn of the XIX–XX centuries played an important role in their struggle against the authorities and was one of the causes of the collapse of the Russian socio-political system. Materials and Methods. The methodological basis of this study is the historical-genetic method, as well as the principles of historicism and micro-history. Results. The main task of the study is to analyze the main activities of the authorities in the fight against anti-government propaganda carried out by opposition political organizations in the period under review. On the example of circulars and orders of local and Central authorities the review of the main directions of activity of revolutionary political organizations and counteraction to them by the provincial authorities and police are given. The growth of the propaganda activities of the revolutionary forces is noted in the early twentieth century, which was primarily due to the emergence of domestic centers for the dissemination of propaganda materials. There is also a complication of the functional, and as a consequence, the records of the provincial authorities in opposition to anti-government propaganda. Discussion and Conclusions. This study allows us to divide the fight against anti-government propaganda into two periods: the predominance of foreign propaganda centers and the predominance of local centers of agitation and propaganda. The coordination of the activity of the provincial civil authorities, the Police Department and Postal and Telegraph officials to prevent the propaganda activities of revolutionary organizations is noted. However, it is concluded that despite the measures taken, the authorities were unable to stop the flow of printed propaganda products, as the country did not solve the objective problems that created a fertile ground for the formation of the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire.

From Third World Theory to Belt and Road Initiative: International Aid as a Chinese Foreign Policy Tool

Abstract In 1946, Mao Zedong began to elaborate his theory of the Third World from the perception that there would be an ‘intermediate zone’ of countries between the two superpowers. From there, he concluded that Africa, Latin America, and Asia, except for Japan, would compose the revolutionary forces capable of defeating imperialism, colonialism, and hegemonism. The start of international aid from the People’s Republic of China to developing countries dates back to the period immediately after the Bandung Conference of 1955, extending to the present. Through a bibliographical and documentary analysis, the article starts with the following research question: What role did domestic and international factors play in China’s foreign aid drivers over the years? To answer the question, the evolution of Chinese international assistance was studied from Mao to the Belt and Road Initiative, which is the complete expression of the country’s ‘quaternity’ model of co-operation, combining aid, trade, investment, and technical assistance.

Forces for change in social impact assessment

ABSTRACT Social impact assessment (SIA) is experiencing both evolutionary and revolutionary forces for change. Using the example of New South Wales, Australia, forces for change include community pressure and shifting expectations, industry desire for clarity and certainty, departmental leadership, a collaborative approach to policy development, and perceived legitimacy of the guideline itself. Inhibiting these forces are general resistance to change, a concern around costs of good SIA, unfamiliarity with social sciences, and insufficient practitioner capacity. The recent Rocky Hill judgement, which highlights concepts such as community cohesion, sense of place, and distributive equity, may accelerate change. However, there is also a need to build capacity among SIA practitioners, and afford sufficient time and budget to meet the standard of leading-practice guidelines. At the same time, unfolding trends such as the climate change and extinction crises, the gendered nature of development, ever-widening inequalities, and ‘post-truth’ discourses may catalyse more revolutionary change in SIA practice – changes that paradoxically may enable SIA to reclaim its social-science principles and the overarching goal of sustainable social development.