Transnational History

""Juvenile Delinquency and the Limits of Western Influence, 1850-2000, brings together a wide range of case studies from across the globe, written by some of the leading scholars in the field, to explore the complex ways in which historical understandings of childhood and juvenile delinquency have been constructed in a global context. The book highlights the continued entanglement of historical descriptions of the development of juvenile justice systems in other parts of the world with narratives of Western colonialism and the persistence of notions of a cultural divide between East and West. It also stresses the need to combine theoretical insights from traditional comparative history with new global history approaches. In doing so, the case studies examined in the volume reveal the significant limitations to the influence of Western ideas about juvenile delinquency in other parts of the world as well as the important degree to which Western understandings of delinquency were also constructed in a transnational context.
Includes chapters by Stephanie Olsen, Amrit Dev Kaur Khalsa, Howard Lupovitch, Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, Sarah Bornhorst, Barak Kushner, Gleb Tsipursky, Nina Mackert, Kate Bradley and Nina Cicek."""

The global ascension of disability human rights has emerged with the onset of global fiscal austerity. Across nearly all Western Liberal Democracies, governments have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, whilst simultaneously, undertaking broad base disability welfare retrenchment that target disability social security regimes. Australia, the UK and Canada, in particular, have progressively implemented more restrictive disability social security eligibility criteria and in turn, many people with disabilities who previously qualified for disability social security no longer qualify. Thus, despite the normalisation of disability rights at the global scale, within the national scale, many people with disabilities are no longer defined as ‘disabled’ and are being shifted onto more precarious social security payments with fewer entitlements. This paper seeks to explore this growing global contradiction drawing upon disability social policy examples from the UK and Australia. It will discuss the tension that exists between the frames of ‘citizenship rights’ and ‘disability human rights’ and how these competing political frames, between the scale of the global and the national, undermine the realisation of ‘rights’ within national disability welfare regimes.

Short presentation on the connections between ACT UP Philadelphia's local AIDS activism and global HIV/AIDS treatment efforts during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Delivered as part of a roundtable discussion organized by the Committee on LGBT History of the American Historical Association.

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

"As Research Assistant on the Peace Process: Layers of Meaning project between June 2012 and November 2013 I created a fully searchable online directory of 1,175 extant interviews relating to the Northern Ireland peace process:
http://www.peaceprocesshistory.org/lomond

Peace Process: Layers of Meaning LOMOND abstract:

'We [the project team] hope that it will serve a number of functions.

A select but authoritative archive in its own right, it will undoubtedly be of value to fellow researchers and students working on similar or related projects.

In the manner of a decades-long time-lapse camera, we hope that it will also permit users to access an instructive and suggestive record of changes in thinking, in public styles and statements, in sets of possibilities, in pressures experienced, and insights gained or rejected.

We envisage, in other words, a contemporary archive, immediately and progressively available, that demonstrates uncertainty, self-interrogation, bewilderment, contradictions, incoherence and disappointment, as well as elements of finality.'"

"HIGHLIGHTS
► Compares three Anglo-Portuguese campaigns in Portugal in the 1380s. ► Examines political, diplomatic, military, social and economic contexts. ► Explores motivations for English service in Portugal and longer term presence. ► Maps itineraries in Portugal of English soldiers. ► Foreign military intervention and mercenaries as a driving force in relations between regions.:


ABSTRACT
Three Anglo-Portuguese campaigns took English servicemen into Portugal in the 1380s. Two of those campaigns were largely guided by Plantagenet interests - in 1381-2 and 1386-7, respectively under the earl of Cambridge and the duke of Lancaster. The other, which started in 1384 under regent João of Avis (later João I), involved entirely volunteer English forces. While Lancastrian-led expeditions were largely political and military failures, servicemen recruited by the Portuguese in England achieved greater success, including victory at the battle of Aljubarrota. This article first looks at the political, diplomatic, military, social, and economic contexts of these expeditions, exploring motivations for English service in Portugal in particular, whilst examining interest from the 'common man', besides that of governments. By looking also at English soldiers' itineraries in Portugal their presence is then mapped and their continuance debated. The Anglo-Portuguese example is finally shown to illustrate how foreign military intervention and 'mercenary' activity might have been a driving force in the social and economic relations between medieval European regions during the Hundred Years War."

Unter welchen Bedingungen werden dem ersten Kosmonauten Jurij Gagarin die Attribute von Fortschritt bis Frieden zugeschrieben, und was bedeutet dies für die Funktion des ersten sozialistischen Kosmoshelden? Eine Antwort auf diese Frage liefert die vorliegende Arbeit, die am Studienkolleg Weltregionalforschung der Universität Erfurt entstand. Mit Hilfe von literaturwissenschaftlichen Diskurs- und Textanalysen werden die Autobiographie Gagarins "Der Weg in den Kosmos" untersucht und Prozesse der Wissens- und Diskursbildung in der UdSSR und der DDR beleuchtet. Es wird gezeigt, wie diese diskursiven Besetzungsstrategien die Narrationen Jurij Gagarins sowie seine Funktion als Kosmonaut, Soldat und Familienvater bestimmen.

This article analyses the position of the major oil companies during the negotiations with the producing countries in late 1970-early 1971, a passage which, by marking a change in the balance of power in the oil market, paved the way for the turning point of late 1973. Contrary to the prevailing view, the “seven sisters” were not a helpless recipient of exporting countries’ demands, but, once shown the impossibility of preserving the status quo, they “willingly” gave in to the pressures to increase the oil price. This would have allowed a reversal, at the expense of consumers, of a decade-long downward trend in their rate of profit. At the same time, by making profitable the exploitation of new high-cost reserves, higher prices of crude would have eased an increasingly unsustainable dependence on the resources of politically “hot” areas such as the Middle East and North Africa. The research is based on company archives (British Petroleum, Compagnie Française de Pétrole, ENI), government archives (French and British) and published sources (Foreign Relations of the US, U.S. Senate Hearings).

Belgian secularists were at the centre of the freethinker’s international during the Belle Epoque. In contrast, Belgian Freemasons did not succeed to be the nexus of international Freemasonry, although the Belgian leaders of the freethinkers’ international were almost all freemasons. The strength of its militant secularism, both within and outside freemasonry, gave Belgium a prominent role in the International Federation of Freethinkers, but it did not facilitate any aspiration to a similar position in a denominationally multiform Masonic field. Towards the end of the period, the central position of the Belgians in the freethinkers’ movement became less self-evident, notably because of its vigorous refusal of reconciliation with German seculars. Whatever the differences, Belgian freethinkers and freemasons were both able to act as intermediaries for ideas and information in transit, whether through an organizational modus or through individual brokers.

As the world turns its attention to London for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, it is worth remembering that the modern Olympics represent the ultimate triumph of capitalist sport and not just about the “ideals” that are presented to the global audience. The Games are run by an elite private organization, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), which has succeeded in stamping out all other “Olympic” games and movements as it is the self-proclaimed great unifier of the world through “Olympic” sport. The IOC owns the rights to use the word “Olympic” and no event beyond of its control can use the word without permission due to its licensing agreements and penchant for using legal systems to protect the name.