Evaluating the legacies of state-building: success, failure, and the role of responsibility

What impact do international state-building missions have on the domestic politics of states they seek to build, and how can we measure this impact with confidence? This article seeks to address these questions and challenge some existing approaches that often appear to assume that state-builders leave lasting legacies rather than demonstrating such influence with the use of carefully chosen empirical evidence. Too often, domestic conditions that follow in the wake of international state-building are assumed to follow as a result of international intervention, usually due to insufficient attention to the causal processes that link international actions to domestic outcomes. The article calls for greater appreciation of the methodological challenges to establishing causal inferences regarding the legacies of state-building and identifies three qualitative methodological strategies—process tracing, counterfactual analysis, and the use of control cases—that can be used to improve confidence in causal claims about state-building legacies. The article concludes with a case study of international state-building in East Timor, highlighting several flaws of existing evaluations of the United Nations' role in East Timor and identifying the critical role that domestic actors play even in the context of authoritative international intervention

The ship as symbol in the prehistory of Scandinavia and south-east Asia

The ship is the dominant element in the visual culture of the South Scandinavian Bronze Age, appearing in several different media, including rock carvings, decorated metalwork and above-ground monuments. Discussion has divided between those scholars who interpret this imagery in terms of long-distance exchange networks and those who emphasize its more local significance, including its deployment in mortuary ritual. A strikingly similar system is identified in Southeast Asia and part of Melanesia and can be interpreted through archaeological and ethnographic sources, but in this case there is no need to distinguish between 'practical' and 'symbolic' interpretations of the depictions of ships. This paper summarizes the evidence from this region and suggests that it can offer a fruitful source of comparison for archaeologists working in northern Europe.

On the long-term interannual variability of the east Asian winter monsoon

The East Asian Winter Monsoon (EAWM) and Siberian High (SH) are inherently related, based on prior studies of instrumental data available for recent decades (since 1958). Here we develop an extended instrumental EAWM index since 1871 that correlates significantly with the SH. These two indices show common modes of variation on the biennial (2-3 year) time scale. We also develop an index of the pressure gradient between the SH and the Aleutian Low, a gradient which critically impacts EAWM variability. This difference series, based on tree-ring reconstructions of the SH and the North Pacific Index (NPI) over the past 400 years, shows that the weakening of this gradient in recent decades has not been unusual in a long-term context. Correlations between the SH series and a tree-ring reconstruction of the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) suggest a variable tropical-higher latitude teleconnection.