From apotheosis to damnation: Mussolini and the Fascist regime, 1936-45

This is an essay for a catalogue of the exhibition 'Against Mussolini: art and the fall of a dictator' held at the Estorick Collection, London, September - December 2010. The essay examines shifting attitudes towards Mussolini in the years immediately preceding his fall, and suggests that the development of 'anti-fascism' was less pronounced than often suggested.

Property company performance and real interest rates: a regime-switching approach

Linear models of property market performance may be misspecified if there exist distinct states where the market drivers behave in different ways. This paper examines the applicability of non-linear regime-based models. A Self Exciting Threshold Autoregressive (SETAR) model is applied to property company share data, using the real rate of interest to define regimes. Distinct regimes appear exhibiting markedly different market behaviour. The model both casts doubt on the specification of conventional linear models and offers the possibility of developing effective trading rules for real estate equities.

Internationalized regimes: a second dimension of regime hybridity

Traditional approaches have conceptualized political regimes almost exclusively with reference to domestic-level political factors. However, many current and historical political regimes have entailed a major role for international actors, and in some cases the external influence has been so great that regimes have become internationalized. This article explores the concept of internationalized regimes and argues that they should be seen as a distinct form of hybrid regime type that demonstrates a distinct dimension of hybridity. Until now, regime hybridity has been conceived of along a single dimension of domestic politics: the level of competitiveness. Yet, some regimes are characterised by a different type of hybridity, in which domestic and international authority are found together within a single political system. The article explores the dynamics of internationalized regimes within three settings, those of international occupation, international administration and informal empire.

Breaking the impasse: towards a new regime for international climate governance

The reality of the current international order makes it imperative that a just and effective climate regime balance the historical responsibility of developed countries with the increasing absolute emissions from many developing nations. In this short outlook article, key pillars are proposed for a new international climate architecture that envisions replacing the current annex system with two new annexes –Annex α, for countries with high current emissions and historically high emissions, and Annex β, for countries with high current emissions and historically low emissions. Countries in both annexes would implement legally binding targets under this framework. Additionally, this proposal includes tweaks and revisions to funding and technology transfer mechanisms to correct for weaknesses and inequities under the current Kyoto architecture. The proposed framework stems from a belief that a top-down, international approach to climate policy remains the most effective for ensuring environmental integrity. Given the slow rate of institutional learning, reforming and improving the current system is held as a more efficient course of action than abandoning the progress already achieved. It is argued that the proposed framework effectively accommodates key equity, environmental integrity and political feasibility concerns.

Increasing Autumn drought over Southern China associated with ENSO regime shift

In the two most recent decades, more frequent drought struck southern China during autumn, causing an unprecedented water crisis. We found that the increasing autumn drought is largely attributed to an ENSO regime shift. Compared to traditional eastern-Pacific (EP) El Niño, central-Pacific (CP) El Niño events have occurred more frequently, with maximum sea surface temperature anomalies located near the dateline. Southern China usually experiences precipitation surplus during the autumn of EP El Niño years, while the CP El Niño tends to produce precipitation deficits. Since the CP El Niño has occurred more frequently while EP El Niño has become less common after the early 1990s, there has been a significant increase in the frequency of autumn drought. This has implications for increasing precipitation shortages over southern China in a warming world, in which CP El Niño events have been suggested to become more common.

A regime-dependent parametrization of subgrid-scale cloud water content variability

The subgrid-scale spatial variability in cloud water content can be described by a parameter f called the fractional standard deviation. This is equal to the standard deviation of the cloud water content divided by the mean. This parameter is an input to schemes that calculate the impact of subgrid-scale cloud inhomogeneity on gridbox-mean radiative fluxes and microphysical process rates. A new regime-dependent parametrization of the spatial variability of cloud water content is derived from CloudSat observations of ice clouds. In addition to the dependencies on horizontal and vertical resolution and cloud fraction included in previous parametrizations, the new parametrization includes an explicit dependence on cloud type. The new parametrization is then implemented in the Global Atmosphere 6 (GA6) configuration of the Met Office Unified Model and used to model the effects of subgrid variability of both ice and liquid water content on radiative fluxes and autoconversion and accretion rates in three 20-year atmosphere-only climate simulations. These simulations show the impact of the new regime-dependent parametrization on diagnostic radiation calculations, interactive radiation calculations and both interactive radiation calculations and in a new warm microphysics scheme. The control simulation uses a globally constant f value of 0.75 to model the effect of cloud water content variability on radiative fluxes. The use of the new regime-dependent parametrization in the model results in a global mean which is higher than the control's fixed value and a global distribution of f which is closer to CloudSat observations. When the new regime-dependent parametrization is used in radiative transfer calculations only, the magnitudes of short-wave and long-wave top of atmosphere cloud radiative forcing are reduced, increasing the existing global mean biases in the control. When also applied in a new warm microphysics scheme, the short-wave global mean bias is reduced.

La monarquia francesa y los financieros en el Antiguo Régimen. El ejemplo de los traitants durante la Guerra de los Nueve Años, 1689-1697 = The French Monarchy and the financiers during the Old Regime. The case of the traitants during the Nine Years War, 1689-1697

This article explores the relationship between the Crown, the French society and the king's financiers. It starts with a brief review of the discourses on the financiers and a survey of the work done by historians. Further to a description of the various groups of financiers, it analyses the nature of the contracts passed between the king and the traitants to pay for the Nine Years War, as well as the latter’s activities and profits. The article argues that the government supervised effectively the traitants and that, given the constraints of the Old Regime, these financiers provided essential services, but too costly to be sustainable.

Contractual restrictions on lawful use of information: sole-source databases protected by the back door?

This article is concerned with the risks associated with the monopolisation of information that is available from a single source only. Although there is a longstanding consensus that sole-source databases should not receive protection under the EU Database Directive, and there are legislative provisions to ensure that lawful users have access to a database’s contents, Ryanair v PR Aviation challenges this assumption by affirming that the use of non-protected databases can be restricted by contract. Owners of non-protected databases can contractually exclude lawful users from taking the benefit of statutorily permitted uses, because such databases are not covered from the legislation that declares this kind of contract null and void. We argue that this judgment is not consistent with the legislative history and can have a profound impact on the functioning of the digital single market, where new information services, such as meta-search engines or price-comparison websites, base their operation on the systematic extraction and re-utilisation of materials available from online sources. This is an issue that the Commission should address in a forthcoming evaluation of the Database Directive.

Profits, malversations, restitutions. Les bénéfices des financiers durant la guerre de la Ligue d’Augsbourg et la taxe de Chamillart

Profit, embezzlement, restitution. The role of the traitants in the Nine Years War and Chamillart’s tax on financial benefits The aim of this article is to revisit the question of the financiers in Old Regime France. It starts with an analysis of the discourses about the financiers under the Absolute monarchy that underlines the complexity of their relationship with the government and the public. It then reviews the secondary literature and highlights the existence of competing historical interpretations (functional, political, utilitarian), which raise the question of their overall capacity to account for the role and impact of the financiers at different times. On this ground, the article focuses on a specific group of financiers, the so-called traitants d’affaires extraordinaires, during the Nine Years War. Further to a description of the specific role and scope of the activities of the various financiers responsible for helping the monarchy to raise the funds it needed to pay for its peace and wartime expenditure, the article examines the conditions and profits granted by the king in his contracts with the traitants whose services were hired for the purpose of selling royal offices in the public and advancing the revenue to the Treasury. It also explores the contractual arrangements of the companies established by the financiers to manage their operations as well as the rights and the responsibilities of their various stakeholders. These bases being laid, the article relies on the administrative correspondence relating to the traités during the Nine Years War to address a range of issues, in particular the extent to which these contracts, and other control procedures, were robust enough to deter fraud. The accounts of two traitants’ companies offer an opportunity to analyse and compare the structure of their income and expenditure (including the volume and cost of the promissory notes sold in the public to finance their payments to the Treasury), to explore the strategies of the contractors, to calculate their net profits and further discuss the problem of embezzlement. The article ends with the study of the context and debates which led to the introduction by finance minister Michel Chamillart, in 1700, of a shortfall tax on the financial profits of the gens d’affaires or traitants, the method used to determine its rate (50 % of the net benefits), its distribution among the various stakeholders (including the bailleurs de fonds or backers), and the related procedures. In total, the article argues that the relationship between the monarchy, society and the financiers under the Ancien Regime was not static and, therefore, suggests that the broad question of control and fraud must be examined against changing circumstances. With regard specifically to the Nine Years War, the article concludes that within the constraints of the Absolute monarchy, contractors offered valuable services by raising capital for the benefit of a king who ruled over a country which, at the time, was by far the wealthiest in Europe, and where ministers failed to foresee long wars of attrition and whose financial strategy was limited by the very existence of privilege. Overall, the traités were too costly to be a viable system of war financing. In these conditions, the substantial fortunes made by a handful of very successful traitants suffice to explain that the government easily gave in to public criticism against the wealth of the financiers and felt compelled, when peace resumed, to cancel the advantageous conditions offered in the treaties by taxing financial profits.

Participatory crop improvement: the challenges of and opportunities for institutionalisation in the Indian public research sector

This thesis considers Participatory Crop Improvement (PCI) methodologies and examines the reasons behind their continued contestation and limited mainstreaming in conventional modes of crop improvement research within National Agricultural Research Systems (NARS). In particular, it traces the experiences of a long-established research network with over 20 years of experience in developing and implementing PCI methods across South Asia, and specifically considers its engagement with the Indian NARS and associated state-level agricultural research systems. In order to address the issues surrounding PCI institutionalisation processes, a novel conceptual framework was derived from a synthesis of the literatures on Strategic Niche Management (SNM) and Learning-based Development Approaches (LBDA) to analyse the socio-technical processes and structures which constitute the PCI ‘niche’ and NARS ‘regime’. In examining the niche and regime according to their socio-technical characteristics, the framework provides explanatory power for understanding the nature of their interactions and the opportunities and barriers that exist with respect to the translation of lessons and ideas between niche and regime organisations. The research shows that in trying to institutionalise PCI methods and principles within NARS in the Indian context, PCI proponents have encountered a number of constraints related to the rigid and hierarchical structure of the regime organisations; the contractual mode of most conventional research, which inhibits collaboration with a wider group of stakeholders; and the time-limited nature of PCI projects themselves, which limits investment and hinders scaling up of the innovations. It also reveals that while the niche projects may be able to induce a ‘weak’ form of PCI institutionalisation within the Indian NARS by helping to alter their institutional culture to be more supportive of participatory plant breeding approaches and future collaboration with PCI researchers, a ‘strong’ form of PCI institutionalisation, in which NARS organisations adopt participatory methodologies to address all their crop improvement agenda, is likely to remain outside of the capacity of PCI development projects to deliver.

A new regime of carbon counting: the practices and politics of accounting for everyday carbon through C02e

Inspired by the commercial desires of global brands and retailers to access the lucrative green consumer market, carbon is increasingly being counted and made knowable at the mundane sites of everyday production and consumption, from the carbon footprint of a plastic kitchen fork to that of an online bank account. Despite the challenges of counting and making commensurable the global warming impact of a myriad of biophysical and societal activities, this desire to communicate a product or service's carbon footprint has sparked complicated carbon calculative practices and enrolled actors at literally every node of multi-scaled and vastly complex global supply chains. Against this landscape, this paper critically analyzes the counting practices that create the ‘e’ in ‘CO2e’. It is shown that, central to these practices are a series of tools, models and databases which, in building upon previous work (Eden, 2012 and Star and Griesemer, 1989) we conceptualize here as ‘boundary objects’. By enrolling everyday actors from farmers to consumers, these objects abstract and stabilize greenhouse gas emissions from their messy material and social contexts into units of CO2e which can then be translated along a product's supply chain, thereby establishing a new currency of ‘everyday supply chain carbon’. However, in making all greenhouse gas-related practices commensurable and in enrolling and stabilizing the transfer of information between multiple actors these objects oversee a process of simplification reliant upon, and subject to, a multiplicity of approximations, assumptions, errors, discrepancies and/or omissions. Further the outcomes of these tools are subject to the politicized and commercial agendas of the worlds they attempt to link, with each boundary actor inscribing different meanings to a product's carbon footprint in accordance with their specific subjectivities, commercial desires and epistemic framings. It is therefore shown that how a boundary object transforms greenhouse gas emissions into units of CO2e, is the outcome of distinct ideologies regarding ‘what’ a product's carbon footprint is and how it should be made legible. These politicized decisions, in turn, inform specific reduction activities and ultimately advance distinct, specific and increasingly durable transition pathways to a low carbon society.