'Royal science' and civil war in Sri Lanka : a comment on S. Goonatilake

In highlighting the relationship between the production of knowledge, the administration of government and the formation of subject–citizens in colonial systems, post-colonialism has arguably found its most fertile field of inquiry and revision in South Asia. The reasons for this are complex and relate, in part, to the nature of both colonial administration and the colonised civilisations to be found in the region, as well as to the nature of the different independence movements—many of these persisting well beyond the formal grants of independence in the late 1940s. Also important is the emerging post-colonial middle class, its transnational interconnections comprising inter alia extensive participation in knowledge/information economies, and its ‘organic intellectuals’ (Gramsci 1971) whose work represents the interests of their class. In other words, the tremendous insights offered by post-colonial theory into the nature of latent or implicit power relations to be found in forms of knowledge reveal the ongoing complicity of scholarship in government. Post-colonialism, thus, raises the issue of how the nexus of knowledge and power translates into contemporary situations—the post-colonial predicament (Breckenridge and van der Veer 1993).

Civil war, conflict resolution and culture in Lebanon and Algeria

This thesis examined the explanatory capacity of political culture in relation to civil war and conflict resolution in Lebanon and Algeria. It argued that political culture operates to affect the form and legitimacy of peace agreements by employing a method of content analysis that emphasised 'contextuality' in resolution processes.

Heritage of war

The Heritage of War is an interdisciplinary study of the ways in which heritage is mobilized in remembering war, and in reconstructing landscapes, political systems and identities after conflict. It examines the deeply contested nature of war heritage in a series of places and contexts, highlighting the modes by which governments, communities, and individuals claim validity for their own experiences of war, and the meanings they attach to them.

From colonizing violence in South America to the United States’ Civil War, the Second World War on three continents, genocide in Rwanda and continuing divisions in Europe and the Middle East, these studies bring us closer to the very processes of heritage production. The Heritage of War uncovers the histories of heritage: it charts the constant social and political construction of heritage sites over time, by a series of different agents, and explores the continuous reworking of meaning into the present.

What are the forces of contingency, agency and political power that produce, define and sustain the heritage of war? How do particular versions of the past and particular identities gain legitimacy, while others are marginalised? In this book contributors explore the active work by which heritage is produced and reproduced in a series of case studies of memorialization, battlefield preservation, tourism development, private remembering and urban reconstruction. These are the acts of making sense of war; they are acts that continue long after violent conflict itself has ended.

Sri Lankan civil society and its fanatics

The current moment, seen by some as an interregnum between societies of discipline and control, is marked by intense forms of religious fanaticism and iconoclasm that are striving to create new forms of the state. This is evident in the militancy and political engagement of Buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, who promote war against Tamil separatists as well as violent resistance to the proselytization identified with global civil society agencies that, due to the war and the 2004 tsunami disaster, have been active in the country. The article looks at this rising Buddhist militancy, which is associated with a political party that is linked to the more famous party known as the JVP. It argues that instead of resisting the formation of the new global civil society, the iconoclasm of this Buddhist political formation is facilitating its establishment.

Refuge in the land of liberty : France and its refugees, from the revolution to the end of asylum, 1787-1939

France has a long tradition of asylum for refugees. Since the Revolution, this has made it the land of liberty (pays de la liberte) and the land of asylum (la terre d'asile)." "In practice, responses have been shaped less by principle than by political and social conditions. Various refugee movements - from the late eighteenth-century Lowlands, to Spanish and Italian liberals in the 1820s, Polish nationalists in the 1830s. German social revolutionaries of 1848-9, anti-Bolsheviks from the Russian Revolution, Christians from the former Ottoman Empire, and Jews from Nazi Germany - have met with mixed responses, which shifted uneasily between sympathy, principle, pragmatism, and open hostility." "This book examines the tensions between refugee rights and political responses to refugees, and between humanitarian concern for their plight and hostility to their imposition on the state. Increasingly punitive measures against refugees saw, in 1939, the end of asylum in the internment of republican exiles from the Spanish Civil War.

Hope of education : Somali families and social connection

This thesis examines Somali parents' experience of their children's education after settling in Melbourne following the outbreak of civil war in Somalia in 1991. The research found that Somali parents instigate connections with teachers to generate social capital to enhance their children's education.

Empowering audiences to measure quality

This paper explores developments in the political representations of English theater audiences from the Elizabethan era to the 1809 OP riots, to demonstrate that audiences were long considered politically significant, not just ‘mere entertainment.’ Early commercial theater audiences were conceived by the Elizabethan state as crowds of subjects that threatened social order. Through the Civil War era, theaters became places of political discussion and dissent and of emerging publics of citizens. By the early nineteenth century theater owners began to reframe audiences as markets of consumers. Each representation continued to appear in later discursive fields, each was contested, and the disputes were couched in political terms.

Messages from Long Tan, Vietnam: memorialisation, reconciliation, and historical justice

This article explores the changing ways in which Australians and Vietnamese remember and memorialize their involvement in the Vietnam War and how these processes intersect with notions of reconciliation and historical justice in postwar contexts. It uses the Battle of Long Tan of August 1966 as an entrée into these considerations and questions how heritage-making and memorialization processes can facilitate the achievement of reconciliation between parties formerly in conflict. Not surprisingly, the Australian and Vietnamese veterans of the battle and the two states, the Commonwealth of Australia and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, have different motivations for wanting to remember Long Tan. On the Australian side, a sense that reconciliation and atonement are needed is often reflected in official government and veterans’ statements about the war and Australia-Vietnam relations, in the memorialization process at Long Tan and in the involvement of Australian veterans groups engaged in local economic development and community building in Vietnam. On the Vietnamese side, where the Vietnam War played out as a civil as well as an international war, efforts by those who actively supported the former Republic of Vietnam based in Saigon in the south and among the overseas Vietnamese (Viet kieu) to memorialize their engagement in the conflict have been frustrated. The usefulness of the notion of seeking historical justice is therefore questioned in post–civil war situations where people are locked into fixed histories and are unprepared or unable to revisit and retell personal and collective memories and histories.

Left-wing melancholies

With the recent passing of the world's "best-known unknown filmmaker," Chris Marker, it is axiomatic that left-wing melancholy now includes the ongoing loss of previously lost causes – a paradox that suggests the true address of all lost causes worth defending is a strange confluence of past and futural states, as one state. This double loss as gain is also the primary mark of the "landscape" of pessimistic optimism that also denotes the foremost position to occupy today in the battles associated with capitalist End Times (Slavoj Žižek's term). Cultural ecology is no longer what it once was – that is to say, a strange amalgam of vernacular essences perpetrated in the rather forlorn 1970s and/or the insistent and incessant production of difference. Instead, cultural ecology invokes spectral civil war – arguably the very state of things today – and the return of "the dead" in the persistence of forms of high-formalist and high-conceptualist works of art and architecture. This paper examines the late works of the late Chris Marker, including the very short videos he uploaded to You Tube under the pseudonym "Kosinki" from 2007 to 2011, an event contiguous with his return to exhibiting very-still photography from 2006 to 2011. Marker's simultaneous returns to still photography and the short film-essay are both magnificent gestures toward the austerities required of present-day media to effect the necessary "return" to what is always present in one form or another anyway – the non-place between world and world-to-come.

Ethno-religious tragedy rebuilds in Iraq

In the shadows of Syria's deadly civil war, a new tragedy is building right next door, in Iraq