The SDLP and the Europeanization of the Northern Ireland Problem

This article explores the various ways in which the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) has used Europe – as a source of financial aid, political support, ideas and inspiration – in its attempts to resolve the Northern Ireland conflict. In this, the piece considers the SDLP, not as a subject, but rather as an advocate of the Europeanization of the Northern Ireland problem. In particular, it looks at the role of John Hume, a founding member and later leader of the SDLP, who inculcated a strongly pro-European outlook within the party. In doing so, the article considers the success of Hume and the SDLP in their efforts to bring a European influence to bear on Northern Ireland, especially in relation to the peace process and the 1998 Agreement. However, it also looks at both the limitations of this influence, and the problems involved with the SDLP's pro-European approach, particularly since Hume's departure as party leader in 2001. In conclusion, the article suggests that the party may have been ‘over-Europeanized’, with its long-term focus on European issues and ideas now becoming electorally disadvantageous. In this way, the Europeanization of the Northern Ireland problem, and by extension the SDLP, has proven costly to the party.

Generation of a coherent superposition of a travelling wave field

We propose an experimentally feasible scheme to generate a superposition of travelling field coherent states using an extremely small Kerr effect and an ancilla which could be a single photon or two entangled twin photons. The scheme contains ingredients which are all within the current state of the art and is robust against the main sources of errors which can be identified in our setups.

Vis-á-Vis-á-Vis. The Three-dimensional and artistic view of a problem

ANPO (A Non-predefined Outcome) is an an art-making methodology that employs structuralist theory of language (Saussure, Lacan, Foucault) combined with Hegel’s dialectic and the theory of creation of space by Lefebvre to generate spaces of dialogue and conversation between community members and different stakeholders. These theories of language are used to find artistic ways of representing a topic that community members have previously chosen. The topic is approached in a way that allows a visual, aural, performative and gustative form. To achieve this, the methodology is split in four main steps: step 1 ‘This is not a chair’, Step 2 ‘The topic’, Step 3 ‘ Vis-á-vis-á-vis’ and step 4. ‘Dialectical representation’ where the defined topic is used to generate artistic representations.The step 1 is a warm up exercise informed by the Rene Magritte painting ‘This is not a Pipe’. This exercise aims to help the participants to see an object as something else than an object but as a consequence of social implications. Step 2, participants choose a random topic and vote for it. The artist/facilitator does not predetermine the topic, participants are the one who propose it and choose it. Step 3, will be analysed in this publication and finally step 4, the broken down topic is taken to be represented and analysed in different ways. 

China's Sovereign Wealth Funds: Problem or Panacea?

China’s impressive economic growth has led to the accumulation of massive financial assets. The emergence of sovereign wealth funds (SWFs), as a governmental investment device for its excessive foreign reserves, symbolizes a major rebalancing of economic power. With its investment portfolios drastically diversified for well-established financial institutions as well as some strategic sectors, a seminal debate seems centered on whether China’s SWFs are in furtherance of purely commercial or geopolitically strategic purposes. Under the sophisticated hard laws associated with international initiatives, it is unlikely that the SWFs-related investment would distort the global financial system, and genuinely threaten national security, which assumption may only exist at a hypothetical level. The potential protectionism would inevitably retard the world economy’s recovery, were it not to be proportionately addressed. A most significant necessity appears to be to strike a proportionate balance between sustaining the credibility of open investment environment and efficiently minimizing implications of SWFs political arenas.

Travelling Images, Images of Travel in Nicolas Bouvier's L'Usage du monde

Sketches and photographs are a familiar tool of the traveller-writer, who commonly draws on them when transforming experience into a textual narrative. The verbal thus displaces the visual — the latter retained, if at all, as mere illustration — in ways that echo James Heffernan's definition of ekphrasis as the ‘verbal description of visual representation’. Yet Nicolas Bouvier's 1963 travel narrative L'Usage du monde challenges conventional conceptions of ekphrasis. Juxtaposing the stark ink drawings of Thierry Vernet — Bouvier's travelling companion — with Bouvier's textual narrative, L'Usage du monde shifts representation away from a hierarchical relationship between verbal and visual; it offers instead an account of other cultures that is grounded in polyphony and exchange. This article applies Bouvier's own image of travel as a mosaic to the dual narrative form (or ‘iconotext’, to use Michael Nerlich's term) in order to consider a range of fluid relationships between Bouvier's text and Vernet's drawings. In examining these relationships of amplification, reduction, and absence, the article argues that the plurality of the narrative prompts a rethinking of conventional, binary paradigms of intercultural contact. Ultimately, the iconotextual nature of L'Usage du monde can be interpreted as a metaphor for the processes of cultural translation and transculturation that are central to Bouvier's travelling ethos.