Indonesian approach to ASEAN Plus Three financial cooperation: power relations, domestic politics, and regulatory regionalism

 This study examines Indonesia’s responses to financial regionalism within ASEAN Plus Three cooperation. It derives largely from the discussions, debates and empirical findings on how the Indonesian financial agencies exercise their authority and mandates, formulate policy coordination with international counterparts, and internalize and execute policy options into domestic financial regimes.

The literary dawn: re-reading Louisa Lawson's poetry and politics

Scholarship on Louisa Lawson and the Dawn has necessarily often focussed on the important and wide-ranging achievements of her feminist work for women's legal, social and political rights. Indeed, as Audrey Oldfield notes, "Louisa Lawson was one of the most important figures in the New South Wales woman suffrage movement" (261). However, I want to focus here on the periodical publishing context of the Dawn as a means of pointing to further discussions of Lawson's significance as a poet. Megan Roughley has noted that the Dawn "was a forum for political causes, especially the movement for the emancipation and enfranchisement of women, and, as importantly to Louisa, the temperance movement" (ix), with influential articles appearing on a wide range of important issues including divorce reform. Yet, Lawson's construction of the Dawn was also highly literary from its first issue, with editorial choices and literary references reflecting her awareness of political and feminist literary culture. In addition to references such as the above quotation from Tennyson, Lawson included an epigraph from Joseph Addison's play Cato in the list of contents: "A day, an hour, in virtuous liberty, is worth a whole eternity in bondage." Citing Addison, a significant figure in the American Revolution, demonstrates Lawson's linking of radical class politics with feminism, as well as highlighting the importance of literary dialogues to Lawson's publishing work. Likewise, the concerns of Lawson's poetry are clearly situated within a continuing female tradition, and Lawson's poetry, when examined in the feminist literary context of the Dawn, reveals a radical and sophisticated poetics.

The politics of memory in Harold Pinter's Ashes to Ashes

The present work proposes an investigation of the treatment given to memory in Pinter’s latest play, Ashes to Ashes, and of its function in the development of Pinter’s work. In order to do that, different aspects of the construction of meaning in the theatre are analysed, so that the specificity of its reception is determined. A survey of techniques used to present information, time and space in the theatre is made. The analytical drama, the history drama, and the theatre of the absurd are defined. After that, the evolution of the author’s work is analysed to determine what characterises Pinter’s work, while at the same time determining how his treatment of themes like menace, memory, and political oppression of the individual has evolved. Finally, a detailed survey of the apparently disconnected elements that are mentioned in Ashes to Ashes is made. The intertextual analysis allied to a study of the analytical form as used in this play enables the discovery of several layers of meaning. Through the connection established between the Holocaust and man’s fall followed by expulsion from Eden, Pinter examines the use of memory as a way of dealing with personal and collective responsibility and guilt. It is through the recovery of memory (also through writing) that the present can establish a critical and responsible relation with the past.

Voter turnout, inflation, and the politics of macroeconomic policy: an empirical essay

This thesis tests some hypotheses regarding the impact of voter turnout on inflation on the assumption that macroeconomic policies depend on voters’ and politicians’ preferences. The work’s empirical basis includes data from 111 nations from the developing world, covering the period from 1978 to 2000. Its main finding indicates that increases in voter turnout co-vary with higher inflation rates, all else held constant.