scholarly journals What is the Relation Between Comparative Historical Analysis and ‘Ordinary’ Case Studies?

2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingo Rohlfing
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
Ordinary Case

‘Troubling’ Chastisement: A Comparative Historical Analysis of Child Punishment in Ghana and Ireland

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-196 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Rush ◽  
Suleman Ibrahim Lazarus
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Family Policy ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Physical Punishment ◽  
Intact Families ◽  
Epochal Change ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
International Convergence ◽  
Familial Obligations

This article reviews an epochal change in international thinking about physical punishment of children from being a reasonable method of chastisement to one that is harmful to children and troubling to families. In addition, the article suggests shifts in thinking about physical punishment were originally pioneered as part and parcel of the dismantling of national laws granting fathers’ specific rights to admonish children under conventions of patria potestas. A comparative historical framework of analysis involving two case studies of Ireland and Ghana illustrates non-unilinear pathways of international convergence towards the prohibition of physical punishment. The comparative historical analysis highlights the 1930s and 1940s as an era when Ireland began to reject patria potestas and religious or judicial rulings which allowed for children to be given ‘a good beating’ in family and school settings. However, from the same period, Ghana is seen to experience Christian remonstrations not to ‘spare the rod’ leading to the ‘conventional’ tradition of ‘this is how we do it here’. Two case studies serve to illustrate that banning physical punishment was less controversial in Ireland where allied traditions of patria potestas and disciplinarian Christian beliefs had lost their moral hegemony than in Ghana where such beliefs still held influence. The article concludes overall that normative campaigns against physical punishment of children emanate from a coherent paradigm of family policy where childcare, education, and well-being of children are embedded as everyday societal responsibilities rather than privatised or patriarchal familial obligations. The coherent model offers an alternative moral hegemony to neo-liberal and Janus-faced conceptualisations of good or ‘intact’ families versus ‘broken’ or ‘troubled’ families.

THE DEMISE OF INTEGRATION

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-217
Author(s):  
Christi M. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Educational Equity ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Racial Integration ◽  
Cultural Meanings ◽  
Differentiation Strategy ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis

AbstractRacial integration has been a tenet of educational equity for over fifty years. Despite this, U.S. higher education presents staggering rates of segregation. Strikingly, there is little scholarship to answer the question of how integrated colleges segregated? I interrogate the process of segregation over a fifty-year period through a comparative historical analysis of the broader field of higher education and case studies of three nineteenth-century colleges. Through analysis of independently collected archival materials, I show that local-level organization of racial contact fails to account for the success or failure of racial integration in schools. Instead, I show that the interaction between colleges—and the emergence of a competitive field of higher education—undermined even successfully integrated campuses. Mesolevel practices are important for revealing how organizational actors implement rationalized cultural ideas as well as how local-level ideas are negotiated in a situated field. The growth of intercollegiate college competition differentiated not only particular types of education but also consecrated groups of people. Further, this reveals the production of cultural meanings around race as a differentiation strategy in response to interorganizational competition.

Authoritarian Rule of Law

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich
Keyword(s):  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Science Literature ◽  
Hybrid Regimes ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Legal Origins ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
Society Research

What for many years was seen as an oxymoron—the notion of an authoritarian rule of law—no longer is. Instead, the phenomenon has become a cutting edge concern in law-and-society research. In this concluding chapter, I situate Fraenkel’s theory of dictatorship in this emerging research program. In the first section, I turn the notion of an authoritarian rule of law into a social science concept. In the second section, I relate this concept to that of the dual state and both to the political science literature on so-called hybrid regimes. Drawing on this synthesis, the third section makes the concept of the dual state usable for comparative-historical analysis. Through a series of empirical vignettes, I demonstrate the contemporary relevance of Fraenkel’s institutional analysis of the Nazi state. I show why it is essential reading for anyone trying to understand the legal origins of dictatorship, then and now.

Contextualizing Discrimination of Religious and Linguistic Minorities in South Thailand

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Mark Joll
Keyword(s):  
High Tide ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Evidence Based ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
World War ◽  
Intractable Conflict ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
Second World

Abstract This article explores how scholarship can be put to work by specialists penning evidence-based policies seeking peaceful resolutions to long-standing, complex, and so-far intractable conflict in the Malay-Muslim dominated provinces of South Thailand. I contend that more is required than mere empirical data, and that the existing analysis of this conflict often lacks theoretical ballast and overlooks the wider historical context in which Bangkok pursued policies impacting its ethnolinguistically, and ethnoreligiously diverse citizens. I demonstrate the utility of both interacting with what social theorists have written about what “religion” and language do—and do not—have in common, and the relative importance of both in sub-national conflicts, and comparative historical analysis. The case studies that this article critically introduces compare chapters of ethnolinguistic and ethnoreligious chauvinism against a range of minorities, including Malay-Muslim citizens concentrated in the southern provinces of Pattani, Yala, and Narathiwat. These include Buddhist ethnolinguistic minorities in Thailand’s Northeast, and Catholic communities during the second world war widely referred to as the high tide of Thai ethno-nationalism. I argue that these revealing aspects of the southern Malay experience need to be contextualized—even de-exceptionalized.

The Regional Path to Peaceful Change: What the Asian and European Experiences Tell Us

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-545
Author(s):  
Mark Beeson
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Comparative Politics ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
International System ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Security Challenges ◽  
Comparative Historical Analysis ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
The Eu

AbstractOne of the more striking, surprising, and optimism-inducing features of the contemporary international system has been the decline of interstate war. The key question for students of international relations and comparative politics is how this happy state of affairs came about. In short, was this a universal phenomenon or did some regions play a more important and pioneering role in bringing about peaceful change? As part of the roundtable “International Institutions and Peaceful Change,” this essay suggests that Western Europe generally and the European Union in particular played pivotal roles in transforming the international system and the behavior of policymakers. This helped to create the material and ideational conditions in which other parts of the world could replicate this experience, making war less likely and peaceful change more feasible. This argument is developed by comparing the experiences of the EU and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and their respective institutional offshoots. The essay uses this comparative historical analysis to assess both regions’ capacity to cope with new security challenges, particularly the declining confidence in institutionalized cooperation.

Environments of Empire

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Invasive Plants ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Ecological Change ◽  
The World

The age of European high imperialism was characterized by the movement of plants and animals on a historically unprecedented scale. The human migrants who colonized territories around the world brought a variety of other species with them, from the crops and livestock they hoped to propagate, to the parasites, invasive plants, and pests they carried unawares, producing a host of unintended consequences that reshaped landscapes around the world. While the majority of histories about the dynamics of these transfers have concentrated on the British Empire, these nine case studies--focused on the Ottoman, French, Dutch, German, and British empires--seek to advance a historical analysis that is comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary to understand the causes, consequences, and networks of biological exchange and ecological change resulting from imperialism.

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