4. Warriors in an age of peace

Author(s):  
Michael Wert

This chapter covers the Tokugawa period, a time of relative peace, when historians know more about the rank-and-file samurai. It begins by describing how Tokugawa Ieyasu and his descendants created the strongest and longest lasting warrior regime, the Tokugawa Shogunate. After describing the political authority at the top, the chapter details the life of daimyo lords, their interaction with samurai, and the curtailing of daimyo interaction with Western countries. Then the chapter covers the average samurai life cycle from childhood, education, and marriage, to concerns about job and free time, and retirement.

Author(s):  
Adrián Félix

In the context of research on the “thickening” of borders, Specters of Belonging raises the related question: How does transnational citizenship thicken across the political life cycle of Mexican migrants? In addressing this question, this book resembles what any good migration corrido (ballad) does—narrate the thickening of transnational citizenship from beginning, middle, to end. Specifically, Specters of Belonging traces Mexican migrant transnationalism across the migrant political life cycle, beginning with the “political baptism” (i.e., naturalization in the United States) and ending with repatriation to México after death. In doing so, the book illustrates how Mexican migrants enunciate, enact, and embody transnational citizenship in constant dialectical contestation with the state and institutions of citizenship on both sides of the U.S.-México border. Drawing on political ethnographies of citizenship classrooms, the first chapter examines how Mexican migrants enunciate transnational citizenship as they navigate the naturalization process in the United States and grapple with the contradictions of U.S. citizenship and its script of singular political loyalty. The middle chapter deploys transnational ethnography to analyze how Mexican migrants enact transnational citizenship within the clientelistic orbit of the Mexican state, focusing on a group of returned migrant politicians and transnational activists. Last, the final chapter turns to how Mexican migrants embody transnational citizenship by tracing the cross-border practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their communities of origin in rural México.


Author(s):  
Martin Loughlin

This chapter examines Carl Schmitt’s contribution to political jurisprudence. It approaches the issue through the concept of politonomy, a concept first alluded to by Schmitt but which he never developed. Politonomy seeks a scientific understanding of the basic laws and practices of the political. The chapter situates Schmitt within the German tradition of state theory and shows that his overall objective was to build a theory of the constitution of political authority from the most basic elements of the subject. It suggests that Schmitt occupies an ambivalent position in political jurisprudence and that this is because of his distrust of the scientific significance of general concepts. To the extent that he acknowledged the existence of a ‘law of the political’, this is found in Schmitt’s embrace of institutionalism in the 1930s and later in his account of nomos as the basic law of appropriation, division, and production.


1916 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 437-464 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harold J. Laski

“Of political principles,” says a distinguished authority, “whether they be those of order or of freedom, we must seek in religious and quasi-theological writings for the highest and most notable expressions.” No one, in truth, will deny the accuracy of this claim for those ages before the Reformation transferred the centre of political authority from church to state. What is too rarely realised is the modernism of those writings in all save form. Just as the medieval state had to fight hard for relief from ecclesiastical trammels, so does its modern exclusiveness throw the burden of a kindred struggle upon its erstwhile rival. The church, intelligibly enough, is compelled to seek the protection of its liberties lest it become no more than the religious department of an otherwise secular society. The main problem, in fact, for the political theorist is still that which lies at the root of medieval conflict. What is the definition of sovereignty? Shall the nature and personality of those groups of which the state is so formidably one be regarded as in its gift to define? Can the state tolerate alongside itself churches which avow themselves societates perfectae, claiming exemption from its jurisdiction even when, as often enough, they traverse the field over which it ploughs? Is the state but one of many, or are those many but parts of itself, the one?


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Flett

This article reviews the way in which the concept of precaution, as commonly referenced in EU law, is received in the WTO. It argues that precaution is not a principle, but one facet of a principle of making rational judgments based on available information, the other facet of which is “that risk is worth taking”. Systematically pursuing high cost measures in response to low risks is not a balanced approach, and has probably contributed to the scepticism with which the concept is viewed in the WTO. However, this article goes on to argue that, without needing to be a principle, precaution is the determining legal feature in the SPS Agreement, because, unlike in the European Union, there is no legislative harmonisation of SPS measures at international level, WTO Members being free to set their own appropriate level of protection. In fact, the concept of precaution is relevant in the context of many other WTO provisions and is in some respects quite close to the concept of subsidiarity. Notwithstanding this, the first WTO SPS cases, driven by regulatory exporters and an interventionist WTO, have excessively emphasised scientific issues, masking policy judgments that the WTO has neither the legal nor the political authority to sustain. The article concludes that the proper way forward necessitates closer political, legal and administrative links between the WTO and other relevant international organisations, and a move away from consensus in the latter.


2015 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
KARA MOSKOWITZ

AbstractThis article examines squatter resistance to a World Bank-funded forest and paper factory project. The article illustrates how diverse actors came together at the sites of rural development projects in early postcolonial Kenya. It focuses on the relationship between the rural squatters who resisted the project and the political elites who intervened, particularly President Kenyatta. Together, these two groups not only negotiated the reformulation of a major international development program, but they also worked out broader questions about political authority and political culture. In negotiating development, rural actors and political elites decided how resources would be distributed and they entered into new patronage-based relationships, processes integral to the making of the postcolonial political order.


1992 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Pergami

The Italian Reform Act (Law 180) has been considered one of the most revolutionary Mental Health Acts in Western countries and has been the subject of considerable attention since its promulgation in May 1978. Interest in the Italian model of community psychiatry has been reflected in the number of articles, special supplements and letters, published in noteworthy European and American journals. However, for a better understanding of the meaning of Law 180 (now part of Law 833 concerning general health measures) the political and sociocultural climate surrounding the enactment of the Italian Mental Health Act should be considered.


2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
VIRGINIA Q. TILLEY

The transnational indigenous peoples' movement (TIPM) can convey important political leverage to local indigenous movements. Yet this study exposes a more problematic impact: the political authority gained by funding organisations who interpolate TIPM norms into new discourses regarding indigeneity, and deploy that discourse in local ethnic contests. In El Salvador the TIPM has encouraged the state to recognise the indigenous communities and has opened a political wedge for indigenous activism. Yet TIPM-inspired programmes by the European Union and UNESCO to support indigenous activism paradoxically weakened the Salvadorean movement by aggravating outside impressions that Salvadorean indigenous communities are ‘not truly Indian’.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-79
Author(s):  
Martin-Joe Ezeudu

There has been a great deal of academic discourse about policy and governance choices embedded in the UNFCCC-based regimes for Climate Change action, and they point to the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of such regimes, which is often attributed to the fact that they hinge on the political authority of State actors and lack meaningful enforcement mechanisms. Against this backdrop, this paper argues that an alternative regime may be needed; and that for an effective regulatory framework for Climate Change action to emerge there needs to be a regulatory imperativeness similar to that upon which the Kimberley Process was created, where Non-State Actors play a leadership role. It also argues that in addition to regulatory imperativeness, the making and enforcement of the Kimberley Process provides helpful lessons towards crafting a more effective Climate Change remedial regime.


2019 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Rachel B. Herrmann

This chapter looks at how enslaved peoples and self-liberated men and women used food to shape the Revolutionary War in ways that failed to address their own hunger. In November of 1775, before the colonies declared independence, Virginia governor Lord Dunmore issued a proclamation that offered freedom to slaves of rebel masters, setting the stage for an exodus of thousands of self-liberated men and women from colonists' homes and plantations to British lines. Dunmore's Proclamation was also responsible for changing white colonists' and British officers' ideas about hunger prevention and just war. Dunmore's Proclamation affected white colonists and Britons less than it did free black folks, enslaved people, and former bondpeople. People of African descent played various roles in the conflict. Dunmore's offer turned some men into victual warriors capable of creating and preventing white hunger. Throughout the war, self-liberated men and women did not enjoy the luxury of worrying about their own appetites—and sometimes, hunger seemed immaterial. But their experiences created the knowledge that would later become necessary to institutionalize a food system that granted black colonists the political authority to fight hunger.


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