The myth of declining violence: Liberal evolutionism and violent complexity

2017 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 225-241 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Lewis ◽  
Belinda Lewis
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Past Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
The Past ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
History Of ◽  
Second World

The publication of Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature popularized an emerging orthodoxy in political and social science – that is, that violence and warfare have been declining over the past century, particularly since the end of the Second World War. Invoking the scientific and political neutrality of their data and evidence, Pinker and other ‘declinists’ insist that powerful, liberal democratic states have subdued humans’ evolutionary disposition to violence. This article analyses the heuristic validity and political framework of these claims. The article examines, in particular, the declinists’ interpretation and use of demographic, archaeological, anthropological and historical evidence. The article argues that the declinists’ arguments are embedded in a utopian liberalism that has its own deep roots in the ‘cultural volition’ and history of human violence. The article concludes that the declinists have either misunderstood or misrepresented the evidence in order to promote their own neoliberal political interests and ideologies.

Resources for the History of Gabon in French Missionary Archives in Rome

1981 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 323-325 ◽  
Author(s):  
David E. Gardinier
Keyword(s):  
Elementary Education ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Past Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Holy Ghost ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Second World

The archives of two Roman Catholic congregations of French origin which have missionaries in Gabon are located in Rome: the Sisters of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception of Castres (commonly called the Blue Sisters) and the Brothers of Saint Gabriel of Saint Laurent-sur Sèvres. The Blue Sisters were founded by Emilie de Villeneuve in 1836 to improve the condition of women, in particular by educating poor and orphaned girls. The Brothers of Saint Gabriel were organized by Louis Grignion de Montfort in 1715 to provide a primary education for poor boys and were reorganized in 1821 by Gabriel Deshayes. Initially both congregations worked only in France. They entered Gabon at the request of the Holy Ghost Fathers-the sisters in 1849 and the brothers in 1900. The sisters had communities at most of the mission stations--in the Estuary at first and from the 1880s along the Ogooué river and other points in the interior. The brothers operated schools at Libreville and Lambaréné, and after the Second World War at Port-Gentil and Oyem as well. During the past century both congregations became primarily missionary bodies, with the sisters active in Africa and South America and the brothers in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. These international activities led to the transfer of their headquarters to Rome in the 1950s.The sisters who worked in Gabon prior to the Second World War included many with intelligence but few with much formal education beyond the primary grades. They spent their time in social service, health care, and elementary education. The latter included French as well as religion and the domestic arts. The sisters had much less contact with the government or the colonial administration than did the Holy Ghost Fathers, who were their ecclesiastical superiors. Though some sisters toured to provide medical aid to persons away from the mission stations, most of their contacts with Africans took place in or near the stations.

World History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jürgen Osterhammel
Keyword(s):  
World History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Global History ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Migration ◽  
Second World

This chapter examines different approaches to global history. Modern world history differs from older universal-historical constructions in that it presupposes an empirical idea of geography and of both the unity and plurality of humanity’s historical experience. After the Second World War, historians paid more attention to the interaction of the nation-state (the local) and the world (the global). The newer global history, while it does not negate the nation-state, strives to understand the reasons for the success of the West, without however reverting to a Eurocentric and essentializing perspective. Aware of the constructedness of history, it nonetheless pays attention to agency in the past, and to the plurality of perspectives and divergent historical paths. It does so by focusing on topics such as the history of migration, the environment, and economic globalization.

Coercion, Internalization, Decolonization

2019 ◽  
pp. 66-89
Author(s):  
Felix Lange
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Contextual Approach ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of International Law ◽  
Historical Writings ◽  
Second World

The chapter discusses competing narratives of ‘rise’ and ‘decline’ of international law in the historical writings of international lawyers and historians. The author proposes a contextual approach to the history of international law which takes the terminology of the actors of the past seriously, but also leaves room for an assessment of functional equivalents. The author applies his contextual approach to the story of international law’s universalization. He claims that from the seventeenth century, European international law universalized via processes of forceful coercion by Western powers, internalization through non-Western states, and decolonization after the Second World War.

scholarly journals Dietetic practice: the past, present and future

2004 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 716-730
Author(s):  
N. Hwalla ◽  
M. Koleilat
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Registered Dietitians ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
The Military ◽  
Deficiency Diseases ◽  
Second World

The history of dietetics can be traced as far back as the writings of Homer, Plato and Hippocrates in ancient Greece. Although diet and nutrition continued to be judged important for health, dietetics did not progress much till the 19th century with the advances in chemistry. Early research focused focuses on vitamin deficiency diseases while later workers proposed daily requirements for protein, fat and carbohydrates. Dietetics as a profession was given a boost during the Second World War when its importance was recognized by the military. Today, professional dietetic associations can be found on every continent, and registered dietitians are involved in health promotion and treatment, and work alongside physicians. The growing need for dietetics professionals is driven by a growing public interest in nutrition and the potential of functional foods to prevent a variety of diet-related conditions

scholarly journals Resurgence of the past: political and media discourse during the breakup of the former yugoslavia

Linguistica ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-151
Author(s):  
Gregor Perko
Keyword(s):  
Hate Speech ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Military Violence ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Discourses ◽  
National Languages ◽  
Second World

The wars and conflicts that accompanied the breakup of the former Yugoslavia are inextricably linked to “language”. The “breakup” of Serbo-Croat into several national languages and the determination of Slovenes and, to a lesser extent, Ma­cedonians to restrain the influence of Serbo-Croat on their respective languages ​​was a prelude to the country’s political breakup. Military violence was carefully prepared by linguistic means: hate speech, which quickly turned into war speech, dominated the words of politicians, media, culture and everyday conversation. This would not have been possible without resorting to the past and to the mythologized history of the warring parties (the Battle of Kosovo Polje, Yugoslavia before the Second World War, the Second World War itself). The analysis of the political and media discourses carried out in this study revealed three major types of semantic inversions on which the underlying discursive mechanisms largely rely: diachronic inversions (the resurgence of the terms “Ustashe”, “Chetniks”, “Turks”), semantic and logical travesties (in which terms such as “defend” and “liberate” lose their primary meanings) and semantic asymmetries (the enemy is an inhuman “aggressor” and “slaughterer”, while “our” side is made up of “innocent victims”, “martyrs” or “heroes”). As a result, the terms and utterances used lose their semantic and referential “basis”, so that they can no longer fully function except within the discursive universe that generated them.

scholarly journals The Second World War in Southeastern Europe. Historiographies and Debates

Südosteuropa ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sabine Rutar
Keyword(s):  
Public History ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Southeastern Europe ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Second World

AbstractIntroducing this special issue on historiographies and debates on the Second World War in Southeastern Europe, the author reflects on the conditionalities of a better balancing of research agendas in terms of the interdependencies between local dynamics and wider scales—be they the regional, national and transnational, or global dimensions of the war. She draws attention to the role the European Union has played in crafting public history, in which processes of ‘internationalizing’ and of ‘nationalizing’ the past have been entangled. She concludes that Southeast Europeanists could greatly enhance international research agendas by taking the lead in fostering a bottom-up, multiscale, and multiperspective history of postimperial, nationalizing societies at war.

That Which Is Carved in Stone: Nanjing’s Monuments and Chinese Commemoration of the Second World War

Modern China ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 009770042094285
Author(s):  
Jonathan Henshaw
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
The Past ◽  
Occupied Territory ◽  
Nanjing Massacre ◽  
History Of ◽  
Memorial Sites ◽  
Second World

Chinese commemoration of the Second World War and of the Nanjing Massacre that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s has been framed as a “new remembering” in response to political change in China and Japanese denial. This periodization obscures both earlier Chinese commemorations and the multiple ways the past has been (re-)remembered. In fact, Chinese commemoration of the victims of the Nanjing Massacre began much earlier, in 1937. Nanjing and its history of building, bulldozing, and restoring wartime monuments and memorial sites offer a case study of how China’s shifting political priorities have provided frameworks that alternately enable and restrain commemoration of the wartime past. This article explores these frameworks, with particular attention to occupied territory, in order to more fully understand the war’s legacy in the People’s Republic of China.

scholarly journals The Image of the Second World War as a Factor in the Formation of Contemporary European Identity

2020 ◽  
Vol 100 (7) ◽  
pp. 199-206
Author(s):  
Yuri Denisov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Steady Increase ◽  
European Identity ◽  
Past Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Common ◽  
Second World

The image of the Second World War is one of the most significant images of the past for the European identity. The purpose of this study is to analyze its potential for the formation of the modern European identity as a supranational construct. The ambivalent nature of this phenomenon is revealed. The image WWII contains a sufficiently powerful unifying impulse. It is determined by the uniting role of the colossal tragedy, the common misfortune that befell Europe in the middle of the past century, its integrational significance for the joint efforts to build a single European community in order to prevent the recurrence of these events. Nowadays, this momentum is realized through the preservation of European memory, the institutionalization of anniversaries, the broadcast of the memory of the war in the process of intergenerational communication in the functioning of the institutions of education and cultural environment as a whole, the articulation of traumatic memories in the political discourse. At the same time the author demonstrated that, the image of WWII has a serious deconsolidating element for the common European identity. It is caused by contradictions in the European collective memory. The new technological revolution that has engulfed Europe, accompanied by a steady shift of communication practices into cyberspace and the emergence of the phenomenon of cyber-memory, changes the mechanisms of representation and reception of the war image. The Global Network facilitates a steady increase of both the means for the representation and visualization of the image of the past, making it more interactive, multimodal, multifaceted and simplified. The number of actors of memory politics, who take part in the formation of the European identity, or rather ‒ of an unlimited set of identities has been growing.

scholarly journals Debating the Greek 1940s: histories and memories of a conflicting past since the end of the Second World War

HISTOREIN ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 8
Author(s):  
Manos Avgeridis
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
First Century ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Politics Of History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Core Issue ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Second World

The article examines aspects of the long history of a major field of public debate in the second half of the twentieth century, that of the Greek 1940s, taking as its starting point the recent “history war” in Greece. It attempts to trace histories and memories from the immediate postwar years and to place them within a broader process: the historisation of the Second World War in Europe. In that context, the article begins by exploring one part of the initial efforts to form a European history of the resistance, from the perspective of the Greek case. Then, the focus is transferred to Greece, and to the mapping of a constellation of different memory and history communities, and the practices of history of the same period: the activities of veteran partisans and eye-witnesses with regard to their contribution to the formation of the first narratives on the war is a core issue at this level. Last, by following the developments in the academy and the politics of history during the Metapolitefsi, the focus returns to the current discussion, attempting a first approach to the subject through the strings that connect it with the past and, at the same time, as a debate of the twenty-first century. 

scholarly journals Muranów czyli karczowanie. O książce „Festung Warschau” Elżbiety Janickiej

2012 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Irena Grudzińska-Gross
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Land Clearing ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Resistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Vision ◽  
The Times ◽  
Second World

Muranów, or about land clearing The article is a review of “Festung Warschau” by Elżbieta Janicka which maps the clash between the recently built monuments celebrating Jewish or Polish places of martyrdom from the times of Second World War. Janicka walks through the streets of the former Jewish neighbourhoods of Warsaw; she photographs and discusses the new plaques, crosses, monuments, and other forms of public marking of history on the buildings, squares and streets. She convincingly shows that the new historical commemorative signs of Polish martyrdom are often placed in the sites that were marked by Jewish resistance or suffering, and that the marks of Polish suffering are rarely linked materially to the site. The new monuments obstruct and hide the past presence of Warsaw Jews and, by submerging their past, create a new vision of ethnically cleansed history of Warsaw, especially in its relation to Second World War. The review applauds the book and rejects some of the criticism against it.

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