Violeta Parra: Her Life, Work, and Legacy

Violeta Parra (1917–1967) was a multifaceted and talented musician and artist. A prolific songwriter, she composed more than two hundred songs as well as experimental pieces for guitar, documentary soundtracks, and music for ballet. Her most famous song, “Gracias a la vida,” has been performed by musicians the world over. In the realm of the visual arts, she was a ceramicist, sculptress, painter, and tapestry maker. In 1964, she became the first Latin American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Louvre Palace’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Parra was also an award-winning folklorist who collected hundreds of songs and other folklore from every region of Chile. Born in southern Chile, she moved to Santiago at age fifteen, where she spent two decades performing a mixture of popular songs from Latin America that is often referred to as música criolla. At age thirty-five she turned to the authentic, first as a folklorist and then as an artist. She was a leader of the Chilean folk revival of the 1950s and inspired the generation of Chilean musicians who formed the protest song movement known as nueva canción in the 1960s. A communist sympathizer, she traveled to Europe as a member of the Chilean delegation to the Soviet-sponsored World Festival of Youth and Students in 1955 (Warsaw) and 1962 (Helsinki). Each time she toured the Soviet Bloc, then made her way to Paris for an extended sojourn. Parra contributed a significant voice to the national debate over chilenidad (Chilean identity) during a critical juncture in Chile’s economic, social, and cultural development. Her biography sheds light on transnational cultural movements and competing notions of authenticity at the height of the Cold War. It is also the deeply human story of Parra’s tenacious struggle to be seen and heard as an artist on her own terms.

Right to Life and Capital Punishment in Transnational Judicial Dialogue

In this article, I bring the constitutional jurisprudence of major East Asian courts into reconstructive dialogue with that of the United States, South Africa, and several former Soviet-bloc countries, on per se review of capital punishment. This fills in a gap in the literature, which has failed to reflect new developments in Asia. Besides analysing various review approaches, I extrapolate recurrent analytical issues and reconstruct dialogues among these court decisions. Moreover, I place the analysis in historical perspective by periodising the jurisprudential trajectory of the right to life. The contextualised reconstructive dialogues offer multilayered understanding of my central analytical argument: for any court that may conduct per se review of capital punishment in the future, the highly influential South African Makwanyane case does not settle the lesson. The transnational debate has been kept open by the Korean Constitutional Court's decisions, as well as retrospectively by the US cases of Furman and Gregg. This argument has two major points. First, the crucial part of the reasoning in Makwanyane, namely that capital punishment cannot be proven to pass the necessity test under the proportionality review, is analytically inconclusive. The Korean Constitutional Court's decision offers a direct contrast to this point. Second, the exercise of proportionality review of the Makwanyane Court does not attest to the neutrality and objectivity of proportionality review. Rather, what is really dispositive of the outcome are certain value choices inhering in per se review of capital punishment.

Solidarity in Search of Human Agency: ‘Détente from Below’ and Independent Peace Activists in the Soviet Union

While the histories of Western grassroots movements and the officially sanctioned, communist-sponsored peace movement are well known, the independent peace activists of the Soviet bloc have remained footnotes in the history of social movements. The Group for the Establishment of Trust between East and West (the Trust Group) was the largest and most prominent unofficial peace group in the late Soviet Union. Active between 1982 and 1989, its members established significant ties with foreign peace activists. This article considers the agenda, activities and membership of the Trust Group. It contrasts the persecution experienced by this independent movement with the activities of the official, state-sanctioned Soviet Peace Committee (SPC). As the article shows, the Trust Group’s agenda resonated with the concept of ‘détente from below’, as promoted by members of European Nuclear Disarmament (END), including the historian E.P. Thompson. The article traces how Western advocates of ‘détente from below’ sought to support these independent campaigners in the Soviet Union, thus highlighting important East-West dimensions in European peace activism in the 1980s.

Property Rights Freedom and Innovation: Eponymous Skills in Women's Gymnastics

Prior research uses the collapse of Soviet-style communism in 1991 as a de facto experimental framework within which to examine the impact of prospective benefits on the motivation of athletes to succeed in the Olympic Games. Prior to the collapse, successful Soviet Bloc Olympians were provided extraordinary living conditions and lifestyles. These rewards evaporated with the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991, subsequently resulting in relatively poorer Olympic performances of Soviet Bloc athletes. The current study extends earlier work by investigating the impact of appropriability on the supply of innovation by examining the frequency of eponymous skills in women's gymnastics before and during the transition to a new market-based economic order. Our central hypothesis is that following the dissolution the communist governments of the Soviet Bloc and its satellites, the supply of innovation in the form of eponymous skills in women's gymnastics from these countries has fallen. Frequency distributions of eponymous skills in women's gymnastics both prior to and after the dissolution of the aforementioned communist regimes support this hypothesis, as do results from goodness-of-fit tests and stochastic dominance analysis of joint probability distributions.

The diffusion of norms, rules and mechanisms for the enforcement of labor standards and the resolution of disputes in the Asia-Pacific, in particular among signatory countries of the TPP

<p>People are central to economic development. Workers are relatively vulnerable compared to the other factors of the economy, including governments and employers. Because violations of workers’ rights and poor working conditions are prevalent, especially in developing countries, the diffusion of internationally recognized labor standards is now emerging as a critical process in the world. This is a process by which internationally recognized labor rights are transferred between countries by various means with the expectation of improving labor conditions world-wide. For this process to be successful, it is important that not only labor standards but also rules and mechanisms for their enforcement be diffused. The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) is currently under negotiation. The TPP is expected to be the first “high-quality, twenty-first-century agreement” in the world. Norm entrepreneurs have chosen the TPP to be a channel for the diffusion of labor standards in the Asia-Pacific. How is the TPP likely to diffuse the norms, rules and mechanisms for the enforcement of labor standards and dispute resolution? Will it be by means of goodwill, cooperation and consensus or through material conditionality? Labor rights are human rights which must be upheld and promoted. The answer to the above empirical question is very important to the policy-makers of signatory countries of the TPP, given that labor standards are considered to be a sensitive issue in many Asian countries. Their concerns are grounded in history. The Government of Poland and the communist system in Eastern Europe were brought down as a result of the implementation of labor rights in the 1980s¹. How to implement these rights without causing social and political disorder is a complex question for policy-makers in the TPP countries. The thesis reviews the literature on theoretical norm diffusion and labor standards as well as provides the empirical evidence of past diffusion of labor standards in order to identify which mechanisms of diffusion are likely to prevail in the field of labor standards in the Asia-Pacific region. It answers who are the drivers of diffusion. It draws on the record of all signed FTAs in the region to provide an empirical foundation for its projection about the likely content of the TPP in terms of rules and mechanisms for the enforcement of labor standards. ¹ After the rights to organize freely and to strike was recognized by the Government of Poland, the Solidarity Unions was formed and after many ups and downs of its evolution, finally it had led successfully the overthrow of the communist Government of Poland and “played a central role in the demise of communism across the Soviet bloc, changing forever the course of history in Europe”. Read more at http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1060898.html, and http://future.state.gov/when/timeline/1969_detente/fall_of_communism.html</p>

The diffusion of norms, rules and mechanisms for the enforcement of labor standards and the resolution of disputes in the Asia-Pacific, in particular among signatory countries of the TPP

<p>People are central to economic development. Workers are relatively vulnerable compared to the other factors of the economy, including governments and employers. Because violations of workers’ rights and poor working conditions are prevalent, especially in developing countries, the diffusion of internationally recognized labor standards is now emerging as a critical process in the world. This is a process by which internationally recognized labor rights are transferred between countries by various means with the expectation of improving labor conditions world-wide. For this process to be successful, it is important that not only labor standards but also rules and mechanisms for their enforcement be diffused. The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement (TPP) is currently under negotiation. The TPP is expected to be the first “high-quality, twenty-first-century agreement” in the world. Norm entrepreneurs have chosen the TPP to be a channel for the diffusion of labor standards in the Asia-Pacific. How is the TPP likely to diffuse the norms, rules and mechanisms for the enforcement of labor standards and dispute resolution? Will it be by means of goodwill, cooperation and consensus or through material conditionality? Labor rights are human rights which must be upheld and promoted. The answer to the above empirical question is very important to the policy-makers of signatory countries of the TPP, given that labor standards are considered to be a sensitive issue in many Asian countries. Their concerns are grounded in history. The Government of Poland and the communist system in Eastern Europe were brought down as a result of the implementation of labor rights in the 1980s¹. How to implement these rights without causing social and political disorder is a complex question for policy-makers in the TPP countries. The thesis reviews the literature on theoretical norm diffusion and labor standards as well as provides the empirical evidence of past diffusion of labor standards in order to identify which mechanisms of diffusion are likely to prevail in the field of labor standards in the Asia-Pacific region. It answers who are the drivers of diffusion. It draws on the record of all signed FTAs in the region to provide an empirical foundation for its projection about the likely content of the TPP in terms of rules and mechanisms for the enforcement of labor standards. ¹ After the rights to organize freely and to strike was recognized by the Government of Poland, the Solidarity Unions was formed and after many ups and downs of its evolution, finally it had led successfully the overthrow of the communist Government of Poland and “played a central role in the demise of communism across the Soviet bloc, changing forever the course of history in Europe”. Read more at http://www.rferl.org/content/article/1060898.html, and http://future.state.gov/when/timeline/1969_detente/fall_of_communism.html</p>

Tak trudno się rozstać

The aim of this article is to analyse the privatisation process in the Republic of Belarus. This analysis will help to answer two questions. Firstly, is Belarusian privatisation strategic in nature? Secondly, what theoretical framework explains Belarusian privatisation policy?Juxtaposing the process of transferring state property to the private sphere in Belarus with traditional theoretical frameworks explaining the causes and course of privatisation in the former Soviet bloc countries does not fully explain the actions of the Belarusian authorities. Privatisation transactions were not part of a broader plan to restructure the economy. They were carried out ad hoc, usually as a result of a combination of two factors – pressure from external actors and the need to raise budget funds.To explain the actions of President Alexander Lukashenko, it seems appropriate to use an approach derived from the concept of power-ownership developed by Russian researchers Yuri Latov and Rustem Nureev. This assumes the formation of property rights from above and directly links political power with property control. In this view, giving up control over property is tantamount to giving up political power.

Rebecca West on communism’s allure for the intellectuals: An appraisal

Feminist activist, novelist, literary critic, bio-ethnographer, legal autodidact, and political writer: Rebecca West (1892–1983) was a 20th-century phenomenon. She was also a lifelong critic of communism’s appeal to the intelligentsia. Communism, West claimed, was attractive to three groups of intellectuals outside the Soviet bloc: a minority of scientists who viewed politics as merely a sum of technical problems to solve; the emotionally devastated for whom communism was a means of mental reorientation; and a déclassé segment of the middle class who envisaged communism as a means of material and status advancement. I examine West’s three explanations for communism’s allure, and then proceed to evaluate her account. My assessment is both empirical, using sociological data on American and European communist parties, and methodological, examining the techniques of West’s style, a mix of novelistic empathy and unmasking political partisanship. This mixture I consider fatal because while the novel, like historical interpretation, allows a generous understanding of human agents, unmasking tends towards caricature and denunciation.

The Bridges of Ideas: Transnational Network of the Book Program for Eastern Europe, 1956-1990

<div>This proposed contribution reflects on how one, relatively small U.S.-led program of cultural diplomacy shaped the attitude of Polish intellectuals towards liberalization and openness to the free world during the Cold War. The importance of the topic lies in the fact that this long-lasting literary service could be considered as a vital tool for creating more space for political and cultural freedom in Soviet-bloc countries. The program represented the spirit of solidarity and friendship between Eastern Europe and the U.S. that, even now, should not be forgotten. That thirty years after the book program ended, Eastern Europe still lacks a transnational perspective on defending universal liberal values and the process of gaining freedom in the region before 1989 demonstrates the importance of bringing the Eastern and Western narratives closer together, by reexamining the legacy of the book program today.</div>