Fresh Unionist Re-Appraisals of the History of Early Modern Ireland

Landowners were challenged both by political change and by historical arguments. Their contribution to debate took the form of county histories to illustrate how landowners had been responsible for improvement and communal leadership. These histories varied because the experience of no two counties was identical. However, most dated the introduction of civil order to the establishment of counties, they enumerated the ‘improvements’ introduced by individual proprietors, they decried absenteeism, and they rejoiced that sectarian strife had been kept at bay other than when it had been provoked by external provocateurs—usually Catholic clerics. George Hill, writing of Ulster counties, dissented from this narrative by attributing past disturbances to the unfair treatment accorded natives in the Ulster Plantation and to the indifference of principal landowners to communal welfare. For him, the bedrock of Ulster society was its Protestant tenant farmers and their willingness to co-operate with their Catholic counterparts.

‘Technologies of Responsibility’

In her important monograph, In Search of Criminal Responsibility, Lacey explores changing relations between individual and state and charts the history of growing state ‘confidence in the possibility of shaping the habits and dispositions of citizenhood’ through the criminal law and other legal measures. She concludes, ‘we are seeing not so much a replacement of one paradigm of responsibility by another, but rather an accumulation of conceptions or “technologies” of responsibility.’ This chapter considers these controversial new hybrid legal orders such as the ASBO and its successors with which the state seeks to instil habits of respectable citizenship and to secure civil order. These diverse powers engraft new techniques of ‘responsibilization’ on to existing criminal laws, designed to police ‘irregular’ citizens who occupy precarious places at the margins, such as youth, those engaging in anti-social behaviour, the poor, and the homeless. Arguably these technologies do not signify the growth of state confidence so much as its resort to regulatory fixes to intractable problems of governance. It concludes by considering the implications of these developments for the attribution of responsibility both in and outside the criminal law.

Minutes of Meetings of the District Chiefs of the Krasnogorodsk Region as a Source for Studying the Nazi Occupation in the Kalinin Region: 1941–44

The article is to study the everyday life of the Soviet population under the Nazi occupation as it remains insufficiently studied yet. One of the author’s tasks is to introduce new sources into scientific use. The study reveals informative capabilities of documents on governance in the occupied territory using microhistorical approach and involving methods of text data analysis. The article reviews minutes of meetings of the staff of civil administration of the Krasnogorodsk region chaired by the German commandant. On the eve of the Great Patriotic War the region was a part of the Kalinin region; in 1941–44 it was under occupation. Then the German commandant was chief representative of the authorities in the region. The staff of the regional administration and its chief (including chiefs of the districts and villages) followed his directions. The districts more or less corresponded to village soviets. The meetings of the commandant with the administration staff were held regularly. The records of meetings found by the author in the fonds of the Velikiye Luki department of the State Archives of the Pskov Region date back to early 1943. The data analysis of the documents suggests that most often discussed issues were administrative and civil order matters, for instance, functions of military and civil administration and forms of their interaction. The job duties and powers of different civil administration staff and their requirements were often clarified, as well as regulations for getting passports and collecting data on population composition and various aspects of the region’s economic life. Much attention was paid to arrangement and implementation of agricultural work, the most difficult matter was lack of draught animals. Deadlines and terms for obligatory delivery of agricultural products were constantly reiterated. Issues related to the social sphere: bread rationing, accommodation of refugees, orphans, and homeless children, their provision with food supplies were mentioned. There are rare references to schools and hospitals mentioning the shortage of funds for their reconstruction and heating. At the meetings ideological work with the attendees was carried out, resulting in moral and material rewards for those who collaborated with Nazis. The commandant constantly reminded of the necessity for recruitment of reliable persons to auxiliary forces and warfare units. Thus, the study of the records shows that top-priority tasks of the invaders were maintaining order and supplying resources to the German army.

Liberal Ideas of B.N. Chicherin: The Past and The Present

Russian liberal heritage, first of all, the scientific works of the famous Russian legal expert Boris Chicherin, is the fundamental basis for the developing science of human rights in modern Russia; it is from this position that this article examines Chicherin’s work. The main purpose of the study is to identify Chicherin’s priorities in shaping new progressive ideas for Russia and to examine the transformation of his views. In examining and analysing Chicherin’s liberal ideas, historical, logical and comparative methods were applied. It has been concluded that Chicherin set the foundation of the liberal theory of human rights, elaborated a set of progressive ideas and a blueprint of reforms, which determined the formation of several generations of liberals in autocratic Russia and are still relevant today. Defending the priority of private law over public law, Chicherin argued: a civil order based on private law must always be free from state absorption. He was among the first in Russia to develop the idea of a constitutional state in relation with the creation of free institutions and the formation of a high intellectual and moral level of society. By developing the new policy of ‘liberal measures and strong state authority’ as an optimal model for Russian state and society, Chicherin gave rise to the formation of political science in Russia. The author believes that the analysis and discussion of Chicherin’s academic writings in university classrooms and at academic conferences contribute to the formation of a culture of human rights, a liberal worldview, a new generation of reformers, and the advancement of the emerging science of human rights.

Towards redeeming marriage custom from ‘triangular captivity’: The missional dilemma of the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe

Marriage in the Methodist Church in Zimbabwe (MCZ) is under siege. This scenario was bequeathed by the British imperialists. This siege is evident because the ecclesiastical theology of marriage in the MCZ is fastened on both African culture and the civil order. Firstly, marriage is anchored on African culture because the MCZ is an African church and it grows its mission using African epistemology. Secondly, marriage in the MCZ is affixed on civil authority because adult membership in the the MCZ is defined by being ‘properly married’ for those who have spouses. The triangular net is evident because marriage starts and proceeds culturally, the government legalises marriages and the MCZ uses marriage certificates to grow its membership, whilst the clergy solemnise marriages as government agents using the civil Marriage Act Chapter 5:11. The aim of this article was to investigate how the MCZ’s mission is informed by both African culture and civil order given that it regards marriage as the canon of adult membership, blousing of women and badging of men, participation in the sacrament of Holy Communion, confirmation into full membership, leadership positions, accredited as local preachers and acceptance into ministry. In responding to this aim, the article uses a qualitative research method to interrogate the MCZ policy books and minutes of conferences that address the theology of marriage. The research will conclude by challenging the MCZ to come up with a theology of marriage that unties itself from the cultural and civil net of this rite to interpret its ecclesial mission.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: This article is interdisciplinary in the sense that it addresses the issues of ecclesiology, missiology, theology, African culture, gender, church polity and the power of civil authority. The research calls the MCZ to define its marriage theology not contaminated by civil ideologies and African philosophy.

When There Was No Aid

For all of the doubts raised about the effectiveness of international aid in advancing peace and development, there are few examples of developing countries that are even relatively untouched by it. This book offers us one such example. Using evidence from Somaliland’s experience of peace-building, the book challenges two of the most engrained presumptions about violence and poverty in the global South. First, that intervention by actors in the global North is self-evidently useful in ending them, and second that the quality of a country’s governance institutions (whether formal or informal) necessarily determines the level of peace and civil order that the country experiences. The book explores how popular discourses about war, peace, and international intervention structure the conditions of possibility to such a degree that even the inability of institutions to provide reliable security can stabilize a prolonged period of peace. It argues that Somaliland’s post-conflict peace is grounded less in the constraining power of its institutions than in a powerful discourse about the country’s structural, temporal, and physical proximity to war. Through its sensitivity to the ease with which peace gives way to war, the book argues, this discourse has indirectly harnessed an apparent propensity to war as a source of order.

Local Ownership and the Rules of the Game

This chapter shows how Somaliland’s institutions have helped to facilitate both war and peace, which is reflected in the way that the independence discourse emphasizes that peace is never guaranteed and so must be actively nurtured. It charts the evolution of the governance institutions that structured key aspects of Somaliland’s recovery between 1991 and 1997, contextualizing their role in ending the violence and in the subsequent maintenance of peace. It emphasizes the contested nature of their emergence and the degree to which their contingency diminishes the notion that there is a “basic set of tools emerging from experience” that can be applied to post-conflict situations. After illustrating the complexity of the rules of the game that were iteratively established over several years and across dozens of the clan-based conferences, the chapter zooms in to examine the government’s institutional capacity to enforce rules that are not directly related to either to violence or civil order: the payment of tax. It argues that the government’s inability to compel people to pay tax has actually helped to produce a limited measure of taxation compliance.

Homeless People in Public Space and the Politics of (In)visibility

Homeless people were a new sight in the post-1989 Czech Republic, as the previous regime effectively criminalized homelessness. Thus, in the 1990s, the new visibility of homeless people was a shock to the public eye. This paper is based on a longitudinal study of how, based on this new visibility, the representations of homeless people developed throughout the 1989–2015 period. The paper focuses on the interplay between physical visibility of homelessness and its visibility for public policy. It introduces a threefold theoretical model of how the former is transformed into the latter: I argue that, to be recognized as “problematic” in public space, a group must (a) be recognized as a distinct category (categorical visibility), (b) be recognized as a threat to the civil order (moral visibility), and (c) that public policy must have legal instruments to perceive and address the issue (the eyes and arms of public policy).