Territorial and Non-territorial Aspects in the Autonomist Proposals of the Sudeten German Party, 1937–38

The article focuses on two sets of autonomist demands that the far-right Sudeten German Party (SdP) in Czechoslovakia put forward during 1937–38. Its central thesis being that both sets were marked by a profoundly close interplay between territorial and non-territorial approaches at accommodating national diversity, it sets to explore this relationship, highlighting the underlying dynamic. Although the 1937 Volksschutzgesetze posed as an ostensibly “pure” case of non-territorial autonomy, whereas the 1938 Skizze über Neuordnung der innerstaatlichen Verhältnisse entailed major territorial provisions, in both cases the practical end-goal implied territorial autonomy. A closer look into their inner logic and intellectual origins however, also reveals a shared, essentially non-territorial underpinning. While the SdP agenda was firmly centered on national territory, its specific völkisch and organicist understanding of nationality manifested a clear preponderance of non-territoriality. Both sets of autonomist demands may thus be treated as a potentially maximalist combination of territorial and non-territorial arrangements resting on a fundamentally non-territorial notion of Volkspersönlichkeit. Encompassing all the members of the national group, the latter was simultaneously conceived as the basic carrier of political will. Volksschutzgesetze and Skizze thus represented clear examples of illiberal (re-)conceptualization of national autonomy, informed by contemporary völkisch sociological, legal, and political thought.

An Interview with Topher Campbell

This Curated Spaces features an interview with Topher Campbell of rukus! archive. The rukus! archive was founded in 2005 by photographer Ajamu X and filmmaker and theatre director Topher Campbell. The archive is dedicated to collecting, preserving, and making available artistic, social, and cultural histories related to Black LGBTQ+ communities in the United Kingdom. Its intellectual origins reside in the work of Stuart Hall and British cultural studies, and the critical dialogue it establishes with both mainstream heritage practices and dominant Black and queer identity discourses.

Counterstorytelling in International Economic Law

This chapter critically evaluates the phenomenon of counterstorytelling in the context of international economic law. The intellectual origins and conceptual assumptions of the narrative turn in legal thought are surveyed, before counterstorytelling is discussed—a style of narrative jurisprudence that emerged primarily in the context of critical race theory, and whose power inheres in its mythbusting potential. Counterstorytelling is illustrated with reference to the past, present, and future of international economic law, focusing respectively on: Adom Getachew’s historical account of the New International Economic Order in Worldmaking after Empire; the diagnostic of the current backlash against economic globalization in Lynn Nottage’s play Sweat; and efforts to forecast the trajectories of neoliberal capitalism.

Introduction

What was sovereignty supposed to be, and what purpose might it serve for our common future? This study addresses these questions by examining the legal and political thought of Jean Bodin (1529/30–1596), widely regarded as the preeminent theorist of sovereignty in early modern political thought. This Introduction offers a preview of four principal themes and arguments to be explored in this book: (1) sovereignty as a permissive legal right; (2) Bodin’s concept of positive law as duty-creating command; (3) the negative function of absolute power; (4) the pluralistic structure of the Bodinian sovereign state. Special emphasis will be placed on Bodin’s outsized, though overlooked, influence on the intellectual origins of modern public international law, whose architecture is still anchored fundamentally in the notion of a state’s sovereign right.

Michael Tierney and the Intellectual Origins of Blueshirtism, 1920–1938

The Blueshirts have been one of the most contested and extensively researched subjects in twentieth-century Irish historiography. Debate has focused principally on the extent to which the movement should be understood as a fascist organisation, or as a spontaneous counter-reaction to the domestic political instability that followed Fianna Fáil’s victory in the 1932 general election. However, strikingly little attention has been devoted to tracing the intellectual origins of Blueshirtism in Irish nationalist and republican thought. This article rejects the dominant historiographical representation of the Blueshirts as an aberration in Irish political history and suggests that the movement can only be understood properly in continuity with the political thought of the pre-Civil War period. It is argued, additionally, that the more complex and differentiated ‘hybrid’ theories of ‘fascistization’ developed by scholars like David D. Roberts, António Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis provide a useful comparative framework for understanding how nationalist intellectuals such as Michael Tierney, once steadfast in their commitment to the norms of parliamentary democracy, came to endorse a corporatist politics after being voted out of office.

The “Indo-Pacific”: Intellectual Origins and International Visions in Global Contexts

As the “Indo-Pacific” concept gains currency in public discourses on foreign policy, it remains poorly understood as an idea, due to inadequate surveys of its intellectual origins and international visions in global contexts. This article studies Karl Haushofer's theory of the “Indo-Pacific” as an organic and integral space primed for political consciousness. Haushofer not only laid the oceanographic foundation of the “Indo-Pacific” with novel evidence in marine sciences, ethnography, and philology, but also legitimated it as a social and political space. Mindful of Germany's geopolitical predicament in the interwar period and informed by sources in indology and sinology, Haushofer envisaged the political resurrection of South, East, and Southeast Asia against colonial domination, and conceived the “Indo-Pacific” vision for remaking the international order.

Inventing ‘infrastructure’: tracing the etymological blueprint of an omnipresent sociotechnical metaphor

This article proposes an archaeology of the concept of ‘infrastructure’, focusing specifically on a period ranging from 1842 until 1951, before the term entered the English language from French. In doing so, it contributes to an ongoing discussion on ‘What does infrastructure really mean?’ by deconstructing the omnipresent concept of ‘infrastructure’ as an expression of modernity that has crystallised a sociotechnical imaginary: a relation between technology, space and power. Indeed, our understanding of its etymological, epistemological and intellectual origins is patchy, based on repeated chronological mistakes and conceptual misunderstandings. To put it bluntly: we do not know how the word came to be. By unearthing the origins of ‘infrastructure’, this article aims to contribute to scholarly debates on the definition(s) of infrastructure in social sciences, urban studies, science and technology studies and infrastructure studies. It also wishes to contribute to ongoing debates taking place in the public sphere regarding what should count as ‘infrastructure’. This paper’s findings demonstrate a clear relation to Karl Marx’s ‘historical materialism’; the paper also analyses how the word evolved over a short period of time to become sociotechnical metaphor; finally, the paper demonstrates the emergence of a concept that linked engineering to larger socioeconomic concerns in the 1890s, well before the emergence of ‘infrastructure’ as a key concept of development economics in the 1950s.