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This paper analyzes the evolution of a small electronic music scene in Brisbane from the mid-1980s to the present. Drawing upon the concept of scene and highlighting its local and trans-local dimensions, we assess how the place-bound attributes of Brisbane (cultural and political history, climate, built form) are still relevant when analyzing the emergence and development of an electronic music scene. The place-bound attributes of Brisbane played a strong role in shaping this scene: the sub-tropical climate enabling outdoor parties; the development of a strong trans-local character due to isolation; ‘scene hopping’ strategies from electronic artists, as well as bands; the hostile political and social environment that characterized Queensland, have all influenced the development of its electronic scene and informed the local/interlocal/virtual dimensions of this scene.

In this article we take a longitudinal view on presidential-term-limit reforms in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa since the third wave of democratization. Many countries in the two regions (re-)introduced term limits at this time as a democratic safeguard against personal rule and power abuses. Since then, term limits have been contested by a plethora of reform attempts. Such reforms are commonly seen as a risk to democracy since stable institutions are considered essential for democratic consolidation, while term-limit eliminations are associated with processes of autocratization. From the literature on democratic consolidation, institutionalization and presidential-term-limit reforms we distil theoretical expectations on term-limit-reform paths across time and examine how they relate to the evolution of the political regime. To empirically investigate reform paths across regions we apply the research method of sequence analysis. We find that the stability of term-limit rules is more prevalent than expected, but that this stability sometimes masks institutional ineffectiveness under authoritarian regimes. Rule instability induced by frequent reforms can be part of a piecemeal path towards autocratization, but it can also reflect an open-ended tug of war between authoritarian tendencies and democratic resistance.

International audience; Mauna Kea, the tallest volcano on Hawai‘i Island, has become a mountain familiar to many in the Pacific and around the world, as a result of the massive mobilizations in which those who identified as kia‘i (protectors) of the mountain opposed the construction of a giant Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) at the summit. This article retraces the history of the Mauna Kea access road, based on a study of the English-language newspaper recordas well as ethnographic and archival material. From the road’s inception in the 1930s onward, economic interests, political conflicts, and relations of domination appear intertwined with the very materiality of the road: its route, surface, safety, maintenance, as well as features such as cattle grids, crosswalks, and guardrails. Three political strategies centrally involved the notion of a Mauna Kea access road. Starting in the 1930s, businessmen and government officials pushed for a road, and later for its improvement, in order to make the mountain more accessible, in particular for skiing. As of the 1960s, this push was paralleled and contradicted by another strategy which consisted in keeping the mountain not too accessible, in part because ofwhat some perceived as a competition between recreational and scientific uses – skiing vs. science. A third political strategy involved the road as a site from which to question the notion of public ownership and to affirm sovereignty. The history of the Mauna Kea access road appears as a synecdoche of the political conflict over land and sovereignty that defines Hawaiian history since the nineteenth century.

The city of Hyderabad has had a distinct linguistic and political history. It was a multilingual city with Urdu (and Persian) as the court languages under the Asaf Jahi dynasty until 1948, when it ...

The High Court's 1992 decision in Mabo v Queensland (No 2) is widely regarded as a seminal moment in Australia's legal and political history. The decision established a legal right to native title ...

The leader of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkeren Kurdistan or PKK), Abdullah Ocalan, is a controversial figure. Since the founding of the PKK in 1978, Ocalan has been the ultimate decis...

One of the most decisive landslide victories in the political history of Japan was achieved by Prime Minister Ōkuma Shigenobu in March 1915. His election campaign catalysed the mediatisation of Jap...

This article considers how the child’s gaze in Napoleonic culture functions as a multifaceted tool in the moral and political history of the Napoleonic Wars. Drawing from Stahl’s framework of the ‘...

Since the mid-twentieth century, higher education has been subject to spectacular growth. While the expansion of higher education is undoubtedly a general trend, its actual characteristics in terms of its specific conditions and driving forces vary by context. In this article, our aim is to develop such a socio-political historical narrative of Swedish higher education since 1945. We focus on how the Swedish case evolved in four salient aspects: (I) the transformations of the welfare state and the economy broadly defined; (II) the policies directly involved in redesigning the higher education system; (III) the scale, composition and structural relations between the parts of the higher education system; and (IV) the way different social groups (vis-à-vis gender and class) have used the system. We show that higher education policy has shifted its focus from massification and unification to marketisation and internationalisation. We notice that the conditions for the expansions differ substantially during the first three decades after 1945 compared to the 1990s in political, economic and demographic terms. While the system has opened up for increased participation overall, the way students are sorted into different institutions and fields of study by gender and class reveals a remarkably rigid social structure. Swedish higher education. Financing, Organisation, Enrolment, Outcomes, 1950-2020 (SHEFOE). Mapping Pathways in Higher Education

This article explores the cultural and political history of the men’s shed movement in Australia. This movement, which is ongoing, gathered steam after the first men’s sheds were opened in the mid-...

Co-hosting mega-events is not a new concept. It has been viewed as a strategic endeavour among nations to not only ease the cost of hosting, but to work on multi-national collaborations that go beyond underlying political and economic agreements. United 2026 is a successful FIFA World Cup bid led by the United States to co-host the event with Canada and Mexico. This commentary offers a cultural and political geographical discussion of this bid and the future mega-event. Some of the governance challenges include critically discussing the uniting of these three nations (based on the role of NAFTA and neoliberalism), contested points of disuniting (through the rise of right-wing political movements) through to an intended reuniting (through a shared mega-event hosting). This political and cultural journey of working towards a United 2026 event began in the early-1990s with the NAFTA agreement initially negotiated by George H.W. Bush and signed by Bill Clinton (as the economic binding of the USA, Canada and Mexico) through to Donald Trump’s threats of a US withdrawal and what would ultimately be renegotiated as the new USMCA Agreement. This context provides some geographical/geo-political underpinnings for understanding the potential and perceived governance of a United 2026, following the longitudinal political history of uniting, disuniting and reuniting. Currently, given the geopolitical climate in North America, a united effort is (somewhat) contradictory to the current apartness that frames the current relationship between the USA and Mexico. But alternatively, a co-hosting approach can be viewed as working towards a new North American togetherness, at least in the sense of an event spectacle and imaginary. From a political geography standpoint, power relations will likely exist in a matter similar to that of NAFTA, but as events are promotion oriented opposed to production focused, it is expected that a newfound cultural connection could emerge amid evolving political disruptions using sport as a cultural driver.

Jon Elster has argued for the explanatory importance of two discrete emotions in political history: namely, the emotions of ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘anger’. His argument forms part of a larger social phil...

The May Fourth movement is widely recognized as a watershed within Chinese cultural and political history, but it was also a significant local episode within a global history of science ac...

Sir Lewis Namier has left a deep, if contested, imprint on studies of eighteenth-century British political history. Namier the student of great power relations, by contrast, has been largely allowed to slide into oblivion. It is a curious fate, for in his day his public profile as a commentator on international affairs was very high. This article attempts to reconstruct Namier as a dfigiplomatic historian, the intellectual assumptions that underpinned his work, the manner in which he framed the study of European great power politics, and the methods he employed.

Using archival, ethnographic, and oral historical sources in her first full-length manuscript, Monique Bedasse writes a compelling intellectual and political history of Rastafari repatriation and P...

Determining the onset of organized disinformation about global warming is critical for understanding its political history and evaluating the responsibilities of fossil fuel producers and other rel...

Warren Denning’s Caucus Crisis (1937) is widely regarded as one of the earliest and most influential works of contemporary political history to be authored and published in Australia. This paper de...

This article adds to the emerging field of transnational studies on the far right by focusing upon the overseas exploits of Britain’s first explicitly fascist movement, the British Fascisti (1923–1...

The conflict that has embroiled the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for decades has been one of the most vexing problems in the political history of Africa and the larger international community...

We investigate whether a framework drawn from the field of organizational management can be used by citizens of two countries with different political history and culture to assess character. Drawi...

This article deals with the ideological development of Danish conservatism in the 1940s. During the German occupation, conservatives developed a platform strongly stressing national cohesion not on...

The need to study the relation between state and periphery in the past is one of the means to understand the socioeconomic and political history of the local people in Africa. Hence, this paper is ...

This paper uses a governmentality approach to examine the political history of human–canine relationships in the People’s Republic of China, focusing on the evolution of household dog regulations i...

Based on a qualitative study of teachers, teacher educators and educational policy makers, this paper examines how political history is framed within national history curricula at primary level and...

Dr Dillon was the founding director of the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Durham, where he taught modern Chinese history, and he is the author of China: A Modern Histo...

This is a review essay of Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History. I interrogate many of North’s claims, most notably his argument about the way a shift from literary critici...

Drawing on fieldwork conducted over multiple seasons between 2012 and 2015, this paper explores aspects of the socio-economic and political history of the Marakwet of Kenya. It does so by focusing ...

Liberia’s 2017 elections represented a watershed moment in the country’s political history. In addition to completing the first democratic transfer of power from one president to another since 1944, it resulted in wide representation across many different parties and independents as well as high levels of legislative turn-overs. Additionally, these polls brought forward unprecedented numbers of party reconfigurations, increased levels of defections, and politicians/parties losing abysmally in presumed ethno-regional bases. In this article, we argue that Liberia currently exists in a post-war arena of “post-party” politics where a profound disregard for parties is the norm, and in which the electorate and politicians alike forum shop for candidates and/or political configurations they presume will deliver the best results at national, sub-national and local levels. Although literature exploring electoral trends in Africa tends to over-emphasize ethno-regionalism as a driver and constraint in the choices of voters and politicians, we demonstrate instead that Liberians make relatively informed, strategic decisions about political alliances and ballot casting thereby subverting allegiances to ethnicity and region. By further eschewing party loyalties, Liberians have gradually become astute forum shoppers in a political marketplace that makes running for office and voting complex undertakings.

The Malaysian General Election 2014 (GE14) was one of the most anticipated in Malaysia’s political history as it was to determine the fate of Barisan Nasional (BN) under the leadership of the scandal-hit Prime Minister, Najib Razak. As in the 2008 and 2013 general elections, the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak once again became the frontline–or ‘fixed deposit’–states as their support was crucial for BN’s survival. There were multiple claims that BN would return to power in Sabah once again, albeit with a reduced majority considering the strong anti-BN sentiment that was felt across all strata of society. The chances of Parti Warisan Sabah (Warisan), the key opposition party in the state, were downplayed as it was assumed that the party’s strength was only concentrated in the East Coast of Sabah. Hence, to comprehend BN’s defeat in the GE14, it is significant to turn towards the particular affinities and affiliations, particular commonalities and connections, particular stories and self-understandings, particular problems and predicaments of the socio-political dynamics in Sabah. Contrary to the claims that national politics were disconnected from Sabah, ‘problems and predicaments’ emanating from Peninsular Malaysia did indeed have a ‘connection and commonality’ upon the way they impacted people’s voting decision. The external factor of the strong tide of the anti-BN sentiment, fortified with the internal particularities of the political dynamics in the ‘stories and self-understandings’ of constituencies, illustrates how a jolt was caused in BN’s power bases.

Environmental sociologists have rarely engaged with the concept of ontological security. Further, those writers who have engaged with the concept have tended to focus predominately on themes of risk and disaster. In this paper I outline several critiques addressing the major methodological issues with Anthony Giddens’ (and others’) conceptualisation of ontological security and –offer my own operationalised model of ontological security for qualitative environmental inquiries. I illustrate this model ‘in action’ through a case study of individuals’ emotional and ontological relationships with forests in Tasmania, Australia. A site of significant environmental political history and conflict, the Tasmanian case study provides an ideal context through which to explore the historically and culturally situated process of ontological security. The paper closes with a discussion of how these insights reflect and extend three emerging and salient themes within environmental social sciences: emotion, temporality, and ontology. Concluding this discussion, this paper demonstrates that ontological security is a useful framework in rendering intelligible and articulable the abstract, emotional, and ontological aspects of human-nonhuman engagements.

This article defines Danish togetherness, putting it in the context of Danish social and political history, and placing particular emphasis on the gradual development of Denmark’s homogeneity, on t...

This special issue re-evaluates the 1950s as a period of transnationalism in ideas and political practices, offering innovative insights into political history and political ideas. Without setting the national and transnational spheres against each other, the issue argues that the dialectics between the two was a defining element of Europe in this period. The articles explore transnational cooperation and exchanges among intellectuals, politicians and trade unionists, showing how they were changing in their interaction. The editorial sets out from the research on the postwar configuration of Europe based on the retake of the nation state, combining it with new research of transnational history and putting out some methodological innovations. The editorial also highlights some significant themes across the articles: the central role of translation and localisation, the interaction with local interests and disputes, the Cold War, the acceleration of European integration, the rise of the Third World, the tensions between hope and fear or between nihilism and rebirth of Europe, the centrality of science.

Jimmy Carter’s successful 1976 presidential campaign resides in a no-man’s land of political history, overshadowed by the landslide Republican victories that preceded and followed it. In Jimmy Cart...

Building the Irish Courthouse and Prison deals with two separate but intimately interconnected themes; the Assize Courthouses and the County Gaols, both physical manifestations of the great changes...

American political history is filled with flashpoints, unique developments sutured to a robust marriage between religion and the culture war. These key moments have lionized evangelical Christianit...

This book is a study of heavily concentrated immigrant Bengali Muslims and the struggle for their share in the resources, who reside in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Glynn in her book examin...

The overwhelming majority of Muslims worldwide, ‘as much as ninety percent’, according to the author of the book under review, are Sunnis. Nevertheless, a full understanding of Islam requires atten...

This recently published book is based on the author’s PhD study, which was undertaken through the University of Minnesota and finalised in 2015, entitled ‘Age of Concrete: Housing and the Imaginati...

In Sunni and Shia: A Political History of Discord, first published in French in 2017, Laurence Louer sets out to explain the dynamics by which conflicts between Sunnis and Shias are activated and d...

The book “Mongolia: A Political History of the Land and its People” is the political history of Mongolia and its population, how it developed historically, what cultural traditions it acquired, wha...

Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism is an intellectual and political history of neoliberal globalism. It follows the individuals and ideas associated with...

This is a cogent political history of modern Japan written by Kitaoka Shinichi, a leading Japanese diplomatic and political historian and Professor Emeritus of The University of Tokyo and Rikkyo Un...

Historians of political discourse and language policy researchers should join forces to develop methods of textual analysis that help to integrate political and intellectual history. They could do so by focusing their analysis on interconnections between material realities, human physical action, practices and structures, as well as institutions and ideologies as discursive constructs. Such a version of soft constructivism underscoring the discursive nature of much of politics encourages historians to analyse past political discourses more systematically. Concepts such as nexus, historical body, mobility and discursive transfers borrowed from language research deepen our analytical understanding of the multi-level dynamics of policy-making, directing attention to links between various debates as well as to transnational transfers. Our empirical examples are derived from Swedish and Finnish constitutional debates in the last phase of the First World War, but similar research strategies are applicable to the analysis of political discourse in any context. peerReviewed

In an historical materialist analysis, the article challenges the dominant understanding of global academic rankings as ‘inevitable’ and ‘here to stay’. Instead, rankings are treated as his...

This article revisits the question of whether contemporary biography can be considered as history through a close examination of the political biographies (and autobiography) of Singapore’s...

Contemporary handwork, including all forms of stitching, provides a reflective outlet and is rich in social, cultural, and political history. The desire to connect to the handmade and the tactile t...

This article introduces a special issue of Citizenship Studies in which historians of East, South and Southeast Asia continue the project of globalizing citizenship by analyzing practices and conceptions of citizenship in pre-colonial China, India and Indonesia. Building on the recent global turn in citizenship studies as well as historicizing this turn, we shift the conceptual focus from formal membership and contracts to practices and acts of citizenship. Against citizenship essentialism, conceptual room is created for different ways in which people across Asia have participated in ruling and being ruled, employing different vocabularies, institutions and practices that showed they had agency in the polities they lived in. The main conclusion is that forms of citizenship participation can be found everywhere in Asian history, and were often anchored in practices which were both structural and effective.