Suchergebnisse

This book looks at the interplay between criminal law and other branches of public law pursuing similar objectives (referred to as 'quasi-criminal law'). The need for clarifying the concepts and the interlink between criminal and quasi-criminal enforcement is a topic attracting a lot of discussion and debate in both academia and practice across Europe (and beyond). This volume adds to this debate by bringing to light the substantive and procedural problems stemming from the current parallel or dual use of the different enforcement systems. The collection draws on expertise from academia, practice and policy; its high-quality analysis will appeal to scholars, practitioners and policymakers alike.

Die Arbeit untersucht und bewertet das behördliche Zusammenwirken von Wissenschaft und Legislative auf europäischer und nationaler Ebene in Bezug auf das Ausbruchsgeschehen des Serotyps 8 der Blauzungenkrankheit in Mitteleuropa zwischen den Jahren 2006 bis 2015. Ziel war es, zu ermitteln, ob die europäischen und nationalen rechtlichen Vorgaben unter Berücksichtigung der biologischen Charakteristika der Blauzungenkrankheit und des zeitgleichen wissenschaftlichen Fortschritts eine effiziente, zielgerichtete und effektive Bekämpfung der Blauzungenkrankheit ermöglichten. In einem ersten Schritt wurde die Verbreitung der Blauzungenkrankheit in Rheinland-Pfalz erfasst. Dies erfolgte durch eine chronologische Aufarbeitung der Daten aus dem deutschen Tierseuchennachrichtensystem, dem Animal Disease Notification System der Europäischen Union und dem World Animal Health Information System der Weltorganisation für Tiergesundheit. Der zweite Schritt bestand aus der Ermittlung der rechtlichen Normen mit unmittelbarer Verbindung zur Blauzungenkrankheit anhand einer Schlagwortsuche in den Datenbanken "EUR-Lex" und "juris" sowie der Bewertung der für die Bekämpfung relevanten Änderungen. Im Mittelpunkt des dritten Schritts stand die Erfassung der chronologischen Entwicklung der rechtlichen Normen und die Berücksichtigung wissenschaftlicher Empfehlungen zum Seuchengeschehen. So konnte gezeigt werden, wann neue wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse Eingang in die Rechtsetzung fanden. Es war möglich, den Hintergrund neuer bzw. geänderter normativer Vorgaben zu erkennen und zu analysieren. Fachliche Begründungen wurden mit dem aktuellen wissenschaftlichen Kenntnisstand auf Kohärenz überprüft. Die Analyse der Rechtsetzung und der Rechtsauslegung in der praktischen Anwendung folgten den Regeln der juristischen Hermeneutik. In einem vierten Schritt fand die Kontextualisierung der drei Elemente "rechtliche Normen", "wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse" und "Ausbreitungshistorie" statt. Hierfür wurde zeitlich geordnet untersucht, in wie weit der wissenschaftliche Kenntnisstand Eingang in die Rechtsetzung fand, welche Änderungen in der Rechtsetzung vorgenommen wurden und wie sich das konkrete Blauzungengeschehen über die Zeit entwickelte. Die Ergebnisse zeigten, dass der Gesetzgeber die biologischen Besonderheiten der Blauzungenkrankheit – insbesondere ihre Vektorabhängigkeit – umfassend in der Rechtsetzung berücksichtigt hat. Allerdings konnte auf Grund bestehender Divergenzen zwischen europäischem und nationalem Recht, Lücken in Begriffsdefinitionen und Festlegung von für den Vollzug benötigten konkreten Kriterien festgestellt werden. Vor dem Hintergrund des globalisierten Wirtschaftshandelns und der möglichen Ausbreitung der Blauzungenkrankheit über ein Verdriften infizierter Vektoren ist die Entwicklung eines gesamteuropäischen Bekämpfungskonzepts, welches sich im Konsens des Gesundheitskodex für Landtiere der Weltorganisation für Tiergesundheit widerspiegelt, geboten. Angesichts der zahlreichen Serotypen und Virusstämme der Blauzungenkrankheit mit unterschiedlicher Virulenz wäre es darüber hinaus empfehlenswert die Virulenz als Kriterium für die zu ergreifenden Maßnahmen einzubeziehen. Die Gesetzgebung zur Bekämpfung der Blauzungenkrankheit sollte in diesem Sinne angepasst werden, um eine einheitliche europäische Bekämpfungsstrategie in der Europäischen Union zu definieren. ; This thesis examines and assesses the regulatory interaction between science and legislation at European and national level in relation to the outbreak of bluetongue virus serotype 8 in Central Europe between 2006 and 2015. The aim was to determine whether European and national legislation has enabled efficient, targeted and effective control of bluetongue by taking into account the biological characteristics of bluetongue and the simultaneous scientific progress. In this context, existing possibilities for improvement for future action should be identified if appropriate. In order to take the Europe wide development into account as well as to enable a deep analysis of small geo-graphical areas, the first step was to record the spread of bluetongue in the Federal State of Rhineland-Palatinate as a country affected by the disease at a very early stage within the Federal Republic of Germany on the one hand, and the Federal Republic of Germany in the context of the pan-European bluetongue epizootic on the other. This was done by chronologically processing the data from the German Animal Disease Notification System (TSN), the Animal Disease Notification System (ADNS) of the European Union and the World Animal Health Information System (WAHIS) of the World Organisation for Animal Health. The second step consisted of identifying the legal standards directly linked to bluetongue by means of a keyword search in the databases "EUR-Lex" and "juris" and the evaluation of the changes relevant to the control. The third step focused on recording the chronological development of the legal standards on the basis of an analysis of the uptake or consideration of scientific recommendations on the epizootic. This allowed to show when new scientific findings were incorporated into legislation. In addition, it was possible to identify and analyse the background of new or modified normative requirements. Technical justifications were checked for coherence with the current state of scientific knowledge. The analysis of the legislation and the interpretation of the law in practical application followed the rules of legal hermeneutics, which describes the legal methodology to infer the correct meaning of the legal text by interpretation. In a fourth step, the contextualisation of the three elements "legal norms", "scientific findings" and "propagation history" took place. For this purpose, the extent, to which the scientific knowledge was incorporated into the legislation, which changes were made in the legislation and how the actual bluetongue occurrence developed over time were examined in chronological order. Traditional legal interpretation methods were used to analyse, among other things, whether the necessary hermeneutical control steps preceded a change in the law – a change in the law was therefore necessary and purposeful in the chosen form –, if changes were necessary from an animal health point of view as well as whether progressive scientific knowledge was taken into account. The results clearly showed that the legislative had taken the biological characteristics of bluetongue - in particular its vector dependency - fully into account in the legislation. However, due to existing divergences between European and national law, gaps in definitions of terms and the establishment of specific criteria required for enforcement, as well as the breaking up of the primarily chosen structure and the interrelationships within and between the individual relevant standards through amendments or legal changes introduced at short notice, it was not always possible to comply with the principle of clarity of standards. Against the background of globalised economic activity and the possible spread of bluetongue via the drifting of infected vectors, the development of a pan-European control concept, which is reflected in the consensus of the Codex of the World Organisation for Animal Health, is necessary. Furthermore, given the large number of bluetongue serotypes and strains with varying degrees of virulence, it would be advisable to include virulence as a criterion for the measures to be taken, as it is already done in the control of avian influenza. The legislation on bluetongue control should be adapted in this sense in order to define a uniform European control strategy to deal efficiently, effectively and cost-consciously with BT as a vector-borne animal disease in the European Union.

The article defines the role of the national zoning in the Soviet Ukraine in the system of administrative-territorial reform in the 1920 and 1930's, its place and degree of efficiency in the process of state building in the republic. Moreover, the experience of operation and liquidation process of national administrative and territorial units in Ukraine at a crucial period of domestic and international history actualizes the research question of efficiency of these entities for modern scholars. It is noted that numerous administrative and territorial reforms were initiated during the establishment of the Soviet power in Ukraine. It is stressed that the reforms in this sphere were aimed at the elimination of pre-revolutionary administrative-territorial division. The numerous administrative and territorial reforms were initiated during the establishment of the Soviet power in Ukraine. They were carried out on the basis of the abolition of private property and the persistent antireligious orientation, were aimed at the elimination of pre-revolutionary administrative-territorial division, which evoked dissatisfaction of the new state institutions due to, from their point of view, far too fragmentation. On the background of general unsettled land relationships and a number of taxation errors implemented measures had brought the situation in the country to crisis. The conclusion is made that administrative and territorial reform in Ukraine in 1923, carried out in a hurry, did not take into account the ethnic composition of inhabitants and historical forms of management. Therefore, deterioration of the situation due to the ignorance of the national factor in the presence of diverse ethnic composition of the country forced the Bolshevik leaders to make certain concessions in the form of the national zoning. The Soviet government began to consider the earmarking of national village and districts councils as a factor capable of simultaneously not only slightly improving the socio-economic situation and to some extent meeting national and cultural needs of the population, but speeding up the attraction of those who are averse to the socialist building. German regions became the first ones to be created in Ukraine during the national zoning. However, the potential of national areas turned out to be of a low effectiveness due to national zoning and stretched in time (from 1923 to 1939) reform of the pre-revolutionary administrative-territorial division. The peculiarity of the situation in the national areas consisted in the fact that with the inclusion of foreign village and town councils to their composition, the full range of activities associated with the introduction of indigenization was necessary to exercise with respect to them. Extremely important was the problem of linguistic personnel training, which required knowledge of the language of the majority population of the district at the district level, the Ukrainian language for the relations with the higher bodies, and language of some ethnic group with the inclusion of the foreign administrative and territorial units to the district. Chronic administrative-territorial reorganizations were carried out not so much on the basis of scientific conclusions, but on the prevailing political considerations of public institutions at various levels. A frequent lack of thought and calculations of far-reaching consequences of the administrative-territorial division as a whole and particularly of the national zoning has contributed to the confusion in the management system and has not helped, despite the authorities hopes, to reduce costs spent on the Soviet apparatus. Conducting administrative-territorial reforms in 1930 and 1932 had disorganizing consequences for the whole administrative system of Ukraine that evolved through trial and mistakes, and its imperfections had led to further territorial changes in the republic. Administrative-territorial changes of the end of the 1920s and the 1930s, under the conditions of the curtailment of the NEP, the implementation of complete collectivization and the loss of economic identity by national districts, initiated the elimination of "undesirable" for the government districts while simultaneously forming new districts with the national status. The final abolishment of indigenization policy in the late 1930s had resulted in the elimination of all national regions of Ukraine as administrative and territorial units. The national regions of Ukraine as administrative and territorial units proved to be inefficient and were abolished in the late 1930s. It is not surprising that the initial positive assessment of the practice of the national administrative and territorial units' creation by the Soviet state structures had changed into the negative attitude to the very fact of their existence, which had gradually resulted in the ultimate elimination of these entities in the end of the 1930s. ; Определяется роль национального районирования в системе административно-территориального реформирования в советской Украине 20-30 гг. ХХ в., его место и степень эффективности в процессе государственного строительства в республике. Показано, что начатые советской властью многочисленные административно-территориальные изменения в Украине, осуществляемые на базе отмены частной собственности вкупе с ярой антирелигиозностью, были направлены на ликвидацию дореволюионного административно-территориального деления и проводились не на основе научных обоснований, а вследствие преобладающих политических соображений государственных учреждений разного уровня. ; Визначається роль національного районування в системі адміністративно-територіального реформування в радянській Україні 20-30 рр. ХХ ст., його місце та ступінь ефективності в процесі державотворення в республіці. Показано, що започатковані радянською владою численні адміністративно-територіальні перетворення в Україні, здійснювані на засадах скасування приватної власності укупі із затятою антирелігійністю, були спрямовані на ліквідацію дореволюційного адміністративно-територіального поділу і провадилися не на підставі наукових обґрунтовань, а внаслідок превалюючих політичних міркувань державних установ різного рівня.

Messe agus Pangur Bán, cechtar nathar fria shaindán: bíth a menmasam fri seilgg, mu menma céin im shaincheirdd. I and Pangur Bán, my cat 'Tis a like task we are at; Hunting mice is his delight Hunting words I sit all night. The poem Pangur Bán [1] was written by an unknown Irish monk in the Benedictine Abbey of Reichenau, in southern Germany in the ninth century. The Abbey, founded in 724 by Saint Pirim, was a centre of learning in Europe for many centuries, reaching its apex under Abbot Berno of Reichenau (1008–48). The Christian church was the sole focus of education in the first millennium, with centres of learning developing around monasteries (e.g. Cluain Mhic Nóis in 546 [2]). The Christian religion, based on Hebrew and Greek documents translated into Latin, required scholarship; at the very least, clergy had to be able to read and write Latin. This was less a problem in Italy, France and other countries with a Latin derived language, but was quite challenging for others. The medieval monastic school was quite diverse, with scholars from all over Europe attending the most prestigious. This was greatly facilitated by the universal use of Latin as a lingua franca. Both monasteries and convents had schools, allowing women an equal, albeit separate, scholarly status. The German Benedictine Abbess, Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 17 September 1179), is one such example, writing sublime hymns, and producing treatises on such diverse topics as theology, medicine and botany. Hildegard's family were minor nobility, one flaw of the medieval system from the modern point-of-view; men and women could be educated, but only if they were wealthy. [3] Some of these monastic schools, such as Paris (1150), developed into universities in the late middle ages, but most of Europe's early universities were secular counterparts to the guild system of craft education (e.g. Bologna (1088) and Oxford (1167)). They were seen as a separate community of teachers and students, universitas magistrorum et scholarium, from which is derived the English word university. Unfortunately, these secular universities were men only, and would remain so until the late 19th century. The University of Bologna made its reputation from the teaching of Roman law; all early universities concentrated on a classical education, studying the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and the literature of Euripedes and Virgil. Even into the 20th Century, many traditional universities prided themselves on the classics, and either ignored or downplayed newer disciplines, especially the sciences. One consequence of this in the late 19th Century was the development of dedicated technical colleges outside the traditional university system. In France, in 1794, the École polytechnique was founded by Monge to achieve the highest standards in Science and Engineering. In Dublin, a similar institution, the Royal College of Science, was established in 1867. In 1926 it was absorbed by University College Dublin (UCD), becoming the faculty of Science and Engineering. Over the past millennium, most third level education has been rooted in the humanities, specifically in the Greco-Roman tradition. Engineering education was confined to the military and to craft guilds. The Romans pioneered the military use of engineering, with cohorts of engineers to build roads and bridges to move the legions around quickly, and weapons engineers to build siege machines. In medieval times, craft guilds controlled most trades, with young men who wished to become craftsmen having to pay to do an apprenticeship, followed by a number of years as journeymen. To join the guild, the journeyman had to pay a sum of money to the guild, and then produce a masterpiece, before the guild's master craftsmen elected them as full members. Henry Ford once said, 'History is bunk', going on to muse that it really does not matter how many times the Ancient Greeks flew kites. [4] Does it matter what type of education Europe has had over the past millennium? What relevance does it have today that most of that education was rooted in the classics? Why should we care that Engineering developed outside the mainstream universities? It matters because what happened in the past conditions the present. In particular, the fact that women's education was confined to the humanities matters today, because there is no tradition of women engineers. Men are part of a tradition going back to the ingenious (Latin ingeniator, from which the word engineer derives) men who built roads, bridges and siege machines for the Roman legions; women are not. Even when engineering became a part of university life, it retained much of its origins 44th SEFI Conference, 12-15 September 2016, Tampere, Finland in the apprentice system of guild education, specifically time in the workshop. Today, there are many engineering courses where one does not have to spend hours in workshops learning how to use a lathe, or weld mild steel, but the perception is otherwise. Oner Yurtseven of Purdue [5] makes this point in his 2002 paper, How Does the Image of Engineering Affect Student Recruitment and Retention? A Perspective from the USA: "As engineers, we see ourselves as bright, articulate, honest, responsible, conscientious and capable. There will not be any argument against this from an engineer of course. The US public version of our image as engineers is not, however, this complimentary. We are seen as predominantly male, too bright for our own good, honest to a fault, non communicative, dull, and loners." A second, vital point is relevant from the Middle Ages in Europe: the concentration of education amongst a tiny, clerical elite was too restrictive, and Europe stagnated for a thousand years, until the stimulus of the Renaissance motivated 14th Century Italy. We cannot afford stagnation today simply because our Engineering education is too narrow and confined, in the main, to only section of society.

Ukrainian cinema researchers did not explore life, creation and cinema pedagogical activity of the greatestUkrainian and Russian writer, historian, director of cinema and theater, military and public figure, General-major, Laureateof the State Premium of the USSR (1947), Hero of Soviet Union Petro P. Vershigora (3.05.1905, v. Severinovka,Rybnickiy region, Moldova – 27.03.1963, Moscow), which was reputed not only the literary and CRT works, by pedagogicalactivity but also personal bravery and talent for organization during the Great Domestic war-time.In 1927–1929 years Petro Vershigora studied on the director faculty of the Odessa Musically-Dramatic Institutethe named of Beethoven. After graduation of it Vershigora worked as actor, assistant of director in the Odessa Theater ofRevolution.1930 P. Vershigora studied at the Kiev State Institute of Cinematography to the common group of scenario writersand film directors. During winter vacations (January-February of 1931) Peter Vershigora drive with so-called "culturetrain" on Donbas in town Stalin (now Donetsk), where future film director, operators and scenario writers, as reported inthe student newspaper "Shots", organized the scenario club, three photo clubs, produced three photo newspapers inwhich showed life and way of life of Donbas workers and Kiev "culture train".As a result of one situation P. Vershigora was forced to abandon studies and begin to work as director and actorin created All-Donbas Theater of Working Young People of town Stalin.From 1932 to 1934 years Petro Vershigora worked in Theater of Working young People of Izhevsk and Gor'kiy(now Novgorod). Vershigora carried out the row of theatrical performances among which "Heaved up virgin soil" of M.Sholokhov, "Platon Krechyt" of O. Korniychuk, "Bunit – fasten!" Bondarovskiy etc.Knowledge's are purchased Peter Vershigora generously passed to the young artists. For example, in 1934–1935 teaching lectures and conducted the course of direction on the Moldavian faculty of Odessa Theatrical Collage.Together with students and like-minded persons Peter Vershigora organized the first Moldavian Theater of "Kostek". Infuture students of P.P. Vershigora became the famous Moldavian artists.In 1936 year Vershigora begin to study at Film director's Academy of High State Institute of Cinematography inMoscow. In Academy he listened the lectures of S.M. Eyzenshteyn, passed practice on the Odessa film studios.After that Vershigora moved to Kiev film studio, where became student of O. Dovzhenko for the Film directorylaboratory at the Kyiv film studios. Peter Vershigora on advice a teacher decided not to wait the scenario of feature filmwhich would become him by diploma work, but made a few scientifically-artistic and documentary movies: "Collectivefarm the named of Stalin", "Beet", "Complex mechanization", "Soviet Moldavia".Under the direction of O.P. Dovzhenko Vershigora wrote a script feature films for an own start, which was notsaved in the war-time.Soon Petro Vershigora, as well as his friends-directors on the Kiev film studio Viktor Ivanov, Тimofiy Levchuk,Mikhylo Vinyarskiy, Grigoriy Lipshic' et al, went a volunteer in the rows of the Red Army, where for short space a waypassed from the commander of platoon to the commander of battalion.Petro Vershigora militated bravely, was injured, and after treatment in a hospital headed the brigade of the cinemaof photo of correspondents. From April to June, 1942 studied on the courses of secret service agents at the Reconnaissancedepartment of Bryansk front after successful completion of which was neglected in a rear to Germans fororganization of reconnaissance work.In September in 1942 P. Vershigora was directed to partisan connection of Sydor Kovpak in which was a secondin a command from secret service. After the recall of S.A. Kovpak on "large earth", P.P. Vershigora led the FirstUkrainian partisan division the name of Sydor Kovpak, that under his wire carried out two raids – to Poland and districtsof Western Byelorussia (Bilovez'ka dense Forest, Grodno) – so-called "Nemanskiy raid".Except for the rank of Hero Soviet Union P.P. Vershigora was the recipient of an award many battle rewardsamong which: two order of Lenin, Red Flag, "Bogdan Khmel'nickiy" of a 1 degree, by the medal "Partisan of Domesticwar of a 1 degree" and others like that.After war of P.P. Vershigora tried to return to the cinema: on his scenario of Boris Dmokhovskiy in 1947 beganto make the movie "People with a clean conscience". However, unfortunately, shooting were shut-down. In the next attemptsof screen version Vershigora allowed to be only a consultant.To write a script movie for Vershigora was not a problem, Vershigora wrote the story of "Checoltan", a few storiesand play about Khotinsk of revolt "Oak Kotovskiy".The attempts of rising of other scenarios of Vershigora made off a failure. Most fruitful was literary activity ofP.P. Vershigora: he is an author of documentarily fiction works about partisans: "People with a clean conscience" (1946;State Premium of the USSR, 1947), "Karpatskiy raid" (1950), "Raid on Sun and Visla" (1959). "Ivan-hero" published collectionof stories in 1960, novel "House is native" (1962). Author of book from history of partisan movement "Military creationof folk the masses" (1961), coauthor of work the "Partisan raids" (1962). P.P. Vershigora combined writer, public andpedagogical activity – teaching in Academy of General Staff of the USSR. ; В этой статье исследовано жизнь, творчество и педагогическую деятельность величайшего украинского и русского писателя, историка, режиссера кино и театра, военного и общественного деятеля, генерала-майора, лауреата Государственной премии СССР, Героя Советского Союза Петра Петровича Вершигори. ; У цій статті досліджено життя, творчість і педагогічну діяльність видатного українського і російського письменника, історика, режисера кіно і театру, військового і громадського діяча, генерала-майора, лауреата Державної премії СРСР, Героя Радянського Союзу Петра Петровича Вершигори.

The main hypothesis of this research is that civil society's participation is able to improve the planning results in the Chinese city of Qingdao in the contemporary age. Qingdao is a young city developed from a German colony in eastern China. Apart from the powers of the government and the market, the 'third power', including mainly the power of volunteer citizens and the citizens' organisations, also positively promoted the spatial development in Qingdao's history. Since 1978's reform, Qingdao's great progress in urban housing, historic preservation, public space and urban traffic results mainly from the increasing strength of both the government and the market, while the government has always been the dominant promoter for urban construction. The actual planning mechanism – the government formulates 'what to do' itself and decides 'how to do it' with the market – has much limit in reacting to the rapidly changing situation, serving diversified social interests, and raising sufficient funds for the city's urgent demands in Qingdao. Searching for new development strategies based on the understanding of civil society in the Chinese context can provide a promising perspective on the urban studies of Qingdao. Chinese civil society can be understood as the intermediate sphere of individuals, families, citizen's organisations, social movements, public communication, and of the non-governmental body's non-for-profit involvement for the provision of public services between the state and the market. China has its own cultural tradition of civil society, and the modern civil society in China is showing its great potential in improving social integration and urban life. The Chinese government has started to advocate for civil society's participation in urban construction, and encouraging the 'bottom-up' mechanism in the planning-related issues through political statements and legislative approaches since the last two decades. The existing planning practice in China is able to demonstrate that civil society's participation helps improve the quality of Chinese urban planning realistically under present conditions, and that moderation of planning experts and the push of the authority are the key factors for successfully integrating the strength of civil society in planning. However, the power of civil society is not yet sufficiently discovered in Qingdao's planning. For better planning results, the city of Qingdao needs more initiatives to mobilize civil society in the planning practice, as well as more support to enrich the related studies. This thesis recommends that Qingdao establishes the 'Foundation for Collaborative Urban Solutions' through the joint efforts of the authority and civil initiatives, which aims at moderating and facilitating the strength of civil society. The suggested pilot projects include: a. The Community-based Housing Workshop for regenerating the living environment of the run-down communities, where the residents are willing to collaborate with the foundation with own efforts. b. The Heritage Preservation Workshop for suggesting an efficient supervision mechanism involving civil society which protects the historic heritage from being destroyed in the urban construction. c. The Public Space Forum for improving accessibility, quantity and ecologic function in the development of Qingdao's urban public space with the knowledge and creativity of both the government and the citizens. d. The Mass Transport Forum for a realistic strategy for funding the rail-based traffic system in Qingdao through enabling the civil society - especially the individual citizens and their households to invest. The 'Foundation of Collaborative Urban Solutions' is able to improve Qingdao's planning to cope with the urban problems the city are facing in its contemporary development, as well as to provide valuable reference for the further research of civil society's participation in Chinese urban planning. ; Die Haupthypothese dieser Arbeit ist, dass durch Beteiligung der Zivilgesellschaft am Planungsprozess die Planungsergebnisse in der chinesischen Stadt Qingdao in der gegenwärtigen Zeit verbessert werden können. Durch das schnelle Wachstum vom kleinen Fischerdorf zu modernen Metropole, sind die stadtplanerischen Erfahrungen in Qingdao stark an die Adaption moderner Planungsideen einerseits und an die dominierende städtische Planungsbehörde andererseits geknüpft. Abgesehen vom Einfluss der Zentralmacht trug auch die nicht-staatliche Seite, dazu zählen die Bürgerbewegungen und die Wirtschaftsverbände, zur räumlichen Entwicklung Qingdaos bei. Seit der 'Reform 1978' hat Qingdao große Fortschritte beim städtischen Wohnungswesen, beim Denkmalschutz, beim öffentlichen Raum und städtischen Verkehr gemacht. Nicht nur der Umfang, sondern auch die Qualität des städtischen Raumes hat sich erheblich verbessert. Die beachtlichen Leistungen sind das Ergebnis zunehmender gemeinsamer Anstrengungen der Regierung und des Marktes, wenngleich die staatliche Seite immer die treibende Kraft der städtebaulichen Entwicklung war. Der gegenwärtige Planungsvollzug – bei dem die Regierung selbst vorgibt 'was zu tun ist' und gemeinsam mit dem Markt entscheidet 'wie dies zu tun ist' – enge Grenzen besitzt, wenn es gilt, auf schnell verändernde Situationen zu reagieren, unterschiedliche soziale Interessen zu bedienen oder ausreichend finanzielle Mittel für dringende städtische Probleme zur Verfügung zu stellen. Die Suche nach neuen Entwicklungsstrategien, die auf einem Verständnis der Zivilgesellschaft im Kontext Chinas basieren, kann eine aussichtsreiche Perspektive für stadtplanerische Untersuchungen Qingdaos bieten. Im einem Verständnis des sozialen Wandels in China, definiert sich die Zivilgesellschaft aus einem Sphäre von Individuen, Familien, Bürgerorganisationen, sozialen Bewegungen, öffentlichen Kommunikation heraus und aus den nichtstaatlichen Institutionen des 'non-for-profit Involvements' zur Einrichtung öffentlicher Dienstleistungen zwischen Staat und Markt. Es gibt ausreichend Beweise dafür, das China in seiner eigenen Kultur über viele Quellen einer Zivilgesellschaft verfügt. Die vorhandene stadtplanerische Praxis in China kann auf ihre Weise zeigen, das Bürgerbeteiligung dabei hilft, die Qualität der Stadtplanung unter gegebenen Bedingungen in realistischer Weise zu verbessern. Außerdem sind Moderation im Planungsprozess und der Antrieb durch die Regierung, zwei wichtige Schlüsselfaktoren, zur erfolgreichen Einbindung des Einflusses bürgerlicher Beteiligung im Planungsprozess. Allerdings wurde die Bedeutung der zivilgesellschaft für die Stadtplanung Qingdaos bisher noch nicht ausreichend untersucht. Um bessere Ergebnisse im Planungsprozess zu erzielen, braucht die Stadt Qingdao mehr Initiativen, die die Gesellschaft im Planungsprozess mobilisieren und auch mehr Unterstützung dabei, ähnliche Studien mit Erkenntnissen anzureichern. Diese These befürwortet, dass Qingdao eine "Foundation for Collaborative Urban Solutions" für gemeinsame Bemühungen der Regierung und bürgerlicher Initiativen einrichten sollte, die auf einen erleichterten und angemessenen Einfluss der Zivilgesellschaft in Planungen zielt. Die vorgeschlagenen Pilotprojekte beinhalten. a. Ein 'Community-based Housing Workshop' um das Lebensumfeld in den heruntergekommenen Gemeinden zu regenerieren, wo ortsansässige Willens sind, durch eigene Anstrengungen mit der Stiftung zusammenzuarbeiten. b. Den 'Heritage Preservation Workshop' um einen effizienten Supervisionsprozess unter Einbeziehung der Zivilgesellschaft anzuregen, der das historische Erbe vor Zerstörung im städtischen Aufbau beschützt. c. Ein 'Public Space Forum' um Zugänglichkeit, Ausmaß und ökologische Funktion bei der Entwicklung des öffentlichen Raumes in Qingdao zu verbessern, mit dem Wissen und der Kreativität sowohl der Regierung als auch der Bürger. d. Das 'Mass Transport Forum' für eine realistische Strategie zur Förderung eines schienenbasierten Verkehrssystems in Qingdao, die der Gesellschaft, speziell auch dem einzelnen Bürger ermöglichen soll sich zu beteiligen. Einer 'Foundation of Collaborative Urban Solutions' ist es möglich, Qingdaos Planungen zu unterstützen und die städtebaulichen Schwierigkeiten - denen die Stadt in der gegenwärtigen Entwicklung gegenübersteht - zu bewältigen. Ebenso ist sie fähig, wertvolle Hinweise für weitergehende Untersuchungen, zu Bürgerbeteiligung in der Stadtplanung Chinas, zu liefern.

The main hypothesis of this research is that civil society's participation is able to improve the planning results in the Chinese city of Qingdao in the contemporary age. Qingdao is a young city developed from a German colony in eastern China. Apart from the powers of the government and the market, the 'third power', including mainly the power of volunteer citizens and the citizens' organisations, also positively promoted the spatial development in Qingdao's history. Since 1978's reform, Qingdao's great progress in urban housing, historic preservation, public space and urban traffic results mainly from the increasing strength of both the government and the market, while the government has always been the dominant promoter for urban construction. The actual planning mechanism – the government formulates 'what to do' itself and decides 'how to do it' with the market – has much limit in reacting to the rapidly changing situation, serving diversified social interests, and raising sufficient funds for the city's urgent demands in Qingdao. Searching for new development strategies based on the understanding of civil society in the Chinese context can provide a promising perspective on the urban studies of Qingdao. Chinese civil society can be understood as the intermediate sphere of individuals, families, citizen's organisations, social movements, public communication, and of the non-governmental body's non-for-profit involvement for the provision of public services between the state and the market. China has its own cultural tradition of civil society, and the modern civil society in China is showing its great potential in improving social integration and urban life. The Chinese government has started to advocate for civil society's participation in urban construction, and encouraging the 'bottom-up' mechanism in the planning-related issues through political statements and legislative approaches since the last two decades. The existing planning practice in China is able to demonstrate that civil society's participation helps improve the quality of Chinese urban planning realistically under present conditions, and that moderation of planning experts and the push of the authority are the key factors for successfully integrating the strength of civil society in planning. However, the power of civil society is not yet sufficiently discovered in Qingdao's planning. For better planning results, the city of Qingdao needs more initiatives to mobilize civil society in the planning practice, as well as more support to enrich the related studies. This thesis recommends that Qingdao establishes the 'Foundation for Collaborative Urban Solutions' through the joint efforts of the authority and civil initiatives, which aims at moderating and facilitating the strength of civil society. The suggested pilot projects include: a. The Community-based Housing Workshop for regenerating the living environment of the run-down communities, where the residents are willing to collaborate with the foundation with own efforts. b. The Heritage Preservation Workshop for suggesting an efficient supervision mechanism involving civil society which protects the historic heritage from being destroyed in the urban construction. c. The Public Space Forum for improving accessibility, quantity and ecologic function in the development of Qingdao's urban public space with the knowledge and creativity of both the government and the citizens. d. The Mass Transport Forum for a realistic strategy for funding the rail-based traffic system in Qingdao through enabling the civil society - especially the individual citizens and their households to invest. The 'Foundation of Collaborative Urban Solutions' is able to improve Qingdao's planning to cope with the urban problems the city are facing in its contemporary development, as well as to provide valuable reference for the further research of civil society's participation in Chinese urban planning. ; Die Haupthypothese dieser Arbeit ist, dass durch Beteiligung der Zivilgesellschaft am Planungsprozess die Planungsergebnisse in der chinesischen Stadt Qingdao in der gegenwärtigen Zeit verbessert werden können. Durch das schnelle Wachstum vom kleinen Fischerdorf zu modernen Metropole, sind die stadtplanerischen Erfahrungen in Qingdao stark an die Adaption moderner Planungsideen einerseits und an die dominierende städtische Planungsbehörde andererseits geknüpft. Abgesehen vom Einfluss der Zentralmacht trug auch die nicht-staatliche Seite, dazu zählen die Bürgerbewegungen und die Wirtschaftsverbände, zur räumlichen Entwicklung Qingdaos bei. Seit der 'Reform 1978' hat Qingdao große Fortschritte beim städtischen Wohnungswesen, beim Denkmalschutz, beim öffentlichen Raum und städtischen Verkehr gemacht. Nicht nur der Umfang, sondern auch die Qualität des städtischen Raumes hat sich erheblich verbessert. Die beachtlichen Leistungen sind das Ergebnis zunehmender gemeinsamer Anstrengungen der Regierung und des Marktes, wenngleich die staatliche Seite immer die treibende Kraft der städtebaulichen Entwicklung war. Der gegenwärtige Planungsvollzug – bei dem die Regierung selbst vorgibt 'was zu tun ist' und gemeinsam mit dem Markt entscheidet 'wie dies zu tun ist' – enge Grenzen besitzt, wenn es gilt, auf schnell verändernde Situationen zu reagieren, unterschiedliche soziale Interessen zu bedienen oder ausreichend finanzielle Mittel für dringende städtische Probleme zur Verfügung zu stellen. Die Suche nach neuen Entwicklungsstrategien, die auf einem Verständnis der Zivilgesellschaft im Kontext Chinas basieren, kann eine aussichtsreiche Perspektive für stadtplanerische Untersuchungen Qingdaos bieten. Im einem Verständnis des sozialen Wandels in China, definiert sich die Zivilgesellschaft aus einem Sphäre von Individuen, Familien, Bürgerorganisationen, sozialen Bewegungen, öffentlichen Kommunikation heraus und aus den nichtstaatlichen Institutionen des 'non-for-profit Involvements' zur Einrichtung öffentlicher Dienstleistungen zwischen Staat und Markt. Es gibt ausreichend Beweise dafür, das China in seiner eigenen Kultur über viele Quellen einer Zivilgesellschaft verfügt. Die vorhandene stadtplanerische Praxis in China kann auf ihre Weise zeigen, das Bürgerbeteiligung dabei hilft, die Qualität der Stadtplanung unter gegebenen Bedingungen in realistischer Weise zu verbessern. Außerdem sind Moderation im Planungsprozess und der Antrieb durch die Regierung, zwei wichtige Schlüsselfaktoren, zur erfolgreichen Einbindung des Einflusses bürgerlicher Beteiligung im Planungsprozess. Allerdings wurde die Bedeutung der zivilgesellschaft für die Stadtplanung Qingdaos bisher noch nicht ausreichend untersucht. Um bessere Ergebnisse im Planungsprozess zu erzielen, braucht die Stadt Qingdao mehr Initiativen, die die Gesellschaft im Planungsprozess mobilisieren und auch mehr Unterstützung dabei, ähnliche Studien mit Erkenntnissen anzureichern. Diese These befürwortet, dass Qingdao eine "Foundation for Collaborative Urban Solutions" für gemeinsame Bemühungen der Regierung und bürgerlicher Initiativen einrichten sollte, die auf einen erleichterten und angemessenen Einfluss der Zivilgesellschaft in Planungen zielt. Die vorgeschlagenen Pilotprojekte beinhalten. a. Ein 'Community-based Housing Workshop' um das Lebensumfeld in den heruntergekommenen Gemeinden zu regenerieren, wo ortsansässige Willens sind, durch eigene Anstrengungen mit der Stiftung zusammenzuarbeiten. b. Den 'Heritage Preservation Workshop' um einen effizienten Supervisionsprozess unter Einbeziehung der Zivilgesellschaft anzuregen, der das historische Erbe vor Zerstörung im städtischen Aufbau beschützt. c. Ein 'Public Space Forum' um Zugänglichkeit, Ausmaß und ökologische Funktion bei der Entwicklung des öffentlichen Raumes in Qingdao zu verbessern, mit dem Wissen und der Kreativität sowohl der Regierung als auch der Bürger. d. Das 'Mass Transport Forum' für eine realistische Strategie zur Förderung eines schienenbasierten Verkehrssystems in Qingdao, die der Gesellschaft, speziell auch dem einzelnen Bürger ermöglichen soll sich zu beteiligen. Einer 'Foundation of Collaborative Urban Solutions' ist es möglich, Qingdaos Planungen zu unterstützen und die städtebaulichen Schwierigkeiten - denen die Stadt in der gegenwärtigen Entwicklung gegenübersteht - zu bewältigen. Ebenso ist sie fähig, wertvolle Hinweise für weitergehende Untersuchungen, zu Bürgerbeteiligung in der Stadtplanung Chinas, zu liefern.

Announcement by Alden Partridge of the opening of the National Scientific and Military College, at Brandywine Springs, Delaware. Includes a general description of the system of education and course of study offered at the school. ; THE NATIONAL SCIENTIFIC AND MILITARY COLLEGE, At the Brandywine Springs, Delaware. THE public is respectfully informed, that the above Institution was opened for the reception of Students, on the 16th of May, 1853, under the personal superintendence of Capt. ALDEN PARTRIDGE, assisted by an able corps of In-structors. The instruction embraces a complete course of Literary, Scientific and Military Education. The Mathe-matics, both theoretical and practical, Civil and Military Engineering, Physical Philosophy, Astronomy, Geography, History, Mental and Moral Philosophy, the Laws of Nations, the Science of Government, the Constitution of the United States, Political Economy, Agriculture, Rhetoric, Sound Literature, the several branches of Military Science, &c., &c., constitute prominent branches of Instruction. The Military Exercises and Duties are so arranged as not to occupy any of the time that would otherwise be de-voted to study; they will be attended to at those hours of the day which are generally passed by students in idleness, or devoted to useless amusements, for which they are made a pleasing and healthful substitute. Practical scientifical operations will be frequently attended to, which conduce equally to health and improvement. The charge for Board, Tuition, Room-rent, Washing, Lights and Fuel, will be 41 dollars per quarter of 11 weeks; or 164 dollars for the Collegiate year of 44 weeks. The French, Spanish, German, and Italian Languages, and also Music and Fencing, are extra branches; for each of which, those who attend to them will be charged Five Dollars per quarter. Instruction in writing will be charged $1,25 for 14 Lessons. The Latin and Greek Languages will be taught to those who may wish to study them. The qualifications for admission are a good moral character; to write a fair, legible hand; a good knowledge of the ground Rules of Arithmetic; and to read and spell the English Language correctly. It is believed that eleven years is as young as a pupil can enter the Institution advantageously. The Cadets will be furnished with Clothing, Books, and every thing else necessary for their comfort and improvement, at the Institution, at established and reasonable prices. No debts must be contracted without the written permission of the Superinten-dent ; and parents and guardians are required not to pay any bills, unless sanctioned by him. No money must be furnished any Cadet, except by the Superintendent, or his written order. The Superintendent will take charge of all the funds of the Cadets, and see that they are furnished with every thing. Each Cadet is required to have a Permit Book, in which all his expenses must be entered. Each Cadet, whose parents or guardian, reside more than 150 miles from the Institution, will be required to.deposit with the Superintendent 125 dollars ; and an additional 125 dol-lars at the end of 22 weeks. At the end of the Collegiate year, the parent or guardian will be presented with an ac-curate statement of his son's or ward's expenses, and credit for monies received, and the balance, whether in favor or against the Cadet, will be transferred to the following account. Those Cadets, who do not reside more than 150 miles from the Institution, must deposit with the Superintendent when they enter, 75 dollars ; after which, their ac-counts will be made out at the beginning of each quarter, and the balance transferred as above. The Cadets will wear the same uniform as was worn at Middletown. Strict economy will be required, and no unnecessary expendi-tures allowed. Great attention will be given to the manners and morals of the Students, and to the developement of those noble, manly and patriotic sentiments that ought to characterize every American citizen. This system of Edu-cation prepares young men equally well for public or private, civil or military life, and its superiority over every other system has been established by thirty-three years of experience. Those who do not wish to complete the full course, can attend to the branches which will best qualify them for such future pursuits as they contemplate. Each one will be allowed to progress as rapidly as he can in his studies, consistently with a thorough understanding of the same. Candidates for admission are admitted at any time and charged their expenses from the time of joining. The 33d ANNIVERSARY OF THE SYSTEM will be celebrated at the Institution, on the 6th of Sept., 1853, at which all are invited to attend. The LOCATION of the Institution is central from north to south, and is proverbially healthy and pleasant. The climate is mild. It is 32 miles from Philadelphia, 5 from Wilmington, and 65 from Baltimore, and in the vicinity of the Philadelphia and Baltimore Railroad—the Depot at Newport being two miles and a half distant, with a ready con-veyance. Being retired from the vicinity of any city or large village, it is well adapted to study, and the preservation of the morals of the Cadets. The quarters are of stone, in good repair, and will accommodate 250 Cadets. There are all the necessary out buildings, a Medicinal Spring, &c., and 60 acres of land, well adapted to Gardening, Agri-culture, &c. A. PARTRIDGE, Superintendent, BRANDYWINE SPRINGS, JUNE 1, 1853

Der Beitrag wendet sich der politischen Unzufriedenheit in den Neuen Bundesländern zu. Die Ostdeutschen beklagen einerseits, dass zu viele "Westeliten" in den Osten gekommen sind, andererseits aber wird geklagt, dass die alten "Osteliten" noch in Machtpositionen sind. Es zeigt sich, dass nach der "Wende" viele hohe Positionen von "Westlern" besetzt wurden, wodurch westdeutsche Politiker der zweiten Reihe eine Chance bekamen. Auf unteren Verwaltungsebenen aber konnten sich viele "alte Kader" behaupten. Die Entwicklung der neuen Bundesländer unterschied sich deutlich von der in den anderen osteuropäischen Reformstaaten, da die Ostdeutschen an das bundesrepublikanische System "andocken" konnten. Der Artikel erläutert, dass es im Verlauf der Jahrzehnte zu abgeschlossenen elitären Klassen in der DDR kam, die häufig ihren eigenen Nachwuchs nachzogen und Machtpositionen gegen die "Arbeiterklasse" abschotteten. Auch Frauen wurden aus Machtpositionen üblicherweise ferngehalten: Die sozialistische Ideologie wurde zunehmend unwichtig, die Binnendifferenzierung in der DDR-Gesellschaft ("Ungleichheit") nahm hingegen zu. Die Entwicklung fachlicher Expertise auf mittleren oder unteren Ebenen konnte nun den Erhalt einer Position rechtfertigen. Auf höherer Ebene blieb aber "politische Loyalität" das Entscheidende. Es wird ausgeführt, dass politische Loyalität in unterschiedlichen Feldern und Positionen unterschiedlich bedeutsam war. Beim Militär oder im "Außenhandel" war sie zum Beispiel wichtiger als im "Binnenhandel". Nach der "Wende" musste auf nachgeordneten politischen Machtpositionen häufig auf die "alten Kader" zurückgegriffen werden, da sie Erfahrung hatten. Bürgerrechtler hingegen hatten keine Chance. Der Artikel erläutert die Struktur der "Eliten" in den Neuen Bundesländern und geht auf Ähnlichkeiten in Ost und West ein. In beiden deutschen Staaten gab es auf der Verwaltungsebene eine Mischung von politischer Loyalität und fachlicher Expertise, die zur Erlangung von Führungspositionen beitragen konnte. Abschließend wird noch kurz auf ein neues ostdeutsches Selbstbewusstsein (den "Ostimismus") eingegangen. (ICB)

Dottorato di ricerca in Storia e cultura del viaggio e dell'odeporica in età moderna ; Expedition into Sicily di Richard Payne Knight, il testo argomento della presente tesi di dottorato, è il resoconto del viaggio svolto in Sicilia, sul finire del diciottesimo secolo, da un ricco inglese accompagnato da due altrettanto benestanti acquarellisti: il noto paesaggista tedesco Philipp Hackert e il ricco dilettante inglese Charles Gore. Creduto perso per più di due secoli, il manoscritto di Knight fu ritrovato soltanto nel 1980 e pubblicato nella sua interezza per la prima volta nel 1986. Scopo del mio lavoro di tesi è far conoscere quest'opera - a lungo considerata come 'minore' - al pubblico italiano attraverso una traduzione critica e metterne in luce l'originalità così come la coerenza interna. Rifacendomi agli studi di chi mi ha preceduto, ho infatti cercato di dimostrare la sostanziale unitarietà del testo, insieme al fatto che tale unitarietà avesse lo scopo di veicolare un messaggio ben preciso: la libertà è condizione necessaria per l'eccellenza umana. Si tratta di un messaggio di chiara matrice illuminista: il giovane Knight – illuminista convinto – legge il suo viaggio attraverso la Sicilia classica come un ritorno alle origini della cultura occidentale, un viaggio a ritroso nel tempo fino all'ideale Winkelmaniano di nobile semplicità e quieta grandezza. Il suo ritorno alle origini è però ostacolato dalla realtà della Sicilia del diciottesimo secolo. L'esperienza del presente va insinuandosi progressivamente nella sua concezione di un passato ideale, imponendo allo sguardo attento di Knight una realtà fatta d'ignoranza e miseria. Queste condizioni sono state portate dall'azione di una classe dirigente e di un clero troppo potenti e corrotti e quindi, in ultima analisi, dalla mancanza di libertà. Nei passaggi della Expedition che descrivono le sue esperienze di viaggio (che caratterizzano almeno due terzi del testo), Knight analizza questa dicotomia tra passato e presente e infine, nella parte finale, dà una forma più generale alle sue idee, fino a giungere alla conclusione che la Sicilia moderna potrebbe tornare alla grandezza delle origini soltanto in seguito a un moto rivoluzionario che coinvolgesse l'intera Europa. E' interessante notare come queste riflessioni precedano di pochi anni la Rivoluzione Francese che però, pur avendo alterato profondamente gli equilibri europei, non fu sufficiente per far emergere la Sicilia dalla sua arretratezza. Il primo capitolo della tesi riporta la traduzione integrale in italiano della Expedition into Sicily con testo inglese a fronte. Il secondo capitolo: L'autore, l'argomento e la storia del manoscritto, è suddiviso in due sezioni. La prima sezione [2.1]: Notizie sulla vita e le opere di Richard Payne Knight, si propone di inquadrare la figura dell'autore del diario e fornire una panoramica sulle sue opere, mentre la seconda sezione [2.2]: Il lungo viaggio di un diario di viaggio ricostruisce, sulla base di dati oggettivi e congetture, la genesi e la storia del manoscritto della Expedition. Il terzo capitolo: Il contesto del viaggio di Knight, tratta del contesto socio-culturale in cui si è svolto il viaggio in Sicilia ed è composto da cinque sezioni. La prima sezione [3.1]: Il contesto storico: dall'Inghilterra alla Sicilia, descrive brevemente la situazione storico-politica dell'Europa, dell'Inghilterra, dell'Italia e della Sicilia in pieno periodo di rivoluzione industriale e dopo la Pace di Utrecht. La seconda sezione [3.2]: Il contesto filosofico: l'Illuminismo inglese e il pensiero di Knight, traccia le linee generali dell'Illuminismo europeo, inglese e italiano che influenzarono Knight prima, e durante e dopo il viaggio in Sicilia. La terza sezione [3.3]: Il contesto artistico: alla riscoperta dei classici tra luci ed ombre, fornisce cenni sul contesto culturale e artistico sia europeo che inglese di quegli anni, soffermandosi in modo particolare sugli autori che svilupparono teorie per definire tali stili. La quarta sezione [3.4]: Il problema del tempo nel Settecento, tratta del dibattito scientifico sul significato e sull'età dei fossili collegato, a sua volta, a quello dell'età della Terra. Si tratta del principale dibattito scientifico del Settecento ed influenza l'idea del tempo, della storia e della geologia di Knight. La quinta sezione [3.5]: Il Grand Tour nella seconda metà del Settecento, presenta una panoramica sulle condizioni logistiche del viaggio in Italia e le motivazioni dei Grand Tourists. Il quarto capitolo: L'analisi del testo e il pensiero di Knight, si suddivide in due sezioni. La prima sezione [4.1]: Analisi del testo, ripercorre brevemente le tappe del viaggio di Knight, approfondisce le scene del diario che si rifanno al pittoresco letterario ed ai caratteri sociali dei siciliani e traccia le conclusioni finali del viaggio. La seconda sezione [4.2]: Gli stereotipi sull'Italia, discute la posizione di Knight su alcuni luoghi comuni che i viaggiatori del suo tempo avevano sugli italiani ed, in particolare, sui siciliani. Infine, aspetti di non stretta attinenza con l'argomento del presente lavoro, ma da me trattati in altra sede, hanno incontrato l'interesse e l'epprezzamento della comunità scientifica internazionale. Si tratta, in particolare, dello studio presentato a Malta in occasione del convegno Encountering Malta: British Writers and the Mediterranean 1760-1840 (novembre 2011), in cui ho proposto un'interpretazione originale del pensiero storico di Knight, collegandolo con quello del noto storico inglese suo contemporaneo Edward Gibbon. Il lavoro è stato accettato per la pubblicazione dalla rivista The Wordsworth Circle. ; Expedition into Sicily by Richard Payne Knight, the text subject of this PhD thesis, is the account of the journey through Sicily taken, at the end of the Eighteenth Century, by a rich Englishman, together with two equally wealthy watercolorists: the renowned German landscape painter Philipp Hackert and the English amateur Charles Gore. Believed lost for more than two centuries, Knight's manuscript was rediscovered only in 1980, and published for the first time in English in 1986. Aim of my thesis is to introduce this work to the Italian audience through a critical translation, and to point out its originality as well as its internal coherence. Referring to the studies of those who preceded me, I have tried to demonstrate the substantial unity of the text, along with the fact that this internal consistency was intended to convey a very precise message: freedom is a necessary condition for human excellence. This is a message clearly influenced by Enlightenment culture: the young Knight saw his journey through Sicily as a return to the classical origins of Western culture, a journey back in time to the Winkelmanian ideal of noble simplicity and quiet grandeur. His return to the origins, however, was hampered by the reality of Eighteenth Century Sicily. The experience of the present crept gradually into his conception of an ideal past, imposing to his watchful eye a reality of ignorance and misery. These dramatic conditions had been brought by a corrupted ruling class and a too powerful clergy, in other words by a lack of freedom. In the analysis of the scenes depicting his travel experiences (featuring at least two thirds of the text), Knight examines the dichotomy between past and present, and finally, in the end, he gives a more general form to his ideas, coming to the conclusion that Sicily could return to the greatness of its origins only after a revolutionary movement involving the whole of Europe. It's interesting to note that these reflections preceded of a few years the French Revolution, which, despite having profoundly altered the European balance, was not enough to bring out the Sicily from its backwardness. The first chapter of the thesis contains the complete translation of the Expedition into Sicily in Italian with the English text opposite. The second chapter: The author, the topic, and the history of the manuscript, is divided into two sections. The first section [2.1]: The life and works of Richard Payne Knight, intends to frame the figure of the author of the diary and provide an overview of his works, while the second section [2.2]: The long journey of a travel diary reconstructs, on the basis of objective data and conjectures, the genesis and history of the manuscript of the Expedition. The third chapter: The context of Knight's trip, traces the socio-cultural context of the trip to Sicily and is composed of five sections. The first section [3.1]: The historical context: from England to Sicily, briefly describes the historical and political situation of Europe, England, Italy and Sicily at the height of the Industrial Revolution and after the Peace of Utrecht. The second section [3.2]: The philosophical context: the English Enlightenment and the thought of Knight, traces the general lines of the European, English and Italian Enlightenment that influenced Knight before, during and after his trip to Sicily. The third section [3.3]: The artistic context: the rediscovery of classics between lights and shadows, provides an outline of the cultural and artistic contexts of the second half of the Eighteenth Century, focusing in particular on the authors who developed theories to define concepts like Beauty, Picturesque and Sublime. The fourth section [3.4]: The problem of time in the Eighteenth Century, focuses on the scientific debate on the significance and the age of fossils, which is linked, in turn, to the age of the Earth. This was the main scientific debate of the Eighteenth Century and it influenced Knight's ideas on time, history and geology. The fifth section [3.5]: The Grand Tour in the second half of the of the Eighteenth Century, presents an overview of the logistical conditions of travel in Italy and the motivations of the Grand Tourists. The fourth chapter: The analysis of the text and of Knight's thought, is divided into two sections. The first section [4.1]: Text Analysis, briefly reviews the stages of Knight's journey, discusses the scenes of the Expedition referring to the literary picturesque and to the social characteristics of Sicilians and, finally, draws the final conclusions of the trip. The second section [4.2]: The stereotypes about Italy, discusses Knight's position on some clichés that the travelers of his time had on Italians and, in particular, on Sicilians. Finally, aspects not strictly relevant to the topic of this work, which I have treated elsewhere, have met the interest and appreciation of the international scientific community. This is, in particular, the study presented at the conference in Valletta Encountering Malta: British Writers and the Mediterranean 1760-1840 (November 2011), in which I have proposed an original interpretation of Knight's historical thought, connecting it with that of the English historian Edward Gibbon's. The work has been accepted for publication by the journal The Wordsworth Circle.

The ICT ethical landscape is changing at an astonishing rate, as technologies become more complex, and people choose to interact with them in new and distinct ways, the resultant interactions are more novel and less easy to categorise using traditional ethical frameworks. It is vitally important that the developers of these technologies do not live in an ethical vacuum; that they think about the uses and abuses of their creations, and take some measures to prevent others being harmed by their work. To equip these developers to rise to this challenge and to create a positive future for the use of technology, it important that ethics becomes a central element of the education of designers and developers of ICT systems and applications. To this end a number of third-level institutes across Europe are collaborating to develop educational content that is both based on pedagogically sound principles, and motivated by international exemplars of best practice. One specific development that is being undertaken is the creation of a series of ethics cards, which can be used as standalone educational prop, or as part of a board game to help ICT students learn about ethics. The history of using games for educational purposes is both extensive and diverse; and current literature most often associates it with the term "Gamification", which Deterding et al. (2011) defines as "the use of game design elements in non-game contexts", this can include things such as; using a points systems, awarding badges, or completing levels, as a form of motivation and incentive (Flatla et al., 2011). A meta-analysis of results by Hamari et al. (2014) suggests that gamification can increase motivation, attitude and enjoyment of tasks, however Seaborn and Fels (2015) caution that much of the research that purports to be Gamification-based is in fact not grounded in theory and does not use gamification frameworks in the design of the systems under study. Nonetheless they found that those studies that did adhere to a good theoretical framework did show improvement in motivation, particularly extrinsic motivation. Groh (2012) notes that gamified applications have been developed across different domains such as productivity, finance, health, education, sustainability as well as news and entertainment media. He also notes that the traditional view of gamification excludes the creation of an actual game, which he classifies as a "Serious Game", a term which arose in 2002 with the emergence of the Serious Games Initiative (seriousgames.org). Seaborn and Fels (2015) support this distinction of gamification, which they define it as the "incorporation of game elements into an interactive system without a fully-fledged game as the end product", but highlight that other researchers have a less restrictive perspective, and note that Kapp (2012) and others see serious games as being a subset of gamification rather than being antithetical to it. Although the literature of gamification only commences in the 2000s, the notion of using elements of games for education, and specifically using concrete "playful" objects to illustrate abstract concepts has existed for centuries. In the context of childhood education, in 1693 Enlightenment philosopher, John Locke proposed the idea of Alphabet Blocks, saying "There may be dice and play-things, with the letters on them to teach children the alphabet by playing" in his thesis "Some Thoughts Concerning Education". The work of both French educator Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont in the 1750s and British cartographer John Spilsbury in the 1760s led to the development of the Jigsaw (also called at the time the Dissected Map), created as an educational tool to teach geography to children. German educator Friedrich Froebel who is renowned for creating the first kindergarten, also developed a group of "play materials" including a collection of blocks of solid geometrical shapes, and a set of foldable materials such as paper. These are now called Froebel's Gifts, and their creation in the mid-19th century is recognised as a seminal moment in education, for their use in effectively stimulating all five senses of a wide range of learners. These led to later developments, such as Meccano in 1907, the Erector Set in 1913, and Lego in 1958 (Zuckerman, 2006). In a similar vein, the military have long used serious games to help teach strategy for thousands of years, the most obvious example being chess, originating from at least the 15th century, but there were many predecessors to the game of chess that had a similar purpose, including the Indian game, Chaturanga, from the 6th century, and the Chinese game Yì (or Weiqi) from around 600 BCE (Smith, 2010). Starting in the 17th century there were versions of chess that begin to evolve towards modern strategic wargames, including in Germany: in 1616 Das Schack-oder Koenig-Spiel, in 1644 Neu-erfundenes grosses Koenig-Spiel, in 1780 (featuring a board with 1,666 squares) Koenigspiel, and in 1812 Kriegsspiel (Vego, 2012). These developments eventually led to science fiction author, H.G. Wells writing "Little Wars" a book codifying the rules for miniature wargaming (Wells, 1913). This in turn led to the first commercial board wargames, including early examples such as Tactics in 1954, and Gettysburg in 1958 (Deterding, 2009). The use of games in teaching ethics and ethics-related topics is not new, Brandt and Messeter (2004) created a range of games to help teach students about topics related to design (with a focus on ethical issues), and concluded that the games serve to as a way to structure conversations around the topic, and enhance collaboration. Halskov and Dalsgård (2006), who also created games for design concurred with the previous researchers, and also noted that the games helped with the level of innovation and production of the students. Lucero and Arrasvuori (2010) created a series of cards and scenarios to use them in, and had similar conclusions to the previous research, but also noted that this approach can be used in multiple stages of a design process, including the analysis of requirements stage, the idea development stage, and the evaluation stage. Bochennek, et al. (2007) reviewed a wide range of card games and board games that focus on medical education (with many concerning medical ethics) and concluded that although games are used widely in this discipline, there has nonetheless been insufficient evaluation of the efficacy of these games, with many simply evaluated based on individuals' opinions, rather than measuring their efficacy as teaching tools. They also reflected that some games are more boring than others, and as such this reduces the likelihood of the game being replayed, and reduces the likelihood of knowledge transfer. Lloyd and Van De Poel (2008) created a game to teach ethics where the students were given opportunity to reflect on their own perspectives and experiences, to help structure their own ethical framework. The game also involved aspects of role-play as the researchers indicated that they thought it was important that the students "felt" ethics as well as experienced them. The aim of our work is to develop educational content for teaching ICT content. In this paper we present the development of a series of ethics cards to help ICT students learn about ethical dilemmas. The development of ethics cards has followed a Design Science methodology (Hevner et al., 2004) in creating the board game these guidelines were expanded into a full methodology that is both iterative and cyclical by Peffers et al. (2007). Our project is currently in the third stage of this methodology, called the "Design & Development" stage, but the process is evolving as the cards are being designing to act as independent teaching materials that can but used in the classroom, as well as part of the board game. A sample set of cards are presented below. The cards can be used independently in the classroom, for example, a student can be asked to pick a random Scenario Card, read it out to the class, and have the students do a Think-Pair-Share activity. This is where the students first reflect individually on the scenario, then in pairs, and finally share with the class. Following this a Modifier Card can be selected, of which there are two kinds, (1) modifications that make the scenario worse for others if the student doesn't agree to do the task on the Scenario Card, and (2) modifications that make the scenario better for others if the student does agree to do the task. This should generate a great deal of conversation and reflection on whether doing a small "bad task" is justifiable if there is a greater good at stake. The cards can also be used in the board game where the players have a combination of Virtue, Accountability, and Loyalty points, which are impacted by both the Scenario Cards and the Modifier Cards. It is worth noting that some modifiers result in points being added on, others subtracted, and others multiplied to the players' global scores. Overall the goal of this project is not simply to design a game to help teach ethics, but rather to explore how effective design science methodologies are in helping in the design of such a game. KEYWORDS: Digital Ethics; Card Games; Board Games; Design Science REFERENCES Bochennek, K., Wittekindt, B., Zimmermann, S.Y. and Klingebiel, T. (2007) "More than Mere Games: A Review of Card and Board Games for Medical Education", Medical Teacher, 29(9-10), pp.941-948. Brandt, E. and Messeter, J. (2004) "Facilitating Collaboration through Design Games". In Proceedings of the Eighth Conference on Participatory Design: Artful Integration: Interweaving Media, Materials and Practices, 1, pp. 121-131, ACM. Deterding, S. (2009) "Living Room Wars" in Hunteman, N.B., Payne, M.T., Joystick Soldiers Routledge, pp.21-38. Deterding, S., Khaled, R., Nacke, L.E. and Dixon, D. (2011) "Gamification: Toward a Definition", CHI 2011 Gamification Workshop Proceedings (Vol. 12). Vancouver BC, Canada. Flatla, D.R., Gutwin, C., Nacke, L.E., Bateman, S. and Mandryk, R.L. (2011) "Calibration Games: Making Calibration Tasks Enjoyable by Adding Motivating Game Elements", in Proceedings of the 24th annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (pp. 403-412). ACM. Halskov, K. and Dalsgård, P. (2006) "Inspiration Card Workshops" In Proceedings of the Sixth Conference on Designing Interactive Systems, pp. 2-11, ACM. Hamari, J., Koivisto, J. and Sarsa, H. (2014) "Does Gamification Work? A Literature Review of Empirical Studies on Gamification", in Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 14(2014), pp. 3025-3034. Hevner, A.R., March, S.T., Park, J. and Ram, S. (2004) "Design Science in Information Systems Research", Management Information Systems Quarterly, 28(1), p.6. Kapp, K.M. (2012) The Gamification of Learning and Instruction: Game-based Methods and Strategies for Training and Education. Pfeiffer; San Francisco, CA. Lloyd, P. and Van De Poel, I. (2008) "Designing Games to Teach Ethics", Science and Engineering Ethics, 14(3), pp.433-447. Lucero, A. and Arrasvuori, J. (2010) "PLEX Cards: A Source of Inspiration when Designing for Playfulness", In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Fun and Games, 1, pp. 28-37, ACM. Peffers, K., Tuunanen, T., Rothenberger, M.A. and Chatterjee, S. (2007) "A Design Science Research Methodology for Information Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, 24(3), pp.45-77. Seaborn, K. and Fels, D.I. (2015) "Gamification in Theory and Action: A Survey", International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 74, pp.14-31. Smith, R. (2010) "The Long History of Gaming in Military Training", Simulation & Gaming, 41(1), pp.6-19. Wells, H.G. (1913) Little Wars. London: Palmer. Vego, M. (2012) "German War Gaming", Naval War College Review, 65(4), pp.106-148. Zuckerman, O (2006) "Historical Overview and Classification of Traditional and Digital Learning Objects", MIT Media Lab.

The paper analyses the migration and ethnocultural processes in the Kosinj Valley in western Lika, which peaked during and immediately after the end of the Great Turkish War at the end of the 17th century and the start of the 18th century. During that time, the area became the intersection of the primary early modern migration flows in this part of the imperial multiple borderlands – southeast and northwest – with their diverse religious (Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians), linguistic (neo-Shtokavian Ijekavian and Ikavian, Chakavian, and transitional Chakavian- Kajkavian), traditional (Dinaric, Adriatic, Pannonian, Eastern Alpine), and socioeconomic characteristics (frontiersmen/peasants, pastoral/agrarian). Each ethnocultural component was internally heterogeneous, characterised by distinct layers shaped by migrations across the turbulent imperial borderlands from the 16th to the 18th centuries. This led to various interactions and intermingling of cultural traditions, ethnic elements, languages, and dialects. It is concluded that the state military-provincial and Chamber authorities played a dominant role in these processes, directly or indirectly encouraging and directing migration flows for geopolitical and economic reasons. Therefore, from the outset, these migratory movements were characterised by planned military and agrarian colonisation. They favoured Catholic elements originating from Habsburg territories. Phenomenologically, they closely parallel the Vlach colonization of the Kosinj Valley a century earlier, which was conducted and directed by Ottoman authorities. Migrations in the turbulent border area of conflicting empires, with the Kosinj Valley at its centre for over 160 years, exhibited distinct dynamics. It was a region marked by intense emigration and immigration of defectors, including internal, external, or cross-border, and return migrations. The 16th and 17th centuries witnessed intense migration that began to subside only at the beginning of the 18th century. Namely, very few families in the 17th century had the chance to live in one place for three generations. The sons and grandsons of the Croats who fled to Carniola returned to Croatian territory in Gorski Kotar, only for the second generation of returnees to move to Lika. Similar return migrations are also observed among the Croats, Vlachs, and Bunjevci from Ogulin. To understand the settlement process, certain internal aspects of differentiated rural society also need to be considered. It is no coincidence that the elders, who were also leaders of migrations, often acquired the largest plots of land and formed the most numerous families in their new homeland. The same applies to Vlach elder families who, on both sides of the old border, retained their prestigious role as village leaders. In that period, the basic outlines of the modern ethnocultural structure of the Kosinj region were formed. The region became an intersection of primary migration flows in the Early Modern Period: the Vlach-Bunjevac, originating from the deep southeastern Dinaric interior, and the Croatian-Carniolan from the northwest, which also included elements originating in the eastern Alpine region. Their protagonists were early modern ethnic groups such as Vlachs, Croats, Carniolans and Bunjevci, who differed from each other along several criteria: socio-economic status, livelihoods, religious affiliation, dialects, family models and cultural areas. They all had in common that each ethnic group was internally heterogeneous and multi-layered. For instance, among the Vlachs, we observe traces of the old Balkan layer, Croats from Ogulin display Carniolan and Uskok-Vlach elements, Carniolan Croats exhibit Slovenian and German influences, and the Bunjevci include Orthodox Vlach converts. Vlachs from Kosinj historically migrated from East Herzegovina. They were part of the "Glamoč" and "Dinaric" migration flows, much like the majority of the Orthodox Vlach population that settled in Lika during the 16th century. Only a small fraction of the newly arrived population was strategically settled by Ottoman authorities across vast areas along their northwestern border, spanning from the Adriatic hinterland to the Drava River between 1550 and 1560. Serb Orthodoxy, neo-Shtokavian Ijekavian (also known as the East Herzegovina-Krajina dialect), seasonal transhumance, and the pastoral-patriarchal culture of the Dinaric area are elements that made them distinctive and distinguishable from their surroundings. After breaking away from their origins in southeastern Herzegovina during the early migrations of the 15th and 16th centuries, they followed a unique development trajectory that shaped a distinct "krajiški" (borderland) type within this historical ethnocultural group in their new habitats across northwestern Ottoman, and later Habsburg and Venetian territories. In 1689, Croatian Krajišnici (frontiersmen) from the Ogulin captaincy settled in Lower Kosinj, situated on the northern edge of a valley that today comprises the hamlets of Sveti Ivan, Draškovići, Selište, Rudine, Klobučari, and Goljak. They were part of the Croatian Chakavian population, specifically peasant soldiers who congregated around borderland fortresses in Ogulin, Oštarije, and Modruš during the 17th century. Some of their Chakavian linguistic features have been preserved to this day in the hamlets of Goljak, Rudinka, and Selište. The ethno-demographic structure of these Croats, which emerged during the first half of the 17th century, shows a tripartite composition. It comprised natives of Modruš, newcomers and/or returnees from Vinodol and Carniola, along with various branches of the Uskok-Vlach migration flows, predominantly migrants from Senj. In 1689, approximately 40 settler families from Gorski Kotar or the borders of Carniola settled the land along the Bakovac stream, extending all the way to its confluence with the Lika River. This area encompasses present-day Upper Kosinj, including the hamlets of Sušanj, Podjelar, and Poljanka, as well as the region of Bakovac and its hamlets Ribnik and Ruja. In most cases, these were descendants of the Croatian population who fled to Carniola in the 16th century. Therefore, it is more appropri¬ate to refer to this segment of the Catholic population in Kosinj in the pre-modern sense as "Carniolan Croats" despite the presence of some Slovenian and German elements among them. Secondly, it is necessary to differentiate between narrower and broader contexts of the usage of the Carniolan ethnicity within Lika itself. Carniolans, in the narrower sense, are represented by these settlers from Gorski Kotar, who were dependent peasants settled in Lika by the Inner Austrian Court Chamber, which introduced its chamber system there. In a broader sense, this ethnic term became a general label for Catholics in the Karlovac Generalate, particularly among the Orthodox population of Lika and Kordun. Bunjevci, also known as "Catholic Vlachs", who settled in the Kosinj Valley, belonged to the so-called "Krmpote branch". They were Catholic Vlachs originating from West Herzegovina who gradually migrated northwest, following the Dinaric migration flow along the Dinara and Velebit mountains during the 16th and 17th centuries. Due to their Herzegovian roots, history of Ottoman subjugation, Vlach social structure, pastoral and patriarchal cultural traditions of the Dinaric area (the culture of "dark cloth and gusle"), and the linguistic features of neo-Shtokavian Ikavian dialect, they exhibited cultural affinities with schismatic Vlachs in Lika. Special attention is given to the historical anthroponymy of the inhabitants of Kosinj, which verifies the aforementioned dynamics. Archival materials, including various documents, lists, and registers, provide valuable insights into their origins, movements, and distribution. Surnames among the Catholic population were documented considerably earlier, allowing for continuous tracing, especially among Croats from Ogulin and Carniola, dating back to the 15th and 16th centuries. The surnames of Orthodox families in Kosinj, and to a lesser extent Bunjevci families, can only be traced from their appearance in the Karlovac Generalate records, which means at best from the 17th century. The structural formation and meaning of surnames in Kosinj largely align with the dialectal and sociocultural characteristics of ethnic groups. Essentially, we can identify two anthroponymic origins: Croatian-Carniolan and Vlach-Bunjevac. It should be noted that surnames became established significantly earlier among Catholics, starting from the decisions of the Council of Trent in 1563, which introduced the practice of church registers for baptisms (Liber baptizatorum), marriages (Liber copulatorum), and deaths (Liber mortuorum). The Roman Ritual of 1614 mandated and required the keeping of parish family books known as Status animarum ("State of Souls") in each parish. Combining it with other sources makes it significantly easier to reconstruct the migration patterns and dispersion of certain Catholic families of Croats and Carniolans, unlike the Bunjevci and especially the Vlachs, who were under Ottoman rule for a long time. By incorporating certain Croatian families that were once part of the middle and lower nobility, anthroponymic continuity is fully established. The Orthodox Church only began to introduce records of its congregation in the 18th century, prompted by the Habsburg Monarchy. First, through parish Domovni protokoli (Household protocols) in the mid-18th century, which listed Orthodox families in specific parishes, but it was only with the Regulament (Regulation) of 1770 that the introduction of parish registers began, mirroring the practice of the Catholic Church. However, in most Orthodox parishes in the Eparchy of Upper Karlovac, this practice was not adopted until the first half of the 19th century. Therefore, it's not possible to trace most of Kosinj Vlachs' early movements or pinpoint their origins before the 18th century. Family traditions and the custom of Slava are not always reliable indicators. For the establishment of surnames among Vlach Orthodox families, and to a lesser extent among Bunjevci, secular military-frontier structures were far more influential than church structures. For military record-keeping purposes, frontier conscriptions were conducted, involving lists of military conscripts, which led to Vlach surnames becoming permanent and hereditary. This probably also explains the higher occurrence of colourful and satirical nicknames, or simply nicknames of differentiated family branches, in their anthroponymic repertoire.

Machine on Black Ground is a 16mm film that fuses archival and original footage, combining images from early 1960s industrial documentaries, a concert by Tangerine Dream at Coventry Cathedral and original abstract material of modernist stained glass architecture (shot in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, Berlin; Coventry Cathedral; and The Meeting House, Sussex University). In doing so, the film suggests a utopian architectural project viewed from an imagined subterranean space or vantage point. At the same time the film proposes two simultaneous formal analogies between modernist sacred architecture and cinema; i.e stained glass as filmstrip and the modernist cathedral as a projector of light. In one sense Machine on Black Ground addresses the question of how to make a film of a building by positioning itself as a continuation and extension of three previous and very different films (about one of the most significant post-war buildings in Britain; Coventry Cathedral) of disparate genres and dating from 1958 to 1976 - a BFI funded film essay, an industrial documentary and TV coverage of a rock concert. This combined with original footage shot in the Kiaser Wilhelm Memorial Church, Berlin; Coventry Cathedral; and The Meeting House, Sussex University. In another sense Machine on Black Ground emphasises the potential of the modernist church space as a vast light modulator, by imagining stained glass windows as an optical printer, or film projector, and in so doing revealing the overlaps between the formal qualities of modernist church design and those of abstract film and how filmmakers have intuited this relationship. Archive material and original footage is combined in a film which is largely abstract, and is principally concerned, with the way film can register or produce architectural space. In this case; post-war Modernist sacred space, the aspirations of reconciliation and renewal, and science fiction narratives of escape and utopia. Machine on Black Ground suggests both the construction of a utopian building and the world viewed from some kind of subterranean space or vantage point. The film switches from the poetic style of the late post-war architectural documentary (the films used are Dudley Shaw Ashton's BFI Experimental Documentary Coventry Cathedral of 1958 and The John Laing Film Unit Coventry Cathedral of 1962), to live video effects material taken from Tony Palmer's BBC2 outside broadcast of German progressive rock band Tangerine Dream playing in Coventry Cathedral in 1976, to extended sequences of immersive expanses of abstract coloured glass that suggest a sequence from a science fiction film in which a camera sweeps around and across a vast structure or space. Even the documentary elements begin to suggest science fiction narratives and it is entirely unclear exactly what is being built. In the same way the Tangerine Dream footage, which consists of early live video vision mixing becomes ambiguous and the musicians appear to be at the controls of something. Recurring sections suggest an abstract colour field film, entirely shot through full frame blocks of stained glass. They create the illusion of looking out at a world from a contained space that might be deep underground or deep under water – as if, in this context, the viewer is looking out of the subterranean space through some kind of viewing device or occluded window. These sections also produce an immersive spectacle of their own as they flood the viewing space with colour. At the same time the film undercuts this spectacle by developing a formal relationship between modernist stained glass and the film strip in which the stained glass cell becomes an analogue for the film frame suggesting that the viewer has taken up a position inside a projector or an optical printer. In this way the film blurs the distinction between the projected light from the fenestration within the church, and the projected light through the film frame within the viewing space. The film's title, Machine on Black Ground, is taken from the title of a Graham Sutherland painting from 1962 in which a large organic machine like object seems to float in deep space. As with our previous recent films Machine on Black Ground explores the interrelationships between architecture and cinema, and the capacities of visual spectacle and structure, point of view, and parallax; common to both. The work's premise is that both architectural design and our experience of built space each play into and are understood through the conventions and formal characteristics of film. It is of importance to the work that such ideas find a resonance in intimately linked buildings, both charged with enormous historical significance. --- Coventry Cathedral was badly damaged and reduced to ruins during Luftwaffe bombing on the night of 14 November 1940. The building of a new Cathedral, the first to be built in England since the Reformation, represented a hugely significant symbolic act. The decision was apparently made the day after its destruction and defined not as an act of defiance, but as a "sign of faith, trust and hope for the future of the world". The Cathedral characterises itself as a centre for reconciliation, and the design of the building, and its use of art – most notable Sutherland's alter piece and Epstein's St. Michael and The Devil, play a large part in this. The consecration on May 25 1962 heard the first performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem composed for the occasion. On the same day in Berlin the consecration of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church took place. The history of the new church in Berlin runs in almost exact parallel with that of Coventry's. RAF bombing in 1943 destroyed the original church and like in Coventry, the new church stands alongside the remains of the old. As in Coventry, its modernist design caused much discussion, but on opening to the public it rapidly became a hugely popular symbol of reconciliation in post-war Britain. On the altar in Coventry is a cross made from nails from the roof trusses of the old Cathedral. Another cross of nails was made and donated to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. In December 1974 Tangerine Dream were invited to play in the grand setting of Rheims Cathedral, a move seen at the time as groundbreaking. Subsequently they were invited to perform in the cathedrals of York, Liverpool and Coventry. The tour attracted the media's attention, especially their performance at Coventry Cathedral, Tangerine Dream being first a rock band, but crucially, also German. As with the previous exchanges and collaborations, this event can be seen as part of the series of gestures between the two countries, through these churches, where the acts, embedded in the buildings, serve to perform a process of renewal. Combining the impetus of the liturgical movement, developments in new materials, and the desire to integrate new art and architecture into a more democratic participatory sacred space, church building across Europe became an unlikely site for avant-garde architectural activity. In Germany the need for a new departure in religious architecture was most keenly felt as the new churches that emerged out of the devastated landscape embodied the principles of a new democratic nation. Dudley Shaw Ashton's 1958 film Coventry Cathedral was produced by the BFI Experimental Film Fund and the British Council, describes the processes of designing the building and the works of art commissioned for it's interior. Notably the film features none of the on site building process – the corner stone was only laid in 1956 – but instead uses numerous shots of a large model of the Cathedral. At times the camera tracks through and around the model, which is not presented as such, and is in fact reasonably convincing as a simulation of the real building. A reciprocal relationship between architecture and film is of central importance to Machine on Black Ground and is suggested in Shaw Ashton's film and reinforced in the BFI's catalogue notes: "Coventry Cathedral was probably the first film to show in detail how a building, not then in existence, would appear when completed. It was a measure of the film's success that architect Basil Spence made substantial modifications to the design after he had seen the first rough cut". The John Laing Film Unit's 1962 film Coventry Cathedral exists as a substantial and at times beautifully shot documentary of the building and consecration of the new Cathedral. Made by the building company themselves, it appears never to have been broadcast, and stands as what seems to be form of commemoration in itself and an extended message of thanks to all those involved and the ambitions of the project. Outstanding moments include the lowering of the Cathedral's unconventional spire onto the flat roof, by RAF helicopter. The BBC2 Outside Broadcast Units live coverage of Tangerine Dream's performance in Coventry Cathedral. Is remarkable in a number of ways. Firstly, it was broadcast without introduction or contextual 'explanation'. Instead we are immediately presented with the band, surrounded by both enormous banks of early electronic music equipment, and dozens of candles, as they perform Ricochet. Secondly the coverage of the performance, in itself not dynamic visually, is married, at times through the use of video effects, with abstract images of architectural details of the interior of the building – the complex forms of the timber vaults of the ceiling or the stained glass.

Timothy Mitchell on
Infra-Theory, the State Effect, and the Technopolitics of Oil










This is the first in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich 







The unrest in the Arab
world put the region firmly in the spotlights of IR. Where many scholars focus
on the conflicts in relation to democratization as a local or regional dynamic,
political events there do not stand in isolation from broader international
relations or other—for instance economic—concerns. Among the scholars who has
insisted on such broader linkages and associations that co-constitute political
dynamics in the region, Timothy Mitchell stands out. The work of Mitchell has
largely focused on highly specific aspects of politics and development in Egypt
and the broader Middle East, such as the relations between the building of the
Aswan Dam and redistribution of expertise, and the way in which the differences
between coal and oil condition democratic politics. His consistently nuanced
and enticing analyses have gained him a wide readership, and Mitchell's
analyses powerfully resonate across qualitative politically oriented social
sciences.  In this Talk, Timothy Mitchell discusses, amongst others, the birth of 'the
economy' as a powerful modern political phenomenon, how we can understand the
state as an effect rather than an actor, and the importance of taking
technicalities seriously to understand the politics of oil.







Print version of this Talk (pdf)



What is, according to you,
the biggest challenge / principal debate in current globally oriented studies?
What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?



I'm not myself interested in, or good at, big debates,
the kinds of debates that define and drive forward an academic field. The
reason for that is partly that once a topic has become a debate, it has tended
to have sort of hardened into a field, in which there are two or three
positions, and as a scholar you have to take one of those positions. In the
days when I was first trained in Political Science and studied International
Relations, that was so much my sense of the field and indeed of the whole
discipline of political science. This is part of one's initially training in
any field: it is laid out as a
serious debate. I found this something I just could not deal with; I did not
find it intellectually interesting which I think sort of stayed with me all the
way through to where I am now. So although big debates are important for a
certain defining and sustaining of academic fields and training new generations
of students, it is not the kind of way in which I myself have tended to work. I
have tended to work by moving away from what the big debates have been in a
particular moment. My academic interests always started when I found something
curious that interests me and that I try to begin to see in a different way.



However, I suppose with my most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011), in a sense there was a big debate going on, which was the debate about the resource
curse and oil democracy. That was an old debate going back to the 70's, but had
been reinvigorated by the Iraq war in 2003. But that to me is an example of the
problem with big debates, because the terms in which that debate was argued
back and forth—and is still argued—did not seem to make sense as a way to
understand the role of energy in 20th century democratic politics.
Was oil good for democracy or bad for democracy? The existing debate began with
those as two different things—as a dependent or independent variable—so you
would already determine things in advance that I would have wanted to open up.
In general I'm not a good person for figuring out what the big debates are.



But I think, moving from International Relations as a
field to 'globally oriented studies', to
use your phrase, one of the biggest
challenges—just on an academic level, leaving aside challenges that we face as
a global community—is to learn to develop ways of seeing even what seem like
the most global and most international issues, as things that are very local.
Part of the problem with fields such as 'global studies', the term
'globalization', and other terms of that sort, is that they tend to define
their objects of study in opposition to the local, in opposition to even
national-level modes of analysis. By consequence, they assume that the actors
or the forces that they're going to study must themselves be in some sense
global, because that is the premise of the field. So whether it is nation
states acting as world powers; whether it is capitalism understood as a global
system—they have to exist on this plane of the global, on some sort of
universal level, to be topics of IR and global studies. And yet, on close
inspection, most of the concerns or actors central to those modes of inquiry
tend to operate on quite local levels; they tend to be made up of very small
agents, very particular arrangements that somehow have managed to put
themselves together in ways that allow them take on this appearance and
sometimes this effectiveness of things that are global. I'm very interested in
taking things apart that are local, on a particular level, to understand what
it is that enables such small things, such local and particular agents, to act
in a way that creates the appearance of the global or the international world.



Now this relates back to the second part of your
question, about substantive concerns that we face as a global community. When I
was writing Carbon Democracy there
was all this attention on the problem of 'creating a more democratic Middle
East', as it was understood at the time of the Iraq war. It struck me that when
debating this problem—of oil and democracy, of energy and democracy—we saw it
as somehow specific to these countries and to the part of the world where many
countries were very large-scale energy producers. We were not thinking about
the fact that we are all in a sense caught up in this problem that I call
carbon democracy, and that there are issues—whether it is in terms of the
increasing difficulty of extracting energy from the earth, or the consequences
of having extracted the carbon and put it up in the atmosphere—that we, as
democracies, are very, very challenged by. Those issues—and I think in
particular the concerns around climate change—when you look at them from the
perspective of U.S. politics, and the inability of the U.S. even to take the
relatively minor steps that other industrialized democracies have taken: this
inaction suggests a larger problem of oil and democracy that needs explaining
and understanding and working on and organizing about. I also think there is a
whole range of contemporary issues related to energy production and consumption
that revolve around the building of more egalitarian and more socially just
worlds. And, again, those issues present themselves very powerfully as concerns
in American politics, but are experienced in other ways in other parts of the
world. I would not single out any one of them as more urgent or important than
another, and I do think we still have a long struggle ahead of us here. 





How did
you arrive at where you currently are in your approach to issues?



Well,
I had a strange training as a scholar because I kept shifting fields. I
actually began as a student of law and then moved into history while I was
still an undergraduate, but then became interested in political theory; decided
that I liked it better than political science. But by the time I arrived in
political science to study for a PhD, I had become interested in politics of
the Middle East. This was partly from just travelling there when I was a
student growing up in England, but I also suppose in some ways the events of
the seventies had really drawn attention to the region. So the first important
thing that shaped me was this constant shifting of fields and disciplines,
which was not to me a problem—it was rather that there was a kind of
intellectual curiosity that drove me from academic field to field. And so if
there was one thing that helped me arrive at where I am, it was this constant
moving outside of the boundaries of one discipline and trespassing on the next
one—trying to do it for long enough that they started to accept me as someone
who they could debate with. And I think all along that has been important to
the kind of scholarship I do; yet therefore I would say where I currently am in
my thinking about my field is difficult in itself to define. But I think it is
probably defined by the sense that there are many, many fields—and it is moving
across them and trying to do justice to the scholarship in them, but at the
same time trying to connect insights from one field with what one can do in
another field. I have always tried to draw things together in that sense, a
sense that one can call an interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary sensitivity.



I
think the other part of what has shaped me intellectually was that, in ways I
explained before, I was always drawn into the local and the particular and the
specific and I was never very good at thinking at that certain level of
large-scale grand theory. So having found myself in the field of Middle Eastern
politics in a PhD-program, and being told that it involves studying Arabic which
I was very glad to do, I then went off to spend summers in the Arab world, and
later over more extended periods of time for field research. But to me, Egypt
and other places I've worked—but principally Egypt—became not just a field
site, but a place where I have now been going for more than 30 years and where
I have developed very close ties and intellectual relationships, friendships,
that I think have constantly shaped and reshaped my thinking. And even when I
am reading about things that are not specifically related to Egypt—the work I
do on the history of economics, or the work I have done on oil politics that
are not directly connected with my research on Egypt—I am often thinking in
relation to places and people and communities there that have profoundly shaped
me as a scholar. 



So
traveling across different contexts I'd say I have not developed a kind of set
of theoretical lenses I take with me. Rather, I would say I have developed a way of seeing—I would not
necessarily call it 'meta', I see it as much more as sort of 'infra': much more
mundane and everyday. While I have this sort of intellectual history of moving
across disciplines and social sciences in an academic way, there is another
sort of moving across fields, another sensibility, and that sensibility
provides me with a sense of rootedness or grounding. And that is a more
traditional way of moving across fields, because whether when one is writing
about contemporary politics or more historically about politics, one is dealing
constantly with areas of technical concern of one sort or another, with
specialist knowledge. Engaging with that expert knowledge has always provided
both a political grounding in specific concerns and with a kind of concern with
local, real-world, struggles on the ground. So that might have been things like
the transformation of irrigation in nineteenth-century Egypt, or the remaking
of the system of law; or it might be the history of malaria epidemics in the
twentieth century, or the relationship between those epidemics and
transformations taking place in the crops that were grown; or, more
recently—and more obviously—of oil and the history of energy, and the way
different forms of energy are brought out of the ground. And I should mention
beside those areas of technical expertise already listed, economics as well: a
discipline I was never trained in, but that I realized I had to understand if I
was to make sense of contemporary Egyptian politics—just as much as I had to
understand agricultural hydraulics or something of the petroleum geology as a
form of technical expertise that is shaping the common world.



In
sum, what keeps me grounded is the idea that to really make sense of the
politics of any of those fields, one has got to do one's best to sort of enter
and explore the more technical level—with the closest attention that one can
muster to the technical and the material dimensions of what is involved—whether
it is in agricultural irrigation, building dams or combating disease. And
entering this level of issues does not only mean interviewing experts but
arriving at the level of understanding the disease, the parasite, the modes of
its movement, the hydraulics of the river, the properties of different kinds of
oil... So as you can see it is not really 'meta', it really is 'infra' in the
anthropological way of staying close to the ground, staying close to processes
and things and materials.





What
would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a
global way?



A
couple of things. I think one is precisely the thing I just mentioned in answer
to your last question: that is, the kind of interest in going inside technical
processes, learning about material objects, not being afraid of taking up an
investigation of something that is a body of knowledge totally outside one's
area of training and expertise. So, if I was advising someone or looking for a
student, I would not say there is a particular skill or expertise, but rather a
willingness to really get one's hands dirty with the messy technical details of
an area—and that can be an area of specialist knowledge such as economics, but
also technical and physical processes of, for instance, mineral extraction. I
think to me this is—for the kind of work I am interested in doing—enormously
important.



The
other thing that I would stress in the area of globally-oriented studies, is
that one could think of two ways of approaching a field of study. One is to
move around the world and gather together information, often with a notion of
improving things, such as development work, human rights work, international
security work. This entails gathering from one's own research and from other
experts in the field, with a certain notion of best practices and the state of
field, and of what works, and therefore what can then be moved from one place
to another as a form of expert knowledge. Some people really want that mobile
knowledge, which I suppose is often associated with the ability to generalize
from a particular case and to establish more universal principles about
whatever the topic is. And in this case one's own expertise becomes the
carrying or transmission of that expert knowledge. One saw a lot of that around
the whole issue of democratization that I mentioned before in the Middle East,
around the Iraq war when experts were brought in. They had done democracy
elsewhere in the world and then they turned up to do it in Iraq, and again
following the Arab Spring.



Against
that, to me, there is another mode of learning, which is not to learn about what is happening but to learn from. So to give the example, if there
is an uprising and a struggle for democracy going on in the streets of Cairo,
one could try and learn about that and then make it fit one's models and
classify it within a broader range of series of democratizations across the
world, or one could try and learn from it, and say 'how do we rethink what the
possibilities of democracy might be on the basis of what is happening?' To me
those are two distinct modes of work. They are not completely mutually
exclusive, but I think people are more disposed towards one or the other. I
have never been disposed, or good at, the first kind and do like the second, so
I would mention that as the second skill or attitude that is useful for doing
this sort of work.





In which discipline or field would you situate
yourself, or would we have to invent a discipline to match your work?



I
like disciplines, but I do not always feel that I entirely belong to any of
them. That said, I read with enormous profit the works of historians, political
theorist, anthropologists, of people in the field of science and technology
studies, geographers, political economists and scholars in environmental
studies. There are so many different disciplines that are well organized and
have their practitioners from which there is a lot to learn! But conversely, I
also think, in ways I have described already, there is something to be learnt
for some people from working in a much more deliberately post-disciplinary
fashion. The Middle East, South Asian and African Studies department to which I
have been attached here in Columbia for about five years, represents a
deliberate attempt by myself and my colleagues to produce some kind of
post-disciplinary space. Not in order to do away with the disciplines, but to
have another place for doing theoretical work, one that is able to take
advantage of not being bound by disciplinary fields, as even broad
disciplines—say history—tend to restrict you with a kind of positive liberty of
creating a place where you can do anything you want—as long as you do it in an
archive. I quite deliberately situate myself outside of any one discipline,
while continuing to learn from and trespass into the fields of many individual
disciplines. They range from all of those and others, because I am here among a
community of people who are also philologists; people interested in Arabic
literature and the history of Islamic science; and all kinds of fields, which I
also find fascinating. The first article I ever published was in the field of
Arabic grammar! So I have interests that fit in a very sort of
trans-disciplinary, post-disciplinary environment and I thrive on that.



Yet
doing this kind of post-disciplinary work is in a practical sense actually
absolutely impossible. If only for the simple fact that if it is already hardly
possible to keep up with 'the literature' if one is firmly situated within one
field, then one can never keep up with important developments in all the
disciplines one is interested in. There are some people that manage to do this
and do it justice. My information about contemporary debates in every
imaginable field is so limited; I do not manage to do justice to any field. In
the particular piece of research I might be engaged in, I try to get quickly up
to pace on what's going on, and I often come back again and again to similar
areas of research. I am currently interested in questions around the early
history of international development in the 1940's and 1950's, and that is
something I have worked on before, but I have come back to it and I found that
the World Bank archives are now open and there is a whole new set of
literatures. I had not been keeping up with all of that work. It is hard and
that is why I am very bad at answering emails and doing many of the other
everyday things that one is ought to do; because it always seems to me, in the
evening at the computer when one ought to be catching up with emails, there is
something you have come across in an article or footnotes and before you know
it you are miles away and it has got nothing to do with what you were working
on at the moment, but it really connects with a set of issues you have been
interested in and has taken you off into contemporary work going on in law or
the history of architecture… The internet has made that possible in a
completely new way and some of these post-disciplinary research interests are
actually a reflection of where we are with the internet and with the
accessibility of scholarship in any field only just a few clicks away. Which on
the one hand is fascinating, but mostly it is just a complete curse. It is the
enemy of writing dissertations and finishing books and articles and everything
else!





What role does expertise, which is kind of a central
term in underpinning much of the diverse work or topics you do, play in the
historical unfolding of modern government?



That
is a big question, so let me suggest only a couple of thoughts here. One is
that modern government has unfolded—especially if one thinks of government itself
as a wider process than just a state—through the development of new forms of
expertise, which among other things define problems and issues upon which
government can operate. This can concern many things, whether it is problems of
public health in the 19th or 20th century; or problems of
economic development in the 20th century; or problems of energy,
climate change and the environment today. Again and again government itself
operates—as Foucault has taught us—simultaneously as fields of knowledge and fields
of power. And the objects brought into being in this way—defined in important
ways through the development of expert knowledge—become in themselves modes
through which political power operates. Thanks to Foucault and many others,
that is a way of thinking or field of research that has been widely developed,
even though there are vast amounts of work still to do.



But
I think there is another relationship between modes of government and
expertise, and this goes back to things I have been thinking about ever since I
wrote an article about the theory of the state (The Limits of the State, pdf here) that was published in American
Political Science Review a long time ago (1991). The point I made then, is that
it is interesting to observe how one of the central aspects of modern modes of
power is the way that the distinction between what is the state and what is not
the state; between what is public and what is private, is constantly elaborated
and redefined. So politics itself is happening not so much by some agency
called 'state' or 'government' imposing its will on some other preformed
object—the social, the population, the people—but rather that it concerns a
series of techniques that create what I have called the effect of a state: the very distinction between what appears as a
sort of structure or apparatus of power, and the objects on which that power
works.



More
recently one of the ways I have thought about this, is in terms of the history
of the idea of the economy. Most people think of 'the economy' either as
something that has always existed (and people may or may not have realized its
existence) or as something that came into being with the rise of political
economy and commercial society in the European 18th and 19th
century. One of the things I discovered when I was doing research on the
history of development, is that no economist talked routinely about an object
called 'the economy' before the 1940's! I think that is a good example of the
history of a mode of expertise that exists not within the operations of an
apparatus of government but precisely outside of government.



If
you look in detail at how the term 'the economy' was first regularly used, you
find that it was in the context of governing the U.S. in the 1940's immediately
after the Second World War. In the aftermath of the war there was enormous
political pressure for quite a radical restructuring of American society: there
were waves of strikes, demands for worker control of industries, or at least a
share of management. And of course in Europe, similar demands led to new forms
of economy altogether, in the building of postwar Germany and in the forms of
democratic socialism that were experimented with in various parts of Western
Europe. As we know, the U.S. did not follow that path. And I think part of the
way in which it was steered away from that path, was by constructing the
economy as the central object of government, coupled with precisely this
American cultural fear of things where government did not belong. So this was
radically opposed to how the Europeans related government to economy: European
governments had become involved in all kinds of ways, deciding how the relation
between management and labor should operate in thinking about prices and wages;
instituting forms of national health insurance and health care; and the whole
state management of health care itself... Now this was threatening to emerge in
the U.S., and was emerging in many ways in the wartime with state control of
prices and production. In order to prevent the U.S. from following the European
path after the war, this object outside of
government with its own experts was
created: the economy. And the economists were precisely people who are not in government, but who knew the laws and
regularities of economic life and could explain them to people. It is
interesting to think about expertise both as something that develops within the
state, but also as something that happens as a creation of objects that
precisely represent what is not the
state, or the sphere of government.





Your most recent book Carbon Democracy (2011) focuses on the political structures
afforded, or engendered, by modes of extraction of minerals and investigates
how oil was constitutes a dominant source of energy on which we depend.
Can you give an example of how that works?



Let
me take an example from the book even though I might have to give it in very a
simplified form in order to make it work. I was interested in what appeared to
be the way in which the rise of coal—the dominant source of energy in the 19th
century and in the emergence of modern industrialized states—seemed to be very
strongly associated with the emergence of mass democracy, whereas the rise of
oil in the 20th century seemed to have if anything the opposite set
of consequences for states that were highly dependent on the production of oil.
I wanted to examine these relations between forms of energy and democratic
politics in a way that was not simply some kind of technical- or energy
determinism, because it is very easy to point to many cases that simply do not
fit that pattern—and, besides, it simply would not be very interesting to begin
with. But it did seem to me, that at a particular moment in the history of the
emergence of industrialized countries—particularly in the late 19th
century—it became possible for the first time in history and really only for a
brief period, to take advantage of certain kinds of vulnerabilities and
possibilities offered by the dependence on coal to organize a new kind of
political agency and forms of mass politics, which successfully struggled for
much more representative and egalitarian forms of democracy, roughly between
the 1880's and the mid 20th century. In general terms, that story is
known; but it had been told without thinking in particular about the energy
itself. The energy was just present in these stories as that which made
possible industrialization; industrialization made possible urbanization;
therefore you had lots of workers and their consciousness must somehow have
changed and made them democratic or something.



That
story did not make sense to me, and that prompted me to research in detail, and
drawing on the work of others who had looked even more in detail at, the
history of struggles for a whole set of democratic rights. The accounts of
people at the time were clear: what was distinctive was this peculiar ability
to shut down an economy because of a specific vulnerability to the supply of
energy. Very briefly, when I switched to telling the story in the middle of the
20th with oil, it is different: partly just because oil was a
supplementary source of energy—countries and people now had a choice between
different energy sources—but also because oil did not create the same points of
vulnerability. There are fewer workers involved, it is a liquid, so it can be
routed along different channels more easily; there is a whole set of technical
properties of oil and its production that are different. That does not mean to
say that the energy is determining the outcome of history or of political
struggles, and I am careful to introduce examples that do not work easily one
way or the other in the history of oil industry in Baku,
which is much more similar to the history of coal or the oil industry in
California for that matter. But you can pay attention to the technical
dimensions in a certain way, and the to the sheer possibilities that arise with
this enormous concentration of sources of energy—which reflects both an
exponential increase in the amount of energy but also an unprecedented
concentration of the sites at which energy is available and through which it
flows—that you can tell a new story about democratic politics and about that
moment in the history of industrialized countries, but also the subsequent
history in oil-producing countries in a different way. That would be an example
of how attention for technical expertise translates into a different
understanding of the politics of oil.





This leads to my next question, which is how do you
speak about materials or technologies without falling into the trap of either
radical social reductionism or a kind of Marxist technological determinism? Do
you get these accusations sometimes?



Yes,
I think so, but more so from people who have not read my work and who just hear
some talks about it or some secondary accounts. To me, so much of the
literature that already existed on these questions around oil and democracy, or
even earlier research on coal, industrialization and democracy, suffered from a
kind of technical determinism because they actually did not go into the
technical. They said: 'look, you've got all this oil' or 'look, you had all that
coal and steam power' and out of that, in a very determinist fashion, emerged
social movements or emerged political repression. This was determinist because
such accounts had actually jumped over the technical side much too fast:
talking about oil in the case of the resource curse literature, it was only
interested in the oil once it had already
become money. And once it was money, then it of course corrupts, or you buy
people off, or you do not have to seek their votes. The whole question of how
oil becomes money and how you put
together that technical system that turns oil into forms of political power or
turns coal into forms of political power, does not get opened up. And that to
me makes those arguments—even though there is not much of the technical in
them—technically very determinist. Because as soon as you start opening up the
technical side of it, you realize there are so many ways things can go and so
many different ways things can get built. Energy networks can be built in
different ways and there can be different mixes of energy. Of course most of
the differences are technical differences, but they are also human differences.
It is precisely by being very attentive to the technical aspects of
politics—like energy or anything else, it could be in agriculture, it could be
in disease, it could be in any area of collective socio-technical life—that one
finds the only way to get away from a certain kind of technical determinism
that otherwise sort of rules us. In the economics of growth, for instance,
there is this great externality of technological change that drives every sort
of grand historical explanation. Technology is just something that is kept
external to the explanatory model and accounts for everything else that the
model cannot explain. That ends up being a terrible kind of technical
determinism.



The
other half of the question is how this might differ from Marxist approaches to
some of these problems. I like to think that if Marx was studying oil, his
approach would be very little different. Because if you read Marx himself,
there is an extraordinary level of interest in the technical; that is, whether
in the technical aspects of political economy as a field of knowledge in the 19th
century, or in the factory as a technical space. So, conventional political
economy to him was not just an ideological mask that had to be torn away so
that you could reveal the true workings of capitalism. Political economy has
produced a set of concepts—notions of value, notions of exchange, notions of
labor—that actually formed part of the technical workings of capitalism. The
factory was organized at a technical level that had very specific consequences.
The trouble with a significant part of Marx's theories is that he stopped doing
that kind of technical work and Marxism froze itself with a set of categories
that may or may not have been relevant to a moment of 19th century
capitalism. There is still a lot of interesting Marxist theory going on, and
some of the contemporary Italian Marxist theory I find really interesting and
profitable to read, for example. Some of the work in Marxist geography
continues to be very productive. But at the same time there are aspects of my
work that are different from that—such as my drawing on Foucault in
understanding expertise and modes of power.





How come so many of the social sciences seem to stick
so rigidly to the human or social side of the Cartesian divide? It seems to be
constitutive of social science disciplines but on the other hand also radically
reduces the scope of what it can actually 'see' and talk about. 



I
think you are right and it has never made much sense to me. I suppose I have
approached it in two kinds of ways in my work. First, this kind of dualism was
much more clearly an object of concern in some of the early work I published on
the colonial era, including my first
book, Colonising Egypt (1988), where
I was trying to understand the process by which Europeans had, as it were, come
to be Cartesians; had come to see the world as very neatly defined it into mind
on the one hand and matter or on the other—or, as they tended to think of it,
representations on the one hand and reality on the other. And I actually looked
in some detail, at the technical level, at this—beginning with world
exhibitions, but moving on to department stores and school systems and modern
legal orders—to understand the processes by which our incredibly complicated
world was engineered so as to produce the effect of this world divided into the
two—of mind or representation or culture on the one hand, and reality, nature,
material on the other.



Second,
what were the effects, what were the repetitive practices, that made that kind
of simple dualism seem so self-evident and taken for granted? All that early
work still informs my current work, although I do not necessarily explore this
as directly as I did. One of the things I try to do is avoid all the vocabulary
that draws you into that kind of dualism. So, nowhere when I write, do I use a
term like 'culture', because you are just heading straight down that Cartesian
road as soon as you assume that there is some hermetic world of shared meanings—as opposed to what? As opposed to
machines that do not involve instructions and all kinds of other things that we
would think of as meaningful? So I just work more by avoiding some of the
dualistic language; the other kind would be the entire set of debates—in almost
every discipline of the social sciences—around the question of 'structure
versus agency' which just doesn't seems to me particularly productive. And I
have been very lucky, recently, in coming across work in the fields of science
and technology studies, because it is a field of people studying machines,
studying laboratories and studying people, a field that took nature itself as
something to be opened-up and investigated. In taking apart these things, they
realized that those kinds of dualisms made absolutely no sense. And they have
done away with them in their modes of explanation quite a long time ago. So
there was already a lot in my own work before I encountered Science and
Technology Studies (STS) that was working in that direction; but the STS people
have been at it for a long time and figured out a lot of things that I had only
just discovered.





Can you explain why it seems that perhaps implicitly
decolonization, or the postcolonial moment—which is understood within political
science and in development literature as a radical moment of rupture in which a
complete transfer of responsibility has taken place, instituted in sovereignty—is
an important theme in your work?



I
have actually been coming back to this in recent work, because I am currently
looking again at that moment of decolonization in Egypt. The period after World
War II, around the 1952 revolution and the debacle around the building and the financing of the Aswan Dam,
constitutes a wonderful way to explore questions on how much change
decolonization really engendered and to see how remarkably short-lived that
sort of optimism about decolonization, meaning a transfer of responsibility and
sovereignty, actually was. Of course decolonization did transfer responsibility
and sovereignty in all kinds of ways, but then that was exactly the problem for
the former colonial regimes: because, from their perspective, then, how were
all the people who had profited before from things like colonialism to continue
to make profits? The plan to build the High Dam at Aswan—although there has
always been Egyptians interested in it—initially got going because of some
German engineering firms… For them, there was no opportunity in doing any kind
of this large-scale work in Europe at
the time because of the dire economic situation there. But they knew that Egypt
had rapidly growing revenues from the Suez Canal and so they got together with
the British and the French, and said: let's put forward this scheme for a dam
so that we can recycle those revenues—particularly the income from the Suez
Canal, which was about to revert to Egyptian ownership—back into the pockets of
the engineering firms, or of the banks that will make the loans and charge the
fees. And that is where the scheme came from. Then the World Bank got involved,
because it too had found it had got nothing to do in Europe in the way of
development and reconstruction, so it invented this new field of development.
And it became a conduit to get the Wall Street banks involved as well. And the
whole thing became politicized and led to a rupture, which provided then the
excuse for another group, the militarists, the MI6 people, to invade and try to
overthrow Nasser. So just in the space of barely four years from that moment of
decolonization, Egypt had been reinvaded by the French, the British, working
with the Israelis, and had to deal with the consequences and the costs of
destroyed cities and military spending. That is an example of how quickly
things went wrong; but also of how part of their going wrong was in this
desperate attempt by a series of
European banks and engineering firms trying to recover the opportunities for a
certain profit-making and business that they had enjoyed in the colonial period
and now they suddenly were being deprived of. 






Last question. Has your work helped you make sense of
what is currently going on in Egypt and would you shine your enlightened light
on that a bit? Not on the whole general situation but perhaps on parts which
are overlooked or which you find particularly relevant. 



May
be in a couple of aspects. One of them is this kind of very uneasy and
disjunctive assemblage relationship between the West and forms of political Islam.
It sometimes seemed shocking and disturbing and destabilizing that the
political process in Egypt led to the rise and consolidation of power of the
Muslim Brotherhood. But of course the U.S. and other Western powers have had a
very long relationship going back at least to the 1950's—if not before—with
exactly these kinds of political forces or people who were locally in alliance
with them, in places like Saudi Arabia. I have a chapter in Carbon Democracy that explores that
relationship and its disjunctions. And I think it is important to get away from
the notion that is just a sort of electoral politics and uneasy alliances, but
it is actually the outcome of a longer problem. Both domestically within the
politics in the Arab states, of how to found a form of legitimacy that does not
seem to be based on close ideological ties with the West, but at the same time
operates in such in a way, that in practical terms, that kind of alliance can
work. So that would be one aspect of it, to have a slightly longer-term
perspective on those kinds of relationships and how disjunctively they
function.



The
other thing, drawing it a little more directly on some of the work on democracy
in Carbon Democracy, is that so much of the scholarship on democracy is about
equipping people with the right mental tools to be democrats; the right levels
of trust or interpersonal relations or whatever. There is a very different view
in my book, that the opportunities for effective democratic politics require
very different sets of skills and kinds of actions—actions that are much more
as it were obstructionist, and forms of sabotage, quite literally, in the usage
of the term as it comes into being in the early 20th century to
describe the role of strikes and stoppages. These are, I attempt to show, the
effective tools to leverage demands for representation in more egalitarian
democratic politics. I have been very interested in the case of Egypt, in the
particular places and points of vulnerability, that gave rise to the
possibility of sabotage. For instance, one of the less noted aspects of the
Egyptian revolution in general, was the very important role played by the labor
movement; this was not just a Twitter or Facebook revolution, but that was
important as well. Although the labor movement was very heavily concentrated in
industries—in the textile industry—the first group of workers who actually
successfully formed an independent union were the property tax collectors. And
there is a reason for that: there was a certain kind of fiscal crisis of the
state—which had to do with declining oil revenues and other things—and there
was the attempt to completely revise the tax system and to revise it not around
income tax—because there were too few people making a significant income to
raise tax revenues—but around property taxes.
And that was a point of vulnerability and contestation that produced not just
some of the first large-scale strikes but strikes that were effective enough
that the government was forced to recognize a newly independent labor movement.
This case is an instance of how the kind of work I did in the book might be
useful for thinking about how the revolutionary situation emerged in
Egypt. 



Timothy Mitchell is a political theorist and historian. His areas of research
include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and
technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other
forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Much of his
current work is concerned with ways of thinking about politics that allow
material and technical things more weight than they are given in conventional
political theory.  Educated at Queens' College, Cambridge, where he
received a first-class honours degree in History, Mitchell completed his Ph.D.
in Politics and Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University in 1984. He joined
Columbia University in 2008 after teaching for twenty-five years at New York
University, where he served as Director of the Center for Near Eastern
Studies. At Columbia he teaches courses on the history and politics of the
Middle East, colonialism, and the politics of technical things.





Related links:





Faculty Profile at Colombia University
Read
Mitchell's Rethinking Economy (Geoforum
2008) here (pdf)
Read
Mitchell's The Limits of the State:
Beyond Statist Approaches and Their Critics (The American Political Science
Review 1991) here (pdf) 
Read
Mitchell's McJihad: Islam and the U.S.
Global Order (Social Text 2002) here (pdf) 
Read
Mitchell's The Stage of Modernity (Chapter
from book 'Questions of Modernity', 2000) here (pdf) 
Read
Mitchell's The World as Exhibition
(Chapter from book 'Colonising Egypt' 1991) here (pdf) 



Print version of this Talk (pdf)