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Fall of Saigon
No full textThe Vietnam War effectively ended on 30 April 1975 with the arrival of the North Vietnamese army in Saigon. Thousands fled the city, but many more were left behind
Review of: Genus und Geschlecht in europäischen Sprachen: Geschichte und Gegenwart, Edited by Vincent Balnat and Barbara Kaltz (2025), Narr/Francke/Attempto Verlag, 468pp.
No full textThe Return of the Coup d’État
No full textCoups d’état have returned to Africa’s governance stage. Scholars and practitioners perceive this as an insidious attack on democratic governance. Their pessimism is influenced by historical antecedents and the frequent vacillation of current transitional military councils in Africa. This chapter takes a different view which draws on the concepts of ‘critical rupture’ and ‘revolutionary coup’ to propose an alternative framework for reimagining coups d’état as a dynamic impulse for reconstruction and renewal. It argues that, whilst coups d’état are considered as fundamentally detrimental to constitutional governance, the dynamics of contemporary coups d’état highlight the emergence of new and renewed spaces for the expression of collective consciousness and political interaction in Africa. The potentials of this new dynamism can be harnessed to ignite and sustain progressive democratic governance transformations which overall, contribute to the reconstruction and renewal of society over a short, medium and long term period
Silencing the Guns in Africa: How Africa’s youth should be supported to contribute to democratic governance
No full textThe Geopolitics of AI-Driven Arms Races
No full textThis forum highlights the disruptive implications of AI for the geopolitical landscape by examining its integration into command-and-control systems, military doctrines, and global security discourses. These transformations are embedded in core debates on spatial power projection, supply chain control, technological sovereignty, shifting international alliances, and the changing geography of innovation hubs. AI-assisted arms races are thus understood not only as strategic phenomena between states, but also as drivers of spatial reconfiguration in the global security order. Challenging the reductive metaphor of a singular ‘AI arms race’, the forum conceptualises contemporary rivalries as overlapping, AI-assisted competitions that amplify key strategic domains such as nuclear deterrence, cyber warfare, and air warfare
Communicating Across Contexts: How Translation Can Benefit Comparative Area Studies
No full textRegardless of the methods used, political science research typically seeks to generate causal arguments that are applicable across a population of cases. But is this the only way to think about how political science research travels? We advocate for an additional logic for thinking about how comparative research might produce broadly applicable insights: translation. Much like linguistic translation, the goal of comparing for translation is to develop ideas that are intelligible or recognizable in a different context, even as the context will change the ways in which an idea or political practice is interpreted or enacted. This process then allows scholars to reflect back on the categories, concepts, and assumptions with which they began research and potentially find new causal pathways, develop novel explanatory outcomes, and creatively redescribe or reconceptualize political phenomena. The language of translation opens new possibilities for comparative area studies as it develops a clear logic for comparisons that are both deeply grounded in particular times and places and speak across regions
The Twilight Years of Taiwan’s Sugar Railways
No full textIn their heyday, Taiwan’s sugar railways were the world’s most extraordinary narrow gauge industrial railway system. Its tracks criss-crossed southern and central Taiwan and the track length of 3,000 kilometres exceeded the national railway’s network. With sugar being Taiwan’s largest export, by bringing sugar cane from the field to the mills and then sugar products to the ports, the sugar railways played a critical role in Taiwan’s economic miracle. The railways were not limited to transporting sugar and instead carried a very diverse range of freight. It also had a passenger network of 600 kilometres that included limited stop express trains. In our book we focus on the twilight years of Taiwan’s sugar railways in the 1990s when the still extensive system was entering a period of rapid closures. We tell the story of Taiwan’s sugar railways using a collection of previously unpublished photographs. We also try to show the human side of this remarkable story by bringing in insights from extensive interviews with retired sugar railway workers
‘Vandals', ‘idiots' and ‘completely deranged'! Exploring political responses to climate activism in Germany and Italy
Get PDFThis paper analyses discursive responses to the Letzte Generation/Ultima Generazione (LG/UG) protests in Germany and Italy. Despite the political differences in the two countries’ governing coalitions, both exhibit similarities in their response to civil disobedience-centred climate activism. We identify three discursive strategies that situate protesters outside the democratic sphere: disparaging, patronising, and criminalising. These strategies are utilised within larger narratives constructed around the activism of LG/UG: that these groups represent a threat to liberty, democracy and social cohesion. We see the antagonism between state and activist groups as rooted in competing understandings of democracy, and legitimate ways of effecting change
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