Thesis (M.A. International St.) -- University of Adelaide, Dept. of Politics, 2000. / Bibliography: leaves 72-78.

Not available / text

The China we know today is the product of vast frontier conquests of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the expanding Qing empire. China Marches West tells the story of this unprecedented expansion and explores its consequences for the modern Chinese nation. / Jacket cover of book

Character list of Chinese terms in book China Marches West.

Thesis (M.A. in Security Studies (Civil-Military Relations))--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2005. / Thesis Advisor(s): Thomas Bruneau. Includes bibliographical references (p. 75-79). Also available online.

Dr. Andrés Serbin. Es Presidente Ejecutivo de la Coordinadora Regional de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales (CRIES) y consejero del Consejo Argentino de Relaciones Internacionales (CARI). Es miembro fundador y co-presidente durante dos periodos del Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict (GPPAC). Desde 1997 es el Director de la revista académica trilingüe Pensamiento Propio. Es autor de varios libros en inglés y español y es actualmente Presidente de la sección Asia y las Américas de LASA. / Eurasia es una región poco conocida en América Latina y el Caribe, pese a estar convirtiéndose en un decisivo polo de poder alternativo en el mundo contemporáneo. Un denso entramado político institucional se configura en el ámbito euroasiático sobre la base de diferentes procesos de conflicto y de conectividad, de la convergencia estratégica entre China y Rusia; del ambiguo papel de la India y de otros países de la región como Irán, Turquía y Kazajistán. La comprensión de esta compleja dinámica, desde una perspectiva latinoamericana, permite entender las actuales relaciones entre Eurasia y América Latina y sus futuras potencialidades, cruciales para una inserción de la región en el cambiante y turbulento mundo actual.

The study of ancient Eurasian metallurgy has been suffering from (or preoccupied by) two conventional perspectives. One is that of the diffusion model emphasising the importance of the settled empires of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, of south-eastern Europe and of China (Shennan 1986, 1993; Kristiansen 1984). The supremacy of these 'cradles' of early civilisation is marked not only by social hierarchies, but also by technological inventions such as metal production. This view sees the mobile populations of the Eurasian steppe as occupying the "hinterland" of these early settled states in the south, believing that the emergence of metal technologies in the Steppe was the result of the expansions of "advanced" civilisations. The second perspective is rooted in the provenance study which traces metal objects back to their geological sources (Pernicka 2014). It assumes that chemical and isotopic composition of metal is static and only reflects a simple linear relationship between artefacts and specific ore deposits. Drawing from a legacy database of approximately 9,000 chemical analyses of copper-based artefacts, this thesis rejects the simplicity of both the diffusion and the provenance models. While admitting that the use of metal might have originated from western Asia, the development of metallurgy in the Eurasian steppe should be understood on its own terms. It is constantly re-shaped by vigorous circulation of metal artefacts across mobile communities on a regional or inter-regional scale. This observation is based on the application of a new innovative framework to interpret the patterns of compositional data (Bray et al. 2015). This novel method argues that metal can flow, quite literally, from one object to another as it is re-melted, re-mixed and re-cast in different shapes and colours, depending on different social contexts. Thermodynamic modelling and modern experiments have shown that during the copper melt, some volatile elements in copper alloys (e.g. arsenic, antimony, and zinc) are preferentially removed through oxidative loss. Instead, some elements, such as silver, nickel, and gold, tend to be preserved in metals. These predictable patterns of elemental losses provide valuable information to trace the directional flow of metal units between regions/cultures, if we combine chemical data of metal artefacts properly with archaeological context, landscape and chronology. By using this new methodology, several routes of copper supplies have been identified in the Steppe during different periods. They feature the exchange of metals within regional networks, fuelled by local copper sources. The Urals, central Kazakhstan, the Altai, and the Minusinsk-Tuva regions were the primary copper production centres that developed distinct trace-element chemistry and artefact typology. By contrast, alloying techniques employed by steppe peoples, generally demonstrate the long-distance connections based on two major metallurgical practices: arsenical copper in the western steppe and tin-bronze in the eastern steppe. Copper-arsenic production was concentrated in the Caucasus but the recycling of its arsenical copper became more apparent further away towards the Urals. On the other hand, the invention of tin-bronze metallurgy was triggered by the formation of the Seima-Turbino phenomenon (c. 2100- 1800/1700 BC) in the Altai, and this alloying tradition was amplified by the emergence of the Andronovo culture (c. 1700-1400 BC) in the Ural-Kazakh steppe. Tin-bronze ornaments, in particular, were exchanged between eastern and western mobile communities over a considerable distance, through the mechanism of pastoral seasonal movements. In conclusion, traditional views of diffusion and provenance theories cannot be uncritically applied to the inception of ancient metallurgy in the Eurasian steppe. Mobile pastoralists developed multi-regional production hubs based on the accessibility of ore resources and the variations in subsistence strategies. Although steppe metalwork revealed some technological borrowings from settled communities, steppe peoples had transformed them into locally adapted products that could fit into their socio-economic systems. That is, when dealing with the issues of Eurasian metallurgy, we should acknowledge the complexity of human engagement with metal and look into subtler differences in cultural context, landscape, and ideology.

Despite more than a century of anthropological research, the origins of reindeer domestication remain elusive. A range of theories has been proposed as to the identity/identities of the first people(s) to tame reindeer for human use, and of the conceptual origins of reindeer husbandry (e.g. as an alternative to cattle, horses, dogs, etc.). While only a few of these theories still have adherents, none can be said to be demonstrated. This thesis seeks to contribute to the solving of this question by examining the origins of reindeer terminology--those words in the the many circumpolar languages for 'tame reindeer' and 'wild reindeer'. Examining data in nearly three hundred (mostly-northern) languages and dialects, the author hopes to determine which vocabulary is native to the peoples who use it and which terms are borrowed from other sources; these borrowings may mirror the transmission routes of reindeer husbandry as a form of economy. When plotted on maps, the linguistic data give credence to the most popular anthropological theory of the origins of reindeer domestication.

This thesis examines the challenges that the Federal and Amhara National Regional State (ANRS)1 Courts of Ethiopia face in the realisation of legal and social justice. The Ethiopia Constitution (1995) under Article 43 declares that Ethiopian people have the right to improved living standards and sustainable development where the basic aim of development activity is to enhance, through their full participation, citizens’ capacity for development and the meeting of their basic needs. The Constitution underlined this as the ‘North Star’ of social justice which would be meaningless unless dispute resolution mechanisms empower litigants and the people in gaining social justice and thus the attainment of the Constitutional objective. The attainment of the social justice is however problematic as the legal justice the formal court is administering does not meet the people’s Constitutional expectations. The mismatch between legal and social justice, coupled with the legal history and the prevalence of justice pluralism, tends to force the People of Ethiopia to use non-formal systems of dispute resolution. Thus, there is a need to refine the formal and non-formal systems and to align them with the Constitutional imperative of social justice. Judicial reform is being implemented, with the help of international institutions like the World Bank, but the underlining concern is whether the World Bank proposals on judicial and legal reform will meet these needs or whether they are too located in Western values, the suggestion being that they may suffer from the same problems as other modernisation projects. There also lies a tension between the Constitutional expectation, the conceptualisation of justice by professionals and clients, and the overall purpose of securing justice and preventing injustice. Litigants’ preference for justice is itself in conflict with other litigants and the diverse institutional understanding of justice that made the attainment of social justice a difficult exercise. The area is found to be so problematic that there is a need to re-connect the practical conceptualisation of justice with the Constitutional conceptualisation of social justice which the Federal and ANRS courts require the redoing of justice so that the conceptualisation of justice would not cause irreversible damage to people’s societal, economic, and ecological demands and to the sustainability of justice and development.

This thesis provides a critical account of state transformation on one of the last ‘frontiers’ of mineral exploration and extraction. Mongolia’s struggle to consolidate its extractive development strategy lies in a fundamental tension between the nature of global capital investment and the responsiveness of national democratic institutions to their political electorate. In this sense, Mongolia is part of a broader pattern of state formation in a global era. This pattern has been recognised in established Western democracies, but, as this thesis argues, vulnerable states in the periphery of the global economy are also being affected with potentially more immediate and alarming consequences. In the context of a transition to a development strategy reliant on the extraction and export of raw minerals (primary commodities) since 1997, the Mongolian state has entered the world of competitive international finance (as opposed to development loans) and investment, in which courting and preserving the interest and ‘confidence’ of the investor is paramount for the government. In the early years of the millennium (2003-2012), Mongolian citizens became increasingly engaged in democratic political processes and particularly vocal regarding the lack of perceived public benefit from mining investment and the damaging socio-environmental consequences of extraction in rural areas. Thus, I argue that a constitutional struggle played itself out between the contradictory impulses of the state towards investors and citizens as evidenced in the see-saw cycles of legal and policy reform between 1997 and 2013. Consequently, by the end of 2013, the general downturn in global commodity prices and the particular “vote of no confidence” in Mongolia’s investment environment from the majority of investors led to the consolidation of a cross-party ‘stability consensus’ within the state. The process of ‘stabilising’ the investment environment has occurred at the expense of the democratic constitution of the state, demonstrated in the curtailment of Parliamentary powers over policy-making processes, the limitation of self-government for sub-national administrations and the restriction of civil society organisations’ participation in political processes. As a post-socialist state adjusting to the constraints of the global economy and the cycles of commodity markets, Mongolia provides concrete evidence of the antagonistic relationship between national democracy and global economic integration, and the reality of the latter’s constitutional impacts.