Examining "The end of revolution": a foretaste of Wang Hui’s thought

Wang Hui is a significant contemporary Chinese thinker and a key representative of Chinese New Left thought. This article provides a critical review of some of the themes that emerge from Wang’s The End of Revolution as a means of situating his position in China’s intellectual landscape, with a particular mind to exploring the historicity of Wang’s thought as it informs his views. The essay engages some of the key discursive threads in The End of Revolution and provides a critical overview of Wang’s positions on neoliberalism, the tension between Western articulations of modernity and China’s own self-image

Collaborative and competitive strategies in the variability and resiliency of large-scale societies in Mesoamerica

Examinations of the variation and duration of past large-scale societies have long involved a conceptual struggle between efforts at generalization and the unraveling of specific trajectories. Although historical particulars are critical to understanding individual cases, there exist both scientific and policy rationales for drawing broader implications regarding the growing corpus of cross-cultural data germane to understanding variability in the constitution of human societies, past and present. Archaeologists have recently paid increased attention to successes and failures in communal-resource management over the long term, as articulated by the transdisciplinary theory on cooperation and collective action. In this article, we consider frameworks that have been traditionally employed in studies of the rise, diversity, and fall of large-scale preindustrial aggregations. We suggest that a comparative theoretical perspective that foregrounds collective-action problems, unaligned individual and group interests, and the social mechanisms that promote or hamper cooperation advances our understanding of variability in these early cooperative arrangements. We apply such a perspective to an examination of cities from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to demonstrate tendencies for more collective systems to be larger and longer lasting than less collective ones, likely reflecting greater resiliency in the face of the ecological and cultural perturbations specific to the region and era

Irrigation and the Origins of the Southern Moche State on the North Coast of Peru

In this paper, I examine the role that irrigation played in the formation of the Southern Moche state in the Moche Valley, Peru. Specifically, I attempt to test Wittfogel and Steward's hydraulic model, which postulates that in certain arid environments, the managerial requirements of construction and maintenance of irrigation systems played a crucial role in the formation of centralized polities. I formulate and evaluate four hypotheses concerning the role of irrigation systems in the Moche Valley. Those hypotheses are then evaluated using settlement pattern data drawn from two surveys that cover the entire coastal section of the valley and provide information on 910 archaeological sites. Based on those data, I present a sequence of political development for the valley from the formation of the first autonomous village in the Late Preceramic period (2500–1800 B. C.) to the zenith of the Southern Moche state. Evaluation of the four hypotheses indicates that the managerial requirements of irrigation were relatively unimportant; rather, warfare, highland-coastal interaction, and political control of irrigation systems created opportunities for leaders to form a highly centralized, territorially expansive state sometime between A. D. 200 and 700

Accumulative Bad Governance

This article argues that accumulative bad governance over three decades of Mubarak's regime represents one of the main reasons why people revolted. Bad governance contributed to the fall of the regime in three fundamental ways: first, it created the conditions (such as rampant corruption, violation of human rights and absence of rule of law) that served to inspire public action against the rulers; second, it led to the breakdown of core elements critical for regime stability (within the bureaucracy and the judiciary for example) and third, it catalysed the middle?class who played a key role in agitating for the uprisings via Facebook and other social media. However, in exposing the dynamics of bad governance in Egypt, this article suggests that the problem is not only one of governance gone bad but the very ‘good governance’ paradigm promoted by international actors. By focusing on institutional reform, the good governance paradigm did not capture the way in which actors, processes and values become diffuse across the state?society divide. A relational governance approach would be more analytically useful in capturing and engaging with some of these dynamics

Warfare, Fiscal Capacity, and Performance

We exploit differences in casualties sustained in pre-modern wars to estimate the impact of fiscal capacity on economic performance. In the past, states fought different amounts of external conflicts, of various lengths and magnitudes. To raise the revenues to wage wars, states made fiscal innovations, which persisted and helped to shape current fiscal institutions. Economic historians claim that greater fiscal capacity was the key long-run institutional change brought about by historical conflicts. Using casualties sustained in pre-modern wars to instrument for current fiscal institutions, we estimate substantial impacts of fiscal capacity on GDP per worker. The results are robust to a broad range of specifications, controls, and sub-samples

Hydraulic Mission at Home, Hydraulic Mission abroad? Examining Turkey’s Regional ‘Pax-Aquarum’ and Its Limits

Water resource development has always been considered as a strategic tool by the Turkish ruling elites to reach food and energy security, as well as to enhance domestic peace and stability since the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. Therefore, the concept of “hydraulic mission” fits this strategic understanding, and it has become a prevailing paradigm in Turkey’s water resource development. Many academic works have already been conducted to understand how Turkey has waged an ambitious hydraulic mission by securitizing its water resource development primarily on economic and political bases. However, fewer studies have shown how the Turkish ruling elites have also considered Turkey’s extensive hydraulic development, sanctioned by the hydraulic mission, as a foreign policy tool to enhance its influence at the international level. Drawing primarily upon the concept of opportunitisation and the body of literature that looks at, albeit indirectly, the international aspect of the hydraulic mission, this study fills this gap in the literature by looking at three case studies: The Southeastern Anatolian Project (GAP), the Water Export Initiatives to the Middle East, and the Water Transfer Project to Cyprus, namely the Peace Water Project. Being informed by an in-depth investigation of those three case studies, this study argues that ambitious hydraulic development projects conducted by the Turkish government do not only serve to keep peace and stability at the domestic level, but they are also strategic tools to enhance Turkey’s influence abroad. However, this study also shows the limits of Turkey’s hydraulic mission abroad. While Turkey promotes those water initiatives as tools for improving regional peace and stability, they are challenged by the recipient countries on social, economic, and political base

Water and power: Reintegrating the state into the study of Egyptian irrigation

The study of irrigation in ancient Egypt has swung between two poles. Early environmental‐determinist scholarship stressed the imperative of state control while the most recent work denies the state any significant role and instead emphasizes the agency of local communities. This article briefly explores the historiography of Egyptian irrigation, critiquing both its colonialist roots and the extreme reaction against colonialist preconceptions that marks current scholarship. A case study of Roman state coordination is then presented as an argument for reintegrating the state into the history of Egyptian water management.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138919/1/hic312394.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/138919/2/hic312394_am.pd

Space, state-building and the hydraulic mission: crafting the Mozambican State

This article explores the role of large-scale water infrastructure in the formation of states in sub-Saharan Africa. We examine this through a focus on government agents and their shifting hydro-developmental visions of the state in colonial and post-colonial Mozambique. Over time, the focus, underlying principles, and goals of the hydraulic mission shifted, triggered by contextual factors and historical developments within and outside the country. We identify the making of three hydraulic paradigms, fostering different imaginaries of ‘the state’ and social and spatial engineering of the territory: the ‘Estado Novo’ (1930 - 1974), the socialist post-independence state-space (1974 - 1987) and the neoliberal state (1987 - present). We then conclude by discussing how the shifting discursive justifications for infrastructure projects consolidate different state projects and link these to material re-patterning of hydrosocial territories, showing that whilst promoted as a rupture with the past, emerging projects tend to reaffirm, rather than redistribute, power and water within the country

An evolutionary model explaining the Neolithic transition from egalitarianism to leadership and despotism.

The Neolithic was marked by a transition from small and relatively egalitarian groups, to much larger groups with increased stratification. But the dynamics of thisremain poorly understood. It is hard to see how despotism can arise without coercion, yet coercion could not easily have occurred in an egalitarian setting. Using a quanti-tative model of evolution in a patch-structured population, we demonstrate that the interaction between demographic and ecological factors can overcome this conundrum.We model the co-evolution of individual preferences for hierarchy alongside the degree of despotism of leaders, and the dispersal preferences of followers. We show that voluntary leadership without coercion can evolve in small groups, when leaders help to solve coordination problems related to resource production. An example is coordinating construction of an irrigation system. Our model predicts that the transition to larger despotic groups will then occur when: 1. surplus resources lead to demographicexpansion of groups, removing the viability of an acephalous niche in the same areaand so locking individuals into hierarchy; 2. high dispersal costs limit followers' abilityto escape a despot. Empirical evidence suggests that these conditions were likely metfor the first time during the subsistence intensification of the Neolithic