The Journal of Research Institute for the History of Global Arms Transfer
Online ISSN : 2423-8546
Print ISSN : 2423-8538
ISSN-L : 2423-8538
Volume 2020, Issue 2
Displaying 1-7 of 7 articles from this issue
  • [in Japanese]
    2020 Volume 2020 Issue 2 Pages 1-2
    Published: July 27, 2020
    Released on J-STAGE: January 21, 2025
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
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  • An Analysis through Experiences of Three Japanese
    YASU’O MIZOBE
    2020 Volume 2020 Issue 2 Pages 3-25
    Published: July 27, 2020
    Released on J-STAGE: January 21, 2025
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    During the era of decolonization, Kwame Nkrumah, the first Prime Minister of newly independent Ghana, hosted several international conferences calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons. Tomi Kora, a former female councilor in the Japanese House of Councilors , attended the Conference on Positive Action for Peace and Security in Africa in 1960. Additionally , Shinzo Hamai, then mayor of Hiroshima City, and Ichiro Moritaki, then chairperson of the Japan Confederation of Atomic and Hydrogen Bomb Sufferers Organizations, along with Tomi Kora participated in the Accra Assembly for World Without the Bomb in 1962. Their experiences in Ghana were recorded in the newsletters of peace movement organizations and newspaper articles published in Japan at the time. However, previous research on the history of peace movements and Japanese-African relations has not discussed these documents. Therefore, this paper elucidates the impacts of Ghana-led anti-nuclear weapons campaigns in the early 1960s on Japanese peace movements.
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  • RACHEL BRIGHT
    2020 Volume 2020 Issue 2 Pages 27-44
    Published: July 27, 2020
    Released on J-STAGE: January 21, 2025
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    This article explores the distinctly legal vagueness that underpinned citizenship and subjecthood in the British empire in the early twentieth century, drawing on examples from South Africa and Australia. Situating the administration of citizenship laws within a global context, this offers a revision of the current scholarship on the global ‘color line’. The white ‘color line’ which developed within the British empire was less a shared legal system and more of a constant negotiation between different actors. Unlike other recent studies of citizenship and subjecthood, this is not an intellectual history. This, instead, is a close scrutiny of bureaucratic decision-making precisely because the system which flourished under British rule was designed to accommodate colonial discrimination by encouraging legal vagueness and executive privilege, allowing considerable space for official and unofficial influence. By focusing on liminal groups (Jews in South Africa and women in Australia), it illuminates how a ‘British’ world was constructed, who was included and who excluded from this process, and how this process unfolded, especially concerning issues of race and gender.
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  • FELICITY BARNES
    2020 Volume 2020 Issue 2 Pages 45-62
    Published: July 27, 2020
    Released on J-STAGE: January 21, 2025
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    Throughout the interwar period, Canada, Australia and New Zealand ran intensive marketing campaigns designed to sell their produce to British consumers. Using the very latest in marketing techniques, money from their respective governments, and advice from Britain’s leading advertising agencies, the dominions created films, advertisements, radio talks, recipe books, shop-window displays and street parades to persuade British consumers to buy Canadian apples, New Zealand lamb or Australian butter. These varied campaigns shared a single message: British consumers should buy their products because, the Dominions, like their produce, were British. These campaigns were surprisingly large: one Australian promotional film screened to more than 3 million people in month. But despite its scale, dominion marketing has largely escaped historical attention. However, it offers a new approach to what historians Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson have recently termed the ‘cultural economy’ of empire. Their work emphasizes the role of ‘co-ethnic British networks’ in shaping patterns of trade and migration. This paper interrogates the idea of co-ethnic networks, moving beyond their function to suggest trade not only benefited from such networks but mobilised ideas about race, especially whiteness, to create them.
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  • ANDREW DILLEY
    2020 Volume 2020 Issue 2 Pages 63-82
    Published: July 27, 2020
    Released on J-STAGE: January 21, 2025
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    After a long spell of neglect, historians in the last twenty years have started again to take an interest in the economics of the ‘British World’: an entity centred on Britain and the dominions. Their approach emphasises shared culture and networks. By contrast this article reasserts the importance of institutions of governance in shaping economic transactions and hence the importance of political (not cultural) economy. In order to re-emphasise the connected importance of co-ordination between states within the Empire, it prefers the term Empire-Commonwealth to British world, a term more closely grounded in contemporary language. It argues that the Empire-Commonwealth possessed complex, patchy, but discernible practices of economic governance which the paper delineates and argues were shaped by the overriding concern to maximise the autonomy of self-governing members (Britain and the dominions). These practices let to cooperation over preferential trading arrangements, currency, taxation, migration and investment, law and regulation, and transport and communications. After 1945 the international framework which sustained these practices transformed, while the internal dynamics of the post-imperial Commonwealth made significant cooperation on matters other than aid and development in the global south unlikely. The possibility of broad-ranging governance receded even as intra-Commonwealth trade and investment declined.
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  • MILOŠ VEC
    2020 Volume 2020 Issue 2 Pages 83-119
    Published: July 27, 2020
    Released on J-STAGE: January 21, 2025
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    Why are some weapons regarded as intrinsically evil and others are not? This article intends to supply a history of the stigmatization of weapons on land warfare in the era often labelled ‘classical international law’. This era is packed with discourses not just about war but also treaties’ restrictions on warfare technologies. Even if war itself was considered to be ‘just’, not every military strategy and not every weapon was seen as a legitimate tool. This article takes a multi-normative perspective to examine entanglements between legal norms, morality, and social custom (like military honour codes) and their impact on the project of outlawing particular methods of killing. Although this article’s goal is to draw a detailed sketch of nineteenth-century international law, it will nonetheless go further back in time to include earlier writings because nineteenth-century discourse cannot be understood without references to pre-modern international law authorities such as Hugo Grotius, Emer de Vattel, or Immanuel Kant.
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  • Historicizing the Concept
    IDO OREN, TY SOLOMON
    2020 Volume 2020 Issue 2 Pages 121-144
    Published: July 27, 2020
    Released on J-STAGE: January 21, 2025
    JOURNAL OPEN ACCESS
    The danger posed by 'weapons of mass destruction' (WMD) was the Bush administration’s chief justification for invading Iraq in 2003. Amid the ceaseless repetition of this phrase during the run-up to the invasion, hardly anyone stopped to ask: what is 'WMD' anyway? Is it not a mutable social construct rather than a timeless, self-evident concept? Guided by Nietzsche’s view of the truth as a 'mobile army of metaphors [and] metonyms . . . which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically', we present a history of the metonym WMD. We describe how it was coined by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1937, and subsequently how its meaning was ‘transposed’ and ‘enhanced’ throughout Cold War arms negotiations, in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and in US domestic law. We also discuss how, in the run-up to the Iraq war, 'WMD' did not merely describe an Iraqi threat; it was rather 'embellished poetically and rhetorically' in ways that created the threat. After the Iraq fiasco, ‘WMD’ became the object of satire and its rhetorical power diminished. Still, other, equally-ambiguous phrases such as ‘failed states’ remain available to be embellished rhetorically for the purpose of producing foreign threats.
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