Brazil is one of the countries with the closest ties to the United
States among many countries in Latin America, and to a certain extent
it is similar to the United States, even considered as the “tropical United
States”, with political, economic and cultural affinities. This paper argues
that this is not a simple echo or imitation between the extreme right-wing
governments of the two countries in recent years, but that there are longstanding institutional reasons behind this evolution. Since the late 19th
century, this proximity has evolved through the interaction between supply
and demand at the institutional level between Brazil and the United States.
Starting from the perspective of institutional supply and demand, this
paper analyzes the reasons for the closeness between Brazil and the United
States from three perspectives: political, economic, and cultural. From
the analytical framework of institutional supply and demand, Brazil’s
proximity to the United States lies in its learning from and approaching the
United States, based on its own institutional needs for development; it also
results from the United States’s efforts to supply and export institutional
models to Brazil, in order that the United States achieves its strategic
interests in Latin America.
Since the coup d’etat in Mali in 2020, the relationship between
France and Mali’s military government has deteriorated rapidly in a
short period of time. Some studies believe that the involvement of the
Russian “Wagner” mercenaries, the anti-French sentiment of all sectors
of society in Mali, and the violation of democratic rules and values by
the Malian junta are the main reasons for the breakdown of Franco-Mali
relations. These viewpoints explain the question from the level of causal
logic of specific events, and regard France as an actor that responds
passively, instead of systematically explaining the reasons why France
makes relevant decisions from the level of state behavior logic. France’s
policy toward Africa has long been influenced by two sets of rational
rules, namely the “value rationality” rules with the Western-style liberal
democratic system as the core, and the “instrumental rationality” rules
dominated by the realistic interests of the country. Historically, France’s
African policy has prioritized “instrumental rationality”. In recent years,
the French government under the leadership of Hollande and Macron
has tried to make “value rationality” the main guiding principle of its
policy toward Africa. The decision-making process of France’s military
intervention in Mali in 2013 shows that the weight of “value rationality”
in France’s policy towards Mali has increased significantly and equalled or
even surpassed the influence of “instrumental rationality”. This emphasis
on “value rationality” was further strengthened during the Macron period.
After two consecutive coups in Mali from 2020 to 2022, the decision of
the French government shows that it is willing to sacrifice “instrumental rationality” in order to follow “value rationality”. This change is trendy.
However, it does not mean that France has completely abandoned
“instrumental rationality” in the Sahel region and even the wider subSaharan Africa region. France’s attitude towards Chad after the coup d’etat
in 2021 shows that France is still willing to implement some policies
that run counter to “value rationality” for fulcrum countries with special
strategic significance. Therefore, countries such as Chad and Niger, whose
military resources and natural resources are of great importance to France,
are likely to receive special leniency from France based on “instrumental
rationality”. Countries with weak military capabilities, lack of strategic
resources, and high governance deficits, such as Mali and Burkina Faso,
may become the harsh targets of France’s “value rationality”.
The common law system is a legal system developed on the
basis of English common law, and the members of this legal system
include the United Kingdom, the United States and the vast majority of
Commonwealth countries. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), a country
largely influenced by civil and Islamic law, has in recent years built two
financial free zones with common law systems, in Dubai and Abu Dhabi
respectively. The case of the UAE taking the initiative to transplant
English common law has created a new model of transplanting English
law on the initiative of former British colonies and protectorates in the
21st century, exploring the possibility of introducing case law in countries
with a codified law tradition, and reflecting the advantages that English
common law has in the era of legal globalization.
As for the origin of modern Algeria, academic circles, especially
western scholars, often take the “Origin Theory of Ottomans” as the
explanation path, that is, Algerian countries can only be traced back to
the Ottoman Empire at the earliest, and it lacks attention and research
on the early Algerian countries. The earliest political entity in Algeria
originated from several tribal alliances formed during the 4th to 3th
centuries BC. In the colonial period of The Roman Empire, under the
dual pressure of external invasion and internal competition, these tribal
alliances successively established the chiefdoms Numidia kingdom and
romanized local regime in the form of wars. In the 7th century, after the
entry of Islam, the natural cohesion of tribal civilization combined with the
religious cohesion of Arab-Islamic civilization gave birth to several local
emirates. The 11th and 13th centuries were a ripe period for the formation
of the early Algerian state. Through religious change, the Berber tribes of
the desert frontier launched numerous conquests in the heartland, creating
two frontier empires. The historical facts of Algeria’s early state formation
reflect that there had been rich political civilization in Africa before the
western colonial rule.
After decades of geography and area studies drifting apart,
I argue there has been an area studies’ turn in geography. The long
divergence between the two subjects, however, has resulted in a certain
misunderstanding by geographers of what area studies scholarship is and
what this field can contribute to the discipline. Area studies should not be
considered as an approach that merely concentrates on the representation
of difference but rather as a milieu in which research of regional
differences can be conducted and geographical concepts can be ‘diffracted’.
Area studies can bring new research methods to geography, providing us
ways to explore what role geography plays in the world, and how it ties up
with the world.
When all disciplines in the Chinese academia have
coincidentally begun to discuss fieldwork, fieldwork has become an
academic ecology in the transdisciplinary perspective. The formation of
fieldwork ecology is closely related to the prevalence of interdisciplinarity
or transdisciplinarity in the academia. The popularity of the
transdisciplinary concept in the global academia implies the deconstruction
of the existing university system rooted in disciplinary classifications and
the emphasis on a positivist methodology based on case studies. In the field
of area studies, which is an emerging interdisciplinary discipline, fieldwork
has become an important methodology because of its characteristics of
dividing research objects by geographical location. Fieldwork is both a
scientific integration of a series of research methods and a disciplinary
synthesis covering several disciplines. The commonalities of fieldwork
in the interdisciplinary perspective are problem-oriented, grasping the
complexity of the research problem; pursuing a holistic perspective of a
certain social field, considering the diversity of the problem; attaching
importance to first-hand materials, and emphasizing the dynamics of
grasping reality. Fieldwork in transdisciplinary discipline is bottom-up,
generative, and original in thinking about research questions from a holistic
perspective. As a new interdisciplinary discipline in China, area studies are
constantly exploring their knowledge system, the core of the discipline and
the boundaries of the discipline. By maintaining a certain degree of boundary
ambiguity, area studies will embrace more flexible and dynamic researches.
In a long period of time, researches on the urban history or
urbanization mostly follow the logic of linear evolution, that is, the history
of urban development with increasing population and spatial expansion,
emphasizing the descriptive statistical analysis and underestimating
the important role of actors and their actions. The study of urban
changes viewing from the urban anthropology perspective enables the
deconstruction of the city’s space and time, by analyzing the symbolic
power and cultural significance of urban places or components such as
streets, buildings, monuments, and infrastructures, to deeply understand
the complexity and heterogeneity of a city through a dynamic and practice
approach. Based on this, this paper focuses on Mexico City, the largest
city in Latin America with a population of 20 million, and presents
the changes in road planning, urban construction, space segmentation,
landscape design, cultural leisure, and commercial development in the
“historical center” of Mexico City and its surrounding areas since the late
19th century, to reveal tension between the conceived space under the
official discourse and the bottom-up resistance of the local residents, thus
providing a new perspective for understanding the two-way construction
of “actors” and “city” in urban history.
Host: Institute for International and Area Studies Address: Institute for International and Area Studies, Room 205, Main Building, Tsinghua University, Haidian District, Beijing Postcode: 100084 Tel: (010) 62780635 Email: areastudies@tsinghua.edu.cn