The Past as Nation: Three Dimensions of Armenian Identity

This article argues that the key to understanding nationhood is its relationship with the past - 'its' history. It accepts that nations are essentially modern constructs, based on subjective and objective characteristics, but this is not how members of a nation usually define their collective. What is crucial in the answer to the question 'when is the nation?' is not a given date (which is never fixed and regularly shifts based on need), but how and why the 'when' is defined. Hence, what needs to be analysed are the dynamics of formulating identity and the interpretation of history for contemporary purposes. Using the case of the Armenians, the article demonstrates that the question 'when is the nation?' is answered in terms of three broad time frames: fourth century AD, 2000 BC or earlier and 1915. Each approach looks at the past to define the nation, and, based on its world view, provides an appropriate answer. These differences are not just historiographical debates among specialists, but widely held views affecting current Armenian national identity.     

When is the Greek Nation? The Role of Enemies and Minorities

This paper questions the importance and usefulness of identifying, through theoretical analysis and empirical study, an historical moment when a nation comes into being. In the first part of our study, we discuss briefly the theoretical background of the question 'when is the nation?'. The second part addresses this question with reference to the Greek case. We first look at the process of consolidation of Greek national identity during the first two decades of the twentieth century. The role of Turks, Bulgarians and other neighbouring countries in the development and crystallisation of Greek nationhood is highlighted. We show that although the Greek nation-state was established in 1829, the Greek nation has been in the process of becoming through the nineteenth century until the 1920s, when its ethnic and territorial components were brought together and irredentism was abandoned. However, as we show in the section that follows, the Greek nation has been further reshaped through its interaction with the Muslim minority of western Thrace, its fundamental 'Other within' during the twentieth century. In the concluding section, we look at more recent developments, such as the Greece-FYROM controversy, that have further influenced the definition of the Greek nation. By analysing the dynamic and constantly evolving nature of nation formation as a socio-political process, we show that fixing an historical moment when a nation comes into being is an analytic exercise for which there is little empirical grounding. Rather, we argue, scholarly research should concentrate on 'how' is the nation.     

Thinking Territory Historically

This paper highlights contextual impacts of the de-Russianisation process in the western post-Soviet space formed by three restored and three new nation-states. The demographic trends indicate that in the territorial configuration of this geopolitical zone of Europe the numbers of Russians are decreasing. The key question considered in this paper is whether the de-Russianisation and ethno-political mobilisation processes of the Russophone population contribute to stabilisation or destabilisation of the multi-ethnic societies and their given nation-states. This analysis considers whether articulations of ethno-political interests of Russophone populations sustain the multi-ethnic state consolidation processes based upon civic political nation conceptions or whether Russian ethnicity-based parties complicate necessary nation-state consolidation processes. The specified de-Russianisation tendencies are evolving in the geopolitical zone between the European Union and the Russian Federation and create a differentiated context of changing political, geo-cultural and geo-economic relationships that are developing since the breakdown of the USSR.     

Territorial Integrity: Rethinking the Territorial Sovereign Right of the Existence of the States

Legal contemporary doctrine has a reified approach to the state. This has led to the perception that territorial integrity is the completeness/unity of the state territory. Amazingly international relations and political geography scholars have not enquired about the link between territoriality and territorial integrity. In essence the principle of territorial integrity is the elaborated and sophisticated legal expression of territoriality. It is intimately linked to the state as a legal entity the main objective of which is to ensure its perennial existence within a specific territory whose borders have been established in accordance with international law.

I think that the life of an institution implies that we are able to criticize, to transform, to open the institution to its own future. So the law as such can be deconstructed and has to be deconstructed. That is the condition of historicity, revolution, morals, ethics, and progress. (J. Derrida)     

面向国土景观风貌管控的中国国家 公园空间布局研究

中国国家公园作为自然保护地的主体,在国土尺度 下保护具有代表性景观风貌发挥着重要作用。中国国家公园体 制建设尚处于起步阶段,国家公园的空间布局成为体制建设的 核心问题。合理规划中国国家公园整体空间布局,有助于在国 土尺度下进行景观风貌管控。景观风貌是一定范围内景观特征 的反映。通过引入景观特征评估方法,制定了用于遴选国家公 园的综合区划方案,分析了国家公园建设潜在区域,并在此基 础上结合分析各国国家公园的面积、离散度等指标,对中国 国家公园空间布局关键指标进行限定,以期对中国国家公园 的整体空间布局提供参考。主要结论如下：1)中国景观特征 综合区划方案包括7个一级景观特征区域、115个二级景观特 征区;2)国土面积的25.12%可以作为国家公园建设潜在区 域;3)建议国家公园设立的数量为65~133个,国家公园总面 积占国土面积的5.23%~10.70%。     

Changing Trends in Palestinian Political Activism: The Second Intifada,the Wall Protests,and the Human Rights Turn

This paper asks where and why Palestinian protests take place and how particular manifestations of territorial dislocation affect the dynamics of Palestinian political activism. Political, social and territorial transformations over the Oslo period had resulted in the fragmentation of Palestinian resistance, a development that had become most evident during the second intifada through the absence of mass-based non-violent protest. Israel’s complex control over Palestinian territory and mobility has been a key factor in driving this fragmentation. In contrast to checkpoints, forbidden roads, and closures, the construction of the Separation Wall had a very different impact, and amid the continuation of a violent and fragmented uprising, it presented a focal point for cohesive organised non-violent local protest. This paper examines to what extent the construction of the Wall has engendered a different type of protest, conception of activism and new forms of cooperation, that break the trend of the second intifada.     

农民工定居城市影响因素的实证分析——以合肥市为例

根据2008年关于农民工定居与城市适应的抽样调查数据,探讨、分析了资本积累与定居的关系。在城时间、进城后职业培训情况、城市交往情况、家庭收入等因素对对定居农民工城市适应具有显著的正向影响,表明城市资本积累是农民工定居的积极影响因素;而进城目的、家庭规模、土地承包情况等对定居都产生负向影响作用。研究结论对于政策制定具有重要的启示。     

Images and Imaginings of Palestine: Territory and Everyday Geopolitics for Palestinian Jordanians

In this paper, I delve into the complex ways in which Palestine is conceptualised as both a concrete and amorphous territory through an examination of the everyday practices of displaying images and imagining Palestine. Building from fieldwork conducted with Palestinian Jordanians, I analyse and contextualise images and maps of Palestine that they display in their homes and communities. I complicate what these images seem to represent with insights from interviews I conducted about how they spatially imagine Palestine. Throughout the paper I show that images and imaginings of Palestine are quite diverse and have various territorial meanings. Yet, as varied and seemingly different as these images and imaginings may be, they are nevertheless intimately linked through territorial discourses of displacement and rootedness, as well as through the everyday practices of remembering and resistance. Thus, I contribute to recent scholarship within geopolitics by highlighting (1) the value of examining images and imaginings of everyday geopolitics in tandem with one another, (2) the complex and fluid ways in which territory configures into everyday geopolitics, and (3) that amorphous notions of territory need to be integrated into work on territory more broadly.     

Hakumat al Tayarrat 1 : The Role of Air Power in the Enforcement of Iraq's Boundaries

Much has been written recently about the territorial integrity of Iraq and its problematic invocation and violation by the US, the UK and their allies since the 1991 Gulf War. Little work however, has considered the effects upon Iraq's territorial preservation and territorial sovereignty of these countries’ aerial incursions into Iraq's airspace. This article seeks to address this gap in the literature. It focuses specifically on analysing the use of air power in the skies above Iraq by the US and the UK, arguing that these flights, whilst violating Iraq's territorial sovereignty did, in some cases, paradoxically help to enforce and maintain Iraq's boundaries. The article develops a theoretical framework melding recent work on vertical- and techno-geopolitics, notions of aerial mobility, power projection and air power theorising. This is used to analyse the use of foreign air power to undertake ‘air policing’ and ‘persistent presence’ missions in Iraq, focusing upon the northern no-fly zone in the 1990s and post-2003 operations. This article illustrates the importance of acknowledging and critically analysing the vertical and technological aspects of geopolitics and the aerial aspects of a state's territorial integrity.     

妥协景观思想及其对中国风景园林实践的启迪

追溯了奥德姆“妥协环境”概念原型、莱尔的“人文生态系统”妥协景观思想雏形以及中国语境的“天人不相胜”思想，认为妥协景观既是一种自然-人工生态系统类型，也是一种人与自然交互型的土地利用类型，还是一种指导风景园林规划实践的思想方法。基于此认识，进一步探讨了“妥协景观”思想对当代中国国土空间区划以及风景园林生态规划实践范式的启迪，最终通过案例分析“妥协景观”思想的具体实践途径。     

Reel Geopolitics: Cinemato-graphing Political Space

Recent research has focused on the efforts of national leaders to legitimize and strengthen national identity through the construction of uncomplicated, linear national histories. Paralleling, and in some respects advancing, these efforts are initiatives aimed at staking national claims to particular territories. These claims are the product of 'regimes of territorial legitimation' that reflect the norms of the modern state system. They are fundamentally influenced by two geographic circumstances: the political-territorial status of states at the time of entry into the modern state system and prevailing ideas about the cultural-historical character of state territory. A comparative framework focused on the intersection of these two circumstances provides insights into some basic features of national senses of territory as articulated by those in power within existing states.     

Funding Pain: Bedouin Women and Political Economy in the Naqab/Negev

ABSTRACT

This contribution focuses on the experiences and voices of Palestinian Bedouin women surviving and challenging Israeli colonial policies while residing in their own land and, in particular, the Bedouin women of the Naqab living in unrecognized villages. Through interviews and focus groups, this study learns from and engages with the voices of Palestinian Bedouin women because colonized women's criticisms of the political economic apparatus are seldom invoked to influence policy. Exploring these women's voices offers an opportunity to examine the political economy of their unrecognized, officially nonexistent villages and homes and to rectify the gap in bottom-up knowledge of political economy by investigating the institutional structures that define and circumscribe women's lives. Privileging Bedouin women's production of knowledge carries the analytical value of studying political economy based on women's own experiences and struggles against hegemony.     

Going Underground: Banal Nationalism and Subterranean Elements in Argentina’s Falklands/Malvinas Claim

ABSTRACT

This article calls for consideration of underground elements that have been typically overlooked or unseen in debates about the nation and banal nationalism. The materialities and (re)presentation of elements such as earth, sand and rock have the capacity to be affective, contentious, to embody intimate memories of conflict and to reinforce national territorial aspirations. These subterranean elements have been ‘nationalised’, bathymetrically mapped and deployed by Argentina to make claims over territories in the South Atlantic, including the Falklands/Malvinas. Rather than re-examining these technical procedures undertaken by the state and analysing what they mean for the geopolitics of the South Atlantic, this article explores how the subterranean is manifest in everyday reproductions of nationalism and national memory in Argentina. It presents insights from research undertaken in a range of different environments in Argentina, encompassing museums, veterans’ centres and public monuments, to demonstrate how the presence of the elemental in the everyday can reinforce and also disrupt banal (territorial) nationalism. Furthermore it argues for conceptualisation of the elemental as part of a relational network that links matter, national citizenries and territories together. The conclusion posits that the subterranean elements and their (re)presentation are essential to understanding the materialisation of banal nationalism as part of the everyday reproduction and rejection of claims to ‘national’ territory.     

When is a Nation? Comparing Lithuania and Georgia

The article uses a constructivist reformulation of the question 'when is a nation?' as a parameter of comparison for the analysis of nationalist discourses on history in post-socialist Lithuania and Georgia. It shows that Lithuanian nationalists, by means of a critical reassessment of national history, described the nation as something that still had to be created, whereas Georgian nationalists referred to the unchallenged image of a glorious past and so treated the nation as something to be simply picked up from history. It is also argued that these diverging historiographical narratives correspond to different conceptualisations of the notion of the nation. While Lithuanians nationalists conceptualised the nation in the tradition of the French Revolution as a category that aims at the reconfiguration of state-society relations, Georgian nationalists identified it with traditional modes of organising social relations.     

When is the Nation? Constituent Elements and Processes

Two types of approach to the question 'When is the Nation?' are discussed: conditional and temporal. The relationship between the two approaches are analysed on three levels. First, through an analysis of various theories of nation and nationalism, it argues that determination of the emergence of the nation through enumeration of different 'constituent elements' fails to distinguish the nation from other social groups. Second an analysis of Croatian nationalist ideologies reveals numerous potentialities to define the same nation by emphasizing various, and sometimes contradictory, constituent elements. Finally, a survey conducted on a sample of Croatian population shows that there is no final set of constituent elements that could define the same nation in a specific historical moment. Therefore, the article concludes that the question 'When is the Nation?' could be answered mainly by identifying specific social processes.     

Politics of Precarious Childhood: Ill Treatment of Palestinian Children under the Israeli Military Order

This paper examines the corollaries of the exceptional treatment of Palestinian children under the Israeli military rule. It is shown how the widespread and systematic ill treatment of Palestinian children accrues from exceptional provisions and lack of legal cover of the Israeli military law. Such lack constitutes a precarious condition under which Palestinian children are not treated as children but as a security threat legally accountable for their acts, in many respects with ways similar to adults. Precarity, the paper argues, is produced through three conditions. First, the lack of protection is institutionalised through the legal, territorial and population-regulating techniques internal to state channels. Second, the lack of protection delegates significant power to the discretion of what Judith Butler calls the ‘petty sovereigns’ – to the soldiers, interrogators, police officers, etc., who are asked to rely on their own judgment when making decisions on the fundamental matters regarding the order and justice, even life and death of children. Third, the use of discretionary power is not only encouraged by the legal system and its exceptions; it also works in tandem with the institutional culture of impunity that accepts the violent disciplining, even torture, of Palestinian children.     

Uneven Borders,Coloured (Im)mobilities: ID Cards in Palestine/Israel

The Israeli state apparatus mandates differentiated IDs to Palestinian citizens of Israel, Palestinian non-citizens in East Jerusalem, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The bureaucracy of Palestinian ID cards since 1948 has rendered Palestinians more legible for the security interests of Israel while simultaneously discriminating Palestinians from Jews as unequal citizens and non-citizens. The ID card regime, and less so the permit regime, limits Palestinian geographic movement and economic mobility while simultaneously permitting freer Jewish-Israeli flows and mobilities. ID cards demonstrate the power of the Israeli regime to produce distinct people and bind them to specific territories (such as the Palestinians), while allowing others (Jewish-Israelis) to ‘trespass’ over those same boundaries. Through ID cards borders are erected between Jewish and Arab people, not Israeli and Palestinian territory. The ID card regime puts into question the nature and territorial boundaries of ‘Israel’, and the geopolitical existence of the ‘Palestinian Territories.’     

欧洲乡村景观价值解读与评估方法对中国的启示

中国具有丰富的乡村景观,但其价值解读与评估方法还存在不足。文化景观研究以动态整体的视角解读景观价值,评估景观质量,准确把握景观特征和演进规律。欧洲国家的乡村景观研究起步较早,以维持土地资源永续利用和延续历史文脉特征为重点的景观解读与评估方法有助于引导乡村可持续发展。从自然、文化、经济、社会与美学等方面梳理了乡村景观价值及其载体要素,分析了欧洲国家典型的乡村景观评估方法,以期为中国乡村景观研究提供借鉴。     

A Cartography of the Unknowable: Technology,Territory and Subterranean Agencies in Israel’s Management of the Gaza Tunnels

ABSTRACT

This article evaluates the potential for agency exercised by the subterranean volume in geopolitical conflict. Joining recent geographical conceptualisations of territory as a volumetric assemblage with calls for an elemental geopolitics, it argues that the density of the underground layer creates a convoluted techno-political problem that obfuscates the state’s means of directly observing, visualising and knowing the topological space of territory. To illustrate this, a methodological approach based on the relational ontologies of actor-network-theory (ANT) and assemblage theory is applied to an empirical study of the geophysical sensing techniques used by Israeli engineers, scientists and military to manage cross-border tunnels built by the Palestinian militant group Hamas before and after the 2014 Gaza war. The soil conditions, settlement patterns and infrastructures in the Gaza-Western Negev region have necessitated experimentation with complex and multiple forms of scientific and political expertise in attempts to locate the invisible tunnels, alongside a shift towards increasingly oblique techniques of cartographic representation of the sub-surface. The contingency of these efforts has unsettled the State of Israel’s confidence in its ability to manage geopolitical risks through techniques of territorial control. This case raises poignant questions about the extent of the capacities and limitations of technological solutions and geopolitical practices to secure territory when confronted with the geophysical agency of the underground.     

A Critical Analysis of Peltzman’s “The Effects of Automobile Safety Regulation”

Karl Polanyi considered that the relationship between the markets and their societies was a central feature of any social order. He studied what he called "ancient societies," to compare them with his own times, in an effort to understand that subject. This paper aims to show, following Polanyi's work on Classical Greece, that it is possible to make a clear analogy between the Athenian state and economy with the modern Welfare State. First, we present Polanyi's study of the early Athenian economy, focusing on the coexistence of a kind of state economic planning and a market. Second, we show how this relates to Polanyi's emphasis in the comparison of different societies and times. Third, we characterize the contemporary Welfare State to make an analogy between these two forms of economic organization. We conclude by underlining the relevance of this analogy in understanding the societies of today.