Fifty Years of Development of Soviet Geographic Thought

A review of trends in Soviet geography covers the increasing specialization of physical-geographic disciplines and attempts to integrate physical geography through landscape-study techniques and the theory of a physical-geographic envelope of the earth. Economic geography has focused on regionalization problems and the formation of territorial-production complexes. The controversy over the content of geography is reviewed, and cartography and regional geography are viewed as frameworks for the generalization of geographic information. The new constructive school of Soviet geography is described.     

Regionalizing global trade patterns, 1981–2001: application of a new method

This paper investigates the establishment of trading regions in the global economy at the national level using a measure of trade intensity and a regional assignment algorithm that generates economically meaningful trading regions. Although there is definite regionalization in the global economy with regard to international trade, there is no evidence of an increase in the concentration of that regionalization over time. The geography of international trade is incredibly dynamic, with change related to political, historical and economic forces. Overall, trading regions have relatively few members and are increasingly a set of geographically close countries.     

Cantonisation: Historical Paths to Territorial Autonomy for Regional Cultural Communities

Abstract. Since the First World War, grants of territorial autonomy have been a widespread means by which regimes of diverse ideologies and political cultures have attempted to address the demands of regional cultural communities within their borders. Cantonisation, or asymmetrical decentralisation along territorial-cultural lines, has been a common form of territorial autonomy employed by these states. Yet, despite its importance, little is known about whether and why such cantonisation measures have helped or hindered the search for peace and stability in culturally heterogeneous states. Part of the answer lies in analysing the historical-political contexts, or historical paths, by which cantonisation arrangements have emerged. Comparative analysis identifies five such paths: international settlements; state-building; democratisation or transitions from authoritarian rule; democratic maintenance; and decolonisation. Each of these paths poses distinctive problems for the evolution of the cantonisation arrangement.     

The Atlantic crisis of confidence

As the ultimate enforcer of such international rules and order as can be said to exist, the United States will often find itself in tension with those rules, and at times may be to stand outside them altogether. Yet for this sort of dispensation to have any international acceptance whatsoever depends on a high level of international confidence that American power will be exercised prudently, wisely and benevolently. Such confidence is precisely what the Bush administration has squandered, a loss that is far more damaging and vital than abstract arguments about force and legitimacy, or contending visions of international order. Confidence will not be restored by continued ideological argument. Rather, the transatlantic alliance needs to concentrate pragmatically on the key issues of international security: fighting terrorism, controlling WMD proliferation, and strategically selective state-building. If this focused cooperation can survive further probable setbacks in Iraq, then there is hope for reversing a deepening transatlantic alienation.     

p‐Functional Clusters Location Problem for Detecting Spatial Clusters with Covering Approach

Regionalization or districting problems commonly require each individual spatial unit to participate exclusively in a single region or district. Although this assumption is appropriate for some regionalization problems, it is less realistic for delineating functional clusters, such as metropolitan areas and trade areas where a region does not necessarily have exclusive coverage with other regions. This paper develops a spatial optimization model for detecting functional spatial clusters, named the p‐functional clusters location problem (p‐FCLP), which has been developed based on the Covering Location Problem. By relaxing the complete and exhaustive assignment requirement, a functional cluster is delineated with the selective spatial units that have substantial spatial interaction. This model is demonstrated with applications for a functional regionalization problem using three journey‐to‐work flow datasets: (1) among the 46 counties in South Carolina, (2) the counties in the East North Central division of the US Census, and (3) all counties in the US. The computational efficiency of p‐FCLP is compared with other regionalization problems. The computational results show that detecting functional spatial clusters with contiguity constraints effectively solves problems with optimality in a mixed integer programming (MIP) approach, suggesting the ability to solve large instance applications of regionalization problems.     

Have we failed our neighbour?

In April 2006, rioting broke out in Honiara, Solomon Islands, following the parliamentary election of Snyder Rini. Occurring almost three years after the commencement of the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI), the riots sparked intense deliberations about the nature of Australia's engagement with Solomon Islands and the success, or otherwise, of RAMSI. Within the context of discussions about state-building in Melanesia, this article seeks to outline challenges to the success of RAMSI. Ultimately, we argue that successful state-building in Melanesia is highly dependent upon awareness of local conditions, rather than simply the application of international best practice. Moreover, we suggest that unless the current approach is modified to accommodate local circumstances—including social and political structures and locally defined needs and desires—the existing growth of anti-RAMSI sentiment will continue to escalate. In conclusion, we offer policy-relevant suggestions aimed at assisting mission stakeholders to improve RAMSI's viability and impact.     

The rise of the Indo-Pacific: understanding ideational change and continuity in India's foreign policy

In 2011, the concept of the Indo-Pacific began to appear in India's foreign policy discourse. This article argues that rather than signalling a dramatic shift in India's foreign policy, however, the way in which the Indo-Pacific has been interpreted by the Indian leadership suggests significant continuity as well as change, which is contrary to the goals of the concept's most fervent proponents in India. The article seeks to develop a framework for understanding ideational change and continuity in foreign policy by theorising the interplay between ideas, political and economic flux, and social expectations related to effective and legitimate state-building. It is argued that the Indo-Pacific concept has instigated a new emphasis on regional architecture-building to manage the ongoing regionalisation in the area between the Indian and Pacific Oceans as a result of heightened trade flows and production and investment linkages. Yet, the Indo-Pacific concept, like the new policy ideas on regional engagement that preceded it—the Look East policy and the ‘extended neighbourhood’—has been articulated in ways that are also compatible with long-standing ideas—such as non-alignment—about what constitutes appropriate international behaviour. This reflects the nature of the broader state project that has emerged since 1990, which, while encompassing a new focus on economic growth and competitiveness as being essential to effective state-building, continues to prioritise older ideas about what constitutes effective and legitimate state-building.     

Advocating the rules-based order in an era of multipolarity

Faced with eroding United States hegemony and the rise of a more multipolar distribution of global power, Australia has embraced a new foreign policy platform built around advocacy for a ‘rules-based global order’. In this essay I first argue that the emerging characterisation of multipolarity overemphasises the centrality of the United States and overlooks the legacies of Asian colonisation, decolonisation, state-building and local norm development. I then consider the reasons for the embrace of the rules-based global order construct, locating it as an instinctive reaction to issues arising from the South China Sea dispute, the raw use of power, and the inclination to share the ideas of a close ally. I note, however, that linking Australia closely with the United States approach to global rules has drawbacks, given the United States’ explicit attempts to reserve a right to use force outside the UN Charter. I suggest that Australia would be better served by clearly delineating a separation between its military alliance with a United States, a policy for worst-case scenarios, from its support for international law and institutions, which should form the mainstay and leading edge of its foreign policy.     

Gifts and Rights: Cautionary Notes on Community Self-help in Thailand

ABSTRACT A pervasive assumption in the critical literature and practice of development has been that capitalism and state-building has undermined relatively autonomous village communities in which there were equalizing institutions of mutual help or gift-giving. These assumptions tend to retain the dualisms of modernization theories by reversing them. The author argues that we should instead challenge these dualisms, and look for complexity and contradictions within both the past and the present. He then draws on a study in Thailand to show how the ‘village’ was a product of state-building, and how in the past the idiom of ‘helping’ constituted relations of domination and extraction as well as more egalitarian relations of mutual help. The use of the language of the gift confers power on the giver; since the 1930s, state officials have appropriated and transformed the language of ‘helping’ to coerce villagers into working on ‘development’ projects. Until the 1970s, villagers described ‘development’ as coerced serf labour, but since then, they have struggled with mixed results to redefine development as their right to participate in the national and global product. The author finishes by arguing that, in the context of the current global crisis of accumulation, we should reclaim rural development as a democratic right, opposing neoliberal attempts to redefine it as a gift which government and development agencies can discontinue at their will.     

Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: Situating al-Qaeda and the Global War on Terror within Geopolitical Trends and Structures

Two North American political geographers situate contemporary terrorism in the world within broad historical trends and geopolitical structures. They employ Rapoport's "four waves of terrorism" to illustrate the changing geography of terrorism (from an intrastate to an international phenomenon) and place it within the context of broad historical shifts in modes of warfare that envisages terrorism as a form of war stemming from imperialism and state-building. The authors broaden the structural setting of terrorism to include geoeconomics and the concept of relative deprivation, using empirical analysis to argue that contemporary terrorism is primarily a feature of the semi-periphery of the world-economy (middle-income countries). Specific characteristics of the Global War on Terror are interpreted by relating processes of imperialism and state-building to a situation in which the U.S. is facing geopolitical challenges and a possible decline in global-power status. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: I390, O100, Y900. 3 figures, 1 table, 52 references.     

Global Environmental Governance and the Challenge of Shadow States: The Impact of Illicit Sapphire Mining in Madagascar

The environment has become a key site of global governance because of its transboundary nature: forests, wildlife and oceans have all become central foci for networks of global governance which link international organizations, international financial institutions, states and non‐governmental organizations. This article examines how contemporary forms of global governance can be challenged and even subverted. It uses the concept of shadow states introduced by William Reno to explore how invisible global networks flow through developing states, to show how they constitute important political and economic interest groups, and to assess what kinds of environmental impact they have. It explores how powerful these networks are, and whether they are able to challenge or subvert attempts to manage, control or govern the environment. The author provides an analysis of the ways in which the clandestine networks of shadow states impact on conservation initiatives in the developing world, focusing on the features of global environmental governance and the problems posed by illicit gem mining and trafficking in Madagascar.     

Back to the Future? Regionalism in South‐East Asia Under Unilateral Pressure

This article assesses the prospects for regionalization in South-East Asia. It takes as its point of departure the contradiction between a regionalized and a unilateral world order as typically pursued by the EU and US respectively. It acknowledges the commonly accepted thesis that since September 11, 2001, the US has increasingly exercised a unilateral world order and that this poses a challenge to global regionalization. South-East Asia, a conflict-ridden, previously 'peripheral', region with a'successful' regionalization has been depicted as a 'second front' in the war against terrorism and is thus eligible for considerable US pressure. In this context, the 'ASEAN way', commonly benignly viewed, has been criticized for being shallow, 'allowing' terrorism to operate regionally. However, since 2001, and especially after the Bali bombings in 2003, ASEAN, as well as its member states, have devoted themselves to the war against terrorism. To some extent this has allowed the US a great influence in individual countries and altered regionalization. However, at the same time, the US 'needs' South-East Asian regional organization for combating international terrorism. Moreover, the US offensive in South-East Asia has caused both Japan and China to respond and strike deals on regional cooperation with ASEAN/South-East Asia, achieving long-awaited progress. Thus, the unilateral approach to global order does not, de facto, counteract regionalization, but rather operates through it, and to some extent triggers it. The counterintuitive conclusion is thus that an increasing unilateral pressure may not preclude a continued global regionalization, and that these two orders are not necessarily incompatible.     

Afghanistan: ‘spoilers’ in the regional security context

The ongoing international military withdrawal from Afghanistan has set the stage for energising the activities of Afghanistan's external stakeholders to re-evaluate their activities. The possible return of the Taliban in some form could compel Afghanistan's current external partners—Iran, India and Russia—to turn into limited spoilers. The absence of an international guarantor in Afghanistan from December 2014 is likely to encourage Pakistan—a greedy spoiler—to intensify its meddling as a means to reposition the Taliban—a total spoiler—at the helm of Afghan affairs. The combination of limited, greedy and total spoilers threatens to undermine security and state-building processes.     

Securing international society: towards an English school discourse of security

English School approaches to international politics, which focus on the idea of an international society of states bound together by shared rules and norms, have not paid significant explicit attention to the study of security in international relations. This is curious given the centrality of security to the study of world politics and the recent resurgence of English School scholarship in general. This article attempts to redress this gap by locating and explicating an English School discourse of security. We argue here that there is indeed an English School discourse of security, although an important internal distinction exists here between pluralist and solidarist accounts, which focus on questions of order and justice in international society respectively. In making this argument, we also seek to explore the extent to which emerging solidarist accounts of security serve to redress the insecurity of security in international relations: the tendency of traditional security praxes to privilege the state in ways that renders individuals insecure.     

International relations and the Himalaya: connecting ecologies,cultures and geopolitics

ABSTRACT

This article examines international relations (IR)'s approach to the Himalaya. We argue that the possibility of violent conflict over contested international borders is not the region's primary international challenge. Rather, slow violence inflicted by state-building and militarisation, intimately connected to geopolitical tensions, threaten the region's ecologies, cultures and languages. The Himalaya is home to three biodiversity hotspots and a mosaic of ethnic groups, many of whom speak threatened languages. Its ice-deposits feed most of Asia's large rivers. In recent years, India and China have pursued large-scale infrastructure development in the region, enabling greater militarisation and extraction, and a tourist rush. These threats are amplified by climate change, which is occurring in the Himalaya at twice global averages, contributing to landslides, flooding, and droughts. However, the region's complexity is not matched by IR's theorisations, which overwhelmingly focus on the possibility of violent conflict between state actors. We argue that IR's analysis of the region must go beyond a states-and-security, Delhi-Beijing-Islamabad centred approach, to look at the numerous interconnections between its geopolitics, cultures and ecologies. We suggest this can be accomplished through incorporating more interdisciplinary analysis, and through focusing on the interaction between the organisation of political authority and the region's environment.     

Can civic nationalism reduce corruption? Transnational and translocal insights from Solomon Islands

Some scholars and practitioners argue that the key to addressing corruption in poor countries lies in citizens eschewing patronage ties and embracing civic nationalism. This view has led some to suggest that a corruption-busting nationalist sentiment can be encouraged by exposing elites from poor countries to the liberal values of relatively well-governed rich ones. However, thus far few scholars have attempted to understand the complex ways that different types of mobility shape perceptions about nationalism and corruption. This article examines the role mobilities play in shaping attitudes towards nationalism and corruption amongst stakeholders connected to anti-corruption reforms in the Pacific Island nation of Solomon Islands. It finds that highly mobile elites framed corruption and nationalism through two distinct concepts: transnationalism (conceiving the world as comprising territorially divided states) and translocalism (which focuses on local connections developed through [im]mobilities). Transnational framings, shaped by international travel and international indices, stressed the importance of promoting civic nationalism to fight corruption. Translocal framings, reinforced by everyday experiences, were more sceptical of both anti-corruption and nation- and state-building efforts. Findings provide insights into why anti-corruption reforms in post-colonial contexts are so challenging, and the potential for reimagining the relationship between nationalism and anti-corruption.     

The Effects and Defects of Nuclear Cosmogeny

Joseph Masco suggests that nuclear weapons have become the icon of American technological superiority in the post-World War II era, and that their manufacture has transformed our worldview. Insofar as this is true, the production, testing, and use of such weapons has exposed the United States of America's experiment in freedom and equality to some of its most brilliant and most tarnished moments. The five volumes considered in this review explore some of the reflections from that patina and uncover many layers of tarnish that accompanied the transformation of the United States into a nuclear super-power.     

Who Owns the State? Understanding Ethnic Conflict in Post-Colonial Societies

Abstract. This article aims to integrate different explanatory approaches to ethnic conflicts: studies on ethnic clientelism and discrimination, on political mobilisation by minority elites, on unequal relations between ethnoregions, and on the effects that different political systems have on the dynamics of ethnic conflicts. For each of these approaches, the relevant research is reviewed and illustrated by selected examples from post-imperial societies. Propositions that seem empirically plausible are integrated into a comparative model which is in turn based on a specific theory of political modernity. The premise holds that the politicisation of ethnicity is to be interpreted as a central aspect of modem state-building. For only when ‘people’ and state are mutually related within the ideal of a legitimate order does the question arise for which ethnic group the state has to act, who is regarded as its legitimate owner, and who is entitled to have access to its services. Ethnic conflicts can thus be interpreted as struggles for the collective goods of the nation-state. Within this paradigmatical frame, a step-by-step analysis at a medium level of abstraction tries to show under which conditions state-building leads to an ethnicisation of political conflicts and in some cases to an escalation into rebellions and wars.     

The calm before the storm: A punctuated equilibrium theory of international politics

Research has shown that policymaking in numerous domestic policies, across a multitude of polities, systematically produces a pattern of change that matches Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET), characterized by many incremental and occasional dramatic changes. The field of International Relations (IR), however, has paid surprisingly little attention to PET, even though the same pattern of change is also found in international politics. This study attempts to fill this gap and explains stability and change in international politics based on PET. Specifically, we detail the dynamics behind this pattern of behavior, both at the domestic and the international level, as well as their interplay. The empirical section shows that different indicators of international politics, including troop deployments, foreign aid and international trade, follow a leptokurtic pattern of change, which characterizes Punctuated Equilibrium, and whereby changes in countries' behavior are generally incremental, representing periods of relative stability, and punctuated by large changes that dramatically overthrow existing policies. Moreover, our results indicate that policy outputs where greater friction is at play are more punctuated than those policies that cannot as easily or directly be managed. This study urges future research to further explore the dynamics of stability and change at the aggregate, international level.     

非洲民族主义史学流派及其贡献

非洲民族主义史学既是民族独立运动的产物,也是一种历史现象。民族独立运动将非洲历史的重构提到了日程,国际学术界开始承认非洲历史学科的存在。《剑桥非洲史》和联合国教科文组织《非洲通史》的编写及有关非洲历史的杂志和研究中心的出现对非洲民族主义史学的兴起起到了重要作用。伊巴丹学派、达累斯萨拉姆学派和达喀尔学派等非洲民族主义史学流派在非洲史观的确立、方法论的突破和史学人才的培养方面做出了贡献,但这些学派也有一定的缺陷。非洲民族主义史学的兴起在树立非洲人民的自信和非洲国家建构等方面起到了重要作用。