Over‐promising and under‐delivering? Ambitions and risks in US defence strategy

Recent changes to US defence strategy, plans and forces have placed the United States at greater risk of over‐promising and under‐delivering on its global security ambitions. In 2012, the Obama administration released a new defence strategic guidance document to adapt to a shifting security environment and defence budget cuts. The guidance upholds the two long‐standing American goals of global pre‐eminence and global reach, but seeks to apply this military power by using new planning and regional concepts. It revises the Department of Defense's force planning construct, an important tool used to size US military forces, and identifies the Asia–Pacific and the greater Middle East as the two regions where the US military should focus its attention and resources. There are three major risks facing this revised US strategy: emerging security threats, the role of US allies and partners, and domestic constraints in the United States. Included in these risks are the proliferation of advanced military technologies, the US response to the rise of China, the continued prevalence of state instability and failure, the capability and commitment of NATO and other US allies, additional US budget cuts, political polarization in the United States, and interservice competition within the US military. In light of these risks, the United States faces a future in which it will continue to struggle to direct its military power towards its most important geopolitical priorities, such as rebalancing towards the Asia–Pacific, as opposed simply to respond to the many security surprises that are certain to arise. If the past is any guide, American political leaders will respond to the aforementioned risks in the worst way possible: by maintaining the current US defence strategy while slashing the resources to support it.     

Divide and rule? The military infrastructure of eighth‐ and ninth‐century Mercia

Military might is widely recognized as having been a key element in the Mercian kings’ ability to forge and maintain a large kingdom in midland England in and after the seventh century. The paper argues that its basis was a network of fortified places – all major royal settlements that were given substantial defences in the eighth and early ninth centuries – and a systemic mechanism for manning them. The archaeological evidence of these defences at Hereford, Tamworth and Winchcombe is reviewed; the probable locations of other such early fortified places in midland England are considered; and the significance of this burghal system for our understanding of ‘the supremacy of the Mercian kings’ is weighed.     

Neoliberalist Planning? Re‐thinking and Re‐casting Sydney's Metropolitan Planning

This paper argues that neoliberalism should be viewed not as a unified coherent project but as a series of complex and overlapping strategies that produce hybrid and always emergent forms of governance. To substantiate this argument, the paper reflects on the recent history of Sydney's metropolitan planning and rejects any simple characterisation of its having been transformed from a social‐democratic to a neoliberal form of governance. Instead it traces the unevenness with which neoliberalist aspirations and forms of governance have been enacted through metropolitan planning. In particular, it examines the enduring scope of state institutional capacity to pursue desired spatial and distributional outcomes through planning and suggests that the current reinvigoration of Sydney's metropolitan planning is an opportunity to enhance that capacity and to pursue ‘after‐neoliberalist’ planning possibilities.     

Exploring the Canadian‐U.S. Unemployment and Nonemployment Rate Gaps: Are There Lessons for Both Countries?

The Canadian and U.S. economies are very similar. Yet, beginning in the 1980s, Canada experienced much greater relative unemployment rates followed in the 1990s by a declining share of population employed. Using state- and provincial-level data this study assesses why U.S. labor markets have recently performed relatively better than their Canadian counterparts. The empirical results indicate that more rapid U.S. employment growth explains a relatively small proportion of its lower joblessness. Structural causes including lower U.S. unionization and less generous unemployment insurance appear to be more important, at least in the long run. The Canadian labor market also appears to be less flexible to regional economic shocks.     

Change and the Corporeal in Seventeenth‐ and Eighteenth‐Century Gender History: Or,Can Cultural History Be Rigorous?

This essay is a methodological evaluation of the procedures and presuppositions informing the social and cultural history of gender, as exemplified in recent scholarship about the transformations of sex and gender in Britain from the early modern period through the long eighteenth century. It suggests answers to two questions: how can we write the cultural history of gender while maintaining both rigour in the enterprise and an awareness of its limits? And where might we go when these limits suddenly appear to undermine the very foundational presuppositions on which the whole cultural‐historical project is built?     

A long‐wave event. HIV/AIDS,politics, governance and ‘security’: sundering the intergenerational bond?

There is a disharmonious resonance between the lifecycle of the human immunodeficiency virus and that of its human host. In heavily affected countries, many people live long enough to reproduce and then die, leaving behind numerous orphans. This process has implications that we do not understand. While some foresee social disorder arising from legions of poorly socialized and unruly children grown to adulthood, the evidence is far from clear. These arguments and the evidence are reviewed in this article, particularly in relation to the links between premature death and electoral processes in southern Africa.     

False Antitheses? Marxism,Nature and Actor‐Networks

This paper stages an encounter between two critical approaches that have been central to the recent "greening" of left geography. The theoretical and normative claims of the first approach, eco-Marxism, have been subject to sometimes biting criticism from advocates of the second approach, actor-network theory (ANT). Taking a nonorthodox Marxist perspective, I argue that the ANT critique of political economy approaches to nature is overstated and only partly defensible. By distinguishing between different modalities of eco-Marxism and ANT, I show the seeming standoff between the two approaches to society-nature relations to be false. Splitting the difference between a weak version of ANT and a relational version of eco-Marxism yields a political economy approach to socionature that arguably avoids the excesses of strong modalities of ANT and dualistic forms of eco-Marxism. By seeking to bridge the apparent gap between Marxism and ANT, the paper avoids reducing either approach to society-nature relations to one fixed position or theoretical-normative "essence". Instead, a particular modality of ANT is used to address the weaknesses of certain extant versions of eco-Marxism. The resulting synthesis offers conceptual tools with which Marxists can still critique a pervasive mode of human relationality to nature–namely, capitalist–while multiplying the actors and complicating the politics involved in approaching the society-environment nexus.