Contested landscapes of Soviet Central Asia: an ethnoarchaeological case study from Kazakhstan

A group of rectangular and circular enclosures in southwest Kazakhstan, originally thought to be prehistoric or early historical, has turned out to date from the 1950s and 1960s. They were built as livestock pens (kora) to protect rice paddies from free-grazing cattle. Rice cultivation had been introduced to the region east of the Aral Sea by deported ethnic Koreans from the Soviet Far East after the native pastoral nomadism had been destroyed by forced collectivisation in the early 1930s. This had resulted in the Great Famine of 1931–33, evidence for which is provided by refugees’ burials found on archaeological sites in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The case study illustrates an approach to the study of twentieth century contested landscapes using evidence from archaeology, ethnography, and oral history.     

Transition Urbanism and the Contested Politics of Ethical Place Making

Abstract: This paper explores the contested construction of more relational urban imaginaries within a movement that is simultaneously committed to enhanced systems of care for distant places/others, and intensified regimes of (re)localisation. Transition Culture initiatives explore ‘how to prepare for a carbon constrained, energy lean world’ and stem from a concern for a post peak‐oil global future. While the radical political openness of Transition Culture is in keeping with the vision of a more diverse polity imagined by advocates of relational space (for instance Amin, 2004), we argue that this openness is predicated upon an apolitical pragmatism that masks latent tensions between an environmentally benign localism and an ethics of care at‐a‐distance. If a transitional ethics of space occupies the uncertain ground between a relational and territorial geographical imagination, the Transition Culture movement provides a rich context within which to explore the ethical conundrums that stem from different tactics of place‐making.     

Mercantile Transformations: Understanding the State,Global Debt and Philippine Agriculture

This paper examines an important continuity in the political economy of the Philippines: the interplay between domestic merchant capitalists and the state over the role of the state in the Philippine economy. During the Marcos regime, this interplay increasingly took the form of competition between state mercantile interests and ‘private’ merchant interests. This competition is still being played out. To better understand the nature of the competition, consideration is focused on two essential contemporary facts: the Philippines has a major external debt crisis and the Philippines, still predominantly an agrarian country, suffers from stagnant productivity growth and enduring rural poverty. While the Philippine external debt problem can be attributed in significant part to various international hegemonic interests, the analysis concludes that the characteristics of the crisis primarily reflect changing state/class/economy configurations within the Philippines. These same configurations, in turn, significantly influence the implications of the external debt crisis on Philippine agriculture.     

中亚的地缘政治--历史和现实

一个多世纪以来 ,中亚的地缘政治格局和作用不断发生变化 ,并在不同时期以不同的方式影响着中国。“9·11”事件之后 ,中亚的地缘政治形势变得更加复杂 ,大国的、区域的、国际的利益交织在一起 ,成为全球关注的热点。阿富汗反恐战争的结束为中亚国家提供了国际合作的新通道 ,尽管中亚在国际地缘政治格局中的作用将越来越重要 ,但它不会成为新的地缘政治“核心地区”。     

Regionalism, Iran and Central Asia

A combination of revolutionary ideology, trouble with neighbours and location in the Middle East, where regionalism is moribund, make the Islamic Republic of Iran an unlikely enthusiast for regional coalition-building. The impetus towards regionalism derives first and foremost from geopolitical considerations–the need to counter the US government's efforts to isolate Iran–but also from domestic dynamics; the regionalist discourse has lent an acceptable ideological colouring to an increasingly pragmatic foreign policy.
Iran's neighbours, however, share neither its geopolitical predicament nor its ideological complexion, and the actual implementation of Tehran's regionalist agenda has been based on functional cooperation, rather than on geopolitics and ideology. Trade promotion and the development of transport infrastructure to link Central Asia and the Caspian to Turkey and the Persian Gulf have been the most appealing areas for northern neighbours, and dominate the agenda of the Economic Cooperation Organization, Iran's main vehicle for multilateral cooperaton with Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Tehran's 1992 proposal for a Caspian Sea Cooperation Organization has so far been stymied by the littoral states' well-publicized disagreements over the sea's legal status, though their numerous multilateral meetings and handful of agreements suggest that the idea has potential in the medium–term.
Notwithstanding the meagre tangible results to date, Iran's tilt towards regionalism has had a positive impact. It has helped to rehabilitate the Islamic Republic in the eyes of its neighbours, contributed to the evolution of policy debate at home and prepared the ground for future multilateral cooperation.     

Han China in Central Asia

A.F.P. Hulsewé. China in Central Asia, the Early Stage: 125 B.C.-A.D. 23. An annotated translation of Chapters 61 and 96 of the History of the Former Han Dynasty, with an Introduction by M.A.N. Loewe. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1979, Pp. viii, 273, map. (70 guilders)     

The Paleolithic of Central Asia

The Lower Paleolithic of Central Asia is represented by several sealed and more or less firmly dated Lower–Middle Pleistocene cave and open-air sites in the southeastern part and by more numerous surface occurrences throughout the region. The assemblages assigned to the Lower Paleolithic form two rather distinct groups, one remarkable for well-made handaxes and the other characterized by cores and flakes with no handaxes. The distribution map of pebble industries and industries with handaxes shows that while the latter originate from the western regions of Central Asia, the former are concentrated in the eastern part of the area. The Middle Paleolithic assemblages of Central Asia do not form a single technocomplex. Their variability in time is difficult to assess, but variation in space is obvious. Very few Upper Paleolithic sites in this region are known. At the same time, their stone industries are very diverse and most of them differ sharply from each other and from sites in adjacent regions.     

Disequilibrium in Development Finance: The Contested Politics of Institutional Accountability and Transparency at the World Bank Inspection Panel

This article examines the dynamic nature with which independent accountability mechanisms operate. Focusing on the World Bank, the authors argue that its Inspection Panel evolves according to internal and external pressures. In seeking to achieve equilibrium, and protect its authority and independence, the Panel has gone through several distinct phases: negotiation, emergence, protracted resistance, assertion of independence and authority, renewed tension, and contestation. The core novelty of the article is its application of concepts from outside the field of development studies — notably institutional accountability from the governance literature, and judicialization from the legal studies literature — to the topic of the Inspection Panel. Examining the Panel in this way demonstrates that accountability mechanisms represent a hybrid of transnational governance influenced by a range of actors including project‐affected peoples, national governments, managers and development donors. Accountability in development finance is about competing interests as well as competing conceptions and expectations of accountability. In such a complex and multi‐scalar system, the Panel is not only concerned with delivering well‐researched investigation reports; it is also an entity seeking to ensure its own survival, as well as an arbiter of its own brand of legitimacy and accountability.