Protecting vulnerable cities: the UK's resilience response to defending everyday urban infrastructure

The events of September 11 2001 in New York and Washington, and of July 7 2005 in London, have ushered in a new era in protective counterterrorist planning within UK urban areas. With the mode of terrorist attack now encompassing the possibility of no‐warning suicide attacks, and target selection now often being seen as related to crowd density, a variety of public places such as sports stadiums, shopping centres, light rail systems, and nightclubs now have to consider ‘designed‐in’ counterterrorism measures. As such the UK has developed a national counterterrorist strategy (CONTEST) which is constantly revised, and one strand of which focuses on protective security measures. In the context of this ‘Protect’ strand of policy, and the increased targeting of crowded places by international terrorist groups, this article outlines the recent attempts to design‐in counterterrorism features to the urban landscape while paying attention not just to their effectiveness and robustness, but also to their acceptability to the general public and impact upon the everyday experience of the city. The article also addresses how the need to consider counterterrorism has affected the practices of built‐environment professionals such as spatial planners. Reflections upon how this aspect of counterterrorism policy might develop in the future are also offered.     

Building an Alliance and Building a Bomb

Books reviewed in this article:
Abraham Ben-Zvi, Decade of Transition: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Origins of the American-Israeli Alliance
Avner Cohen, Israel and the Bomb     

构建兼容并包的中国近代史学科体系

中国社会科学院近代史研究所组织编撰的《中国近代通史》近期已由江苏人民出版社出版。全书共10卷,约550万字,各卷名称如下:第1卷《近代中国历史进程概说》,第2卷《近代中国的开端(1840—1864)》,第3卷《早期现代化的尝试(1865—1895)》,第4卷《从戊戌维新到义和团(1895—1900)》,第5卷《新政、立宪与辛亥革命(1901—1912)》,第6卷《民国的初建(1912—1923)》,第7卷《国共合作与国民革命(1924—1927)》,第8卷《内战与危机(1927—1937)》,第9卷《抗日战争(1937—1945)》,第10卷《中国命运的决战(1945—1949)》。本书的出版,完成了近代史研究所几代人的夙愿。对于1840—1949年完整的中国近代史来说,本书的撰写还是一个尝试。本刊特别约请我国近代史学界几位著名学者通过笔谈的形式发表看法,以期引起关注和讨论。     

Transnational Muslim solidarities and everyday life

ABSTRACT. Discussions of globalisation and identity have focused on the renewed relevance of various post‐national frameworks of belonging, including the Muslim umma. This article argues against the idea that the umma has come to constitute a primary referent in contemporary Muslim debates about identity or a form of globalised political consciousness. Furthermore, the advent of ‘post‐Islamism’ means that Islamic political mobilisation rarely seeks to establish alternative political orders within the container of the nation‐state. However, this does not mean that we are seeing a reaffirmation of the nation in Muslim contexts today. Rather, transnational Muslim solidarities represent an intermediate space of affiliation and socio‐political mobilisation that exists alongside and in an ambivalent relationship with the nation‐state. I point to two different socio‐religious movements that, without positing the primacy or exclusivity of the umma/Islamic identity, express discrepant visions of the relationship between Islam and the nation: (1) the Fethullah Gülen movement, which serves simultaneously as the vehicle for a particular vision of neo‐Ottoman Turkish nationalism and a critique of the Kemalist national order; and (2) the neo‐Salafist movement, read here as an effort to embed conceptions of public morality and accountability within the discursive tradition of orthodox Islam rather than the institutional framework of modern polity.     

Three geographers in an archive: positions, predilections and passing comment on transient lives

Despite the existence of research conducted by geographers eschewing or professing religious faith, the influence of researchers and their methods have yet to receive critical attention within the study of religion. The experience of three geographers working on a three-year research project suggests that it is vital to reflect upon the inter-subjective relationships and methodologies used to reconstruct the religious past. How do different subject positions influence our selections from historical records? We also consider whether the spatialities of putatively 'religious' archives, whether formally or informally constituted, make a difference to the construction of historiographical knowledge. In attempting to answer these questions, the paper argues that developing an awareness of different types of positionality, vis-à-vis religious faith and practice, combined with reflexivity, vis-à-vis methodology, can enrich the interpretative reconstruction of the religious past.     

Four lives that rocked the boat

Oscar Lewis, Ruth M. Lewis, and Susan M. Rigdon. Four Men: Living the Revolution, an Oral History of Contemporary Cuba. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. lxv + 538 pp. Map, abbreviations, glossary, selected bibliography. $15.00 paper.     

Marginalized for a lifetime: The everyday experiences of gulag survivors in post-Soviet Magadan

Over the past decade notions of social capital have become embedded in the social development lexicon, often presented as the ‘missing link’ within development theory. Much social capital‐based research takes Robert Putnam's theorization of the subject as its starting point. Putnam's work argues that social capital can be measured by a region's levels of trust and civic engagement. While its use, and conceptualization, has undergone much academic debate, often formal institutions still employ this very narrow, and arguably Western‐centric, reading of the subject. This paper argues that while at the micro‐level social capital has little to do with the civic engagement and trust theories posited by Putnam, it still has relevance to the lives of marginalized individuals and is an important factor in their continued survival. To explore this, drawing on extensive qualitative research conducted in Magadan, Moscow and St Petersburg, I critically examine the construction of everyday survival strategies among Gulag survivors living in Russia's far northeast city of Magadan. Denied a return to their ‘homeland’ upon their release, this group experienced considerable marginalization in the post‐Stalin period. This was exacerbated when the collapse of the Soviet Union saw pensions in the far northeast of Russia fall to below 50% of the state‐set subsistence minimum. The paper demonstrates the importance of social capital to this group by showing how their survival is based on far more than interactions with formal and informal organizations.     

Building an Experimental Comparative Reference Collection for Lithic Micro-Residue Analysis Based on a Multi-Analytical Approach

Residue analysis applied to stone tools is a useful aid for better understanding their past function and, by extension, reconstructing early human behaviour. However, if the nature of residues found on the lithic tools is misinterpreted, so will be our understanding of their archaeological context. As a consequence, correctly identifying residues in the domain of lithic studies is of paramount importance. With this main goal in mind, we analysed different experimental materials likely to have been involved in daily tasks in the prehistoric context (e.g. bone, wood, meat). Microscopic analyses were then carried out using two (comparable) techniques: Optical Light Microscopy and Scanning Electron Microscopy. Also, energy dispersive X-rays spectroscopy (EDX or EDS) was applied to the experimental samples to determine their elemental composition. Advantages and disadvantages of both microscopic methods and their implications for correct residue identification are discussed. The distribution of residues on lithic surfaces is also considered. This study resulted in the construction of a data-set including both photographic material and EDX spectra for each residue analysed. The main result is that, compared to OLM scanning, SEM analyses highly improves the accuracy of residue identification.     

The lit world: living with everyday urban automation

In this article, we develop and advance the concept of the lit world by bringing together literatures about everyday lighting, automation in everyday life and human perception, along with our ethnographic research into people’s experience of automated lighting in Melbourne, Australia. In doing so we formulate and argue for an approach to automation that situates it as part of everyday mundane worlds and acknowledges its entanglement with the emergent and experiential qualities of everyday environments as they unfold. We demonstrate this through the example of automated lighting, understood as a situated technology that has contingent effects and participates in the making of particular ways of seeing and feeling the world. We thereby argue for an account of automation that reaches beyond its potential for the management of human (and other) behaviour, to ask how the qualities and affordances of automated technologies might seep out of their intended domains, and create new perceptual and experiential opportunities. In a context where automation is increasingly prevalent in everyday life, such attention to the experience and use of automated technologies which already exist on a large scale is needed. Urban lighting is an example par excellence of automation in the world because it has a long history beyond the recent association of automated technologies with code and digital infrastructures. As scholars debate how automated technologies will become part of our future digital lives, understanding how people live in a lit world offers a starting point for considering how we might live with other anticipated algorithmic forms of automation.     

Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people's everyday politics

This paper examines how high school-aged young people from New Zealand are crafting their everyday political subjectivities within the liminal status and liminal spaces they occupy in society. With a specific focus on schooling and the citizenship education curricula in New Zealand, three vignettes are introduced which examine young people's less reflexive and ‘everyday’ forms of political action in the interstitial liminal space between Public/private, Formal/informal and Macro/micro politics. These vignettes underline how young people's everyday politics were embedded within spatial and relational processes of socialisation with adults within their schools and communities, yet, also showed both agency and resourcefulness with these spaces. Young people's liminal status and occupation of liminal spaces provided them with unique perspectives on social issues (such as bullying, racism, water conservation, and obesity) and enabled them to respond in ways that were ‘different’ to adults' Politics, yet nonetheless showed their political and tactical selves (de Certeau, 1984). A focus on young people's political practices in liminal spaces allows for new possibilities and understandings of the political.     

Women's and men's lives and work in Sweden

Kvinnors och Mäns Liv och Arbete. J. Acker, A. Baude, U. Björnberg, E. Dahlström, G. Forsberg, L. Gonäs, H. Holter & A. Nilsson, 1992. Stockholm, SNS Förlag. ISBN 91–7150–451–6.     

Visualising everyday geographies: practices of vision through travel-time

Responding to recent debates in human geography on the need to explore more complex renderings of everyday visuality, this paper explores some of the fluid relationships between everyday visuality, materiality and mobility through practices of contemporary railway travel in Britain. Based on extensive empirical research, this paper explores three different but related visual practices experienced during the course of a railway journey. First, it looks at how sublime forms of vision emerge to produce a variety of passive embodied effects. Second, it looks at how more attentive visual practices are implicated in the temporal organisation of the journey and have the capacity to activate changes to routine. Third, it looks at how the physical materiality of the carriage interior serves to mediate the visual field in particular ways and gives rise to a series of freedoms and constraints. Whilst the visual consumption of landscapes viewed through a window is often taken to be an axiomatic part of the travelling experience, this paper demonstrates the importance of apprehending how a multiplicity of visual practices affect how perceptions of time, space and location unfold over the course of a journey.     

UK cyber security and critical national infrastructure protection

This article is intended to aid the UK government in protecting the UK from cyber attacks on its Critical National Infrastructure. With a National Cyber Security Centre now being established and an updated National Cyber Security Strategy due in 2016, it is vital for the UK government to take the right approach. This article seeks to inform this approach by outlining the scope of the problems Britain faces and what action the UK government is taking to combat these threats. In doing so, it offers a series of recommendations designed to further help mitigate these threats, drive up cyber resiliency and aid recovery plans should they be required. It argues that complete engagement and partnership with private sector owner–operators of Critical National Infrastructure are vital to the success of the government's National Cyber Security Strategy. It makes the case that for cyber resiliency to be fully effective, action is needed at national and global levels requiring states and private industry better to comprehend the threat environment and the risks facing Critical National Infrastructure from cyber attacks and those responsible for them. These are problems for all developed and developing states.     

建设开放的地方志事业刍议

作为中国特色社会主义文化事业一部分的地方志事业,要想在新的历史时期实现可持续发展,应当以开放的姿态,面向社会,面向大众,面向世界,在以下方面做出努力：一是工作定位要开放。《地方志工作条例》将地方志工作的范畴从单纯的志书编纂扩大到为地方经济社会发展服务的全新境域,从而使地方志工作从封闭转向开放。二是工作主体要开放。地方志的工作主体是人才队伍,为适应工作定位从单纯的编纂工作到建设开放的地方志事业的转变,地方志需要一支开放多元的人才队伍。而这需要通过创新用人机制、拓宽用人视野、完善培训工程来实现。三是工作机制要开放。通过建立市场化运作机制、区域联动机制、合作研究机制、对外学术交流机制、品牌运作机制,形成一种有凝聚力和辐射力的工作机制。四是资源成果要开放。通过开发志鉴衍生产品、优化公众传播渠道等,推进地方志资源成果的开发利用。