Understanding the Sunni Realignment in Iraq with Complexity Theory

Concurrent to the surge of U.S. forces in Iraq between 2006 and 2008, Sunni tribesmen in the U.S. Marine‐controlled western Anbar province of Iraq experienced an “awakening” movement, which led them to side with U.S. and coalition forces. The Sunni Awakening demonstrates that individuals will often realign because of betrayal and opportunities for advancement. It also demonstrates that individual motives can have macrolevel social consequences. Complexity theory suggests that political factions will realign based on individual considerations that then develop into macrolevel movements. Complexity theory also combines both agency (in terms of microbehaviors) and structure (in terms of initial conditions). An important concept within the complexity literature is the idea of “critical mass.” Theories of self‐organization suggest that individual considerations aggregate to a point of critical mass to become macrolevel movements. In the case of Iraq, you had individuals who decided as individuals to align with the Americans, but the macrolevel Awakening movement did not gain momentum until enough individuals had joined the movement. This pattern suggests that complexity theory can be used as a framework for understanding how critical mass is achieved in realignment.     

“It's About Time You Came Out”: Sexualities,Mobility and Home

Abstract: Helping redress the dominance of metropolitan narratives upon which much literature on sexuality is framed, this article interprets the narrative told by a “white” 16‐year‐old man living in regional Australia. Our aim is to investigate the intersections of migration and homemaking in sexual subject formation. Finding a place to call “home” can be a complex process for young men born in regional Australia and not conforming to the social formations of a “normal guy”. This young man's narrative expressively reveals the fluidity and spatiality inherent in processes of negotiating sexual subjectivities. His story provides telling insights into how migration and mobility change his understandings of home and of self by making possible a third‐space configured by neither the gender norms of his hometown nor the “gay scene” in Sydney.     

The demon of technology,mass society,and atomic physics in West Germany, 1945–1957

In the cultural‐political literature of post‐1945 West Germany, atomic energy often functioned as the most potent image of a “demon of technology” fraught with both enormous potential and enormous danger. These critiques of techno‐science also represented a traditional critique of “mass society,” whose erstwhile anti‐western sentiments now had to be sublimated. As the Cold War developed, discussion shifted to ambivalence about Germany's place in the struggle between superpowers, and the “demon of technology” sentiment shifted away from the conservative end of the spectrum. The controversy over the “Göttingen Eighteen” anti‐armaments manifesto of nuclear physicists is indicative of these shifts.     

Austronesian aboriginality or the ritual organization of the state? A controversy on the political dimension of temple networks in early bali

Since early colonial times, Dutch government officials as well as anthropologists have made a distinction between what have been called “Bali Aga”, the allegedly aboriginal inhabitants of Bali (Indonesia), and those inhabitants associated with title‐bearing groups oriented towards royal courts and brahmana ritual specialists. While the former have been described as constituting a society characterized by equality and democracy, the latter have been portrayed as being almost the opposite. This article questions the basic assumptions about the “Bali Aga”, especially the role of their ritual networks focusing on regional temples. These have been interpreted as a demonstration of equality and of a bounded “Bali Aga” ethnicity. This article suggests a different interpretation, one in which the ritual networks are understood as basic segments, not restricted to the Bali Aga, in the ritual organization of the pre‐colonial Balinese state.     

Network Structures in Regional Innovation Systems

While interactive learning and inter-organizational relations are the fundamental building blocks in regional innovation system (RIS) theory, the framework is rarely related to investigations of regional knowledge network structures, because in RIS literature relational structures and interaction networks are discussed in a rather fuzzy and generic manner, with the “network term” often being used rather metaphorically. This paper contributes to the literature by discussing theoretical arguments about interactions and knowledge exchange relations in the RIS literature from the perspective of social network analysis. More precise, it links network-theoretical concepts and insights to the well-known classification of RIS types by Cooke [(2004) Introduction: Regional innovation systems – an evolutionary approach, in: P. Cooke, M. Heidenreich & H.-J. Braczyk (Eds) Regional Innovation Systems: The Role of Governances in a Globalized World, 2nd ed., pp. 1–18 (London: UCL Press)]. We thereby exemplarily show how the RIS literature and the literature on regional knowledge networks can benefit from considering insights of the respective other.     

Human Trafficking and Online Networks: Policy,Analysis, and Ignorance

Dominant anti‐trafficking policy discourses represent trafficking as an issue of crime, “illegal” migration, victimhood and humanitarianism. Such a narrow focus is not an adequate response to the interplay between technology, trafficking and anti‐trafficking. This article explores different levels of analysis and the interplay between human trafficking and technology. We argue for a shift from policy discourses with a very limited focus on crime and victimisation to more systemic understandings of trafficking and more robust micro‐analyses of trafficking and everyday life. The article calls for an agnotological understanding of policy responses to trafficking and technology: these depend upon the production of ignorance. We critique limitations in policy understandings of trafficking‐related aspects of online spaces, and argue for better engagement with online networks. We conclude that there is a need to move beyond a focus on “new” technology and exceptionalist claims about “modern slavery” towards greater attention to everyday exploitation within neoliberalism.     

Measuring Relative Sustainability of Regions Using Regional Sustainability Assessment Methodology

Scientists analyze sustainability at the regional level with a combination of multiple indicators which reflect different characteristics of regions without combining the results in a single comparative unit. Moreover, the assessment of interdependencies between different characteristics requires experts' analyses, which makes sustainability analysis subjective, time consuming, and limited in use. This article analyzes the relative sustainability of subnational level regions through the application of regional sustainability assessment methodology (RSAM) based on accounting of resources capital and its internal and external transfers. This approach allows for assessment of regional sustainability as a function of resource quantity, quality, and interchangeability. The comparison of the two case study regions presented in the paper indicates the difference between a more sustainable region and a region of “weak sustainability.” First, the article indicates the discussion of the relevant geographic, economic, and social literature for both sustainability assessment and regional comparison. This discussion is followed by a conceptual representation of proposed RSAM and its application to various regions. Next, the article covers the data used and applied methods to test the proposed methodology and compare the two case study regions. The article concludes with a discussion of findings and recommendations for further application and testing.     

The Policy Sciences of Social Media

Twitter, Facebook, and other social media are increasingly touted as platforms not merely for networks of friends and for private diversion, but as vehicles that allow ordinary people to enter and influence the many arenas of public life. On the surface, the disparate and shapeless population of “i‐reporters,” policy “tweeters,” and anonymous news web site “commentators” would appear to challenge the comparatively well‐defined cast of professional diplomats, journalists, and propagandists that Harold D. Lasswell identified as policy‐oriented communicators. However, to illuminate the roles and impacts of social media in politics and policymaking, insights from Lasswell's “science of communication” must be embedded in Lasswell's broader lessons on value assets and outcomes. A closer look at the so‐called democratizing functions of social media in politics reveals the influence of powerful intermediaries who filter and shape electronic communications. Lasswell's insights on the likelihood of increased collaboration among political elites and skilled, “modernizing intellectuals” anticipates contemporary instances of state actors who recruit skilled creators and users of social media—collaborations that may or may not advance experiments in democracy. Lasswell's decision process concept is deployed to discover social media's strengths and weaknesses for the practicing policy scientist.     

History and folklore: a historiographical survey

This article is designed as an introduction to the other articles in this special edition of Folklore. It argues that the relationship between historians and folklorists has undergone three phases: the “age of harmony” prior to the First World War, when both disciplines were in their infancy; the “age of suspicion” from the 1920s to the 1970s, when historians tended to define their field narrowly as the development of the nation‐state, and to stress their “scientific” methodology based on contemporary archival documents; and the “age of rapprochement” since the 1970s as historians ventured into new areas—popular culture, micro‐history, “history from below”—borrowing methodologies from the social sciences as they did so. And it looks forward to an “age of co‐operation” between the two disciplines.     

Post‐9/11 Masculinist Incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan: Women’s Bodies as Bullets in Imperialist Agendas

The gender question in the Middle East now serves ends beyond the local. It may be registered within a cluster of international patriarchal war‐promoting discourses that find tremendous benefit in the historical bulk of literature that demonizes the Middle Eastern male and victimizes the female. This article attempts to defend two related arguments, both of which are well served by Foucault’s Biopolitics (Foucault, The birth of biopolitics), in which he correlates between territorial control and the violence inherent to any hegemony’s preoccupation with the body (i.e., the Middle Eastern/Muslim woman’s body) and Achille Mbembe’s theory of Necroplotics and its designation of who “may live” and who “must die” (Mbembé, 2003:11–4). I argue that in the post‐9/11 era, the world has witnessed a globalist civilizational masculinist incursion on its demonized Middle Eastern/Islamic Other. The militaristic discourse at work seems to be self‐appropriating the Middle Eastern/Muslim woman’s body as a site of sexual oppression and (mis)using it to its own means. The impetus of the 9/11 necropolitics, aggressively transposes gender dialog/conflict in the Middle East/Muslim countries from a benign social and intellectual interface, where different alliances may be negotiated, to an aggressive militaristic zone, where the “bogeyman” must “die.”     

Between Regionalization and Centralization: The Creation of the Musée Léopold II in Elisabethville (Musée national de Lubumbashi), Belgian Congo (1931–1961)

Since “museumland” was revisited in the 1980s, different authors have studied the history of colonial museums in Europe within a broader discussion on colonial bias, the creation of traditions and the theory of representation. It has become clear, for example, how African utensils were exported to Europe, where they were exhibited as curiosa, ethnographical objects or art. But what happened when the very notion of the museum was exported back to Africa? Who created these institutes and in what context? Was the relationship between colonizers and colonized altered? Did the “social life” of the objects on show change? And what was the relationship between the “old” museums in Europe and the “new” ones created in the colony? These questions have rarely been studied. In this article, the creation of the Musée Léopold II will be used as a basis to offer insight into the links between colonial “science” and “policy”, which proved not to be as monolithic as often portrayed, but rather were complex amalgamations of different opinions and even conflicting interests.     

Prefiguring the State

Merging means and ends, prefigurative politics perform life as it is wished‐for, both to experience better practice and to advance change. This paper contributes to prefigurative thinking in three ways. It explores what it might mean to prefigure the state as a concept; takes its inspiration from a historical episode rather than imagined time ahead; and addresses what, if anything, prefigurative conceptions can do when practiced. Central to my discussion is the plural state—taking shape as micro, city, regional, national and global formations. Plural state thinking makes room for divergent kinds of states but does not necessarily foreground progressive ones. Thus, to explore in more detail a transformative left conception of the state, discussion turns to 1980s British municipal radicalism. Taking up this adventurous episode in governing as a “thinking tool”, an imaginary of the state as horizontal, everyday, activist and stewardly emerges.     

Thinking Outside the Bubble of the Global North: Introducing Milton Santos and “The Active Role of Geography”

Brazilian geographer Milton Santos is one of the most quoted, celebrated, and controversial social scientists of the so‐called “global South”. His body of work employs a rich vocabulary including reinterpretations of concepts such as “totality”, as well as original concepts like “used territory”. These and other concepts have formed the basis of what could be called a “Miltonian” school of thought in geography. However, despite his national and regional importance to Brazil and the “global South” more generally, he has long been overlooked by the English‐speaking community of geographers. The present article intends to bridge this gap by offering an introduction to Santos and to the English translation of one of his most important and hotly debated texts, “The Active Role of Geography: A Manifesto”.     

Knowledge Networks as a Regional Development Resource: A Network Analysis of the Interlinks between Scientific Institutions and Regional Firms in the Metropolitan region of Hanover,Germany

The debate on regional innovation potentials has concentrated in recent times upon the topic of regional knowledge networking. This article presents the findings of the first phase of a detailed network analysis of the cooperation relations between scientific institutions and firms in the “metropolitan region Hanover-Brunswick-Göttingen”. The research concentrated on the regional and supra-regional cooperation relations of approximately 500 science establishments of the region, including their interlinks with private sector firms. This analysis of a polycentric metropolitan region's knowledge networks in different fields of competence produced detailed information on the density of knowledge interlinking within the region, on the degree of connectivity between the region's scientific institutions and private sector firms, and on central network nodes within the regional innovation networks. The case study exemplifies the methodical approach of a regional network analysis and emphasizes the role of knowledge networks as a development resource which is of particular relevance to the region's innovation capacities.     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

A POLYMORPHIC APPROACH TO POLICY ANALYSIS: A CASE STUDY OF ONTARIO'S ETHANOL IN GASOLINE REGULATION

This article develops a “polymorphic” approach to policy analysis, that is, an approach that draws on multiple forms of spatial reasoning. Specifically, the proposed framework deploys scale and network not merely as epistemological devices that make sense of “horizontal” and “vertical” politico‐institutional structures, but as co‐constitutive ontological processes that involve an ever‐shifting interplay among legacies, rhythms, and events. This polymorphic approach, we argue, facilitates the identification and the examination of the mobilization of social networks and of the attendant cross‐scalar interactions that must be articulated whenever a given policy is framed as a sensible and politically viable place‐based solution. The novel conceptual framework is then applied to the empirical investigation of the formulation of the complex moral, political, and economic environment that enabled the emergence of Ontario's controversial Ethanol in Gasoline Regulation. Our polymorphic approach reveals how this regulation is a (failed) attempt to reconcile Canada's legacy as a resource‐based economy and Ontario's legacy as a manufacturing‐based economy where value is added, with the need for more rational and less harmful resource extraction and for greener fuels that can sustain the current order. We build on the lessons drawn from this case study to suggest that our approach has wider applicability in that it can help create a process‐oriented, dynamic, and multi‐dimensional geography of policy‐making.     

Remeasuring and rethinking social cleavages in Russia: Continuity and changes in electoral geography 1917–1995

This paper examines the role of social cleavages in creating spatial associations between major pre-Revolutionary and post-Soviet political parties at the guberniya-level statistical aggregates. The paper begins with a theoretical discussion of social cleavages and a literature review of cleavage theory research applied to various Russian elections. The analysis of spatial associations between the pre-Revolutionary/post-Soviet parties involved elaborating a new measurement framework, creating a spatial database using GIS, transformation of thematic social–economic–geographic attributes, calculating the strength of the linear relationship among regional spatial units and utilizing probit statistical models. This research empirically supports the hypothesis that contemporary Russian parties are expressions of rediscovered cleavages as well as of conflicts engendered by the Tsarist and Soviet and post-Soviet periods of development. It appeared that the constituent assembly election of 1917 and parliamentary election of 1995 tend to be “maintaining” elections for the liberals. The situation appeared different for the communitarian parties. A critical realignment – significant changes in the left electorate and a split in this electorate did occur. The 1995 election results indicate that only parties with developed networks and local and regional organizations faired well in the election and that nationalization of Russian political life was still weak in 1995.     

Ideological others and national identifications in contemporary Poland

Sexual minorities in Poland are excluded from the traditional understanding of “Polishness” premised on conservative, Catholic values. This article examines how ethnic Polish citizens who identify as non‐heteronormative navigate their relationship to “Polishness” at a moment of heightened nationalism. Through 31 interviews with Polish sexual minorities, I show that while national identification is a struggle for some sexual minorities, others work to reframe what “Polishness” means to them. I argue for further research examining the ways that stigmatised members of the ethnic majority—what I term ideological others—understand and navigate their relationship to national identity. The study contributes to the literature on everyday nationhood and national identity by attending to national identification among stigmatised members of the ethnic majority.     

DIAGNOSING FROUDE'S DISEASE: BOUNDARY WORK AND THE DISCIPLINE OF HISTORY IN LATE‐VICTORIAN BRITAIN

Historians looking to make history a professional discipline of study in Victorian Britain believed they had to establish firm boundaries demarcating history from other literary disciplines. James Anthony Froude ignored such boundaries. The popularity of his historical narratives was a constant reminder of the continued existence of a supposedly overturned phase of historiography in which the historian was also a man of letters, transcending the boundary separating fact from fiction and literature from history. Just as professionalizing historians were constructing a methodology that called on historians to be inductive empirical workers, Froude refused to accept the new science of history, and suggested instead that history was an individual enterprise, one more concerned with drama and art than with science. E. A. Freeman warned the historical community that they “cannot welcome [Froude] as a partner in their labors, as a fellow‐worker in the cause of historic truth.” This article examines the boundary work of a professionalizing history by considering the attempt to exclude Froude from the historian's discourse, an attempt that involved a communal campaign that sought to represent Froude as “constitutionally inaccurate.” Froude suffered from “an inborn and incurable twist,” argued Freeman, thereby diagnosing “Froude's disease” as the inability to “make an accurate statement about any matter.” By unpacking the construction of “Froude's disease,” the article exposes the disciplinary techniques at work in the professionalization of history, techniques that sought to exclude non‐scientific modes of thought such as that offered by Froude.