Contesting Putin's nation‐building: the ‘Muslim other’ and the challenge of the Russian ethno‐cultural alternative

This article explains the crystallisation of a new Russian national discourse, shaped by a challenge posed to Putin's statist non‐ethnic national model by a popularly formed ethno‐cultural alternative, constructed through negation of the ‘Muslim other’. The article describes this new and previously overlooked phenomenon of Russian nationalism and explicates the social mechanism behind its formation. The article concludes that when rampant corruption exists, generating a breakdown of legal order, the ‘other’ is defined through behaviour that deviates from accepted local norms, while the contrasting normative ‘general public’ is defined as ‘Russian’. Such group definitions mean that the current process of Russian grass‐roots exclusive national consolidation is based predominantly on culturally based behavioural codes, rather than on mere ethnic or religious affiliation, as is widely believed. Additionally, a conceptual landmark discourse shift from the question of Russia's mere plausibility as a nation‐state to a focus on its ongoing definition is demonstrated.     

Defining and Contesting Environmental Justice: Socio-natures and the Politics of Scale in the Delta

Abstract:  This article examines a contemporary process intended to "identify a strategy for managing the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta as a sustainable ecosystem that would continue to support environmental and economic functions that are critical to the people of California" ( Delta Vision 2008 , http://deltavision.ca.gov/AboutDeltaVision.shtml ). Environmental injustices in the Delta are exacerbated by connected conflicts between knowledge and power, over the scale at which "environmental justice" and the "Delta" are understood through public policy. The rejection of environmental justice and the socio-natural in the Delta Vision process represents how contemporary policy processes are recreating and reenacting the power/knowledge dynamics that have defined the Delta, placed it on a path to ecological collapse and injected high levels of social and racial injustice in its landscape over the past 150 years. Our article combines an ethnographic and a historical geographical approach that contributes to the literature on environmental justice and scale and links with the literature on water governance and power to advance the task of defining environmental justice from the academic and policy perspectives.     

British and Irish Conflict Regulation from Sunningdale to Belfast Part I: Tracing the Status of Contesting Sovereigns, 1968–1974

Abstract. This article, which is presented in two parts, analyses the changing conceptions of the status of the two sovereigns (the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic) whose competing claims to sovereignty over Northern Ireland has been the ultimate cause of conflict. In Part I (presented here) I adapt Ian Lustick's theory of state contraction and expansion to the British-Irish relationship as it affected the negotiation of the Sunningdale Power-sharing Agreement of 1973–1974. I argue that the failure to address the competing claims to sovereignty limited the possibilities of achieving and maintaining the consent of sufficient proportions of each ethno-national community. Part I of the article (forthcoming) will extend the analysis to explain the relative equalisation of sovereignty status between Britain and Ireland and presents a modification of a ‘liberal intergovernmentalist’ explanation of the evolution of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) and Belfast Agreement (1998).