From the Atlantic to the Bug,from the Arctic to the Tigris? The Transformation of the EU and NATO

Both the European Union and NATO are now committed in principle to substantial enlargement. It remains doubtful, however, how far member governments are making a success of further enlargement, let alone thinking through its strategic implications. Yet the process of dual enlargement will define the future security, political and economic structures of the European region. During the past year west European governments have extended promises of eventual membership to the western Balkan states and to Turkey; while the future positions of Ukraine, Russia, the Caucasus states and the southern Mediterranean associates all raise delicate policy issues. Hard choices remain to be made about the adaptation of these organizations to eastern enlargement, and about the management of relations with the near neighbours who will remain outside.     

Geopolitics at the margins? Reconsidering genealogies of critical geopolitics

Critical geopolitics has become one of the most vibrant parts of political geography. However it remains a particularly western way of knowing which has been much less attentive to other traditions of thinking. This paper engages with Pan-Africanism, and specifically the vision of the architect of post-colonial Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to explore this overlooked contribution to critical engagements with geopolitics. Pan-Africanism sought to forge alternative post-colonial worlds to the binary geopolitics of the Cold War and the geopolitical economy of neo-colonialism. The academic division of labour has meant that these ideas have been consigned to African studies rather than being drawn into wider debates around the definitions of key disciplinary concepts. However Nyerere's continental thinking can be seen as a form of geopolitical imagination that challenges dominant neo-realist projections, and which still has much to offer contemporary political geography.     

Joseph’s Dialogue with the Egyptians in Genesis 47,13-26: From Grammar to Social Dynamics

The relationship between Joseph and the Egyptians in Gen 47,13-26 is a disputed topic. Halliday’s Functional grammar offers a system that quantifies the dynamics of social interaction by tracking speech roles, topic changes, and modulation. It is the intention of this study to demonstrate that clarity can be brought to the dispute over the nature of the interaction between Joseph and the Egyptians in Gen 47,13-26 by applying the analytical tools of the Interpersonal Metafunction from the Systemic Functional Linguistics of M.A.K. Halliday. Specifically, the contours of the gradual capitulation of the Egyptians to Joseph’s supremacy can be substantiated from a number of discrete linguistic variables. (10,0008 words)     

From flexibility to accommodation? Disabled people and the reinvention of paid work

Scholarship on 'flexible' work and changing organizational cultures has had little to say about the implications of these developments for disabled people. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this paper examines the ways in which disabled workers struggle over accommodations in contemporary workplaces. Analysis reveals a number of themes concerning training, speed at work, and emotional and aesthetic labour. At their core, these themes concern the ability of workers to exercise control over the labour process. Efforts to obtain accommodation are frustrated by multiple strategies that include people's propensity to self-discipline in the interests of achieving a valued identity through paid work. The paper argues in conclusion that accommodation, as both discourse and practice, offers a conceptual resource for rethinking contemporary employment with implications for both disabled and non-disabled workers.     

Learning from history? From Soviet collapse to the ‘new’ Cold War

Many moments in what we now rather lamely call the ‘end of the Cold War’ have been examined in detail. However, within the extraordinarily rich literature that has arisen over the past 25 years, little attention has been paid thus far to one very important problem: the part played by ‘history’ in shaping the way different actors tried to make sense of what was going on around them in a time of rapid transition.     

Mirage in the Desert? Access to Educational Opportunities in an Area of Social Exclusion

While for British policymakers the route out of social exclusion is paid work through the acquisition of educational qualifications, research shows that academic achievement in areas of social exclusion is often poor. Based on a study undertaken on an inner London council estate, this paper explores the experiences of a group of carers and their children's access to secondary school education. It demonstrates the importance of a geographical focus on inequality, and the need for a nuanced approach in explaining educational opportunities in socially excluded areas. It also counters the notion of working class people as an undifferentiated group, devoid of cultural capital, whilst at the same time acknowledging the structural constraints of place which limit the full exercise of agency, so that for many, the opportunities apparently open to them turn out to be illusory.     

What consensus? Geopolitics and policy paradigms in China and the United States

The Washington Consensus is not what it was. A model of development associated with the Untied States, it has been diminished both by apparent failures, widespread criticism and by the recent economic crisis that had its origins in the US. Anglo‐American capitalism has lost a good deal of its influence and attractiveness. As a consequence, alternative models of development have become more prominent, especially the so‐called Beijing Consensus. The authors argue that at one level this evolving policy discourse and debate reflects a long‐term structural change in the relative positions of China and the United States. However, it is far from clear that this transformation has gone far enough to underpin a significant ideational or policy challenge on China's part. On the contrary, the debate in China demonstrates that there is little appetite for, or expectation of, a major paradigm change in the near future.     

From dates to demography in later prehistoric Ireland? Experimental approaches to the meta-analysis of large C data-sets

We present a series of iterative methods to examine the problems associated with summed probability functions (SPFs) based on archaeological radiocarbon data. As a case study we use an SPF generated from a substantial radiocarbon data-set from the Irish Later Bronze and Iron Ages. We use simple numerical methods to show that real patterns can be deciphered from SPFs that can be used to trace and evaluate patterns of change. However, our results suggest that SPFs should not be used as a simple index of past human activity.     

The right to Belfast City Centre: From ethnocracy to liberal multiculturalism?

This paper outlines a longitudinal study of struggles to control the public space of Belfast City Centre, the capital of Northern Ireland and a city divided by the competing political aspirations of British unionists and Irish nationalists. While the City Centre was once proscribed to nationalist groups, since 1993 nationalist groups have claimed equal use of this ‘sacred space’, once the spatial preserve of unionism. I examine this opening access of the City Centre in terms a shift from an ‘ethnocratic’ form of citizenship to one inflected by liberal multiculturalism, from one of ethnic exclusion to one informed by forms of power-sharing between nationalists and unionists. While many commentators have critiqued this form of conflict management for institutionalizing sectarianism and facilitating zero-sum conceptions of space, I argue that current strategies of creating a ‘shared space’ can be critically viewed as a successful form of liberal multiculturalism.     

A post-imperial,pluralist nationalism? From the Five Nation Republic of China to multicultural Taiwan

Although many nations emerged during the collapse of the empire, the case of China is curious in its failure to divide into separate nation-states. Resisting disunion, the Republic of China (ROC) adopted a rhetoric of national pluralism and laid claim to the fallen Qing Empire's vast territory. This divergence from other post-imperial nationalisms engenders questions about the legacy of imperialism in the ROC's approaches to nation-building. Such questions remain salient after the ROC retreat to Taiwan (1949), as since the end of martial law (1987), the ROC has championed itself as a model of multiculturalism. This paper examines the extent to which today's ‘Multicultural Taiwan’ paradigm differs from 20th-century official conceptualisations of pluralism, through discourse analysis of publications from the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission (MTAC). Investigation finds that despite centring Taiwan in national ideology, certain Chinese imperialist attitudes towards cultural hierarchy remained influential in MTAC representations of pluralism within Asia.     

Arendt’s Promise to Civil Society: Bridging the Social and the Political

In Arendt’s political theory the concept of civil society is often read as an extension of her concept of the social and is therefore dismissed as irrelevant to her political vision. This view leaves Arendtian theory in an exclusivist position with regard to contemporary political contexts and experiences. My aim in this essay is to address this problem by discussing the relationship of Arendtian theory and the concept of civil society in the context of contemporary political experience. This calls for not only a particular reading of the social in Arendt but, more importantly, for a joint reading of Arendt’s concept of the council state and civil society. Here, civil society is defined as the associations institutionalized by the voluntary engagement of active citizens, which definition, I argue, is compatible with Arendt’s concept of politics as action, plurality, and participation.     

From Civil War to ‘Civil Society’: Has the End of the Cold War Brought Peace to Central America?

Revisiting one arena of the Cold War—Central America—which dominated international headlines in the 1980s, this article explores its legacy on the region. It asks whether the ending of the Cold War and the peace accords which concluded the internal wars of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in 1990, 1992 and 1996, respectively, have brought sustainable peace, development and democracy. In particular, it explores the changing agenda of international financial and development agencies which have supported the postwar reconstruction of the region. The experiences of Nicaragua and El Salvador have shown that failure to coordinate the efforts at economic adjustment with those of peace-building compromised the possibilities of development and democratization, particularly for the poorest sectors of the population. Conservative elites who emerged intact from the war were able to consolidate their economic power, and resist and limit political reform, while handing responsibility for the poor and the former war zones to international agencies. The latter have shifted their agenda in the Guatemalan peace process, incorporating a strategy of 'civil society strengthening' in order to build capacity within society to create more accountable and democratic states.
The conclusion of the article explores the ambiguities of this strategy. On the positive side it legitimizes and protects the newly won but fragile freedoms of speech and association in the region; on the negative side, it risks turning a historical social and political dynamic into externally funded 'projects' with limited sustainability, whose outcome many international agencies tend to assume they can shape to their own expectations.     

What Does the Somali Experience Teach Us about the Social Contract and the State?

Since 1991 the international system has struggled and failed to recreate a state on the territory of the former Somalia. Proto‐state systems have been formed by Somalis themselves in Somaliland and Puntland and alternative forms of governance and order exist in other parts of Somalia, but none enjoys international recognition. The polities of Somalia offer important lessons concerning our general theories about social contract, the role that states play in creating wealth, indigenous systems of governance, and the failure of existing international approaches to state reconstruction. Contemporary Somali politics is re‐explored here to extract these lessons. The article explores the assumptions embedded in the works of the classic Western social contract theorists in the light of Somali experience in order to show that the underlying conceptual structure of international state reconstruction work needs to be rethought. We conclude that it frequently is better to allow for bottom‐up, organic, disjointed negotiation of indigenous governance solutions (even though they probably will not conform to Western ideas of liberal democracy) than for the international system to impose top‐down answers. The former more closely tracks the history of state formation in Europe and the latter is troubled by the inconsistent and not necessarily benign interests of the international actors involved. Indigenous, local political systems are changed by the stresses of violent conflict, so prompt action to employ them in a post‐conflict situation is indicated.     

Leibniz’s Kehre: From Ultradeterminism to the Philosophy of Freedom

Abstract

This article examines the rift in Leibniz’s conception of determinism after being rebuffed by the Parisian theologian Antoine Arnauld in their correspondence of 1686. As, in addition, his study of surds infracted his confidence in the “complete concept,” Leibniz embarked on a new, dynamic doctrine of substance or “law of the series.” In the literature, this strategy has been widely (mis)understood as “tweaking” the system to allow some self-assertion of free will. But as this article will show, it amounts to a revolutionary conception that culminates in the unmasking of determinism as an insupportable, indeed incoherent doctrine. As all forms of determinism are profoundly entangled with human self-perception, the Leibnizian Kehre invites us to a new engagement with human freedom and autonomy and the disentanglement from a philosophical position for which neither a metaphysical nor an empirical proof can be given.