Iran as a ‘pariah’ nuclear aspirant

This article demonstrates that Iran conforms to Richard K. Betts' model of a ‘pariah’ nuclear aspirant, as its nuclear program is driven by a potent combination of security, normative and domestic political motivations. The regime's commitment to its nuclear program is influenced by Iran's long-standing sense of vulnerability to both regional and international adversaries, and an enduring sense of national humiliation at the hands of foreign powers, in parallel with a powerful belief in the superiority of Persian civilisation. This has resulted in the development of a narrative of ‘hyper-independence’ in Iran's foreign policy that simultaneously rejects political, cultural or economic dependence and emphasises ‘self-reliance’. The presumed security benefits that a nuclear weapons option provides are seen as ensuring Iranian ‘self-reliance’ and ‘independence’. This suggests that current strategies that focus exclusively on Iran's security motivations or on a heightened regime of sanctions are fundamentally flawed, as they fail to recognise the mutually reinforcing dynamic between Iran's security and normative/status-derived nuclear motivations.     

Safe Places in Domestic Spaces: Two-Year-Olds at Play in their Homes

This paper contributes to the growing research literature on children's ‘intimate geographies’ by focusing on two-year-old children's explorations and play within the domestic spaces of their homes. It draws on video data showing three young girls playing in selected home spaces i.e. a family grocery shop in Peru, the upstairs rooms of a house in America, and the balcony of an apartment in Italy. Through analysis of short video sequences the paper describes the way children use and invest meaning in these spaces. It is argued that the three domestic locations can be seen as ‘safe places’, in both material and personal senses; and that they enable children's sense of belonging, foster their ‘emplaced knowledge’ and build on their confidence to explore spaces further afield.     

Experiencing Dracula's homeland

ABSTRACT

Transylvania has not only a geographical location as a province of Romania but also a mental meaning as Dracula's land. Dracula has become an important brand name for Romania, attracting many tourists in recent years – especially after the fall of communism. The main dimensions of Dracula's castle (i.e. Bran Castle) experiences shared online by tourists were identified to ascertain the primary reasons for satisfaction and dissatisfaction with visits and to test whether narratives and satisfaction vary according to the occasion (i.e. Halloween). Quantitative (i.e. computer-based) and qualitative (i.e. narrative) content analyses were conducted on the Web reviews written by visitors. The results reveal that the experiences are multidimensional, and they include the following themes: ‘castle’, ‘visit’, ‘Dracula’, ‘inside’, ‘tourist’, ‘outside’, ‘trip’, ‘souvenirs’, ‘stairs’ and ‘Dracula's castle’. The main reasons for dissatisfaction are overcrowding, which is connected with the outside theme, and the disappointment of tourists regarding the old furniture, which is associated with the inside theme. The results also reveal that visitors are the most satisfied with their experience around the time of Halloween. The narratives shared online emphasise tourists’ need to associate their imaginings with this region and castle, giving their experiences greater meaning through this destination's image as Transylvania.     

Analysing international nuclear order

William Walker's article, ‘Nuclear enlightenment and counter‐enlightenment’, raises fundamental questions about the history of efforts to construct order in international politics in relation to nuclear arms and weapons‐related capabilities. However, Walker's ‘enlightenment’ and ‘counter‐enlightenment’ tropes are clumsy and unsatisfactory tools for analysing contemporary policies concerning nuclear deterrence, non‐proliferation and disarmament. Walker holds that in the 1960s and 1970s most of the governments of the world came together in pursuit of ‘a grand enlightenment project’. This thesis cannot withstand empirical scrutiny with regard to its three main themes—a supposed US‐Soviet consensus on doctrines of stabilizing nuclear deterrence through mutual vulnerability, a notion that the NPT derived from ‘concerted efforts to construct an international nuclear order meriting that title’, and the view that the NPT embodied a commitment to achieve nuclear disarmament. Walker's criticisms of US nuclear policies since the late 1990s are in several cases overstated or ill‐founded. Walker also exaggerates the potential influence of the United States over the policies of other countries. It is partly for this reason that the challenges at hand—both analytical and practical—are more complicated and dif cult than his article implies. His work nonetheless has the great merit of raising fundamental questions about international political order.     

‘So that we don't spoil them’: understanding children's everyday mobility through parents’ affective practices

ABSTRACT

Children's everyday mobility and freedom of movement have been closely linked to parental practices, or what has been referred to as parental ‘mobility permits’ or ‘mobility licences’. Most research tends to focus on parental restrictions, while this article explores the affective practices Swedish middle-class parents use in order to enhance their children's mobility, i.e. how emotions are perceived as enabling parents’ and children's spatial experiences and thus their feelings of safety and security; as well as how emotions are talked of as disabling or disrupting the potential for children's mobility. These affective practices are analysed in relation to the parents’ self-reflexive positioning on a continuum between ‘the helicopter parent’ and ‘the engaged and enabling parent’. The material for the article is comprised of 33 interviews with the children's parents, carried out within a larger ethnographic research project on children's everyday mobility in Sweden.     

Fallout from the thunder: poetry and politics in Seamus Heaney's District and Circle

This article examines Heaney's preoccupation in District and Circle (2006) with international political events during this ‘new age of anxiety’, and how he initially approaches these circuitously through a return to originary, boyhood experiences. Such momentous acts as the attacks of 9/ll, the ‘War on Terror’ and the London bombings are filtered through, juxtaposed with and illuminated by episodes both from the ancient past and Heaney's family history. In attendance, as always, throughout the latest volume is the poet's diverse literary ancestry, a reminder of how his work exemplifies core claims made in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), where Eliot argues that ‘what makes the writer most acutely conscious of his own place in time’ is ‘the historical sense’, ‘a feeling for the whole of literature’ from Homer onwards. Thus, alongside its detailed address to politics and such crucial literary matters as structure, form and metaphor, the essay repeatedly returns to the intertextual ‘presences’ which haunt and animate Heaney's continuing creative project.     

The (Jean) Nouvel Other: Primitivism and the Musée du Quai Branly

The Musée du Quai Branly, located beside the Eiffel Tower in Paris, opened in June 2006. Constructed to house France's important collection of non-western art, the museum has been promoted as ‘decidedly post-colonial’ and a place of ‘reconciliation and sharing’. Historians have situated the creation of the museum within political debates over the restructuring of several of France's museums and, more broadly, the country's position in a post-colonial world, while focusing little critical attention on the building itself. The author argues that Jean Nouvel's architectural program for the Musée du Quai Branly—a ‘primitive shelter’ surrounded by a ‘sacred wood’—gives physical form to a primitivist aesthetic. The unproblematised binaries of self versus other and culture versus nature evident in Nouvel's design reveal a surprisingly unsophisticated theoretical standpoint. As a frame in which to view and understand the objects on display, the Musée du Quai Branly invites a primitivist—and colonial—reading of its collection.     

Deterrence dogma? Challenging the relevance of British nuclear weapons

In December 2006 the British government released a White Paper announcing its intention to begin the process of replacing its current Trident nuclear weapons system, thereby allowing it to retain nuclear weapons well into the 2050s. In March 2008 the government released its National Security Strategy that stressed the long‐term complexity, diversity and interdependence of threats to British security with a clear focus on human rights, justice and freedom. This article asks how the threat to kill tens if not hundreds of thousands of people with British nuclear weapons fits into the National Security Strategy's world view and questions the relevance of an instrument of such devastating bluntness to threats defined by complexity and interdependence. It argues that the government's case for replacing the current Trident system based on the logic of nuclear deterrence is flawed. First, Britain faces no strategic nuclear threats and the long‐term post‐Cold War trend in relations with Russia and China—the two nuclear‐armed major powers that could conceivably threaten the UK with nuclear attack—is positive, despite current tensions with Moscow over Georgia. Second, the credibility and legitimacy of threatening nuclear destruction in response to the use of WMD by ‘rogue’ states is highly questionable and British nuclear threats offer no ‘insurance’ or guarantee of protection against future ‘rogue’ nuclear threats. Third, nuclear weapons have no role to play in deterring acts of nuclear terrorism whether state‐sponsored or not. Fourth, British nuclear threats will be useless in dealing with complex future conflicts characterized by ‘hybrid’ wars and diverse and interdependent sources of insecurity. The article concludes by arguing that the government's fall‐back position that it must keep nuclear weapons ‘just in case’ because the future security environment appears so uncertain, makes no sense if British nuclear threats offer no solution to the causes and symptoms of that uncertainty.     

Hwaetberht,Sicgfrith and the reforming of Wearmouth and Jarrow

This paper builds upon recent scholarship, exploring how Wearmouth‐Jarrow, founded as a ‘family monastery’ in the mainstream of early medieval Northumbrian monasticism, reformed itself to become the proto‐Benedictine bastion of correct behaviour described in Bede's Lives of the Abbots and the anonymous Life of Ceolfrith. The understudied abbots Hwaetberht and Sicgfrith appear to be at the heart of this process. Their careers and actions suggest the existence of a party at Wearmouth‐Jarrow opposed to the dominance of the founder's kin group and wishing to reform the monastery on Benedictine lines. This party triumphed only in 716, when Hwaetberht became abbot.     

Regulating Body Boundaries and Health during the Second World War: Nationalist Discourse,Media Representations and the Experiences of Canadian Women War Workers

This article examines the intersections of gender, wartime nationalist rhetoric and the production of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies in both the Canadian workplace and the home during the Second World War. Analysing government, industry and media discourses in relation to oral history interviews with thirty‐eight women aircraft workers, we discuss women's distinctive role in shaping the health and morale of the social body during wartime, to ensure the maintenance of family, nation and the Allied war effort. While health in wartime was defined in terms of worker productivity for both men and women, anxiety about women's expanded roles heightened the emphasis on moral respectability as a marker of the ‘healthy’ female body. This was further complicated by the wartime emphasis on women's responsibilities to boost morale as part of their role in maintaining health and productivity for both men and women. Through such examples as workplace regulations and domestic advice, we examine the increased monitoring of women's individual and collective bodies and the intensified demands on female war workers as they crossed between the public and private spheres. We use our oral histories to examine women's embodied memories of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ bodies within a regional context and their responses to government, industry and media discourses.     

Book Reviews

Letters from the Dust Bowl by Caroline Henderson Alvin O. Turner (Ed.), 2001 Norman, OK, University of Oklahoma Press 320 pp., $34.90 hardback ISBN 0-8061-33-3 hardback The American ‘Dust Bowl’ landscape of the 1930s has been etched into the global imagination through powerful narratives: Farm Security Administration photography (1935-43), Per Loretz's film, The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath (1939). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, historians such as Donald Worster (1979) have constructed their own narratives of this time and place. Caroline Henderson's Letters from the Dust Bowl, edited by Alvin O. Turner, provides a counterpoint, in the form of a first-hand account and a woman's voice, to the news stories, government propaganda, and historians' analyses that construct our understanding of the Dust Bowl. Henderson's letters reveal not only the ‘real’ experience of living in that place during a particularly difficult time, but also the ‘before’ and ‘after’–what led these individuals to the Great Plains and what became of them afterward. Educated at Mt Holyoke, Caroline Henderson ventured out onto the panhandle of Oklahoma to homestead in 1907 as a single woman, who ‘hungered and thirsted for something away from it all and for the out-of-doors’ (p. 33). She met her future husband Will when she hired a crew to dig a well on her land. Letters from the Dust Bowl captures Caroline's transformation from an idealistic young woman to a woman ‘worn by years of struggle with land and life’. Caroline's ‘letters’ are an amalgamation of letters to family and friends, and letters and essays written for publications such as the Atlantic Monthly. Letters begins with Henderson's optimism and delight in both life and landscape. Caroline's early writings capture the excitement of homesteading, of marriage, of being a young mother. Her writings eventually shift from purely personal letters to family and friends to being a source of additional income. Drought and failed crops led Caroline to begin writing for publication in 1913; her first published article was on her first years homesteading. She became a regular contributor to Ladies' World magazine, as their ‘Homestead Lady’, until its demise in 1918.     

‘Homes’ and being ‘at home’ in New Zealand: women's place-making in internationalised higher education

Research on students' experiences in internationalised higher education largely assumes students' autonomy and privileges their public selves. New Zealand research is no exception. Little attention has been paid to students' lives beyond classroom contexts; how national policy and institutional practices shape students' everyday experiences and ‘home’ lives similarly and differently. In addition, gender is afforded scant attention or considered only as a secondary concern, and people whose partners or family members are international students are invisible. This article endeavours to address the relative inattention to gender in international education research and the invisibility of women whose partners are international students. It draws on data from interviews with 17 women involved in a broader doctoral research project during 2005 and 2006. The women were either migrant or international students or had partners enrolled as international students. The article uses ‘home’ as a lens for examining women's situated and transnational place-making and factors that promoted or precluded a sense of belonging in New Zealand. It draws connections between women's accounts of ‘home’ and feeling ‘at home’, and broader politics, policies and institutional practices in New Zealand higher education.     

Du Rutabaga et Encore du Rutabaga: Daily Life in Vichy France

‘Amerindians’ represent only a small proportion—currently estimated at 3–4%—of the sparse but rapidly growing population of France's South American département d'outre-mer. Yet the existence of ‘autochthonous’ communities in Guyane presents legal, political, cultural and environmental challenges to the concepts of republican universalism ostensibly established in 1946 alongside its status as an overseas department of France. Using an Amerindian cultural centre as a case study, this article seeks to explain how representations of ‘Amerindian’ identities in Guyane are constructed both alongside and against a traditional framework of opposition between universal commonality and cultural particularism. Through engagement with museum ethnography and analysis of personal narrative and collective action, the article traces conflicts and compromises surrounding ‘indigeneity’ and citizenship in the face of state non-recognition of ethnicity. It argues that the politics of Amerindian identity, from citizenship rights to ecotourism, has increasingly been characterised by an emphasis on ‘ecological’ relationships.

Les « Amérindiens » ne constituent que 3 à 4 % de la population de la Guyane – seul département d'outre-mer de France en Amérique du Sud – une population relativement faible et dispersée mais qui connaît une croissance rapide. Cependant, l'existence de communautés « autochtones » dans ce département présente des défis juridiques, politiques, culturels et environnementaux face à l’universalisme républicain établi au moment où la Guyane est devenue département, en 1946. Cet article s'appuie sur le cas d'un centre culturel amérindien pour exposer comment les représentations de l'identité « amérindienne » en Guyane se construisent à la fois avec et contre l'opposition traditionnelle entre les communalités universellement partagées et le particularisme culturel. S'appuyant sur l'ethnographie muséologique et sur l'analyse des récits individuels et de l'action collective, l'article reconstitue les conflits et les compromis autour de « l'autochtonie » et de la citoyenneté face à l'aveuglement officiel de l'État par rapport à l'idée de l'ethnicité. L'article suggère que, des droits citoyens à l'écotourisme, la politique identitaire « amérindienne » se caractérise de plus en plus par une emphase sur les relations sociales « écologiques »; c'est-à-dire entre hommes, femmes et environnement.     

The Anti‐Essentialist Choice: Nationalism and Feminism in the Interaction between Two Women's Projects

Abstract. Two cross‐national women's organisations, one in Northern Ireland the other in Bosnia‐Herzegovina, are observed here in interaction with each other. The article explores the connection between their ability to sustain such cross‐community alliances and their choice to be women's projects. In so doing, it addresses the question ‘are feminism and nationalism compatible?’ Not all the women are ‘anti‐nationalist’ in philosophy, but they draw distinctions between variants of nationalism, and may be described as ‘anti‐essentialist’. The article distinguishes between variants of ‘feminism’, recognising it, too, as a plurality of movements. An anti‐essentialist understanding of ethnicity and nation is partnered in both the Network and Medica by an anti‐essentialist feminism, in which a woman's family role is minimised and value placed instead on her autonomy and agency. Certain forms of feminism and nationalism are thus compatible – but the configuration may be progressive or retrograde.     

Women and Alcohol Consumption in Fascist Italy

This article examines discourses and practices around women's drinking in Fascist Italy. The history of alcohol production and consumption in Italy during the fascist dictatorship has only recently received attention; alcohol's gendered dimensions, especially women's drinking, have been hitherto overlooked. While the production of legislation, rhetoric and propaganda on alcohol consumption was dominated by men, women were identified as key constituents whose alcohol-related practices could make or break the causes of fascist propagandists, ‘anti-alcohol’ campaigners and alcohol industry associations. The article explains how Italian women were imagined and addressed by regime propagandists, alcohol industry producers and temperance campaigners as (a) simultaneously the principal victims of and responsibility bearers for male excess alcohol consumption, (b) potential ‘crisis-women’ whose unpatriotic drinking choices (whether English tea, French champagne or American cocktails) denoted their prioritising of fashion over fascist values and (c) gatekeepers of family alcohol consumer practices and consumers of alcohol in their own right. It then moves to examine sources left by interwar Italian women to explore what, how and when they drank. Ultimately, it argues that despite attempts to construct women's drinking in archly nationalistic terms, the discourses and actual practices of Italian women around alcohol consumption operated within profoundly transnational frames.     

‘A real woman has to do it all – with the kids and in the office’: Doing femininity in the transcultural context of Russian-German migration

The au pair stay allows young women to experience the doing gender of family work and waged work in another cultural context than their own. This article investigates how Russian university graduates, who had been working as an au pair in Germany, developed transcultural strategies to balance work and family for their prospective future referring to these different experiences. It will be shown that interviewees rejected the Soviet family model of the fulltime ‘working mother’. Some women positively evaluated that in Germany the equality of gender has been better established than in Russia and aimed at sharing housework with their partner. Criticizing the outsourcing of childcare to an employee, in this family model femininity is not based on housework but on women's dedication to motherhood. Other women negatively evaluated that in Germany the family model of the ‘business woman’ characterized by women's role as the main breadwinner of the family and the primary provider of family work has developed. These women preferred to work part-time to be able to care for their families. In this family model the responsibility of breadwinning is ascribed solely to men, while women's waged work is constructed as time devoted to women's individual needs by offering an intellectual challenge and an individual income.     

Towards an NPT‐restrained world that makes economic sense

Because most of the world's proliferators have used the Nuclear Non‐proliferation Treaty's (NPT) call on nations to ‘share the benefits of the applications of peaceful nuclear energy’ to help justify their nuclear activities, it is unclear just how much any proliferator ultimately has been restrained by these rules. This needs to change but is unlikely, unless the NPT's qualifications on the right to ‘peaceful’ nuclear energy are read in a much more restrictive fashion to only authorize nuclear projects that are clearly beneficial economically and that truly can be safeguarded against diversion to make bombs. In this regard, our best hope is that, as nations consider how to prevent global warming, they might adopt clear economic guidelines that would compel all energy projects—both nuclear and non‐nuclear—to compete economically against one another on a much more level playing field. This would make dangerous, uneconomical nuclear projects far less likely to be pursued, and a centering of the world's security on a proper reading of the NPT much more likely and sustainable. Indeed, unless economic discipline of this sort is attempted internationally, it is quite likely that the continued implementation of the current egregious view of the NPT will only serve to accelerate nuclear proliferation more rapidly than if there was no NPT at all.     

A zone of exception: gendered violences of family ‘Happiness’ in Vietnam

This article examines the ways in which women’s ‘family happiness’ in Vietnam paradoxically, and alarmingly, is rendered compatible with the endurance of what is diminished as ‘minor’ partner violence. Thus focusing on the gendering of ‘happiness’ and the discrepancies between ideals and practices, the article unfolds how intersections between a number of ‘power-geometries’ including violence preventive legislation, an official family discourse, and the patrilineally organized family facilitate the conditions that allow for male-to-female violence in the domestic sphere. The article highlights how Intimate Partner Violence transmutes the ‘happy family’ into a ‘zone of exception’ wherein which the laws prohibiting violence are suspended, the juridico-political status and rights of a woman blurred, and a state of chronic precariousness and crisis generated. Such tendencies are fortified by the ambiguous strategies of the Women’s Union. In maneuvering between violence preventive legislation and family ideals, the Union is criticizing patriarchal family hierarchies while also encouraging women to nurture family happiness by complying with an abusive partner.     

The great war and the french people

Thomas Hobbes's theory of action seems to give up on the idea that actions are ‘up to us’. Thomas Pink has argued that this counter-intuitive stance should be understood as the implication of his radical assault on the scholastic Aristotelian model of action. Hobbes rejects the existence of the immaterial soul. This means that he must also reject the existence of so-called elicited acts of the will, which form the primary locus of human agency. In this paper an alternative interpretation is presented. It is argued that Hobbes's fundamental disagreement with the scholastic tradition is not over the existence of elicited acts of the will but over scope and productiveness of mechanical explanation. Hobbes aims to give an account of human actions as in our control and as ‘up to us’ while at the same time applying and defending his mechanical mode of analysis. This paper contributes to the contextualisation of Hobbes's views and furthers our understanding of his theory of action.