Seeing Red: Baghdad and the event-ful city

In late modern war visuality plays a vital role in both the conduct and the rationalization of military violence. This essay explores the techno-cultural apparatus of US military operations and media briefings in occupied Baghdad from 2003 to 2007. It traces the visual reconfiguration of the city as a space of events rather than purely objects. These digital mappings were an intrinsic part of the US Army’s counterinsurgency strategy, and their performances were punctuated by a dialectical interplay of geopolitical and biopolitical imaginaries that was focal to the abstraction and legitimation of American military intervention.     

Paving the Way for Baghdad: The US Invasion of Panama, 1989

ABSTRACT

In December 1989, the United States unleashed its might against Panama. The invasion, Operation Just Cause, was the largest military operation conducted by the US since Vietnam and its first post-Cold War intervention. US troops invaded a foreign country, quickly occupied it, and withdrew before engendering a violent insurgency. Although George H. W. Bush authorized an illegal invasion which invited international denunciation, its quick and successful resolution concealed serious issues. Senior officials who served Bush senior, but who badly failed his son, also drew important lessons from the invasion. Just Cause demonstrated how a small and mobile force using overwhelming firepower could decapitate an enemy regime and establish the conditions for the development of a democratic state. The invasion also prefigured the justification for US interventionism in the post-Cold War: spreading democracy and protecting human rights. An easy victory on the surface, the Panamanian intervention paved the way for a greater calamity on the Tigris decades later. Just Cause provided US policy-makers with a false sense of confidence and optimism that paved the path for the invasion of Baghdad in 2003.     

Editorial: Making an Impact

We promised in our last editorial (Puga and Wrigley, 2004) toreturn with news of the Journal's performance in the ISI citation‘impact factor’ rankings. That is to say, to givereaders the opportunity to gauge how the Journal is beginningto fare in the ‘market place for ideas’. June 2005saw the release of the ISI 2004 Journal Citation Reports (JCR)—thefirst year Journal of Economic Geography appears in the JCR.The result (Table 1) is remarkable. On the basis of citation‘impact factor’, Journal of Economic Geography entersthe rankings as No. 1     

犹太民族核心凝聚力诸因素分析

根据马克思主义的民族理论,“民族是人们在历史上形成的一个有共同语言、共同地域、共同经济生活以及表现于共同化之上的共同心理素质的稳定的共同体”。共同语言、共同地域、共同经济生活和以共同化为基础的共同心理素质构成了民族的四个典型特征。但是,对于流散于世界各地的犹太人来讲,前三个特征在长期流散的生活中几乎丧失殆尽,犹太民族的特征集中体现在第四个方面,即建立在共同化基础上的共同心理素质。