Placing blame: Making sense of Beslan

The aftermaths of terrorist spectacles are intensely consequential moments in the making of geopolitical meaning. This paper develops a critical geopolitical account of the ways in which key actors involved in the terrorist incident at School Number 1 in Beslan North Ossetia constructed its meaning and justified their actions. The event is examined from three perspectives: the terrorist's Beslan, the Kremlin's Beslan and the contested meaning of Beslan among Ossetians and others in the North Caucasus. Multiple sources are utilized in the construction of the account: an English language archive of Russian reporting on the event, accounts of the siege, statements by key protagonists, elite interviews in North Ossetia, and the results of a survey question in North Ossetia and the North Caucasus on Beslan. The paper examines the construction of blame by the various actors and relates it to indiscriminate geographies, sweeping acts of abstraction whose homogenizing effects make (counter)terrorist violence possible.     

The cultural dimension in comparative research: Making sense of development control in France

There is a tendency amongst planners to think of planning systems as phenomena with an independent existence that may be directly compared. Such a view lingers even where the concept of end‐state planning has long been abandoned, and where it is understood that the context for plan‐making and development control is an important factor in comparing systems of different countries. This paper will argue that systems of plans and development control procedures are essentially creatures of the cultures which give rise to them. They are to be understood as expressions of underlying beliefs about the way that decisions ought to be taken for the administration of a country. This paper presents three cases drawn from the author's own experience of research in France as indicative of the approach. The first, a development control case of the extension to a heavy goods vehicle depot, looks at the cultural factors that affected the way the application was determined. The second, concerning the formal development control agreements between state and commune in rural France, hinges on the understanding of the concept of a plan. The third, a consultation procedure in Lyon, is dependent for its explanation on the status of the participants in the procedure. Such an approach implies a mature understanding of the way in which a country works, not merely of its planning system. It implies an ability to communicate in the language of the country being studied. The paper concludes by suggesting that comparative research has important benefits for the understanding of planning in the home country, because of the way in which, if properly done, it questions the assumptions that are made about the nature and purpose of planning.     

现代性及其限度：民国文官考试制度平议

民国文官考试制度是一个传统与现代的混合体.其现代性主要体现为法制化程度的提高,平等性和开放性的增强,考试权的独立和考试内容的现代化.但是对经义考试的保留,对传统科举制考试程序的模仿,考试与任用的脱节,党治和军治色彩的存在,个人因素的干扰,派系势力的抗拒等,又使民国文官考试制度的现代性受到极大限制,难以发挥其应有的功效.     

Making sense out of cents: compositional variations in European coins as a control model for archaeometallurgy

Archaeometallurgy frequently seeks to correlate between the temporal and spatial distribution of ancient metal objects and their chemical composition. In this study, we examined whether and to what extent local or temporal deviations in the content of modern artifacts can be identified as a proxy for archaeological material that is typically less controlled and therefore more difficult to cluster. For this purpose, Euro coins of 10, 20 and 50 cents from Germany, France, Spain, Italy and Belgium, which are made of copper (Cu) with 5% aluminum (Al), 5% zinc (Zn) and 1% tin (Sn), were analyzed using a simple XRF analyzer. The mass ratios Sn/Cu and Zn/Cu were measured with a relative precision c.a. of 5%. The mean content of the coins from each country was then determined for 20–39 of them. The difference of the mass ratio Sn/Cu observed – from 0.0101 to 0.0111. One coin from Luxemburg shows differences in various areas of its surface of up to a factor of 1.5. Thus, the results of this small pilot research show that even in modern metal artifacts we can detect differences in metal content, which can be correlated to their production and utilization places. Therefore, this study can serve as a model for evaluating compositional variations noted in archaeometallurgical studies where the standard deviations are greater and the differences can be linked more readily to spatial and temporal differences.     

A changing sense of Somaliness: Somali women in London and Toronto

This article considers how direct and indirect transnational linkages influence Somali refugee women settling in London, England and Toronto, Canada, and lead to shifts in identity in resettlement contexts. Drawing on interviews with Somali refugee women and discussions with resettlement staff, this article shows that under influences of distant and local linkages with other Somalis and through the cultural and social influences of the receiving society, Somali women develop a changing sense of their own Somaliness. The article argues that indicators of belonging, such as dress, religion and language, come to hold new and increased value within the new context, and familiar facets of national, cultural and religious identity shift in significance in response to competing influences and are used as intentional signifiers of identity.     

The placing of matter: industrial water pollution and the construction of social order in nineteenth-century France

Set within a Douglasian framework, this paper explores the genesis and the social significance of the concept of environmental ‘pollution’ in late nineteenth-century France by drawing on printed scientific and medical sources and analysing archival material from administrations and industrial companies. ‘Pollution’ brought together various strands of water research (especially water analysis, bacteriology and hydrology) but also served as the foundation of a discourse on industrial responsibility. It was a response to the new material circulations created by industrial discharges in river. Paradoxically, it condoned industrial discharges in watercourses, which the hygienist community deemed less dangerous than domestic wastewaters. The co-production of pollution science and nineteenth-century industrial order explains why industrial water pollution was allowed to go unabated. The incapacity of the legal framework of the time to accommodate polluting discharges as legal objects and find legitimate places for them, the power politics at work around pollution and scientific controversies themselves made discharges very difficult to challenge in court. Accordingly, water pollution was regulated informally and industrialists were able to claim rivers as legitimate places for industrial matter against challenges brought up by other social actors.     

The Brazilian devaluation: national responses and international consequences

The Asian financial crisis in 1997 reached Latin America the following year. The Brazilian devaluation in January 1999 demonstrated the vulnerability of Latin America's largest economy to external shocks, but it was also a consequence of fiscal imbalance. This article explores the background to the devaluation and explains the circumstances under which it might lead to an improvement in economic performance. The article then examines the impact of the devaluation on Brazil's neighbours in MERCOSUL, particularly Argentina. It also considers the lessons of the Brazilian devaluation in the context of attempts to reform the global financial architecture and in the light of the volatility of capital flows to emerging markets. The main conclusion is that the impact of the devaluation will be felt most strongly in Brazil and that a successful outcome will require economic and political reforms over and above those already adopted by the Cardoso administration.     

Choiseul: The Making of a Diplomat

ROHAN BUTLER. Choiseul, Volume i: Father and Son, 1719–54. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980. Pp. xxxv, 1133. $135.00 (US).