The Consolation of Soldiers: religious life in the Swedish army during the Great Northern War

It is commonly acknowledged that an elaborated military pastoral care provided a significant contribution to the efficiency of the Swedish army during the Great Northern War (1700–1721). Usually battle preparations and the chaplains’ efforts to instil morale and discipline among the soldiers are emphasized. In this article my aim is to provide a somewhat different idea on the nature of the religious life in the army of Charles XII. By focusing in turn on the chaplains’ duties, the military sermons, the hymns sung in the army and the soldiers’ reading of prayer books, I point at the similarities between military and civilian religious life in early 18th-century Sweden.     

The Singing War: Canadian Soldiers' Songs of the Great War

Singing was an important leisure activity for Canadian soldiers serving overseas in the Great War. Soldiers sang popular songs of the day and religious hymns, while also parodying them to better suit their wartime experience. Singing was a group activity that brought men together, forged bonds of comradeship, reinforced belonging in the group, and helped the soldiers endure the strain of unending combat and service. Wartime songs reveal the culture from below and shed new light on the soldiers' experience.     

Orphan Heritage: Issues in Managing the Heritage of the Great War in Northern France and Belgium

Abstract

This paper summarises recent developments in the field of Great War archaeology and examines solutions to the issues raised. The Great War is recent enough to be modern, but far enough back to be beyond living memory. As such, its material remains have become the province of archaeology, which raises two issues. Firstly, that the heritage is "owned" by people distant from the territories that contain the material, an issue exacerbated by modernity and derivation through conflict of the material. Secondly, the issue of what kind of archaeology is suitable for dealing with this material, and which archaeologists should do it.     

The Great War of Enclosure: Securing the Skies

Swarms of police drones, fleets of overhead delivery bots, and flocks of private security drones are set to multiply the complex interfaces between state, capital, and sense. This paper explores the military and economic enclosure of the atmosphere by drones. For centuries, capitalist enclosure has privatized and secured common spaces: territorializing new power relations into the soil. Enclosure now operates through an increasingly atmospheric spatiality. The birth of airpower enabled new vertical regimes of state power, capital accumulation, and violence. Now, drones are materializing both intimate and pervasive colonizations of local, national, and international airspace. Crucially, this discloses new morphologies and ontologies of urban (in)security, in which an atmospheric state polices deterritorialized aerial circulations. Such a reenchanted atmosphere collapses the geopolitical and geoeconomic in uncertain robotic orbits. This paper, which connects past and present, is driven by a deeper concern for the existential dimensions of dronified skyscapes, subjects, and violence.     

The Intellectual Internment of a Conflict: The Forgotten War in Northern Ireland

One of the most enduring ideas about the Northern Ireland conflict is that it has been rigorously studied. This is a myth. The stark absence of analysis of its military and international dimensions makes the conflict one of the least understood of modern times. Scholarly studies of Northern Ireland have been insulated from influences in the wider academic world by the dominance of hitherto unchallenged images about the crisis. These images support a dominant orthodoxy that has confined intellectual investigation of the 'Troubles' to Northern Ireland itself, sustaining a view that little of value can be gained from studying the military nature of the conflict. This orthodoxy is one to which, depressingly, the international relations community has been only too willing to contribute to justify its fear and neglect. Not only does this reflect poorly on academic practice but it has also helped to engender a dangerously distorted image of the conflict that bodes ill for the future.     

Multipolis: High-technology Network in Northern Finland

Multipolis is a publicly funded innovation-oriented regional policy instrument to develop high technology in northern Finland. Northern Finland has few experts, under 1000 high-technology enterprises and a small market in a territory of 155,100 square kilometres with 716,000 inhabitants. Multipolis connects high-technology enterprises in, and between, 15 specialized high-technology clusters, regional developers and higher education and research institutes. Multipolis combines the technologically highly developed functional urban region of Oulu (“technopolis”) and the rest of northern Finland (“learning region”). Multipolis has enhanced cooperation, acquisition of new information, social networks and common projects by high-technology enterprises. However, the management of the Multipolis network requires more attention.