Bosnia and Herzegovina Five Years after the Dayton Accords

A specialist on financial issues in the State of Bosnia and Herzegovina assesses economic performance in that country during the five years following conclusion of the Dayton Peace Accords. The basic provisions of the Accords relating to economic activity and post-war reconstruction are presented, after which the analysis focuses on developments in the economy, privatization, and banking-sector reform, to the extent that available data allow. Coverage then turns to a review of the role of the Office of the High Representative in administration of the State's two constituent Entities: the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the Serb Republic. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O11, O18, O52. 5 tables, 33 references.     

经济全球化与民族国家的主权保护

经济全球化是一个发展过程,也是一个客观现实。经济全球化对威斯特伐利亚体系所确立的传统的民族国家主权进行着挑战,但并未导致主权的终结。对包括中国在内的发展中国家来说,必须积极参与国际经济秩序的重构,才能有效地维护国家利益和捍卫国家的主权。     

The United Nations and State Sovereignty: Mechanism for Managing International Security

Recently, some analysts have accused the United Nations of eroding the sovereignty of its members. However, these critics often ignore the fact that the creation of the United Nations was itself one incident in the process of reinterpreting sovereignty which has gone on for centuries. Before 1945, sovereignty was often reinterpreted to fit the changing norms and institutions. As a principle which legitimises political control and helps enhance international security, sovereignty often reflects the prevailing notions of international order. While the Security Council has tried to redefine sovereignty after the cold war, the UN Charter remains a constraint on such reinterpretation. If the Charter is not amended to reflect post-cold war changes, the international society might be split between supporters of the Charter principles of sovereignty and those who seek change.     

State Absence and State Formation in Solomon Islands: Reflections on Agency,Scale and Hybridity

This article engages ethnographic research on perceptions of disputation, justice and security in rural Solomon Islands to reflect on issues of agency, power and scale in areas of limited statehood. Set against widespread popular perceptions of state retreat in Solomon Islands, the authors situate their study within the literature which addresses engagements with conflict‐affected and fragile countries and, in particular, literature with an interest in the spaces created by prolonged state absence as potential sites of innovation and transformation. The article examines the role of agency and power at different scales in the highly contested processes of state formation underway in post‐conflict Solomon Islands. Taking issue with the presumed privileging by local actors of non‐state over state forms that runs through much of the hybridity literature, the authors suggest that international ‘state‐building’ interventions, such as that recently experienced in Solomon Islands, require a more nuanced and historically informed understanding of local agency vis‐à‐vis the state in fragile and conflict‐affected settings.     

Insularity, Sovereignty and Statehood: The Representation of Islands on Portolan Charts and The Construction of The Territorial State

This article investigates the cartographic origins of the idea that the territorial state is a unified, bounded, homogeneous and naturally occurring entity, in a world of equivalent but unique entities. It is noted that this image of the territorial state closely resembles the representation of islands on sixteenth‐century portolan charts, and this suggests a historical link between the Renaissance‐era imagination of islands and the modern imagination of states. The article posits that the concept of territorial unity and boundedness, which appeared on portolan charts to signify islands as obstacles amidst maritime routes of movement, migrated in the late sixteenth‐century to form the basis for representing the emergent concept of the territorial state. It is suggested that the conceptual and aesthetic links between these representations of islands and states has led to an ongoing dilemma for those who seek to comprehend (or cartographically represent) islands that are divided between multiple states.     

Bosnia: The Crime of Appeasement

Few international journalists have been as intimately involved in the conflict in former Yugoslavia as Ed Vulliamy. In this vivid personal account of the war years he argues that the international community's response to Serbian claims amounted to nothing less than appeasement.     

Sovereignty: The Algerian Case

Books reviewed:
Matthew Connelly. A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria's Fight for Independence and the Origins of the Post-Cold War Era. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 400 pp. Bibliography, Index. $55.00 (cloth), $26.00 (paper).     

New State Spaces,Agency and Scale: Devolution and the Regionalisation of Transport Governance in Scotland

Abstract: New state spaces can be seen as products of the interaction between emerging initiatives and pre‐existing institutional arrangements ( Peck 1998 , Space and Polity 2:5–31). In the devolved territories of the UK devolution has created new political centres of policy formulation and this paper is concerned with how devolved policy initiatives are reshaping and rescaling sub‐national spaces of governance. We focus on the rescaling of transport governance in Scotland through a nationally orchestrated process of regionalisation involving the creation of Regional Transport Partnerships (RTPs), an initiative that has been shaped by tensions between changing national political objectives and local interests. Our approach draws on Neil Brenner's “new state spaces” (NSS) framework, which has value in emphasising the historically embedded and path‐dependent nature of restructuring processes. At the same time, its abstract nature leads the NSS approach to privilege the broad processes that generate new configurations of state power over the complex politics associated with the restructuring of particular spaces. In response, we suggest a new theoretical synthesis that draws NSS together with the ancillary notions of “regional armatures” and “the politics of scale” to provide a stronger purchase on the political agency and struggles that “form” and “mould” particular spaces.     

The Social Life of Robots: The Politics of Algorithms,Governance, and Sovereignty

This symposium aims to broaden the way scholars theorise and empirically treat the increasingly complex relationships between robots and social life, especially in the context of our historically anthropocentric human geographies. The authors of this symposium engage a range of diverse epistemological, ontological, and methodological commitments, but all in some way address the power dynamics and shifting political economies involved in human–robotic interactions as well as possibilities for resisting and overcoming particular forms of domination and oppression. At the same time, the papers present new avenues for conceptualising the rise of robots and robotics and the everyday socio-spatial relations of contemporary algorithmic life. In a rapidly evolving present and future, where life is increasingly managed in relation to algorithmic imaginaries and automated fantasies, these papers demonstrate the potential for geographers to make significant interventions and contributions to investigate the limits, contradictions, and messy contingencies of socio-technical assemblages, to trace the shifting spatialities and temporalities of the geographies of algorithmic governance, and to envision radical democratic, post-capitalist, emancipatory alternatives. These futures are unlikely to be “robot free”, so the question remains how will we build a future set of geographies that acknowledges this reality while also claiming space for the diverse and rich expansion of all forms of life, both human and non-human?     

Effects of Autonomy, Performance Contracting, and Competition on the Performance of a Public Agency: A Case Study

What effects do new control mechanisms have that governments use to monitor the performance of quasi‐autonomous public agencies? The control mechanisms under review are managerial autonomy, performance contracts, financial incentives, and competition. Using principal‐agent theory, a theoretical model is developed. In order to assess its value for further empirical research this model is then confronted with evidence of an in‐depth case study of a Flemish public agency, which encompasses two embedded cases. In this case, the four control mechanisms seem to induce the public agency to performance‐enhancing behavior through ways assumed in the theoretical model, but only under very specific conditions. The case study points to another and seemingly more fundamental motivation for such behavior, that is, the need of the public agency to strengthen or restore its legitimacy toward its customers and especially toward its political principals, when it is confronted with certain threats to legitimacy.     

Self,Consciousness and Agency in The Egoist

This article re-reads representations of the self and agency in George Meredith’s The Egoist (1879) by drawing new connections between the novel and Victorian psychological theory. Critical discussions of The Egoist and psychological themes have rightly stressed the many ways in which, in Meredith’s novel, impersonal forces, biological, physiological and ideological, threaten to obliterate any notion of the self as discrete and autonomous. Yet Meredith maintains a strong ethical investment in individual agency. Comparing metaphors of fluidity, used to describe the self and consciousness in Meredith’s text, with similar images taken from the work of G. H. Lewes and James Sully, I argue that Meredith presents the self’s plasticity as crucial to its individuation and potential autonomy, even while that same plasticity also underlines the self’s vulnerability to social and ideological forces which threaten its independence. Clara’s individuality and agency take on distinctive political significance by challenging oppressive gender norms. Yet the vulnerabilities and bewildering complexities of individual subjective life, expressed in Meredith’s extravagant extensions of psychological metaphors, mean that any one self’s moves towards greater freedom must be fraught with uncertainty. The final part of the essay draws new connections between the psychological imagery that I have been exploring and Meredith’s engagement with human evolution. Clara’s individuation and capacity for autonomous action give the lie to Willoughby’s pseudo-Darwinian schematisation of her identity, yet the relationship between self and evolution remains a serious and complex issue in the novel.     

The Struggle for La Sierra: Sovereignty,property, and rights in the San Luis Valley

In 2002 the Colorado Supreme Court reversed decades of precedent in Lobato v. Taylor by awarding Hispano heirs to the Mexican-era Sangre de Cristo Land Grant renewed access rights to that grant's former communal land for grazing, timber, and firewood. Placing Lobato in historical context, this paper examines the contingent emergence of sovereignty and private property in the San Luis Valley of Southern Colorado through acts of violence, land loss, and dispossession. The paper argues that sovereignty and property, as forms of boundary drawing, are unfinished and contested projects rather than abstract, achieved universals. U.S. sovereignty in the San Luis Valley has emerged contingently through the iteration of private property, as struggles over resource access have produced sovereign effects. Such a perspective makes visible how Lobato has reiterated private property rights and U.S. sovereignty in ways that create new exclusions, even as the case returns access rights to the commons.