Supreme emergencies and the protection of non-combatants in war

Is it ever justifiable to target non‐combatants deliberately? This article assesses Michael Walzer's claim that the deliberate targeting of non‐combatants may be justifiable during ‘supreme emergencies’, a view that has received some support but that has elicited little debate. It argues that the supreme emergencies exception to the prohibition on targeting non‐combatants is problematic for at least four reasons. First, its utilitarianism contradicts Walzer's wider ethics of war based on a conception of human rights. Second, the exception may undermine the principle of non‐combatant immunity. Third, it is based on a historical fallacy. Finally, it is predicated on a strategic fallacy–the idea that killing noncombatants can win wars. The case for rejecting the exception, however, has been opposed by those who persuasively argue that it is wrong to tie leaders' hands when they confront supreme emergencies. The final part of the article addresses this question and suggests that the principle of proportionality may give political leaders room for manoeuvre in supreme emergencies without permitting them deliberately to target non‐combatants.     

Seeking the State: Appropriating Bureaucratic Symbolism and Wealth in the Margins of Southeast Asia

Anthropological research on Southeast Asian states has contributed to understanding how local communities engage with states in their everyday lives. Two approaches drawing out the complexities of state‐society entanglement stand out. First is Foucault's idea that states possess the art‐of‐government. Through techniques such as mapping, census data, biometrics and so on, states are believed to achieve new levels of control over people, who are thus rendered as individual citizens. Second is Scott's idea that societies possess the art‐of‐not‐being‐governed. People, particularly in peripheral areas, seek to escape state control, for instance by sheltering in the hills and forests of Asia. In this article, we seek to identify and expand upon a literature which we see as emerging from the space opened between Foucault and Scott's work, to demonstrate the many creative and diverse ways that peripheral societies seek out states. In doing this we present a synthesis of diverse forms of entanglement to provide new insights into understanding relations between societies and states.     

Unity and Exclusion in the Roman Catholic Priesthood: Explaining the Creation of the National Council of Priests of Australia

The National Council of Priests of Australia (NCP) was created in Sydney in September 1971 and continues to exist today. The organization has undergone some significant changes since its beginnings. It moved, for instance, from representation by delegates to direct membership in the mid‐1970s, which made it unique among other national associations of priests that were sponsored by bishops. Since its beginnings, deciding whether or not to extend membership to ordained men no longer in active ministry has proved to be a vexing issue within the NCP. It has shaped the organization's culture as much as those who qualify to belong. This article explains the significance of the NCP membership criteria and looks to some of the long‐term and short‐term influences on its creation.     

Hungry for Justice: Social Mobilization on the Right to Food in India

This article explores the potential and limits of contemporary economic rights‐based social activism by analysing an ongoing ‘Right to Food Campaign’ in India. While social movement theory often positions radical and reform strategies as alternatives, the RTF campaign has adopted a hybrid strategy: it has made a radical legal demand that the right to food be recognized as intrinsic to the right to life, while seeking implementation of this right through reform of existing government feeding programmes. The campaign's dual strategy reflects two distinct logics of human rights: a logic of non‐derogable rights that are immediately actionable (such as the right to life) and a logic of progressive implementation of rights that can only be realized fully over time (such as economic rights). This article draws on original data to demonstrate that the campaign's radical legal demands framed around the non‐derogable right to life have come closer to fulfilment than its reformist demands around progressive implementation. The RTF campaign's relative success in galvanizing legal action on hunger is tempered by ongoing challenges in sustaining grassroots‐level mobilization and influencing public policy implementation.     

A bargain between the secular state and Turkish Islam: politics of ethnicity in Central Asia

Abstract. This paper reveals and analyses the ethnic politics mobilised by a fast‐growing Islamic movement, the Gülen movement, which emerged in the 1980s in Turkey and expanded to Central Asia in the mid‐1990s. Following the micro‐sites, where nationness is reproduced as an everyday practice, my ethnographic research in Almaty‐Kazakhstan explored the emergent Islamic sensibilities for the nation and ethnic identity. Revivalist Islam has often been essentialised as incompatible with nationalism, since it has been widely associated with the Muslim community rather than nations and nation‐states. I argue that this bias is facilitated and maintained by the deep division in the literature. Scholarly work on both Islam and nationalism are split into two opposing approaches, state‐centered and culture‐centered. The findings of the present study challenge the binary thinking that juxtaposes politics against culture and dichotomises ethnic and state‐framed base of nationalism and nationhood. My major finding is that the Gülen movement has not only inherited the symbols and myths of descent from the founding fathers of the Turkish state, but it is also currently reproducing the related ethnic politics in cooperation with–not in opposition to–the secular states in the post‐Soviet Turkic world. The study reconciles ethno‐symbolic and state‐centered approaches in explaining the convergence between Islamic and secular nationalism in the formation of ethnic politics in Almaty‐Kazakhstan.     

Some Recent Trends in the Study of Religion and Youth

From the beginning of the twenty‐first century there has been a sharp increase in research on the ways in which young people engage with religion and spirituality. Three trends are apparent: first, there has been a shift away from focusing on the formal processes of young people's religious socialisation and a realisation that youth exercise considerable agency in their construction of personal and group identities; second, the 1970s and 1980s assumption that religion was in decline in developed countries and was of little interest to young adults has been challenged by the growth of trans‐national religions including Pentecostal Christianity, and by the emergence of a myriad spiritualities and identity‐conferring subcultural groups including Paganism, Satanism, Goth culture and vampirism; and third, there is an increased acceptance that youth is less a uniform stage that all human beings undergo, and is more intimately connected to the specific historical, geographical, economic, and social context in which it is experienced. This article reviews four recent publications on religion, spirituality and youth, three of which are from Australia. The fourth volume is an international edited collection containing studies from the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, and a small number of European countries.     

Accessibility interrupted: the Shimshal road,Gilgit‐Baltistan,Pakistan

Geographers working in mountainous northern Pakistan note that gains in accessibility following the Karakoram Highway's official opening in 1978 significantly reshaped social organization, economic activity, and land use across the region. These valuable regional‐scale analyses provide few insights regarding the contingent and variable ways new roads are conceived and experienced at the community and household level by the people whose mobility they drastically impact. This article addresses that limitation of regional research by focusing on an individual agricultural community called Shimshal that in 2003 completed a 40‐kilometre link‐road connecting it to the highway. Drawing from qualitative information gathered before and after the Shimshal road's completion, we briefly describe the community's motivation for constructing the road, villagers’ accessibility‐related hopes and concerns as it was being built, and some of the social, cultural, and economic changes that followed the road's completion. The article concludes by summarizing the community's response so far to landslide‐induced destruction of over 20 kilometres of the Karakoram Highway which, since January 2010, has left community members without vehicular access to the rest of Pakistan just seven years after their link‐road's completion.     

Actually how Empowering is Microcredit?

This article re‐assesses the effect of microcredit programme participation on women's empowerment by applying an analytical framework that recognizes the conceptual shift in emphasis in the definition of empowerment, from notions of greater well‐being of women to notions of women's choice and active agency in the attainment of greater well‐being. The author finds that microcredit programme participation has only a limited direct effect in increasing women's access to choice‐enhancing resources, but has a much stronger effect in increasing women's ability to exercise agency in intra‐household processes. Consequently, programme participation is able to increase women's welfare and possibly to reduce male bias in welfare outcomes, particularly in poor households.     

‘Aceh thanks the world’: The possibilities of the gift in a post‐disaster society (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

While it has often been argued that post‐disaster aid is humiliating for its beneficiaries, based on my ethnographic research in post‐tsunami Aceh, Indonesia, I argue that such aid may also come to mean the opposite. Rather than feeling humiliated by foreign aid, people in Aceh actively glossed post‐tsunami foreign assistance as ‘gifts’ for which they often expressed their gratitude. Building on Marcel Mauss's classic argument, as well as on more recent works on the nature of the gift, I argue that they did so because they felt that the gift of post‐disaster aid brought with it both a long wished‐for recognition of Aceh and the possibility of establishing long‐term relationships between Aceh and ‘the world’. Therefore, rather than something humiliating, the post‐disaster aid became a medium for imagining what James Ferguson has called a ‘place‐in‐the‐world’ for Aceh.     

Iron in the soil: Living with military waste in Bosnia‐Herzegovina

Waste, in particular the waste produced by conflicts, has become a serious matter of concern in recent scholarship on materiality and society. But what is military post‐conflict waste, and what kind of materiality does it entail? This article retrains an ethnographic focus on post‐conflict materiality away from visible and easily recognized entities such as politicized monuments, towards (in)visible and misrecognized war remnants, those parts buried in the soil, in trees and sometimes in people's bodies. The article focuses on people's quotidian practices of re‐creating, re‐relating to and re‐dwelling in the world in the presence of military waste in rural Bosnia. It calls for an inclusive scholarship of materiality that takes the material‐cum‐emotional affects and effects that these material objects discharge upon persons as a matter of serious concern. The themes discussed in the article have far‐reaching implications, not just for Bosnian postwar anthropology, but for critically engaged anthropology and the role of the discipline in the contemporary world.     

Team Arab: al‐Jazeera and the flagging of everyday Arabism during the 2008 Beijing Olympics

The linking of living rooms across state borders by al‐Jazeera and other pan‐Arab satellite television channels has prompted claims that a ‘new Arabism’ that undermines state nationalism is emerging. Until now, analysts have mostly focused on the ‘hot’ Arabism in the news coverage of politicised events such as the Israel–Palestine conflict. This article offers a new dimension by suggesting that as important to satellite television's construction and reproduction of Arab identity is the everyday discourse found in less overtly political programmes such as sport. To demonstrate this, it offers an analysis of al‐Jazeera's coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympics showing how the broadcasts address viewers as a common Arab audience who are simultaneously encouraged to be nationalistic towards their separate nation‐states within a given ‘Arab arena’ of states with whom they should primarily compete. This suggests that new Arabism should in fact be considered a ‘supranationalism’, not a revived Arab nationalism as it simultaneously promotes Arab and state identities in tandem. Finally, it aims to expand our understanding of ‘everyday nationalism’ by adapting Michael Billig's theory and methodology of ‘banal nationalism’ in British newspapers to facilitate the study of sport on supranational Arab identity on satellite television.     

Mapping History: Cartography and the Construction of the San Pedro Valley

The San Pedro Valley of North America’s desert Southwest has been depicted in maps for over four centuries. These images composed by Euro‐American colonialists do not merely portray a topographical reality; they also construct singular notions of place. While place‐making often inspires a rich awareness of self and belonging, it is also a device of power that shapes people’s desires, perceptions and experiences. Employing Geographic Information System (GIS) technology, we explore the hidden messages embedded in maps from the 1500s to 1800s to reveal the social and political ideologies that buttressed the Spanish, Mexican and American empires. These analyses illustrate that Euro‐American maps do not advance in a linear evolution from simple (unknown) to complex (known) in the production of place. Rather they act to legitimize colonial rule through strategies of representation that privilege Euro‐American standpoints and disregard competing claims of entitlement.     

By‐Elections and Political Change in a Local Context: The Case of the 1973 Dundee East By‐Election and the SNP

With their unpredictability and occurrence in between nationwide elections, by‐elections have attracted a degree of scholarly interest. However, this has focused almost exclusively on how the contests have affected, or failed to affect, the direction of national politics. This article seeks to, instead, explore their influence upon the locality in which they are fought. It will achieve this through an analysis of the 1973 Dundee East by‐election and its consequences for the development of the local Scottish National Party (SNP). Prior to the by‐election, the party had not been particularly strong in Dundee. Yet the contest provided a setting in which it was able to transform itself into one of the most effective Nationalist organisations in Scotland, capable of cementing an SNP MP in the constituency from 1974 until 1987, holding firm against the collapse in the party's support across the country in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The article will examine the extent to which this resistance to the national swing was facilitated by the legacies of the by‐election and the extent to which its wider footprint contributed towards the development of an enduring party tradition that has persisted for decades.     

Neoliberalism and Suburban Employment: Western Sydney in the 1990s

During the past 15 years metropolitan planning strategies of the NSW state government have done little to address the spatial distribution of either employment or labour market equity within the metropolis. In the fast‐growing outer western suburbs, the government has focused on attracting business investment to increase the stock of local jobs and to improve employment ‘self‐sufficiency’— a dominantly neoliberal policy framework. This paper explores a widening gulf between the reality of outer urban change and this policy framework by considering changes in the location of jobs and in the employment experiences of residents in Greater Western Sydney (GWS). Evidence is drawn from census journey‐to‐work data (1991–2001). While holding a majority of manufacturing jobs in Sydney, GWS also experienced continued growth of jobs in service industries during the 1990s. Yet the relative importance of employment in the city's fast‐growth finance and business services sector still lags well behind that of inner and northern parts of the city. The focus on growing the regional stock of jobs has not addressed problems of labour market access faced by residents of particular localities and the goal of employment self‐sufficiency has not delivered greater equity to outer suburban labour markets. A focus on sufficiency of access to employment for residents of GWS draws attention not only to regional stocks of jobs but also to the provision of social infrastructure and state‐provided services to outer suburban populations as they continue to expand.     

Baldwin Hyde,Clerk of the Parliaments in the Readeption Parliament of 1470–1

Baldwin Hyde, who served as clerk of the parliaments in the assembly held during Henry VI's brief restoration in 1470–1, has traditionally been thought to have been a party‐political appointee, who displaced his long‐serving predecessor. This article presents new evidence based on an analysis of Hyde's career, that suggests that far from being a placeman, he may, in fact, have been Faukes's own choice of successor.     

Adaptation Machines and the Parasitic Politics of Life in Jamaican Disaster Resilience

This paper unpacks a politics of life at the heart of community‐based disaster management to advance a new understanding of resilience politics. Through an institutional ethnography of participatory resilience programming in Kingston, Jamaica, I explore how staff in Jamaica's national disaster management agency engaged with a qualitatively distinct form of collective life in Kingston's garrison districts. Garrison life has been shaped by the confluence of political economic, cultural, geopolitical force relations, which creates a hyper‐adaptive life that exceeds the techniques and rationalities of neoliberal disaster resilience. I draw on autonomist Marxist and Deleuzian readings of biopolitics to identify a new subject of disaster politics that I call, after Deleuze and Guattari, “adaptation machines”, decentralized apparatuses of capture that are parasitically reliant on the population's immanent adaptive capacities. The concept of adaptation machines enables us to envision resilience politics as a struggle over how to appropriate vulnerable peoples’ world‐forming constituent power.     

From Spatial Keynesianism to Post‐Fordist Neoliberalism: Emerging Contradictions in the Spatiality of the Irish State

Abstract: The transition from Fordism to post‐Fordism has been accompanied by profound changes in the spatiality of west European states. The hierarchical, top‐down and redistributive structures that typified the Fordist welfare state have been replaced by more complex spatial configurations as elements of economic and political power have shifted both downwards to subnational territorial levels and upwards to the supranational level. A major debate has developed around the nature of these emerging forms of state spatiality and of the processes underpinning their formation. This paper examines how these processes have operated in the particular case of the Republic of Ireland. Here, the spatiality of the state was founded on a peculiar post‐colonial combination of a localised populist politics and a centralised state bureaucracy. While this arrangement was quite suited to the spatial dispersal of industrial branch plants which underpinned regional policy in the 1960s and 1970s, it has become increasingly problematic with the more recent emergence of new trends in the nature and locational preferences of inward investment. This is reflected in the profound conflicts that have attended the formulation and implementation of the National Spatial Strategy, introduced in 2002. The result is a national space economy whose increasing dysfunctionality may now be compromising the very development model upon which Ireland's recent spectacular economic growth has been built.     

Common Counsel,Common Policy: Healthcare,Missions and the Rise of the ‘Voluntary Sector’ in Colonial Tanzania

Analysis of the voluntary sector in sub‐Saharan Africa has tended to focus on the role of the NGO, and the types of relationships this institution establishes and maintains with donors, national governments and the communities with which they work. The voluntary sector in Africa is therefore usually defined through, and often treated as synonymous with, the institution of the NGO. As a result, the boundaries of understandings of the ‘third sector’ space occupied by the vast number of NGOs — its origins, the nature of the relationship of voluntary sector actors to the state, the types of organizations that characterize the sector — have tended to reflect a narrow concern with the NGO type and its experiences. This article suggests that this view is too narrow in its gaze. The voluntary sector was not a creation of a post‐colonial (and especially post‐1970s) development crisis. It emerged from an evolving relationship between colonial‐era non‐state (voluntary) actors and governments determined to demonstrate that they were meeting their commitments to the welfare of Africans under their charge. Missions and mission welfare services, expanding across much of rural sub‐Saharan Africa by the beginnings of the twentieth century, and increasingly coordinated from the late 1920s and early 1930s, created the foundations for the emergence of sub‐Saharan Africa's formal voluntary sector as it exists today. This matters for more than just historical accuracy. To understand the constraints, challenges and opportunities faced by NGOs, we need to move beyond a narrow focus on the institution of the NGO itself, and look in addition to the environment in which it operates: its history, its evolution and the shifts that created those conditions.     

Not Learning from the Past: Adaptive Governance Challenges for Australian Natural Resource Management

Australia's governance arrangements for natural resource management (NRM) have evolved considerably over the last 30 years. The impact of changes in governance on NRM planning and delivery requires assessment. We undertake a multi‐method programme evaluation using adaptive governance principles as an analytical frame and apply this to Queensland to assess the impacts of governance change on NRM planning and governance outcomes. Data to inform our analysis includes: (1) a systematic review of 16 audits/evaluations of Australian NRM over a 15‐year period; (2) a review of Queensland's first‐generation NRM plans; and (3) outputs from a Queensland workshop on NRM planning. NRM has progressed from a bottom‐up grassroots movement into a collaborative regional NRM model that has been centralised by the Australian government. We found that while some adaptive governance challenges have been addressed, others remained unresolved. Results show that collaboration and elements of multi‐level governance under the regional model were positive moves, but also that NRM arrangements contained structural deficiencies across multiple governance levels in relation to public involvement in decision‐making and knowledge production for problem responsiveness. These problems for adaptive governance have been exacerbated since 2008. We conclude that the adaptive governance framework for NRM needs urgent attention so that important environmental management problems can be addressed.