‘One Belt,One Road’ and China’s emerging Afghanistan dilemma

This article argues that China’s approach to Afghanistan since the end of the Cold War has been shaped by the desire both for security in Xinjiang and for geopolitical advantage in Central Asia. While Beijing’s Xinjiang calculus was ascendant from 1991 to 2001, since 2001 a broader geopolitical calculus has emerged. This latter factor has been encapsulated in President Xi Jinping’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy, which, at its core, is an outgrowth of Beijing’s decades-long agenda to integrate Xinjiang and utilise this region’s unique geopolitical position to facilitate a China-centric Eurasian geo-economic system. While China’s Xinjiang calculus determines that it shares an interest with the USA in combating radical Islamism in Afghanistan (and Central Asia more broadly), the geopolitical calculus of the ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy points to a fundamental incompatibility between US and Chinese interests.     

Funding the ‘nation’ in the national theatre of Scotland

The National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) is a an innovative and ground‐breaking, non‐building‐based, commissioning and producing cultural institution, established in the wake of the devolution of the Scottish Parliament. This article sketches the contours of this new model of a national theatre, exploring the complex dialectic between various economic, political, social and artistic choices, forces and factors that have influenced, and continue to influence, the formative years of the NTS. The article charts changes to the company during these early years and, most significantly, notes the potential effect that the change from arm’s length to direct government funding might have on the company’s long‐term development. It is argued that direct funding aligns the arts too closely to political agendas rather than supporting artistic freedom and expression.     

One Europe or Many? Reflections on becoming European

Europe is being re-defined as a result of the combined effects of a complex set of processes. What sort of Europe is emerging from them? What criteria are being deployed to define Europe, Europeans and Europeanness and their respective boundaries? Such questions are considered via exploring a number of themes about and through Europe. They centre on the ways in which, and criteria by which, geo-political and economic spaces in Europe have been defined and divided. These practical cartographic processes are linked to changes in systems of, and the construction of new scales of, governance and regulation. As both supra-nationalism and the emergence of an EU 'super-state' and sub-nationalisms challenged the authority of the national state, new multi-scalar complex systems of governance and regulation resulted. These in turn are related to questions of singular and multiple identities, discussing these in the context of the possibilities for the emergence of a European civil society. Recognizing that the future map of Europe will not be determined by Europeans alone, the legacies of the division within Europe between NATO, the Warsaw Pact and neutral states and implications of the neo-imperialist geo-political ambitions of the USA state and military-industrial complex are then explored. Finally, some conclusions are drawn.     

‘One single ivory cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain

This paper considers Oscar Wilde's ongoing interest in the image of a single brain cell as a souvenir of human autonomy in a world of matter. Taking a long view of Wilde's career that demonstrates the relevance to his literary work of his college interests in physiology and philosophy, this paper shows how Wilde's socialism can be explained by his uniquely aesthetic take on the brain. For many late Victorians brain science threatened both the autonomy of human action and the legitimacy of beauty because it had the potential to invalidate conscious experience, but writers whose work Wilde knew, like Ernst Haeckel, W.K. Clifford and John Tyndall, apply aesthetic vocabularies to their own discussions of cells. Their theories illuminate Wilde's representation of the cell as an aesthetic object. Wilde's art collaborates with science to reject action, as action is conventionally understood, without relinquishing beauty as his ultimate value. His discovery of beauty in matter that is beyond the pale of human experience, yet intimately and strangely constitutive of our experience, directs the senses to a new field of experience that values the molecular life the species holds in common, in which individuals and their actions matter less to the possibility of social change than does the necessity of pleasure.     

‘Against the tide’: placing visual art in the Highlands and Islands,Scotland

Within a political context where Gaelic arts are recognised as integral to the configuration of a new Scotland, this paper focuses on the art and artistic practice of a community arts centre in North Uist, Outer Hebrides, and the art of internationally acclaimed Scots artist, Will Maclean, who has worked with this centre, with initiatives to commemorate the land struggle on the Isle of Lewis, and with Gaelic arts. Drawing, at the conceptual level, on ‘the idea of place as a political project’ (Gibson-Graham 2003 Gibson-Graham, J.K. 2003. An Ethics of the Local. Rethinking Marxism, 15(1): 53–78.  [Google Scholar]: 35) and a narrative of resistance that suggests a differential rather than oppositional optic (Braun 2002 Braun, B. 2002. The Intemperate Rainforest. Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada's West Coast, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.  [Google Scholar]), I examine how art and artistic practice contribute to an aesthetics that works ‘against the tide’ and how, as part of this process, place is re-constituted.     

Nationality and children's drawings — pictures ‘about Scotland’ by primary school children in Edinburgh,Scotland and Syracuse,New York State

The way that children perceive and understand places and locations is an area of geographical research that had an intermittent history until the 1990s saw a sustained interest in ‘children's geographies’. Here I build upon these studies and those of spatial cognition, developmental psychology, constructions of nation and nationality, by asking children to draw pictures about a nation. I review this methodology and analyse drawings collected from work with children in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Syracuse, New York State. I obtained 127 pictures ‘about Scotland’ drawn by six to nine year olds. These drawings reveal a range of stereotypical images of Scotland that are learned, both nationally and internationally, by this early age. They also suggest that knowledge and experience of Scotland varies by school district in each location and that these children often intertwine personal and national narratives when representing Scotland.     

Exhibiting Cultures: Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum

Museums occupy many roles which are influenced by wider circumstances and changing conditions. This study deals with the case of Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and the manner in which it is used to promote nation building in a multi‐ethnic and relatively newly independent state. In addition, it serves a political purpose and acts as an economic resource. The Asian Civilisations Museum illustrates some of the recent trends affecting the museum sector as a whole and also the particular challenges facing such institutions in a country like Singapore with its many distinctive qualities.     

‘We’re Internationalists,not Nationalists’: The Political Ramifications of Welsh Labour’s Internal Power Struggle over the ‘One Wales’ Coalition in 2007

The bitter arguments within the Labour Party in Wales in 2007 preceding its agreement to enter coalition with Plaid Cymru in the National Assembly have faced little substantive analysis, and the specific behind-closed-doors debates at the special conference held to vote on the deal have remained undisclosed. This paper fulfils both tasks, revealing how actors’ arguments tapped into historically resonant traditions in Welsh Labour thought, coalescing around a central ideological conflict over the party’s identity vis-à-vis nationalism. The article thus sheds light upon Welsh Labour’s internal power struggles at an important juncture in its recent history and their continuing ramifications.     

Future Non-Analogue Climates for Scotland’s Temperate Rainforest

Temperate rainforest is restricted to a globally rare set of climatic conditions. Scotland has among the best remaining examples of intact temperate rainforest in Europe, characterised ecologically by a unique assemblage of epiphytic bryophytes and lichens. Given climatic control on rainforest distribution and ecology, climate change is a probable risk to Scotland’s rainforest. This study investigated climate change impacts for 20 target sites, classified based on (i) bioclimatic conditions, and (ii) epiphytic diversity, into contrasting rainforest and more continental (non-rainforest) examples. Space-for-time matching identified climate analogues within the European conservation forest network, which at present have a climate similar to that expected of the target sites during the 2080s (WorldClim datasets). The results show that 2080s analogues for sites in more continental north-eastern Scotland occur in Wales and southern England. However, Scottish rainforest sites were their own ‘best analogues’ through to the 2080s, despite the fact that their climate is projected to change significantly; they had no suitable future analogue within Europe’s conservation forest network. These contrasting regional patterns highlight the need for a flexible approach to species conservation during climate change, including a strategy to cope with ecological uncertainty in Scotland’s zone of oceanic rainforest.     

Pluralism,Perspective, Order and Organization: The Fault-Lines of 21st Century ‘Cultures’ and Epistemologies

The original Two Cultures debate has been told and retold as a struggle for the moral high ground; the entitlement to define ‘culture’ and especially the route to understanding humanity. Later skirmishes and attempts to define a ‘Third culture’ snatched elements of these and the battleground shifted, with the strangely playground-sounding claims that science had ‘won’. However I will argue that more interesting features of the debate were the underlying assumptions about epistemology; how can we, and should we, proceed in understanding our world and experience, and how sixty years of intellectual and cultural developments in many fields illuminate profoundly new and apparently incompatible discourses. This wide-ranging argument will necessarily be superficial but my purpose is to draw attention to what I regard as central concerns of twenty-first century lay and expert epistemologies and why they matter.     

Wood and Fire: Scotland’s Timber Cursus Monuments

This paper offers the first comprehensive overview of Scotland’s early Neolithic timber cursus monuments. This small group of sites has, in recent years, been viewed as a significant element of the early Neolithic repertoire in northern Britain, and forerunner to the later earthwork cursus monuments found across the British Isles; but as yet their treatment has been at a largely superficial level. The article draws together the evidence from excavations, cropmarks and the authors’ own fieldwork. As well as describing the monuments, the study also offers a new interpretation of the construction, role and destruction of these monuments within the context of the woodland world of lowland Scotland in the first half of the fourth millennium BC.