Rethinking the Rise and Fall of the Malayan Security Service, 1946–48

An item of conventional wisdom in our understanding of the Malayan First Emergency is that the original security organisation, the Malayan Security Service (MSS), was a comprehensive failure, prompting its dissolution and replacement with the Malayan Special Branch. This article challenges that orthodoxy, arguing first that MSS actually produced accurate assessments of Malayan Communist capabilities and intentions prior to 1948 although the actual outbreak of violence did come as a tactical surprise. Second, recently released documents show that the abolition of the MSS arose instead from a protracted turf war over the control of intelligence in Malaya with the Security Service (MI5), particularly in the person of the latter's director general, Sir Percy Sillitoe . An outsider to the intelligence and defence communities, Sillitoe was disinclined to manage inter-agency disputes in the joint fashion that had developed during the Second World War, and instead marshalled opposition to the MSS in Whitehall that resulted it being dismantled. This in turn led to a breakdown in security intelligence activity, at the very start of the Emergency, that would not be fully resolved until the Malayan Special Branch became fully operational nearly four years later.     

‘Operation Restore Public Hope’: Youth and the Magic of Modernity in Vanuatu

ABSTRACT This paper explores the measures known as ‘Operation Restore Public Hope,’ which were authorized during the State of Emergency in January 1998 in Port Vila, Vanuatu, after rioting and looting erupted over the alleged government mismanagement of the mandatory workers' savings fund. The excessive police violence associated with these ‘clean‐up measures’, I argue, undermined the state's claim ‘to restore public hope’ and illuminated the changing relationship between kastomary leaders and the state as well as their competing strategies to define and maintain social order. The extraordinary events of the State of Emergency point to the confluence of sorcery practices and police violence; underline the contested nature of everyday life, and draw attention to the disciplining of young bodies in new urban spaces. Exploring the deployment of a sorcery technique to counter police violence highlights the landscapes of modern power in Vanuatu where magical and state practices coexist with regimes of violence.     

Caring practices: the connection between logics of state and domestic violence in Cairo,Egypt

This article analyzes the multiscalar relationship between state violence and domestic violence among low-income residents of Cairo, Egypt. To do so, I look at the concept of care and how notions of care are intimately linked with interpretations of violence within daily life. In the accounts of research participants, acts of violence are instances that are understood as lacking regard for the other’s well-being. Violence is juxtaposed against ‘discipline’ and is generally understood as an act of care meant to correct inappropriate behavior. Here, discipline can encompass acts of physical force. Finally, findings show that for low-income Egyptians, the violence of the state not only shapes but also happens simultaneously to violence in the home.     

Geopolitics of gender and violence ‘from below’

This article examines geopolitical violence, gender and political constructions of scale from the site of the body to international discourse and politics. The political constructions of scale and body-politics analyzed in this study draw on feminist and political geographic analysis and an empirical study of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). This study includes an examination of state, military and paramilitary violence from below as articulated through the lens of RAWA's documentation and political framing. RAWA clandestinely used photographic and video technologies to document the corporeal results of state/military violence and politically constructed scale by way of linking this violence to international discourses and political action. A number of opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls are identified as part of RAWA's geopolitics of violence from below. The post 9-11-01 U.S.-led military invasion of Afghanistan demonstrates a significant shift in the management and manipulation of RAWA's documentation. Both the U.S. and RAWA politically constructed scale and drew upon western-led “universal” moralities and human/women's rights discourses for alternative purposes. This paper also discusses the use of gender politics and its various manipulations to resist, criminalize, or legitimize the use of violence in the name of human/women's rights.     

The Terrible Geographicalness of Terrorism: Reflections of a Hazards Geographer

Oppositional engagement with the phenomenon of terrorism by geographers could bring much needed scholarly clarity and balance to the militaristic dominant discourse on terrorism. The hazards subfield within the discipline of geography is germane to research on terrorism, as hazards geographers have been deeply concerned with environmental and technological extremes threatening human life and well‐being. A hazards perspective on terrorism could contribute towards defining terrorism, clarifying the contours of the terrorism discourse, root causes, and response. Insights gleaned from geographical research on social violence, technological and environmental hazards can be eminently applicable to researching various aspects of terrorism. The fundamental point is that terrorism is a deeply geographical phenomenon with potentially disastrous consequences for international peace. Beyond enhancing human safety, the geographical research agenda in terrorism will be part of the struggle to wrest control of the terrorism terminology away from the Western politico‐military elites, to keep them from using it to whip their real or imagined enemies.     

Armed Struggles under Late Colonialism

RICHARD STUBBS. Hearts and Minds in Guerrilla Warfare: The Malayan Emergency 1948–1960. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp. xiv, 286.

ROBERT B. EDGERTON. Mau Man: An African Crucible. New York: Free Press (Macmillan), 1989. Pp. xii, 298.     

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.     

Changing Discourses of Marital Violence in Sweden from the Age of Reformation to the Late Nineteenth Century

This article analyses how public attention to marital violence in Sweden changed from a question of maintaining good order and ambitions to discipline self‐indulgent house tyrants into responsible masters of households in the seventeenth century, to the vanishing of the house tyrant as a cultural stereotype in favour of the female shrew in the eighteenth century, following the formal abolition of the husband's legal right to chastise his wife and an equalisation of liabilities and responsibilities. It also traces the beginnings of the social marginalisation and silencing of marital violence in the nineteenth century as a phenomenon associated with the lower classes and regulated by the law as a case for private action only when committed within the household circle.     

Late Glacial and Holocene Vegetation History at Dublin Bog North-Central Tasmania

Percentage and influx pollen analyses of a 9.17 m core from Dublin Bog give a post last glaciation vegetation history (-13.6 to 0 ka BP) for the upper Mersey Valley. Herbaceous vegetation of Gramineae, Compositae and Chenopodiaceae developed rapidly after deglaciation and lasted until 13.2 ka BP. Around 13 ka BP Eucalyptus woodland and forest developed rapidly on the valley floor. At the same time Pomaderris apetala became an important understorey shrub/tree, and Phyllocladus aspleniifolius rainforest developed in the gullies on the upper slopes of the Mersey Valley and in the valleys to the west The major change in climate from late glacial cold (and probably drier conditions) to warm humid conditions similar to present occurred between 13.2 and 13 ka BP. Wet sclerophyll Eucalyptus forest occupied the valley throughout the post glacial and attained its maximum development between 11.7 and 8.4 ka BP. Rainforest never occupied the valley floor extensively. Phyllocladus aspleniifolius sattained an early maximum about 13 ka BP. The peak of Pomaderris apetala and expansion of Dicksonia antarctica suggests that the climate was warmer and wetter between 10.3 and 8.4 ka BP than at other times. Nothofagus attained its maximum development between about 10.3 and 6 ka BP. Both sclerophyll and rainforest vegetation associations in the upper Mersey Valley appear to have been very stable and similar to their present floristic compositions during the Holocene. Aborigines occupied the valley by 10 ka BP. Fire was always present in this marginal area between the wet climate of western and the dry climate of eastern Tasmania. Fire did not cause replacement of rainforest by wet sclerophyll forest on the valley floor, though it could have prevented rainforest establishment     

Teaching about political violence: a primer on representation

Geography is not generally viewed as a ‘source’ discipline for political violence studies, but this paper begins with the presumption that geography is well disposed to teach courses on the subject. The key purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that engaging issues of political violence is useful for our pedagogy. In particular, teaching about political violence allows geography to address concerns arising from the ‘crisis of representation’. It does so in two ways. First, it provides another venue for teaching about the ‘the other’ and ‘othered places’ in our curricula. Second, it also allows geography to challenge uncritical tropes about political violence as emerging from some peoples and places and not others. As a case study this paper overviews a course entitled Militia Movements in Comparative Perspective. This course was organized around a theoretical unit and four case study units. The case conflicts were chosen to represent conflicts that crossed ideological (right/left) and geographical (Global North/Global South) divides. The course structure is overviewed and a classroom discussion that highlighted questions about representation is described and analysed. The paper concludes by reviewing current efforts to address violence in the discipline, noting problems with these efforts, and suggesting alternatives to them.     

New views on an old forest: assessing the longevity, resilience and future of the Amazon rainforest

The aim of this paper is to investigate the longevity and diversity of the Amazonian rainforest and to assess its likely future. Palaeoclimate and palaeoecological records suggest that the Amazon rainforest originated in the late Cretaceous and has been a permanent feature of South America for at least the last 55 million years. The Amazon rainforest has survived the high temperatures of the Early Eocene climate optimum, the gradual Cenozoic cooling, and the drier and lower carbon dioxide levels of the Quaternary glacial periods. Two new theories for the great diversity of the Amazon rainforest are discussed – the canopy density hypothesis and the precessional-forced seasonality hypothesis. We suggest the Amazon rainforest should not be viewed as a geologically ephemeral feature of South America, but rather as a constant feature of the global Cenozoic biosphere. The forest is now, however, entering a set of climatic conditions with no past analogue. The predicted future hotter and more arid tropical climates may have a disastrous effect on the Amazon rainforest.     

Urban Pacification and “Blitzes” in Contemporary Johannesburg

The term pacification is regularly used in urban scholarship as a euphemism for state violence and social control. However, this term is used loosely and is underexplored as a concept. This paper aims to address this gap by discussing recent critical theory on pacification, which argues that the term captures the combination of war and police power in the replication of capitalist order. This concept will then be applied to a case study of “blitzes”, a practice which became central to urban management in Johannesburg from the late 1990s. Originally, the word was used to refer to aggressive raids led by the police in “trouble” spots, but has since been expanded to include inspections on general services. Understood as pacification, blitzes reflect how the state is constantly engaged in a low‐intensity war against perceived “disorder”, which is intended to control and discipline spaces in South Africa's largest city.     

Omsorg om livet. Spädbarnsdödlighetens förändring i Ådalen under 1800-talet [Caring about life. Infant mortality in Ådalen,Sweden, during the 19th century]

The Finnish forest workers' trade union and employers' organizations signed their first wage agreement in 1957 and first collective labour agreement in 1962. Many other sectors had concluded such agreements years earlier. This article challenges the widely accepted idea that collective labour agreements were becoming ubiquitous in Finnish industrial relations soon after the Second World War. Forest workers were left out of this process, and up until the late 1950s their wages and working conditions were not determined by the labour market parties but by state authorities – the state legislated and regulated forestry wages. The explanation for the delayed development of labour market practices in this sector can be found in forest work itself as well as the state's active role. This work was, up until the 1960s, done mainly by small farmers who were reluctant to unionize and unable to otherwise promote their interests. The situation changed when professionalization made them more or less full-time forest workers who more often joined the union. At the same time, the state created organizations and institutions which encouraged labour market parties to cooperate. Their shared struggle against political interference pushed labour market parties towards collective bargaining.     

Ethnicity and political violence in Africa: The challenge to the Burundi state

This paper contributes to debates on the crisis of the African state, particularly the challenge posed by the rent-seeking elite, ethnicity and political violence. In most accounts, Burundi's persistent civil war fits contemporary discourse of the failed neo-patrimonial state in which opportunistic elites mobilize ethnicity for economic gain. Drawing on recent theorising on the politicization of identities and their intersection with state formation, the paper examines historically the development of ethnic consciousness and its links to the Burundi state. Ethnicity, it contends, has been the central organizing principle of the modern Burundi state with its successive policies of differentiation and exclusion. Throughout its post-colonial history, the Burundi state has not been a fully functioning sovereign state along the lines of its western counterparts. Yet, its citizens, irrespective of their ethnic affiliation, have not contested its territorial integrity. Instead the conflict reflects contested claims for enrichment, representation and security as expected from a model state. The on-going violence is attributed to an increasingly factionalised political elite, based on the multiple cleavages in Burundi society, who mobilize ethnicity in their struggle for control of the state. Recent peace negotiations, aimed at correcting ethnic imbalance through power sharing and reform of the institutions of governance are unlikely to resolve the political crisis as they fail to move beyond a methodological pre-occupation with ethnic identities and address the complex social reality of Burundi society and to include the people of Burundi as part of a broader non-ethnicized political community, a prerequisite for a stable pluralistic democracy.     

The Changing Geography of Violence in Russia's North Caucasus, 1999-2011: Regional Trends and Local Dynamics in Dagestan,Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria

Three U.S. geographers analyze the temporal and spatial trends of 17,438 violent events in Russia's North Caucasus region from August 1999 to July 2011, demonstrating that the diffusion of conflict away from Chechnya intensified during the period 2007-2011, as levels of violence rose in neighboring republics. An increasing number of casualties are civilians in Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkaria, the three republics that are the focus of the paper. Employing multiple methods of spatial pattern analysis and geographically sensitive regression models, the authors examine the spatial fragmentation of violence from the perspective of rebel groups operating in the three republics. The analysis documents how the incidence of violence varies dramatically over space (i.e., reflecting the influence of urbanization, strategic location, and physical geographic factors such as elevation and extent of forest cover). Although violence in the North Caucasus region as a whole has declined in absolute terms over the past four years, the authors show how new geographies of violence are developing in the region, underscoring the emergence of republic-based insurgent operations against the various organs of the Russian state. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: H560, H770, O180. 9 figures, 3 tables, 1 appendix, 103 references:     

Death-squads contemplating queers as citizens: what Colombian paramilitaries are saying

Colombian right-wing paramilitary forces aligned with the state and leftist guerrilla groups are associated with homophobic and transphobic attacks. However, the most extreme accounts of violence are attributed to the former group. Sexual and gender minorities are victimized in the ongoing internal conflict in which armed actors use attacks as a form of communicative violence meant to discipline the civilian population. At the same time, Colombian lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities are making significant advances in gaining recognition of their human rights. This article explores the space where the advance of LGBT rights confounds reactionary homophobic beliefs of illegal right-wing armed groups. I consider how concepts such as ‘nation’ and ‘citizen’ shape the discourse of paramilitary forces in their account of their group's homophobic violence. Special attention is paid to the logic provided by two informants, former paramilitary members themselves, regarding the conditions under which right-wing paramilitary groups would be obliged to recognize the rights of sexual and gender minorities as citizens. The article concludes with a discussion of how the development of a sexual citizenship discourse, in place, may serve to disrupt extreme violence against sexual and gender minorities in the context of militarization and armed conflict.     

Changing Trees,Enduring Forests: Institutional Bricolage,Gradual Change and Community Forestry among Yucatec Mayans in Mexico

This article seeks to understand why community forestry enterprises in the Mayan rainforest of Mexico are losing ground, while middlemen and manufacturers are regaining control over forestry resources. It focuses on the case of the Ejido San Felipe Oriente where an NGO codesigned a commercialization platform with the objective of bringing together local cooperatives to negotiate in the market from a position of strength. The project was hampered by an internal rupture in the ejido; in investigating this rupture, the authors use the concept of institutional bricolage to understand local power struggles, and the theory of gradual change to search for historical causal mechanisms. They find that the proximate causes of the rupture were family rivalries, suspicions of embezzlement, unfair exclusions, and the disruption of customary practices regarding the distribution of monetary benefits. However, historical continuities lay beneath the power struggle: ejidos in the Yucatan Peninsula have used their function as intermediaries to subordinate local interests rather than promote endogenous development. The authors advocate for an institutional design process that takes account of the unconscious and taken-for-granted meanings that influence institutional adaptation; they encourage development practitioners promoting community forestry enterprises in the Mayan rainforest of Mexico to address historical continuities in local institutions as a focal target of development interventions.     

Forest becomes frontline: Conservation and counter-insurgency in a space of violent conflict in Assam,Northeast India

Using the case of the Ecological Task Force (ETF) of the Indian Army as an entry point, this contribution nudges the existing conceptual and theoretical views on green militarization and violent environments in the context of reserve and protected forest areas. This is achieved by going beyond coercive physical violence and accounting for forms of symbolic and structural violence meted out to populations. I position this work within and also complement the broader literature on critical and militarized practices and apply it to the reserve forests in the Bodoland Territorial Autonomous Districts (BTAD) in Assam, northeast India. Here, politics that surround conservation is immersed within a context of violent ethno-religious conflict. The BTAD has been a theatre of recurrent insurgencies between the autochthonous Bodo tribe and the Adivasi, Muslim groups over land and demographics. A key characteristic of the conflict is its occurrence in the reserve forests on Assam-Bhutan borderlands, which can be traced back to the colonial process of forest making that brought immigrants into Assam, threatening cultural and territorial loss for Bodos. During the Bodo movement for a separate state, starting in 1980s and continuing, the militants operated from within the forest, leading to the departure of the forest department. As a result, rebels and locals appropriated the forest through rampant resource extraction. In response, the ETF was constituted in 2007. Fieldwork suggests that ETF through its military tactic and discipline engages in ‘soft’ militarization while also trusting on the regular Army for protection during conservation operations. Further, drawing on regional environmental history, I analyze how ethno-religious conflict influences modes of conservation and is exemplified by continuing inter-institutional competition between the forest department and the ETF. In the ensuing conservation-counterinsurgency nexus, retribution towards insurgents prevail over forest protection. Moreover, despite ETF's efforts to buffer from local politics, incidents of a political nature seep into its operations, e.g. ambushed by militants during conservation activities.     

America's Role in the Five Power Defence Arrangements: Anglo-American Power Transition in South-East Asia, 1967–1971

Prior to 1971, Britain played a key role in the security of Malaysia and Singapore, especially during the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) and Konfrontasi (1963–1966). Britain's military withdrawal from the east of Suez beginning from 1968 not only became a catalyst for post-colonial development of Malaysia and Singapore, but also pushed them towards America's security umbrella. Negotiations to replace the Anglo-Malaysian Defence Agreement with a new defence arrangement were fraught with pussyfooting on the part of British, Australian and New Zealand leaders. The Malaysian and Singapore defence ministers were divided and contributed to further foot dragging. By the time the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) were signed by the five nations in November 1971, collective defence among the signatories had devolved to mere consultation. By analysing the obstacles encountered during the negotiations and American influence on the shape of the FPDA, this paper demonstrates that a power transition that had been set in motion after Second World War was completed by 1971 when British strategic influence in South-East Asia gave way to American dominance.     

East Timorese Women Challenge Domestic Violence

Timor-Leste's struggle for independence has won it high international profile. Yet there is little known internationally about the role women played in the resistance movement and how independence has affected them. Has democratisation brought women greater freedom and rights? This article argues that some East Timorese women benefited from the construction of a new democratic state by mobilising and unifying in the political space created post-1999. East Timorese women's NGOs allied with international organisations and NGOs to form a campaign against domestic violence. This article takes a constructivist approach, analysing how international norms of women's rights and gender equality have: (1) emerged, (2) reached a tipping point, (3) cascaded and (4) been internalised in a post-conflict, democratising context.