Human Rights,Modernity, and Milton’s Areopagitica

Some of the founding documents of our modern human rights culture assert that, by virtue of natural law, the will of God, the will of a Supreme Being, or some kind of natural world order, all humans have a right to civil liberties. In Areopagitica (1644), Milton rejects this way of grounding the claim to civil liberties. Instead, he argues for civil liberties on pragmatic grounds, but also on the premise that members of political societies are entitled to civil liberties from their governors only insofar as those members are rational and virtuous. His argument for civil liberties is also grounded in the view that the proper function of government includes propagating virtue in those it governs, assessing their rationality and moral virtue, and extending civil liberties to them in accordance with this assessment. Arguing in this way, Milton opposes the notion that, simply by virtue of being human, all members of political societies have a specific set of rights which their governments, and indeed all other people on earth, are bound to respect. He thus has more in common with Isocrates and Renaissance humanists than he does with the defenders of our modern human rights culture.     

France’s ‘elites’, Islamophobia,and communities of friendship in Sabri Louatah’s Les Sauvages

Sabri Louatah’s Les Sauvages (2011–2016) joins an ongoing discussion over the French political class’s relationship with the racial and religious divides in contemporary French society. Louatah portrays the political class as imposing from above a divide between French descendants of Muslim immigrants and their majority-culture compatriots, and suggests that the functioning of the modern state makes this necessary: states are founded upon communities of belonging which require the exclusion of given minorities, and will reimpose that exclusion with force if a more inclusive model of community threatens to emerge. Two readings of how Les Sauvages suggests we should respond to this are possible. One suggests that subjects should reject the state entirely, seeking to form inclusive communities escaping its control. Another suggests that the structures of the modern state should be appropriated to promote inclusion, but that the nature of modern democracy will prevent such action from succeeding completely; as such, traditional political engagement must work in conjunction with more radical attempts to form communities free from exclusion. Both readings, however, hold in common the idea that racial and religious divides are imposed from above and that these divides cannot be completely overcome while working within mainstream political structures.     

MIT architecture and values: Gehry’s Stata and Holl’s Simmons

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2000 initiated a billion dollar building program featuring buildings by world‐renowned architects, including Frank Gehry and Steven Holl. Gehry’s Stata Center, which houses computer scientists, and Holl’s Simmons Hall dormitory raise questions about the relationship of architecture to MIT’s values. Many MIT faculty, students, and administrators celebrate Gehry’s Stata and Holl’s Simmons as expressing the inventiveness, energy, and excellence of the people within them and as moving the campus into the twenty‐first century. Others ask if MIT has lost its way by choosing elite, costly buildings at an institution historically characterized by utilitarian and functional values.     

Geopolitical cultures,pragmatic patriotism,and Russia’s disputed islands

This paper draws on the notion of “geopolitical culture” as a conceptual tool for understanding debates over the formulation of foreign policy in contemporary Russia. To draw out the value of this concept, the paper explores the symbolism of territory as a means for restoring Russia’s status, respect, and power. However, in contrast to previous studies, it traces the ways in which a concession of territory has been promoted as a device for achieving Russia’s great power ambitions. More broadly, the paper seeks to stimulate a wider debate on reconceptualizing the relationship between territory and identity in Russia, at the same time as it places Russia’s Far Eastern borderlands at the heart of debates on the spatial imaginaries of the Russian homeland. By drawing on and advancing recent theoretical innovations in critical geopolitics, and recognizing the significance of the discourse of nationalism within these framings, the paper explores the nuanced and multiple story lines that constitute Russia’s geopolitical culture. Through this approach, intriguing and complex plot lines and unexpected twists are revealed, which have at times been obscured by nationalist-territorial-revanchist narratives on Putin’s Russia. It is suggested that such approaches can also provide insights for interpreting cases and contexts beyond Russia and Eurasia.     

Disabilities,urban natures and children’s outdoor play

Normative, widely circulated discourses about the value of outdoor, natural play for children overwhelmingly marginalize the experiences of families with disabled children, who can often experience outdoor/natural play as a site of hard work, heartache, dread, resignation and inadequacy. This paper presents findings from research with 60 North London families with children aged 5–16 who have a statutory ‘Statement of Special Needs’. Focusing on these families’ experiences of visiting designated, newly refurbished accessible natural play-spaces in two local country parks, the paper highlights: (i) the multiple, compound social-material ‘barriers to fun’ encountered in these spaces; (ii) the profound emotional-affective impacts of such barriers, most notably in terms of feelings of ‘resignation’ and ‘dread’; (iii) parents’/carers’ sadness occasioned by perceived ‘failures’ to ‘live up to’ normative ideals of parenting and family engagement with outdoor play and urban natures; (iv) nevertheless, the possibility of moments of family joy, love and ‘special’ time, afforded via families’ ‘hard work’ and ‘keeping going through hard times’. Through an engagement with recent conceptualizations of everyday geographies of disabilities, the paper suggests that these qualitative experiences complicate some chief, normative ways of knowing outdoor play, urban natures and barriers to accessibility.     

The Earthworks of Brinklow,Lilbourne, and Earl’s Barton

Fyfield Hall, a timber-framed aisled hall in Essex, has been tree-ring dated to 1167–85. It was built with passing braces, notched lap joints and curved arcade braces, and underwent major repairs between 1391 and 1416, when the central arcade posts, arcade plates and braces were replaced, but, curiously, in a late twelfth-century style with passing braces. To repair the building in the archaic style might seem surprising, but tree-ring dating shows that such developments were not unusual. This study examines the building in detail and looks at later developments on the site.     

Antiquarianism,archaeology, and aporetic immanence in Beckett’s prose

Beckett derides those antiquarians unaware of “the rupture of the lines of communication” between subject and object in his 1934 essay “Recent Irish Poetry”. However, Beckett will come to incorporate into the late prose specific terminology used by archaeologist, including those involved in the Ordnance Survey of Ireland, who were contemporaries of the same antiquarians he scorns so contemptuously in his early career. This paper traces and examines the Irish antiquarian elements in relation to megalithic archaeology in Beckett’s prose. The elements of antiquarian archaeology in Beckett function to present the existence of those populating the work as mediated by the aporia between ancient and modern epochs. Allusions to antiquarian and archeological terminology contribute to the issues of representation in Beckett’s work. Instances where historical material resides in Beckett’s prose will be analysed through the logic of reverberation. Based on the physics of sound, it will be argues that the fragments of historical material act like artefacts which do not represent historical discourse but reverberate within an aporia of chronological time.     

Masculinities and geography,moving forward: men’s bodies,emotions and spiritualities

Geographical work on men and masculinities has expanded and diversified since the 1990s. Gender, Place and Culture has been, and continues to be, a significant outlet for this research. Geographies of masculinities now range across diverse sub-fields – social, cultural, economic, health, post-colonial, urban and rural geographies. We provide a brief overview of this scope, including the expansion of geographies of masculinities beyond the Anglo-American sphere. We then focus on two vibrant fields of research on geographies of men and masculinities, which cut across the various sub-fields of the discipline: men’s embodied and emotional geographies, and their experiences in relation to religion, faith and spirituality. We discuss these fields, suggesting further productive developments for geographies of masculinities, which include work on the body and wellbeing, body size, male care giving, men’s experiences in diverse faith communities, and men and alternative spiritualities. Ongoing development of geographical work on men and masculinities is important for helping to contest patriarchal structures and knowledge production.     

‘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.     

Myth,perspective, and affirmation in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy

While the Apollonian and Dionysian in Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy are often understood as a rehashing of Schopenhauerian metaphysics, recent accounts have shown that his use of these concepts is at odds with such a metaphysics, interpreting them instead as myths. I follow this insight that Nietzsche is engaging in mythmaking in BT, but I argue that proponents of this view have missed an important dimension of that mythmaking: that Nietzsche presents multiple narratives of Apollo and Dionysus from different perspectives, each of which offers different senses of tragic affirmation. This perspectival feature of BT sheds light on the more formal ‘perspectivism’ articulated in the Third Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, as Nietzsche uses perspective in both cases to generate an epistemic alternative to the life-denying features of modern science. Thus, the metaphysical discussions of the early Nietzsche are inseparable from the development of a stylistic practice that constitutes a radical rejection of metaphysics for the later Nietzsche, and this style is part of a project of generating a more life-affirming approach to knowledge.     

Georges Sorel’s Diremption: Hegel,Marxism and Anti-Dialectics

Georges Sorel’s use of the term diremption to describe his method has long been found obscure. This paper shows that the term was associated with Hegel, and that interpreting it in this light can help us make sense of Sorel's method. Sorel, this is to say, in his revision of Marxism and his social theory more generally, was engaging specifically with Hegelian philosophy. In addition to clarifying Sorel's method, this perspective allows us both to place Sorel more clearly in his fin-de-siècle context and to draw connections between his work and more recent marxisant theory.     

Cyprus’s Earliest Prehistory: Seafarers,Foragers and Settlers

Over the past 20 years, the earliest prehistory of Cyprus has been completely rewritten as a result of new excavations, survey work and high-resolution radiocarbon dating. This study attempts to summarise the earliest chapter in the prehistory of Cyprus, focusing on published and unpublished results from several new sites and surveys. I attempt to place these results in an interpretative context that focuses on early seafarers, fisher-foragers, and the people who were instrumental in establishing the earliest agricultural communities on the island of Cyprus. The pace of change in the study of both the Late Epipalaeolithic and earliest Neolithic is such that all current interpretations must remain open-ended. Nonetheless, these new streams of evidence demand an interim assessment, not least in order to integrate Cyprus into current interpretations of interaction amongst seafarers, fisher-foragers and early agriculturalists in the wider Mediterranean world.     

Beijing’s institutional-balancing strategies: rationales,implementation and efficacy

China has in recent years been actively engaged in multilateral diplomacy. From the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia to the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and the One Belt, One Road initiative, Beijing is pursuing strategies and promoting norms that are viewed as concerted efforts by China to challenge some of the key institutional arrangements of the existing international order. This article seeks to discuss these contentious issues and assess the rationales, approaches and implications of Chinese diplomacy in initiating and promoting what can be considered as institutional-balancing strategies. The author suggests that the rationales behind these Chinese strategies have as much to do with Beijing’s shifting priorities and the need to address them as with reflecting a degree of dissatisfaction with existing multilateral institutions. And there are more marked differences in Chinese motivations and modalities in security arenas than in economic areas. However, it would be overstating Beijing’s intentions and capabilities if these China-sponsored initiatives are viewed as direct challenges to the existing international and regional orders.