Enabling persistent presence? Performing the embodied geopolitics of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle assemblage

Military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being increasingly used to provide surveillance and attack capabilities within war zones. At the heart of much of the rhetoric about these aircraft is their supposed ability to enable persistent presence across the battlespace. They are also unique in that they actively distance the aircrew from the aircraft. This paper seeks to question whether this claim to persistent presence can be justified and considers the implications of the distancing of pilot from machine in this. In order to achieve this, the paper focuses upon conceptualising UAVs as assemblages, composed of both human and machine elements. It uses firsthand accounts from a Royal Air Force Reaper UAV aircrew as a basis to analyse the ways in which the deployment of these aircraft in Afghanistan is changing the ways that war is experienced by aerial combatants. It does this through the utilisation of a feminist, embodied geopolitics, refiguring it from a concern with victims of war to argue for its use to understand the micro-scale of how the humans within these UAV assemblages experience combat. This paper thus focuses upon the extent to which the Reaper UAV achieves a persistent presence through analysis of its supposed more-than-human loitering and vision abilities, and the limitations associated with the requirement for a human-in-the loop. The paper contends that although UAVs like the Reaper change the geopolitics of combat, the continuing requirement for the human element of the assemblage restricts their ability to provide persistent presence.     

The enforcement archipelago: Detention, haunting, and asylum on islands

From offshore border enforcement to detention centers on remote islands, struggles over human smuggling, detention, asylum, and associated policies play out along the geographical margins of the nation-state. In this paper, I argue that islands are part of a broader enforcement archipelago of detention, a tactic of migration control. Island enforcement practices deter, detain, and deflect migrants from the shores of sovereign territory. Islands thus function as key sites of territorial struggle where nation-states use distance, invisibility, and sub-national jurisdictional status (Baldacchino & Milne, 2006) to operationalize Ong’s (2006) ‘graduated zones of sovereignty’. In sites that introduce ambiguity into migrants’ legal status, state and non-state actors negotiate and illuminate geopolitical arrangements that structure mobility. This research traces patterns among distant and distinct locations through examination of sovereign and biopolitical powers that haunt asylum-seekers detained on islands. Offshore detention, in turn, fuels spatial strategies employed in onshore detention practices internal to sovereign territory.     

A Singular and Awkward War: The Transatlantic Context of the Hartford Convention

This essay argues that the Hartford Convention of 1814–15 unfolded as part of a wide‐ranging and vibrant debate concerning the role of the United States in the turbulent Atlantic community of the early nineteenth century. The author’s approach to the convention stands in sharp contrast to those of other scholars, many of whom have treated the convention as either the last gasp of the Federalist party or as a manifestation of New England’s insularity during the War of 1812. This orthodox view fails to account for the distinctly international quality of the convention. Review of newspapers and pamphlets produced in and around Boston, the intellectual and political center of New England, during the period between late 1814 and early 1815 suggests that for all their ideological differences, both Republicans and Federalists in Massachusetts understood the convention as attempting to negotiate a place for New England in the newly formed international relations triangle that comprised Britain, France, and the United States.     

The Socio‐Nature of Local Organic Food

Abstract: The concept of socio‐nature asserts that social relations are inherently ecological and that ecological relations are inherently social. This paper examines how, and with what consequences, discourses and practices of support for local and organic food reflect this idea. It argues that proponents of local organic agriculture view the food they promote as simultaneously social and the product of human labor. However, advocates’ understanding of the concept is partial and constrained by social privilege. It does not extend to industrial agriculture or paid farm labor. The literature on socio‐nature coheres around the revelation that what is understood as natural is also social and vice versa. In contrast, this paper takes a new approach, examining socio‐nature as a practice‐shaping discourse already embedded in social life. Investigating the on‐the‐ground ideological work performed by the concept also allows for assessment of its political consequences.     

Cross-Cultural Interpretation Planning in the Canadian Arctic

Facilities that interpret local cultures to tourists can promote positive host-guest relations. However, developing these facilities can be challenging because of the cross-cultural context in which the planning must take place. A participatory approach to planning must be used so that the local residents can determine how their culture is to be portrayed to visitors. However, the planner should be familiar with both the cultures of the hosts and the guests so that the local culture is authentically presented, in a way which is appropriate for visiting tourists. Often interpretation planners from "western" cultures are brought in to coordinate the development of such facilities. These planners, as well as the agencies which sponser them, must be committed to working closely with residents of the community over long periods of time to develop the necessary understanding of the host culture, as well as to cultivate an atmosphere of cooperation.