An Empire of the Scholars: Transnational Lawyers and the Rule of Opinio Juris

The eternal conflict between justice and violence is the theme of director John Ford's last great film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. In the world of the American West where Ford's story is set, justice does not just happen; it is a work of manly courage that encompasses a willingness—in extreme cases—to kill those men, such as Liberty Valance, who challenge law and order. Justice will require, as Plato said, a rightly ordered soul, but it will be a soul that must do violence to realize justice in a world that too often resembles a Hobbesian state of nature. In Ford's view, the truth of these violent origins of justice are more likely to be obscured than illuminated by the civilized historian's account of this truth. And we do violence not merely to justice but also to truth itself if we fail to respect the hard reality that civilization requires such measures.     

Going for the win‐win: including the public in underwater cultural heritage management through citizen science in Australia and New Zealand

UCH managers are increasingly aware of the limitations of excluding public participation in heritage management both in terms of their own limited resources and need for wide public political support. This article assesses a pilot project in South Australia to train citizen scientists to record and monitor underwater cultural heritage sites. The results reinforced the need to ensure the data collected is robust and meaningful, and that citizen scientists know their contribution is valid; the need to help citizen scientists interpret data and foster peer‐to‐peer learning, and highlighted the importance of open source data for site conditions.     

Global Poverty and Inequality: Change and Continuity in Late Development

This contribution assesses the ‘converging divergence’ thesis that global inequality is falling and national inequality is rising. The article argues that falling global inequality is primarily due to China's development and that national inequality has risen in some developing countries and fallen in others. In light of the dominance of China's development in the global picture, questions arise as to what has changed and what has not changed outside of China. A set of changes and continuities is presented. It is then argued that these changes and continuities provide for the contemporary relevance an older conceptual lens — that of ‘late development’.     

The General Law of US Capitalist Accumulation: Contingent Work and the Working Class

For several years now, there has been a minor rekindling of interest in the ideas of Karl Marx, hailed in the New Yorker as "the next big thinker. Like other articles supposedly professing sympathy with Marx, this exhibits a common misconception. It is also underwritten with the following revisionism: Given that the agents of social changethe "modern working class"are shrinking drastically and disappearing fast, Marx's revolutionary hopes are doomed. Nowonly a residual Marx prevails, a Marx-lite, a mere analyzer of the defects of bourgeois society. This article seeks to contest these distortions. It brings Marx to bear on the present US context, positing him as an apt economic critic and telling political prophet of millennial America. It addresses standard clichés about his class definition and emphasizes how Marx really left us with a flexible, dialectical theory, hinging on the process of capital accumulation. From the standpoint of accumulation dynamics, we can justifiably argue that the working class is still growing, not shrinking in numbers. From this perspective, too, we might better comprehend the whole phenomenon of corporate downsizing and "contingent work" within the remit of Marx's different forms of relative surplus populations. The attendant questions about working class organization and politics are dealt with in the paper's conclusion, which illustrates how Marxian-style resistance is already beginning to take hold in the United States.     

Saucer Barrows: Places for Ritual within Wessex Early Bronze Age Chalkland Barrow Cemeteries

The Bronze Age barrow groups of Wessex have primarily been classified as places of burial where lineages were marked and mourners deployed to create mythologized links with the recently dead and the ancestors. These chalkland barrow cemeteries are associated with a range of barrow forms – bowl barrows and ‘fancy’ barrows, the latter comprising disc, bell, pond and saucer types. Whilst funerary activity was undoubtedly an important activity within these barrow groups, this paper examines the evidence for other forms of ritual practice within one particular barrow type, the saucer barrow, and considers whether there was more to ritual activity in Wessex barrow cemeteries than the disposal of the dead and the commemoration of ancestors.     

Landscapes of Stone: Contextualizing Greenstone Working and Lithics from Clodgy Moor,West Penwith,Cornwall

Between 2004 and 2011 Graham Hill and Dave Edwards plotted nearly eight thousand prehistoric artefacts from ploughed fields across the Clodgy Moor area of West Penwith. In 2011 a project was carried out by the Historic Environment Service Projects team, Cornwall Council, the Portable Antiquities Scheme and the Cornwall Archaeological Society to catalogue and digitize all the finds recorded from the fieldwalking.

The project demonstrated that some places within the project area were persistent locales which were occupied throughout the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. The results were particularly significant because they shed light on the context of the production of greenstone axes, widely exchanged around Britain and across the Irish Sea during the Neolithic, and suggest why, despite large numbers of artefacts, no greenstone ‘axe factory’ site has been found close to the potential sources of the greenstone before.     

The cultural geographies of Abstract Expressionism: painters,critics, dealers and the production of an Atlantic art

In this article I propose that the artistic genre of Abstract Expressionism which emerge d from New York in the late 1940s provides an illustrative example of the way a productive, trans-national geographical framework can be provided by exploring the cultural geographies of the Atlantic world. By drawing on the ways Abstract Expressionism was constructed and promoted within the rigid national perspective of 1950s' US cultural policy and reacted against in Britain and Europe on similarly nationalistic terms, I show how the circulatory exchange of cultural flows reveals a more co-produced understanding of these histories. The notion of a network of painters, dealers and critics is used to emphasize the way Abstract Expressionism was produced through a spatial framework which plays a constitutive, rather than purely connective, role. In doing so I draw particular attention to the period from the early 1950s to the 1960s and the artistic activity and critical writing associated with New York City and the Cornish coastal town of St Ives.

Les géographies culturelles de l'Expressionnisme Abstrait: les peintres, les critiques, les marchands et la production d'un art de l'Atlantique

Je propose dans cet article que le style artistique de l'Expressionnisme Abstrait, né à New York à la fin des années 1940, fournit un exemple permettant d'illustrer la façon dont un cadre géographique productif et transnational peut être élaboré à partir d'une exploration des géographies culturelles de l'univers Atlantique. En prenant comme base les moyens par lesquels l'Expressionnisme Abstrait a été construit et s'est développé dans le cadre rigide et national de la politique culturelle américaine des années 1950 et s'est confronté à une Angleterre et une Europe tout autant nationalistes, je démontre comment l'échange circulaire des courants culturels permet de voir et de comprendre que ces histoires ont en partie été coproduites. La notion de réseau de peintres, de marchands et de critiques sert à souligner par quel moyen l'Expressionnisme Abstrait a été produit au travers d'un cadre spatial dont la fonction est constitutive plutôt que simplement de permettre de former des liens. Ce faisant, j'attire l'attention sur l'époque allant du début des années 1950 jusque dans les années 1960 et sur l'activité artistique et les écrits critiques qui sont liés de près à la Ville de New York et à Saint-Ives, village côtier de Cornouailles.

Las geografías culturales del Expresionismo Abstracto: pintores, críticos, marchantes y la producción de un arte atlántico

En este papel sugiero que el género artístico de Expresionismo Abstracto que surgió en Nueva York en los años 40 es un ejemplo ilustrativo de la manera en que se puede facilitar un productivo marco geográfico transnacional por una exploración de las geografías culturales del mundo atlántico. Las maneras en que se construía y promovía el Expresionismo Abstracto dentro de la perspectiva nacional rígida de la política cultural de los Estados Unidos de los años 50 y las maneras en que se reaccionaba contra ello en Gran Bretaña y Europa en términos igualmente nacionalistas sirven como ejemplo de cómo el intercambio circulatorio de flujos culturales revela una interpretación co-producida de estas historias. La idea de una red de pintores, marchantes y críticos sirve para destacar el modo en que el Expresionismo Abstracto fue producido por un marco espacial que juega un papel tanto constitutivo como conectivo. En particular destaco el período de los años 50 a los años 60 y también la actividad artística y la literatura crítica asociada con la ciudad de Nueva York y la ciudad córnica costera de St Ives.     

Book reviews

New works in geography

Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism. Gregory A. Barton. Pp. xiii + 192. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0 521 81417 0 (hbk).

Claiming Rural Identities: Dynamics, Contexts, Policies. Tialda Haartsen, Peter Groote &; Paulus P.P. Huigen (eds). Pp. viii + 166. Assen: Van Gorcum, 2000. Price €17.02, ISBN 90 232 3567 3 (pbk).

Geographies of Health. Anthony C. Gatrell. Pp. xv + 294. Oxford: Blackwell. 2002. Price £16.99 (pbk), ISBN 0 631 21985 4 (pbk).

The Peopling of Britain: The Shaping of the Human Landscape. Paul Slack and Ryk Ward (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press 2002. Price £50.00 (hbk), ISBN 0 19 829759 9 (hbk).

Focus on Scotland

William Speirs Bruce: Polar Explorer and Scottish Nationalist. Peter Speak. Pp. 144. Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland Publishing, 2003. Price £9.99 (pbk), ISBN 1 901663 71 X (pbk).