The Pluralities of Black Geographies

This paper seeks to spur conversations around the inherent pluralities found within Black Geographies. While analyses of Black Geographies have provided important reflections on the spatial imaginaries and practices of Black populations, less attention has been paid to the differences found among Black geographical expressions. This piece therefore seeks to draw out the ways in which Black people uniquely conceive of space by highlighting the distinctions present within different Black social movements. The authors explore the spatial politics of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Black Panther Party for Self‐Defense, and the Provisional Government of the Republic of New Afrika to argue that while these three movements all attempted to create spaces of Black self‐determination, they did so with distinct spatial aspirations and concrete politics. The authors argue that recognising and accounting for the pluralities of Black spatial creation is necessary for realising more just geographies.     

“Our life is a struggle”: Respectable Gender Norms and Black Resistance to Policing

This paper investigates the role of women in anti‐racist campaigns against policing in post‐2011 England. It argues that imperial discourses about gender norms and respectability have helped to shape how race and crime are constituted in the contemporary period. Women's resistance to police racism has received scholarly attention from black feminists in North America; such attention has been less in Britain, particularly since the 1990s. While influential analyses of policing in Britain have deployed a post‐colonial lens, gender and women's resistance are rarely the primary focus. This paper significantly develops debates on gender, race and policing, by arguing that the colonial roots of race and gender norms are fundamental to conceptualising one of the key findings of the field research which informs this paper: that women lead almost every campaign against a black death in police custody in post‐2011 England. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with activists, ethnographic observations at protests and scholar‐activist participation in campaigns against black deaths in custody, this paper demonstrates how 18^th and 19^th century imperial discourses on respectability and nation do not simply contextualise racialised policing in the contemporary period, but expose the racialised and gendered norms that legitimise racist policing in modern Britain.     

The canopic jars of Rameses II: real use revealed by molecular study of organic residues

Four blue-glazed faience jars, on exhibition in the Louvre Museum, are referred to as the canopic jars of Rameses II. Their recent typological re-examination rendered this original assignment questionable. In order to clearly determine their use, a study of two successive organic residues from the canopic jars, using molecular biomarkers analysed by GC-MS and LC-MS and absolute dating by ¹⁴C, was initiated. The results revealed that these two materials were not contemporary to the reign of Rameses II. The first one, scraped from the interior face of one jar, was identified as an unguent made of coniferous oil and animal fat and dated from the Third Intermediate Period. The second one, originally stored with glued linen inside one jar, is likely an embalming substance, made of pure vegetable resin (Pistacia) and dated from the Ptolemaic Period. These results clarify a controversy which has been lasting over a century. The famous blue-glazed faience jars are not the canopic jars of Rameses II but are confirmed as situlae which were reused at least two times: first to store unguents during the Intermediate Period and later to store embalming packages of an unknown person during the Ptolemaic period.     

Arms Racing in ‘Space’: Spatial Modelling of Military Spending around the World

This paper builds on previous research into determinants of military spending by examining global and local spatial effects. Other research has examined the effects of regional differences and neighbours' spending levels with standard econometric techniques. This paper uses spatial econometrics to gain a better understanding of the influence of location and distance on levels of defence spending. I find that a spatial lag specification provides much more robust evidence of arms racing and security dilemma dynamics than previous studies. These basic dynamics have been difficult to detect empirically without the context and nuance introduced by spatial modelling. The paper represents a first cut at the topic, but two specific findings emerge. First, globally there is positive spatial correlation (nearby states have similar levels of spending). This conforms to arms racing and security dilemma expectations. And, second, locally there is variation in the patterns of spatial clustering across broad international regions (e.g. Europe, Asia etc.). The second finding supports previous research suggesting important qualitative regional variation in patterns of defence spending and international conflict. The models also confirm the effects of political regime type and interstate war on defence spending, and are robust to the inclusion of a temporally lagged dependent variable.     

Book reviews

The Solitary Self: Jean‐Jacques Rousseau in Exil and Adversity. By Maurice Cranston (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997) xii + 247 pp. $29.95 cloth.

The Self‐Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern Meta‐Painting. By Victor I. Stoichita (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) xv + 345 pp. $85.00, £55.00 cloth.

The Cambridge Companion to Nietzsche. Edited by Bernd Magnus and Kathleen M. Higgins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) ix + 403 pp. $18.95, £13.95 paper, $59.95, £40.00 cloth.

David Hume: Political Essays. Edited by Knud Haakonssen, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) lxvi + 346 pp. $49.95, £30.00 cloth, $15.95, £10.95 paper.

Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason. By Thomas R. Flynn (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1997) 340 + xvi pages. $18.95 paper.

Shaping World History: Breakthroughs in Ecology, Technology, Science, and Politics. By Mary Kilbourne Matossian (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997) 264 pp. $62.95 cloth, $22.95 paper.     

Forbidden Images: Rock Paintings and the Nyau Secret Society of Central Malaŵi and Eastern Zambia

This paper examines the rock art of the nyau secret society of eastern Zambia and central Malai. The art dates principally from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has been known to researchers since the 1970s but has given up few of its secrets. I examine the questions of why the art was made and why the tradition ceased. Key to answering these is the realization that the art belonged to a specific historical and geographic context: the era and area where nyau was forced to become an underground movement because of its suppression by Ngoni invaders, missions, and the later colonial government. The art provides us with detailed insights into the way nyau has served in the process of overcoming and manipulating the traumatic social changes faced by Chea society in the last few centuries.Cet article examine l'art rupestre de la société secrète de nyau au est du Zambia et Malai centrale. L'art date principalement aux dix-neuvième et bas vingtième siècles. Recherchers ont su l'art depuis les années soixante-dix, mais ils ont appris peu de ses secrets. J'examine les questions de pourquoi l'art était fabriquer et pourquoi la tradition a cessé. Pour résoudre ces questions c'est important à réaliser que l'art était à sa place dans un milieu spécifique d'histoire et géographie: au temps et place où nyau était forcer à devenir un mouvement clandestin à cause de sa répression par les envahisseurs Ngoni, les missions et, plus tard, le gouvernement colonial. L'art nous donne les aperçus détaillé sur comment nyau a servi dans le procès à surmonter et manipuler les changements traumatiques que la société Chea a bravé dans les siècles récents.     

Sharpening Advocacy Coalitions

The concept of “advocacy coalitions” is the bedrock of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), one of the most established and successful approaches for understanding policy processes across the globe. This article revisits and sharpens the conceptual definition of advocacy coalitions. We summarize the lessons from its theoretical emphases under the ACF and specify its five attributes (policy actors, shared beliefs, coordination, resources, and stability). Through this specification, we identify the ideal coalition type and several coalition subtypes. We then clarify and make a distinction between how we think about coalitions as a concept and how we approach coalitions empirically. This article sharpens the lens for describing and explaining coalitions toward better observations, theorizing, and measurements. It ends with next steps for further deepening and broadening knowledge about advocacy coalitions.     

Platform Capitalism’s Hidden Abode: Producing Data Assets in the Gig Economy

In this article, we argue that the governance of gig work under conditions of financialised platform capitalism is characterised by a process that we call “dual value production”: the monetary value produced by the service provided is augmented by the use and speculative value of the data produced before, during, and after service provision. App-governed gig workers hence function as pivotal conduits in software systems that produce digital data as a particular asset class. We reflect on the production of data assets and the unequal distribution of opportunities for their valorisation, after which we survey a number of strategies seeking data-centric worker empowerment. These strategies, we argue, are crucial attempts to push back against platform capitalism’s domination, bankrolled by what we term “meta-platforms”. Ultimately, it is the massive wealth and synergetic capacities of meta-platforms that constitute the most formidable obstacle to worker power and social justice in increasingly data-driven societies.