The Amenity Complex: Towards a Framework for Analysing and Predicting the Emergence of a Multifunctional Countryside in Australia

There is growing consensus among academics, regional development organisations and rural communities that the future growth and development of rural regions is increasingly dependent upon their ability to convey, to both established and prospective residents, the ‘amenity’ of their local physical, social and economic environments. However, little research to date has sought to identify exactly what comprises ‘amenity’ in the rural context, or has examined how this conceptually slippery quality is distributed across rural Australia, or how it influences local demographic, socio‐economic and land use change. This paper attempts a broad scale investigation of rural amenity in the south‐east Australian ecumene, identifying its core components in this context, mapping its distribution and assessing the nature of its influence over in‐migration rates over the past three decades. The paper finds that, at a macro‐scale, amenity tends to follow a general gradient from high to low according to distance from the coast, and that its relationship with in‐migration rates has increased substantially between 1976–1981 and 1996–2001.     

Historical limits: narrowing possibilities in ‘Ontario's most historic town’

Place branding in heritage tourism development is presented as a strategy that opens up new possibilities for attracting investors and visitors by distilling, capturing and shaping what is distinctive about a place. This representational fix is an efficient marketing device in the sense that it represents places through widely intelligible symbols. Branding is also a limiting activity that locks places in time and class relations. While place branding has always had this dual effect, we argue that it has particularly insidious and limiting consequences for local development under current conditions of roll‐out neoliberalism. Beginning in the 1960s, several prominent residents and outsiders initiated efforts to transform the Town of Cobalt, Ontario, into a mining heritage tourism destination. In 2001, the town entered and won a contest to be named Ontario's Most Historic Town. The following year it persuaded Parks Canada to designate it as a national historic site. These two events provided renewed external validation for the efforts to brand Cobalt as a heritage site and began a new cycle of mining heritage tourism development. However, instead of breaking the dependency relationships that characterize resource regions, the current round of place branding has acted to circumscribe the range of possible economic development options.     

Wrestling with the integrity of a nation: the disputed internal boundaries in Iraq

The disputed internal boundaries in northern Iraq between the Kurds and the Arabs have been a persistent fault‐line in the state's history and have rapidly emerged as a core dispute since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Kurds underwrote, more than any other constituency, the democratic project in the new Iraq and contrived an ambitious constitutional route through Article 140 to place Kirkuk and other disputed areas under the administration of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) by December 2007. Article 140 was designed to resolve the issue in the Kurds favour once and for all, to circumvent yet another tedious negotiation round with the Arabs and to quarantine the Kurdish project from regional interference, particularly Turkey. On all three counts the strategy failed. This is primarily because of the complexity of the issue but there is also evidence of internal Kurdish discord with the strategy concerning the restoration of Kirkuk governorate's boundaries. The years 2007–2008 were a watershed for Kurdish designs to incorporate Kirkuk through a constitutional process and since then the disputed boundaries question has been left in a state of suspended animation. However, if a negotiating framework were to emerge the contours of a ‘deal’ have begun to crystallize and there is scope to move from management of the issue to resolution. Answers to the questions of when and how will depend on the shape of the complete package, the new government constellation and the extent that Turkey and Iran reveal themselves in the political marketplace.     

The trouble with radicalization

Though widely used by academics and policy‐makers in the context of the ‘war on terror’, the concept of radicalization lacks clarity. This article shows that while radicalization is not a myth, its meaning is ambiguous and the major controversies and debates that have sprung from it are linked to the same inherent ambiguity. The principal conceptual fault‐line is between notions of radicalization that emphasize extremist beliefs (‘cognitive radicalization’) and those that focus on extremist behavior (‘behavioural radicalization’). This ambiguity explains the differences between definitions of radicalization; it has driven the scholarly debate, which has revolved around the relationship between cognition and behavior; and it provides the backdrop for strikingly different policy approaches—loosely labeled ‘European’ and ‘Anglo‐Saxon’—which the article delineates and discusses in depth. Rather than denying its validity, the article calls on scholars and policy‐makers to work harder to understand and embrace a concept which, though ambiguous, is likely to dominate research and policy agendas for years to come.