Hybrid identities in Canada's Red River Colony

Scholarship on Canada's Métis women has been informed largely by their central economic and reproductive roles in the British fur trade in North America. This article moves beyond these representations and focuses on Victorian discourses of race, class, gender and sexuality in a re-conceptualization of women's lives and experiences in territory. The article's primary aim is to evaluate the concept of female agency in Canada's Red River Colony (now Winnipeg, Manitoba) in 1850 and 1863. I use case studies of two unrelated lawsuits, Foss v. Pelly and The Queen v. Corbett , involving two differently situated Métis women. My central argument is that British attempts to translate English law over colonized space provided the 'Other' with a space of resistance and created hybrid socio-legal and cultural forms. My approach questions Western assumptions about discrete colonizer/colonized identities and power relations in those identities, maps the impact of law on social and cultural change in the fur trade and asks whether the Red River Colony was a hybrid place.     

Unofficial Road Building in the Amazon: Socioeconomic and Biophysical Explanations

Roads have manifold social and environmental impacts, including regional development, social conflicts and habitat fragmentation. ‘Road ecology’ has emerged as an approach to evaluate the various ecological and hydrological impacts of roads. This article aims to complement road ecology by examining the socio‐spatial processes of road building itself. Focusing on the Brazilian Amazon, a heavily‐studied context due to forest fragmentation by roads, the authors consider non‐state social actors who build ‘unofficial roads’ for the purpose of gaining access to natural resources to support livelihoods and community development. They examine four case studies of roads with distinct histories in order to explain the socio‐spatial processes behind road building in terms of profit maximization, land tenure claims, co‐operative and conflictive political ecologies, and constraints as well as opportunities afforded by the biophysical environment. The study cases illustrate the need for a multi‐pronged theoretical approach to understanding road building, and call for more attention to the role of non‐state actors in road construction.     

The governance bank

While the cancellation of a number of high‐profile loans because of corruption concerns has made headline news, the World Bank's principal approach to poorly governed countries is lending in order to support reforms. Although designed to be an apolitical technocratic development financier, increasingly the Bank has focused its attention and resources on promoting good governance in its borrowers. Bank lawyers and presidents have attempted to hive of apolitical aspects of governance by arguing a distinction between the rule of law and the political character of government, but this distinction is illusory. The Bank's inability to address the political embeddedness of poor governance in neo‐patrimonial governments skews risk assessments and impedes the formation of effective strategies. Reform of the charter would not eliminate the Bank's bureaucratic and political constraints.