Beyond cooperation: towards an Oceanic community

Oceania, through the Pacific Islands Forum, is re-examining its processes and institutions in an attempt to become more effective as a region. Pacific leaders have adopted a ‘Pacific Plan’ that is designed to detail how the region will improve its governance, develop economically, ensure democratic values and deepen its commitment to human rights. The Plan argues that more and deeper cooperation is necessary to achieve these outcomes. But the region's states already cooperate closely in many spheres and there is no evidence that more cooperation will achieve anything but more cooperation. What is needed is the development of an explicit regional community within which the members (both states and citizens) can achieve their full potential unconstrained by the many structural and cultural barriers that exist with even the closest cooperative arrangements.     

EU Regional Policy After 2006: Will Scotland Notice the Difference?

In order to accommodate the recent enlargements of the European Union (EU) there has been considerable changes to the operation of EU regional policy which means that Scotland along with other regions in the EU-15 will receive considerably less money from the Structural Funds in the future. This article discusses the extent to which the reduction in EU funding for economic development will impact on the Scottish economy. The issue is explored by considering the contribution, which Structural Funds have made in the past to economic development in Western Scotland, which has received the lion's share of the money allocated to Scotland. It is suggested that whilst the amount of economic development in Scotland will not be significantly reduced as a result of the decline in EU funds the types of projects and organizations receiving funding will alter because of changes made to the way in which the funds are administered in Scotland.     

Tracing the Busy Gap Rogues

Busy Gap is one of the earliest attested place names located along the line of the central sector of Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, yet in Newcastle during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was a term of abuse, applied collectively to those who came from upland Tynedale and was synonymous with the Border Reivers. Archaeological and historical sources indicate that throughout the Middle Ages the place was located in a zone of seasonal settlement, characterized by groups of shielings probably associated with townships located in the valley of the South Tyne. The question is how to understand the role of Busy Gap, a place identified with a triangular earthwork on the north side of the Roman Wall. This paper will consider the results of recent archaeological investigations carried out by the author on the site and will investigate the place and its setting within the archaeological and historical context of early-modern Northumberland.     

Nunc autem a Gothis subversa: the province of Alicante and the Spanish Mediterranean towns between the Byzantine and Visigothic periods

The transition between the sixth and the seventh centuries in the towns of Iberia has been a matter of much discussion, leading to the development of the ‘urban renewal’ model, by which the Visigothic process of state formation generated a new urban munificence. A similar process can be seen in the towns of the Byzantine area, and our aim is to discuss the evolution of the urban settlements of the modern province of Alicante, reassessing the available evidence and comparing it with the models proposed for the Byzantine and Visigothic areas.     

A Pre-Lapita Structure at Apalo,Arawe Islands,Papua New Guinea

Stilt structures in the inter-tidal zone or over shallow water on fringing reefs are widely accepted as a feature of settlements of the Lapita cultural complex in Near Oceania. Claims for similar structures in a pre-Lapita context at the Apalo site in the Arawe Islands, New Britain, Papua New Guinea, have been queried on several grounds. Re-evaluation of the Apalo evidence, together with 10 additional AMS radiocarbon dates, establishes human activity associated with some form of structure and possibly with a ground stone axe about 400–500 years before the Lapita pottery occupation. The paucity of occupational refuse suggests a non-residential structure perhaps associated with water transport. Comparisons with the older Dongan midden site in the Sepik-Ramu basin suggest stilt structures were probably used there as well. An apparent shift in depositional processes between the pre-Lapita and Lapita use of Apalo could reflect changed sea conditions arising from increased ENSO activity.     

Measuring the impact of the European Capital of Culture programme on overnight stays: evidence for the last two decades

This study explores the effects of the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) on tourism demand, measured as overnight stays, for the years 1998–2014. The analysis includes 34 ECoC hosts and makes use of data on approximately 800 European cities. A difference-in-differences propensity score matching estimator shows that hosting the ECoC leads to an increase in overnight stays of 8% on average during the year of the event but does not stimulate tourism demand in subsequent years. To account for deviations in the distribution of tourism inflows between ECoC and other cities, the quantile difference-in-differences estimator is used. This leads to similar but somewhat stronger results, especially for the year of the event and for the year after. Separate estimations of ECoC hosts reveal that there is a certain degree of heterogeneity in the effect. Long-term impacts can only be observed for a small group of cities (Essen, Guimarães, Salamanca and Tallinn).     

The politics of the public and private spheres: the High Court’s decision in Monis and the gendered privileging of free speech

The High Court of Australia’s decision in Monis v The Queen and Droudis v The Queen concerned whether Monis and Droudis’s use of the postal service to send offensive letters warranted the constitutional protection of the implied freedom of political communication. The outcome was a split decision: the three men judges found for Monis and Droudis, and the three women judges against. We argue that this decision was significant because it draws attention to the law’s key role in framing political understandings of the nature of and demarcation between public and private spheres. The Court’s interpretations concerning how we should understand and apply the foundational relationships binding the state, the individual, and the public and private spheres in the twenty-first century highlights the gendered complexities of the politics shaping those relationships. It also highlights the gendered privileging of what sort of speech should be exempted from the law’s immediate purview, and in so doing, further reveals the masculinism upon which Australia’s constitutional framework rests.     

'Hard and Heavy': Gender and Power in a heavy metal music subculture

This article analyses gendered structures of power in a heavy metal (HM) music club. Although both male and female HM devotees often declare that they are engaged in a rebellious activity, this romantic conviction sits uneasily alongside the HM scene's reinforcement of conventional gender relations and identities. Although many women gravitated toward the HM setting in order to escape stifling adolescent situations, they wound up in another oppressive context. Both the forceful corporeal practices of men and the highly gendered structures of power meant that women 'did' gender on men's terms. HM texts, narratives, identities, and corporeal practices constituted a complex and contradictory gender regime that literally kept women 'in their place'.