Micro-Politics of a Makeshift Refugee Camp: The Grafosrem Factory in Šid,Serbia

With the EU's increasingly militarised and violent external borders, makeshift refugee camps have developed into crucial nodes along the “Balkan Route” where refugees reside between their clandestine border-crossing attempts. Though a rich body of scholarship has recently emerged on the makeshift camp, there remains limited engagement on the complex and dynamic social and political lives produced within these spaces. Building upon ethnographic fieldwork in the makeshift camp of the abandoned Grafosrem factory in the border town of Šid, Serbia, this paper examines, in particular, the micro-politics produced by the camp's different actors (leaders, residents, outcasts, volunteers). This paper also emphasises how aspects such as race, gender, age, class, and language are at play in dictating the differential access, power, privileges, violence, and exclusion taking place among Grafosrem's diverse subjects, and in generating a multiplicity of lived experiences of the makeshift camp and the corridor more generally.     

Interdisciplinary Research into the Legacy of the Medieval Metropolis of Soba in a Modern Khartoum Suburb

Recent research at Soba focuses on the tangible and intangible heritage of the medieval capital of Alwa kingdom, whose remains cover approximately 275 ha. About 222 ha of this area has been built up or transformed into agricultural land in the past 30 years. An ethnographic survey was also carried out in the built-up area to understand how the residents engage with the archaeological heritage and material remains. The undeveloped area of the capital (53 ha) was the focus of interdisciplinary archaeological fieldwork conducted in 2019 and 2020. A large-scale geophysical survey, using a fluxgate gradiometer and ground-penetrating radar, was initiated in the undeveloped area, and excavation trenches were opened to verify distinctive magnetic anomalies. Along with the ethnographic and geophysical data, the study of the pottery, burials, and stratigraphic sequence (supplemented with radiocarbon dates) provides new insights into the spatial organization of the medieval capital.

     

Detecting Late Holocene cultural landscape modifications using LiDAR imagery in the Boreal Forest,Susitna Valley,Southcentral Alaska

The subarctic boreal forest, or taiga, is the largest biome in the world but has received minimal archaeological research because of its remoteness and difficult working conditions. In Southcentral Alaska the most common archaeological sites are surface manifestations of proto-historic semi-subterranean caches once used for food storage and living structures. However, in dense summer vegetation, these small-scale features are difficult to locate without high intensity pedestrian survey. To test the usefulness of LiDAR data for archaeological prospection in the taiga, we compare LiDAR imagery to the known distribution of small-scale semi-subterranean cultural features. The use of LiDAR, when complemented with Sky-View Factor, has proven valuable in identifying relatively small semi-subterranean features though it does not replace on-the-ground investigation. Nevertheless, the application of LiDAR to locate low density and small-scale cultural features is widely applicable across the subarctic in densely vegetated contexts and may assist in significantly expanding our current knowledge of land-use patterns and site distributions in logistically challenging places.     

To Avenge the Burnt Statues and Temples of the Gods: The Religious Background of the Greek Wars with the “Barbarians”

Abstract

In The Clash of Civilizations (1996) Samuel Huntington placed the Persian Wars at the beginning of the long line of clashes between civilizations. To the modern reader the emphasis Huntington puts on the role played by religion in defining Athenian civilization and its conflict with the “barbarians” appears to be consistent with Herodotus’ position on these wars. However, this position overlooks the fact that the ancient polytheistic beliefs and cults implied a particular attitude to religion, unlike that of monotheistic religions. In the ancient Mediterranean world the temples and sacred places were to be universally respected and any violation of this rule was regarded as sacrilege that justified persecution of the wrongdoers, whose ethnicity was of no, or only of secondary, importance. The purpose of this article is to survey the main passages in Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon that treat the wars between the Greeks and Persians and between Greek city-states, and to demonstrate that the line dividing defenders (or avengers) of divine cults from offenders of the gods was not drawn between Greeks and barbarians, but between defenders and offenders.     

TERRITORIAL GOVERNANCE,NETWORKS AND POWER: CROSS‐SECTORAL PARTNERSHIPS IN RURAL POLAND

Research on the operation of territorial governance and rural development programmes is dominated by qualitative methodologies, paying little attention heretofore to the characteristics and structures of new horizontal and vertical relationship formations that are the explicit objective of the governance and rural development model. Seeking to address this deficit in the literature, this article adds to a small number of existing contributions that use social network analysis (SNA) to examine the role of inter‐organizational networks in shaping geographic functional regions in the context of governance. Rooted in the methodological perspective of SNA, the analysis focuses on relations between local actors participating in three area‐based rural partnerships in Poland, which are conceptualized as territorially embedded institutional network clusters. The structure of inter‐sectoral relations, understood as interactions (competition, conflict, coordination, cooperation, and control) and flows (information, financial, human, or tangible resources), between the institutional partners of these partnerships is examined. Analysing in detail attributes of network relations, the article identifies structural characteristics of the area‐based partnerships, such as manifestations of how diverse local resources are engaged and how dominance by traditional powerful stakeholders can be overcome by network structures. Structural dynamics and transformations that represent expressions and manifestations of how territorially embedded governance networks are expected to operate are important areas of inquiry in political geography. In this context, the particular empirical and theoretical capacity of SNA is illuminated in this article as part of a broader presentation of primary field data on how network governance and rural development is taking shape in Central and Eastern Europe.