Whitewash: white privilege and racialized landscapes at the University of Georgia

This paper examines racialized landscapes at the University of Georgia to better understand the ways that whiteness—or more specifically white privilege—is positioned in and uses landscapes. Given a history of segregation, violently contested desegregation, and a contemporary student body that is disproportionately white (compared to the population of the entire state of Georgia), we investigate the meanings and contradictions of the University's historic ‘North Campus’. Using a multi-method qualitative approach—including open-ended interviews and ‘roving focus groups’—we argue that privileged, white landscapes operate through a kind of whitewashing of history, which seeks to deploy race strategically to create a progressive landscape narrative pertaining to ‘race’.     

The state of environmental protection in the Russian Federation: a review of the post-Soviet era

Abstract

In the 25 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, sweeping political, economic, and social changes have profoundly influenced environmental protection in Russia, the world’s largest country and one of global importance with respect to natural resources, biodiversity conservation, wilderness preservation, and climate change mitigation. This paper reviews the state of the environment by assessing post-Soviet era changes to legislation, government regulatory institutions, and civil society. A gulf exists between Russia’s formal environmental laws and state agency capacity and interest in enforcing them. This stems, in part, from repeated bureaucratic reorganizations that have progressively eroded environmental institutions. The Russian environmental movement, which blossomed during Gorbachev’s reforms in the late 1980s, struggled in the 1990s to mobilize the broader public due to economic hardship and political instability. Since then, the Putin administration has labeled many environmental groups “anti-Russian” and used aggressive tactics such as raiding NGO offices, intimidating journalists, and instituting severe legislative measures to quash advocacy and dissent. Post-Soviet environmental successes have been relatively few, with expansion of the protected area system and forest certification notable exceptions. These successes can partially be attributed to efforts by large environmental organizations, but expansion of certification and corporate social responsibility is also tied to Russian business interests dependent on natural resource export to global markets increasingly sensitive to environmental concerns. The paper concludes by illustrating how corruption, poor enforcement, and the muzzling of civil society render the state incapable of resolving arguably its most significant environmental challenge: illegal and unregulated resource use.     

ALL IN?

This review treats Mark Greif's remarkable inquiry into what he calls the crisis of man and man‐talk: the invocation to inquire into humanity that Greif traces out through various genres of writing (philosophy, journalism, literature, and literary criticism) through a succession of decades (1930s–1960s) within an exclusively North American US context. As seems suitable for this journal, the review focuses primarily on Greif's own standpoint and methods. In its first half, it identifies and ultimately questions Greif's decidedly anti‐hermeneutic stance. Greif cordons off his own discourse from those he treats, picking an approach that prevents his making their questions his own, despite the fact that many of his chosen texts raise issues pertaining to how history, especially intellectual history, is to be conducted. In the review's second half, two key instances are surveyed: Greif's discussions of Hannah Arendt and of Ralph Ellison.     

Perceptions and Misperceptions of Regime Stability and Iran's Convoluted Rise to Regional Influence

This article seeks to explain revolutionary Iran's convoluted rise to regional prominence over the last three decades. We hold that perceptions and misperceptions of regime stability (both of one's self and of others) by the relevant actors have played a major role in Iran's recent. The main logic is that the success of many strategies employed by relevant regional actors to augment their regional influence (both Iran seeking more influence and others seeking to stem that influence) have crucially hinged on making correct assessments of regime stability. This study has both theoretical and empirical findings. Theoretically, we find that failures to accurately estimate regime stability stem from three main sources: (1) objective uncertainties regarding the target state's level of regime stability, given the high strength of societal forces shaping state‐society relations in the Middle East and given the distinct variation between autocrats in terms of their ability to develop effective counterrevolutionary/repressive tools; (2) ideological blinders, from which both the United States and regional actors frequently suffer, which have often led them to be falsely optimistic regarding the existence of either subversive opportunities or opportunities to stabilize regimes facing domestic pressures; and (3) incorrect theories regarding sources of regime stability which lead experts and policymakers to overlook factors which may destabilize a regime. This article has two major empirical findings. First, Iran's rise may be at least partly attributed to Iran demonstrating a slightly better learning curve at the tactical level (i.e., learning subversive skills from its Lebanese experience in the 1980s–1990s and applying them to Iraq in the 2000s–2010s) as well as at the strategic level (i.e., understanding the limits of its subversive capacities and correctly assessing when it can engage in successful stabilizing operations). Second, two errors committed by the United States have been far more consequential than those committed by Iran for the regional balance of power: First, the George W. Bush Administration myopically opened up subversive opportunities for Iran when it invaded Iraq in 2003 by thinking that it could stabilize a democratic regime and insulate it from outside influence; second, on two occasions Washington overestimated the transformative effect that its concessions to Iran would have in terms of sufficiently empowering reformists so as to bring about complete regime transformation from within.     

Tailors-Made: Heritage Governance Customization in Late Modern Canada

Canada is not just a patchwork of varying heritage governance delineated by provincial and territorial boundaries but a maelstrom of contesting and overlapping practices and processes originating from state and non-state actors. Since the 1990s, this patchwork of governance has increasingly diffused into Indigenous and local spheres through the negotiation of formal (treaties, legislation) and semi-formal (memoranda of understanding) agreements. Ideological tensions persist between the design aspirations of resurgent Indigenisms and Canadian late modern state processes. The resurgence of Indigenous capacities and institutions with a heritage management mandate has also created Indigenous jurisdictions not premised in any nation-to-nation agreement.     

Organizational principles of Khirigsuur monuments in the lower Egiin Gol valley,Mongolia

Khirigsuurs are the largest and most common archaeological monuments of the Mongolian Steppe in the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, a critical time for the spread of nomadic pastoralism and the emergence of a new social order during the Bronze Age in Inner Asia. Using data from a full coverage regional survey of the Lower Egiin Gol valley, this paper presents a system for studying the defining ground level features of Khirigsuurs to discover structural categories, organize sites, compare Khirigsuur monuments across regions and explore activities that may have gone on around the Khirigsuurs themselves as they were built and used. The primary methods used are a study of monumental scale and a typology of additive parts from which complex and comparable types emerge. Elaborate Khirigsuurs illustrate the use of Khirigsuurs as small monuments, stages for group activities, and are the persistent backdrop for social transformations during the spread of nomadic pastoralism. I suggest that the Khirigsuurs of the Lower Egiin Gol are monuments constructed with relatively regular frequency, by a consistently sized group, and used for group oriented activities rather than the memorialization of an elite. This is consistent with something one might see as part of a regular yearly nomadic round.     

School Choice as a Latent Variable: Estimating the “Complier Average Causal Effect” of Vouchers in Charlotte

Randomized field trials of school voucher policy interventions face major statistical hurdles in the measurement of a voucher effect on student achievement. Selection bias undermines the benefits of randomization when the treatment, a random offer of a voucher, is declined by participants who systematically differ from those who accept. This article argues that the complier average causal effect (CACE) is the parameter of interest in voucher evaluations. As an example, the CACE is estimated using data from a small, one‐year field trial of vouchers in Charlotte, NC. In this estimation, voucher impacts in Charlotte are positive, but appear to be moderated by the probability of compliance. For math achievement, maximum likelihood CACE estimates are smaller and insignificant compared to intention to treat and instrumental variable estimates of mean treatment effects.