The politics of being sorry: the Greensboro truth process and efforts at restorative justice

This paper examines the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission (GTRC) to better understand the way the truth process in Greensboro, North Carolina intersects with conceptions of restorative justice and geographic understandings of the ‘right to the city.’ The GTRC was a grassroots truth process focused on a shooting of labor organizers in 1979 by Ku Klux Klan and American Nazi Party Members and the complicity of local officials in the violence. In 2006, the GTRC released its report to the citizens of Greensboro and its recommendations for the city touched off a contentious debate. Using a multi-method qualitative approach—including open-ended interviews and archival research—I argue the GTRC process engages with notions of right to the city activism that challenges the right to the city literature to focus on broader discussions of racism, activism, and white privilege that emerges from critical race scholarship and contributes to the growth of robust, multiracial anticapitalist coalitions; an approach to scholarship on the right to the city that has broad academic purchase for social geography and urban political engagement in general.     

Constructing Homeland Security: An Anemic Policy Regime

This research addresses the strength of the homeland security policy regime that was constructed after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. We argue that homeland security provides a preeminent example of the challenges of developing policy regimes that focus policymaking on a common goal across diverse subsystems. All the ingredients for fashioning a powerful regime were in place after the terrorist attacks of September 2001—a common purpose, engaged stakeholders, and institutional redesign. But for a variety of reasons that we discuss, the results are far from cohesive. The lessons we draw are more general ones regarding factors that influence the strength of boundary‐spanning policy regimes.     

Hegel and the Paradox of Democratic Education

This article explores Hegel’s Philosophy of Right as a work on education that responds to two democratic ideals: the ideal of individual integrity, which demands that individuals come to know the principles that animate them of their own accord, and the ideal of collectivism, which demands that individuals be at home in a shared world. While the great political works of Plato and Rousseau fasten on one of these ideals at the expense of the other, I show that Hegel’s political philosophy accepts both. The result is what I call the paradox of democratic education. Hegel solves this paradox through a three-fold pedagogical strategy which speaks to the transformational possibilities of institutions as well as more directly to the needs of the “ironic consciousness.” This strategy reveals a Hegel who calls on us to strengthen our commitment to a democratic polity through a deeper conception of the requirements of democratic education.     

Archaeology and the Late Modern State: Introduction to the Special Issue

While archaeologists have always shown great interest in the rise and fall of premodern states, they perennially show little interest in their own. This is particularly troubling because the state is the nexus of power in archaeology. In practice, virtually all archaeology is state archaeology, imbued with and emboldened by state power. It is in this light that contributors to this Special Issue of Archaeologies grapple with the archaeology–state nexus, addressing such timely issues as colonialism, capitalism, and cultural resource or heritage management (CRM/CHM). We outline here the archaeology–state nexus concept and introduce the Special Issue.     

Marijuana,Guns, Crocodiles and Submarines: Economies of Desire in the Purari Delta

Traded down the Purari River by male youth through a network of friends, kuku dipi, as marijuana is known in the Purari Delta, is consumed locally, and traded for guns it is rumoured that the American Mafia bring in submarines. The movement of kuku dipi is part of a constellation of informal trade that has emerged alongside the large‐scale logging and oil projects in the Gulf Province. These networks involve the exchange of alcohol, pornography and radios by logging ship crews for live birds, crocodile skins and other local flora and fauna. Numerous sets of speculations have arisen about the seen and unseen transactions that these exchanges are felt to entail. Focusing on aspects of kuku dipi's use and movement in the Delta, I examine some of the explanations and anxieties around this illicit commodity. Doing so provides insight into kuku dipi's social impact and illuminates how the Purari's engagement in this trade is an attempt to transcend and cope with the economic and political disparities caused by the current resource extraction projects.     

Does Policy Diffusion Need Space? Spatializing the Dynamics of Policy Diffusion

For decades, scholars in multiple disciplines have examined spatial diffusion, or the spatiotemporal properties associated with the diffusion of innovations. These properties include contagious, hierarchical, and relocation diffusion. Each of these refers to a spatial model that epitomizes how innovations spread among geographic locations. Policy diffusion, a separate but homologous research tradition, had its theoretical underpinnings in spatial diffusion. However, contemporary policy diffusion has focused largely on mechanism‐based diffusion. This article demonstrates how exploratory spatial data analysis can be used to uncover spatial policy diffusion properties. In this study, municipal smoking regulation adoptions, religious‐based initiatives, and bag ban and bag fees are examined. This study finds evidence that for each policy more than one property is occurring; therefore, this study proposes that a hybrid model best explains diffusion. This article demonstrates how examining spatial diffusion properties, in addition to diffusion mechanisms, can improve the conceptualization of diffusion theories, enhance mechanism or theory‐based specification of diffusion models, and unravel the specific regional or neighboring causal pathways linking policies between adopting jurisdictions.