Local-scale turnpike roads in nineteenth-century Kentucky

This essay will examine, through a Kentucky case study, the process whereby states, county-level localities, and individuals undertook for themselves the responsibility for internal improvements, especially the construction of comprehensive road networks in the nineteenth century. Before the Kentucky legislature authorized state-funded road construction in the twentieth century, the state's best roads were a few toll turnpikes. Following other eastern states, Kentucky approved turnpike construction charters and subscribed to turnpike stock to underwrite construction. State statutes, based upon directives from trained engineers hired by the Board of Internal Improvement, required that turnpike construction follow complex procedures. A change in the state constitution in 1850 forced the state to withdraw from turnpike road investment and road construction oversight and finance devolved to counties and private investors. Local county road networks were largely the product of neighborhood turnpike companies chartered by the state. Primary documents record the local road-building process for a five-mile turnpike in a Bourbon County. With little direction or assistance from state engineers, the neighborhood residents, led by farmer John W. Jones, surveyed a route, arranged for right-of-way access through adjacent farms, hired Irish turnpike construction crews, built a tollhouse, and collected tolls. Formal state law and engineering directives became attenuated as amateur turnpike builders constructed a simplified version of the state's ideal road.     

Ordering without bordering: drones,the unbordering of late modern warfare and ontological insecurity

ABSTRACT

Borders – both physical and otherwise – are seen to be on the rise, but in late modern warfare, a complex process of unbordering can be observed in drone warfare. Targeted killings through drone strikes have changed the battlespace, made physical occupation unnecessary and rendered the Westphalian border as contingent and arbitrary. Furthermore, drones perform a complex form of ordering without borders in unruly spaces imbued with uncertainty, violence and danger. This article examines the intersection of bordering, drones and ontological security through the CIA-led U.S. drone strikes in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of northwest Pakistan. It examines the relationship between drone warfare and ontological security, specifically the effects produced by postcolonial unbordering and ordering. For the liberal state, drones provide a sense of ontological security and cohere with liberal values because they are deemed precise and ethical weapons that avoid collateral damage and protect military personnel, without the costs of occupation. Yet drone strikes create deep insecurity within postcolonial borderspaces, impacting communities already subject to multiple forms and legacies of power and control. This article argues that drone warfare has complex implications for bordering/unbordering practices in late modern warfare as well as hierarchical ontological insecurity in postcolonial and liberal subjects.