The Language of Imperialism in British Electoral Politics, 1880–1910

This article asks us to reconsider the impact of the issue of imperialism in electoral politics in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Using a corpus of around five million words of digitised campaign speeches from the years 1880–1910, it examines the language of the nine General Elections held in this period through computerised text-mining. This ‘big data’ analysis produces three conclusions, which in some cases nuance existing interpretations and in others directly challenge them. The first questions the prevailing consensus that elections in the high age of empire featured imperialism as a consistently central issue. The article argues that this interpretation relies too heavily on evidence from a minority of elections—especially the famous ‘khaki’ struggle of 1900—and that in the majority of campaigns in this period, imperialism was relatively unimportant as an election issue, including in the Unionist landslide of 1895. The second argument questions historians’ preoccupation with the ‘contested’ nature of discourses of imperialism and patriotism at elections, and contends that—insofar as the empire was an important campaign issue at all—the Conservatives were considerably more likely to champion it and connect it to politically charged and emotive appeals than were their Liberal opponents. Finally, the article maintains that the languages of imperialism and patriotism have often been unhelpfully conflated by historians, and argues that they could become politically synonymous only in the very specific circumstance of a ‘khaki’ election. In other contests, they could diverge, as is demonstrated by a case study of the campaign of 1906 when patriotism was reclaimed by the Liberals from a domestic, rather than imperial platform.     

The power of precision air strikes and social media feeds in the 2012 Israel–Hamas conflict: ‘targeting transparency’

This article analyses the evolving uses of social media during wartime through the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) Spokesperson Facebook and Twitter accounts. The conflict between Israel and Hamas-affiliated groups in November 2012 has generated interesting data about social media use by a sovereign power in wartime and the resultant networked discourse. Facebook data is examined for effective patterns of dissemination through both content analysis and discourse analysis. Twitter data is explored through connected concept analysis to map the construction of meaning in social media texts shared by the IDF. The systematic examination of this social media data allows the authors’ analysis to comment on the evolving modes, methods and expectations for state public diplomacy, propaganda and transparency during wartime.     

Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater: Australia’s New Policy on Treaty-Based Investor-State Arbitration and its Impact in Asia

Abstract

Treaties allowing investors to initiate arbitration claims directly against host states for illegally interfering with cross-border investments are becoming increasingly common in Asia, but Australia announced in 2011 that it will no longer include such protections in future treaties. The backdrop to this decision includes keen interest from Asia in foreign direct investment (FDI) into Australia’s resources sector, meaning that potential investors may not be significantly deterred by a lack of arbitration provisions in future treaties. This article argues, however, that Australia’s policy shift risks undermining the entire investor-state arbitration (ISA) system, with the earliest impact being felt by major pending treaty negotiations by Australia with Japan, China and Korea (respectively); and that the shift may significantly reduce FDI flows or have other adverse effects. The article criticises the cost-benefit analysis of ISA protections in one pivotal study conducted in 2010 by an Australian Government think-tank, arguing that this assessment is insufficiently nuanced. Instead, the article presents a justification for more tailored and moderate changes to ISA provisions in future treaties. Its tentative interest-group analysis suggests, however, that there may be surprisingly few public or private constituencies that would prefer such moderate reforms, and that most may well prefer the more extreme position recently adopted by Australia, despite the damage that will be done to the ISA system as a whole. The article also argues that Australia’s policy shift and think-tank analysis may make Asian countries more cautious about ISA, especially those (like the Philippines and Vietnam) which have traditionally been more cautious about this dispute resolution system.     

Who goes there? Accounting for gender in the urge to explore abandoned military bunkers

This article enquires into the motivations of ‘bunkerologists’ – a term coined for analytic convenience by the author to describe those who research, explore and survey twentieth century military bunkers as a hobby. Specifically, it considers the gendered dimension of this predominantly male pastime. In doing so, the article examines the role of a range of cultural influences, including signification of militarism, inter-generational initiation and remembrance around themes of defence and labour, human-technology relations, conquest, and hermitic escapism. These factors all appear to have roles to play in disposing individuals towards participation in this practice. The analysis finds the source of many of these influences within a particular mode of English male socialisation, and masculinities related to it, prevalent in the late twentieth century. The analysis presented is also grounded in an auto-ethnographic exploration of the biographical roots of the author's own choice of this research topic and the effect of the research upon him and his family. Whilst the subject matter of the study may be regarded as somewhat arcane, the analysis of the role of socialisation within routes to participation in this predominantly masculine pastime may help to illuminate the motivational frameworks of other rarely studied, and seemingly introverted, ‘male’ hobbies such as train spotting, stamp collecting and sport fishing (angling).     

Reimagining GIScience for relational spaces

A mismatch between largely absolute Newtonian models of space in GIScience and the relational spaces of critical human geography has contributed to mutual disinterest between the fields. Critical GIS has offered an intellectual critique of GIScience without substantially altering how particular key geographical concepts are expressed in data structures. Although keystone ideas in GIScience such as Tobler's “First Law” and the modifiable areal unit problem speak to enduring concerns of human geography, they have drawn little interest from that field. Here, we suggest one way to reformulate the computational approach to the region for relational space, so that regions emerge not through proximity in an absolute space or similarities in intensive properties, but according to their similarities in relations. We show how this might operate theoretically and empirically, working through three illustrative examples. Our approach gestures toward reformulating key terms in GIScience like distance, proximity, networks, and spatial building blocks such as the polygon. Re‐engaging the challenges of representing geographical concepts computationally can yield new kinds of GIS and GIScience resonant with theoretical ideas in human geography, and also lead to critical human geographic practices less antagonistic to computation.     

George Woodcock and the Doukhobors: peasant radicalism,anarchism, and the Canadian state

For the British-Canadian writer and intellectual George Woodcock, the Doukhobors – a persecuted radical Christian sect, many members of which emigrated from Russia to Canada at the turn of the twentieth century – were a continual source of fascination. A cause célèbre for a host of nineteenth-century thinkers, including Leo Tolstoy and Peter Kropotkin, the Doukhobors were frequently portrayed as the exemplars of the viewer’s particular ideological beliefs. The present article examines Woodcock’s shifting interpretation of the Doukhobors, mapped onto the development of an intellectual career that saw him emerge as a leading anarchist thinker, and his broader transition from a British writer to a Canadian public intellectual. Where once he saw the Doukhobors representing anarchism in action, as his politics matured his view of the sect became more complex. Rather than living anarchists, he came to see the Doukhobors’ experience as a powerful reminder of the forces of assimilation at work in modern democracies that threatened the liberties of dissenters. Reflecting Woodcock’s revised anarchist politics, the Doukhobors’ story now became a key component of an intellectual vision that cast a probing light on Canadian history and Canadian cultural politics.     

地理的视角:中国历史地理研究与教学的前沿

2011年2月19日到20日,在美国中南部的阿肯色州州会小石城举行了"中国历史的地理视角国际学术研讨会",藉以推广地理学在传统汉学界的影响。本次会议由阿肯色州大学小石城分校(University of Arkansas,Little Rock)组织,得到了中国大陆、中国台湾、英国、德国、白俄罗斯与美国等各地学者的高度重视。19日全天开会,总共提交12篇论文,论点创新,时地跨越很广,从古代到当代,从华西北到华东南,收获相当丰富。主要演讲者是伊利诺斯州大学芝加哥分校(University of Illinois,Chicago)的何特勒(Laura Hostetler)和哈佛大学(Harvard University)的包弼德(Peter Bol)。20日上午包弼德举行颇有启示的讲座,即关于"中国历史地理信息系统"的研究与教学实用。