Greetings from the cybercaliphate: some notes on homeland insecurity

One of the paradoxical effects of the 7 July bombings in London was to expose the ambivalence in the British government's attempt to wage war on terror by forcefully prosecuting war against those who resort to jihad abroad, actively participating in coalitions of the willing whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, while affording some of Islamism's key ideologists and strategists a high degree of latitude in the United Kingdom itself. This indicates a number of contradictions in official policy that simultaneously recognizes the globalized threat from violent Islamic militancy while, under the rubric of multiculturalism, tolerating those very strains of Islamist radicalism, some of which draw upon the interdependent and transnational character of conflict, to render the UK vulnerable to those very same violent forces. Consequently, the British authorities displayed a studied indifference towards this developing transnational phenomenon both during the 1990s and in some respects even after the London bombings. To explore the curious character of the government's response to the Islamist threat requires the examination of the emergence of this radical ideological understanding and what it entails as a reaction to modernization and secularism in both thought and practice. The analysis explores how government policies often facilitated the non-negotiable identity politics of those promoting a pure, authentic and regenerated Islamic order both in the UK and abroad. This reflected a profound misunderstanding of the growing source and appeal of radical Islam that can be interpreted as a consequence of the slow-motion collision between modernity in its recent globalized form and an Islamic social character, which renders standard western modernization theory, and indeed, the notion of a 'social science' itself, deeply questionable.     

The second generation of human security: lessons from the UN and EU experience

The concept of human security, while much contested in both academic and policy debates, and highly fragmented across different meanings and forms of implementation, offers a potential locus around which global security discourse might converge, particularly in light of current shifts in US security thinking. However, key pioneers of human security, such as the United Nations and Canada, appear to be losing their enthusiasm for the concept, just at the moment when others such as the European Union, are advancing a human security agenda. This article examines the divergence of human security narratives between the UN and the EU. It argues that the UN's use of the concept ran aground owing to a triple problematic of lack of clarity, confusion between previously distinct policy streams on human rights and human development and conceptual overstretch. After assessing the EU experience with the concept to date, the article argues that future use of human security will require greater focus on how it deepens ideas of individual security, rather than treating it as an agenda for broadening security. As well as a need to project clarity on the conceptual definition of human security, there is also a need to associate human security with greater clarity of intent. If successful, this would contribute to establishing second generation human security as a new policy paradigm.     

ARAMAIC BASALT STATUES FROM TELL HALAF,SYRIA: LOCATING THE ANCIENT QUARRIES

Tell Halaf is the locality of the ancient Aramaic city of Guzāna (c. 1000–800 bc ) in Syria. The statues of Tell Halaf were made from monolithic basalt blocks, comprising massive as well as amygdaloidal types. However, the exact location of the original quarries was as yet unknown. Reconnaissance mapping and sampling concentrated on the four basaltic centres in the vicinity of Tell Halaf, covering both south‐eastern Turkey and north‐eastern Syria. In addition, basaltic artefacts from the two archaeological sites of Tell Beydar (c. 2700–2300 bc ) and Djebelet el Beda (c. 2600–2350 bc ) were investigated. All basalt samples were analysed for their bulk rock major and trace element compositions by X‐ray fluorescence, ICP–MS analysis and the mineral chemistry of individual minerals by combined electron microprobe analysis and laser‐ablation ICP–MS. The data show that basalt works of art from all three archaeological sites were derived from the Syrian basalt plateau of Ard esh‐Sheikh, approximately 57 km south of Tell Halaf. Accordingly, this basalt quarry was actively exploited over a considerable time span of c. 1900 years. This study demonstrates that petrographic and geochemical investigations of basalt, combined with electron microprobe and laser‐ablation ICP–MS analysis of minerals, are powerful tools to discriminate between possible sources of raw materials, especially if isotopic data yield unsatisfying results.     

Gambling,Resource Distribution,and Racial Economy: An Examination of Poker Machine Expenditure in Three Remote Australian Towns

Our aim in this paper is to examine the ways in which electronic gaming machines (EGMs) redistribute resources to and from three remote towns in the Northern Territory (NT), namely Katherine, Tennant Creek and Nhulunbuy. We describe EGM expenditure levels in each town at the level of the individual venue, examine patterns of socioeconomic status within each town, explore the ways in which EGM markets are racialised through venue gate‐keeping practices and spatially‐based alcohol regulations, and examine the effects of resource redistribution mechanisms designed to return a proportion of EGM profits to host communities. The ability of venues to draw resources from extremely disadvantaged groups from the remote periphery is of central concern when attempting to assess the societal consequences of gambling in remote towns, both in terms of individual harm and the adequacy of resource redistribution. Existing mechanisms for resource redistribution are both selective and relatively meagre, pointing to a political and racial economy of EGM gambling that transfers resources from remote towns to sites of centralised ‘white’ power. We conclude that political economy in the context of remote NT towns may not be understood outside a consideration of racial economy and the way that constructed notions of race operate to legitimate existing processes of economic exploitation and resource redistribution.