The commentariat and discourse failure: language and atrocity in Cool Britannia

Recent terrorist events in the UK, such as the security alerts at British airports in August 2006 and the London bombings of July 2005 gained extensive media and academic analysis. This study contends, however, that much of the commentary demonstrated a wide degree of failure among government agencies, academic and analytic experts and the wider media, about the nature of the threat and continues to distort comprehension of the extant danger. The principal failure, this argument maintains, was, and continues to be, one of an asymmetry of comprehension that mistakes the still relatively limited means of violent jihadist radicals with limited political ends. The misapprehension often stems from the language that surrounds the idea of 'terrorism', which increasingly restricts debate to an intellectually redundant search for the 'root causes' that give rise to the politics of com placency. In recent times this outlook has consistently underestimated the level of the threat to the security of the UK. This article argues that a more realistic appreciation of the current security condition requires abandoning the prevailing view that the domestic threat is best prosecuted as a criminal conspiracy. It demands instead a total strategy to deal with a totalizing threat. The empirical evidence demonstrates the existence of a physical threat, not merely the political fear of threat. The implementation of a coherent set of social policies for confronting the threat at home recognizes that securing state borders and maintaining internal stability are the fi rst tasks of government. Fundamentally, this requires a return to an understanding of the Hobbesian conditions for sovereignty, which, despite the delusions of post-Cold War cosmopolitan multiculturalism, never went away.     

POST‐MEDIEVAL CRUCIBLE PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION: A STUDY OF MATERIALS AND MATERIALITIES*

This paper is concerned with the manufacture and trade of post‐medieval crucibles (14th–19th centuries). The analytical study of crucibles from different contexts in Europe and America employed optical microscopy and SEM–EDS, coupled with archaeological and historical data. We identified two major producers of crucibles, both of them in Central Europe, whose products appear widely distributed internationally. The analytical data allow an explanation of the technical reasons behind their superior reputation, as both crucible types shared comparable material properties, such as thermal, chemical and mechanical stability. Conversely, the two crucible types were radically different in their manufacture and appearance. We argue that, besides technical considerations, sensorial aspects such as texture and colour may have played an important role in the perception and choice of materials.     

Back to the future or forward to the past? Strengthening markets and rules for effective global energy governance

Current public policy debates on energy security are characterized by a singular focus on questions regarding access to resources. This lopsided attention to the geopolitical dimension of energy security is based on the myopic and erroneous presumption that global energy politics is necessarily a zero-sum game in which one country's energy security is another's lack thereof. In fact, debates deflect attention from the real issues that policy-makers should consider in their attempts to foster effective global energy governance—the central role increasingly international energy markets play in balancing demand and supply—and, even more importantly, the significance of the 'rules of the game' that structure these markets. This article makes a first attempt to apply a broader analytical lens by pointing out and analyzing the important role rules play in determining outcomes in international oil and gas markets; by examining how current trends are affecting the existing 'rules of the game'; and by highlighting consequences for public policy.     

The evolving quality of trade between Canada and the United States

This article examines the quality level of trade between Canada and the United States, 1979–2003, to investigate the relevance of staples theory for Canada. After disentangling the quality levels of trade, it is found that the pattern of quality-level trade changed significantly around the time free trade was established between Canada and the United States. Before free trade, Canada was moving into the lower end of quality, but after the establishment of free trade, Canada is now moving into the higher end of quality trade with the United States. This observation potentially means that Canada is moving out of the staples trap.     

Security and democracy: the ASEAN charter and the dilemmas of regionalism in South‐East Asia

In November 2007, the heads of the ten member governments of the Association of South‐East Asian Nations (ASEAN) signed a charter that will, once ratified, give the association a legal personality. The charter, significantly, requires more of its members than a reassertion of the traditional ASEAN norm of non‐interference and the practice of consensus. The charter lists a number of novel goals among the organization's purposes: ‘to strengthen democracy, enhance good governance and the rule of law, and to promote and protect human rights and fundamental freedoms.’ In view of the wide economic and political disparities between the member states of ASEAN, this article examines whether strengthening democracy would in fact facilitate ASEAN's goal of becoming an integrated political, economic and security community. Rather than enhancing an integrated community, democratization would arguably create a faultline between the more politically mature and economically developed states and a northern tier of less developed, authoritarian single‐party dominant regimes in South‐East Asia. Moreover, given China's emerging political and economic importance to the region, such a strategy would, as if by an invisible hand, draw the more authoritarian ASEAN states into China's less than democratic embrace. This article concludes that rather than strengthening democracy, ASEAN's charter needs urgently to reinforce practices of rule governance and mechanisms of market integration to enhance both ASEAN's economic profile as well as the region's autonomy.     

The year of the insurgents: the 2008 US presidential campaign

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush's unpopularity at home and abroad and the looming threat of recession would have made a gripping drama of the 2008 presidential election campaign even without the ground‐breaking emergence of the first credible black and female candidates for the White House. But the defeat of the Democratic establishment's front‐runner, Hillary Clinton, by a little‐known freshman Senator of mixed ancestry suggested that this was to be the year of the insurgent, just as the Republicans rallied to the least loyal and most contentious of their candidates, the maverick Senator John McCain. The extraordinarily attractive and articulate Senator Barack Obama re‐wrote the rule book on winning primaries and caucuses with the help of Silicon Valley and an unprecedented turnout among black and young voters, before veering sharply to the centre once the nomination was secured. Orthodoxy returned at the conventions, with Obama picking a safe centrist as running mate and McCain choosing a Christian conservative, although generating great excitement by nominating a woman and undermining the usual democrat advantage among female voters. And for all the talk of a ‘new politics’, the year of the insurgents came down at the end, as US elections usually do, to a handful of swing states and the money and organization to win them.     

The Determinants of Regional Sourcing by Multinational Manufacturing Firms: Evidence from Yorkshire and Humberside,UK

An examination of the factors influencing the extent of regional sourcing by multinational manufacturing firms using data collected by interview from 50 foreign- and UK-owned plants in Yorkshire and Humberside. The evidence shows that higher levels of regional sourcing are observed where certain demand characteristics coincide with strengths in the supply potential of the region. A 'corporate filter' reduces regional sourcing. There were no differences in regional sourcing between foreign- and UK-owned multinationals. The findings identify barriers to policy aspirations of increased regional sourcing and emphasize that any policy initiatives should target the plants of domestic, as well as foreign, multinational enterprises (MNE).