Argentine territorial nationalism revisited: The Malvinas/Falklands dispute and geographies of everyday nationalism

This paper is concerned with expressions of Argentine territorial nationalism with a specific focus on the Malvinas/Falklands dispute. Billig’s (1995) notion of banal nationalism has been widely applied as a means to understanding the ways in which national identities are learnt and reproduced by the populace, through a multitude of ‘mundane’ representations. More recently Billig’s (1995) thesis has been critiqued (Jones & Merriman, 2009) for its rigidity and inability to take account of the different ways these nationalisms are produced and received (Müller, 2008) within and outside of the nation-state. We build on these interventions by arguing that research into territorial nationalism should not ignore the wider temporal, spatial, political and everyday contexts in which such discourses emerge and are consumed. To illustrate this diversity we contend that territorial nationalism and, more specifically, the attention placed on the Malvinas dispute by the Argentine government has varied in its intensity, depending on wider political events and agendas in the South West Atlantic and Latin American regions. Secondly, through the use of interview extracts from a pilot study conducted with 20 young people in Buenos Aires, we suggest that Argentine territorial nationalism is not received uniformly across the nation-state and, rather, should be explored in its everyday contexts. These contexts take into consideration things like respondent’s geographical location, personal/familial relationships and generation, amongst other variables, in order to more sensitively appreciate Argentine territorial nationalism’s multifarious reception.     

Obsidian sources and distribution systems in Island Southeast Asia: new results and implications from geochemical research using LA-ICPMS

This paper discusses new evidence of long-distance interaction networks in Island Southeast Asia obtained from geochemical analyses using SEM-EDXA and LA-ICPMS of 101 obsidian samples from 25 locations including seven obsidian sources and 19 archaeological sites. Given that there are obsidian sources distributed throughout much of Island Southeast Asia, the potential for obsidian studies to provide greater understanding of patterns of mobility and exchange in the Pre-Neolithic and Neolithic periods would seem to be considerable. This potential, however, remains largely unrealised as obsidian sourcing has hitherto only been carried out intermittently in Island Southeast Asia using PIXE-PIGME, XRF and other methods.     

A Fall from Grace? National Unity and the Search for Naval Power and Colonial Possessions 1848--1884

Traditionally, German naval and colonial agitation has beendiscussed as a late nineteenth-century development that signaledthe cooption of many German liberals to a conservative policyof imperialism. This has been posited by many historians asantithetical to the true nature and objectives of politicalliberalism. Those few commentators that have noted the navaland colonial agitation of liberals during the early and mid-nineteenthcentury have argued that there was a period in which these imperialistpressures were subdued, when their end was heralded by the failureof the nationalist movements of 1848/49 to consolidate theirnation-building project. Through an investigation of the FrankfurtNational Assembly and the National Association of the 1860sit becomes apparent, however, that German liberal imperialismdid not represent the distasteful invention of a somehow corruptedliberalism of the 1880s, nor did it cease to be a leitmotivwithin liberal circles after 1849. Rather, German liberals,enamoured with the model of Britain as a global trading powerand concerned with the economic repercussions of undirectedemigration, had continuously argued for a German imperialistcapacity throughout the nineteenth century as an integral partof any attempt to build a trading nation that could competeinternationally.     

The Search for the 1871 Whaling Fleet of the Western Arctic: writing the final chapter

During 2015, the NOAA Office of National Marine Sanctuaries led a systematic seabed mapping survey along the Arctic coast of Alaska in search of whaling ships abandoned in 1871. The purpose of the expedition was to determine if wreckage from these abandoned ships was still present in the survey area, and, if so, to assess and document its location, status and condition. The project mapped approximately 50 km² of seabed using sidescan sonar and magnetometry and identified six sites that contained wreckage from at least two whaling ships. Magnetometry data also suggested that additional wreckage may be buried in the seabed.     

Transformation and Specialization in London and its Topography

This article puts John Tallis’s London Street Views (1838–40) into conversation with some of the major topographical projects that preceded them. By examining how London was represented in works including Richard Horwood’s PLAN of the Cities of LONDON and WESTMINSTER the Borough of SOUTHWARK, and PARTS adjoining Shewing every HOUSE (1792–9), Richard Phillips’s Modern London (1804) and Rudolph Ackermann’s Microcosm of London (1808–10), it considers the extent to which the form, content, price and organizing principles of the Street Views iterated on prior traditions while drawing out aspects of Tallis’s work that should be read as representing innovative new directions. The Street Views were more specialized and more explicitly focused on business than the relatively genteel works of the earlier nineteenth century, but topography had long been a commercial prospect, often publisher-led rather than author-driven. As the century progressed, changes in the city and in technologies of representation modified the ways in which visions of London were assembled and sold, allowing for significant expansions in their potential audiences. However, there were also considerable continuities in what was depicted, in the reliance on part-publication and in the areas that were seen as being crucial to the experience of the metropolis. This article traces these continuities and discontinuities qualitatively, quantitatively and spatially.     

The effect of economic sanctions on the severity of genocides or politicides

This study examines the effect of economic sanctions on the severity of ongoing instances of genocide or politicide. Research suggests that sanctions exacerbate human rights conditions, yet influential policymakers, human rights advocates and some scholars continue to call for economic sanctions to mitigate ongoing atrocities. Ordered logit analyses of genocides and politicides from 1976 to 2008 reveal that sanctions neither aggravate atrocities, as some of the academic literature expects, nor alleviate them, as assumed by many policymakers and advocates (and some researchers). These findings hold regardless of whether they are measured as the number or presence of sanctions, cost, level of comprehensiveness, duration or whether imposed or administered by an international organization. Threats of sanctions also have no effect on atrocity severity, either on their own or combined with other policy options.     

Political Theology,Democracy, and the Exception in the Egyptian Revolution

As the sixth anniversary of the 2011 protests in Tahrir Square passes, those uprisings and the events that followed continue pose important challenges not only for students of Middle Eastern and North African politics, but also for students of political theory and political theology. While scholars debate the extent to which the “Arab Spring” has amounted to a truly revolutionary turn of events, it is commonly accepted that the protests that swept the region were exceptional in their unanticipated and profound disruption of ordinary affairs. Under the influence of Carl Schmitt's theory of sovereignty, “the exception” has become a key figure in contemporary reflections on political theology, but attention to events in Egypt suggests that the familiar figure of the exception has not yet been mined for all of its implications for democratic practice. Slipping below grand articulations of the exception as a moment of sovereign decision, or as the suspension of the law, this essay turns its attention to the minor, everyday, background patterns of exceptionality that accompany the emergence of democratic practices outside the purview of the sovereign state. I argue that there is an intimate connection between the forms of exceptionality produced by longstanding practices of Egyptian secularism, the forms of exceptionality peculiar to the 2011 uprisings and their aftermath, and the forms of exceptionality that both make and unmake democratic practices. My argument has three parts: first Egyptian secularism is a process that manages and transforms authorized forms of Islamic practice, while at the same time producing exceptional formations, of which the Muslim Brotherhood is a key example; second that revolutionary politics can be understood as a matter of opening and sustaining the kind of exceptional circumstances that attended the 2011 uprisings, and that this can be usefully framed as an open-ended process of conversion; third that democratic practice requires courting both kinds of exception, despite their challenges, ambivalences, and potential dangers.     

Intertidal Foraging on Atolls: Prehistoric Forager Decision-Making at Ebon Atoll,Marshall Islands

Prehistoric molluscan assemblages provide insights into long-term patterns of human landscape use, environmental change, and human impacts to marine resources. The investigation of forager decision-making regarding the selection of certain mollusc taxa and/or the exploitation of particular habitats is fundamental to understanding human-environment interactions in the past, and is relevant for understanding trajectories of human impacts to the intertidal zone in coastal settings. We document variability in the collection of molluscs at two archaeological sites on Ebon Atoll, Republic of the Marshall Islands: one on a windward, intermittently occupied islet, and the other on a permanently inhabited leeward islet. All molluscan taxa were assigned to a range of habitats within a hierarchical classification scheme for intertidal marine environments. The relative abundance of taxa from each habitat was used as a proxy for forager decision-making. We report a generalized, non-selective, foraging strategy focused on gastropod taxa from the high intertidal and supratidal. These results indicate that rather than focusing intensively on select taxa, intertidal foragers targeted particular marine habitats, taking advantage of the predictable behaviors of the molluscs that inhabit them.