War and peace? An agenda for peace research and practice in geography

In 1885, Kropotkin called for geography to be ‘a means of dissipating [hostile] prejudices’ between nations that make conflicts more likely, and ‘creating other feelings more worthy of humanity’. As a body of scholars, we have risen far more ably to the negative task of ‘dissipating’ than to the positive charge of ‘creating’: Geography is better at researching war than peace. To redress that imbalance, we need both to conceptualise more clearly what we mean by peace, and make a commitment to researching and practising it. These arguments are made with reference to the broader literature and research along the Danish/German, Israeli/Palestinian and Kyrgyz/Uzbek interfaces.     

Poromoi Tamu and the Case of the Drowning Village: History, Lost Places and the Stories We Tell

Archaeological excavations at an ancestral village site within rainforest in Papua New Guinea has revealed buried cultural evidence that can be explained in a number of ways. While interpretations based on Western archaeological methods suggest regional landscape dynamics informed by geomorphological processes, Indigenous Rumu oral traditions suggest an interpretation of the site’s stratigraphy based on the workings of spiritual forces. The role of story-telling and new information in site interpretation and understanding is explored in light of these different yet complementary accounts.     

Towards a geography of tolerance: Post-politics and political forms of toleration

This paper argues for a closer inspection of how tolerance and politics interact. Within geography and beyond there is rising concern about post-political situations, whereby potential disagreements are foreclosed and situated beyond the remit of political debate. This is conceptualised as a process of de-politicisation that operates ‘much more effectively’ than alternative ways in which politics can be and has been disavowed (?i?ek, 1999: 198). While ?i?ek associates liberal tolerance with the post-political condition, however, theories of tolerance are at odds over whether it represents an everyday enactment of the political. Although some authors have indeed associated tolerance with a depoliticising tendency (Brown, 2006), others insist that certain types of tolerance are capable of nurturing simultaneous recognition and disagreement, which directly contradicts the conditions of post-politics (Forst, 2003). We therefore ask, contra ?i?ek, whether certain forms of tolerance can be an antidote to the post-political practice of foreclosing politics, and offer a set of considerations pertinent to the geographical analysis of this issue.     

Introduction

In November 2004, France carried out one of the biggest evacuation operations of its expatriates since the Algerian War of 1954–1962. Within a couple of days, more than 8000 French citizens were forced to leave Côte d'Ivoire because of violent anti-French protests by the supporters of the Ivorian regime. This article examines the dispute between French repatriates from Côte d'Ivoire and the French government by analysing the arguments put forward by both sides in legal texts and semi-structured interviews conducted in France and Côte d'Ivoire. It is argued that the dispute cannot be explained satisfactorily as a mere instrumentalisation of the current debates in France about Françafrique. On the contrary, the article shows that Françafrique should be understood primarily as an ideological discourse that organises Franco-African relations and makes them resilient to change.     

Embodied cosmopolitanisms: the subjective mobility of migrants working in the global sex industry

Anti-trafficking rhetoric and policies emphasise the extent of exploitation and coercion of female migrant sex workers and obfuscate the shared ambivalences and contradictions experienced by migrant female sex workers and their male agents and partners. By engaging in the global sex industry, both young men and women negotiate their aspiration to cosmopolitan late modern lifestyles against the prevalence of essentialist patriarchal gender values and sexual mores at home. In the process, established gender normativities, legitimising women's subjection to men, are both reproduced and challenged. The evidence informing this article shows that a minority of women are coerced into the sex industry. There is a direct link between the adherence to essentialist gender/sexual roles and the recourse to violence and exploitation, because migrants' prolonged involvement in the sex industry coincides with the adherence to more cosmopolitan gender/sexual roles, translating into less authoritarian and violent discourses and practices. Hegemonic understandings of migrants' involvement in the global sex industry in terms of ‘trafficking’ erase these important dynamics and dimensions, which underpin intricate feelings and experiences of advantage, disadvantage and exploitation. By failing to engage with the meanings that migrants working in the sex industry ascribe to their working and personal lives, the (anti)trafficking logic of ‘humanitarian intervention’ enforces forms of solidarity and support that appeal to the minority and harm the majority of the people they are supposed to ‘rescue’.     

公共考古学的多样性与非调和性

公共考古学英文作,或被译作公众考古学。在英文中,public所指并非汉语中的公众及其群体,而更与国家公共机构密切相关。从这层意思上来说,Public Archaeology译作公共考古学更为贴切。这一概念出现于上个世纪70年代初期的美英等发达国家,最初是与考古学科发展所带来的考古遗存和文化资源管理工作中所出现的紧急情况密切相关的。这种紧急状况表现在两个方面,第一是由学科专业化增强所带来的资料的保护和管理问题,第二是学术界对于大量的具有潜在价值的考古资源面临日益严重的破坏而自身却又缺乏足够的保护能力。就是说,文化遗产的管理和保护是公共考古学关注的焦点,甚至可以说,公共考古学就是文化遗产保护。业内人士对以往那种由专业学者和官员来"替"公众管理文化资源的模式进行反思,首先从理论上厘清了长期以来在文化遗产保护工作中对于公众角色的定位问题。这里的"公众"一词指的是一个多元的、但又不以考古研究为职业的人群。作为国家概念之外的一个具有批评性的实体,他们对文化遗产的参与权与解释权应得到充分尊重;考古学的公共方面多数是与文化、价值甚至经济利益冲突相关的,因此被有的学者称为"不谐调的遗产";考古学归根到底是阐释文化认同及其演变,因此不可避免地与政治脱不开干系。诸如此类,文化遗产管理与保护中所遇到的这类问题,都成了公众考古学研究的对象。经过30多年的发展,公众考古学现已发展成为当今考古学一个非常重要的分支学科。本文作为NickMerriman所主编的《公共考古学》一书的序言,对于公共考古学在西方的产生和发展做了系统论述,有利于我们对国外公共考古学的历史与现状的认识。