‘One Belt,One Road’ and China’s emerging Afghanistan dilemma

This article argues that China’s approach to Afghanistan since the end of the Cold War has been shaped by the desire both for security in Xinjiang and for geopolitical advantage in Central Asia. While Beijing’s Xinjiang calculus was ascendant from 1991 to 2001, since 2001 a broader geopolitical calculus has emerged. This latter factor has been encapsulated in President Xi Jinping’s ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy, which, at its core, is an outgrowth of Beijing’s decades-long agenda to integrate Xinjiang and utilise this region’s unique geopolitical position to facilitate a China-centric Eurasian geo-economic system. While China’s Xinjiang calculus determines that it shares an interest with the USA in combating radical Islamism in Afghanistan (and Central Asia more broadly), the geopolitical calculus of the ‘One Belt, One Road’ strategy points to a fundamental incompatibility between US and Chinese interests.     

The geochronological potential of isoleucine epimerisation in cassowary and megapode eggshells from archaeological sites

Our research demonstrates that the extent of isoleucine epimerisation (A/I) in fragments of avian eggshells provides geochronological information in archaeological contexts. In the archaeological sequence of Hay Cave, northern Queensland, Australia, there is an excellent correspondence between the A/I values of Australian brush-turkey (Alectura lathami) eggshells (n = 99) and independent geochronological control (n = 16 radiocarbon ages including 4 on eggshell calcite). The A/I values identify three phases of deposition during the Holocene at Hay Cave. In contrast to the Alectura eggshell A/I values, a poor correspondence was observed between the A/I values of cassowary (Casuarius) eggshells from Toé (n = 35) and Kria caves (n = 23) (Ayamaru Plateau, Papua) and the depths from which the specimens were recovered in these stratified sequences. Given coherent archaeofauna trends and radiocarbon chronologies (n = 8 and 2 eggshell calcite radiocarbon ages at Toé and Kria, respectively) with respect to depth, the variable A/I values are not explicable in terms of mixing. Rather, the variability is most likely due to exposure of the eggshells to the high temperatures of campfires. Despite the variability, eggshells with relatively low A/I values amongst specimens recovered from similar depths (and therefore presumably least influenced by high temperatures) exhibit a gradual increase in A/I with respect to depth, as expected in a stratified deposit. From this observation it is suggested that the identification of heated eggshells will increase confidence in geochronological information provided by A/I. These studies illustrate the complications that arise from campfire-induced acceleration of amino acid racemisation and emphasise that although this phenomenon is common, it is not universally encountered in archaeological contexts.     

Lost and Found: the Woman Writer in the Eighteenth Century

Jennifer Summit, Lost Property: the Woman Writer and English Literary History, 1380–1589 Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn's Afterlife Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750’1810 Elizabeth Eger, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (eds), Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700’1830     

In what sense ‘spaces of neoliberalism’? The new localism,the new politics of scale,and town twinning

This paper draws on a study of town twinning in Britain since 1945 to engage with narratives of ‘the new localism’ and ‘the new politics of scale’. It argues that town twinning is often used in technical assistance programmes such as the UK Government's Know How Fund and various schemes of the Commonwealth Local Government Forum. ‘Fast policy’ is a concept that can be usefully applied to these programmes and the broader field of interurban networking, urban policy mobility, and policy transfer. Town twinning plays an active yet overlooked role in fast policy. The paper also argues that town twinning is part of a longer history of bottom-up localism that includes the political arguments of John Stuart Mill, at least two moments of twentieth-century municipal internationalism, the municipal foreign policy movement of the 1980s, and the community development movement of the last three decades. This longer history suggests sources of localism other than statecraft, and problematises the conceptualisation of power and periodisation of history found in regulation theories of devolution.