The futures past of the Women,Peace and Security agenda

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has developed at the United Nations over the course of the past 15 years, and there have been critical engagements with it for nearly as long. In this article, we first take stock of the operationalization of the WPS agenda, reviewing its implementation across a number of sectors. In the second section, we expose the tensions that have marked the WPS agenda from the start. With others, we argue that there has been a narrowing of the agenda's original scope, reducing it to the traditional politics of security rather than reimagining what security means. We highlight this reduction primarily through an analysis of the tension between the ‘participation’ and ‘protection’ pillars of the agenda. Further, we argue that the WPS agenda faces a current challenge in terms of the actors entrusted with it. Although in some ways involving civil society, the consolidations and implementation of WPS principles at the national and international levels have become increasingly state‐centric. Third, we imagine some possible futures of the agenda, from a trajectory characterized by increasing marginalization or even irrelevance, to new avenues like the emergent, albeit tentative, ‘Men, Peace and Security’ agenda. We close with an argument for a revival of the WPS agenda beyond a fixation on states, beyond a narrow heteronormative or essentialist focus on the ‘Women’ of the WPS resolutions, and moving towards the radical reimagining of security as peace that inspired the original architects of these important resolutions.     

La dynamique spatiale des marchés locaux de l'emploi au sein du champ métropolitain de Québec, 1981–2001

Spatial Dynamics of Local Labour Markets in the Québec City Metropolitan Field, 1981–2001
This research analyzes the spatial dynamics (from 1981 to 2001) of local labour markets at an infra-regional scale, namely the Québec metropolitan field, with particular emphasis on interactions between the metropolitan region and its hinterland. It seeks to better understand the factors underlying this evolution. Centrographic analyses were performed to characterize the evolution of the spatial configuration of local labour markets (displacement of gravity centre, shape change, evolution of dispersion indices and of workforce preferential distribution axes). Between 1981 and 2001, almost all employment poles experienced an increase in the mean-distance tied to their recruitment area, that being particularly true for peri-metropolitan poles which employ an increasing part of their workforce inside the metropolitan labour basin, where a more qualified and diversified labour force is available; thus, giving rise to significant reverse commuting. In addition to the influence of distance to metropolitan area, a multiple regression model shows that factors such as manufacturing specialization and employment growth within job centres also play a crucial role in the spatial dynamics of local labour markets in the Québec City metropolitan field.     

Universal vision or bounded rationality?

William Walker's article takes a strongly universalist view of the requirements of nuclear order. It finds recent American administrations deliberately unwilling to maintain international confidence in the necessary collective narrative of eventual universal nuclear disarmament, so causing a crisis of confidence in the Non Proliferation Treaty regime. This commentary examines how far realistically different recent US policies and declarations could have avoided such problems, given certain underlying realities and dynamics surrounding the management of nuclear weapons. It also questions how indispensable abstract universalism will be in containing future nuclear proliferation.     

Aires de marché et choix des destinations de consommation pour les achats réalisés au cours de la semaine – Le cas de la région de Québec

Since the early 1990s, big box stores have profoundly modified the retail structure of Canadian cities. This entails multiple consequences, beyond the mere competition between establishments, for the evolving relationships between diversity of retail forms, consumer behaviour and urban planning. These relationships are explored in the Québec Metropolitan Community, using detailed databases, including establishment directories, mobility surveys and a virtual road network, integrated into a regional GIS. Trade areas of commercial streets, shopping centers and big box stores are delineated and analyzed. Consumers' attributes, such as age, gender, type of household, mode of transport, which putatively influence the probability of patronizing one type of retail cluster compared to another type, are modelled using logistic regression. The influence of the relative location of cluster types on their capacity to attract consumers is also modelled in order to gain some understanding of the competition among and between types. The analysis suggests that, by and large, the growing number of big box stores has more negative consequences for shopping centres than they have for commercial streets. The study also clearly reveals the growing importance of shopping trips in the mobility profile of households and provides a knowledge base useful for urban planning.     

4. THREE DOGMAS (MORE OR LESS) OF EXPLANATION1

What ought to count as an explanation? Such normative questions—what “ought to be” the case?—typically mark the domain that those with a type of philosophical aspiration call their own. Debates in the philosophy of history have for too long been marred by bad advice from just such aspirants. The recurrent suggestion has been that historians have a particular need for a theory of explanation since they seem to have none of their own. But neither the study of the natural sciences nor the study of narrative compels or even makes plausible the view that it will be possible to adduce the norms of explanation, either in history or elsewhere, in advance of identifying theories that explain. I readily concede to Stueber, Carr, and Førland the use of a certain vocabulary when speaking of others. But it is one thing to point to a pervasive habit of explaining behavior in certain terms. It is quite another to document that these explanations have any value as explanations. What apart from habit or philosophical dogma establishes any of their proposals as explanatory? Explanation by invoking the myth of the shared should be replaced by explanations that have empirical content.     

The parable of the footbridge: Creativity and change in the between

In this article, the author suggests that anthropologists use the creative power of ‘the between’, an imaginative space of invention, as one way to heal the wounds of contemporary social life. His model for such practice is the sohanci, the sorcerer among the Songhay people of Niger in West Africa. The sohanci is a liminal figure who is always between the village and the bush, between health and illness, between life and death, a vantage that makes him or her a spiritual guardian, a person who dares to use the power of the between to transform social turbulence into social harmony. Like the sohanci, anthropologists have long experience of being between things, and as such, the author argues, they can use the insights derived from their experiences between things to chart paths that lead us to innovation, invention and a future of greater social harmony and social justice. What could be more important for the future of anthropology? What could be more important for the future of us all?