Offshoreness, Globalization and Sovereignty: A Postmodern Geo-Political Economy?

Processes of globalization rework sovereignty as the ordering principle of the international political economy, creating new geographies of power. Such a reworking is most apparent offshore, a site where sovereignty is unbundled. The principle of sovereignty is maintained in the offshore financial centres' legal sovereignty but relinquished in terms of their fiscal powers. This unbundling articulates the state system and the capitalist economy. Such an unbundling is possible because sovereignty is based upon property rights. Changes in the practices and understandings of property rights change the meaning of sovereignty, altering the principle of differentiation which shapes the international political economy. In this way, the paradoxical marginality and centrality of offshoreness to the dynamics of the international political economy is explained.     

Assessing Conservative Populism: A New Double Movement or Neoliberal Populism?

This article examines the populist turn through the lens of changing social policy by relating this to the question of whether or not conservative and far-right populism represent a break from, or a new mutation of, neoliberalism. Does this shift represent a conservative Polanyian double movement, or a mutation and extension of neoliberalism? This question is examined through a brief account of neoliberalism's failures, both before and after 2008, and how conservative populism challenged it, particularly around the question of liberal social policy. In then defining and discussing neoliberalism, the article shows how conservative populism in some respects challenges it, through its focus on re-politicization in the face of technocratic and economistic de-politicization and disenchantment. But the article then demonstrates important similarities and continuities in both neoliberal theory and populist practice.     

Changes in starch grain morphologies from cooking

One of the three main plant microfossils, starch grains are increasingly used as markers of diet, plant domestication, tool use and site organization, because their morphology and features provide a means to identify the plant that produced them. However, starch grains are susceptible to damage when they are exposed to heat in the presence of water, as in cooking. We documented the changes that occur in the starch grains of 10 domesticated plant species due to exposure to different cooking methods, in order to better understand how cooking alters the appearance of the grains, and if these cooking methods might be identifiable in the archaeological record. Our results show that some cooking methods produce unique, identifiable damage on some types of plant starches, but generally each plant species reacts uniquely to cooking. In order to record the changes for each plant species, we have created a database, available at (http://www.osresearch.net/∼hollyf/starchdb/index.cgi), to which registered users can add their own images of cooked starch grains.