The Legitimacy of Nostalgia

In Fractured Republic, Yuval Levin criticizes nostalgia as obstacle to conservative reforms. This essay defends nostalgia as a indispensable element of politics. Rather than dismissing nostalgia, we should attempt use it, guided by the virtue of prudence. Shakespeare, Tocqueville, Mencken, and Dos Passos provide models of this prudent nostalgia.     

Apparatus of capture: Fiscal state formation in the republic of Georgia

How did the rate of central government tax revenue more than triple in the (post-Soviet) Republic of Georgia over 2004–2007? This paper investigates fiscal state formation in Georgia using ethnographic fieldwork to document how the reformist government brought to power by the 2003 “Rose Revolution” impelled tax compliance using a set of tactics of anti-corruption, anti-tax evasion, individual accountability, and compromising information collected through extra-legal surveillance. The use of ethnographic methods to examine the recent and rapid process of state formation in Georgia is a departure from much of the extant literature on state formation, which is dominated by historical scholarship that examines relatively long-term processes of political and economic change culminating in the present state. In contrast, the approach taken here uses the Deleuzian concept of assemblage to examine how the state is a process of continuous formation. The fast emergence of a historically unprecedented scale of tax compliance in Georgia was the result of the application of particular techniques of government that assembled micro-subjective dispositions into a macro-institutional process of revenue capture.     

Investigating the processes necessary for satisfactory freeze-drying of waterlogged archaeological wood

Preliminary studies into methods for improving and safeguarding the preservation of waterlogged archaeological wooden artefacts are presented. Mannitol, sorbitol and trehalose have been tested as replacements for polyethylene glycol (PEG) as a treatment prior to freeze-drying of wooden archaeological objects. The highest anti-shrink efficiency achieved in this short experiment was (70 ± 15) % using a 20% weight per volume solution of sorbitol after soaking for one week. The collapse or eutectic temperature of each solution used was determined using a freeze-drying microscope. Importantly, it was noted that the collapse temperature of the solutions was reduced by several degrees after use for treatment of the wood samples for one month. A freeze-drying microscope with a cold light source has been used to observe the real-time freeze-drying behaviour of various treatments inside a thin section of wood, confirming that this novel technique is indeed possible and useful. Lastly, the effects of magnesium phytate as an iron chelator have been studied. It was found that the treatment lowers the collapse temperature of a PEG 600/2000 solution by roughly 3 °C meaning that objects must be freeze-dried at a correspondingly lower temperature. Iron K-edge X-ray absorption near-edge spectroscopy analysis showed that the treatment extracted approximately half of the iron(III) ions present in the timbers.     

Security in international society: A comment on Alex J. Bellamy and Matt McDonald

Although English School (ES) theorists have played a significant and explicit role in security studies, Bellamy and McDonald claim that this has not been the case. However, they fail to show how they have arrived at their conclusion. Moreover, Bellamy and McDonald conflate solidarism with cosmopolitanism, with the result that they wrongly claim that some theorists are ‘weak’ while others are ‘deep’ solidarists. In addition, their attempt to view human security as a reflection of solidarist trends in the ES is welcome, but their method risks undermining the ES. I propose that an ES perspective on security needs to incorporate elements from three streams of thought: pluralism, solidarism and cosmopolitanism. I contend that security ought to be viewed as people centred and that it should be embedded within international society's norms, rules and institutions.