Trading Spaces: Imagining and Positioning the 'New' South Africa within the Regional and Global Economies

The end of apartheid has precipitated rapid rethinking of South Africa's position in relation to the rest of Africa and the global arena. Whereas a substantial literature already exists on the country's evolving post-apartheid foreign policy, this article offers one of the first critical analyses of its emerging external economic relations. Although clearly the economic giant of the Southern African Development Community, South Africa does not perform as well on all economic and social indicators as many people, especially South Africans, believe. South African businesses' perception of, and experiences in, the rest of Africa are assessed in relation to emerging patterns of trade and investment there. Selected advertisements and associated imagery deployed by firms in support of their strategies are analysed in the context of domestic transformation and the opening of new horizons abroad. South African foreign direct invest-ment (FDI) is increasingly diversified, both sectorally and geographically, although large firms dominate the profile. South African-based transnational corporations are also becoming increasingly influential global players. FDI and development aid inflows to South Africa, and in relation to the rest of Africa, are analysed and their implications explored. Far Eastern investment rose fast as part of a growing global inflow until 1997/8; more recent figures are disappointing. This reflects political and security concerns, as well as vulnerability to rapid flow reversal in the increasingly important portfolio investment market.     

A good international citizen? Australia at the World Summit on Sustainable Development

Australia has often been identified as a middle power in foreign policy terms. This article assesses the worth of the concept in understanding the role of Australia in global environmental governance. Using a case study of the role played at the World Summit on Sustainable Development, it assesses whether Australia conformed to a classic middle power role, building coalitions as a ‘good international citizen’ or whether its role was more like a veto state, preventing positive change. This is done via a reflection of Australia's Summit priorities and an assessment of its impact over the Summit outcomes. The article shows that Australia was able to offer leadership in certain specific areas, but overall domestic policy preferences, a growing mistrust of multilateralism, and a strong defence of the national interest meant that Australia played the role of a veto state, often in coalition with the United States of America.     

Comment on ‘A Bayesian approach to ageing perinatal skeletal material from archaeological sites: implications for the evidence for infanticide in Roman Britain’ by R.L. Gowland and A.T. Chamberlain

In 1993, I published a paper noting that the age distribution of perinatal infants for some Romano-British sites did not conform to a natural mortality pattern but rather showed a pronounced peak at a gestational age corresponding approximately to a full term infant. I interpreted this as suggestive of infanticide, given that the deed is generally carried out immediately after birth. Gowland and Chamberlain have recently published in this journal (J. Archaeol. Sci. 29 (2002) 677) a reconsideration of the problem of Roman infanticide in which they suggest that the peak I observed in the Romano-British perinatal age at death distribution may have been an artefact of the particular ageing technique I used, and they hence call into question the evidence for Roman infanticide. In this comment I argue that their work is seriously flawed and, using a re-analysis of my 1993 data, I demonstrate that the perinatal peak I observed in the Romano-British age distribution is a robust result that supports an interpretation of infanticide.     

Warrior geopolitics: Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and The Kingdom Of Heaven

The “war on terror” and remilitarization of political anxiety in the aftermath of September 11th in the West, is both facilitated and challenged by representations of geopolitical danger and the supposed necessity for warriors to fight wars in distant lands. Ridley Scott's three movies, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and most recently The Kingdom of Heaven explore the morality and identity of warriors. They do so in exotic landscapes and settings that emphasize the confrontation with danger as external and frequently unknowable; political violence is presented as something that has both simple and very complicated geographies. The public discussion of the necessity for warfare and “intervention” in Western states is enmeshed in discourses of moralities, rights and “just war”. The professional Western warrior, whether a special forces operative or garrison soldier in peacekeeping mode, is a key figure of the post September 11th era, physically securing the West, and simultaneously securing its identity as the repository of virtue against barbaric threats to civilization. These themes are key to Ridley Scott's work. Analyzing them in terms of the warrior, empire and the particular geographies of combat adds a specifically military dimension to the critical geopolitical literature on war and representation.     

SPATIAL COMPETITION,PRICING, AND MARKET POWER IN TRANSPORTATION: A DOMINANT FIRM MODEL*

ABSTRACT Transport firms compete over space. We develop a dominant firm model of transport services wherein one firm (the railroad) has market power, but competes in space with a competitive alternative (truck‐barge). When constrained, the dominant firm prices to “beat the competition”, which impedes efficiency when demand has some elasticity. We extend the basic model in a number of directions that include the relationship between monopoly prices and the generalized concavity of the shipper demand functions, the effects of multiple terminal markets, the role of joint production (fronthaul–backhaul markets), and the effects of capacity constraints.     

Living the cruel futures of industrial change

Industrial change is related to and experienced by those affected by such changes through particular sets of relations with futures. However, engagements with industrial change have in large part included futures only in the role of the temporal, and often teleological, background of industrial change rather than addressing futures in their own right. Through an engagement with the closure and later reopening of a steelworks within Teesside, UK, this paper argues that attending to futures allows the complex relationships through which industrial change comes to be rendered present, related to and lived to be brought into accounts of the experience of industrial change. Through diverse modalities such as phone calls, tones of voice, news reports, rumour and soundscapes a future of works closure was rendered present by and for the steelworkers of Teesside. In addition to this, the paper also goes on to exemplify how such relationships with futures of industrial change can be theorized through the example of engaging with pension entitlements through the concept of ‘cruel optimism’ after the work of Lauren Berlant.