“Every Iraqi's Nightmare”: Blogging Peace in Occupied Baghdad

Abstract: The importance of war blogs is increasingly acknowledged, but their political dimensions remain largely unexplored. This paper provides a series of critical readings of Riverbend's Baghdad Burning and addresses two main issues. First, there is a systematic tension between the ways in which Riverbend is “subalternized” (by her readers and herself) and her attempts to reclaim the ground upon which post‐invasion Iraq is represented. Second, the invasion has fundamentally reworked the ways in which the figure of the “Iraqi” is constructed. These epistemological and ontological processes are always complex and partial: they occur at a variety of geographical scales and they are mobilized by a diversity of actors, making it very difficult to pin them down in time and space. Nevertheless, they highlight the difficulties of reducing Riverbend's project of resistance to a simple act of speaking out: of telling the reader what life is “really like” in occupied Baghdad.     

Economic Transition and Demographic Change in Russia, 1989-1995

A World Bank demographer reviews recent population changes in Russia, relating trends in fertility, mortality, natural increase, and migration to the social and economic effects of the transition to a market economy. Significant trends (a precipitous drop in fertility, an extraordinary increase in mortality—especially among middle-aged males—and a consequent decline in natural increase) are identified and analyzed, with dislocations caused by the uncertainties of economic and political transition suggested as the principal causes. The effect of net in-migration to Russia (probably mainly ethnic Russians from the Near Abroad countries) in partially offsetting the natural population decrease is examined as well. 5 tables, 16 references.     

The Ideological Ends Against the Middle: House Roll Call Votes on Normal Trade Relation Status for China, 1990-2000

From 1990 to 1999, the House of Representatives held roll call votes to attempt to overturn presidential extensions of Normal Trade Relation (NTR) status to China. What was once a routine matter attracting little congressional attention became a highly divisive matter. Interestingly, the coalition that formed to oppose such extensions was a partnership of strange bedfellows: extreme liberals joining their far-right colleagues to try to rescind the president's extension of normal trade status for China. When the distribution of opposition on the yearly extensions of NTR is compared to that on the vote to approve permanent NTR (PNTR) for China, the ideological distribution of opponents changes noticeably. I argue that important procedural differences between the votes on the yearly extension, and PNTR, serve to explain why ideologically extreme members formed their strange alliance.     

Pivotal Politics,Presidential Capital,and Supreme Court Nominations

We analyze the Supreme Court nomination process in order to provide a general explanation of presidents' propensity to win confirmation battles even in the face of an ideologically hostile Senate. The analysis serves two purposes. First, we argue that employing the conventional measure of the Senate's power to constrain the president's choice of nominees–the median senator–provides an inaccurate picture of this process. In its stead we argue that the filibuster pivot (or the sixtieth most liberal or conservative senator) more accurately captures the Senate's power over the president (Krehbiel 1998). Second, we argue that even under this more stringent spatial constraint, presidents still have the ability to win most confirmation battles with the Senate. Indeed, our results indicate that presidents often overcome situations where the Senate should reject their nominees, or where it should force them to make a less desirable choice, by invoking political capital.     

Monitoring Islamic Archaeological Landscapes in Ethiopia Using Open Source Satellite Imagery

The African landscape is set to change dramatically in the coming years, and will have a detrimental impact on the inherent archaeological and cultural heritage elements if not monitored adequately. This paper explores how satellite imagery, in particular open source imagery (Google Earth, multispectral satellite imagery from Landsat and Sentinel-2), can be utilized to monitor and protect sites that are already known with particular reference to Islamic archaeological sites in Ethiopia. The four sites used are in different geographic and geomorphological areas: three on the Somali Plateau (Harlaa, Harar, and Sheikh Hussein), and one on the edge of the Afar Depression (Nora), and have varied histories. The results indicate that open source satellite imagery offers a mechanism for evaluating site status and conservation over time at a large scale, and can be used on data from other areas of Africa by heritage professionals in the African continent at no cost.