中国的政治地理环境分析及外交对策探讨

本文从政治地理学的角度分析了当今中国的政治地理环境特点,认为中国在地缘政治上处于亚太地区的枢纽位置,海陆邻国众多,国际关系错综复杂,潜在性的不稳定因素较多,政治地理环境比较严峻。鉴于这种特殊的政治地理环境和中国目前的国力等实际情况,提出了因势利导、放眼未来的外交方略与对策,即理智而妥善地处理好中美关系,积极争取欧洲、转化美国,立足亚太"舞台",发挥大国作用。认为当今中国迫切需要的是继续争取一个良好的发展环境,坚持不懈地走强国之路。     

Political economic reorganization among non-state societies: A case study using Middle Holocene mortuary data from the Cis-Baikal,Russia

The extraordinary record of prehistoric funeral activities in Russia’s Cis-Baikal region provides an opportunity to study changes in political strategies that boreal forest hunter–gatherers employed at these events in the Middle Holocene. I use published data on burial treatments (quantities of grave goods, presence of exotic materials, burial layouts) from 10 Late Neolithic (henceforth referred to as “LN,” 4000–3000 BC) and 11 Early Bronze Age (“EBA,” 3000–2000 BC) cemeteries to explore important and previously undetected shifts in the ways that funerals during these periods articulated with political life. LN groups used funerals to emphasize affiliation with corporate institutions, while EBA funeral participants employed political strategies focused on displaying wealth. Current evidence indicates that groups on the western peripheries of the Cis-Baikal started employing semi-nomadic pastoral subsistence practices at the time of the LN-EBA transition, and I suggest that these groups presented new opportunities for Cis-Baikal inhabitants. Interactions with mobile, food-producing groups may have indirectly stimulated indigenous populations to redefine funeral gatherings as venues appropriate for cultivating long-distance economic and political support through competitive displays of wealth.     

Teaching about political violence: a primer on representation

Geography is not generally viewed as a ‘source’ discipline for political violence studies, but this paper begins with the presumption that geography is well disposed to teach courses on the subject. The key purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that engaging issues of political violence is useful for our pedagogy. In particular, teaching about political violence allows geography to address concerns arising from the ‘crisis of representation’. It does so in two ways. First, it provides another venue for teaching about the ‘the other’ and ‘othered places’ in our curricula. Second, it also allows geography to challenge uncritical tropes about political violence as emerging from some peoples and places and not others. As a case study this paper overviews a course entitled Militia Movements in Comparative Perspective. This course was organized around a theoretical unit and four case study units. The case conflicts were chosen to represent conflicts that crossed ideological (right/left) and geographical (Global North/Global South) divides. The course structure is overviewed and a classroom discussion that highlighted questions about representation is described and analysed. The paper concludes by reviewing current efforts to address violence in the discipline, noting problems with these efforts, and suggesting alternatives to them.     

Bristol and the eruption of memory: Making the slave-trading past visible

This article describes the work undertaken by the public authorities of Bristol to construct, for this old slaving port, a collective memory of the trade in Africans. It shows how the use of urban space is necessary to resurrect that past and implies a visual model to inform a new gaze on the city. Through intensive action on the memory of slavery, the author suggests, from the work of Paul Ricoeur, the passage from silence to 'too much memory'. This excess can be viewed as the result of a political instrumentalization linked to the requirements of the British multicutural model. Further, these actions on memory reveal distinctly divergent intentions for the different communities of the city.     

Animating the urban: an ethological and geographical conversation

Abstract

Urban animals and their political ecologies constitute an arena of geographical scholarship that has intensified in recent years. Yet, little headway has been made in terms of understanding how sentient creatures inhabit and negotiate dynamic, metabolic environments. Focusing on urban macaques in Indian cities, the paper develops a conversation between geography and ethology. Firstly, the conversation provides insights into what urbanisation might entail for animals. Secondly, it assays ways in which non-human knowledges enable rethinking what expertise counts in urban governance. Thirdly, the conversation foregrounds other spatial topologies of the urban that become evident when animals’ lifeworlds are taken into account. The paper advances efforts to animate urban political ecology in registers yet inattentive to non-human lifeworlds. It concludes by reflecting upon the purchase of such etho-geographical conversations generate for political ecologies of urbanisation.     

The romance of the Inland Isle: Tocqueville's Democracy in America and the landscape of Providence

Nearly two centuries after its publication, Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1990a) remains among the most influential accounts of American political culture. This essay argues that the rhetorical foundation of the Democracy's enduring cultural power is its “imaginative geography” (Said 2000), about which I make two, interrelated claims. The first has to do with the Democracy's identification of the American land with divine Providence. I claim that the providential landscape is the chief means by which Tocqueville contains and organizes the account of the tension between achieved liberty and natural freedom that drives the Democracy. My second focus is on the romantic character of the providential landscape. Cosgrove (2005, p. 302) reflects upon the “tenacity of the island condition on the Western imagination” as frame and vessel of “imagination, desire, hopes and fears.” I argue that the Democracy's “Inland Isle,” as I call it, is a metaphorical island in this sense, and that its theoretical capacity and exhortative power derive from Tocqueville's use of an idiom expressive of a distinctively French tradition of landscape theorizing in which garden metaphor was used to construct meanings of equality and freedom, and voice and identity, in an emerging national, bourgeois order.     

Berlusconi,strong government and the Italian state

Over the past decade, state capacity has increased at all levels, including that of central government, and the emergence of effective government in Italy has proved popular. A second trend has been the reassertion of party government since 1996. Given these two trends, the large parliamentary majority obtained by Silvio Berlusconi's alliance, the Casa delle LibertÀ, might be expected to result in strong party government. In fact, Berlusconi's triumph offers something more and something less than party government, challenging Italian democracy. Nevertheless, as a consolidated democracy, Italy should be able to withstand such a challenge. One stable, democratic outcome to Italy's political transformation would be the consolidation of a Schumpeterian model of democracy. This would require the anomalies of the right's accumulation of powers to be resolved, a process which the left could promote by accepting that strong democratic government is a public good, and by organizing itself to challenge Berlusconi by campaigning to provide Italy with such government through parliamentary competition.     

The politics of town planning in post-war Naples

The article examines town planning in the city of Naples since the war and, in ­particular, the ambiguous relations between politicians and policy. The focus of the analysis highlights the failure to give effect to the various master plans (PRG) ­discussed and sometimes adopted by the city authorities. This explains to a large extent the widespread building speculation that occurred in these years.     

RELATION BETWEEN BUILDING DAMAGE AND GROUND CONDITIONS IN THE 1999 QUINDIO EARTHQUAKE IN COLOMBIA

An earthquake of magnitude 6.2 (M _b ) occurred in west-central part of Colombia on January 25, 1999. This earthquake is officially called Quindio Earthquake from the name of the most affected province. The earthquake caused disastrous damage to a large number of buildings resulting in significant casualties. In Armenia City and its neighbouring villages close to the epicentre over 1000 people were killed by the earthquake and the total monetary loss reached US$ 2 billion. Armenia City, which has an approximate population of 280 000 people, apparently suffered the worst in terms of casualties and damage to the buildings.

The present paper focuses on the causes of damage to houses and buildings in Armenia City. First, the evolution of the urban area of the city was investigated using historical features available maps from each era. Then a correlation between buildings damage and topographical features of the city was studied. The effects of geological features and amplification of ground motion were also investigated.     

Shaking Table Model Test of a Steel-Concrete Composite High-Rise Building

Shaking table tests were conducted on a 1/20 scaled-model of a 25-story steel-concrete composite high-rise building, composed of steel frame (SF) and concrete tube (CT). The seismic behavior of the model was investigated with the increasing of table-input acceleration amplitudes. It has been found that the seismic failure of the model concentrated on the shear walls and corner columns at the lowest story of the CT as well as the joints between the SF and the CT. Even subjected to extremely strong earthquakes, due to effective composite action, the composite model was able to support its weight to prevent collapse.