江苏淮安王庄村汉墓群发掘简报

2013年淮安市博物馆发掘淮安王庄村汉墓群,共清理汉墓97座。墓葬形制多样,排列有序,共同位于一大型土墩之下,与淮安地区传统族葬墓有明显的区别。墓葬随葬器物丰富多样,器物组合时代特征明确。从出土器物和墓葬形制及排列情况分析,墓葬时代在西汉早期至东汉时期,墓葬之间在年代上有明显的承继关系,是一处大型汉代土墩墓。该墓地的发掘为研究淮安乃至苏北地区汉代墓葬特别是汉代土墩墓类型提供了极其重要的新材料。     

Pivoting toward Asia: Comparing the Canadian and American Policy Shifts

Both Canada and the United States have “pivoted” toward Asia in their foreign policy over the past decade, although emphases in those pivots differed between the two countries. The former focuses on an economic pivot initially, the latter on a security one. What factors explain these shifts? What was the magnitude of policy change by both? Utilizing some important theoretical works by Charles Hermann, we discuss the factors that appear to have brought about this policy change toward Asia, outline the actions and activities that both countries have initiated toward Asia in the past decade to illustrate the type and magnitude of policy change that has occurred, and compare some areas of political, economic, and military similarities between Canada and the United States toward this region. Finally, we assess the likely future of these pivots to Asia in light of the change in political leadership within both nations.     

Alberta’s Great Experiment in Senatorial Democracy

In 2014, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that the unelected nature of the Senate is an inherent feature of Canadian parliamentary democracy and is a central pillar of the constitution. Members of the Upper House are appointed by the Governor General, acting on the advice of the Prime Minister. The decision taken by the Prime Minister is not subject to review by Parliament or the provincial legislative assemblies. Patronage appointments have given the Senate a reputation as a dumping ground for political friends and party insiders. In 1989, the province of Alberta enacted the Senatorial Selection Act, arguing that it would serve as a stepping stone for substantive reform to the Senate. The province has held four elections in which the people of the province have chosen senators-in-waiting. This article argues that the Court’s opinion in Reference re Senate Reform undermines the foundation upon which the provincial statute rests.     

Social Careers Across Imperial Spaces: An Empire Family in the Dutch-British World, 1811-1933

Here the object biography of a scale model of an old Dutch colonial sugar factory directs us to the history of an extended family, and demonstrates the connectedness of people and identities across and within European imperial spaces in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This case study shows how people in colonial Indonesia became ‘Dutch’ through their social networks and cultural capital (for instance a European education). They even came to belong to the colonial and national Dutch elites while, because of their descent, also belonging to the British colonial and national elites. These intertwined Dutch and British imperial spaces formed people’s identities and status: the family discussed here became an important trans-imperial patrician family with a broad imperial ‘spatial imagination’, diverse identities and social circles. It was mostly women who played important roles in these transnational processes— roles indeed that they played well into the early twentieth century when colonial empires ceased to exist and the nation-state became the ‘natural’ social and political form of the modern world, obscuring these transnational processes.     

Tourism as a vehicle for regional development in peripheral areas – myth or reality? A longitudinal case study of Swedish regions

In the contemporary so-called ‘competition state era’, many rural and peripheral regions are in decline. Tourism is increasingly viewed as being able to alleviate and rejuvenate regions that are facing economic difficulties. The European Union has launched several programmes with the goal of stimulating growth and employment in peripheral areas. These programmes are often used to support tourism development projects. In this paper, a longitudinal analysis of spatial changes in Swedish tourism is conducted. The analysis is based on statistics regarding overnight stays in Swedish commercial accommodation facilities. The aim is to investigate if tourism and tourism policy contribute to the reduction in disparities between regions. Although there are exceptions, the main findings indicate that the potential for creating sustainable rural tourism growth through tourism policy seems to be much less than the popular discourse suggests.     

City branding in polycentric urban regions: identification,profiling and transformation in the Randstad and Rhine-Ruhr

In polycentric urban regions several distinct cities, none of which is dominant, cooperate and compete with each other to attract inhabitants and firms. In such settings city branding strategies do not solely affect one city, but the entire region. We examined how city branding in the face of ecological modernization, that is, delivering higher added economic value, while lowering environmental impacts, is playing out in the Dutch Randstad and the German Rhine-Ruhr. Our findings show that regional identity formation occurs at the sub-polycentric urban region level, coinciding more with (historical) economic profiles than with planning imaginaries. The Dutch cities profile themselves more along the lines of ecological modernization than their German counterparts. Differences between subregions within each polycentric urban region are also noticeable, where more industrialized regions, such as the Ruhr or southern Randstad focus on ‘green’, ‘liveable’ and ‘knowledge-oriented’, while cities with stronger knowledge-intensive sectors portray themselves as ‘smart’ or ‘sustainable’. Cities generally substantiate their profiles through projects, but a significant gap persists between reality and aspirations for improved environmental conditions. This is especially true for the Dutch cities, where many claims, but little visible action can be observed.     

Hedwig revisited

The mainstream success of the 2014 Broadway revival of John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch is in stark contrast to the precarity of the central protagonist’s life and the communities out of which the original Hedwig production emerged. While these tensions reveal some of the complicities between homonormativity, gentrification, and neoliberalism, by tracing Hedwig’s other genealogies, a more complicated vision of queer possibility emerges.     

A geopolitics of migrant women,mobility and abortion access in the Republic of Ireland

Drawing on three select case studies and feminist engagements with mobility studies, I illustrate the Irish state’s use of a dialectic of gendered and racialized citizenship, and mobility and fixity, in the creation of ‘new geographies of belonging and exclusion’. Using detailed analyses from select cases, I argue for more nuanced feminist engagements with mobility that acknowledge and analyse ‘processes and trajectories’ in relation to a geopolitics of abortion – one that eschews undifferentiated uses of the category migrant and discourses of tourism, in analysing abortion in the Republic of Ireland. I expose how their use constructs limited ideas about gender, nation and Irishness to assure exclusions from Ireland, and from its diaspora.     

Historical Use of Metal Tie-Rods in the Italian Territory: Treatises,Essays, and Manuals through Four Centuries of History

The use of metal tie-rods in buildings is documented and visible in many Italian areas since the 15th century. This article refers to the study of treatises, manuals and essays from the 15th to the early 20th century, mainly in the Italian context with some exceptions of certain foreign texts that, due to their diffusion and importance, have greatly influenced the technical literature on the subject. Technology is an expression of the social, economic, cultural, political and juridical events of a country and, as such, is deeply linked to the times and territories in which it develops. However, it is also closely linked to the laws of nature and to forms of communication, therefore it is useful to compare, underlining the analogies and differences, the knowledge and the ways of the productive and technical process in a long-term analysis.     

Russian-occupied Crimea and the state of exception: repression,persecution, and human rights violations

ABSTRACT

Since annexing Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in 2014, Russian authorities there have introduced harsh repressive measures to silence opposition to the ongoing occupation, chiefly targeting the indigenous Crimean Tatars and others pro-Ukrainian individuals. From the legally subversive methods it employed to orchestrate the annexation to the rhetoric of anti-extremism with which it has continually justified its occupation, the Kremlin has inaugurated a new “state of exception” in Crimea, invoking the prerogative to circumvent normative legal and juridical procedures in response to a perceived emergency. While Crimea’s state of exception resembles those initiated elsewhere by some Western states and Russia itself as part of the global War on Terror, the state of exception has provided the pretext for a particularly severe degree of repression, persecution, and human rights violations in occupied Crimea. In conjunction with the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group, this article discusses the theoretical groundings of the state of exception, its broader applications within the Russian Federation, and its troubling repercussions for residents of Crimea. Casting the Kremlin’s actions as belonging to a state of exception helps draw attention to its alarming human rights violations, and may bolster resistance to the creeping normalization of the Russian occupation of Crimea.