The power of hope: the mobilisation of small and mid-tier companies in the mining industry's campaign against the Resources Super Profits Tax

This article examines the mobilisation of small and mid-tier companies in the mining industry's campaign against the Resources Super Profits Tax (RSPT), drawing on interviews with 18 industry players. The government anticipated that small exploration and development companies would support the RSPT, on account of its promise to contribute towards the costs of exploration and development. In doing so, it was guided by Treasury advice and the assumption of calculative rationality on the part of small companies. Instead, industry leaders forged a common front against the tax within days of its announcement. In doing so, they appealed to the hope of extraordinary returns – or what is sometimes described as ‘sentiment’, ‘animal spirits’ and ‘irrational exuberance’ – among mining entrepreneurs and investors, against the odds. Other researchers have argued that the debate around the RSPT highlights the ‘power of ideas’, but we argue that it highlights the ‘power of hope’.     

Transforming cross‐cultural water research through trust,participation and place

Indigenous voices in government‐led natural resource management planning processes are often marginalised, misinterpreted, or excluded. Third parties, including government‐employed geographers, can act as knowledge brokers in defining Indigenous values and interests so they might be included in government planning processes. This paper reviews and assesses a research partnership that evolved to document the complex and diverse ecological and hydrological values held by Ngan'gi speakers about the Daly River and connected water places in the Northern Territory, Australia. The development of trust through the slow building of a relationship based on place‐based dialogue, a key aspect of participatory action research (PAR), created the foundation from which a mutually beneficial and respectful research partnership was able to, and continues to, evolve. Both research partners' perspectives are revealed here to articulate why the research partnership was deemed a success. Key lessons learned from the research partnership include the importance of trust, respect for place‐based learning, researcher and institutional flexibility, and awareness of the intricacies of relationship building and the benefits that research engagement can bring to Indigenous people and communities. We aim to further dialogue among geographers and interested disciplines as to the potential for PAR methods to foster mutually beneficial Indigenous–non‐Indigenous research partnerships.     

Unwritten Factors Affecting Structural Funds: The Influence of Regional Political Behaviours on the Implementation of EU Cohesion Policy

While EU regional policy has the ambitious objective of supporting lagging regions and promoting inter-regional convergence, its impact is dependent on the ability of regional policymakers to secure and use EU funding to meet the region's needs. This paper aims to show under which conditions politics has a defining influence on the distribution, allocation and utilization of structural funds (SF), specifically in Objective 1 regions. The empirical analysis focuses on the 2000–2006 programming cycle in France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. The results show that regions politically aligned with national governing coalitions tend to perform better in terms of received SF support and enjoy more flexibility in implementing SF. However, the influence of regional political behaviours on economic performances is very limited. The findings confirm the importance of politics in influencing SF implementation, but its limited influence on economic outcomes.     

Collective Action and the Evolution of Intergovernmental Cooperation

Voluntary cooperation among governments holds tremendous promise for solving policy problems with regional and national scope. In this article, we apply insights from the theory of institutional collective action to understand the evolution of cooperative governmental institutions. We address the question: What makes a government decide to exit an existing cooperative arrangement and join a new one with a stronger central authority? Our empirical analyses examine state choices about whether to participate in the new Interstate Compact for Juveniles or remain in an existing compact that serves the same purpose. The findings shed light on how governments make trade‐offs between their desire to maintain their autonomy and the need to overcome the transactions costs, coordination problems, and free‐rider problems associated with cooperative governance in order to achieve policy gains.     

The polis and the res publica: two Arendtian models of violence

The influence of the ancient Greek world on Hannah Arendt’s thought is well documented, yet her interest in the politics of the Roman Republic is often considered less central to her work. This paper explores Arendt’s analysis of both these political worlds, with a particular emphasis on what this comparison can tells us about her understanding of the role of violence in politics. Arendt has generally been understood to structurally exclude violence from the political, in part due to the claims she makes in her later essay ‘On Violence.’ Yet in her portrayal of Roman politics, and her preference for this political system above the Greeks’ (in certain respects), a genuinely political engagement with violence can be discerned. The paper claims that this particular case study indicates the framework of the vita activa, set out by Arendt in The Human Condition, should be reinterpreted, particularly insofar as ‘fabrication’ or ‘work’ here appears as something that is legitimately part of the political, and incorporates within it some forms of violence. The claims that violence is structurally anti-political, this paper concludes, are temporally specific to a twentieth-century context, rather than constituting a foundational ‘rule’ of political practice for Arendt.     

Generating a voice among ‘media monsters’: hybrid media practices of Taiwan’s Anti-Media Monopoly Movement

This article assesses how social movement actors strategically use a hybrid mix of social and traditional media to organise political actions in an attempt to influence media and public agendas. Using the case study of the Anti-Media Monopoly Movement in Taiwan, it investigates how the activists’ use of social and mainstream media contributed towards their collective action and mediated visibility. We argue that the effectiveness of social media activism is augmented by the activists’ engagement in protest actions and tactics catering to news media logics. Through their hybrid media practices, the activists were able to mobilise local and overseas groups into forms of collective and connective action and amplify the impact of protests.     

Feminist geographies and participatory action research: co-producing narratives with people and place

Abstract

This review offers thoughts, queries and hesitations regarding articles drawing on participatory action research (PAR) published over 25?years of Gender, Place and Culture. It foregrounds the interconnections and overlaps between PAR and feminist geographies, and considers a continuum of participations-collaborations-actions-knowledges co-produced across a range of interrelated feminist methodologies. I emphasise epistemological commitment as central to PAR, pointing to work in GPC that evidences critical approaches to research process, embedded in feminist perspectives regarding how scholars re-produce the world and/as act/ing in the world, particularly in attending to shifting, situated and complex subjectivities and power inequalities. Working together with participants is vital, through an ethic that centres participants’ voices, as actors in their own lives. Highlighting the emotional and embodied geographies that weave through such research and writing, this review suggests deepening and strengthening interdependences and a feminist ethos of care as researchers, to further foreground diverse stories and voices, work towards social and spatial justice, and co-produce progressive changes with people and place.     

Illusions of care: Iraqi students between the Ba’thist State and the Stasi in socialist East Germany, 1958–89

For four decades, Iraqi students came to the German Democratic Republic for education, political refuge, or to burnish their credentials. In 1969, Iraq opened diplomatic relations with the GDR, simultaneously extending its persecution of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) into East Germany by means of a complex bureaucratic apparatus of diplomatic organs, security services and student organisations. While ICP members were eventually protected by the Stasi, this entangled them in a system that offered care at the cost of obedience. The on-going campaign against ICP students ultimately played an outsized role in undermining the relationship between the SED and the Iraqi Ba’th.     

The Direct Historical Approach, Analogical Reasoning, and Theory in Americanist Archaeology

Prior to the early 1950s, Americanist archaeologists, given their interest in chronology, routinely searched for direct historical connections between ethnographically documented cultures and archaeological cultures. In those instances where clear evolutionary connections existed between ethnographic and prehistoric cultures, the ethnic affinities of the latter could be assessed, chronologies of prehistoric cultures could be built, and ethnographic descendant cultures could be used as analogs of prehistoric ancestral cultures. The latter became known as specific historical analogy, and it stands in contrast to general comparative analogy, in which no detectable evolutionary connection exists between archaeological subjects and ethnographic sources. The theory underpinning the use of specific historical analogs is Darwinian evolutionism, or descent with modification; thus similarities between ethnographic sources and archaeological subjects are homologous. By midcentury, with the problem of chronology behind them, archaeologists began to address anthropological concerns. Darwinian evolutionism was replaced by the theory of orthogenesis as an explanation of culture change, and concomitantly specific historical analogy was replaced by general comparative analogy, in which similarities between ethnographic sources and archaeological subjects are the result of convergence. For over a century anthropologists and archaeologists have mixed elements of the two theories.     

Exploring and Implementing Participatory Action Research

This paper explores the research method of participatory action research, first by examining the roots of this approach and then analysing the shift to using more participatory approaches than in former years. It begins by considering the reasoning and theoretical underpinning for adopting this approach and provides an overview of the steps to be undertaken when implementing participatory action research. The latter section of the paper presents an example and suggests how participatory action research might have been used instead for a study that utilized open-ended questionnaires undertaken in geography. Finally, tips on how to use it are proposed along with a consideration of the challenges and opportunities.