Contesting the nation: negotiating national narratives and the Jewish settlements

Why and how does national identity reopen for contestation? Existing theories argue that institutional design, social ties or elite manipulation alter the saliency and nature of national identity. These theories view the ethno‐nation as homogenous and shaped vis‐à‐vis other groups. However, I argue that we should examine the re‐emergence of nationalism as an intra‐national struggle between groups with different saliency and understandings of national identity: new issues can raise the importance of national identity for some members of the group but not others. Moreover, members develop diverging understandings of fundamentals of national identity such as citizenship, borders and the role of religion. To support the theory, the paper utilises original not yet studied archival materials to show that struggle over Jewish settlements in the Occupied Territories led to contestation of the saliency and meaning of Jewish Israeli national identity. Specifically, I analyse letters individuals sent to leading government officials in the early days of the settlements and show that settlement supporters tied the issue to Zionist ethos, injecting new content into Zionist identity. Meanwhile, national identity did not rise in importance or alter in meaning for settlement opposition. The method reveals individual understandings of national identity and points at broader societal divisions.     

政治地理学中的领域概念辨析

领域是政治地理学的重要概念，但是目前国内对领域的内涵缺乏深入的解读和整理。本文在梳理西方对领域概念的理论探讨的基础上，归纳了理解领域概念的三个主要视角，并基于西方相关理论讨论，提出了领域概念的四个基本属性，即多尺度性、多维性、关系性和生成性。继而，通过对西方领域理论的研究，提出未来中国政治地理学的领域研究应该加强的几个方向。本文对于深化政治地理学领域概念的理解，避免传统认识中的偏见和局限，以及更好地制定领域策略、展开领域研究将起到积极的推动作用。     

乌梁海问题

自19世纪初起,乌梁海地方已纳入清帝国版图。1727年俄中布连斯奇界约和恰克图界约确定了俄中两国在乌梁海地方的国界。自1755年起,乌梁海地方受乌里雅苏台将军管辖,其行政体制与蒙古的行政体制相同。乌梁海人信仰喇嘛教,使用的文字为蒙文。1908年1月24日,沙皇尼古拉二世在一份报告上批示说：乌梁海日后对俄国极为有用,并指示内阁讨论向乌梁海移民和占领乌梁海问题。1911年11月21日,俄国内阁就乌梁海问题举行专门会议,认为,自18世纪中叶起,乌梁海实际上已臣服博格达汗,俄国确实没有占领乌梁海地方的法律根据,但内阁依然决定加强向乌梁海移居俄国臣民。其现实目的是加强俄国在乌梁海的影响,而日后的任务是吞并乌梁海。1914年沙皇政府以威胁利诱,甚至讨伐手段,先后将乌梁海五旗置于俄国保护之下,实际上已将乌梁海并入俄国版图。     

ROMANCE,PRACTICE AND SUBSTANTIVENESS: WHAT DO LANDSCAPES DO?

Although Torsten Hägerstrand is not known primarily as a landscape geographer, he made significant contributions to the understanding of landscape in Swedish geography. This paper argues that Hägerstrand examined the importance of representation for the understanding of landscape as place and territory, which is a key ingredient in current engagements with landscape within (Nordic) geography and the broader European political context. The current debate on landscape, however, reaches beyond Hägerstrand's rather “scientistic” approach and brings out a stronger sense of the cultural, social and political powers conveyed by landscape and representation. We show that this is made explicit in recent scholarly work on the so‐called substantive landscape. The paper also provides an introduction to the essays of this theme issue, which reflects a selection of the landscape research presented at the Inaugural Meeting of Nordic Geographers at Lund, Sweden, in May 2005.     

Fixing the territory,a turning point: The paradoxes of the Wichí maps of the Argentine Chaco

Indigenous mapping is a powerful political tool for long-marginalized populations to create visibility and establish land claims. In the case of Argentina, a country that was built on a denial of the presence of Indigenous peoples in the national territory, the emergence of these maps stemming from participatory processes coincided with the recognition of these communities' territorial rights in 1994. However, this mapping of Indigenous territories freezes extremely dynamic and complex socio-spatial realities just as it inflects their representations. In this paper, I reassess the weight and the role that Indigenous cartographic representations play in the evolution of these populations' spatial capital. Paradoxically, they give rise to more contradictions than they clarify. These paradoxes demonstrate the varied relationships different generations maintain with their territory, just as they concern its structure and its cartographic form. Therefore, based on the case of the Wichí of the Argentinian Chaco, this paper contributes to the understanding of contemporary issues of indigeneity by adopting a critical approach to Indigenous cartography. Whereas in Argentina cartographic knowledge is undergoing a process of decolonization, this does not apply to the legal system or to society as a whole.     

The New Nature of Things? Canada's Conservative Government and the Design of the New Environmental Subject

Since coming to power in 2006, Canada's government under Stephen Harper has worked to recalibrate federal regulatory, legislative and economic development frameworks as they overlap in the littoral zone of the environment. We argue that Harper's Conservative government is pursuing a totalizing strategy in reconfiguring the desired Canadian environmental subject. This strategy approaches an integrated design that eclipses the incremental strategic options most Canadian federal governments have understood themselves to be constrained by. This design's basic features include the discursive strategies employed to collapse “the environment” into a singular resource extraction paradigm, a programmatic concentration of power to the executive branch of the Canadian government, and a classical conservative ideology that associates environmental regulation and management with dominion over and improvement of national territory, to the exclusion of other frames and relations. We query the articulation of consent and certainty in relation to the environment and extractive economies in Canada.     

The Unbearable Humanness of Drone Warfare in FATA,Pakistan

Abstract: This paper provides a critical analysis of how and why US‐led drone warfare is conducted in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. First, we provide detailed statistics on the scale and funding of US drone operations, noting a rapid acceleration of its adoption by the military. This is then situated within an overarching narrative of the logic of “targeting”. Second, we study a legal document called the “Frontier Crimes Regulation” of 1901 that defines the relationship of FATA to the rest of Pakistan as an “exceptional” place. In the third section, we argue that the drone is a political actor with a fetishized existence, and this enables it to violate sovereign Pakistani territory. In this sense, the continued violence waged by robots in Pakistan's tribal areas is a result of the deadly interaction between law and technology. The paper concludes by noting the proliferation of drones in everyday life.     

SOCIO-ECONOMIC DETERMINANTS OF AGE AT FIRST MARRIAGE OF THE ETHNIC TRIBAL WOMEN IN BANGLADESH

This paper examines the socio-economic determinants of age at first marriage of the ethnic tribal women of Bangladesh. Cox proportional hazard regression analysis was applied to the data set containing 792 observations from four different tribal communities compiled on the basis of a household survey. The singulate mean age at marriage (SMAM) of the women, and mean age at first marriage for females, were found to be 21.8 years and 18.9 years, respectively, which were much higher than those at the national level. Findings revealed that woman's educational attainment and pre-marital work status significantly delayed the timing of marriage. Parents’ economic status and respondents’ birth order had the most significant effect on marital timing. The multivariate statistical analyses also identified several variables as important determinants of marriage timing for the tribal women, including ethnic identity, childhood place of residence, father's literacy and father's survival status. The findings of the study may provide a clue to the rising age at first marriage of the disadvantaged indigenous women.