Wild(er)ness: Reconfiguring the Geographies of Wildlife

Amidst millennial talk of the 'end of nature' ( McKibben 1989 ), this paper examines the precarious geographies of 'wildlife' in rather less apocalyptic terms. Animal (and plant) species designated wild are placed categorically outside the ambit of 'human society', confined to inhabiting the margins and interstices of the social world. Yet, we contend, such animals have long been routinely imagined and organized within multiple circuits of social power, which (re)configure them in important ways. These social orderings of animal life confound the moral geographies of wilderness, which presuppose an easy coincidence between the species and spaces of a pristine nature. In this paper, we employ the fluid spatial vocabulary of topology to map a more volatile and relational conception of the fabrics of wildlife. Our arguments are worked through glimpses of two historically very different social orderings of 'wild' animals – those associated with the military vernacular of the gladiatorial games of Imperial Rome, and the scientific vernacular of endangered species listing and conservation under CITES (the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species). These 'foldings' of wildlife in distant time/space aim to disrupt the linear historical narratives of 'civilization' and 'evolution', which consign wildlife to marginal spaces with a teleological destiny of erasure.     

华人网络与韩人网络的比较研究

通过当前韩国对于海外华人四个方面的"似是而非"认识的分析,对华商网络的倾向与特征、建设韩民族网络等问题的探讨,得出结论:韩国华侨与韩国所理解的海外华人之间存在很大的差异;当代韩国政府希望能像中国充分发挥海外华人的优势那样,使海外韩人发展成为韩国在21世纪的新的成长动力并加以利用的认识是一种错误的"乐观判断";海外华人对祖国的向心力,不只是来自爱国情,更重要的是其生存保障与利益的实现;中韩两国的侨务政策存在区别,中国致力于"护侨",而韩国的目光集中于"用侨"。     

The intellectual origins of Leninism, 1977

This essay is a general introduction to the special number on recent research on Atlantic history. While the topics here presented are diverse, most focusing on the first French Empire, particularly in North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the authors share several common themes: (1) In Africa and the Americas, they seek to view the question of the Empire as a series of contested, temporary, and uncertain alliances and collaborations, in which negotiation rather than submission was most often the basis of power relations; (2) In the realm of political economy in theory and practice, the authors refuse pre-established notions of an Atlantic “community” of commodities and merchants functioning within an Atlantic “system.” Instead, they focus on closed networks of merchants functioning within the dynamics of merchant capitalism. (3) The authors seek alternatives to traditional approaches focusing on the nation-state and its institutions. Instead, they examine communities and regions in the Atlantic that include social elites, such as, merchants, the nobility, the gentry, and intellectuals, as well as neglected native peoples and forgotten spaces such as Africa.     

The congresses of Italian scientists between Europe and the Risorgimento (1839 – 75)

Abstract

This article reconstructs the history of the Italian scientific congresses from 1839 until 1875. The congresses are analyzed in the context of the political Risorgimento, but also as a reflection of relations among social groups, and between society and institutions. We examine the troubled coexistence of a minority interested primarily in encouraging the professionalization of science in state institutions of learning, and a broader sector of eminent citizens that placed the value of ‘expertise’ alongside the values of birth and social ranking. This complicated coexistence was the chief reason that the Italian congresses failed, and after 1861, as well, in their effort to establish a national scientific association comparable to those existing in many other countries, both inside and outside Europe. This essay reconstructs the main points and phases of the debate and the changes in the relations among the social and professional groups and scientific work, up until the foundation of a Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze (SIPS, Italian Association for the Advancement of Science), which explicitly rejected the heritage of the Risorgimento.     

A Swiss anomaly? A relational account of national boundary‐making

ABSTRACT. This article reviews how major theorists of nationalism – from Ernest Renan to Benedict Anderson – have tried to come to grips with the puzzle that Swiss nationalism and the Swiss state present in view of the monoethnic states that surround it. I will argue that this puzzle disappears when assuming a political sociology perspective that highlights the networks of political alliances underlying nationalist movements and the power structure of recently formed nation‐states. Studying an ‘outlier’ case such as Switzerland helps us to gain insight into the general processes and mechanisms at work in the rise of nationalism and the nation‐state.     

SPID: A New Database for Inferring Public Policy Innovativeness and Diffusion Networks

Despite its rich tradition, there are key limitations to researchers' ability to make generalizable inferences about state policy innovation and diffusion. This paper introduces new data and methods to move from empirical analyses of single policies to the analysis of comprehensive populations of policies and rigorously inferred diffusion networks. We have gathered policy adoption data appropriate for estimating policy innovativeness and tracing diffusion ties in a targeted manner (e.g., by policy domain, time period, or policy type) and extended the development of methods necessary to accurately and efficiently infer those ties. Our state policy innovation and diffusion (SPID) database includes 728 different policies coded by topic area. We provide an overview of this new dataset and illustrate two key uses: (i) static and dynamic innovativeness measures and (ii) latent diffusion networks that capture common pathways of diffusion between states across policies. The scope of the data allows us to compare patterns in both across policy topic areas. We conclude that these new resources will enable researchers to empirically investigate classes of questions that were difficult or impossible to study previously, but whose roots go back to the origins of the political science policy innovation and diffusion literature.     

Sharpening Advocacy Coalitions

The concept of “advocacy coalitions” is the bedrock of the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), one of the most established and successful approaches for understanding policy processes across the globe. This article revisits and sharpens the conceptual definition of advocacy coalitions. We summarize the lessons from its theoretical emphases under the ACF and specify its five attributes (policy actors, shared beliefs, coordination, resources, and stability). Through this specification, we identify the ideal coalition type and several coalition subtypes. We then clarify and make a distinction between how we think about coalitions as a concept and how we approach coalitions empirically. This article sharpens the lens for describing and explaining coalitions toward better observations, theorizing, and measurements. It ends with next steps for further deepening and broadening knowledge about advocacy coalitions.     

Movement in Print: Migrations and Political Articulations in Grassroots Publishing

What makes a book political? This essay takes up this question through analysis of a small network of grassroots publishing projects. In doing so, I suggest that the materiality and mobility of a book can be just as, if not more, significant than its content when considering its political character. Specifically, I examine the interconnected trajectories of a cluster of books published since 2010 that participate in conversations about migration, work, and popular politics in Argentina and Bolivia. By zooming in on two very distinct contexts of book culture (Buenos Aires and La Paz) and especially the connections and tensions that emerge between them, I seek to account for some of the heterogeneous contemporary formations of what Ángel Rama called the ‘lettered city’ in Latin America. As I focus on grassroots publishing projects, I shift my attention away from the usual spaces of book culture, allowing other marginal circuits of production, circulation, and consumption to appear. Combining ethnographic narrative with textual analysis, this essay develops the double concept of political articulation (as expression and connection) to offer a transdisciplinary exploration of how movement is shaping the print book – materially and politically – in Latin America today.     

Convergence space: process geographies of grassroots globalization networks

This paper considers grassroots globalization networks, which comprise a diversity of social movements working in association to engage in multi-scalar political action. Drawing upon David Harvey's notion of militant particularism (regarding the problems of effecting politics between different geographical scales), and recent research on networks and their relationship to places, the paper analyses People's Global Action, an international network of social movements opposing neoliberal globalization. From an analysis of the process geographies of People's Global Action, the paper proposes the notion of convergence space as a conceptual tool by which to understand and critique grassroots globalization networks. The paper argues that contested social relations emerge in such convergence spaces and considers the implications of these for theorizing such networks, and for political action.     

Inns,innkeepers and the society of later medieval England, 1350–1600

The inns and innkeepers of medieval England form a poorly documented and neglected group of institutions and individuals. Yet at a time of growing specialism, they were a crucial part of the economic infrastructure of the country. This study is focused on the documentation for central southern England but seeks to place this in a wider perspective. There was now a regular provision of inns in accordance with the size and importance of the towns. Inns generated substantial rent and were evidently felt to be worth considerable investment. Innkeepers were among the rich and influential members of the town. Inns played a vital role in the evolving and prospering economic, social and political life of the nation in this period.