THE ART OF NEOLIBERALIZING PARK MANAGEMENT: COMMODIFICATION,POLITICS AND HOTEL CONSTRUCTION IN PALLASYLLÄSTUNTURI NATIONAL PARK,FINLAND

Following the growth of nature‐based tourism, national parks and other protected areas have become important tourist attractions. This article examines the legislative process of revising the Act on Pallas‐Yllästunturi National Park, located in northern Finland, to enable the renovation and enlargement of the old hotel. The first draft of the government bill published in 2008 led to widespread public opposition, and thus, construction rights were reduced substantially before the new Act was passed in 2010. The main question of this article is why the Finnish government changed its policy on national park governance that had existed for decades. We assess the extent to which the changes in park governance can be interpreted as part of the worldwide neoliberalization of nature, as well as what kind of forces and values work against neoliberal management ideologies. We examine how the process of revising the Act proceeded in the Parliament and analyse on what grounds the hotel construction was defended and opposed in the discussions. Finally we ponder how the political disagreements are explained by neoliberal frames. We conclude that the neoliberal element was one part of the process, but it intertwined with local political reality creating results hardly resembling textbook definitions of neoliberal or classic liberal ideals. Mixed ideological principles, contextual economic conditions, and complex dependencies between individual actors create cases which must be analysed carefully to find out if neoliberal elements really exist and how they are transformed. Close relations between economic and political actors and creation of economic monopolies should raise doubts if vocabulary of liberalization is just a disguise of actions supporting hidden political and economic interests.     

War,state and society in Ukraine

ABSTRACT

This collection of papers examines the impact of revolution and war on the development of the Ukrainian state and its sovereignty since 2014. Comparative literature on the state shows that aspects of statehood and sovereignty are shaped by war, and that domestic and international dimensions of statehood do not necessarily covary. The four papers in this collection examine these issues in detail. They show that Ukrainian statehood is strengthening internally and that the European Union is providing substantial external help in building the institutions of the Ukrainian state. However, the breakaway territories in Donetsk and Luhansk are also beginning to build some internal aspects of statehood, to go with the massive support they receive from Russia. These competing statehoods may make the impasse in eastern Ukraine even harder to solve.     

Brokering a Buffer State: Afghan Neutrality and American Diplomacy, 1973–1979

This article argues that during the 1970s, the United States Department of State and other US officials sought to promote and maintain Afghan political neutrality as a means of Soviet containment in Central Asia. This piece follows the evolution of this diplomatic model through the 1970s, how it interacted with various Afghan regimes and ultimately became an impediment on the imagination of US officials in predicting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.     

Ireland in the imperial imagination: British nationalism and the Anglo-Irish Treaty

ABSTRACT

The signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 6 December 1921 was a watershed moment in modern Irish history. In addition to copper-fastening the partition of the island, the agreement catalysed the bifurcation of revolutionary Sinn Féin and set in train the processes that culminated, ultimately, in the outbreak of a bitter Civil War the following June. The events that led to the Treaty and the debates on it in Dáil Éireann have received extensive treatment from historians. However, scholars have paid far less attention to the impact of the Treaty on British politics; in particular, they have neglected to explore how the concession of limited Irish self-government impacted Britain’s national self-image at a time of crucial imperial adjustment following the Great War. This article will examine the range of arguments proffered for and against the Treaty in the House of Commons and the House of Lords and suggest that Parliamentary opposition to the settlement was underpinned by a sense of imperial-national feeling, one guided by an attitude of conscious superiority to non-British elements that can be understood productively as a form of British nationalism.     

Ukraine’s national integration before and after 2014. Shifting ‘East–West’ polarization line and strengthening political community

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the question of Ukraine’s societal polarization along the East-West line and the state of cohesion and endurance of its political community. In both political and academic discourses, Ukraine is often characterized as a country split between Western and Eastern regional and societal parts belonging to some wider geopolitical and cultural entities. Moreover, the recent upheavals in the life of the country – Euromaidan Revolution, illegal annexation of Crimea and Russian-Ukrainian war in Donbas – have actualized the allegations about Ukraine as a feeble state structure on the brink of disintegration and collapse. The findings in this study challenge both of these claims and it is argued that Ukraine is not a deeply divided or failed state. In practice, the East-West political polarization line is not clearly defined, but to the extent that it does surface in the political and electoral contests, this line has been moving from west to east since the early 1990s. The shifting of the polarization line implies that political and cultural identities in Ukraine are not fixed and, at the same time, reflects a strengthening cohesion of Ukraine’s political and cultural space. These findings are confirmed by the improved and ever-increasing convergence of Ukrainian society following the Euromaidan and Russian military aggression.     

Embracing the future: path transformation and system reconfiguration for self-driving cars in West Sweden

ABSTRACT

The past years have witnessed a surge of academic interest into how new industrial paths are developed in regions. Transformation processes of existing regional industries have received less attention. This article focuses on radical innovation-based renewal processes of established paths and investigates how regional innovation systems are tackling challenges related to path transformation. Drawing on insights from the regional and technological innovation systems literatures, we develop an analytical framework that elucidates the relation between path transformation and system reconfiguration. The framework suggests that regional innovation system elements are created or adapted to (i) target the build-up of system functions regionally; (ii) link up to system functions in other locations, and (iii) transplant system functions from elsewhere. The analytical framework is applied to a case study of the transformation of the automotive industry in West Sweden towards self-driving cars. The empirical analysis provides support for the importance of the three types of system reconfiguration and emphasises the relevance of different types of assets. Furthermore, it highlights how actors tend to utilise previous networks and positions in global innovation systems rather than turning to the development of system functions regionally as the ‘default option’ of system reconfiguration.