Ghosts,Memory, and the Right to the Divided City: Resisting Amnesia in Beirut City Centre

Violently divided cities are incubators of ethnic conflicts. Under the auspices of postwar reconstruction, these cities are supposedly disciplined into peace through the regeneration of the city centre, including privatization, commercial adaptation and gentrification strategies. Such dynamics render city centre space amnesiac, with no reference to the history of sectarian violence, and exclusivist by limiting public access. Rather than foster peacebuilding, city centre regeneration exposes the dangerous weakness of the neoliberal peace built on accommodating ethnic and socioeconomic divisions. This paper connects Lefebvre's right‐to‐the‐city to non‐sectarian social movements’ struggle to forge participatory democracy in Beirut's city centre. A key aspect of these movements’ activities is to reprogramme memory—cosmopolitan and inclusivist—into the city centre, a project supporting peacebuilding.     

The enemy as the unthinkable: a concretist reading of Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political

This article offers an unconventional interpretation of Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political. It first identifies two alternative readings – an ‘exceptionalist’ and a ‘concretist’ one – to make the claim that in the late 1920s he laid the foundations for a theory of politics that overcame the flaws of his theory of exception. It then explains why the concretist reading provides an insightful key to Schmitt’s take on the relationship between politics and law as a whole. Despite this, the chief aim of this analysis is not interpretive. Rather, the article claims that such a paradigm change was related to Schmitt’s pondering on the elements that were menacing to draw the experience of modern statehood to an end even more seriously than any upheavals and revolutions. For he came to the conclusion that the mere claim to political self-sufficiency on the part on non-state social entities was able to defy the idea of the state as the political entity par excellence. While these reflections urged Schmitt to reformulate many features of his conception of the political, the article contends that this particular juncture in his production sheds light on a crucial feature of contemporary politics.     

Rewriting the Latin liturgy of the Holy Sepulchre: text,ritual and devotion for 1149

ABSTRACT

An extraordinary reform of Jerusalem’s liturgy took place under the patriarchate of Fulcher of Angoulême (1146–57). The refocusing of Jerusalem’s rite positioned the commemoration of Easter as its central theological theme. This was effected to a level unparalleled in the liturgical traditions of the West. However, rubrics from extant twelfth-century liturgical books from Jerusalem further reveal how this reform was made to coincide with the 1149 rededication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the 50-year celebration of the capture of Jerusalem. From this newly discovered perspective, this study argues that liturgy, through its active rewriting, formed an integral part of a hitherto unexplored religious programme carried out by Patriarch Fulcher. Liturgy, alongside architecture and civic festivities, was used as a central tool to reshape the devotional identity of Jerusalem and the Latin East.     

The Training of Secret Police in Conflictual Intelligence Cultures: British Failure in the Middle East during the Cold War

This article explores the nature of security training chiefly associated with MI5. It shows that, akin to the security training implemented throughout the colonies, policy-makers in London hoped to strengthen Middle Eastern security services via British training, which would safeguard British interests in the region. This article argues that an unintended consequence was that strengthening Middle Eastern security services became part of the problem rather than the solution. The policy served mainly to bolster increasingly unpopular, authoritarian regimes against a rising tide of anti-British sentiment. Thus, British foreign, more specifically anti-Communist, policy in the Middle East was short-sighted and a failure.     

Out of Arabia: British Strategy and the Fate of Local Forces in Aden,South Yemen,and Oman, 1967–76

The British engagement with Oman from 1967–76 came at a time when other imperial and defence commitments were being reduced in the Gulf region and elsewhere. Following the ignominious retreat from Aden, the British chose to support the Omani regime in its conflict with Communist-inspired insurgents (1970–6). This article gives context to the dichotomy of outcomes in southern Arabia and examines the role of local military forces in the counter-insurgencies. It demonstrates that Britain's domestic political considerations, regional strategic requirements, and concerns for its global reputation, rather than counterinsurgency operations and the local forces, were the main drivers of outcomes. Insurgents and local actors nevertheless responded to changes taking place in and around Oman, recalibrating their decision to co-operate or resist on their own terms, and changes in the international support for the insurgents were decisive. The key argument is that the dynamic combinations of international support, British strategic assumptions and miscalculations, and local agency, were crucially important to the outcomes in the region. The ‘fate’ of those who had allied with, or resisted, the British, needs to be set in this context.     

The Role of Non-Human Creatures in the Book of Jonah: The Implications for Eco-Justice

Previous studies on the Book of Jonah often concentrated on God, Jonah, and the people of Nineveh. This article takes a different approach by focusing on the roles of all “non-human creatures” in the Book of Jonah—the great Storm, the great fish, the animals of Nineveh, the worm, the land and the kikayon plant. This approach reveals something new about the role of non-human creatures in the book and the implications thereof for the amelioration of today’s ecological crisis. It highlights the beauty of all elements of nature working together with humanity for the good of all: a clear indication of the ecological vision implicitly proposed by the Book of Jonah. In this regard, YHWH’s attitude to every creature in the book is exemplary, to him every creature is in itself valuable and fulfills a particular important role in nature and existence.     

The death of Sir Victor Horsley (1857–1916) and his burial in Amarah

Sir Victor Alexander Haden Horsley (1857–1916), the pioneering British neurological surgeon, passed away 100 years ago. He died young in his sixtieth year from the effects of heat stroke while serving as consulting military surgeon to the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force in Amarah, modern-day Iraq, and was buried in the now largely abandoned “Amara War Cemetery.” By the time of his death in 1916, Victor Horsley had established himself as one of the most eminent innovators of modern neurological surgery. His pioneering researches in cerebral physiology earned him an early reputation in the field, and his experiences with vivisection allowed him to confidently operate on the brain and spinal cord at a time when surgical intervention of the nervous system was fraught with uncertainty. Outside the operating theatre, Horsley was a proud advocate for a number of sometimes controversial sociopolitical issues; national temperance, women’s suffrage, and medical unionism particularly interested him. He brought the same courageousness to the British army during the First World War, and labored tirelessly under considerable hardships to improve the conditions for soldiers. Otherwise robust and healthy, it was only through great self-denial and overwork that Horsley suddenly succumbed to the burning heat of Mesopotamia. He died as he lived—a fearless and painstaking fighter for the common man. His was a most beautiful life of unselfish devotion to others.     

The body eating its food politics: reflections on relationalities and embodied ways of knowing

This Viewpoint article builds on feminist geography research methods, scholarship of embodiment, and more-than-human geographies to challenge us to think about how relationalities are reconfigured through attention to the human eater’s body. Drawing on an example from ethnographic research, the author problematizes how an embodied act of eating other non-human bodies raises concerns for how we negotiate the complicated sets of ethical relations that we each confront on a daily basis. In particular, this example is used to describe the ethical dilemmas researchers encounter when the intellect conflicts or collides with the corporeal. Rather than reinstate the mind–body dualism that feminists have long argued against, this article grapples with the complicated and complex negotiations embodied knowledge contributes to academic knowledge production. Embodied knowledge is not straightforward, yet should be acknowledged in our academic scholarship and debated about its potential for epistemological and ontological openings in our areas of research.     

A portrait of the chief as a general paralytic: rhetorics of sexual pathology in the Parnell split*

The O’Shea trial and the ensuing fall of Charles Stewart Parnell occupy an epochal position in accounts of the sexual politics of Victorian Britain and the development of Irish nationalism. This article examines how the “Parnell myth” came to serve (and was constructed from the outset) as a symbolic edifice within which anxieties concerning the relationship between Irishness and sexuality could be foregrounded and negotiated. In particular, it will analyse Timothy Healy’s influential post-split denunciations of Parnell, and the rhetoric of sexual contagion through which they were conducted, a campaign which set the discursive terms of twentieth-century mainstream Irish nationalism. Through an analysis of Healy’s post-split journalism, contemporary political memoirs by T.P. O’Connor, and a range of nineteenth-century medical and psychiatric texts, this article will highlight the ways in which discourses of sexual health were used to reshape Parnell’s public persona at the level of gender and ethno-national affiliation. In doing so, it will illustrate how a sensitivity to the history of medicine can enrich critical understandings of a crucial moment in the political and cultural history of Ireland, and shed fresh light on the vexed collocation of Irish identity and sexual purity which the Parnell split reinforced.     

Cultural diplomacy: India does it differently

Abstract

This article reviews the singularities of Indian doctrine and practice of cultural diplomacy, beginning with the observation that this term and the notions of ‘soft power’ and ‘public diplomacy’ commonly associated with cultural diplomacy elsewhere do not have much purchase in India, where the spirit and letter of ‘international cultural relations’ are the preferred currency. The essay explores the historical grounding for this preference, as well as the attitudes and practice that flow from it. Another singularity is the role and importance of the Indian diaspora: overseas populations of Indian origin have been both a significant segment of the target audience for international cultural relations – as if a certain idea of India had to be projected abroad to a part of itself – and a significant ‘co-producer’ in projecting that image. A third is the emergence of a new avatar of the diasporic Indian, now identified with capitalist entrepreneurship.