'A milestone in the history of the EU': Kosovo and the EU's international role

The Kosovo war was a decisive catalyst in the development of the EU's international security role. The escalating crisis in Kosovo confirmed that the EU was still unable to prevent, contain or end violent conflict along its own borders. This led the EU to augment both its hard and soft power through the launch of the European Security and Defence Policy and the Stabilisation and Association Process. These initiatives endowed the EU with the potential to make a distinct contribution to international conflict management. Unsurprisingly, this continuing transformation has encountered significant obstacles relating to capabilities, political will and coordination. Concerns have also been raised about how the development of a military dimension has changed the nature of EU power. However, the EU has not abandoned the core principle upon which its international role was founded, namely the need to transcend conflict. Ten years after its failings in Kosovo, the EU is assuming increasing responsibility for conflict management and becoming a more capable international security actor.     

The ‘new home front’ and the war on terror: ethical and political reframing of national and international politics

This article adopts the notion of the ‘new home front’ to consider the spatial complexity of the war on terror and the blurring of domestic and foreign policy divides. It considers the politics and ethics of the war in three main areas: new media and everyday life; liberalism under strain; and citizens’ lives, multiculturalism and gender. It discusses the increasing role of horizontal (bottom up) influences alongside vertical (top down) ones, not least in the context of new media, which adds the sociospatial (virtual) realm of online communications to the familiar geospatial (physical) world of politics. Implications of the extended nature of the war on terror are assessed, as well as the potential for developments that have been part of it to impact on the broader sphere of liberal international politics in the future.     

The futures past of the Women,Peace and Security agenda

The Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda has developed at the United Nations over the course of the past 15 years, and there have been critical engagements with it for nearly as long. In this article, we first take stock of the operationalization of the WPS agenda, reviewing its implementation across a number of sectors. In the second section, we expose the tensions that have marked the WPS agenda from the start. With others, we argue that there has been a narrowing of the agenda's original scope, reducing it to the traditional politics of security rather than reimagining what security means. We highlight this reduction primarily through an analysis of the tension between the ‘participation’ and ‘protection’ pillars of the agenda. Further, we argue that the WPS agenda faces a current challenge in terms of the actors entrusted with it. Although in some ways involving civil society, the consolidations and implementation of WPS principles at the national and international levels have become increasingly state‐centric. Third, we imagine some possible futures of the agenda, from a trajectory characterized by increasing marginalization or even irrelevance, to new avenues like the emergent, albeit tentative, ‘Men, Peace and Security’ agenda. We close with an argument for a revival of the WPS agenda beyond a fixation on states, beyond a narrow heteronormative or essentialist focus on the ‘Women’ of the WPS resolutions, and moving towards the radical reimagining of security as peace that inspired the original architects of these important resolutions.     

Engendering the Slum: Photography in East London in the 1930s

Photographs are not truthful records of reality. They are images that are always interpreted, and this essay looks at some critical interpretations of photographs taken in the 1930s of white working-class women in the streets of East London. It pays particular attention to two current critiques that tend to address two different kinds of photographs (and in so doing to constitute them as distinct genres): a Foucauldian account of photography as a form of disciplining surveillance, and a Lacanianinfluenced analysis of photography as a disruptive reminder of absence and death. By examining documentary photographs and family snapshots from the East End in the 1930s I argue, first, that both of these critical accounts require an explicit consideration of the constitution of sexual difference, since both implicitly reproduce regressive visions of (working-class) femininities. Secondly, I argue that feminist revisions of both should be deployed together in order to effect a destabilising critique of the constitution of sexual difference through photographs. I elaborate that argument by considering a third series of photographs, commissioned by Stepney Borough Council in 1937 to record housing condemned as slums in the borough. In discussing that series, I suggest that through its organisation of the spatiality and corporeality of the women photographed outside their houses that were to be demolished, a radically uncertain femininity is conjured.     

THE CROW DOWN HOARD, LAMBOURN, WEST BERKSHIRE

Summary.   The discovery of a hoard of five middle Bronze Age gold objects during a metal-detecting rally on the Lambourn Downs in 2004 precipitated an archaeological investigation into their character, provenance and context. This article describes the objects themselves, their composition, how they were made and their archaeological background. It also reports the result of forensic archaeological work undertaken on them. The parallels for the objects and the social context of their deposition are discussed.     

WOAD, TATTOOING AND IDENTITY IN LATER IRON AGE AND EARLY ROMAN BRITAIN

Summary. This paper explores the archaeological evidence for the practice of facial and corporeal dyeing, painting and tattooing in the later Iron Age and early Roman period. The aim is to construct a hypothesis which explains how, why, when and by whom such pigments were worn. Although this hypothesis discusses woad-derived indigo, this is used mainly, although not exclusively, as an experimental tool, as no conclusive archaeological evidence exists which reveals the identity of the 'real' pigment(s). Woad has also long held a place in the popular imagination as the source of the dye which the ancient Britons used to paint themselves.
This paper explores the possibility that the cosmetic grinder was the focal artefact used in body painting or tattooing, and was used for grinding and mixing body and face paint. It is suggested that, rather than being a 'Roman'-style tool for cosmetic application from the start, it may have begun life as an artefact first used by the later Iron Age Britons for body painting and expressing indigenous identities.