Shared rivers and conflict – A reconsideration

Neomalthusians have regularly predicted "water wars" while cornucopians have argued that there is no inherent water scarcity and liberal institutionalists have seen cooperation as a more likely outcome of competition for limited water resources than violent conflict. Three earlier studies have found a positive statistical relationship between shared rivers and low-level interstate conflict. Based on a more comprehensive dataset, an improved model of conflict, and a more appropriate control for geographical opportunity, we argue that these results are spurious and that we cannot establish a conflict-inducing effect of shared rivers over and beyond contiguity itself. In fact, the new dataset presented here makes it clear that nearly all neighbors in the international system share at least one river. This calls for a different approach to investigating interaction in shared river basins. This notwithstanding, freshwater and other shared resources may still provide a mechanism to explain why contiguity is robustly associated with conflict, so the water-conflict scenario cannot be dismissed. Indeed, our results show that among river-sharing states, basins with an upstream/downstream configuration increase the risk of conflict. The article finally discusses how river interaction should be further investigated based on these results and what new data are needed to enable such research.     

Greenstone and diabase utilization in the stone age of western Norway: Technological and socio‐cultural aspects of axe and adze production and distribution

The subject of this article is the production and distribution of stone axes and adzes originating from two large Stone Age quarries in western Norway: the greenstone quarry on the small island of Hespriholmen, B?mlo kommune, Hordaland fylke, and the diabase quarry at Stakaneset, Flora kommune, Sogn og Fjordane Fylke. The identification of production sites and distributed products associated with these quarries is based on petrological investigations, both thin‐section and geochemical analyses. Radiocarbon and shoreline datings of debris assemblages and chronological grouping of the distributed artifacts have made it possible to gain control over the time depth and time consistency in the utilization of the two outcrops. Different technological aspects of the production process are discussed on the basis of finds and observations from the quarries and workshop sites. The distribution patterns will be examined with regard to their reflection on cultural continuity and change. Finally, some hypotheses on the social context of production and distribution will be put forward. These include the diffusion mechanisms responsible for the distribution and aspects concerning terri‐toriality and demography as reflected in the distribution patterns.

The results presented here are based on two theses for a master's degree in archaeology at the University of Bergen: ‘Bruk av diabas i vestnorsk steinalder’ (Asle Bruen Olsen 1981) and ‘B?mlo. Steinalderens råstoffsentrum på S?rvestlandet’ (Sigmund Alsaker 1982).     

From Head‐hunter to Organ‐thief: Verisimilitude,Doubt, and Plausible Worlds in Indonesia and Beyond

In the last few years, occult head‐hunters – elusive figures that have haunted communities and the public imagination in Indonesia since at least colonial times – appear to have adopted a novel and troubling tactic. Instead of decapitating their victims and using the heads in construction rituals as they are said to have conventionally done, head‐hunters are now allegedly harvesting their victims’ organs to sell them on the global market of body parts. Based on a comparison of ethnographic material from North Maluku, a province in the eastern part of Indonesia, and news reports in regional and national papers, I trace how accounts about headhunting have morphed with narratives about organ theft. I argue that this plasticity is not a merely a change in symbolic ideas of the occult that reflects changing political and economic realities. Rather, I propose that their turn to organ theft enrols head‐hunters in a contemporary and global ‘travelling package’ that includes and entangles organ trafficking practices, media accounts, political imaginaries, and social anxieties within the same field of reality and possibility, a field of verisimilitude in which fiction and fact, rumour and reality, are fundamentally blurred. The article proposes a ‘more‐than‐representational’ approach to the organ‐stealing head‐hunter that sees him not just as a representation of particular political and historical circumstances but as a co‐producer of these circumstances, of particular political worlds and their attendant scales of anxiety. This approach, I argue, challenges the epistemological distinction between symbolic representation and political reality that informed (but also incommoded) the analyses of headhunting rumours in the 1980s and 1990s – and that continues to inform anthropological analyses of ‘the occult’ more generally.     

Excerpta Lucianea

The paper addresses the scope, ground and force of the critique of writing in the final part of the Phaedrus. It argues that although the critique directly concerns written texts as such, its primary target is rhetorical speeches intended to persuade audiences in matters of ethical and political concern. The ground for this critique is the fixity and under-determination of the written word, features shared by certain non-written “texts”, such as oral poetry, myths and hearsay. These features make these texts problematic for the purpose of instruction in practical wisdom. However, they can to some extent be compensated for by its author ‘s active presence and support.     

Outsiders? A sociological study of Norwegian artists with minority background

Why are there relatively few successful artists from a migrant background in Norway? Based on a study of artists of known migrant backgrounds, we explore this question from the artists’ points of view. We analyze both their social and cultural background, and the mechanisms of exclusion and inclusion at work in Norway’s art world, and especially the interaction between the two. We have concentrated on the dramatic arts: theater and dance. The article presents a theoretically informed analysis of the qualitative material using the sociology of art on the one hand and the sociology of migration and ethnic relations on the other. Further, the empirical analyses are in constant dialog with other Norwegian studies of the art field and the artists themselves. The article presents original findings on the relationship between barriers in young migrants’ backgrounds and impediments to entering and navigating at the field of dramatic arts.     

Diffusion patterns of violence in civil wars

Much of the current conflict literature attempts to explain the occurrence of violence as the result of determinants exogenous to the conflict process. This paper takes a different approach and analyzes how violence in civil wars spreads in space and time, drawing on earlier work on micro-diffusion of violence in criminology as well as high resolution conflict data. Two general scenarios are distinguished in our analysis: the relocation and the escalation of conflict. Relocation diffusion corresponds to a shift in the location of violence, whereas escalation diffusion refers to the spatial expansion of the conflict site. We argue that unconventional warfare in civil wars without demarcated front lines should primarily lead to the second type of pattern. We describe an extension to a joint count statistic to measure both diffusion types in conflict event data. Monte Carlo simulation allows for the establishment of a baseline for the frequency of contiguous conflict events under the assumption of independence, and thus provides a significance test for the observed patterns. Our results suggest that violence in civil wars exhibits patterns of diffusion, and in particular, that these patterns are primarily of the escalation type, driven by the dynamic expansion of the scope of the conflict.