Territorialising Movement Parties: The Case of Nuevo Encuentro in Buenos Aires

How and why do political parties, seemingly focused on electoral politics, also mobilise within contentious arenas? Drawing on qualitative research with a centre-left Argentine party called Nuevo Encuentro (NE) in the city of Buenos Aires this paper demonstrates the importance of a geographical reading of “movement parties” for responding to this question. Specifically, the paper analyses NE’s territorialisation, understood as a strategy for organisation building via the political appropriation of space, typically by opening branches and mobilising activists in neighbourhoods. Between 2007 and 2019 NE’s strategy of territorialisation mobilised across multiple scales—the neighbourhood, city and national—yet in so doing its organisation became overstretched and struggled to engage across both contentious and electoral arenas. Through an analysis of NE’s territorialisation, grounded in the historical and geographical context of contemporary Argentina, the paper provides an original attempt to spatialise the concept of movement party.     

A Man and a Perpetuum Mobile? Assigned Hermaphrodite Andreas Bruce's Memoirs

This article presents the memoirs of Andreas Bruce, a Swedish man that was assigned female sex at birth and later re-assigned sex as a male hermaphrodite. His memoirs, written by the end of the nineteenth century, are unique. They exhibit a rare example of what life could be like for gender transgressors during the nineteenth century. According to the memoirs, Bruce's transition and legal gender recognition was the source of some attention, but once he had gained a certificate of hermaphroditism and a male first name, his masculinity seldom seems to have been contested. Bruce navigates between describing himself as an ordinary man and describing his life story as unique.     

A geometric morphometric relationship predicts stone flake shape and size variability

The archaeological record represents a window onto the complex relationship between stone artefact variance and hominin behaviour. Differences in the shapes and sizes of stone flakes—the most abundant remains of past behaviours for much of human evolutionary history—may be underpinned by variation in a range of different environmental and behavioural factors. Controlled flake production experiments have drawn inferences between flake platform preparation behaviours, which have thus far been approximated by linear measurements, and different aspects of overall stone flake variability (Dibble and Rezek J Archaeol Sci 36:1945–1954, 2009; Lin et al. Am Antiq 724–745, 2013; Magnani et al. J Archaeol Sci 46:37–49, 2014; Rezek et al. J Archaeol Sci 38:1346–1359, 2011). However, when the results are applied to archaeological assemblages, there remains a substantial amount of unexplained variability. It is unclear whether this disparity between explanatory models and archaeological data is a result of measurement error on certain key variables, whether traditional analyses are somehow a general limiting factor, or whether there are additional flake shape and size drivers that remain unaccounted for. To try and circumvent these issues, here, we describe a shape analysis approach to assessing stone flake variability including a newly developed three-dimensional geometric morphometric method (‘3DGM’). We use 3DGM to demonstrate that a relationship between platform and flake body governs flake shape and size variability. Contingently, we show that by using this 3DGM approach, we can use flake platform attributes to both (1) make fairly accurate stone flake size predictions and (2) make relatively detailed predictions of stone flake shape. Whether conscious or instinctive, an understanding of this geometric relationship would have been critical to past knappers effectively controlling the production of desired stone flakes. However, despite being able to holistically and accurately incorporate three-dimensional flake variance into our analyses, the behavioural drivers of this variance remain elusive.     

Counter-narratives of coping and becoming: Karen refugee women’s inside/outside figured worlds

The purpose of our research is to understand the socially and culturally constructed architecture within which refugee women produce and negotiate identity. This ethnographic case study discusses findings from data collected through participant observation and informal interviews in two refugee camps along the Thai-Burma border. As Karen refugee women described their positionality within and negotiation between the socially constructed Inside and Outside Figured Worlds of the refugee camp, they depict the negotiation of a hybrid Third Space. Created at the intersection of the refugee camp structures that dominate individual agency and the discourses of gender and displacement that influence the social practices of women, this third space is characterized by the response strategies Karen women engage to support individual, family, and community health. Within the transformational spaces that refugee women constructed, the processes of coping and becoming reflected the relationship between structure and agency. Within these intersections a woman could express her resistance to a system that in its design represented a majority she was not a part of. As Karen refugee women moved to redesign their position within these systems, shifts in meaning of cultural norms resulted, inclusive of those that influence or define the role of women.     

Middle-power definitions: confusion reigns supreme

Renewed interest in middle powers since the late 2000s has seen a surge in research. Yet an agreed definition is more elusive than ever. This compromises the ability to pursue meaningful research programs, communicate practical policy advice, and instruct future generations. Why is an agreed definition so elusive and how can this challenge be overcome? The author contends that the definition of the term ‘middle power’ has evolved to be less about discovering either ‘the meaning of a word’ or ‘the nature of a thing’ in the pursuit of knowledge, and more about persuasion, influence, coercion and, ultimately, the exercise of power. An alternative approach to definition offers the best hope to address this challenge. With this objective, the author first looks into the nature and criteria for definition in the social sciences. Second, he looks at the structure of contemporary attempts to redefine the term. Third, he analyses definitional ruptures to shed light on the rhetorical import of contests. Finally, the author turns to rhetorical theory to offer an alternative approach to the definition of the term ‘middle power’.