Spain and the Partition Treaties (1697–1700)

This study takes an analytical approach to the diplomatic strategy adopted by the Spanish monarchy in confronting the challenge it faced associated with the Partition Treaties that were signed by Louis XIV, William III and the United Provinces in 1698 and 1700. By consulting Spanish sources to complete the understanding of the diplomatic process, this study analyses the political action that Spain mobilized in its defence around 1700 and describes the evolution of Spain's foreign policy as the product of the mistrust that had developed between the main powers of Europe. This mistrust was politically answered by Madrid with Carlos II's last will and other planned measures to ensure the viability of the project that contained a turning point in the policy underlying the alliances of the monarchy. Although, like that of the other powers, Spain's manoeuvrability was restricted, this study concludes that Spain was able to create policy action plans and rationally implement them; moreover, the dynamics resulting from the negotiation and signing of the Partition Treaties led the monarchy to oppose them at all costs and naturally led to the choice of a French heir as its only solution.     

Using cultural trauma: Gandhi's assassination,partition and secular nationalism in post‐independence India

Nationalism theorists have noted the link between traumatic events and national identity, and cultural trauma theory presents a framework for understanding how these events become trauma narratives. I argue for greater consideration of how these narratives are strategically linked to ideological frames of national identity. A case study of post‐Independence India considering the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi and the Partition of India and Pakistan demonstrates how two very different events were promoted as cultural traumas by various carrier groups in order to promote a secular vision of the Indian nation. Adapting Armstrong and Crage (2006), I suggest that the success of these trauma narratives depend on several criteria: the ease of narrating the event, how it is linked to underlying cultural meanings/frames and how the event interacts with historical contingencies.     

The role of the Irish boundary commission in the entrenchment of the Irish border: from tactical panacea to political liability

The abortive saga of the Irish Boundary Commission has largely been dismissed as a minor footnote that warrants little elaboration in the discussion of Ireland's partition. This is unsurprising considering that its final report was hastily suppressed so as to prevent the destabilisation of the nascent regimes in Northern Ireland and the then Irish Free State. However, the concept of the Commission derives from the intensifying controversies of Irish Home Rule and partition, and the consequent difficulties in establishing how and where a boundary was eventually drawn as well as to the status of the entities it would be dividing. The Commission was legally conceived in Article 12 of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty but confusion over its wording protracted a sequence of events that ensured that it was almost three years before it actually met. Article 12 was eventually interpreted in a restrictive manner, which exposed inherent flaws that were either ignored or naively underestimated when it was originally adapted from part of the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles. Furthermore, the complexities of evidence were inadequately scrutinised by a small and under-resourced panel that operated under considerable political pressure to delimit a precise line that satisfied subjective terms of reference. Nevertheless, the revoked Commission served as a crucial catalyst in defining the Irish Free State's relationship with the British State and in entrenching the territorial framework of Northern Ireland's six counties that exists to this day.     

The persistence of partition: Boundary-making,imperialism, and international law

This article implores political geographers to engage with the sub-discipline's imperial roots in which international law was foundational. It does so by revisiting the practice of partition – defined here as an imposed boundary – which remains central to historical and current-day imperialism. This is the case, both regarding longstanding partitions, such as Northern Ireland, Kashmir, the Chagos Islands/British Indian Ocean Territory, Cyprus, Korea, and Western Sahara, and with regard to proposals to impose new partitions in Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Palestine, and in the South China Sea. By adopting an historical perspective on the geopolitics of bordering, partition can be understood as an imposed boundary, in which the negotiators, to the extent they were consulted, were not presented with a free choice. Partitions in colonial situations only became illegal during the height of decolonization and the Cold War confrontation with the West, when the Soviet Union and Third World succeeded in modifying international law in a way that required the colonial powers to obtain the consent of the representatives of the communities whose territories they proposed to partition. As the world enters a more uncertain period, with increasing geopolitical competition, partition could make a comeback, in various guises, in which it may become necessary to pass judgment on the legality of partition, and not just its efficacy.     

Imperialism and nationalism: The Home Rule struggle and border creation in Ireland, 1885–1925

This article explores relationships between imperialism and nationalism, illustrated by their interactions in the struggle over devolved Irish ‘Home Rule’ and partition between 1885 and 1925. Ireland's partition border was primarily an imperial creation shaped by the prolonged, complex and unequal interactions between Irish nationalism and British imperialism. But partition was by no means an inevitable outcome of a mutually constitutive and ambiguous relationship where British imperialism had long characterised Ireland as a frontier zone but one within the core of empire. The Irish case serves as a reminder of the role of imperial arbitration in modern state and nation-building, and also in sowing the seeds of contemporary conflicts. This argument draws on the recent ‘re-discovery of imperialism’ and is advanced as a corrective to reading history backwards through the lenses of contemporary national states. It challenges the tendency to draw overly sharp temporal and spatial distinctions between imperialism and nationalism as rival ideologies and practices.     

Capacity Evaluation of Typical Stud-Track Screw Connections in Nonstructural Walls

A series of component-level experiments have been conducted aiming to evaluate the force and displacement capacities of typical stud-track screw connections (STCs) in steel-framed partition walls. The variables considered in these experiments included screw-edge distances, loading protocols (monotonic or cyclic), and stud and track thicknesses. The experimental data was then utilized to develop different capacity fragility curves for STCs in terms of displacements. A series of analytical STC hinge models were also proposed and validated using this data. The hinge models can be adopted in future studies to develop a comprehensive analytical model for a typical partition wall assembly.     

The necessary indeterminacy of self‐determination: Politics,law and conflict in the Horn of Africa

This article frames a themed collection on Nationalism and Self‐determination in the Horn of Africa. It demonstrates how the praxis of self‐determination in the Horn of Africa has contributed to normative developments. On the basis of case studies of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Sudan/South Sudan this article argues that nationalism and self‐determination have had different meanings in the political cultures across the different countries and have changed over time. We contend that such indeterminacy is unavoidable and should be welcomed. Nationalism is driven by historical circumstances that are contingent and often transitory. Self‐determination claims based on such nationalism are equally contingent and transitory. When the principle of self‐determination gets translated into concrete legal entitlements (for instance, a referendum on independence), it tends to solve one problem only by creating others. Instead, the pursuit and realization of self‐determination require constant political processes.     

Notes on the Zionist passage to India,or: The analogical imagination and its boundaries

This article provides an outline of an alternative narrative of the Zionist road to statehood by reading the parallel histories of partition and state-making in the British Raj in India and Mandatory Palestine/Israel in tandem. After reviewing some of the recent scholarship on the subject, the article demonstrates how the reconstruction of an analogical prism among the historical actors can contribute to the understanding of the roots of partition politics transnationally. Lastly, it points at the way in which the analogical perspective became part and parcel of the bureaucracy and legislation developed post-partition by the new states.     

Deducing rationales and political tactics in the partitioning of Ireland, 1912–1925

Partition is an intrinsically abstract and simplistic blunt instrument applied on a complex mosaic of peculiarities that constitute reality. There are very few modern states that are ethnically or culturally homogenous. In this context, partition is a subjective territorial tactic that can treat or exacerbate symptoms of historical, political, and geographical difficulties. While exhibiting comparative scope, especially to the role of the British State and the dynamics of national majorities and minorities, the circumstances concerning the partitioning of Ireland deviate from patterns gleaned from other examples as the evolving bases of its partition between 1912 and 1925 mutated at various stages with regard to geography, political status, and function. However, Ireland served as an important historical precedent in illustrating the disparity between the original intent and eventual result of its partition. Indeed, one can extrapolate from the Irish example that partition is better understood as a catalytic tactical process that radically reconfigures the political and geographical dimensions of conflict rather than as a decisive political instrument solving it.     

Putting the border in place: customs regulation in the making of the Irish border, 1921–1945

This paper explores the historical geography of the making of the Irish border through a focus on the practices of customs regulation through which it was constituted and on the impeded, permitted and concealed mobilities of people and objects across the customs boundary after 1923. It traces how legislative change at the level of the state – in this case the governments of the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom – was translated into the routine practices of those trying to regulate the movement of people and objects across the customs boundary, and considers the responses of those subject to, and regularly subverting, these efforts. Drawing on recent interests in the prosaic practices of the state, and in materiality and mobility more widely, our focus is both on the work of political power at the border through the practices, texts, tools and techniques of customs regulation, and on the experience and effects of customs control for those living near the newly defined line between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State.