Peace negotiations in the political marketplace: the implications of women's exclusion in the Sudan-South Sudan peace process

This article investigates the implications of women’s exclusion for the nature and durability of peace processes, and whether factors that undermine peace consolidation post-settlement might be prevented through more inclusive peacemaking. It examines the Sudan-South Sudan peace process that produced the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the roles women played in peacemaking and their exclusion from official negotiations, and the sources of insecurity post-CPA. South Sudan’s peace process shows that the exclusion of women can be understood as a canary in a coal mine: a highly visible marker of the broader exclusivity of such processes, and the complex dynamics of elite capture in war and peace processes. Women’s exclusion was the product of the region’s political marketplace, in which power and authority is secured by elites through violence and bargaining, to the exclusion of other groups. By understanding exclusion as a deliberate strategic tactic that extends from war into peacetime, I argue that the exclusion of women is not the reason why peace processes fail in and of itself, but rather the product of elite ownership of peace processes and the structure of many peace processes that facilitates and rewards such ownership, with serious consequences for the sustainability of peace post-settlement.     

Atomic structures: the architecture of nuclear nationalism in India and Pakistan

Abstract

A half-century after their completion, India’s Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) and the Pakistan Institute of Nuclear Science and Technology (PINSTECH) stand out as unchallenged architectural advertisements for ‘nuclear nationalism’. Elsewhere, Atoms for Peace reactors made no pretence to architectural refinement. In the right hands, however, ‘Cold War Modern’ could express the hard power of the nuclear age. For India and Pakistan, these nuclear laboratory complexes became the public faces of the peaceful atom that held out the promise, and masked the peril, of the atomic age at home and abroad, and deliberately deflected attention away from clandestine nuclear weapons programmes. BARC and PINSTECH, envisioned as cornerstones for self-confident and self-reliant programmes of nuclear physics, embodied the paradox of postcolonial science, necessarily borrowing from the West but determined to break the cycle of dependency, in defiance of Western expectations.     

Human rights and the development of a twenty-first century peace architecture: unintended consequences?

The ‘long peace’ of the last twenty-five years has linked various forms of intervention—from development to peacebuilding and humanitarian intervention—with human rights. This ‘interventionary system/order’ model has premised its legitimate authority on expanded versions of human rights, connected to liberal frameworks of democracy, rule of law, and capitalism in order to connect peace more closely with justice. Human rights offer a tactical way forward for those interested in conflict resolution, but this has led to unintended consequences. Unless conceptions of rights are continually expanded as new power structures and inequalities are uncovered and challenged, philosophical and material matters of distributive and historical justice will remain.     

Mediating anti-political peace in Abidjan: Radio,place and power

After a decade of conflict (1999–2011), peace-building in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, focused on the local as a primary site of reconciliation. In addition to being local, peace was anti-political, seeking to separate place from politics as autonomous realms of public life. Through the example of local radio peace programmes, this article offers a critical, ethnographic account of anti-political peace as a spatial process. It links local peace and its justifications to the operations of governmental power, emphasising continuities of anti-political mediation and political domination. Such a historicised perspective challenges the framing of anti-political peace as the opposite of politics-as-conflict: they have long been two sides of the same coin in Abidjan and, as a binary “choice,” prevent the search for more democratic alternatives. Simultaneously, I argue that anti-political peace it is best approached as a field of contest. An ethnographic approach acknowledges the widespread rejection of politics in the Ivoirian metropolis, while resisting the collapse of institutional and everyday perspectives into a self-reinforcing consensus. I show that radio producers and Abidjanais residents could not quite pin down the meaning of politics, as that which ought to be shunned. Rather than bypass these hesitations through normative or ontological reasoning, I suggest (following others) that we might treat politics' irreducible polysemy as a source of continued struggle.     

Power to the people: when culture works as a social catalyst in urban regeneration processes (and when it does not)

This article focuses upon the relationship between culture, urban regeneration schemes, and their impact on socio-cognitive assets – namely, social and human capital. It examines three major urban regeneration projects in the districts of Saint Michel (Montreal, Canada), Auburn (Sydney, Australia) and Bicocca (Milan, Italy), where culture has been invoked as a main transformational driver at the economic and socio-environmental levels, but with different approaches and results. Through comparative analysis, we develop a more general reflection on the social impact of culture-led urban transformation processes, questioning the actual role of cultural initiatives – particularly those related to the creation of new cultural facilities and the programming of big cultural flagship events – and participation as a means to improve the local social milieu. We find that a key role for social efficacy is played by projects’ capacity to elicit the commitment of residents through inclusive cultural participation, as opposed to instrumental top-down initiatives mainly addressing city and neighbourhood branding and real estate marketing purposes.     

Empires for Peace: Denis Veiras’s Borrowings from Garcilaso de la Vega

Writing The History of the Sevarambians in the 1670s, the Huguenot Denis Veiras borrowed many ideas from Garcilaso de la Vega, also known as El Inca, whose Royal Commentaries of the Incas was published in 1609. Both works describe the history of an empire and justify it on the ground that it brought peace and unity. While Garcilaso’s book purported to be a history, his selection of facts reflected his goal of improving the treatment of the Incas by the Spanish. Veiras’s story also claimed to be a history, but it was transparently a fiction, even to the point of lifting many elements from Garcilaso’s book. What both works equally emphasized was that empires could aim at, and could be justified by, the benefits they provided their subjects. Both tell stories of benevolent and paternalistic rulers who founded nearly ideal societies in the countries they conquered. These were models of empire for peace and unity rather than merely promoting toleration of differences or concord among differing parties. Veiras’s utopia thus offers an instructive case study of the effects of cross-cultural borrowings of literary and political ideas.     

Recovering social and cultural dynamics from plaster floors: chemical analyses at ancient Chunchucmil,Yucatan, Mexico

Phosphate analysis and trace metals analysis were used to determine activities that took place on plaster floors in domestic contexts at the ancient Maya site of Chunchucmil, Yucatan. Research on activities and the use of space contributes to an understanding of social relations within household groups as well as unforeseen patterns that structure refuse discard. The floors analyzed in this paper pertain to three structures in two neighboring houselots dating to the Early Classic (300–600 A.D.) period. Data from the chemical analyses were utilized in conjunction with associated architectural features and artifacts found on the floors. These three lines of information were interpreted with the help of models developed from ethnographic and ethnoarchaeological research. The results demonstrated functional differentiation of rooms within elaborate residences and suggested that front rooms were used to host visitors. The results also suggested that different types of debris were managed differently. Finally, chemical analyses suggest that non-elite Maya occasionally enacted rituals often restricted to elites.     

Dangerous Places and Wild Spaces: Creating Meaning with Materials and Space at Contemporary Maya Shrines on El Duende Mountain

Ethnoarchaeological observations at Maya shrines on a sacred mountain suggest that three potent material strategies imbue ritual practices with different social meanings: 1) the use of different types of materials as offerings in various rites, 2) the ways in which the physical conditions of an offering are altered during deposition, and 3) the choice of location where the offering is deposited within the site relative to a ceremonial focal point. Through these strategies, individuals creatively negotiate limited access to material resources and assign diverse meanings to the material culture, practices, and places of ritual. Materials that represent commoners' rituals may primarily consist of quotidian items that are transformed in meaning by how and where they are deposited into an archaeological context.     

Gas breakthrough experiments on fine-grained sedimentary rocks

The capillary sealing efficiency of fine‐grained sedimentary rocks has been investigated by gas breakthrough experiments on fully water saturated claystones and siltstones (Boom Clay from Belgium, Opalinus Clay from Switzerland and Tertiary mudstone from offshore Norway) of different lithological compositions. Sand contents of the samples were consistently below 12%, major clay minerals were illite and smectite. Porosities determined by mercury injection lay between 10 and 30% while specific surface areas determined by nitrogen adsorption (BET method) ranged from 20 to 48 m² g ^{? 1}. Total organic carbon contents were below 2%. Prior to the gas breakthrough experiments the absolute (single phase) permeability (k_abs) of the samples was determined by steady state flow tests with water or NaCl brine. The k_abs values ranged between 3 and 550 nDarcy (3 × 10^?21 and 5.5 × 10^?19 m²). The maximum effective permeability to the gas‐phase (k_eff) measured after gas breakthrough on initially water‐saturated samples extended from 0.01 nDarcy (1 × 10^?23 m²) up to 1100 nDarcy (1.1 × 10^?18 m²). The residual differential pressures after re‐imbibition of the water phase, referred to as the ‘minimum capillary displacement pressures’ (P_d), ranged from 0.06 to 6.7 MPa. During the re‐imbibition process the effective permeability to the gas phase decreases with decreasing differential pressure. The recorded permeability/pressure data were used to derive the pore size distribution (mostly between 8 and 60 nm) and the transport porosity of the conducting pore system (10^‐5–10^‐2%). Correlations could be established between (i) absolute permeability coefficients and the maximum effective permeability coefficients and (ii) effective or absolute permeability coefficients and capillary sealing efficiency. No correlation was found between the capillary displacement pressures determined from gas breakthrough experiments and those derived theoretically by mercury injection.     

The Chun Doo-Hwan Authoritarian Regime’s Securitisation of Water: The Case of the Peace Dam,South Korea

This article explores the securitisation of water aimed at avoiding a political crisis for the Chun Doo-Hwan regime in South Korea (1979–1988) using the case of the Peace Dam. The legitimacy of the Chun regime was vulnerable because of diverse factors such as internal and external crises inherited from the previous regime and Chun’s rise to power through a military coup and civilian massacres. In this political situation, the securitisation of nature could be an effective method of curbing potential resistance and ruling a people facing a complex crisis. The constructed threat of an attack by flooding by North Korea and the consequent alleged need for the Peace Dam were part of a scheme by Chun to maintain political power through the securitisation of water, specifically by establishing North Korea as an external enemy and unifying the South Korean people.