International relations and foreign policy in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

The Australian Journal of Political Science (AJPS) has evolved from a publication that deliberately relegated articles in international relations (IR) to a secondary status to one that has defined and encouraged leading-edge contributions to that field. This development can be attributed to successive AJPS editorial teams’ realisation that contemporary political problems are increasingly interconnected and that emerging approaches to IR reflect this condition. Several recent and key IR debates that have emerged within the journal’s pages are assigned special attention here: the linking of Australia’s domestic politics to that country’s foreign policy interests and behaviour; in-depth discussions that relate to ongoing trends in the international political economy; critical analysis of national defence and regional security postures; and diverse theoretical perspectives that are increasingly shaping the IR field’s paradigmatic identity. It is concluded that the AJPS is now a leading source of IR thought and discourse.     

Connecting global health interventions and lived experiences: suspending ‘normality’ at funerals in rural Tanzania

In this paper, we use the funeral space and its liminal nature as a milieu for exploring how a ‘modern’ health intervention, the mosquito bednet, is negotiated by its recipients in relation to its (non)-usage in such spaces. With a focus on sleeping arrangements at funerals and drawing on empirical data from participants living in rural southern Tanzania, we discuss how the bednet is linked to the notion of being unsympathetic to the death. Viewed as a symbol of modernity and a reflection of wealth and individual pride, the bednet becomes physically and symbolically inappropriate in the more sacred, ‘in-between’ site of the funeral. We also uncover how risk perceptions regarding malaria transmission are re-cast in funeral spaces, with socio-cultural practices and health-related behaviours being simultaneously ‘risky’ for individual mourners and reinforcing in terms of group social cohesion. As individual mourners' concerns about malaria risks are suspended, notions of pain and discomfort come to the fore as part of the mourning process and respect for the deceased.     

Seal on Land, Elk at Sea: Notes on and Applications of the Ritual Landscape at the Seaboard

Ritual landscapes at sea are marked in the cognitive world of coastal people by a primary antagonism between sea and land. This contrast is negotiated by liminal 'foreign' agents, selected for their symbolic adherence to either part. The primary source of maritime culture is fishing as a survival of past hunter-gatherer societies. Forms of religious or magical management of this contrast are manifold, from recent superstitious magic to powerful symbols in ancient worship, objects, art, architecture and cult. Also described are ways of using the sea on land as a magic metaphor and a fundamental point of reference. Related dichotomies and ways of negotiating them, such as the liminal agent, exist elsewhere in the cognitive world of pre-industrial societies, so these ideas could have applications in archaeology.
© 2005 The Nautical Archaeology Society     

Mothers in the making? Exploring liminality in cyber/space

This paper makes a case for cyberspace and geographical space coexisting simultaneously as an interconnected dyadic cyber/space combining the virtually real and the actually real. Based on empirical evidence from a study examining the role of the Internet in the life of new mothers, we investigate the simultaneity of online/onsite experiences through an exploration of cyberspace as a performative liminal space, one where the women 'tried out' different versions of motherhood. We suggest that liminality, as a concept that can denote both a space and time of 'betweenness', is a useful tool in the virtual geographers 'conceptual handbag' as it enables a more lively understanding of cyberspace. But although cyberspace can result in the production of new selves, these selves have residual attachments to embodied experiences and practices. This suggests that new theorizing about cyber/space must combine a consideration of liminality with everyday corporeality.     

Producing liminal space: gender,age and class in northern Ontario's tree planting industry

Drawing upon qualitative data, this article examines how tree planters in northern Ontario, Canada engage with liminality in terms of gender, class, age and space. In doing so, it provides insight into concepts of gender liminality and the variegated experiences of males and females in liminal space. The article focuses on four aspects of the liminal engagement. First, the spaces of tree planting are liminal as they are marked by homelife and worklife, but dominated by neither. Second, gender performances are liminal, as males perform masculinities seldom necessary or appropriate – yet often valorized – in their permanent communities, while females (who make up nearly half of the workforce) are offered opportunities to work and succeed in a traditionally male industry. However, success often requires that they adopt certain masculine traits. Third, most tree planters are in the interstitial age of ‘youth’, somewhere between adolescence and adulthood. Finally, tree planters are generally members of affluent urban middle-classes, yet the work they perform is more readily associated with rural or peripheral working-classes.     

Nature in the Old Portuguese Lyric

The present article focuses on the role of paratextual elements—epigram, marginal notes, and musical partitures—in Juan Benet's Un viaje de invierno (1976), with special emphasis on their role in the reading process. Gérard Genette's work on paratexts will serve as a helpful entry to my analysis of the Spaniard's novel. When conceived as the components of a liminal space that mediates text and off-text, Benet's paratexts serve to explore and enrich the zona de sombras inherent to his narrative vision. This slippage situates readers on the thresholds of interpretation and underscores the indeterminate quality of aesthetic (re-)creation. The interconnected, and often contentious, “zones” of the work engender multiple readings, vitiate chronology, and reinforce several recurring themes such as alienation, death, and rebirth. The novel brings to the fore the reader's role in negotiating the highly indeterminant components of the text and the paratext. Through this process, Benet eschews the tenets of casticismo and highlights the role of enigma central to his literary theory and praxis.     

Distinction and the Ethics of Violence: On the Legal Construction of Liminal Subjects and Spaces

This paper interrogates the relationship among visibility, distinction, international humanitarian law and ethics in contemporary theatres of violence. After introducing the notions of “civilianization of armed conflict” and “battlespaces”, we briefly discuss the evisceration of one of international humanitarian law's axiomatic figures: the civilian. We show how liberal militaries have created an apparatus of distinction that expands that which is perceptible by subjecting big data to algorithmic analysis, combining the traditional humanist lens with a post‐humanist one. The apparatus functions before, during, and after the fray not only as an operational technology that directs the fighting or as a discursive mechanism responsible for producing the legal and ethical interpretation of hostilities, but also as a force that produces liminal subjects. Focusing on two legal figures—“enemies killed in action” and “human shields”—we show how the apparatus helps justify killing civilians and targeting civilian spaces during war.     

‘Martinique is ours,not theirs!’: framing conflicting identities during the 2009 protests

This article undertakes a close analysis of the general strike that occurred in the French department of Martinique in 2009, which brought most economic activities on the island to a standstill for 38 days. The movement was a privileged site for observing how the integration of Martinique into the French nation state was thwarted by the politics of departmentalisation. The protests created a liminal space that allowed protesters to contest the resilience of colonial discourses and to voice alternative identity narratives. This open space was an integrative space, and the ultimate rhetorical bond that unified the protesters in the performance of communitas. The discussion of this historical event presents an alternative reading to theoretical debates about the multifaceted relationships between nationalism and collective memories in postcolonial settings in general, and on the impacts of social movements in the reconstruction of national identities in particular.     

Spatial segregation and class subjectivity in Turkey

Drawing on ethnographic research in an upper-class district in Turkey, this article examines social and spatial experiences of young low-wage service workers who travel daily back and forth between their homes in low-income neighbourhoods and their jobs in gated communities, upscale shopping malls and corporate offices. The paper argues that the significance of upper class districts or gated communities for urban inequality lies not in the sites themselves, nor the lifestyles of their elite inhabitants as commonly treated in the literature, but rather in the ways in which they relate to the outside and outsiders. Within this framework, the paper analyses the district’s effect on urban spatial segregation and urbanites’ sense of place in society. While resentment and reaction to inequalities and upper class customers are prevalent in young workers’ narratives, workers’ class subjectivities are also marked by a sense of mobility and liminality between the upper middle classes in their work district and their families, friends and neighbours back home. This sense of socio-spatial ‘in-betweenness’ is reinforced by being young, hence a sense of temporal liminality between youth and adulthood. The study contributes to the understanding of urban inequality at the intersection of spatial, emotional and temporal experiences of urbanites.