Riding the Rhino: Conservation,Conflicts, and Militarisation of Kaziranga National Park in Assam

Since 2004, media and public opinion in Assam (India) have focused on increasing instances of poaching of rhinoceros for their horns and presence of Bengali‐speaking Muslim peasants, especially in and around the iconic Kaziranga National Park. From hastily made digital films, to anti‐poaching motifs at Durga Puja pandals, the plight of the rhinoceros has occupied an important position in an acrimonious political discourse on Assamese culture. The innocence and dignity attributed to the animal stands in marked contrast to the lack of discussion on the large numbers of young men who have been killed in anti‐poaching campaigns by the state. This article looks at the interstices of class, culture and commerce in an attempt to understand the popular deification of the rhinoceros and implications of the developmental discourse that seeks to put people and rhino in their “rightful” place.     

Border collapse and boundary maintenance: militarisation and the micro-geographies of violence in Israel–Palestine

Drawing upon subaltern geopolitics and feminist geography, this article explores how militarisation shapes micro-geographies of violence and occupation in Israel–Palestine. While accounts of spectacular and large-scale political violence dominate popular imaginaries and academic analyses in/of the region, a shift to the micro-scale foregrounds the relationship between power, politics and space at the level of everyday life. In the context of Israel–Palestine, micro-geographies have revealed dynamic strategies for ‘getting by’ or ‘dealing with’ the occupation, as practiced by Palestinian populations in the face of spatialised violence. However, this article considers how Jewish Israelis actively shape the spatial micro-politics of power within and along the borders of the Israeli state. Based on 12 months of ethnographic research in Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem during 2010–2011, an analysis of everyday narratives illustrates how relations of violence, occupation and domination rely upon gendered dynamics of border collapse and boundary maintenance. Here, the borders between home front and battlefield break down at the same time as communal boundaries are reproduced, generating conditions of ‘total militarism’ wherein military interests and agendas are both actively and passively diffused. Through gendering the militarised micro-geographies of violence among Jewish Israelis, this article reveals how individuals construct, navigate and regulate the everyday spaces of occupation, detailing more precisely how macro political power endures.     

The present tense of Afghanistan: accounting for space,time and gender in processes of militarisation

Based on ethnographic research among women married to servicemen, this article explores the diffusion of militarisation across time as well as social space. The study setting is a garrison town in Germany during the deployment of women's husbands to Afghanistan. Rather than prioritising the grand narratives of linear time prevalent in IR and military history, however, this article takes into account cyclical and everyday modes of temporality that have traditionally been associated (and undervalued) as feminised ‘zones’, including reproduction, the domestic sphere and local social space. The article explores the temporal register of an operational tour and demonstrates the material, discursive and emotional labour undertaken by military wives in smoothing and converting this rupture into stability through everyday practices. Accounting for the diffusion of militarisation over time as well as space in this way provides further evidence that its causes and effects are intricately gendered.     

Health geography in Canada: where are we headed?

This paper overviews the emergence of medical/health geography in Canada. The paper discusses the key questions that Canadian health geographers have explored in the past two decades, how these enquiries have featured in the field and how they contribute to the wider discourse of human geography. It also addresses questions on emerging themes and where Canadian health geography will go in the years ahead. With shifting health landscapes in terms of changes in social, political and physical environments, and changes in health care restructuring, Canadian health geographers are entering a new phase of research, teaching and policy. The complexity of the questions that health geographers seek to address means it is necessary to continue to highlight the policy implications of their findings. Health geographers need to emphasize the public agenda through interdisciplinary research and by continuing to work with geographers in other subfields.     

Some Napoleonic-style army camps from the period of the Dutch-Belgian separation (1830–1839) in the Southern Netherlands

This paper focuses on the period of the political separation of the Netherlands and Belgium (1830–1839). Both countries were in a state of war for almost a decade, which resulted in massive troop deployments along their borders and the militarisation of the landscape. The principal objects of study are the Dutch army camps at Rijen and Oirschot near the Belgian border, which to date have barely received any scholarly attention. Both camps were almost 2 km across and offered accommodation to up to 12,000 infantry soldiers. They will be studied from an archaeological-historical perspective, focusing on the spatial and social dimensions of the camps and their place in the wider landscape. The camps are representative of the final stage of pre-industrial warfare in Europe, which is characterised by a continuation of many eighteenth century and Napoleonic traditions.     

Militarisation as diffusion: the politics of gender,space and the everyday

Drawing together the work of five feminist scholars whose research spans diverse sociopolitical contexts, this themed section questions militarisation as a fixed condition. Using feminist methodologies to explore the spatialised networks and social mechanisms through which militarisation is sustained and resisted, ‘gendering’ militarisation reveals a complex politics of diffusion at work in a range of everyday power relations. However, diffusion acts not as a unidirectional movement across a border, but as the very contingency which makes militarisation – and transformation – possible. Through connecting the empirical and theoretical work on militarisation with feminist geographies, the authors in this collection highlight the influence of military thinking and institutions, not as static structures, but instead as productive sites.     

Homogenisation,nationalism and war: should we still read Ernest Gellner?*

ABSTRACT. Is homogenising nationalism a consequence of industrialisation? This view has been most forcefully and systematically advanced by Ernest Gellner. The article contests this approach by focusing instead on militarism and militarisation. It therefore identifies the key role of the mass army as presaging the era of mass nationalism and cultural homogenisation. Drawing on a range of authors from history, sociology and political science, the relationship is found to be reciprocal and symbiotic. A preliminary exploration on the possibility of early modern (or pre‐modern) forms of cultural homogenisation is preceded by a critical assessment of Gellner's interchangeable use of the terms culture, language and ethnicity.