The many shades of grey in urban governance: How illegality shapes urban planning,policy and development

Most research on urban planning, policy and development only considers legal practices and actors, and treats illegal ones as insignificant anomalies, unable to structurally affect the governance of urban space. However, this approach is inadequate for explaining urban governance in contexts (e.g. several countries in the Global South, the former Soviet bloc and Southern Europe) where illegal practices such as corruption and organized crime infiltration are widespread in many public and economic sectors. This paper addresses the role of illegal actors and practices in urban governance in the Italian context, using urban regime theory as the theoretical frame of reference. The research centres on the analysis of two case studies in the city of Rome (the In-between world investigation of a criminal network that had infiltrated the local administration and shaped several urban policies, and the investigation of episodes of corruption related to the project for the new A.S. Roma soccer stadium). It shows the existence of two shades of ‘grey urban governance’: firstly, the presence of a dark urban regime, centred on a criminal organisation and parallel to the ‘regular’ one; secondly, the use of corruption as a customary practice with which real estate entrepreneurs influence municipal decisions. Overall, this research contributes to moving away from a rhetoric of ‘gentlemanly’ urban capitalism and politics, and suggests the need to revise several aspects of urban regime theory – as well as other approaches to urban governance dynamics in general – in order to incorporate the role of illegal actors and practices.     

文化地理学视角下跨国移民饮食适应研究进展与启示

全球化进程下,跨国移民成为不同地域间文化交流、冲突和再协商的主要载体,其在地饮食适应问题尤为凸显。本文回顾了国内外跨国移民饮食适应的研究,发现由营养学等范式主导的早期研究偏重对饮食适应水平的直接观测,较少探究饮食适应的身体属性、地方关系以及文化意涵。文化地理学视角下的跨国移民饮食适应的相关研究进展主要包括以下三个方面：身体尺度下的动态饮食适应过程、地方尺度下跨国饮食景观的生产与重构,以及身体与地方交互尺度下饮食适应与身份认同的复杂关系。本文最后针对当前研究的主要不足提出未来跨国移民饮食适应研究的可能议题。     

Punishing wars of aggression: conceptualising Nazi State criminality and the US policy behind shaping the crime against peace, 1943-1945

This paper refocuses attention on what has been seen as one of the most important limbs of the Nuremberg Charter – the crime against peace, or aggressive war. It looks at the legal and political dimensions that motivated such a characterisation by figures behind the debate, and the various, at times uncertain steps, in bringing forth the designation based on breaches of the Kellogg–Briand Pact within the milieu of other traditional offences. Particular attention is given to the philosophical underpinnings of the crime against peace regarding individual German guilt, notably members of the Nazi leadership, with an examination of influences that proved critical in creating a punishable crime at international law. This paper argues that, despite being of continuing interest to civic groups, such an offence continues to trouble legislators and lawyers, rooted as it is in the focus on war as itself criminal.     

‘Assisting you to become a local’: NGOs and constructed foreign spouses in Eastern Taiwan

As social and cultural contexts change and globalization spreads, the number of transnational-marriage migrants mainly from Southeast Asia has increased in Taiwan. Using institutional ethnography, this article investigates the roles of local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and projects aimed at helping foreign spouses to adapt to their new life. I mainly elaborate that NGOs emerge as important actors in assisting and empowering transnational spouses to ‘become locals’. In empowerment projects, foreign spouses are given a voice to elaborate themselves. However, this article elaborates that these projects are a scheme of education to shape each such migrant into a proper ‘Taiwanese wife/mother/daughter-in-law’. Also, these projects particularly promote ‘exoticism’ of migrants and become key sources of how local people understand the images of ‘foreign spouses’. As a result, though NGOs play positive roles in empowering foreign spouses, we need to be aware that NGOs’ efforts may ironically become a mechanism to strengthen transnational spouses’ gender roles and cultural stereotypes.     

La Méditerranée solide: un espace double en construction

There exists a space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’. This concept was first proposed by the Annales’s co-founder Lucien Febvre in 1944–45, during a course on Europe in the longue durée. The flexible borders of this double space, both conceptual and contextual, remain in construction within the on-going and global reality of the solid Mediterranean’s space. The comparative history of European societies promoted during the interwar period by Marc Bloch, the other Annales founder, contributes to the construction of said space. Examining this space allows us to concretely articulate scales of analysis from the local to the global. The article is based on a comparative analysis of two Italian and Spanish cases that appear to be particular and paradigmatic (‘exceptional normal’, Edoardo Grendi) of – respectively – Italy’s so-called ‘southern question’ (questione meridionale) and the Spanish ‘agrarian question’ (cuestión agraria). Thus the article helps to conceptualize the space of the Méditerranée solide, marked by the complex and long-term Southern European question. The article compares Il Ministro della mala vita (The Minister of the Corruption, 1910) by historian Gaetano Salvemini and Del caciquismo trágico (On Tragical Caciquism, 1913) by republican journalist Pedro Torres. Through these ‘exceptionally normal’ case studies, taken together and explained reciprocally, it is possible to better understand the space of the solid Mediterranean. The social realities of the Spanish cuestión agraria and the Italian questione meridionale, as well as the conditions of local historiographical production on such realities are, indeed, a consubstantial part of the European transnational, global space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’.     

Transnational Constructors of Parliamentary Democracy in Swedish and Finnish Constitutional Controversies, 1917–1919

During the First World War, the legitimacy of established polities was challenged everywhere in Europe. Not only the combatant great powers but also smaller states witnessed a resurgence of constitutional disputes and competing ideological conceptualizations of revolution and reform, the will of the people, democracy, and parliamentarism. While these controversies primarily focused on the future of the national polities concerned, historical experiences and discourses accelerated by the war and the Russian Revolution were transnationally interconnected and contributed to discursive transfers between political cultures. Swedish and Finnish socialists were linked by their internationals, liberals were connected by transnational debates for and against ‘Western’ democracy and parliamentarism, and conservative politicians and academics were involved in ideologically oriented networks. This article reconstructs transnational links and discourses in order to understand the exceptionally confrontational dynamics (which, in Finland, partly led to a civil war) and the outcomes of the Swedish and Finnish constitutional debates in 1917–1919. It examines the nature of the transnational connections of eight Swedish and Finnish conservatives, liberals, revisionist socialists, and far-Left socialists, analysing their argumentation on constitutional questions in published works and parliamentary speeches as illustrative examples of the political groups they represented.     

Start-up factories,transnational entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial ecosystems: unpacking the lure of start-up accelerator programmes

This paper examines the role of accelerator programmes in promoting transnational entrepreneurship. Designed to assist the growth of start-ups by providing seed finance and structured entrepreneurship support, these programmes are now a prominent feature in many entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world. Drawing on in-depth qualitative evidence focused on one particular programme, the paper shows accelerators play an important intermediary or ‘brokerage mechanism’ providing start-ups with enhanced relational connections and networks. Transnational entrepreneurs attracted to these programmes are highly focused on exploiting these networks whilst maintaining multiple levels of embeddedness in various contexts to maximize the opportunities afforded by accelerators. While many governments are attempting to replicate accelerators programmes within the public sector, the paper concludes that such attempts may prove problematic within weaker entrepreneurial ecosystems.     

Onward Precarity,Mobility, and Migration among Latin Americans in London

Contributing to debates around the relationships between precarity, mobilities and migration, this paper examines the nature of precarity among onward Latin American (OLA) migrants as they have moved transnationally to multiple destinations from their homelands to southern Europe and onwards to London across different time periods. Drawing on primary research with over 400 OLAs, the discussion highlights how precarity maps onto onward migration trajectories in fractal rather than linear ways. In moving beyond a continuum approach to labour exploitation, the paper develops the concept of “onward precarity” to capture how migrants negotiate intersecting vulnerabilities in holistic spatio‐temporal ways as they move through different structural contexts across the world from origin, through transition to their final destination country over time. These negotiations are underpinned by multiple agentic tactics that revolve around resilience and reworking strategies as onward migrants traverse wider structures of disadvantage in situ and through mobility in different places.