Security as Socio‐Technical Practice: Predictive Policing and (Non‐)Automation

Predictive policing is among the most prevalent new technological tools for law enforcement. Understanding how the police produce knowledge about crime and society in technologically mediated ways is important vis‐a‐vis practices of social ordering. In this paper, I suggest to draw on literature from Science and Technology Studies (STS) in order to understand the impact of technology not as analytically isolated artefact, but as embedded in socio‐technical relations that define how it comes to matter in everyday practice. In order to demonstrate what it means to think about technology in socio‐technical terms, I engage the discrepancy between the technical capacities of predictive policing applications and the ways in which they actually become part of police work on a daily basis. Specifically, I investigate how claims about the automation of crime analysis in predictive policing are reconfigured through the interplay of social and technical elements in police work.     

Anti-Tamil Riots and the political crisis in Sri Lanka

Abstract

“Have a taste of Paradise” says the advertising blurb of Air Lanka, the national airline. But on July 24, 1983, the island paradise for tourists turned into a veritable hell for its Tamil-speaking inhabitants, with fire and smoke engulfing the capital city of Colombo. Within days, rioting spread throughout Sri Lanka in a wave of assaults against the Tamils in almost all the towns and plantation areas. For nearly a week, mob rule prevailed and lynching was the order of the day.     

Population Redistribution and Language Spread in the Medieval Muslim World

Between the seventh and eighth centuries, a remarkable linguistic phenomenon took place: the Arabic language, which had been mainly the tongue of a few isolated tribes in Western Arabia, became the spoken and written language of a vast region that spanned from the Oxus River in the east to the Atlantic Ocean in the west. Virtually overnight, speakers of other languages had to become conversant and literate in Arabic in order to maintain their positions throughout the Arabic-speaking Muslim Empire. This article explores one factor that enabled the spread of Arabic in such an unprecedented manner: the mass population movement of Arabic speakers and others that occurred as a result of the expansion of the Muslim Empire. The article traces and analyses three categories of movement: initial settlement by the conquest armies; later voluntary movement due to scholarship, alliance building and intermarriage; and ruler-instigated population movement.     

Decomposing the Vote: Individual,Communal, and Cantonal Sources of Voting Behavior in Switzerland

This article considers individual, communal, and cantonal sources of voting behavior in the 2007 National Council elections in Switzerland. Using hierarchical linear models, it is shown how the vote propensity for the five main parties (CVP, FDP, Greens, SP, and SVP) varies across individuals, communes, and cantons. Key explanatory factors at each of these levels are explored, as well as cross‐party differences in the effects of these factors.     

Changing Narratives of Race and Environment in the Nineteenth‐Century and Early‐Twentieth‐Century Brazilian Amazon

The Amazon has been the object of numerous reflections upon the relationship between the natural environment and the categories of human society. This article analyses Brazilian writers who considered the relations between space and race over the course of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. It focuses on João Henrique de Mattos, José Veríssimo and Euclides da Cunha, placing them in relation to each other and within local, national and international discourses on race, nature and development. Its aim is to examine how a racialised geographical understanding of the Amazon changed over the course of the nineteenth century and was tied to Brazilian nation‐building.     

Venerating the pir: patron saints of Muslim ceramists in Uzbekistan

In some Central Asian oasis towns, the patron saints of craftsmen, known as pirs, have continued to be venerated, despite the repression of Islam and changes to the industrial structure during the Soviet Era. This paper analyses the social function and individual significance of pir veneration in the modern era, using ethnographic observations and interviews conducted in a ceramics town in Uzbekistan. Today, many old customs practised in pottery studios have become mere formalities, and the controlling role of the pirs over ceramist groups is declining. However, this is not necessarily indicative of an immediate decline in the pirs’ power. Some ceramists believe their highly skilled masters to be quasi-pirs and that the pir provides them with desirable goals, in addition to an ideal form to which to aspire.