Mapping fears: the use of commercial high-resolution satellite imagery in international affairs

In October and November 2001, the Pentagon purchased the rights to all images of Afghanistan taken by the Ikonos remote sensing satellite, a high-resolution satellite owned and operated by Space Imaging, Inc. Ikonos is one of a growing number of privately owned and operated remote sensing satellites. It is suggested that Ikonos and other high-resolution satellites carry at least two challenges to national security policy makers. The first is a challenge to operational security – the ability to plan, prepare and carry out military operations in a controlled information environment. Second, commercial remote sensing presents a political challenge to policy makers. Policy makers today face a greater challenge in their efforts to maintain control over the content of debate concerning national and international security priorities and objectives. It is argued here that the nature of the security policy debate itself is in the midst of a fundamental shift in tone and quality as a result of remote sensing satellite technology. It was principally this latter challenge – and not a concern over operational security – that led to the Pentagon's purchase of all Ikonos images during the opening phases of the war in Afganistan.     

Do Belgian parties undermine the democratic chain of delegation?

The Belgian party-archy violates the ideal-type chain of parliamentary delegation in many ways, insofar as political parties play a predominant role at each stage. They channel the delegation of power from voters to MPs, from Parliament to the cabinet, from the collective cabinet to individual ministers, and from ministers to their civil servants. Hence, they can be considered the effective principals in the polity, and many actors of the parliamentary chain of delegation, such as MPs, ministers, and civil servants have been reduced to mere party agents. The extreme fragmentation of the Belgian party system in combination with its increasing need for multilevel coordination have further enhanced the position of political parties in the Belgian polity. Yet, at the same time (since the early 1990s), Belgium has also witnessed a gradual decline in the informal system of partitocratic delegation and clientelistic excesses, thereby giving back part of their autonomy to some formal agents, such as the cabinet, top civil servants and some MPs. Still, one can wonder whether these corrections are sufficient to counter the strong outburst of public dissatisfaction with the way parties have run the country in past decades.     

A Higher Form of Intelligence: Hugh Trevor-Roper and Wartime British Secret Service

Throughout his distinguished career, the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper was known in many incarnations and guises: the ‘sleuth of Oxford’; Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford; the Spectator's Mercurius Oxoniensis; Baron Dacre of Glanton; and Master of Peterhouse College. In addition, he was to gain wider notoriety in the early 1980s as the man who helped authenticate the forged Hitler Diaries. Nevertheless, his wartime embodiment as a British intelligence officer is one facet of his personal history that has never before been addressed by scholars in any great depth. Using previously unpublished material from Trevor-Roper's memoirs and personal papers, as well as excerpts from the Guy Liddell Diaries, this article aims to highlight the fact that, contrary to the impression engendered by F.H. Hinsley's dry and depersonalized multi-volume official history, British Intelligence in the Second World War, Major H.R. Trevor-Roper, and many other intelligence officers like him, not only had a ‘good war’, but a rich and colourful one. If historians are to escape the late Sir Maurice Oldfield's indictment of that official history, namely, that it was written ‘by a committee, about committees, for a committee’, they might do worse than begin to reappraise the role of the individual in the context of Britain's intelligence effort during 1939–45. The late Lord Dacre, so this article argues, is one such individual requiring further study.     

Escaping Suez: New interpretations of Western policy in the Middle East 1936–1961

Tony Shaw, Eden, Suez and the Mass Media (London: I.B. Tauris 1996). Pp.xi + 268, biblio., index. £39.50. ISBN 1–85043–955–9.

Hoda Gamal Abdel Nasser, Britain and the Egyptian Nationalist Movement, 1936–1952 (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press 1994). Pp.xxv + 350, biblio., index. £30. ISBN 0–86372‐ 177‐X.

Andrew Rathmell, Secret War in the Middle East: The Covert Struggle for Syria, 1949–1961 (London: I.B. Tauris 1995). Pp.246, biblio., index. £39.50. ISBN 1–85043–992–3.     

Exclusion through citizenship: civic deliberation and its limits in the Peruvian blogosphere

Research on the exclusionary nature of citizenship has concentrated on the state as the agent who defines the limits of citizenship, framing it as a legal status. Exclusionary discourses and practices resulting from everyday notions of ‘good citizenship’ have received less attention. A stronger focus on these can contribute to our understanding of the relationship between citizenship and exclusion by highlighting exclusion through citizenship. In other words, it emphasises the ways in which practices and discourses of ‘good citizenship’ simultaneously produce its limits, consisting of practices and discourses which are considered ‘not civic’. In this sense, exclusion happens because of, rather than in spite of, citizenship. The article examines notions of civic deliberation among Peruvian bloggers, arguing that these included clear limits, which, if violated, allowed for exclusion.     

(Im)possible citizens: Canada's ‘citizenship bonanza’ and its boundaries

This article discusses a recent amendment to the Canadian Citizenship Act, which retroactively restores or gives Canadian citizenship to ‘hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting foreigners, most of them Americans’ (P. Dvorak, 2009. Canada issues a wake-up call: you may be a citizen. The Wall Street Journal, 17 April. Available from: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123993183347727843.html) while also restricting the inheritance of Canadian citizenship to the first-generation born abroad. Aiming to redress past discriminations based on gender, marital status and dual citizenship while simultaneously curtailing modern citizenship's dubious ius sanguinis provision, the new law might be interpreted as perpetuating Canada's reputation as a world leader in interethnic relations and human rights. A contextual analysis of the new law, by contrast, shows that the opposite is the case: the boundaries that are being drawn by Canada's new citizenship regime follow the now common trend of re-ethnicization and securitization. Specifically, they conflate kinship and Whiteness, thereby leading, on the one hand, to the construction of possible citizens whose authenticity and loyalty to the nation are unquestioned. On the other hand, within the logic of the new laws and their surrounding discourses, non-White, non-Christian ‘impossible citizens’ emerge, whose lack of loyalty and instrumental use of their Canadian passport are said to be eroding the value of citizenship from within.