Spaces of disappearance: aesthetic responses to contemporary Beijing city planning

The construction boom of the past two decades, primarily funded by the private sector, has engendered fierce aesthetic conflicts due to intense competition for limited space in rapidly modernizing Beijing. Contemporary Chinese artists both protest the commercial exploitation of traditional cultural sites, and appropriate market devices for their ends. In this article I analyze aesthetic strategies employed in experimental art, film, and fiction, which grapple with the tensions inherent in globalization and urban culture in late twentieth‐century Beijing. Examples include installations protesting the forced relocation of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in 1994 to develop a ‘City of Commerce’ in its place, and renting the Imperial Ancestral Temple in the Forbidden City to exhibit domestic experimental art, as a foil to the orientalist productions promoted at this site. While much contemporary Beijing cultural production shares a realist, documentary drive to address urban, post‐industrial anxieties relative to dislocation, Chinese artists deconstruct the present with a conspicuous absence of nostalgia. The contemporaneity of the ruin is one of the most prevalent expressions of the 1990s urban aesthetic, where the past, as human sentiment, is nonexistent. Rather than anachronistically violating chronology, these works are examples of what Ackbar Abbas terms achronicities, where past and present disappear in each other. As an aesthetic strategy, disappearance is a form of hybridity that resists delimiting not only temporal, but also conceptual and normative frames of reference. By highlighting hybrid effects rather than merely conceptualizing the tensions inherent in the global city, an aesthetics of disappearance functions as a site of resistance while also working to reposition artists at the center of commercial culture.     

Is Russia the Emerging Global ‘Breadbasket’? Re-cultivation,Agroholdings and Grain Production

Expectations of Russia becoming a global ‘breadbasket’ have been nurtured by its rise to the top group of global wheat exporters, the abundance of abandoned land, assumed yield gaps and the apparent ‘success’ of agroholdings. It is argued here that becoming a global breadbasket is hindered by substantial costs of re-cultivating abandoned land, management and financial problems of megafarms and agroholdings, lack of infrastructure for exports and increased domestic demand for feed grains as input for the meat sector. Furthermore, as Russian wheat production is extremely volatile it might increase global price volatility, rather than contributing to global food security.     

Multicultural Vanguard? Sarajevo’s Interethnic Young Adults between Ethnic Categorisation and International Spaces

This article analyses how Sarajevo’s young adults from a middle class, interethnic background deal with the rigid ethnic categorisation enforced by state institutions and society. Their strategies (exit, reframing, and partial separation) appear to be unsatisfactory to the actors themselves, and wield generally no influence on the institutions they wish to change. Three factors have been setting into motion this dynamic: first, the difficulty of escaping ethnic group thinking when attempting to reframe ethnic categories; second, the rationality of avoiding open defiance to ethnic categorisation; and third, the young adults’ tendency to centre their life on interethnic and international spaces. As a ‘project elite’, Sarajevo’s young adults are rather separated from society, both discursively and socio-economically.     

May the Force Be with You: The Legal Classification of Intervention by Invitation

Netherlands International Law Review - It is a truth universally acknowledged that states can consent to the military presence of other states on their territory. This is better known as...     

The petit effect of campaign spending on votes: using political financing reforms to measure spending impacts in multiparty elections

Public Choice - This paper explores the relation between campaign spending and votes, in France, relying on political financing reforms as a quasi-natural experiment to assess if and how spending...     

Oligarchs,megafarms and land reserves: understanding land grabbing in Russia

This paper seeks to unravel the political economy of large-scale land acquisitions in post-Soviet Russia. Russia falls neither in the normal category of ‘investor’ countries, nor in the category of ‘target’ countries. Russia has large ‘land reserves’, since in the 1990s much fertile land was abandoned. We analyse how particular Russia is with regards to the common argument in favour of land acquisitions, namely that land is available, unused or even unpopulated. With rapid economic growth, capital of Russian oligarchs in search of new frontiers, and the 2002 land code allowing land sales, land began to attract investment. Land grabbing expands at a rapid pace and in some cases, it results in dispossession and little or no compensation. This paper describes different land acquisitions strategies and argues that the share-based land rights distribution during the 1990s did not provide security of land tenure to rural dwellers. Emerging rural social movements try to form countervailing powers but with limited success. Rich land owners easily escape the implementation of new laws on controlling underutilized land, while there is a danger that they enable eviction with legal measures of rural dwellers. In this sense Russia appears to be a ‘normal’ case in the land grab debate.