Putting Ukraine on the map: the contribution of Stepan Rudnyts'kyi to Ukrainian nation-building

This paper examines the contribution of the founder of modern Ukrainian geography, Stepan Rudnyts'kyi, to Ukrainian nation-building. It demonstrates how Rudnyts'kyi put Ukraine on the mental map of the Ukrainian public before the declaration of Ukraine's independence in 1918. This is done by analyzing his key publications and showing how he formed a vision of Ukraine and delineated its territory to influence the perceptions of the Ukrainian public on the eve of the struggle for Ukraine's independence. Rudnyts'kyi's contribution is also viewed within the context of competition from rival modern nation-building projects in Eastern Europe, most notably Polish and Russian. The developments are also examined within Miroslav Hroch's periodization of national movements. Rudnyts'kyi played an important role in stage B (patriotic agitation) in Ukrainian national revival.     

The recovery of radical Islam in the wake of the defeat of the Taliban11Many of the websites cited in this article have either been suppressed or have moved from address to address. When this is the case I have placed an asterix in brackets (∗) at the end of the URL.

This article analyses the intellectual and religious processes through which radical Islam has had to confront its defeat in Afghanistan and rebuild during the period since that time, including paradigms of battle, dreams and martyrologies and apocalyptic readings of history and current events.     

Fragmentation,Conflict, and Competition: Islamist Anti-civilian Violence in Sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT

In spite of the shared high profile of recent Islamist attacks on civilians in sub-Saharan Africa, patterns of anti-civilian violence differ across and within violent Islamist groups, and the countries in which they are active. This research seeks to explain this variation by situating Islamist violence within the sub-national spaces in which such groups operate, and the wider conflict environment in which they choose to use, or limit the use of, anti-civilian violence. Drawing on data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Dataset, the research finds that violent Islamist groups are more likely to target civilians where they are the most active conflict agent, even when other conflict agents are active in the same spaces; but less likely to do so when they are relatively weak and in competition with other non-state armed groups. Anti-civilian violence is thus deployed strategically by violent Islamist groups, while its function as a signalling or retributive policing tool depends on the relative strength of groups in relation to actors in the wider conflict arena.     

重读上海都市“新感觉”：从技术地理学到技术感性学的视角

技术的更迭不断地改造着人类社会的空间形态,也重构着在空间中生存之人的生命体验和审美感知。现代都市作为技术性空间,构成了上海新感觉派的感知环境,也是其重要的表征对象。上海都市现代性首先表现为一种传播和移植的“技术现代性”,是西方现代军事、运输和通信等技术的直接地理后果;而其在地生产,包括了都市空间的营造和城/乡空间关系的重构。新感觉派作家对现代技术事物的感觉之“新”,是在作为技术性空间的都市中,与“技术”效应之间产生的剧烈感应与共鸣。新感觉派技法的电影化,则是一种感性表征的现代技术媒介机制。从“技术地理学”到“技术感性学”的交汇视域来重读新感觉派,彰显了现代都市中“人/技术/空间”的辩证关系,在当代语境中具有普遍的参照意义。     

Imagined Races: From Environmental Determinism to Geographical Authenticity in Twentieth‐Century Argentina

This article explores how Argentine intellectuals incorporated the natural environment into their accounts of the racial, cultural and political features of the nation. In the late nineteenth century environmental determinism, based on the assumption of a cause–effect relationship between geographical and racial factors, entered Argentina through three main routes: Lamarckism, Darwinism and Spencerianism. By the mid twentieth century, however, anti‐positivist philosophies had been fully incorporated into a body of work that analysed Argentina's socio‐historical foundations. This article examines the shift that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century in how those seeking to define race incorporated the environment into their arguments. The raza was commonly taken to be synonymous with nation. Selected works by sociologist and legal scholar Carlos Octavio Bunge (1875‐1918) and by writer and ensayista Bernardo Canal Feijóo (1897‐1982) will be analysed as influential yet overlooked examples of how ‘the problem of Argentine culture’ could not be separated from the question of nature understood in terms of both physical and human geography. The goal will be to reveal, firstly, the extent to which the notion of the interior as geographical and anthropological desert deeply informed the political vision of the early national period in relation to race and nation and, secondly, how later interpretations of the nation recast American nature as a foundational element of cultural authenticity based on a sentiment of geographical belonging.     

Introducing the International System(s) Dataset (ISD), 1816–2011

We argue that the Correlates of War dataset on sovereign state membership has two weaknesses: a requirement that states maintain diplomatic relations with Britain and France, and a size inconsistency that disqualifies many mid-sized states in the pre-1920 period. As a consequence, entire state systems are excluded from the data, and the total number of states during the nineteenth century is undercounted. After reviewing two other approaches to identifying states, we offer an alternative set of criteria that identifies 100 completely new cases, and a total of 363 states between 1816 and 2011. These modifications reveal several previously overlooked patterns. Most importantly, the global trend in the number of states over time is concave. From a high of 134 in 1816, states declined precipitously in the mid-nineteenth century through the processes of accession, conquest, and unification. This pattern of state consolidation bottomed out in 1912, and states have proliferated since 1945. However, the pattern of state death and state birth varied by region in the nineteenth century. Whereas the state systems of South Asia and Southeast Asia experienced a steady reduction in the number of states, Africa underwent a more dynamic process of state formation, consolidation, and death.     

我国地理标志热的冷思考

在我国目前“地理标志热”的表象之下，应该看到地理标志保护和发展前景方面的隐忧和问题。包括：首先，过于强调保护而忽视发展；其次，过于强调其知识产权属性而忽视其产业特点；再次，过于强调借鉴他国经验而忽视本国国情；复次，过于强调政府干预而忽视行业协会和企业的能动性；最后，过于强调地理标志形式而忽视其实质。     

Gender and ethnicity in the Soviet Muslim peripheries: a feminist postcolonial geography of women’s work in the Tajik SSR (1950–1991)

ABSTRACT

This article explores the articulation and experience of Soviet gendered ideology regarding work in the Tajik SSR, one of the Muslim Soviet peripheries, during the post-war period ending with Perestroika. Central Asian women’s work was used for economic purposes, as well as being a key driver for fulfilling the ideological objective of emancipating Central Asian women from religion and tradition. Through a feminist postcolonial geography approach, attentive to questions of discourse and material lived experiences, this article explores the ways in which gender and ethnicity were co-produced by Soviet ideology. Analysis of scientific publications produced by Tajikistani female researchers, and of women’s magazines from the 1950s, is contrasted with ethnographic data on workers from various collective farms and semi-urban places, including ‘work heroines’ (peshqadam). Our findings illustrate the hybrid nature of the Soviet regime, advancing theoretical debates on the use of postcolonial theory in Soviet Central Asia.     

The Body Politic as Spatial Metaphor

As part of a special issue on the geographies of citizenship, this paper considers the longstanding and popular metaphor of “the body politic” for a polity. The metaphor's comparative power is successful because it imports key geographic assumptions about how polities are best organized. It makes claims about society and space (premises about location, spatial organization), nature–society relations (how the two spheres do and do not connect) and cartographic representation (the human body is the optimal representation of spatial and natural relations in a polity). We describe three ways in which geographical imaginations are constructed: organic, mechanical, and posthuman bodies politic. Our goal is twofold: first is to consider the ways the deployment of the metaphor of the body is used in political theory to convey a normative conception of citizenship; second is to bridge the gap between political theory and geography by paying special attention to the ways the body is a space. The metaphor of the body politic is a political geography that links citizenship to particular geographical and normative relationships.