‘If Not Yourself,Who Would You Be?’: Writing the Female Body in Agatha Christie's Second World War Detective Fiction

The mystery writer Agatha Christie (1890–1976) has long been understood as a best-seller who could negotiate the demands of the marketplace, but who never tried to engage with political or social issues. Formulaic, linguistically simple and dependent on stereotypes, her books have a reputation as ‘animated algebra’—retreats from reality. This essay rethinks Christie's political significance, with reference to selected texts published during the Second World War. During the crucial war years, Christie published murder mysteries prolifically, mostly set in country houses or holiday resorts. Apparently escapist settings, however, gave her space to explore problems facing women at a time when men had been displaced to the battlefield. The majority of Christie's victims in these texts are women and, more than usual, the plots revolve around identifying or misidentifying corpses. In the two novels explored here—Evil Under the Sun (1941) and The Body in the Library (1942)—Christie considers women as victims in commercial and domestic narratives. In both cases, women trade identities with each other in death: for example, a schoolgirl dresses up for a Hollywood screen test, only to be killed, her body swapped with a glamorous dancer's to obscure the time of death. In life and in death, characters read women as combinations of bodies and cosmetics. Far from avoiding reality, Christie engaged with concerns of the day. Her detective fiction rarely references war directly, but there is a running commentary on domestic and commercial spheres, and women's roles, as victims, within these.     

LGBTQ+ Tensions in the 2018 Chilean Feminist Tsunami

In this article, we will critically reflect on the 2018 feminist student mobilisations in Chile through an analysis of interviews and discussion groups with LGBTQ+ students who participated in the feminist student protests and occupations. We will argue that even though these feminist student mobilisations can be considered an example of transfeminist coalitions, some relevant conflicts and tensions remain, such as discourses and practices that still use an either/or, binary, cishet framework, maintaining a problematic separation between feminist and LGBTQ+ agendas, undermining the intersectional feminist understandings necessary for a more complex idea of social justice.     

Comerciar con la sangre de nuestros hermanos: Early Abolitionist Discourses in Spain's Empire

The proposal of Agustín de Argüelles to abolish the slave trade in 1811 was crucial in defining a new ideological stance within the Spanish political debate by adopting the moral condemnation elaborated by the British abolitionist movement. His initiative was the result of a coordinated strategy with the British authorities and was key in the construction of early abolitionist discourses in Spain. This article explores the political, ideological and diplomatic influence of Britain in the development of early anti‐slavery and anti‐slave trade discourses in Spain and the centrality of Argüelles' proposal.     

Biometric Security and Privacy Using Smart Identity Management and Interoperability: Validation and Vulnerabilities of Various Techniques

The central position of this article is that validation and interoperability are paramount for the effective and ethical use of biometrics. Illuminating the relevance for policymakers of the science underlying the security and privacy aspects of biometrics, this article calls for adequate and enforceable performance metrics that can be independently corroborated. Accordingly, the article considers biometrics and forensics for the dual challenges of addressing security and privacy using smart identity management. The discussion revolves around the concepts of “personally identifiable information” (PII) and interoperability with emphasis on quantitative performance analysis and validation for uncontrolled operational settings, variable demographics, and distributed and federated operations. Validation metrics includes expected rates of identification/misidentification, precision, and recall. The complementary concepts of identity and anonymity are addressed in terms of expected performance, functionality, law and ethics, forensics, and statistical learning. Biometrics encompasses appearance, behavior, and cognitive state or intent. Modes of deployment and performance evaluation for biometrics are detailed, with operational and adversarial challenges for both security and privacy described in terms of trustworthiness, vulnerabilities, functional creep, and feasibility of safeguards. The article underscores how lack of interoperability is mostly due to overfitting and tuning to well‐controlled settings, so that validation merely confirms “teaching to the test” rather than preparation for real‐world deployment. Most important for validation is reproducibility of results including full information on the experimental design used, that forensic exclusion is allowed, and that scientific methods for performance evaluation are followed. The article concludes with expected developments regarding technology use and advancements that bear on security and privacy, including data streams and video, de‐anonymization and reidentification, social media analytics and cyber security, and smart camera networks and surveillance.     

La réforme du système de sécurité malien à l’épreuve des mutations du nexus “défense/sécurité intérieure” dans l’espace sahélien

RÉSUMÉ

Les obstacles rencontrés dans la mise en ?uvre du processus de Réforme du système de sécurité (RSS), engagé au Mali à la suite de la crise de 2012 par les autorités maliennes, massivement soutenues par les partenaires internationaux, ne sauraient être considérés comme d’ordre purement opérationnel. En réalité, un certain nombre de ces freins proviennent de la difficulté à prendre en considération, d’un point de vue conceptuel aussi bien que stratégique, les dynamiques sécuritaires actuellement à l’?uvre dans le pays et plus largement dans l’espace saharo-sahélien (voire sur la scène internationale). Dynamiques dont la nature influe pourtant structurellement sur les missions présentes et à venir des différentes forces de défense et de sécurité.     

L’évolution des niveaux de vie au Mali: promesses politiques et incertitudes statistiques

RÉSUMÉ

L’agitation politique et sociale persistante au Mali depuis 2017, en particulier à Bamako, amène à s’interroger sur l’évolution des niveaux de vie et sur les constats qui peuvent être tirés de statistiques fragiles. En effet, l’exploitation des enquêtes budget–consommation disponibles se caractérise par des insuffisances, et l’évolution qu’elles traduisent n’est jamais commentée; elles révèlent aussi d’importantes discordances avec les résultats des comptes nationaux. Pourtant ces imprécisions n’interdisent pas d’envisager la possibilité d’une dégradation des niveaux de vie qui pourrait en partie expliquer les troubles sociaux des trois dernières années.     

Measuring Environmental and Economic Opinions about Hydraulic Fracturing: A Survey of Landowners in Active or Planned Drilling Units

We investigate how Eastern Ohio landowners affected by the recent boom in high‐volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF) view the industry and the factors that affect their attitudes. Our unique sample almost exclusively contains individuals whose land is under lease for and/or experiencing HVHF. Nation‐ and state‐wide surveys that investigate HVHF attitudes tend to find nearly even splits between opposed and supportive respondents, whose views are strongly influenced by political partisanship. These trends largely do not manifest among Eastern Ohio landowners, for whom personal experiences with HVHF crucially influence attitudes. Most respondents support HVHF and say it has benefited their community economically. Political partisanship does not significantly impact HVHF views. Contrary to arguments in the literature that economic considerations drive variation in support for HVHF, landowners’ support for the industry also appears influenced by perceptions of its environmental and infrastructure impacts. Environmental concerns appear to more powerfully shape attitudes than economic benefits.     

Las garantías bancarias en el comercio internacional*

Demand guarantees are irrevocable undertakings, independent underlying contracts, issued by a bank guarantor on the instructions of the applicant to pay the beneficiary any sum that may be demanded stated in the text of the guarantee. The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) has aimed to highlight the use of ther most important instruments of the international trade to achieve an important juridical security and help to avoid hesitation, misunderstating and confusion. In the field of the independent guarantees, the recent major development has been the adoption of the Uniform Rules for Demand Guarantees (URDG), Brochure 758. This publication replaces URDG 458 and contains new definitions and interpretation rules to provide greater clarity and precision.     

Gradualism and uncertainty in international union formation: The European Community’s first enlargement

This paper introduces a new theoretical framework of international unions qua coalitions of countries adopting a common policy and common supranational institutions. I make use of a three-country spatial bargaining game of coalition formation, in order to examine the endogenous strategic considerations in the creation and enlargement of international unions. Why would we observe a gradualist approach in the formation of the grand coalition even if the latter is assumed to be weakly efficient? I propose asymmetric information about the benefits of integration as a mechanism that can generate gradual union formation in equilibrium. As it turns out, it may well be in the ‘core’ countries’ interest to delay the accession of a third, ‘peripheral’ country in order to (1) stack the institutional make-up of the initial union in their favor and (2) signal their high resolve to wait out the expansion of their bilateral subunion. A related case from the European experience provides an interesting illustration.     

Biometric Elections in Poor Countries: Wasteful or a Worthwhile Investment?

Elections have emerged as a leading area for the application of biometric technology in developing countries, despite its high costs and uncertainty over its effectiveness. Why then do countries pursue such programs, often with the support of donors? The paper considers the costs and benefits of technology, where the latter involves its potential to reduce the probability of seriously disputed elections that escalate into violence. Based on the limited data available, it finds that a reduction in the probability of postelection violence by only a few percentage points could offset the cost of the technology. However, this is far from assured; we argue that biometric technology can only contribute to less disputed and less violent elections in particular settings, those where democracy is not yet well institutionalized but where political parties value the legitimacy conferred by elections that are sufficiently credible for their results to be accepted. One priority is therefore to screen potential cases carefully, before investing in costly programs that have a low probability of success. Another step toward using technology more effectively to underpin sustainable elections would be to build on voter registration drives to strengthen permanent identification assets such as civil registration and national ID programs that can serve as the basis for the voter roll.