From national identity to national security: China's changing responses toward India in 1962 and 1998

This article examines Russian Government policy towards Northeast Asia as an interplay between aspirations, which have been expressed by government leaders, parliamentary figures and prominent academics and journalists and actual results. The article uses three levels, global, regional and bilateral, as a basis for the analysis. In terms of global interests the Russian leadership has sought diplomatic balance against the US, in terms of regional interests the leadership has pursued the aim of economic and security integration while at the bilateral level Russian leadership has sought specific benefits from particular relations with China, Japan and South Korea. The article notes that Russia has obtained certain diplomatic benefits from the relationship with China which serve its interests at the global level. At the regional level policy aspirations have been frustrated by Russia's dire economic condition and the tendency to be treated as an ‘outsider’. Russia has benefited from an improvement of bilateral relations with China, Japan and South Korea but these gains do not translate into an improved position at the regional level yet. while the Russian leadership has been nurturing the development of bilateral relationships problems particular to those relationships hinder its wider regional acceptance.     

Border work: surveillant assemblages,virtual fences,and tactical counter-media

The new technologies of bio-informatic border security and remote surveillance that have emerged as key infrastructures of reconfigured mobility regimes depend on various kinds of labor to produce the effect of bordering. The current retrofitting and technological remediation of borders suggests their transformation away from static demarcators of hard territorial boundaries toward much more sophisticated, flexible, and mobile devices of tracking, filtration, and exclusion. Borders require the labor of software developers, designers, engineers, infrastructure builders, border guards, systems experts, and many others who produce the “smart border”; but they also depend on the labor of “data-ready” travelers who produce themselves at the border, as well as the underground labor of those who traffic in informal and illegalized economies across such borders. Bordering increasingly relies on technological forms of mediation that are embedded within hi-tech, military and private corporate logics, but are also resisted by electronic and physical “hacks” or bypassing of informational and infrastructural architectures. In this paper we consider three socio-technological assemblages of the border, and the labor which makes and unmakes them: (1) the interlocking “cyber-mobilities” of contemporary airports including visual technologies for baggage, cargo, and passenger inspection, as well as information technologies for passenger dataveillance, air traffic control, and human resource systems; (2) the development of the Schengen Information System database of the EU, and its implications for wider migrant rights and internal mobility within the EU, as well as radical border media that have attempted to intervene in that border space; and (3) elements of the US–Mexico “smart border” regime known as the Secure Border Initiative Network (2006–2011), and those who have tried to tactically evade, disrupt, or undermine the working of this border.     

The 'Bad Mother' in Media and Legal Texts

Mothers who kill or injure their children highlight crucial disjunctions between the status ‘mother’ and the practices and expectations of mothering. Failures of ‘mothering’ reconstruct the meaning of the maternal, while being themselves given meaning by it. Violent mothers may be pathologised and excused, demonised and condemned, but the explanatory narratives that are used draw centrally on notions of the maternal and, more broadly, the feminine. These discourses are reproduced in legal proceedings and sentences, and in the media reports of these proceedings. This paper will analyse the construction of the bad mother in legal proceedings in one prominent recent Victorian case, and in the print media reports of this case.     

Memories of ethnic cleansing and the local Iron Curtain in the Czech–German borderlands

The Czech–German borderlands are an archetypal European border region. They evoke not only Cold War histories, but also shelter layers of European memories of the ethnic reshaping of early post-war Europe. By means of life story interviews with German speakers of the border region, this article analyzes the symbolic meaning of and the individual dealing with the local Iron Curtain. It will shed light on the biographical and narrative interconnectedness of experiences of ethnic cleansing in the early post-war period and retrospective perceptions of the Iron Curtain in these borderlands. In particular, it inquires whether and to what extent the local Iron Curtain intensified fractures caused by the region's post-and pre-war attempts to halt the multiethnic composition of the border communities. The article suggests that the local Czech–German Iron Curtain would have never endured as strongly if the border communities' common identity had not already been severely damaged in the course of the region's traumatic history and forced population transfers.     

Post-9/11 counterterrorism in popular culture: the spectacle and reception of The Bourne Ultimatum and 24

This article examines the representation of counterterrorism in contemporary film and television and surveys its reception among active online audiences. Contemporary counterterrorism fiction like The Bourne Ultimatum (2007 The Bourne ultimatum. 2007. Film. Directed by Paul Greengrass. Produced by Doug Liman, Henry Morrison and Jeffrey M. Weiner. USA.  [Google Scholar]; Film. Directed by Paul Greengrass) and the TV series 24 (2001–2010; Television series. Created by Robert Cochran and Joel Surnow), present viewers with conventional hero-driven narratives wrapped in a spectacle of high-tech surveillance technologies. As counterterrorism is an inherently covert exercise, the widespread popularity of these Hollywood franchises raises questions about how the public understands the capabilities and ethics of counterterrorism. These questions are addressed through an analysis of the generic and aesthetic features of the texts along with a survey of audience responses on the Internet Movie Database (IMDb).     

Improving Nonmetric Sex Classification for Hispanic Individuals

Current techniques used by forensic anthropologists for the identification of unknown human skeletal remains have largely been created using U.S. Black and White samples. When applied to Hispanics, these techniques perform poorly and can lead to misclassifications; consequently, there is an imperative need for population‐specific standards for Hispanics. This research examines the classification accuracies obtained by the original Walker (Am J Phys Anthropol, 136, 2008) and Klales et al. (Am J Phys Anthropol, 149, 2012) methods for nonmetric sex estimation and provides recalibrated regression equations specifically for Hispanics. Ordinal data were collected for five skull and three pelvic traits from a sample of 54 modern Hispanic individuals. Recalibration of the Klales et al. equation improved accuracy (90.3% vs. 94.1%), while recalibration of the Walker method equation decreased accuracy (81.5% vs. 74.1%), but greatly improved sex bias (22.2% vs. ?7.4%), thereby making the recalibrated equations more appropriate for use with Hispanics.     

跨境次区域经济合作中我国沿边地方政府行为分析

跨境次区域经济合作是我国中西部沿边地区对外开放的主要形式,而沿边地方政府又是其主要推动力量。目前,中央政府主导、地方政府积极参与是我国跨境次区域合作的主要模式。但由于地方利益的强化,沿边地方政府与中央政府在利益和目标上会有所偏差。这导致了沿边地方政府在区域经济合作中,采取对内竞争和对外合作两种不同的行为模式。这两种不同行为模式背后的动力机制研究对进一步揭示我国经济转型发展的内在制度安排,提升我国沿边地区对外开放开发水平具有重要的意义。     

辽宁省边境地区与朝鲜经济贸易合作研究

辽宁省边境地区与朝鲜的经济贸易合作不仅是辽宁省对外开放总体战略的重要组成部分 ,而且关系到我国的国家利益。分析双方经济贸易合作基础 ,着重研究双方经贸合作的现状和存在的问题 ,并提出今后发展的对策建议 ,对辽宁省边境地区的发展将能起到很大的借鉴作用。     

At Boiling Point: Like Water for Chocolate and the Boundaries of Mexican Identity

Abstract — This article explores the mechanisms of Mexican identity as they are constructed in Alfonso Arau's film Como agua para chocolate (1991) (Like Water for Chocolate). In re-designing the characters of Laura Esquivel's novel, Arau produces a range of filmic stereotypes drawn from both the Hollywood and the Mexican traditions of film-making. Through the careful manipulation of filmic devices such as editing, framing and close-ups, many of the features of Mexican otherness perpetuated by Hollywood throughout the twentieth century are inscribed. I apply the metaphor of boiling, derived from the film's title, to examine certain key concepts of cinematic 'mexicanness' including the tropes of 'revolution', 'border', 'race' and 'sex'. Crucial to this argument is a consideration of the contemporary political climate in which Like Water for Chocolate was both produced and released. In Mexico, it was released halfway through the sexenio (six-year period of rule) of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's rule and is clearly one of the most succesful cultural products (and exports) of his government's now infamous rule. In the United States, the climate of anti-immigrant attitudes in 1992 and 1993 and the corresponding political tension provokes new readings of certain stereotypical images of Mexicans and mexicanness. It is the tension that is produced by the collision between these two contexts — cultural, political and ethnic — that forms the principal focus of discussion in this article.     

对中缅边境管理中与缅甸地方民族武装势力开展警务合作的思考

中缅两国建交多年以来 ,双方在和平共处五项原则的基础上共同维护边境安全 ,增进了双方的胞波情谊 ,促进了双边贸易的发展。然而 ,由于与我云南接壤段缅方地方民族武装势力的存在 ,给双方的边境安全、出入境管理和边境地区治安管理等增加了复杂性和特殊性。加强与缅方地方民族武装势力在边境管理中的双边警务合作 ,具有极其重要的现实意义和非常深远的历史影响