Ethnosexual frontiers in queer Tokyo: the production of racialised desire in Japan

Recent years have seen a worrying rise in anti-Korean and anti-Chinese xenophobia in Japan. This xenophobia has pervaded many aspects of Japanese society, and the gay male community in Tokyo's Shinjuku Ni-chōme is no exception. Drawing upon an ethnographic study of Ni-chōme and interviews conducted with Japanese, Chinese and South Korean men, this article utilises Nagel's theory of the ethnosexual frontier to examine how certain racial identities are rendered illegitimate in Ni-chōme. I argue that the stratification of Ni-chōme into spaces where only certain ‘racialised desires’ (minzokuteki na seiyoku) are legitimated reflects broader ideologies of racial identity that circulate throughout Japanese society. I discuss how Chinese and South Korean men understand themselves as ‘ethnosexual sojourners’ who visit Japan to form long-lasting romantic relationships with Japanese men, striving to adopt Japanese ethnosexual mores. I juxtapose the Chinese and South Korean men's narratives with the voices of Japanese gay men who ambivalently position Chinese and South Korean tourists as a threat to the status quo of the Japanese gay sub-culture. I suggest that these men draw upon neo-colonial discourses of China and South Korea as ‘backward’, which circulate throughout wider Japanese society to position Chinese and South Korean men as ‘ethnosexual invaders’.     

Inscribing the victor’s land: nationalistic authorship in Sri Lanka’s post-war Northeast

This article examines the nationalistic authorship of space in Sri Lanka’s post-conflict Northeast as part of the state’s nation-building strategy and as a continuation of a post-colonial process of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalistic revival. Exploring issues of historiography, conflict resolution, physical vehicles of ideology and collective memory, the article demonstrates how land policies, development and the tourism industry in a post-conflict context can go hand-in-hand with dispossession, militarisation and the humiliation of a ‘defeated’ minority community.     

调解中的博弈与对策——对一宗交通事故调解案的分析

调解的过程其实是一场博弈的过程。调解过程中当事人的空间位置以及相关的人文空间对警察作为调解组织者权力的实际运作可能产生重大的影响。为了调解成功,应当通过自然空间和人文空间的转变,重新构造权力格局,确保警察的权威。另外,陪同当事人参与调解的亲朋好友在调解过程中具有独特的地位,劝服他们是成功调解所必须解决的问题。     

Where is the political? Insurgent mobilisations and the incipient “return of the political”

There is an emerging intellectual body of thought on the dynamics of de-politicisation and the “disappearance of the political”. In the first part of the paper, I shall consider the process of post-politicisation. In a second part, I shall re-centre the political by drawing on the work of a range of political theorists and philosophers who have begun to question this post-politicising process. The theme of the final section will consider the contours of a reawakening of the democratic political understood as a political order contingently based on the axiomatic presumption of equality of each and every one in their capacity to act politically.     

Occupations,mediations, subjectifications: fabricating politics

The revolutions and protests that have spread across the globe since 2008 have been seen as a watershed moment. In this article we examine the relationships between urban space and politics that have emerged across these events. We draw upon the political philosophy of Jacques Rancière to provide a framework to understand some events of this period as political moments and, in addition, attempt to build upon Rancière's work to trace out the geographical dimensions of politics. The paper concludes with a consideration of the counter-revolutionary projects enacted by current social orders.     

Humanitarian workers in peril? Deconstructing the myth of the new and growing threat to humanitarian workers

In the last few years, insecurity for relief workers has become a matter of great concern and a central issue in aid policy debates. Explanation for such a widespread anxiety is the claim that international humanitarian organisations are facing a new type of threat, while operating in increasingly hostile environments. This article explores the construction of humanitarian insecurity as a new and growing threat. Drawing on historical material, we suggest that the departure from ‘the past’ is not as pronounced as it is suggested by experts and commentators on this issue, and that the perceived deterioration of operating environments is questionable. The article concludes that the tendency to report humanitarian insecurity in catastrophic rather than analytical terms can create more problems than resolve them, in effect deepening the conditions for some of the challenges that humanitarian actors face today.     

Three faces of Chinese modernity: nationalism,globalization, and science

This article addresses three facets of modernity that are signified by slogans and spatial settings in Beijing, China. The research was conducted as a preliminary study of the communication process in the course of globalization and nationalism reflected in the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. This article uses some photographs and observations to analyze symbolic meanings of slogans and spaces from Beijing in summer 2007, a year before the Games. Since slogans in China have a long tradition, the repeated usages of slogans and their relations to the spatial settings might signify strong messages to promote governmental orientations. This article explores slogans on Tiananmen Square in relation to the political space, a huge sign displaying the motto of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games in Wangfujing district in relation to the economic space, and slogans in an old and poor district under a redevelopment project. The article posits that these three slogans and spaces reflect three different facets of Chinese modernity: nationalism, globalization, and developmental ideology.     

Spacing commemorative-related violence in Northern Ireland: assessing the implications for a society in transition

This paper explores the geography of commemorative-related violence in Northern Ireland and considers its ramifications for a society in transition. Using original primary research, this article contributes to discussions on violence, space and memory through a spatial analysis of new quantitative archival data and existing archival material explored through a multi-disciplinary lens. It examines the complex relationship between the practices and processes of commemoration, the violence that it sometimes occasions and the places in which such violence exists. In unpacking this specific form of violence we consider the continued importance of both place and past in a post-conflict society.     

Process and Social Formation: Petty Commodity Producers in Zinder,Niger

This case study employed a qualitative methodology to examine gender relations in urban domestic water supply under duolocality where heterogeneous spouses live in separate residences. It is based on the experiences of the Ga of Ghana at the present time (2011–present), with James Town as the study area. Results show that gender relations in duolocal water supply is mediated by several factors, including women's economic positioning and time reported to sleep at husbands' homes, age and authority structure, proximity of males and females, distance to water points, and availability of public showers and sachet water. There is significant participation of duolocal men in household water provision, aided by short distances to water points and ready access to showers and pure water. Women renegotiate their subordinate position in domestic water provision by using their economic clout as leverage, manipulating their physical presence at men's residences, including late arrival to sleep but early departure, and capitalising on opportunities presented by new social dynamics to form indirect alliances with men. The study provides additional contribution to understanding gender discourse in urban water supply as it uncovers previously under-explored social processes in the linkages between residential patterns and gender relations in resource access and use.     

From walls to membranes: fortress polis and the governance of urban public space in 21st century Britain

Drawing on the work of Paul Virilio, this paper addresses changes in the architectural and legal topography of the urban landscape through an examination of regulatory patterns, which increasingly intensify governance through, and as, ‘control’. Such regulation is ambivalent in that it cuts across many traditionally discrete regimes of power melding them into new forms with new effects; as a consequence it is no longer sufficient to think in terms of such distinctions as private/public, civil/criminal, and so on. This paper argues that a concern with patterns of enclosure and privatisation in our urban centres must now be placed within the context of changes in architectural practice and technology, which the authors term ‘open architecture’, and the embedding of governance through partnership, which give particular emphasis to the use of dematerialised and diffused modes of control. The paper utilises Virilio’s history and image of the fortress, which he tracks from a material form to a dematerialised form, to envisage these developments and to provide the foundation for an understanding of the importance of the development of practices of surveillance into, what the authors term, ‘total registration’ as a feature and function of governance through ‘control’.