Atrocities in theory and practice: An introduction

Classical counterinsurgency theory – written before the 19th century – has generally strongly opposed atrocities, as have theoreticians writing on how to conduct insurgencies. For a variety of reasons – ranging from pragmatic to religious or humanitarian – theoreticians of both groups have particularly argued for the lenient treatment of civilians associated with the enemy camp, although there is a marked pattern of exceptions, for example, where heretics or populations of cities refusing to surrender to besieging armies are concerned. And yet atrocities – defined here as acts of violence against the unarmed (non-combatants, or wounded or imprisoned enemy soldiers), or needlessly painful and/or humiliating treatment of enemy combatants, beyond any action needed to incapacitate or disarm them – occur frequently in small wars. Examples abound where these exhortations have been ignored, both by forces engaged in an insurgency and by forces trying to put down a rebellion. Why have so many atrocities been committed in war if so many arguments have been put forward against them? This is the basic puzzle for which the individual contributions to this special issue are seeking to find tentative answers, drawing on case studies.

The Extras Regina, 2008

Project includes: a large scale live performance and resulting performance video, at Curtain Razors, Regina Queen’s Square, Regina, 2008 Live Performance, 45 mins, incl. 1 actor, 23 extras, 2 live cameras, live video and sound mixing, stage set, video projection. Video 45 mins Video Trailer 7 mins The Extras is a video performance referencing the form of a large live film shoot. The Extras contextualises contemporary Westerns genres within an experimental live tableau. The live performance and resulting 45 mins video make reference 19th century Western Author German Karl May, the tradition of Eastern European Western, (Red Western), Uranium exploitation and entrepreneurial cultures in the Canadian Prairies. Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, Saskatchewan Arts Board and Curtain Razors, the Extras Regina was staged and performed at Central Plaza in Regina, with a crew of 23 extras, 2 live cameras, live video and sound mixing ad video projection. It involved research in Saskatchewan film and photographic archives. The performance was edited live and mixed with video material which was shot on location, with a further group of extras at historical historical ‘Western’ locations, including Fort Qu' Appelle, 
Castle Butte and Big Muddy. It also involved a collaboration with a local theatre production company, which enacted a dramatised historical incident.

Putting the S-word back into Sustainability: Can we be more social?

In an era dominated by climate change debate and environmentalism there is a real danger that the important ‘social’ pillar of sustainability drops out of our vocabulary. This can happen at a variety of scales from business level through to building and neighbourhood level regeneration and development. Social sustainability should be at the heart of all housing and mixed-use development but for a variety of reasons tends to be frequently underplayed. The recent English city riots have brought this point back sharply into focus. The relationships between people, places and the local economy all matter and this is as true today as it was in the late 19th century when Patrick Geddes, the great pioneering town planner and ecologist, wrote of ‘place-work-folk’. This paper, commissioned from Tim Dixon, explains what is meant by social sustainability (and how it is linked to concepts such as social capital and social cohesion); why the debate matters during a period when ‘localism’ is dominating political debate; and what is inhibiting its growth and its measurement. The paper reviews best practice in post-occupancy social sustainability metric systems, based on recent research undertaken by the author on Dockside Green in Vancouver, and identifi es some of the key operational issues in mainstreaming the concept within major mixed-use projects. The paper concludes by offering a framework for the key challenges faced in setting strategic corporate goals and objectives; prioritising and selecting the most appropriate investments; and measuring social sustainability performance by identifying the required data sources

The distribution of London residential property prices and the role of spatial lock-in

Much of mainstream economic analysis assumes that markets adjust smoothly, through prices, to changes in economic conditions. However, this is not necessarily the case for local housing markets, whose spatial structures may exhibit persistence, so that conditions may not be those most suited to the requirements of modern-day living. Persistence can arise from the existence of transaction costs. The paper tests the proposition that housing markets in Inner London exhibit a degree of path dependence, through the construction of a three-equation model, and examines the impact of variables constructed for the 19th and early 20th centuries on modern house prices. These include 19th-century social structures, slum clearance programmes and the 1908 underground network. Each is found to be significant. The tests require the construction of novel historical datasets, which are also described in the paper.

Sharing power? Prospects for a U.S. concert-balance strategy

The Pax Americana and the grand strategy of hegemony (or “Primacy”) that underpins it may be becoming unsustainable. Particularly in the wake of exhausting wars, the Global Financial Crisis, and the shift of wealth from West to East, it may no longer be possible or prudent for the United States to act as the unipolar sheriff or guardian of a world order. But how viable are the alternatives, and what difficulties will these alternatives entail in their design and execution? This analysis offers a sympathetic but critical analysis of alternative U.S. National Security Strategies of “retrenchment” that critics of American diplomacy offer. In these strategies, the United States would anticipate the coming of a more multipolar world and organize its behavior around the dual principles of “concert” and “balance,” seeking a collaborative relationship with other great powers, while being prepared to counterbalance any hostile aggressor that threatens world order. The proponents of such strategies argue that by scaling back its global military presence and its commitments, the United States can trade prestige for security, shift burdens, and attain a more free hand. To support this theory, they often look to the 19th-century concert of Europe as a model of a successful security regime and to general theories about the natural balancing behavior of states. This monograph examines this precedent and measures its usefulness for contemporary statecraft to identify how great power concerts are sustained and how they break down. The project also applies competing theories to how states might behave if world politics are in transition: Will they balance, bandwagon, or hedge? This demonstrates the multiple possible futures that could shape and be shaped by a new strategy. viii A new strategy based on an acceptance of multipolarity and the limits of power is prudent. There is scope for such a shift. The convergence of several trends—including transnational problems needing collaborative efforts, the military advantages of defenders, the reluctance of states to engage in unbridled competition, and hegemony fatigue among the American people—means that an opportunity exists internationally and at home for a shift to a new strategy. But a Concert-Balance strategy will still need to deal with several potential dilemmas. These include the difficulty of reconciling competitive balancing with cooperative concerts, the limits of balancing without a forward-reaching onshore military capability, possible unanticipated consequences such as a rise in regional power competition or the emergence of blocs (such as a Chinese East Asia or an Iranian Gulf), and the challenge of sustaining domestic political support for a strategy that voluntarily abdicates world leadership. These difficulties can be mitigated, but they must be met with pragmatic and gradual implementation as well as elegant theorizing and the need to avoid swapping one ironclad, doctrinaire grand strategy for another.

Terrorist transgressions: gendered representations of the terrorist in visual culture

The aim of Terrorist Transgressions is to analyse the myths inscribed in images of the terrorist and identify how agency is attributed to representation through invocations and inversions of gender stereotypes. In modern discourses on the terrorist the horror experienced in Western societies was the appearance of a new sense of the vulnerability of the body politic, and therefore of the modern self with its direct dependency on security and property. The terrorist has been constructed as the epitome of transgression against economic resources and moral, physical and political boundaries. Although terrorism has been the focus of intense academic activity, cultural representations of the terrorist have received less attention. Yet terrorism is dependent on spectacle and the topic is subject to forceful exposure in popular media. While the terrorist is predominantly aligned with masculinity, women have been active in terrorist organisations since the late 19th century and in suicidal terrorist attacks since the 1980s. Such attacks have confounded constructions of femininity and masculinity, with profound implications for the gendering of violence and horror. The publication arises from an AHRC networking grant, 2011-12, with Birkbeck, and includes collaboration with the army at Sandhurst RMA. The project relates to a wider investigation into feminism, violence and contemporary art.

Implications of the recent low solar minimum for the solar wind during the Maunder minimum

The behavior of the Sun and near-Earth space during grand solar minima is not understood; however, the recent long and low minimum of the decadal-scale solar cycle gives some important clues, with implications for understanding the solar dynamo and predicting space weather conditions. The speed of the near-Earth solar wind and the strength of the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) embedded within it can be reliably reconstructed for before the advent of spacecraft monitoring using observations of geomagnetic activity that extend back to the mid-19th century. We show that during the solar cycle minima around 1879 and 1901 the average solar wind speed was exceptionally low, implying the Earth remained within the streamer belt of slow solar wind flow for extended periods. This is consistent with a broader streamer belt, which was also a feature of the recent low minimum (2009), and yields a prediction that the low near-Earth IMF during the Maunder minimum (1640-1700), as derived from models and deduced from cosmogenic isotopes, was accompanied by a persistent and relatively constant solar wind of speed roughly half the average for the modern era.

Centennial variations in sunspot number, open solar flux and streamer belt width: 3. Modelling

From the variation of near-Earth interplanetary conditions, reconstructed for the mid-19th century to the present day using historic geomagnetic activity observations, Lockwood and Owens [2014] have suggested that Earth remains within a broadened streamer belt during solar cycles when the Open Solar Flux (OSF) is low. From this they propose that the Earth was immersed in almost constant slow solar wind during the Maunder minimum (c. 1650-1710). In this paper, we extend continuity modelling of the OSF to predict the streamer belt width using both group sunspot numbers and corrected international sunspot numbers to quantify the emergence rate of new OSF. The results support the idea that the solar wind at Earth was persistently slow during the Maunder minimum because the streamer belt was broad.

Small wars and insurgencies in theory and practice, 1500-1850

In early modern times, warfare in Europe took on many diverse and overlapping forms. Our modern notions of ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ warfare, of ‘major war’ and ‘small war’, have their roots in much greater diversity than such binary notions allow for. While insurgencies go back to time immemorial, they have become conceptually fused with ‘small wars’. This is a term first used to denote special operations, often carried out by military companies formed from special ethnic groups and then recruited into larger armies. In its Spanish form, guerrilla, the term ‘small war’ came to stand for an ideologically-motivated insurgency against the state authorities or occupying forces of another power. There is much overlap between the phenomena of irregular warfare in the sense of special operations alongside regular operations, and irregular warfare of insurgents against the regular forces of a state. This book demonstrates how long the two phenomena were in flux and fed on each other, from the raiding operations of the 16th century to the ‘small wars’ or special operations conducted by special units in the 19th century, which existed alongside and could merge with a popular insurgency. This book is based on a special issue of the journal Small Wars & Insurgencies.

A new calibrated sunspot group series since 1749: statistics of active day fractions

Although the sunspot-number series have existed since the mid-19th century, they are still the subject of intense debate, with the largest uncertainty being related to the "calibration" of the visual acuity of individual observers in the past. Daisy-chain regression methods are applied to inter-calibrate the observers which may lead to significant bias and error accumulation. Here we present a novel method to calibrate the visual acuity of the key observers to the reference data set of Royal Greenwich Observatory sunspot groups for the period 1900-1976, using the statistics of the active-day fraction. For each observer we independently evaluate their observational thresholds [S_S] defined such that the observer is assumed to miss all of the groups with an area smaller than S_S and report all the groups larger than S_S. Next, using a Monte-Carlo method we construct, from the reference data set, a correction matrix for each observer. The correction matrices are significantly non-linear and cannot be approximated by a linear regression or proportionality. We emphasize that corrections based on a linear proportionality between annually averaged data lead to serious biases and distortions of the data. The correction matrices are applied to the original sunspot group records for each day, and finally the composite corrected series is produced for the period since 1748. The corrected series displays secular minima around 1800 (Dalton minimum) and 1900 (Gleissberg minimum), as well as the Modern grand maximum of activity in the second half of the 20th century. The uniqueness of the grand maximum is confirmed for the last 250 years. It is shown that the adoption of a linear relationship between the data of Wolf and Wolfer results in grossly inflated group numbers in the 18th and 19th centuries in some reconstructions.

Interacting effects of change in climate, human population, land use, and water use on biodiversity and ecosystem services

Human population growth and resource use, mediated by changes in climate, land use, and water use, increasingly impact biodiversity and ecosystem services provision. However, impacts of these drivers on biodiversity and ecosystem services are rarely analyzed simultaneously and remain largely unknown. An emerging question is how science can improve the understanding of change in biodiversity and ecosystem service delivery and of potential feedback mechanisms of adaptive governance. We analyzed past and future change in drivers in south-central Sweden. We used the analysis to identify main research challenges and outline important research tasks. Since the 19th century, our study area has experienced substantial and interlinked changes; a 1.6°C temperature increase, rapid population growth, urbanization, and massive changes in land use and water use. Considerable future changes are also projected until the mid-21st century. However, little is known about the impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services so far, and this in turn hampers future projections of such effects. Therefore, we urge scientists to explore interdisciplinary approaches designed to investigate change in multiple drivers, underlying mechanisms, and interactions over time, including assessment and analysis of matching-scale data from several disciplines. Such a perspective is needed for science to contribute to adaptive governance by constantly improving the understanding of linked change complexities and their impacts.

Going with the floe

Julia Wilkinson and a Zooniverse citizen-science team examine Arctic auroral data, using observations from the ill-fated 19th-century Arctic exploration ship USS Jeannette.

Embryonic Development of Ampheres leucopheus and lporangaia pustulosa (Arachnida: Opiliones: Gonyleptidae)

The first studies concerning the embryonic development of harvestmen started in the late 19th century, and focused mostly on holarctic species, and only three species of the suborder Laniatores (the largest, among the four suborders considered presently) were studied. Moreover, the last studies on embryology of harvestmen were made during the late 1970s. This study focused on the embryonic development of Ampheres leucopheus (Gonyleptidae, Caelopyginae) and Iporangaia pustulosa (Gonyleptidae, Progonyleptoidellinae). The embryonic development was followed in the field, by taking daily photographs of different eggs during about 2 months. When laid, eggs of A. leucopheus and I pustulosa have approximately 1.13 and 1.30 mm in diameter, respectively, and the second is embedded in a large amount of mucus. The eggs grow, mainly due to water absorption at the beginning of the process, and they reach a diameter of about 1.35 and 1.59 mm, respectively, close to hatching. It took, respectively, 29-56 days and 35-66 days from egg laying to hatching. For the description of the embryonic development, we use photographs from the field, SEM micrographs, and histological analysis. This allowed us, for instance, to document the progression of structures and pigmentation directly from live embryos in the field, and to record microstructures, such as the presence of perforations in the cuticle of the embryo in the place where eyes are developing. Yet, contrary to what was expected in the literature, we record an egg tooth in one of the studied laniatoreans. J. Exp. Zool. (Mol. Dev. Evol) 314B:489-502, 2010. (C) 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Archaeological Mounds in Marajo Island in Northern Brazil: A Geological Perspective Integrating Remote Sensing and Sedimentology

Earthen mounds with archaeological artifacts have been well known in Marajo Island since the 19th century. Their documented dimensions are impressive, e.g., up to 20m high, and with areas large as 90 ha. The mounds, locally known as lesos, impose a significant. relief on the very low-lying landscape of this region, which averages 4 to 6 in above present. sea level. These features have been traditionally interpreted as artificial constructions of the Marajoara culture, designed for defense, cemetery purposes, or escape from flooding. Here, we provide sedimentological and geomorphological data that suggest an alternative origin for these structures that is more consistent with their monumental sizes. Rather than artificial, the Marajoara tesos seem to consist of natural morphological features related to late Pleistocene and Holocene fluvial, and possibly tidal-influenced, paleochannels and paleobars that became abandoned as depositional conditions changed through dine. Although utilized and modified by the Marajoara since at least 2000 years ago, these earthen mounds contain a significant non-anthropogenically modified sedimentary substratum. Therefore, the large Marajoara tesos are not entirely artificial. Ancient, Marajoara cultures took advantage of these natural, preexisting elevated surfaces to base their communities and develop their activities, locally increasing the sizes of these fluvial landforms. This alternative interpretation suggests less cumulative labor investment, in the construction of the mounds and might. have significant implications for reconstructing the organization of the Marajoara culture. (C) 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Trace-metal biogeochemistry in the Mediterranean Thau Lagoon, a shellfish farming area

The present study contributes to the knowledge of the biogeochemistry of Pb, Cd, Cu, and Ni in the Mediterranean Than Lagoon, southern France, which is an important shellfish farming system. The concentrations of the metals were determined in sediment cores and the overlying waters using inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry. Particular attention was given to the determination of dissolved Cu species because of their dual role as essential nutrient and toxicant to planktonic organisms. Dissolved Cu speciation was determined using the diffusive gradient in thin-film technique (DGT) and competitive ligand exchange-adsorptive cathodic stripping voltammetry (CLE-ACSV). Our data indicated a significant historical contamination of the sediments, which commenced in the second half of the 19th century, with trace metal inputs persisting until the end of the 20th century. In recent years a decrease in metal contamination has become apparent. The maxima observed for Pb, Cd, and Cu profiles probably indicate the occurence of anoxia crises. A strong complexation of the dissolved Cu species was observed in the waters of the Than Lagoon, which reduced the bioavailability of Cu. The dissolved Cu(2+) concentrations were probably too low to cause direct toxic effects on shellfish, but the highest concentration (5.29 pM) observed in this study can potentially influence phytoplankton communities. A comparison between the Cu speciation data indicates that up to 50% of the complexed Cu determined using CLE-ACSV was DGT labile.