Persistent Place-Making in Prehistory: the Creation, Maintenance, and Transformation of an Epipalaeolithic Landscape

Most archaeological projects today integrate, at least to some degree, how past people engaged with their surroundings, including both how they strategized resource use, organized technological production, or scheduled movements within a physical environment, as well as how they constructed cosmologies around or created symbolic connections to places in the landscape. However, there are a multitude of ways in which archaeologists approach the creation, maintenance, and transformation of human-landscape interrelationships. This paper explores some of these approaches for reconstructing the Epipalaeolithic (ca. 23,000–11,500 years BP) landscape of Southwest Asia, using macro- and microscale geoarchaeological approaches to examine how everyday practices leave traces of human-landscape interactions in northern and eastern Jordan. The case studies presented here demonstrate that these Epipalaeolithic groups engaged in complex and far-reaching social landscapes. Examination of the Early and Middle Epipalaeolithic (EP) highlights that the notion of “Neolithization” is somewhat misleading as many of the features we use to define this transition were already well-established patterns of behavior by the Neolithic. Instead, these features and practices were enacted within a hunter-gatherer world and worldview

Preventing violent extremism through the United Nations: the rise and fall of a good idea

In January 2016, late in his term as Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon introduced a Plan of Action to Prevent Violent Extremism (PVE). The approach promised to bring balance to multilateral counterterrorism by adding much-needed focus on the drivers of mobilization into violence. Highly arguable in theory and with great potential against the online recruitment efforts of groups such as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, the PVE agenda has nonetheless found enemies at the United Nations—both among member states and within the Secretariat. Errors committed in the Plan of Action\u27s rollout made the new approach hostage to the very limitations and tensions that it was intended to resolve. PVE also rests on a shaky conceptual foundation and has been further stultified by the intensely political setting in which it was to be implemented. The future of this well-intended approach therefore looks at risk, even bleak. This article traces and explains the rise and likely fall of PVE at the United Nations, bringing to light a number of sobering insight into the possibilities and limits of multilateral counterterrorism

GNSI Decision Brief: Educate as You Operate: Developing National Security Practitioners for Strategic Competition

Amid a “rapidly changing world,” shaped by “strategic competition” and “shared challenges,” the 2022 National Security Strategy (NSS) set out a U.S. vision for a global environment “that is free, open, secure, and prosperous.” Achieving this vision, it acknowledged, will “demand increased global cooperation,” not only across the United States Government but with its partners and allies.i In similar terms, the 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) recognized the novel threats of near-peer competitors and emphasized the need to work “seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, all instruments of U.S. national power and our networks of alliances and partners.” It seems the NDS and NSS authors believe good strategy is important, but integration is key to its implementation.https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/gnsi_decision_briefs/1009/thumbnail.jp