Overview of the Large Hadron Collider cryo-magnets logistics

More than 1700 superconducting cryo-magnets have to be installed in the Large Hadron Collider tunnel. The long, heavy and fragile LHC cryo-magnets are difficult to handle and transport in particular in the LEP tunnel environment originally designed for smaller, lighter LEP magnets. An installation rate of more than 20 cryo-magnets per week is needed to cope with the foreseen LHC installation end date. The paper gives an overview of the transport and installation sequence complexity, from the storage area at the surface to the cryo-magnet final position in the tunnel. The success of this task depends on a series of independent factors that have to be considered at the same time. The equipment needed for the transport and tunnel installation of the LHC cryo-magnets is briefly described. The manpower and equipment organisation as well as the challenges of logistics are then detailed. The paper includes conclusions and some of the lessons learned during the first phase of the LHC cryo-magnets installation

Towards a History of Mass Violence in the Etat Indépendant du Congo, 1885-1908

The present article provides an up-to-date scholarly introduction to mass violence in the Etat Indépendant du Congo (Congo Free State, EIC). Its aims are twofold: to offer a point of access to the extensive literature and historical debates on the subject, and to make the case for exchanging the currently prevalent top-down narrative, with its excessive focus on King Leopold's character and motives, for one which considers the EIC's culture of violence as a multicausal, broadly based and deeply engrained social phenomenon. The argument is divided into five sections. Following a general outline of the EIC's violent system of administration, I discuss its social and demographic impact (and the controversy which surrounds it) to bring out the need for more regionally focused and context sensitive studies. The dispute surrounding demographics demonstrates that what is fundamentally at stake is the place the EIC's extreme violence should occupy in the history of European ‘modernity’. Since approaches which hinge on Leopoldian exceptionalism are particularly unhelpful in clarifying this issue, I pause to reflect on how such approaches came to dominate the distinct historiographical traditions which emerged in Belgium and abroad before moving on to a more detailed exploration of a selection of causes underlying the EIC's violent nature. While state actors remain in the limelight, I shift the focus from the state as a singular, normative agent, towards the existence of an extremely violent society in which various individuals and social groups within and outside of the state apparatus committed violent acts for multiple reasons. As this argument is pitched at a high level of abstraction, I conclude with a discussion of available source material with which it can be further refined and updated

"Should a country's leaders apologize for its past misdeeds?": An analysis of the effects of both public apologies from a Belgian official and perception of Congolese victims' continued suffering on Belgians' representations of colonial action, support for reparation, and attitudes towards the Congolese

This study sought to identify the conditions facilitating the recognition of a social group’s past misdeeds among its members. Such recognition entails a threat to group members’ social identity, potentially triggering defensive strategies, such as denying these misdeeds, not experiencing collective guilt and shame, opposing reparative actions, and derogating the victim group’s members. As collective rituals, public apologies performed by an official representative should allow group members to acknowledge the harm done while maintaining a positive social identity, therefore alleviating the need for such defensive strategies. We carried out an experimental study based on a 2 (Apologies vs. No apologies) x 2 (Continued suffering vs. No continued suffering) + 1 (Control) design, with Belgian participants (N = 164). In all conditions, participants were reminded of the atrocities committed during the first years of the Belgian colonization of Congo. This description was followed by a short statement about the suffering that Congolese people still endured (Continued suffering condition) or none (No continued suffering), then by a transcript of public apologies pronounced by Belgium’s Foreign Affairs Minister in the Apologies condition, or none (No apologies). Results revealed that Belgian participants’ attitudes and behavioural intentions towards the Congolese were the most positive when both apologies and the victims’ continued suffering were reunited. A mediation analysis further demonstrated that differences in levels of racism and in support for reparation were mediated by representations of the ingroup’s past.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

'Rough crossings' and 'Congo: white King, red rubber, black death': documentary, drama and radical otherness in history programming

As scholars charting representations of the 1807 abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the UK have noted, its portrayal on British radio and television was minimal until the recent bicentenary commemorations (Wilson 2007: 391). This article focuses on two examples from the BBC’s 2007 ‘Abolition Season’: Congo: White King,Red Rubber, Black Death, written and directed by Peter Bate, which first aired in February 2004, and Simon Schama’s Rough Crossings. Drawing on Elsaesser's idea of the 'fractured viewer', we argue that in these cases the use of drama-documentary has greater potential, both as historiography and for audience engagement,than ‘straightforward’ documentary, and especially when the topic predates the twentieth century, with little film footage and few, if any, surviving eyewitnesses. Furthermore, the continuing significance of slavery and colonialism to modern nations leads us to consider drama-documentary a legitimate form of representation and of historiography for a past which, it is increasingly recognised, cannot be ‘a place of rest, certainty, reconciliation . . . of tranquillized sleep’ (Foucault 2006: 16), as Robert Harms (2007) has recently suggested of several cinematic representations of the transatlantic slave trade