In the Shadow of Akimbo Corporatism: Arched Athleticism and the 'Becoming-Human' of a People.

The importance of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s development of ‘encounter’ is brought into sharp relief as key to the notion of ‘athleticism’. Here, both are developed as indispensable to each other, forming an a-radical/ana-material groundless ground to power, politics, literary sensibility, indeed sense itself – though all played in a minor key. It is a nuanced encounter which, at one and the same time, if working as encounter, produces an acephaletic knowledge, a body-knowledge, without the Ego-I. This, in itself would have been enough. But in an age of massifying systems, drone warfare and horrific migrations, where corporate tentacles bend the rules akimbo, one finds that this turn to a Deleuzean athleticism offers a different kind of political analysis, a radical difference, which, despite (or because of) the odds, enables a politics of hope and indeed, of a ‘becoming-human’

The logic of tact:How decisions happen in situations of crisis

The mass-migration of refugees in the fall 2015 posed an immense humanitarian and logistical challenge: exhausted from their week-long journeys, refugees arrived in Vienna in need of care, shelter, food, medical aid, and onward transport. The refugee crisis was managed by an emerging polycentric and inter-sectoral collective of organizations. In this paper, we investigate how, during such a situation, leaders of these organizations made decisions in concert with each other and hence sustained the collective's capacity to act collectively. We ask: what was the logic of decision-making that orchestrated collective action during the crisis? In answering this question, we make the following contribution: departing from March's logics of consequences and appropriateness as well as Weick's work on sensemaking during crisis, we introduce an alternative logic that informed decision-making: the logic of tact. With this concept we (a) offer a better understanding of how managers make decisions under the condition of bounded rationality and the simultaneous transgression of their institutional identity in situations of crisis; and we (b) show that in decision-making under duress cognition is neither ahead of action, nor is action ahead of cognition; rather, tact explicates the rapid switching between cognition and action, orchestrating decision-making through this interplay

Military maladaptation : counterinsurgency and the politics of failure

Tactical learning is critical to battlefield success, especially in a counterinsurgency. This article tests the existing model of military adaption against a ‘most-likely’ case: the British Army’s counterinsurgency in the Southern Cameroons (1960–61). Despite meeting all preconditions thought to enable adaptation – decentralization, leadership turnover, supportive leadership, poor organizational memory, feedback loops, and a clear threat – the British still failed to adapt. Archival evidence suggests politicians subverted bottom-up adaptation, because winning came at too high a price in terms of Britain’s broader strategic imperatives. Our finding identifies an important gap in the extant adaptation literature: it ignores politics.PostprintPeer reviewe

Situating 1816, the ‘year without summer’, in the UK

The immediate local impacts of the eruption of Mount Tambora, Sumbawa, Indonesia in April 1815 were devastating, resulting in the loss of an estimated 60 000 lives on this and neighbouring islands. However, the longer term effects of the largest known historical eruption on global weather and climate and the related consequences for human health and wellbeing have maintained the prominence of the eruption in public memory. Among the most notable effects were global weather anomalies the following year, which has come to be referred to as ‘the year without summer’. Scholars across the sciences and humanities continue to investigate the eruption, seeking insights into the likely meteorological and societal impacts of future volcanic eruptions. The bicentenary of the ‘year without summer’ in 2016 provides a timely moment to revisit this weather episode. In this paper, we draw on a range of archival materials and contemporary publications to reconstruct the weather year and explore how the summer of 1816 was experienced and recorded across the UK. We also wish to demonstrate the importance of historical contingency in understanding the potential implications of the event at the local level, and of situating events within their appropriate temporal context. We do this by considering the summer of 1816 as set against the wider weather and cultural contexts of the 1810s. Our findings illustrate that in a UK context, summer 1816 was characterised by unusual and extreme weather events. Importantly it also took place within a sequence of years that were similarly replete with anomalous and challenging weather conditions

Technology and the Era of the Mass Army

We investigate how technology has influenced the size of armies. During the nineteenth century, the development of the railroad made it possible to field and support mass armies, significantly increasing the observed size of military forces. During the late twentieth century, further advances in technology made it possible to deliver explosive force from a distance and with precision, making mass armies less desirable. We find support for our technological account using a new data set covering thirteen great powers between 1600 and 2000. We find little evidence that the French Revolution was a watershed in terms of levels of mobilization

Terrain, politics, history

This article is based on the 2019 Dialogues in Human Geography plenary lecture at the Royal Geographical Society. It has four parts. The first discusses my work on territory in relation to recent work by geographers and others on the vertical, the volumetric, the voluminous, and the milieu as ways of thinking space in three-dimensions, of a fluid and dynamic earth. Second, it proposes using the concept of terrain to analyse the political materiality of territory. Third, it adds some cautions to this, through thinking about the history of the concept of terrain in geographical thought, which has tended to associate it with either physical or military geography. Finally, it suggests that this work is a way geographers might begin to respond to the challenge recently made by Bruno Latour, where he suggests that ‘belonging to a territory is the phenomenon most in need of rethinking and careful redescription; learning new ways to inhabit the Earth is our biggest challenge’. Responding to Latour continues this thinking about the relations between territory, Earth, land, and ground, and their limits

Towards an Embodied Sociology of War

While sociology has historically not been a good interlocutor of war, this paper argues that the body has always known war, and that it is to the corporeal that we can turn in an attempt to develop a language to better speak of its myriad violences and its socially generative force. It argues that war is a crucible of social change that is prosecuted, lived and reproduced via the occupation and transformation of myriad bodies in numerous ways from exhilaration to mutilation. War and militarism need to be traced and analysed in terms of their fundamental, diverse and often brutal modes of embodied experience and apprehension. This paper thus invites sociology to extend its imaginative horizon to rethink the crucial and enduring social institution of war as a broad array of fundamentally embodied experiences, practices and regimes