Public Opinion in the Eurasian De Facto States

Developing reliable social scientific knowledge about public opinion in de facto states is a challenging exercise. Since 2008 we cooperated with a variety of research partners to organize a series of social scientific surveys in all four de facto states in the post-Soviet region, organizing an initial round of surveys in 2010-2011 and a follow-up round in December 2014. In this contribution we summarize the responses by declared nationality to two questions asked in 2010-11 and then again in 2013-2014: preferred future status and trust in the president. We show the results for nationalities because these values tend to be most distinctive and indicate some of the key divides in the de facto states

Je li etničko čišćenje uspjelo? Geografija manjinskog povratka u Bosni i Hercegovini i njezino značenje

Članak propituje etničko čišćenje kao geopolitičku strategiju te napore međunarodne zajednice i običnih stanovnika Bosne i Hercegovine da ponište učinke kroz proces povratka izbjeglica i prognanih. Etničko je čišćenje uspješno pridonijelo podjeli stanovništva i teritorija prema nacionalističkim nacrtima, no Daytonski mirovni sporazum uključivao je i odredbe koje su potaknule znatnu povratnu migraciju prognanog stanovništva te je na taj način imao učinak protivan ratnoj politici segregacije. Članak analizira i kartografski prikazuje geografiju povratka u Bosnu i Hercegovinu. U prigodi 10. obljetnice Daytonskoga sporazuma (1995.-2005.), uključuje i raspravu o trenutačnom stanovništvu i teritorijalnom sastavu Bosne i Hercegovine. Svoje geopolitičko viđenje suvremene Bosne i Hercegovine javno iznose nacionalistički političari, inozemni diplomati, promatrači i novinari. Njihove ocjene o još uvijek podijeljenoj zemlji odnosno o zemlji djelomično sređenoj zahvaljujući međunarodnoj intervenciji, ne opisuju valjano trenutačno situaciju. Iz demografske perspektive gledano, etničko čišćenje niti je uspjelo, a niti je poništeno.Has ethnic cleansing succeeded? Geographies of minority return and its meaning in Bosnia-Herzegovina The paper describes the geopolitical strategy of ethnic cleansing as it was used in pursuit of state-breaking and state-making in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1992-1995 war. It considers the question of whether this strategy worked in the sense that it left a segregated population and exclusionary political geography in Bosnia ten years after Dayton. The paper presents two geographies of post-Dayton Bosnia-Herzegovina which relate to the legacy of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is discussed as a gepolitical strategy that yields a political geography characterized by the massive population displacement brought by nationalists\u27 effort to segregate and partition Bosnia. Although ethnic cleansing was succesfull in dividing population and territory acording to the nationalists\u27 maps, The Dayton Peace Accord that ended the war contained provisions that eventually led to considerable return migration by displaced persons, udoing the exclusivity of the war\u27s political geography. The paper provides maps of the geography of return to describe and analyze the effect to which the effort to promote minority returns over the last decade has ameliorated the political geography of ethnic cleansing. The paper then analyzes the meanings ascribed to Bosnia-Hercegovina\u27s current population and territory ten years after Dayton. Nationalist politicians, international diplomats, observers and journalists are among those disseminating new visions of the meaning of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which make claims about persistence of nationalism or the condition of human rights in post-war Bosnia. Their depiction of Bosnia as either yet broken by nationalism or near fixed by international community does not describe properly the actual lived spaces in post-war Bosnia. We argue, instead, that Bosnia must be understood as a new political space that defies the purity of nationalist visions and also fails to satisfy the wish of a truly heterogeneous society. Ethnic cleansing has not succeded nor has it yet been reversed

Politicizing Memory: Evidence from Ukraine

Research shows that people’s perceptions of historical violence shape many present-day outcomes. Yet it is also plausible that people emphasize or downplay certain events of the past based on how these resonate with their beliefs and identities today. With a population of diverse orientations involving Russia and Europe, Ukraine in 2019 was an important case for exploring how people’s present geopolitical orientations shaped perceptions of victimization in World War II. Drawing on a survey experiment, we find evidence for “motivated reasoning” among Western-oriented respondents, who emphasized their family’s suffering in World War II when faced with information that attributed blame to the Soviet regime. We find no evidence for motivated reasoning among the Russian-oriented respondents

Ocular Microtremor Laser Speckle Metrology

Ocular Microtremor (OMT) is a continual, high frequency physiological tremor of the eye present in all subjects even when the eye is apparently at rest. OMT causes a peak to peak displacement of around 150nm-2500nm with a broadband frequency spectrum between 30Hz to 120Hz; with a peak at about 83Hz. OMT carries useful clinical information on depth of consciousness and on some neurological disorders. Nearly all quantitative clinical investigations have been based on OMT measurements using an eye contacting piezoelectric probe which has low clinical acceptability. Laser speckle metrology is a candidate for a high resolution, non-contacting, compact, portable OMT measurement technique. However, tear flow and biospeckle might be expected to interfere with the displacement information carried by the speckle. The paper investigates the properties of the scattered speckle of laser light (λ = 632.8nm) from the eye sclera to assess the feasibility of using speckle techniques to measure OMT such as the speckle correlation. The investigation is carried using a high speed CMOS video camera adequate to capture the high frequency of the tremor. The investigation is supported by studies using an eye movement simulator (a bovine sclera driven by piezoelectric bimorphs). The speckle contrast and the frame to frame spatiotemporal variations are analyzed to determine if the OMT characteristics are detectable within speckle changes induced by the biospeckle or other movements

Cooperative robotic path planning for comprehensive bridge inspection with LiDAR technology:navigating unknown structures

This paper presents a new automated workflow designed for 3D reconstruction of previously unsurveyed bridges, developed within the EU-funded RAPID project. A cooperative approach, where Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Un-manned Surface Vehicles (USVs) collaborate is employed to en-sure the safe execution of inspections in unknown environments. In this proposed approach, a survey is first performed using a UAV. The mapped environment serves to plan a path for a USV, addressing safety concerns associated with the UAV flight path. This collaboration enables a secure mapping of the underside features of the bridge. Real-world environment tests, conducted with one of the most popular commercial UAS platforms and a novel research USV, demonstrate the feasibility of the developed system in autonomous bridge inspections

Critical geopolitics/critical geopolitics 25 years on

Gerard Toal’s/Gearoid ´ O ´ Tuathail’s Critical Geopolitics was published in 1996 in the University of Minnesota’s book series on borderlines, a series described as one concerned with the task of revisioning global politics. It was entirely appropriate that he was the first geographer to contribute to this series given his role in what was then the nascent field of critical geopolitics. In its pages he launched a trenchant critique of the representational practices of international politics that mapped global space. The book subjected the taken-for-granted geographical specifications of power and territory to critical review from a wide range of theoretical perspectives all designed to render strange the geographical constructions of the world map

Critical geopolitics: The social construction of space and place in the practice of statecraft

This dissertation is an attempt to develop a critical intellectual practice devoted to the understanding and refutation of orthodox geopolitics, which is part of a contemporary hegemonic world order of militarism, nuclear terror and pervasive structural violence. It argues that the practices of geography and geopolitics are not disinterested recordings of already legible surfaces. Rather, geography and geopolitics are technologies of earth-writing: they help construct and write a particular world which is projected as being an essential copy of a supposed natural world. It is argued that the very acts of seeing, reading and writing are never natural but mediated by social, historical and geographical contexts. Worlds are social not natural, constructed not given, scripted not immanently meaningful. All human practice can be regarded as engaging in the writing of worlds, or, more specifically, the writing of spaces and places to compose a world (or worlds). Practices such as foreign policy and international relations are participants in the social construction of worlds. The practice of statecraft is innately geopolitical for it involves the political writing of spaces and places in international politics. This geopolitics has two forms: first order or high academic and formalized geopolitical reasoning such as that of Mackinder and other supposed wise men of geopolitics, and second and third order geopolitical reasoning which is of a more tacit, common-sense type. The implications of this theoretical argument for the study of foreign policy are explored in two empirically orientated chapters: one on tacit American geopolitics and the second on the geopolitics (formal and tacit) of U.S. foreign policy towards South and southern Africa. It is argued that the study of how geopolitics works is, in part, the study of how hegemony (in the Gramscian sense) in the modern world order functions. American foreign policy is characterized by a self-centered panoptic and U.S. foreign policy in South and southern Africa write that place as both strategic and tragic