Locating The Mississippi: Landscape, Nature, And National Territoriality At The Mississippi Headwaters

Geography and the Environmen

Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt's international political and legal theory

The ongoing Schmitt revival has extended Carl Schmitt's reach over the fields of international legal and political theory. Neo-Schmittians suggest that his international thought provides a new reading of the history of international law and order, which validates the explanatory power of his theoretical premises – the concept of the political, political decisionism, and concrete-order-thinking. Against this background, this article mounts a systematic reappraisal of Schmitt's international thought in a historical perspective. The argument is that his work requires re-contextualization as the intellectual product of an ultra-intense moment in Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. It inscribed Hitler's ‘spatial revolution’ into a full-scale reinterpretation of Europe's geopolitical history, grounded in land appropriations, which legitimized Nazi Germany's wars of conquest. Consequently, Schmitt's elevation of the early modern nomos as the model for civilized warfare – the ‘golden age’ of international law – against which American legal universalism can be portrayed as degenerated, is conceptually and empirically flawed. Schmitt devised a politically motivated set of theoretical premises to provide a historical counter-narrative against liberal normativism, which generated defective history. The reconstruction of this history reveals the explanatory limits of his theoretical vocabulary – friend/enemy binary, sovereignty-as-exception, nomos/universalism – for past and present analytical purposes. Schmitt's defective analytics and problematic history compromise the standing of his work for purposes of international theory

COMPARATIVE LAW AND THE PROCESS OF DE-JURIDIFICATION: THE JOINT-EMPLOYMENT LAW CASE IN LABOUR LAW

The process of de-juridification is, in some respects, ambiguous and paradoxical. While in certain areas, we see a proliferation of detailed legislative regulations, in others, we detect tendencies pointing in the opposite direction. One of the most interesting cases is that of labor law, where both tendencies emerge. Recent reforms in many European countries show a trend towards a relaxation of rules, inspired by the aim to stimulate growth in employment. In this context, the newly-introduced concept of \u201cjoint employment\u201d plays a pivotal role. The process of de-juridification clearly invests labor law, in particular within enterprise networks, where arrangements under joint employment seem to give the parties of a commercial contract the highest standard of contractual freedom. This social phenomenon is not therefore regulated by detailed legislative provisions, but simply through non-specific norms inspired by general goals. In considering several recent reforms of labor law in European countries, in this paper, we aim to determine the real level of de-juridification currently present within traditionally rigid legislative system

Transgressive bodies in the work of Julie Doucet, Fabrice Neaud and Jean-Christophe Menu: towards a theory of the 'autobioBD'

As the comic book, and more precisely its exceptionally francophone doppelganger, la bande dessinée, begins to fulfil its potential as 'the Ninth Art', the range of styles, reading contexts, and genres which constitute the form as a signifying practice has consequently expanded. Consideration of 'what a comic is', such as is found in the works of Thierry Groensteen and Benoît Peeters1 needs therefore to be complemented by a range of subsidiary questions addressing not only 'what kinds of comics there are', but, as an integral part of those inquiries, how different comic genres signify, and how the enunciative and representational functions deployed by each might be conceptualised. This paper considers the work of three Francophone comic artists, Fabrice Neaud and Jean-Christophe Menu, both French, and the Québecoise Julie Doucet, all of whom could be considered as proponents of the genre of BD we will call 'autobiocomics'. It will be argued that Neaud and Doucet, through their exploration of ontologies of presence and self-representation, work against the visual order of the phallocentric and heteronormative, an order which Menu appears to replicate but ultimately calls into question

Islands and the offshoring possibilities and strategies of contemporary states: insights on/for the migration phenomenon on Europe’s southern flank

Islands have transitioned from being conceived as prototypes of idealised polities to being deliberately engineered as offshore enclaves where the rules of the parent state need not fully apply. With their manageable size, separation and distance from the mainland, small islands are rendered as convenient laboratories for entrepreneurial political engineering, and equally handy sites for research on the same. Island migration policies manifest this contemporary flexibility and creative governance of states. As we approach the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), this paper explores these ideas in relation to the migration phenomenon on Europe’s southern flank. Using an island studies approach, it discusses the problematique of island spaces caught in this dynamic but which cannot be ‘offshore’ because, as unitary island states (Cyprus and Malta) and unlike larger states with small outlying and peripheral island components (Italy and Australia), they must somehow be ‘both inside and outside’. The paper goes on to critique such facile binarisms, arguing for a more nuanced appreciation of islands as well as a recognition that what may be, at face value, an expression of a state’s authority is as much a manifestation of its limitations

Public authority and conservation in areas of armed conflict : Virunga National Park as a ‘State within a State’ in Eastern Congo

Much research on nature conservation in war-torn regions focuses on the destructive impact of violent conflict on protected areas, and argues that transnational actors should step up their support for those areas to mitigate the risks that conflict poses to conservation efforts there. Overlooked are the effects transnational efforts have on wider conflict dynamics and structures of public authority in these regions. This article describes how transnational actors increasingly gained influence over the management of Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and how these actors contributed to the militarization of conservation in Virunga. Most scholarly literature suggests that ‘green militarization’ contributes to the extension of state authority over territory and population, yet this is not the case in Virunga. Instead, the militarization of Virunga translates into practices of extra-state territorialization, with the result that many in the local population perceive the park's management as a project of personalized governance and/or a ‘state within a state’. This article thus argues that it is important to depart from an a priori notion of the ‘state’ when considering the nexus of conservation practices and territorialization, and to analyse this intersection through the lens of public authority instead

GATS and the Education Service Industry : The Politics of Scale and Global Reterritorialization

One consequence of the hype around globalization and education and debates on global political actors such as the World Bank, IMF and WTO-is that there has not been sufficient attention paid by education theorists to the development of a rigorous set of analytic categories that might enable us to make sense of the profound changes which now characterize education in the new millennium. 1 This is not a problema confined to education. Writing in the New Left Review, Fredric Jameson observes that debates on globalization have tended to be shaped by "…ideological appropriations- discussions not of the process itself, but of its effects, good or bad: judgements, in other words, totalizing in nature; while functional descriptions tend to isolate particular elements without relating them to each other." In this paper we start from the position that little or nothing can be explained in terms of the causal powers of globalization; rather we shall be suggesting that globalization is the outcome of processes that involve real actors-economic and political-with real interests. Following Martin Shaw, we also take the view that globalization does not undermine the state but includes the transformation of state forms; "…it is both predicated on and produces such transformations."3 Examining how these processes of transformation work, however, requires systematic investigation into the organization and strategies of particular actors whose horizons or effects might be described as global

Geographies of Finance : Centers, Flows, and Relations

In this paper, I critically examine how geographers and other social scientists have developed complementary research programs for economistic studies of finance by drawing on new relational concepts such as networks and embeddedness and opening up new research frontiers. In so doing, I investigate how global financial spaces have been conceptualized in mainstream finance literature and how economic concepts have been applied to studies of finance. Drawing on these discussions, I suggest that we need to undertake an alternative research of financial space that pays more attention to relational power dynamics among financial firms and the macroeconomic impacts of financial flows on regional economies.Relational Turns, Financial Space, Financial Centers, Financial Flows

Citizenship, Nationhood, and Non-Territoriality: Transnational Participation in Europe

Since the 1980s, the question of citizenship has taken root as a major theme in the social sciences and as the focus of juridical, political, social, and cultural debates in all democratic societies. In Europe, citizenship has taken different shapes and definitions in its rhetoric, ideology, and practice with regard to immigrants’ incorporation into nation-states and their expansion of political participation beyond boundaries relating to home and host country to include a broad European space. [Premières lignes