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Located in the often-contentious center of the European continent, German territory has regularly served as a primary tool through which to understand and study Germany's economic, cultural, and political development. Many German geographers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries became deeply invested in geopolitical determinism – the idea that a nation's territorial holdings (or losses) dictate every other aspect of its existence. Taking this as his premise, Mingus focuses on the use of maps as mediums through which the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union sought to reshape German national identity after the Second World War. As important as maps and the study of geography have been to the field of European history, few scholars have looked at the postwar development of occupied Germany through the lens of the map – the most effective means to orient German citizens ontologically within a clearly and purposefully delineated spatial framework. Mingus traces the institutions and individuals involved in the massive cartographic overhaul of postwar Germany. In doing so, he explores not only the causes and methods behind the production and reproduction of Germany's mapped space but also the very real consequences of this practice.

This paper examines shifts in the design of, use of and rhetoric accompanying maps published in the periodical Raumforschung und Raumordnung from 1936 through 1955. In the discussion of these maps published prior to and during the Second World War, special attention is paid to the depiction of the German Empire, the incorporation of Austria into maps of the Third Reich, and cartographic portrayalsof Poland and other eastern European territory. Particularly in-depth investigation into articles and maps written and drawn by Reinhold Niemeyer and Rudolf Hoffmann is also undertaken here. In evaluating the maps published in Raumforschungund Raumordnung (RuR) after Germany's defeat, this paper focuses on depictions of the new Federal Republic of Germany and the mapping of its relationship, geographically, to the German Democratic Republic. While the content of the maps published in RuR reflected the territorial reality of its German cartographers and authors - from violent expansionism to defeat, territorial diminution and a split into two distinct nation states -, this paper argues that many of the cartographic strategies employed in its pages remained relatively consistent over time.

Nations in the Arab world are largely unitary states, yet Iraq has embarked on a seemingly ambitious agenda of decentralization and devolution mixed with federalism. While local elections have been delayed at least until 2012, and indeed may never take place, Iraq's constitutional commitment to decentralize and subsequent statutory enactments appear to be turning provincial governments into significant actors in Iraqi governance. Progress has taken place at a slower, more deliberate pace than both proponents and opponents feared in 2002–6. This article discusses the current state of implementation of this process as a cornerstone of Iraqi democratic development, from the perspective of a former U.S. Department of State senior governance specialist who served on an embedded Provincial Reconstruction Team in 2009–10. These reconstruction teams were dismantled in the year leading up to September 6, 2011, as the American relationship with Iraq was "normalized," though they likely will continue in Afghanistan into 2013.

The February 2006 national election in Canada was driven by numerous political scandals rather than by a positive sense of what needs to be accomplished in Canada. The two key scandals were the events leading to the resignation of David Dingwall as president of the Royal Canadian Mint and the Sponsorship Program scandal that lead to the Gomery Inquiry. This article examines these two financial scandals to determine f they may have been driven by a shift from traditional democratic, public-sector values to the market-based, private-sector values of the New Public Management (NPM). It appears that the NPM played little role in these scandals, although the model of contracting out for government services bears some responsibility for the Sponsorship scandal because this tool was used to avoid transparency. Adapted from the source document.