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Access to water is a critical aspect of human survival; we have seen an increased tension over transboundary water over the years. In the northeast of Africa, the Nile River is among the most vital source of water and a source of conflict among three of its major riparian countries (Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia). For downstream states (Egypt and Sudan), the river serves as a lifeline, but for upstream states (rest of equatorial states), it provides an opportunity for economic growth. Historically Egypt has been the regional hydro-hegemon in the Nile Basin through historical treaties and agreements. However, the independence of Nile Basin countries in the mid-1900s has allowed upstream states to reassert their rights and establish equal control and benefits from the Nile River. International efforts to establish a legal structure since the 1900s was unsuccessful and has done little to convince downstream countries to agree on any legal framework. While no direct military confrontation between any of the beneficiaries of the Nile River has occurred, studies have predicted that the recent disputes between Ethiopia and Egypt over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam is likely to lead to armed conflict. This study explores the trilateral disputes over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam involving Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan by examining the following research question: Under what conditions can Ethiopia, Egypt, and Sudan work to resolve their disputes over the Nile River in the absence of legal framework? The study suggests that while there is a possibility of direct arm conflict, it is unlikely that it will occur because any military confrontation between any of these states will result in a costly regional crisis and will supersede peace resolution of the ongoing disputes.

The article considers the ecological and economic component as a prerequisite for the sustainable development of regions and the country as a whole, which is one of the most resonant issues of the programs of international environmental forums, an integral part of the economic policy of regional entities. Due to the increase in the population of the planet, the aggravation of the food crisis, the achievement of the goals of natural and economic development is a prerequisite for maintaining stability in the global space. The growth of the tendencies of regionalization of economic relations requires an expansion of the spectrum of state governance instruments that would lay the institutional preconditions for the transformation of regional economies towards the achievement of identified indicators of sustainable development of regions.The ecological and economic situation in Ukraine has its territorial differences both in terms of the nature and severity of the problems, and the possibilities of their practical solution. This implies the objective need for regional differentiation of government management decisions and practical actions aimed at stabilizing and improving the environmental and economic situation. Significant difficulties arise in ensuring the balanced development of transboundary regions, which, in conditions of strengthening integration processes, are most vulnerable to excessive expansion of transnational business entities and unwarranted import of market economy institutions.The basic provisions of the theory of the ecological and economic component in the state management of the natural and economic potential of the regions are formulated. The methodical approaches to determining the level of ecological and economic security of the regions, directions of development of the mechanism of state management of environmental activity at the regional level are determined. Applied tools for the implementation of state management of ecological and economic development of regions have been developed. ; В ...

The borders are becoming the subject of recent attentions in the world. In Europe the issue of openness and integration seemed completely solved with Schengen agreement. But, migrant crisis recalled the need of borders controls. In West Africa, integration is building. The problem of migration reminds how border, a geographic, political and institutional subject, can divide or connect spaces. This thesis studied the dynamics that transcend the borders and that participate in cross-border territorial creation. It has proven that towns and borders become more relevant in geography and spatial planning to understand cross-border territorial systems. The socio-cultural relationship, informal cooperation between local actors, the cross-border trade and the daily cross-border migration are the fundamentals of this transboundary system. Border towns are carriers of this dynamic by creating nodes of networks and by interconnecting spaces. They emit, receive and make transit cross-border flows. Local cross-border cooperation's initiatives observed in West Africa are based on these elements. So, these cross-borders cooperations constitute a form of bottom up territorialisation. The thesis also shows that institutional policies (regional integration, decentralization, national border policies) have mixed responses on strengthening borders processes. However, security issues reinforce the situation in some border areas becoming fully refuge spaces. ; La frontière est aujourd'hui l'objet de toutes les attentions. Aussi bien en Europe où la question de l'ouverture et de l'intégration semblait complètement réglée avec les accords SCHENGEN, qu'en Afrique de l'Ouest où l'intégration se construit, la crise des migrations vient rappeler combien ces objets géographiques et institutionnels divisent ou connectent des espaces. La problématique de cette thèse a été d'étudier les dynamiques qui transcendent la frontière et qui participent à une création territoriale transfrontalière. La ville et la frontière sont des objets d'étude de ...

The outbreak of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a grave global public health emergency. Nowadays, social media has become the main channel through which the public can obtain information and express their opinions and feelings. This study explored public opinion in the early stages of COVID-19 in China by analyzing Sina-Weibo (a Twitter-like microblogging system in China) texts in terms of space, time, and content. Temporal changes within one-hour intervals and the spatial distribution of COVID-19-related Weibo texts were analyzed. Based on the latent Dirichlet allocation model and the random forest algorithm, a topic extraction and classification model was developed to hierarchically identify seven COVID-19-relevant topics and 13 sub-topics from Weibo texts. The results indicate that the number of Weibo texts varied over time for different topics and sub-topics corresponding with the different developmental stages of the event. The spatial distribution of COVID-19-relevant Weibo was mainly concentrated in Wuhan, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and the Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomeration. There is a synchronization between frequent daily discussions on Weibo and the trend of the COVID-19 outbreak in the real world. Public response is very sensitive to the epidemic and significant social events, especially in urban agglomerations with convenient transportation and a large population. The timely dissemination and updating of epidemic-related information and the popularization of such information by the government can contribute to stabilizing public sentiments. However, the surge of public demand and the hysteresis of social support demonstrated that the allocation of medical resources was under enormous pressure in the early stage of the epidemic. It is suggested that the government should strengthen the response in terms of public opinion and epidemic prevention and exert control in key epidemic areas, urban agglomerations, and transboundary areas at the province level. In controlling the crisis, accurate response countermeasures should be formulated following public help demands. The findings can help government and emergency agencies to better understand the public opinion and sentiments towards COVID-19, to accelerate emergency responses, and to support post-disaster management.

The outbreak of Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a grave global public health emergency. Nowadays, social media has become the main channel through which the public can obtain information and express their opinions and feelings. This study explored public opinion in the early stages of COVID-19 in China by analyzing Sina-Weibo (a Twitter-like microblogging system in China) texts in terms of space, time, and content. Temporal changes within one-hour intervals and the spatial distribution of COVID-19-related Weibo texts were analyzed. Based on the latent Dirichlet allocation model and the random forest algorithm, a topic extraction and classification model was developed to hierarchically identify seven COVID-19-relevant topics and 13 sub-topics from Weibo texts. The results indicate that the number of Weibo texts varied over time for different topics and sub-topics corresponding with the different developmental stages of the event. The spatial distribution of COVID-19-relevant Weibo was mainly concentrated in Wuhan, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, the Yangtze River Delta, the Pearl River Delta, and the Chengdu-Chongqing urban agglomeration. There is a synchronization between frequent daily discussions on Weibo and the trend of the COVID-19 outbreak in the real world. Public response is very sensitive to the epidemic and significant social events, especially in urban agglomerations with convenient transportation and a large population. The timely dissemination and updating of epidemic-related information and the popularization of such information by the government can contribute to stabilizing public sentiments. However, the surge of public demand and the hysteresis of social support demonstrated that the allocation of medical resources was under enormous pressure in the early stage of the epidemic. It is suggested that the government should strengthen the response in terms of public opinion and epidemic prevention and exert control in key epidemic areas, urban agglomerations, and transboundary areas at the province level. In controlling the crisis, accurate response countermeasures should be formulated following public help demands. The findings can help government and emergency agencies to better understand the public opinion and sentiments towards COVID-19, to accelerate emergency responses, and to support post-disaster management.

Plastics have become a severe transboundary threat to natural ecosystems and human health, with studies predicting a twofold increase in the number of plastic debris (including micro and nano-sized plastics) by 2030. However, such predictions will likely be aggravated by the excessive use and consumption of single-use plastics (including personal protective equipment such as masks and gloves) due to COVID-19 pandemic. This review aimed to provide a comprehensive overview on the effects of COVID-19 on macroplastic pollution and its potential implications on the environment and human health considering short- and long-term scenarios; addressing the main challenges and discussing potential strategies to overcome them. It emphasises that future measures, involved in an emergent health crisis or not, should reflect a balance between public health and environmental safety as they are both undoubtedly connected. Although the use and consumption of plastics significantly improved our quality of life, it is crucial to shift towards sustainable alternatives, such as bio-based plastics. Plastics should remain in the top of the political agenda in Europe and across the world, not only to minimise plastic leakage and pollution, but to promote sustainable growth and to stimulate both green and blue- economies. Discussions on this topic, particularly considering the excessive use of plastic, should start soon with the involvement of the scientific community, plastic producers and politicians in order to be prepared for the near future. ; Thanks are due to CESAM (UIDP/50017/2020+UIDB/50017/2020), with the financial support from FCT/MCTES through national funds; and to the research projects comPET (PTDC/CTA-AMB/30361/2017) and MARSENSE (PTDC/BTA-GES/28770/2017) funded by FEDER, through COMPETE 2020 - Programa Operacional Competitividade e Internacionalização (POCI), and by national funds (OE), through FCT/MCTES. J.C.P. and A.L.P.S. were funded by Portuguese Science Foundation (FCT) through scholarship PD/BD/135581/2018 and PD/BPD/114870/2016 + CEECIND/01366/2018, respectively; under POCH funds, co-financed by the European Social Fund and Portuguese National Funds from MEC. T.R.W. was funded by a NSERC Discovery Grant RGPIN-2018-04119. ; Peer reviewed

Communities and countries around the world are gearing up efforts to implement the 2030 Agenda goals and targets. In this paper, the water and migration scenarios are explained with a focus on Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 6 (water-related), 11 (urbanization), and 16 (peace and political stability). The study has two phases. The first phase illustrates the application of geospatial data and tools to assess the water-migration interlinkages (nexus) by employing a case study approach. Three case studies, Lake Chad, the Aral Sea region, and the Nile Delta, representing various geographic and socio-political settings, were selected to perform the multitemporal analysis. For this analysis, a mixed toolset framework that combined algorithmic functions of digital image processing, the Landsat sensor data, and applied a geographic information system (GIS) platform was adopted. How water-related events directly or indirectly trigger human migration is described using spatial indicators such as water spread and the extent of urban sprawl. Additionally, the geospatial outputs were analyzed in tandem with the climate variables such as temperature, precipitation data, and socio-economic variables such as population trends and migration patterns. Overall, the three case studies examined how water and climate crisis scenarios influence migration at a local and regional scale. The second phase showcases global-scale analysis based on the Global Conflict Risk Index (GCRI). This indicator reflects on the risks and conflicts with environmental, social, and political aspects and comments on the connection of these dimensions with migration. Together, the two phases of this paper provide an understanding ofthe interplay of water-related events on migration by applying the geospatial assessment and a proxy global index. Additionally, the paper reiterates that such an understanding can serve to establish facts and create evidence to inform sustainable development planning and decision making, particularly with regard to SDGs 6, 11, and 16. Targets such as 6.4 (managing water stress), 6.5 (transboundary challenges) and, 11.B (adaptation and resilience planning) can benefit from the knowledge generated by this geospatial exercise. For example, the high GCRI values for the African region speak to SDG targets 11.B (integrated policies/plans) and 16.7 (decision support systems for peaceful societies). Two key highlights from the synthesis: (a) migration and urbanization are closely interconnected, and (b) the impact of water and climate crisis is comparatively high for rural-urban migration due to the considerable dependence of rural communities on nature-based livelihoods. In conclusion, geospatial analysis is an important tool to study the interlinkages between water and migration. The paper presents a novel perspective toward widening the scope of remote sensing data and GIS toward the implementation of the SDG Agenda.

The article presents arguments in favor of that the role of international criminal law in ensuring of human security is transboundary in nature, as beyond the jurisdiction of national legislation and particularly applies to collective security types - state, single nation, people or ethnic group. But right now it is in crisis because of its flagrant violations, but because it is the most effective international institutions designed to provide individual types of human security.The beginning of the XXI century was marked by a real crisis of public international law, including international criminal law. The events of 2013–2104 years clearly demonstrated the failure of the UN to influence countries that are permanent members of the UN Security Council so that it can stop the obvious to the world, but the impugned by the aggressor, breach of military security of Ukraine.Not all rules of the substantive criminal law of Ukraine concerning international legal relations or contain «international legal component», with internal or external communications with international law or otherwise implemented in the context of international relations (and a significant number of such rules – extradition and transfer of criminals, universal jurisdiction of law on criminal liability, diplomatic and other immunities from prosecution of criminal responsibility for attacks on representatives of foreign countries, convention and conventional crimes).The author has developed assertion that the world needs to build a new security system since the postwar structure, both European and world ones are no longer effective and are not able to defend any country. The new security system should be directed not against anyone, but operate in order to protect its territory, make absolutely unacceptable violation of borders and aggression have effective mechanisms to preserve peace.This assertion takes place and concerns of national security from steadfastness of which depends human security. The main thing here – so the state never put its safety above man, because the true state exists to serve the needs of its citizens, and not vice versa.Key words: safety; state security; human security; international standards; international criminal law; annexation; aggression. ; Наведено аргументи на користь того, що роль міжнародного кримінального права у забезпеченні безпеки людини має транскордонний характер, оскільки виходить за юрисдикцію національного законодавства та здебільшого стосується колективних видів безпеки – держави, окремої нації, народу чи етнічної групи. Розвинуто твердження про те, що світ потребує побудови нової системи безпеки, оскільки післявоєнні структури, як європейські, так і світові, більше не ефективні та не здатні захистити жодну країну. Нова система безпеки, спрямована не проти когось, функціонуватиме для того, щоб захистити свою територію, зробити абсолютно неприпустимими порушення кордонів та агресію, мати ефективні механізми для збереження миру.Ключові слова: безпека; безпека держави; безпека людини; міжнародні стандарти; міжнародне кримінальне право; анексія; агресія.

La llamada globalización tiene su origen en el predominio del capitalismo financiero, que provoca, en apariencia, el escape al Estado de los flujos económicos, y a la consecuente predisposición normativa. Las causas del escape son la revolución tecnológica y el predominio de concepciones políticas y económicas de cuño ultra liberal-conservador: ideología neocon y escuela económica monetarista que abonan la idea de la inevitabilidad de las decisiones de los mercados. Sin embargo no hay: mercado sin reglas jurídicas salvo por el rehúse del Estado. Así nace el Derecho de la globalización como fruto exclusivo de las instancias del poder privado Los resultados: crisis institucional por vacío del poder político jurídico del Estado; aparición de modos de producción del Derecho sin legitimación política; de ello son vehículos la nueva lex mercatoria, el contrato y el arbitraje. Se debe notar que el Derecho global no es Derecho solo transfronterizo, sino que sus soluciones se trasladan al ámbito estatal. Vienen así a la existencia de dos dimensiones jurídicas, una desregulada, otra subalterna de la desregulación, alumbrando un mundo de grandes incertidumbres. ; The so-called globalization stems from the predominance of financial capitalism, which causes an apparent escape for the state of economic flows and your consequent regulation. The causes of the escape are the technological revolution and the prevalence of political and economic conceptions of ultra-liberal-conservative stamp: neocon ideology and monetarist school of economics. This analysis supports the idea of the inevitability of the decisions of the markets. However, there is not market without legal rules; there is the refusal of the state power. Thus, borns the globalization law as the exclusive product of instances of private power. It is results an institutional vacuum of legal political power of the state; and the emergence of modes of production of law without political legitimacy; vehicles of this are the new lex mercatoria, the contract and arbitration. It should be noted that the so called law of globalization is not only transboundary but their solutions are transferred to the state leve!. So, comes to the existence of two legal dimensions, one unregulated, another subordinate to deregulation, arising a world of great uncertainty.

2012 Summer. ; Includes bibliographical references. ; Theorizing the relationship between sovereignty and nature has posed challenges to both scholars and activists. Some believe that sovereignty is a problematic institutional constraint that hampers the formulation of holistic solutions to ecological problems, while others contend that the norms, practices and institutions of sovereignty can be stretched in pursuit of ecological and social sustainability. Complicating this picture is the fact that the empirical contours of sovereignty have shifted of late, as the authority and control of the nation-state has been challenged by neoliberal globalization and the transboundary realities of many environmental challenges, creating a crisis of legitimacy that societal actors attempt to ameliorate in various ways. This dissertation begins from the observation that "nature" - the socially constructed ideal employed to capture the vast multiplicity of the non-human realm - is increasingly central to the process through which individuals, interest groups and social movements attempt to create more democratic, sustainable or ethical political communities and forms of governance. As environmental politics continue to gain traction within mainstream political discourses, environmentalists and non-environmentalists alike are inserting nature into struggles to reconfigure sovereignty toward a particular ecological and/or social ethos. In exploring this interaction, I ask: how do societal groups conceptualize and work to reconfigure the relationship between nature and sovereignty? And what are the social and ecological implications of the normative ideals that they attempt to institutionalize? In order to gain insight into these questions, I examine contemporary American debates over the environmental impacts of immigration. Discussions of the so-called "immigration problem" have been contentious for American greens, leading to significant division within environmentalist organizations, and surprising alliances with a variety of other societal interests. The individuals and organizations involved all attempt to challenge the status quo, but deploy vastly different conceptions of nature, political community and governance to do so. Turning to individuals and organizations who have taken public stances within this debate, I employ (1) textual analysis of websites and publications; (2) semi-structured interviews; and (3) content analysis, in considering the various discursive pathways through which environmental restrictionists and their opponents attempt to reconfigure sovereignty. Through this empirical analysis, I make the case that the discursive terrain on which the relationship between nature and sovereignty resides remains poorly understood - to the detriment of efforts to promote socially and ecologically inclusive polities.

The borders are becoming the subject of recent attentions in the world. In Europe the issue of openness and integration seemed completely solved with Schengen agreement. But, migrant crisis recalled the need of borders controls. In West Africa, integration is building. The problem of migration reminds how border, a geographic, political and institutional subject, can divide or connect spaces. This thesis studied the dynamics that transcend the borders and that participate in cross-border territorial creation. It has proven that towns and borders become more relevant in geography and spatial planning to understand cross-border territorial systems. The socio-cultural relationship, informal cooperation between local actors, the cross-border trade and the daily cross-border migration are the fundamentals of this transboundary system. Border towns are carriers of this dynamic by creating nodes of networks and by interconnecting spaces. They emit, receive and make transit cross-border flows. Local cross-border cooperation's initiatives observed in West Africa are based on these elements. So, these cross-borders cooperations constitute a form of bottom up territorialisation. The thesis also shows that institutional policies (regional integration, decentralization, national border policies) have mixed responses on strengthening borders processes. However, security issues reinforce the situation in some border areas becoming fully refuge spaces. ; La frontière est aujourd'hui l'objet de toutes les attentions. Aussi bien en Europe où la question de l'ouverture et de l'intégration semblait complètement réglée avec les accords SCHENGEN, qu'en Afrique de l'Ouest où l'intégration se construit, la crise des migrations vient rappeler combien ces objets géographiques et institutionnels divisent ou connectent des espaces. La problématique de cette thèse a été d'étudier les dynamiques qui transcendent la frontière et qui participent à une création territoriale transfrontalière. La ville et la frontière sont des objets d'étude de la géographie et de l'aménagement territorial qui se révèlent d'une grande pertinence dans la compréhension des systèmes territoriaux transfrontaliers ouest africains actuels. Les liens socioculturels, les coopérations informelles ou clientélistes entre les acteurs locaux d'une part, le commerce transfrontalier, les mobilités transfrontalières quotidiennes d'autre part, sont, entre autres, les fondamentaux du fonctionnement de ce système transfrontalier. Les villes, notamment frontalières sont porteuses de cette dynamique. Elles émettent, reçoivent et font transiter les flux. Ce sont les lieux où se nouent et s'interconnectent les réseaux. Ces éléments s'intègrent de plus en plus dans les projets de coopération transfrontalière constituant ainsi une forme de territorialisation par le bas. Les politiques institutionnelles (intégration régionale, décentralisation, politiques frontalières) influent de façon mitigée sur le renforcement de ces processus locaux. Mais les enjeux de sécurité renforcent la situation de certaines zones frontières devenant ainsi pleinement des espaces de refuge.

The illicit wildlife trade (IWT) is the fourth most lucrative form of organised crime globally (Donnenfeld & Aucoin, 2017:1). The Global Financial Integrity (GFI) reports that IWT is one of the most profitable and illicit economies with a profit margin of US$ 23 billion annually (May, 2017:np). It has developed into one of the most expensive security challenges. Affecting a broad range of plants and animals, the illegal trade in wildlife deprives nations of their biodiversity, income opportunities, natural heritage and capital (Nowak, 2016:1). Although governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and locals have sought to protect wildlife in the past, entire species of animals and plants are still in danger. To complicate matters, wildlife crime is no longer nationally bound and has moved to a highly sophisticated and a transnational problem (Steyn, 2017:np). Wildlife criminal syndicates exploit weaknesses in neighbouring countries criminal justice systems and porous borders amongst other elements making it easier for the crime to be transboundary in nature (Pienaar, 2014:2; Steyn, 2017:np), through loopholes derived from inconsistent neighbouring countries' wildlife laws. This is due to each country listing country-relevant species and developing legislation suitable to their needs. However, the dynamics of wildlife crime being transnational and perpetrated by organised criminal networks cannot only be dealt with at a national level, as this may aid in the exploitation of wildlife crime laws and the above-mentioned loopholes (Warchol & Harrington, 2016:25). IWT has become a serious and global problem and has developed into a well organised criminal activity, involving multiple TCN's. Its clandestine nature, coupled with it being deemed as a low risk crime has allowed it to extend into other forms of TOC's in the SADC region. South Africa's abalone crisis has moved from a national wildlife crime to that of a regional one. This is as a result of the TCN's being involved in the poaching and smuggling of the marine mollusc at a rapid rate. Furthermore, East Asian criminal groups in collaboration with local Cape Flats gangs have successively used the illicit abalone trade to facilitate the drug trade in Cape Town. Although great efforts have gone into the protection of wild fauna and flora there the low risk of detection and weak deterrence due to low penalties in neighbouring SADC countries aid in the illicit trade. International regulatory frameworks such as CITES have undoubtedly been a key factor both in terms of raising awareness and developing collective responses and strategies to control the wildlife trade. However, like that of CITES, most international and regional treaties are only regulatory and require domestic laws to regulate the regional trade in endangered species. Ultimately, what is required is a domestic consensus in neighbouring countries laws to stop IWT.

Asia's ten main river systems originate in the Himalayas, most of them in the enormous Tibetan plateau, the Roof of the World, which holds a unique geostrategic importance in the world and controlled by China. This country is one of the countries with most transboundary rivers in the world, second only to Russia and Argentina. The Asian water tower holds a position that gives it enormous power and influence, and the possible decisions Pekin can make regarding its hydraulic relations with the rest of the countries transcend the Himalayas and have a regional, continental and possibly global scope. The management of its 16 transboundary rivers can affect the availability of water in many downstream countries, directly affecting access to water resources in 14 countries on the Asian continent and almost three billion people, that is, almost half of the world population This article aims at analysing the Chinese hydraulic behavior in the Himalayan complex, based on two case studies: Nepal, and India. The present piece of work contributes to the debate, on the one hand, on the explanatory factors of the Chinese water behavior, both domestically and internationally. On the other, to the academic debate on the Chinese strategy in relation to one of the most valued resources on the planet, water. China has embarked upon 90,000 projects on hydraulic infrastructure, including dams, dikes, water diversion projects, river basin and river water transfers. These megaprojects affect both internal rivers —which suffer from scarcity and drought more seriously, such as the Yellow river or the Yangtze—, as well as international transboundary rivers, which immediately poses a threat to the countries with which it shares these rivers —such as the Brahmaputra. The Himalayas represent a strategic enclave of extraordinary significance in the international system, but it remains unknown and under studied in Spain, especially the case of Tibet, the Himalayas, and Sino-Indian relations. The theoretical framework guiding this research comes from hydropolitics, coined from the first time in 1979 by Waterbury and that holds significant explanatory power for the present work. The analysis uses hydropolitics as the systematic investigation of the interaction between riparian states, non-state actors and other participants in relation to the authorized allocation and / or use of national and international water resources. Hydro-politics is also related to the capacity of geopolitical institutions to manage shared water resources in a politically sustainable way. Two main concepts related to hydropolitics frame the research. On the one hand, hydrohegemony, understood as the preponderance position of a country within a given water complex. On the other, that of hydrodomination, highlighting the behavior of a country trying to impose its dominion. Both concepts are notably intertwined but do not mean, or imply, the same, and both will illuminate the findings of the study of China' water policy in the Himalayas. The text is structured as follows. First, it sets the rationale of the paper, laying out the main objectives of the paper, the relevance of the topic under scrutiny and the appropriateness of the selected case studies. The second chapter bears the theoretical part of the piece of work and contains two main aspects. First, it depicts water as a geopolitical problem and outlines why water is a geopolitical asset. Second, it explores hydropolitics as the main explanatory approach and the two main concepts therein, hydrohegemony and hydrodomination. The main empirical part of the paper is found in the third chapter. This chapter unfolds by presenting the Himalayas and underlines its strategic standpoint, namely as a key hydrological complex. It then analyses two meaningful case studies, that help address to the two main questions posed by the paper. Sketching out China' hydropower in Tibet as the main domestic factor, as the Tibetan plateau is the main source of hydrological power to China, the paper focuses on China's projects in Nepal as the first case under the prism of the study, as China is bouncing back to this country and is increasingly stepping in this territory through several water-related projects. Then, the paper draws its attention to Sino-Indian relations and, concretely, to the relations over the Sikkim region and regarding the Chinese projects in the Brahmaputra. The paper outlines some findings of the analysis of the case studies. The paper states that China takes advantage of its hydrohegemony and of the current international context to impose its preferences over water relations and to pursue a unilateral, assertive, aggressive hydropolicy. China' water context cannot be neglected, but the crisis of multilateralism and lingering geopolitical disputes in the wider Himalayan region are external factors that shape Chinese behaviour. A second finding is related to geography, as geographical considerations always matter. China's control over the Tibetan plateau and its transboundary water character provide this country with a position which allows this country to exert some hegemony and domination vis-à-vis its riparian neighbours. This is not merely a geographical reality, but a geopolitical imperative that China always uses as a trump card. Third, China's hydropolicy in Nepal and India seems to indicate a huge degree of continuity in Mao's the bigger, the better policy. Pekin keeps its political strategy to become the world's leading superpower, and this needs naturally enormous infrastructure projects, massive investments, and a global quest for natural resources. Some of the concrete projects presented, such as the South-to-North Water Diversion Project, are remarkable in that sense. The final conclusions and considerations close this article. The paper zooms out and refers to the relevance of the Himalayas, with the special case of the Tibetan plateau, to Chinese behaviour and to hydropolitics. It also proposes some topics and theoretical approaches for future research. The main argument of the article is that Chinese water policy in the Himalayas should be conceived as one more step in China's attempt to consolidate its political and strategic presence in different parts of the world. Chinese relations must be analyzed in the context of its foreign policy over the last decade, marked by its expansionism, its crystallization as a great world power and the fostering of mega projects and initiatives on a global scale. In short, maybe the most hydropolitical imperative of China is Why should I cooperate if I can dominate? ; Los diez sistemas de ríos principales del continente asiático nacen en el Himalaya, la gran mayoría, en la enorme meseta tibetana. China es uno de los países con más ríos transfronterizos en el mundo, solo superado por Rusia y Argentina. La torre de agua de Asia se encuentra en una posición que le confiere un enorme poder e influencia, y las decisiones que adopte en el campo de sus relaciones hidráulicas con el resto de países tiene un alcance regional, continental y, posiblemente, global. La gestión de sus 16 ríos transfronterizos puede afectar la disponibilidad de agua de muchos países río abajo, con afectación directa al acceso a los recursos hídricos de 14 países en el continente asiático y de casi tres billones de personas, es decir casi la mitad de la población mundial El objetivo del presente artículo es analizar el comportamiento hidráulico chino en el complejo del Himalaya, a partir de dos casos de estudio: las relaciones de China con Nepal e India. Se pretende así contribuir al debate sobre, por una parte, los factores explicativos del comportamiento hídrico de la potencia asiática, prestando especial atención a la importancia de la meseta tibetana y, por el otro, al debate académico sobre la estrategia china en relación con uno de los recursos más apreciados del planeta, el agua. China cuenta hoy en día con unas 90.000 infraestructuras hidráulicas, contando presas, diques y proyectos de desvío de agua, y sus intereses hídricos abarcan tanto ríos internos —que acusan la escasez y la sequía con más gravedad, como el Amarillo o el Yangtzé— como los ríos transfronterizos internacionales, lo que conlleva de inmediato una amenaza para los países con los que comparte estos ríos —como el Brahmaputra. El principal argumento es que la política china en el Himalaya es un eslabón más en el intento chino de consolidar su presencia política y estratégica en diferentes partes del mundo. Las relaciones hídricas chinas se deben analizar en el contexto de la política exterior del gigante asiático en la última década, marcada por su expansionismo, su cristalización como gran potencia mundial, y su estilo de política exterior a escala global El artículo se estructura de la siguiente forma. El primer apartado contiene el marco teórico y analítico del articulado, empezando por el paraguas conceptual que nos ofrece la hidropolítica para entender el comportamiento en términos hídricos de China en el espacio del Himalaya, en base a dos conceptos principales: hidrohegemonía e hidrodominación. El segundo apartado contiene una disección analítica del Himalaya como complejo hídrico y el estudio de los casos relevantes para entender el comportamiento de China en el sistema himalayo; Nepal e India. El análisis de los factores explicativos de la política hídrica china, a nivel endógeno y exógeno, así como la estrategia seguida por Pekín, sustentan el tercer apartado del documento. Las conclusiones y consideraciones finales cierran el presente artículo.

Theory Talk #75: Tarak Barkawi on IR after the West, and why the best work in IR is often found at its marginsIn this Talk, Tarak Barkawi discusses the importance of the archive and real-world experiences, at a time of growing institutional constraints. He reflects on the growing rationalization and "schoolification" of the academy, a disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized within a university audit culture, and the future of IR in a post-COVID world. He also discusses IR's contorted relationship to the archive, and explore future sites of critical innovation and inquiry, including the value of knowledge production outside of the academy. PDF version of this TalkSo what is, or should be, according to you, the biggest challenge, or principal debate in critical social sciences and history?Right now, despite thinking about it, I don't have an answer to that question. Had you asked me five years ago, I would have said, without hesitation, Eurocentrism. There's a line in Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe where he remarks that Europe has already been provincialized by history, but we still needed to provincialize it intellectually in the social sciences. Both sides of this equation have intensified in recent years. Amid a pandemic, in the wreckage of neoliberalism, in the wake of financial crisis, the defeats in Iraq and Afghanistan, the events of the Trump Presidency, and the return of the far right, the West feels fundamentally reduced in stature. The academy, meanwhile, has moved on from the postcolonial to the decolonial with its focus on alternative epistemologies, about which I am more ambivalent intellectually and politically. Western states and societies are powerful and rich, their freedoms attractive, and most of them will rebound. But what does it mean for the social sciences and other Western intellectual traditions which trace their heritage to the European Enlightenments that the West may no longer be 'the West', no longer the metropole of a global order more or less controlled by its leading states? What kind of implications does the disassembling of the West in world history have for social and political inquiry? I don't have an answer to that. Speaking more specifically about IR, we are dealing now with conservative appropriations of Eurocentrism, with the rise of other civilizational IRs (Chinese, European, Indian). These kinds of moves, like the decolonial one, foreground ultimately incommensurable systems of knowing and valuing, at best, and at worst are Eurocentrism with the signs reversed, usually to China. I do not think what we should be doing right now in the academy is having Chinese social sciences, Islamic social sciences, Indian social sciences, and so on. But that's definitely one way in which the collapse of the West is playing out intellectually. How did you arrive at where you currently are in your thinking about International Relations?By the time you get to my age you have a lot of debt, mostly to students, to old teachers and supervisors, and to colleagues and friends. University scholars tend not to have very exciting lives, so I don't have much to offer in the way of events. But I can give you an experience that I do keep revisiting when I reflect on the directions I've taken and the things I've been interested in. When I was in high school, I took a university course taught by Daniel Ellsberg, of the Pentagon Papers. As many will know, before he became involved in the Vietnam War, and later in opposing it, he worked on game theory and nuclear strategy. I grew up in Southern California, in Orange County, and there was a program that let you take courses at the University of California, Irvine. I took one on the history of the Roman Empire and then a pair of courses on nuclear weapons that culminated with one taught by Ellsberg himself. I actually had no idea who he was but the topic interested me. Nuclear war was in the air in the early 1980s. Activist graduate students taught the preparatory course. They were good teachers and I learned all about the history and politics of nuclear weapons. But I also came to realize that these teachers were trying to shape (what I would now call) my political subjectivity. Sometimes they were ham handed, like the old ball bearings in the tin can trick: turn the lights out in the room, and put one ball bearing in the can for each nuclear warhead in the world, in 1945 this many; in 1955 this many; and so on. In retrospect, that's where I got hooked on the idea of graduate school. I was aware that Ellsberg was regarded as an important personage. He taught in a large lecture hall. At every session, a kind of loyal corps of new and old activists turned out, many in some version of '60s attire. The father of a high school friend was desperate to get Ellsberg's autograph, and sent his son along with me to the lecture one night to get it. It was political instruction of the first order to figure out that this suburban dad had been a physics PhD at Berkley in the late '60s and early '70s, demonstrating against the Vietnam War. But now he worked for a major aerospace defense contractor. He had a hot tub in his backyard. Meanwhile, Ellsberg cancelled class one week because he'd been arrested demonstrating at a major arms fair in Los Angeles. "We stopped the arms race for a few hours," he told the class after. I schooled myself on who Ellsberg was and Vietnam, the Cold War, and much else came into view. Meanwhile, he gave a master class in nuclear weapons and foreign policy, cheekily naming his course after Kissinger's book, I later came to appreciate. I learned about RAND, the utility of madness for making nuclear threats, and how close we'd come to nuclear war since 1945. My high school had actually been built to double as a fallout shelter, at a time when civil defense was taken seriously as an aspect of a credible threat of second strike. It was low slung, stoutly built, with high iron fences that could be closed to create a cantonment. We were not far from Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station and a range of other likely targets. All of this sank in as I progressed in these courses. Then one day at a strip mall bookstore, I discovered Noam Chomsky's US foreign policy books and never looked back. At Cambridge, I caught the tail end of the old Centre of International Studies, originally started by an intelligence historian and explicitly multi-disciplinary. It had, in my time, historians, lawyers, area studies, development studies, political theory and history of thought, and IR scholars and political scientists. Boundaries certainly existed out there in the disciplines. But there weren't substantial institutional obstacles to thinking across them, while interdisciplinary environments gave you lots of local resources (i.e. colleagues and students) for thinking and reading creatively. What would a student need to become a kind of specialist in your kind of area or field or to understand the world in a global way? Lots of history, especially other peoples' histories; to experience what it's like to see the world from a different place than where you grew up, so that the foreign is not an abstraction to you. I think another route that can create very interesting scholars is to have a practitioner career first, in development, the military, a diplomatic corps, NGOs, whatever. Even only five years doing something like that not only teaches people how the world works, it is intellectually fecund, creative. People just out of operational posts are often full of ideas, and can access interesting resources for research, like professional networks. How, in your view, should IR responding to the shifting geopolitical landscape?  The fate I think we want to avoid is carrying on with what Stanley Hoffmann called the "American social science": the IR invented out of imperial crisis and world war by Anglo-American officials, foundations and thinkers. Very broadly speaking, and with variations, this was a new world combination of realism and positivism. This discipline was intended as the intellectual counterpart to the American-centered world order, designed, among other things, to disappear the question of race in the century of the global color line. The way it conceived the national/international world obscured how US world power worked in practice. That power operated in and through formally sovereign, independent states—an empire by invitation, in the somewhat rosy view of Geir Lundestad—trialed in Latin America and well suited to a decolonizing world. It was an anti-colonial imperium. Political science divided up this world between IR and comparative politics. This kind of IR is cortically connected to the American-centered world fading away before our eyes. It is a kind of zombie discipline where we teach students about world politics as if we were still sitting with the great power peacemakers of 1919 and 1944-45. It is still studying how to make states cooperate under a hegemon or how to make credible deterrence threats in various circumstances. Interestingly, I think one of the ways the collapse of US power is shaping the discipline was identified by Walt and Mearsheimer in their 2013 article on the decline of theory in IR. In the US especially but not only, IR is increasingly indistinguishable from political science as a universal positivist enterprise mostly interested in applying highly evolved, quantitative or experimental approaches to more or less minor questions. Go too far down this road and IR disappears as a distinct disciplinary space, it becomes just a subject matter, a site of empiricist inquiry. Instead, the best work in IR mostly occurs on the edges of the discipline. IR often serves as cover for diverse and interdisciplinary work on transboundary relations. Those relations fall outside the core objects of analysis of the main social science and humanities disciplines but are IR's distinctive focus. The mainstream, inter-paradigm discipline, for me, has never been a convincing social science of the international and is not something I teach or think much about these days. But the classical inheritances of the discipline help IR retain significant historical, philosophical and normative dimensions. Add in a pluralist disposition towards methodology, and IR can be a unique intellectual space capable of producing scholars and scholarship that operate across disciplines. The new materialism, or political ecology, is one area in which this is really happening right now. IR is also a receptive home for debating the questions thrown up by the decolonial turn. These are two big themes in contemporary intellectual life, in and beyond the academy. IR potentially offers distinct perspectives on them which can push debates forward in unexpected ways, in part because we retain a focus on the political and the state, which too easily drop out of sight in global turns in other disciplines. In exchange, topics like the new materialism and the decolonial offer IR the chance to connect with world politics in these new times, after the American century. In my view, and it is not one that I think is widely shared, IR should become the "studies" discipline that centers on the transboundary. How do we re-imagine IR as the interdisciplinary site for the study of transboundary relations as a distinct social and political space? That's a question of general interest in a global world, but one which few traditions of thought are as well-equipped to reflect on and push forward as we are.That's an interesting and forceful critique which also brings us back to a common thread throughout your work: questions of power and knowledge and specifically the relation between power and knowledge in IR and social science. I'm interested in exploring this point further, because so much of your critique has been centered on how profoundly Eurocentric IR is and as a product of Western power. Well, IR's development as a discipline has been closely tied to Western state power. It would seem that it has to change, given the shifts underway in the world. It's like Wile E. Coyote in the Road Runner cartoons - he's run off the cliff. His legs are still moving, but he hasn't dropped, yet. That said, there's no singularly determinate relation between power and the historical development of intellectual traditions. Who knows what kind of new ideas and re-imagining of IR's concepts we might see? As I say, I think one reflection of these changes is that we're already seeing North American IR start to fade into universal quantitative social science. As Hoffmann observed, part of IR's appeal was that the Americans were running the world, that's why you started a social science concerned with things like bipolarity and deterrence, and with analyzing the foreign policy of a great power and its interests and conflicts around the world. Nowadays the Americans are at a late Roman stage of imperial decline. Thinking from the command posts of US foreign policy doesn't look so attractive or convincing when Emperor Nero is running the show, or something altogether darker is waiting in the wings. IR is supposed to be in command of world politics, analyzing them from on high. But what I've seen over the course of my education and career is the way world politics commands IR. The end of the Cold War torpedoed many careers and projects; the 1990s created corps of scholars concerned with development, civil war and humanitarian intervention; in the 2000s, we produced terrorism experts (and critical terrorism studies) and counterinsurgency specialists and critics, along with many scholars concerned in one way or another with Islam. What I have always found fascinating, and deeply indicative, about IR is the relative absence until relatively recently of serious inquiry into power/knowledge relations or the sociology of knowledge. In 1998 when Ole Waever goes to look at some of these questions, he notes how little there was to work from then, before Oren, Vitalis, Guilhot and others published. It's an astounding observation. In area studies, in anthropology, in the history of science, in development studies, in all of these areas of inquiry so closely entangled with imperial and state power, there are long-running, well developed traditions of inquiry into power/knowledge relations. It's a well-recognized area of inquiry, not some fringe activity, and it's heavily empirical, primary sourced based, as well as interesting conceptually. In recent decades you've seen really significant work come out about the role of the Second World War in the development of game theory, and its continuing entwinement with the nuclear contest of the Cold War. I'm thinking here of S.M. Amadae, Paul Erickson, and Philip Mirowski among others. The knowledge forms the American social science used to study world politics were part and parcel of world politics, they were internal to histories of geopolitics rather than in command of them. Of course, for a social science that models itself on natural science, with methodologies that produce so-called objective knowledge, the idea that scientific knowledge itself is historical and power-ridden, well, you can't really make sense of that. You'd be put in the incoherent position of studying it objectively, as it were, with the same tools. IR arises from the terminal crisis of the British Empire; its political presuppositions and much else were fundamentally shaped by the worldwide anti-communist project of the US Cold War state; and it removed race as a term of inquiry into world politics during the century of the global color line. All this, and but for Hoffmann's essay, IR has no tradition of power/knowledge inquiry into its own house until recently? It's not credible intellectually. Anthropologists should be brought in to teach us how to do this kind of thing. You've been at the forefront of the notion of historical IR, and in investigating the relationship between history and theory – why is history important for IR?Well, I think I'd start with the question of what do we mean when we say history? For mainstream social science, it means facts in the past against which to test theories and explanations. For critical IR scholars, it usually means historicism, as that term is understood in social theory: social phenomena are historical, shaped by time and place. Class, state, race, nation, empire, war, these are all different in different contexts. While I think this is a very significant insight and one that I agree with, on its own it tends to imply that historical knowledge is available, that it can be found by reading historians. In fact, for both empiricism and historicism there is a presumption that you can pretty reliably find out what happened in the past. For me, this ignores a second kind of historicism, the historicism of history writing itself, the historiographical. The questions historians ask, how they inquire into them, the particular archives they use, the ways in which they construct meaning and significance in their narratives, the questions they don't ask, that about which they are silent, all of these, shape history writing, the history that we know about. The upshot is that the past is not stable; it keeps changing as these two meanings of historicism intertwine. We understand the Haitian revolution now, or the indigenous peoples of the Americas, entirely differently than we did just a few decades ago.That raises another twist to this problem. Many IR scholars access history through reading historians or through synthetic accounts; they encounter history by and large through secondary sources. One consequence is that they are often a generation or more behind university historians. Think of how Gaddis, for instance, remains a go to authority on the history of the Cold War in IR. In other disciplines, from the 1980s on, there was a historical turn that took scholars into the archives. Anthropologists and literary scholars used historians' tools to answers their own questions. The result was not just a bunch of history books, but entirely new readings of core questions. The classic example is the historical Shakespeare that Stephen Greenblatt found in the archives, rather than the one whose texts had been read by generations of students in English departments. My point here is that working in archives was conceptually, theoretically significant for these disciplines and the subjects they studied. For example, historical anthropology has given us new perspectives on imperialism. While there is some archival work in IR of course, especially in disciplinary history, it is not central to disciplinary debates and the purpose is usually theory testing in which the past appears as merely a bag of facts. In sum, when I say history and theory, I don't just mean thinking historically. I mean actually doing history, being an historian—which means archives—and in so doing becoming a better theorist. Could you expand on these points by telling us about your recent work on military history? I think that military history is particularly interesting because it is a site where war is reproduced and shaped. Military history participates in that which it purports only to study. Popular military histories shape the identities of publics. Staff college versions are about learning lessons and fighting war better the next time. People who grow up wanting to be soldiers often read about them in history books. So our historical knowledge of war, and war as a social and historical process, are wrapped up together. I hope some sense of the promise of power/knowledge studies for larger questions comes through here. I'm saying that part of what war is as a social phenomenon is history writing about it. It's in this kind of context that the fact that a great deal of military history is actually written by veterans, often of the very campaigns of which they write, becomes interesting. Battle produces its own historians. This is a tradition that goes back to European antiquity, soldiers and commanders returning to write histories, the histories, of the wars they fought in. So this question of veterans' history writing is in constitutive relations with warfare, and with the West and its nations and armies. My shorthand for the particular area of this I want to look into is what I call "White men's military histories". That is, Western military history in the modern era is racialized, not just about enemies but about the White identities constructed in and through it. And I want to look at the way this is done in campaigns against racialized others, particularly situations where defeats and reverses were inflicted on the Westerners. How were such events and experiences made sense of historically? How were they mediated in and through military history? I think defeats are particularly productive, incitements to discourse and sense making. To think about these questions, I want to look at the place of veterans in the production of military histories, as authors, sources, communities of interpretation. My sandbox is the tumultuous first year of the Korean War, where US forces suffered publically-evident reverses and risked being pushed into the sea. In a variety of ways, veterans shape military history, through their questions, their grievances, their struggles over reputation, their memories. This happens at many different sites and scales, including official and popular histories, and the networks of veterans behind them as well as other, independently published works. Over the course of veterans' lives, their war throws up questions and issues that become the subject of sometimes dueling and contradictory accounts. Through their history writing, they connect their war experience to Western traditions of battle historiography. They make their war speak to other wars. This is what military history is, and how it can come to produce and reproduce practices of war-making, at least in Anglo-American context. Of course, much of this history writing, like narrations of experience generally, reflects dominant ideologies, in this case discourses of the US Cold War in Asia. But counter-historians are also to be found among soldiers. The shocks and tragic absurdities of any given war produce research questions of their own. At risk of mixing metaphors, the veterans know where the skeletons are buried. They bear resentments and grievances about how their war was conducted that become research topics, and they often have the networks and wherewithal to produce informed and systematic accounts. So as well as reproducing hegemonic discourses, soldier historians are also interesting as a new critical resource for understanding war.This shouldn't be that surprising. In other areas of inquiry, amateur and practitioner scholars have often been a source of critical innovation. LGBTQ history starts outside the academy, among activists who turned their apartments into archives. Much of what we now call postcolonial scholarship also began outside the academy, among colonized intellectuals involved in anti-imperial struggles. Let me close this off by going back to the archive. There are really rich sources for this kind of project. Military historians of all kinds leave behind papers full of their research materials and correspondence. The commanders and others they wrote about often waged extended epistolary campaigns concerned with correcting and shaping the historical record. But more than this, by situating archival sources alongside what later became researched and published histories, what drops out and what goes in to military history comes into view. What is silenced, and what is given voice? We can then see how the violent and forlorn episodes of war are turned into narrated events with military meaning. What is the process by which war experience becomes military history?Given the interdisciplinary nature of your work, what field you place yourself in? And are there any problems have you encountered when writing and thinking across scholarly boundaries?In my head I live in a kind of idealized interdisciplinary war studies, and my field is the intersection of war and empire. Sort of Michael Howard meets Critical Theory and Frantz Fanon. This has given me a particular voice in critical IR broadly conceived, and a distinctive place from which to engage the discipline. The mostly UK departments I've been in have been broadly hospitable places in practice for interdisciplinary scholarship and teaching, so long as you published rather than perished. Of course, interdisciplinary is a complicated word. It is one thing to be multi-disciplinary, to publish in the core journals of more than one discipline and to be recognized and read by scholars in more than one discipline. But work that falls between disciplinary centers, which takes up questions and offers answers recognized centrally by no discipline, that's something harder to deal with. I thought after Soldiers of Empire won prizes in two disciplines that I'd have an easier time getting funding for the project I described earlier in the interview. But I've gotten nowhere, despite years of applications to a variety of US, UK, and European funders. Of course, this may be because it is a bad project! My point, though, is that disciplines necessarily, and even rightly, privilege work that speaks to central questions; that's the work that naturally takes on significance in disciplinary contexts, as in many grant or scholarship panels. I think another point here is the nature of the times. Understandably, no one is particularly interested right now in White men's military histories. What I think has really empowered disciplines during my time in the UK academy has been the intersection with audit culture and university management. Repeated waves of rationalization have washed over the UK academy, which have emphasized discipline as a unit of measurement and management even as departments themselves were often "schoolified" into more or less odd combinations of disciplines. Schoolification helped to break down old solidarities and identities, while audit culture needed something on which to base its measures. The great victory of neoliberalism over the academy is evident in the way it is just accepted now that performance has to be assessed by various public criteria. This is where top disciplinary journals enter the picture, as unquestionable (and quantifiable) indicators of excellence. Interdisciplinary journals don't have the same recognition, constituency, or obvious significance. To put it in IR terms, Environment and Planning D or Comparative Studies in Society and History, to take two top journals that interdisciplinary IR types publish in, will never have the same weight as, say, ISQ or APSR. That that seems natural is an indicator of change—when I started, RIS—traditionally welcoming of interdisciplinary scholarship—was seen as just as good a place to publish as any US journal. Now RIS is perceived as merely a "national" journal while ISQ and APSR are "international" or world-class. This kind of thing has consequences for careers and the make-up of departments. What I'm drawing attention to is not so much an intellectual or academic debate; scholars always disagree on what good scholarship is, which is how it is supposed to be. It is rather the combination of discipline with the suffocating culture of petty management that pervades so much of British life. Get your disciplinary and epistemological politics institutionalized in an audit culture environment, and you can really expand. For example, the professionalization of methods training in the UK has worked as a kind of Trojan Horse for quantitative and positivist approaches within disciplines. In IR, in the potted geographic lingo we use, that has meant more US style work. Disappearing is the idea of IR as an "inter-discipline," where departments have multi-disciplinary identities like I described above. The US idea that IR is part of political science is much more the common sense now than it was in the UK. Another dimension of the eclipse of interdisciplinary IR has been the rise of quantitative European political science, boosted by large, multiyear grants from the ERC and national research councils. It's pretty crazy, strategically speaking, for the UK to establish a civilizational scale where you're always behind the US or its European counterparts. You'll never do North American IR as well as the North Americans do, especially given the disparity in resources. You'll always be trending second or third tier. The British do like to beat themselves up. Meanwhile, making US political science journals the practical standard for "international excellence" threatens to make the environment toxic for the very scholarship that has made British IR distinctive and attractive globally. The upshot of that will be another wave of émigré scholars, which the British academy's crises and reform initiatives produce from time to time. Think of the generation of UK IR scholars who decamped to Australia, an academy poised to prosper in the post-covid world (if the government there can get its vaccination program on track) and a major site right now of really innovative IR scholarship. To return to what you mentioned earlier regarding the hesitancy to go to the archives, this is also mirrored in a hesitancy to do serious ethnography, I think as well. Or there's this "doing ethnography" that involves a three-day field trip. This kind of sweet-shop 'pick and mix' has come to characterize some methodologies, because of these constraints that you highlight…A lot of what I'm talking about has happened within universities, it's not externally imposed or a direct consequence of the various government-run assessment exercises. Academics, eagerly assisted by university managers, have done a lot of this to themselves and their students. The implications can be far reaching for the kind of scholarship that departments foster, from PhDs on up. More and more of the UK PhD is taken up with research methods courses, largely oriented around positivism even if they have critical components. Already this gives a directionality to ideas. The advantage of the traditional UK PhD—working on your own with a supervisor to produce a piece of research—has been intellectual freedom, even when the supervisor wasn't doing their job properly. It's not great, but the possibility for creative, innovative, even field changing scholarship was retained. PhD students weren't disciplined, so to speak. What happens now is that PhD students are subject to a very strict four year deadline, often only partially funded, their universities caring mainly about timely completion not placement and preparation for a scholarly career, a classic case of the measurement displacing the substantive value. The formal coursework they get is methods driven. You can supervise interdisciplinary PhD research in this kind of environment, but it's not easy and poses real risks and creates myriad obstacles for the student. A strange consequence of this, as many of my master's students will tell you, is that I often advise them to consider US PhDs, just in other disciplines. That way, they get the benefit of rigorous PhD level coursework beyond methods. They can do so in disciplines like history or anthropology that are currently receptive both to the critical and the transnational/transboundary. That is not a great outcome for UK IR, even if it may be for critically-minded students. Outside of a very few institutions and scattered individuals, US political science, of course, has largely cleansed itself of the critical and alternative approaches that had started to flower in the glasnost era of the 1990s. That is not something we should be seeking to emulate in the UK.So yes, there's much to say here, about how the four year PhD has materially shaped scholarship in the UK. There is generally very little funding for field work. Universities worried about liability have put all kinds of obstacles in the way of students trying to get to field work sites. Requirements like insisting that students be in residence for their fourth year in order to write up and submit on time further limit the possibilities for field work. The upshot is to make the PhD dissertation more a library exercise or to favor the kind of quantitative, data science work that fits more easily into these time constraints and structures. Again, quite obviously, power sculpts knowledge. It becomes simply impossible, within the PhD, to do the kinds of things associated with serious qualitative scholarship, like learn languages, spend long time periods in field sites and to visit them more than once, to develop real networks there. Over time this shapes the academy, often in unintended ways. I think this is one of the reasons that IR in the UK has been so theoretic in character—what else can people do but read books, think and write in this kind of environment? As I say, the other kind of thing they can do is quantitative work, which takes us right back to the fate Walt and Mearsheimer sensed befalling IR as political science. Watch for IR and Data Science joint degrees as the next step in this evolution. Political Science in the US starts teaching methods at the freshman level. They get them young. We have discussed the rather grim state of affairs for the future of critical social science scholarship, at least in the UK and US. To conclude – what prospects for hope in the future are there?Well, if I had a public relations consultant pack, this is the point at which it would advise talking about children and the power of science to save us. I think the environment for universities, political, financial, and otherwise may get considerably more difficult. Little is untouchable in Western public life right now, it is only a question of when and in what ways they will come for us. The nationalist and far-right turns in Western politics feed off transgressing boundaries. There's no reason to suspect universities will be immune from this, and they haven't been. In the UK, as a consequence of Brexit, we are having to nationalise, and de-European-ise our scholarships and admissions processes. We are administratively enacting the surrender of cosmopolitan achievements in world politics and in academic life. This is not a plot but in no small measure the outcome of democratic will, registered in the large majority Boris Johnson's Conservatives won at the last general election. It will have far reaching consequences for UK university life. This is all pretty scary if you think, as I do, that we are nearer the beginning then the end of the rise of the right. Covid will supercharge some of these processes of de-globalization. I can already see an unholy alliance forming of university managers and introvert academics who will want to keep in place various dimensions of the online academic life that has taken shape since spring 2020. Often this will be justified by reference to environmental concerns and by the increased, if degraded, access that online events make possible. We are going to have a serious fight on our hands to retain our travel budgets at anywhere near pre-pandemic levels. I'm hoping that this generation of students, subjected to online education, will become warriors for in-person teaching. All of this said, it's hard to imagine a more interesting time to be teaching, thinking and writing about world politics. Politics quite evidently retains its capacity to turn the world upside down. Had you told US citizens where they would be on January 6th, 2021 in 2016, they would have called you alarmist if not outlandish. I think we're in for more moments like that. Tarak Barkawi is a professor of International Relations at LSE. He uses interdisciplinary approaches to imperial and military archives to re-imagine relations between war, armed forces and society in modern times. He has written on the pivotal place of armed force in globalization, imperialism, and modernization, and on the neglected significance of war in social and political theory and in histories of empire. His most recent book, Soldiers of Empire, examined the multicultural armies of British Asia in the Second World War, reconceiving Indian and British soldiers in cosmopolitan rather than national terms. Currently, he is working on the Korean War and the American experience of military defeat at the hands of those regarded as racially inferior. This new project explores soldiers' history writing as a site for war's constitutive presence in society and politics.PDF version of this Talk

Kosovo is a small and young state that gained an interim United Nations (UN)-administered status in the wake of the Dayton peace accord only in 1999; it declared independence in 2008. Compared to neighboring countries, it is still lacking in its basic infrastructure and its administrative and technical skills. In addition, with the onset of the War in Yugoslavia in 1992 most investment and normal maintenance came to a standstill. Much of the publicly owned infrastructure fell into disrepair or was vandalized, but private investments led to a construction boom which, however, is leading to many environmental problems. The government is committed to reconstruction and to the development of a peaceful state. It also intends to align with EU policies. Thus, the study has the specific objectives to: (i) assist the government to improve its river basin planning and management by providing (for demonstration purposes) a replicable tool and simulation model for integrated river basin planning and management; and (ii) support the government in its identification of priority measures of structural and non-structural nature to help strengthen the water resources sector performance. The source(s) for the financing of the identified projects will need to be identified further by the Government as the World Bank has not committed to involvement in the sector.