Suchergebnisse

In dark tourism affects are generated in a relational manner by the tourists and the locations visited by them. Exploring affective meanings of Banksy's Dismaland via socio-spatial theories of emotion and affect is a way to contribute to the understanding of dystopian tourism. The dystopian touristic experience of Dismaland evolves from the interaction of a dystopian atmosphere, a displacement strategy and productive negative intensities. Whilst the affects produced vary according to the artist's intentions, through innovative and politicised forms of dystopian dark tourism, Banksy creates atmospheres where productive negative intensities are able to be developed. In spite of the shades of dystopia and darkness in the artist's work, a hopeful form of tourism could be generated. The implications are that affect in the dark tourism context has different layers of meaning where the materialising dystopian experiences, as simulacra, range from pure attraction to social change. Dismaland's dark tourism experience reveals the role that political and ethical matters play in socio-affective encounters as exemplified by the commodification of the tourism industry, the Mediterranean refugee crisis and the glorified/sorrowful death of Diana, princess of Wales.

When focusing on Augustus as a commander in chief, a strategist, and a field commander – and especially the formative years of the civil war(s) –, there are numerous potential approaches. We know that he fought battles, campaigns, and wars. Sometimes he did well, sometimes less so. Traditionally, Augustus has not been viewed as a good general, but he was, or so this article claims, an excellent commander. We shall here discuss the actual fighting only when it has a direct bearing on what might be termed the 'command structure', in this case during the triumvirate and beyond, and its formulation of strategy. Rather, the main question is as follows: how did the learning curve followed by Young Caesar on his rise to power create a new, shared command structure as part of a monarchical system, with Augustus as commander in chief? If we look at political initiative in warfare and military campaigns, rather than just tactically, then leadership is always a learning curve. This is accordingly a question of how we, as scholars, approach ancient warfare, strategy, and the relationships between commanders: for example, the 'high command' or commander in chief in one theatre and the field commander in the other. This is thus an article on how we, as scholars, approach Roman military history in general.

This article assesses whether the Local Government Council's Scorecard Initiative, implemented in Uganda since 2009, achieved its intended impact of enhancing service delivery by providing information on the performance of local government. We analyse a district-level panel dataset (2005-2016) with administrative data, as well as Afrobarometer data on citizen perceptions (2005-2017). Empirically, we exploit the phasing in of the scorecard for a meticulous difference-in-difference framework with district-specific trends. The results show some small measurable impacts of the scorecard along the so-called 'long route of accountability' on public service delivery. Scorecard districts appear to spend less of their budgets in comparison with non-scorecard districts. This points to greater budgetary restraint of local government councils in scorecard districts. Although no direct impacts on service delivery can be detected, districts with more electoral competition in their constituencies perform better on one service-delivery indicator, the primary school leaving exam pass rate. Concomitantly, the scorecard impacts on perceptions of corruption, as citizens of scorecard districts perceive the local councillors as less corrupt compared to citizens of non-scorecard districts. This result can be interpreted as an indication of the trust-enhancing effect of government scorecards and civic engagement. Overall, our results provide a quantitative contribution to the literature on accountability by demonstrating that civil society reporting mechanisms about the performance of political representatives only trickle down slowly to improved services. The findings suggest that the sustained implementation of instruments to provide citizens with more information about their political representatives may have a positive impact on civil society perceptions as well as relevant political and policy outcomes. Like earlier research, we find that impacts also depend on political competitiveness, thus highlighting the positive role of ...

This article is a contribution to the current debates in conflict and peace studies that examines the contributions of creative approaches to postwar peacebuilding. It mainly asks how post-conflict peacebuilding can be achieved and promoted through the use of creative approaches and what the potential challenges and limitations are in realizing postwar peacebuilding through creative approaches. We relied on primary qualitative visual data and interview data generated on the photographic exhibition of 'War of Memories' curated in 2017 by the Centre for Non-Violent Action, a civil society organization working on the theme of postwar peacebuilding in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Serbia. Findings suggest the creative initiatives can play a positive role at individual level, but their translation into macro-level sustainable social peace is challenging, as long as the structural impediments to peace, prevailing unequal ethnic power relations and ethnicised social and political ordering of the society remain unaddressed.

Conservation efforts must develop strategies to perform at violent frontiers where environmental values, mineral extraction and conflict intersect. Using war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's Itombwe Nature Reserve as an illustrative example, this article explores how community conservation is implemented and received at a violent frontier. Taking inspiration from an emerging body of literature which portrays conservation as a form of 'social contract' in regions where the nation state is weak or absent, it explores some of the expectations and obligations that surround community conservation initiatives. It draws the conclusion that conservation social contracts are likely to produce unintended consequences when left unfulfilled or broken. Conservation actors perceived to be breaking the terms of (implicit) social contracts can inadvertently encourage local communities to embrace alternative contracts with other actors seeking to extract value from the resources located in frontiers, such as industrial mining companies.

Authorities in the People's Republic of China communicate with citizens using an estimated 600,000 Sina Weibo microblogs. This study reports on a study of Chinese citizens' adoption of microblogs to interact with the government. Adoption results from trust and peer pressure in smaller-network ties (densely knit, pervasive social networks surrounding individual citizens). Larger-network ties (trust in institutions at large, such as the Chinese Communist Party, executive organizations, the judicial system, the media, etc.) are not associated with the adoption of microblogging. Furthermore, higher levels of anxiety are correlated with lower levels of use intention, and this finding underlines the impact of the Chinese authority's surveillance and control activities on the lives of individual Chinese citizens. Based on these findings, we outline a theory of why citizens use microblogs to interact with the government and suggest avenues for further research into microblogs, state–citizen communication patterns and technology adoption. Points for practitioners: Our research identifies trust in individual civil servants, citizens' anxiety and peer pressure as drivers of Chinese citizens' intentions to use the Weibo microblogging platform to interact with the Chinese government. This insight allows practitioners to better understand citizens' drivers and obstacles in the use of social media in state–citizen relations in China.

his article is a study of the Edinburgh-based anti-Catholic organisation, the Scottish Reformation Society, in the immediate aftermath of the 1850 restoration of the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, commonly known at the time as the papal aggression. The papal aggression sent shockwaves throughout England and was viewed by Protestants as an illegal attempt to overthrow Britain's civil and religious liberties by Pope Pius IX. Despite in practice only affecting England, the restoration also had a dramatic impact in Scotland, resulting in thousands of parliamentary petitions and sporadic bouts of communal violence. The Scottish Reformation Society, led by the controversial Free Church of Scotland minister James Begg, was at the forefront of this Scottish Protestant response. The society was dominated by Scotland's Presbyterian dissenters, particularly members of the establishmentarian Free Church. The Free Church had formed out of the 1843 Disruption in the Established Church of Scotland, a momentous politico-ecclesiastical event which highlighted divisions between the British state and its Scottish church, the national kirk and dissent, and pro-establishment and voluntary ecclesiologies. By focusing on the influence of a major Scottish anti-Catholic society during a turbulent period for British Protestantism, this article examines the gulf between the rhetoric of national Protestant unity and the reality of national, ideological, and denominational divisions within mid-nineteenth century Protestantism in the United Kingdom. It builds on existing research to highlight the various ways in which the anti-Catholic movement was fractured on denominational lines and reflected the wider tensions of Scottish ecclesiastical politics in the years after the Disruption.

Using the case study of statements of denial issued by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) over an extended 35-year period, this article critically examines how non-state armed groups (NSAGs) use statements of denial when engaging with various audiences across time and space. It posits that these statements are an integral part of how NSAGs communicate with different audiences during their armed campaigns, and subsequently during the process of transitioning out of political violence. At the same time that these statements feed into the macro-level "propaganda war" between the NSAG and the state, this article maintains that they also reflect the complex intimate relationship between NSAGs and the communities from which they emerge. Arguing that statements of denial help NSAGs to favourably frame how the conduct of its campaign, the character of its members and its internal cohesion are understood by proximate and distant audiences, the article tracks the qualitative changes to IRA statements that would eventually become a key component in the performance of the peace process by the late 1990s.

This article investigates the implications of recent research findings that establish that older victims of crime are less likely to obtain procedural justice than other age groups. It explores original empirical data from the United Kingdom that finds evidence of a systemic failure amongst agencies to identify vulnerability in the older population and to put in place appropriate support mechanisms to allow older victims to participate fully in the justice system. The article discusses how the legally defined gateways to additional support, which are currently relied upon by many common law jurisdictions, disadvantage older victims and require reimagining. It argues that international protocols, especially the current European Union Directive on victims' rights, are valuable guides in this process of re-conceptualisation. To reduce further the inequitable treatment of older victims, the article advocates for jurisdictions to introduce a presumption in favour of special assistance for older people participating in the justice system.

Recent warfare in Eastern DRC, especially since 2015, is marked by violence inspired by 'race' narratives. Identity politics around 'race' is used to legitimise 'expressive' or reprisal-oriented violence against 'Hamitic' or 'Tutsi' minorities. The case of the Banyamulenge of South Kivu is examined in this article. Following Autesserre, we show that one-dimensional narratives – in this case of 'race' – tend to over-simplify the dynamics of political violence. Anti-Hamitic racism is derived from colonial ideas around race hierarchies, and has resulted in systematic killings of Banyamulenge civilians in what resembles a 'slow genocide'. Expressive violence has, in turn, produced a lack of concern for the plight of Banyamulenge civilians among the military, humanitarians, media, scholars and NGOs. Given armed alliances between local Maimai forces, Burundian and Rwandan opposition and the DRC army, such 'race' narratives cruelly legitimise violence against civilians from 'Tutsi' communities, associated by neighbouring communities with Rwanda. Resultant displacement, starvation and killing of Banyamulenge civilians in this context amount to an on-going, slow-moving genocide. As the COVID-19 crisis unrolls, the decolonisation of identity politics in Eastern DRC, and in South Kivu in particular still seems very remote.

This article builds on debates about conflicts surrounding territorialisation for conservation. It elaborates on how slow violence can generate covert resistance which in turn transitions toward forms of overt resistance and sudden violence. Taking eastern Democratic Republic of Congo's Kahuzi-Biega National Park as an example, it argues that the violent reoccupation of the park by indigenous Batwa communities can be explained by three factors: (i) the failure of peaceful strategies of rightful resistance; (ii) an increase in the level of threats to the Batwa; and (iii) the arrival of opportunities for the Batwa to forge alliances with different stakeholder groups.

In Guatemala, within the space of a few decades, a civil war largely marked by state-sponsored violence has made way for a democracy in which violence diffused into the hands of the masses and gained an increasingly criminal and urban character. Much of the violence roots in poverty, inequality and exclusion. This ethnographic research explores the way people in Guatemala City give shape and meaning to their lives in the midst of high levels of violence and structural violence. It centralizes around five narratives, the protagonists of which all belong to a different level of the city's hierarchical spectrum, ranging from a group of street people to a wealthy family with a bodyguard at its disposal.

Covid-19 generated a crisis in capitalism, but not of capitalism. Capitalism reproduces itself in crisis and in ways that have significant but uneven impacts on the conditions and struggles of agrarian classes of labour. This article explores preliminary studies of how Covid-19 has affected agrarian social formations in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the farmers, petty commodity producers, labourers and agribusinesses who populate them. It considers some of the implications for wage-labour, agriculture, accumulation and social reproduction including care work. And it briefly considers Covid-19's political impacts—in terms of the role of the state and possibilities for challenging capitalism, its violence and its ecological crisis.

How often are politicians confronted with public allegations of integrity violations? Which types of violations, government levels, and parties do these scandals involve? The Political Integrity Index developed in The Netherlands offers information about the number and types of political integrity scandals in the country since 2013. This article presents a brief overview of the relevant literature on integrity and corruption and on political scandals, with a summary of the conceptual framework and methodology used in our research, as well as some of the results. In the years 2013–2019, 355 political integrity scandals were documented, primarily at the local level of government (79%), involving almost all political parties but with the liberal–conservative People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie [VVD]) most prominent (90 scandals), and containing all types of integrity violations, with as the most prominent type "misconduct in the private sphere" (30%). The topic of integrity scandals involving politicians is relevant but nearly absent in research on public integrity and corruption. This is a challenge and an invitation to researchers in other countries to do comparable research, which might result in a theoretically and practically useful international political integrity index. For that research, the framework of the Political Integrity Index seems useful.

Since the mid-twentieth century, the extraction and consumption of mineral aggregates (i.e., sand and gravel) has grown at a higher rate and on a larger scale than any other resource group, making it the largest mineral resource currently consumed globally. Although reliable data for extraction of mineral aggregates (referred to as sand extraction) are lacking, estimates suggest that current annual extraction is as high as 40 Gt. This has important social and ecological ramifications. The industry overall is also plagued by rampant illegality, a strong black market, and intense violence, and results in the generation of severe social and environmental injustices. Yet despite the wide-ranging impacts of sand mining, there continues to be an acute shortage of research on its extraction, impacts, and solutions for future resource governance. This article draws on the political ecology literature, utilizing the concept of the commodity frontier and the theoretical framework of extractivism whilst engaging with academic as well as non-academic, grassroots literature around sand mining, to introduce the concept of "sand frontiers". Using the sand frontier as an analytical tool, four central questions are addressed, namely: 1) What are the drivers of expansion and intensification of sand frontiers? 2) What and where are the current and potential sand frontiers? 3) How is the forward movement of sand frontiers occurring? and 4) What are the identifiable socio-ecological transformations at these frontiers? In addressing these questions, the paper bridges research gaps around solutions to unsustainable sand extraction, using the lens of post-extractivism (PE) whilst continuing to put people living at sand frontiers at the centre of proposed solutions.