Formal Borders Research Articles

A materialist reconsideration of international peace practice and its human and non-human constituents

Abstract The international community's sobering track record of sustainably reducing the number of armed conflicts worldwide, as well as the increasing involvement of non-human complexities in times of climate crisis suggest that current approaches to foster peace are too narrow and inflexible. So far, demands and calls for more flexible and adaptive peace practice made by policy-makers and researchers have not led to a related paradigm shift. In order to contribute to such a change of practice, this article advances a speculative analytical attempt that seeks to conceptually uncover new modes of engaging with the world for the purpose of peace. It builds on Baruch Spinoza's materialism and describes peace as intimately interrelated with the issue of political community. Following Spinoza, the article reconsiders the imaginary of political community as something that is constantly being rearticulated by a contingent complexity of human and non-human actors, and thus transcends the geographic scope of its formal borders as well as its epistemic scope across power hierarchies. Finally, the article introduces the human-non-human multitude as political subject that is able to detect and interpret the constituents of a political community, and therefore to maintain and sustain peace.

Formal Borders and Cross-Border Interactions: Country – Region – Municipality

This study draws on the concept of isomorphism of formal borders (those established by legislative acts), which postulates similarity in their functions performed in different combinations by borders of various statuses. The article aims to explore the isomorphism of formal borders and their impact on the economy and the quotidian practices of the population. The study employs expert interviews and personal observations from several Russian regions while analysing regional and municipal socioeconomic development strategies. On the one hand, the barrier and constitutive functions of borders help to level the socioeconomic gradient within such boundaries. On the other hand, these same functions accentuate the contrasts between neighbouring territories. The general characteristics of borders also encompass their capacity to either attract or deter specific activities and create or exacerbate the peripherality of adjacent areas. The tension between the continuity of physical and social space and the barrier function of borders shapes the population’s ‘cross-border’ practices, generating commodity flows and other interactions between neighbouring territories. This interaction, in turn, necessitates cooperation between border territories to address a range of cross-border issues. However, such collaborations exist almost exclusively at the interstate level. At the regional and municipal level, this need is either unaddressed or absent, even when acknowledged in strategic planning documents.

Регион государства как сложная экономико-социальная система и объект стратегирования: на материалах Кемеровской области – Кузбасса

The article describes the concept of region as a holistic economic and social system, as well as an object of strategizing. The research relied on numerous theoretical and regulatory approaches used by different authors and institutes. The empirical part of the research concentrated on the Kemerovo Region aka Kuzbass. The methods included system, comparative, and logical analyses, as well as the dialecticmaterialistic method of cognition and a complex approach to conceptualization, generalization, and specification. The study also involved the descriptive-historical approach and individual theoretical-methodological provisions of regional strategizing. The article introduces the main approaches to the concept of region as a basic definition of regional economy and the theory and practice of regional strategizing. The term was interpreted using the case of the Kemerovo Region as an economic-social system and an object of strategizing. The current theory of strategy and the methodology and practice of strategizing demonstrate a severe ambiguity of scientific approaches and juridical interpretations to the term region. The traditional definition of the region is an object of strategizing for developing and implementing a formal strategy based on a current legislation. Thus, a region with its formal borders is a federal subject. This approach reflects its main characteristics as a complex economic-social system, where the economic aspect is primary and serves as a base for the social one.

Olga Albizu’s Lyrical Abstraction and the Borders of the Canvas

The abstractionist paintings of Puerto Rican artist Olga Albizu (1924–2005) gained prominence in the late 1950s when her work debuted in galleries across the Americas and entered the commercial music industry with RCA and Verve records. However, existing scholarship has failed to capture the complex relationship between Albizu’s anti-commercial abstractionist aesthetic and its mass reproduction as cover art for vinyl records during the Cold War era. Returning to the canvas to explore the iconographic, formal, and aesthetic qualities of Albizu’s work within its sociohistorical post-World War II context, this study reveals Albizu’s devotion to formal borders, vivid color juxtapositions, and compositional tensions. I argue that Albizu’s practice constitutes an ongoing concern with a Modernist dialectic and ideals about subjective transformation in a postmodern world of mass culture, a message she conveyed through the material and experiential borders of the canvas. As an avowed formalist and Modernist existing between the postcolonial and postmodern worlds of San Juan and New York City, her work merits formal scrutiny. This paper will add to the diverse histories of Abstract Expressionism and mid-century Modernisms across the Americas while shedding light on an important post-war historical moment and artistic impulse that held on to anti-commercial values in an all-encompassing consumerist world.

Editorial Note: Suffrage and Beyond: Celebrating Women's History

Editorial NoteSuffrage and Beyond: Celebrating Women's History Elisa Camiscioli and Jean H. Quataert 2020 is the centennial year of the granting of women's suffrage in the United States through state ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. Many diverse celebrations are planned to commemorate the anniversary, from museum exhibits and symposia to workshops and concerts. Indeed, as we write, local singers in Binghamton, New York already performed a concert called "Women of Note," featuring music composed by women and highlighting suffragist songs. The anniversary is a milestone of sorts. Suffrage was a cardinal aim of feminist mobilizations across the globe over the past two centuries, and the topic has spurred a vibrant yet increasingly critical historiography. With this issue, the JWH brings the insights of women's historians to the celebration. We open with a Special Forum that asks, provocatively, "What Difference Did the Nineteenth Amendment Make?" The Forum is guest edited by Liette Gidlow who proposed, organized, and edited it. She brings together six leading women's historians who write about the topic from different regional, class, and race perspectives. As Gidlow writes in her introduction, the authors extend the moment of 1920 "both backward and forward in time," inserting the suffrage question into the history of US imperial expansion and exploring the meanings of inclusion in—and exclusion from—the nation as the ranks of the voting public expanded. Each contribution to the Forum offers valuable documentary and historiographical details in a length easily adaptable for teaching purposes. Lori D. Ginzberg writes from the perspective of the women advocates themselves. She shows that over the decades, the consistent call for the women's vote reflected different rationales. She explores a "radical reimagining of political, religious, and marital hierarchies" inherent in suffrage claims in the antebellum era. She then examines the compromises suffrage advocates accepted around the turn of the century, a "tactical shift" that required concessions to white supremacy and to notions of women's purity. These political accommodations, Ginzberg writes, made suffrage "mainstream, respectable, and safe," setting the stage for 1920 itself—although the vote "left many things unsorted." Rosalyn Terborg-Penn looks at the outcome for African American women. Terborg-Penn, recently deceased, was a pioneer in the field of African American women's suffrage history, and Gidlow's introduction includes a fitting tribute to her pathfinding scholarship and their collaboration in this Special Forum. In her essay, Terborg-Penn examines the fraught history of suffrage for Black women and men who, soon after [End Page 7] ratification, lost the right to vote in the South. Her main story deals with Black women's formative role in the women's suffrage movement prior to 1920 and their subsequent mobilization strategies for the ballot through the Civil Rights era of the 1960s. Looking outside the formal borders of the United States, Rumi Yasutake takes us to Hawai'i, at the time a US territory. She focuses on Native Hawaiian women suffragists who seized the vote as a "means to recover their political and economic rights lost in the modern American system," including the right to hold office. In the next contribution by Cathleen D. Cahill, the vote is examined in the longer context of Native American history. Cahill explores the topic through the writings of two Native feminist intellectuals who creatively intertwined citizenship with sovereignty for Native Nations. Gidlow's own essay rounds out the Special Forum. She provides trenchant historical reassessment of the many sides to the "rise of the 'Women's Vote.'" In her telling, suffrage helped revive the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s; it transformed a piecemeal strategy known as the "white primary" into a uniform policy that effectively barred "Black voters from local Democratic Party organizations"; turned the Republican Party after 1965 into a white party when southern white conservative Democrats defected to it; and shaped the "racial politics of the feminist movements." Since 1976, the women's vote, Gidlow observes, elevated Black women into a key constituency of the Democratic Party—on full display in the 2018 midterm elections in the Trump era. This issue also includes three article-length pieces. As in the Special Forum on women's suffrage...

Terrorism in the Context of Conflicts in the Modern World

Contrary to popular expectations, armed conflicts persisted after the end of World War II. Some countries are fighting for independence, others for influence, and others are experiencing civil wars. This is determined by cultural, ethnic and religious differences. The modern world is tormented by many conflicts which, despite their regional scope, have an impact on the political and military situation on the entire globe. The functioning of formal borders that do not coincide with national borders, the low sense of nationality compared to ethnicity, poverty and political instability are also conducive to the use of terrorist methods. Terrorism is almost as old as civilisation. However, unlike in the past, today’s terrorists use violence on an unprecedented scale. Terrorism in many cases shows its regional specificity, varying according to the cultural and civilisation area in which it occurs. Reasons for resorting to terrorist methods may be a need for freedom, protection of one’s heritage, sense of harm done by the occupier, a need to express dissatisfaction with the political system or changes being made, or, finally, a mere desire to draw attention to the problems of countries and societies that have not yet been noticed or have been ignored by public opinion. Religion is also a frequent reason for resorting to terrorism. Contemporary terrorism is represented mainly by extremist Islamic fundamentalism and is based on the clash of two cultures. It is a global threat, and anyone can become its potential victim today. Numerous signals of the emergence of new, hitherto unknown organisations prove that in the future, unfortunately, the escalation of the phenomenon will have to be taken into account.

Evolving Dynamics in Competition Law: A GCC Perspective

This article examines the Competition Laws of the Members States of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). It examines their content, puts all of them under general scrutiny from their enactment until today and compares their basic features to other (developed) competition law jurisdictions, such as EU Competition Law and US Antitrust Law. The article argues the importance of the Advocacy principle in the region and the incentives international organizations (IOs) have induced so far for the development of Competition Law in the GCC Countries, including the link between trade and Competition Law. In today’s economy where online giant companies dominate, where the restrictive conduct among separate independent commercial entities grows immensely, and where mergers do not identify formal state borders, the need for global Competition Law enforcement is indispensable. Therefore, in order to be part of the global competition world, a creation of GCC Competition Law may be considered progressive and advantageous. The article argues the purposes and motivations why such awareness is desirable and provides legislative and normative recommendations on how to accomplish this endeavor.

Character Studies

Character Studies Alison Booth (bio) I readily agree with James Phelan that Chatman's model of narrative should be expanded. All models smooth the data for the sake of argument. Models must decontextualize, and while designed to show variation, they prefer "constants" to "variables," to borrow Phelan's terms.1 This is as true of representations of persons as it is of models. Phelan's model of authors, resources, and audiences accommodates variables so much that it may not really be a model—until you return to an individual text that it models. The extensible list of resources, "the etc. at the end of the middle column" (8), allows for description or what in other contexts has been called surface reading focused on a particular textual production (Best and Marcus). [End Page 118] Such contextual particularity is a sure sign that Phelan is indeed what he professes, a rhetorical narrative theorist—an approach almost naturally congenial to me. I particularly appreciate his hospitality in inviting "characters [to] … be part of Chatman's model" (5).2 I will focus on that resource, turning a light on its implications for nonfiction.3 I propose that character typology be considered a resource comparable to genre. Characterization relies upon the interplay between individuals and types, variables, and constants. Readers fill in a narrative's gaps in the indications of personality according to different roles and prototypical functions, from the "round" protagonist to the "flat" member of the chorus. In biography as well as in realist fiction, agents are read as referring to both literary and social conventions. Thus, fictional characterization is one member of a large species of narrative representation of persons, which relies on typological modeling to communicate with its audiences. In Phelan's model, "audiences have agency" in responding to a narrative's resources (10), as when they register the paratext and other indications of a specific genre. Readers in a sense choose which preloaded apps to use according to marks of authorial source and cues such as footnotes, specific day-month-year birth dates, or absence of fictitious place names.4 Similarly, typologies of persons preload from all sorts of social encoding, including genres beyond printed realist fiction.5 Character has had a revival as research topic, though of course no one speaks about any work of fiction for long without some mention of the agents of the events. Characters capture readers' attention, and teachers try to school novices to see beyond mimetic and thematic functions of character to look at other resources.6 In the realm of life narrative, it is absurd to deflect attention from the agents, the subject(s) being the very pretext of an autobiography or biography. Yet this is not to say we read nonfiction only mimetically. We should avoid solely referential readings of the subjects of life narrative as much as of fictional characters. Hayden White, we recall, agitated the world of historiography by calling attention to the narrative genres that shape even the most exhaustively documented histories. Critics, similarly, should do more to dispel the notion of clear formal borders between factual and fictional narration.7 A factual rendition of a real person is as mediated and almost as constructed as a fictional character is by authorial and audience agency and typological expectations. The biggest difference [End Page 119] lies in documented events. Biographers may overlay certain plots such as tragedy or triumph over adversity, or may embellish childhood experiences, but they break their genre's contract if they contradict well-known evidence of events. Omit many events, by all means invent focalization or dialogue, tell it out of chronological order, but do not attribute the deeds of Caroline Herschel to Florence Nightingale, who never discovered a comet; do not say that Nightingale died in 1856, a martyr to her service to British soldiers in the Crimean War.8 I pursue the difference of nonfiction from fiction somewhat further, not because I need to argue that they share common techniques; this is widely accepted. Rather, I would invite further discussion of what I call strategic typologies, in the spirit of Phelan's contributions to narrative ethics. Typologies like gender can be deployed strategically, not...

Legislative Framework for Landscape Planning in Latvia

With the adoption and the ratification of the European Landscape Convention a legally justified need for a clear landscape policy was grounded in the European countries. It includes the elaboration of the new and the improvement of the existing legislative documents on landscape planning, protection and management. The aim of the particular study is to analyse the existing legislative documents in Latvia influencing landscape planning on different scales / and the implementation of the European Landscape Convention. The study emphasizes the complex structure of the Latvian legislative framework affected by the distribution of the normative documents under the various ministries. Therefore, the main problem is unclear responsibility levels and organizational system for solving the issues regarding landscape planning, protection and management. Thus the various discussions between the involved disciplines and responsible institutions are arising. Two groups of the legislative documents influencing the implementation of the landscape policy in Latvia are detected within the study. The first group is strategic documents determining main landscape planning principles and directions at European, national, regional and professional or sectoral level. The second group is operational documents providing a set of actions for the landscape planning, protection and management at the local or the municipality level. The study concludes that operational documents developed by the municipalities are in high importance because of their direct influence on the landscape planning in Latvia. This often leads to the different landscape planning requirements included in the normative documents of the neighbouring municipalities, although the spatial and ecological borders of the visual landscape do not fit with the formal borders of the municipalities. Thus, it is essential to develop the common principles and actions that would be incumbent on all municipalities to provide the landscape integrity and to protect its values according to the main principles defined in the European Landscape Convention.

Borders and the Roots of Xenophobia in South Africa

Responses to migration are intricately linked to the demarcation of borders and hence separate citizenships. In South Africa, the racist roots of the connection between nationality and territory is especially significant for understanding anti-foreigner violence. Ameliorating xenophobia, in turn, requires destabilising this foundation, from the abstract world of social theory, through assumptions embedded within policymaking processes, down to public education. As a crucial step in that agenda, I bring the region's national narratives into sharper focus by concentrating on three constitutional transitions, each of which fundamentally altered territorial boundaries. (1) The establishment of the Union of South Africa in 1910 defined the core of its current borders, but those negotiations also left unresolved the liminal status of the neighbouring British protectorates. (2) A cascade of decolonisation into the early 1960s inscribed formal borders within the region, a process that also created new citizenships. (3) The dismantling of white-minority rule in South Africa transformed key features of this regional order, notably by granting full rights of citizenship for non-white nationals, but democratisation also reinforced an exclusionary definition of nationality that fuels xenophobia.

Global History, Imperial History and Connected Histories of Empire

The turn towards Global history shows no sign of abating. It seems that across the discipline, historians are becoming increasingly interested in understanding the past on a planetary scale. Prominent Imperial historians, in particular, have been among the most fervent advocates of Global history. So close are the concerns of some Imperial history—particularly British Imperial history—to those of Global history, that it is getting harder to disentangle the two. Despite this we argue that, whilst both fields are overlapping and heterogeneous, historians should reflect more explicitly on the methodological differences that exist between them. In the process we point out some lessons that Global historians might learn from Imperial historians, and viceversa. We argue for “connected histories of empire” that seek to uncover links that operated across the formal borders of imperial formations and that deploy novel spatial frameworks. Such an approach would draw on the diverse methodologies developed by Imperial and Global historians who seek to write both “comparative” and “connected” histories. We point the way towards histories that are more than imperial, but less than global.

Spatial analysis of myocardial infarction in Iran: National report from the Iranian myocardial infarction registry.

Myocardial infarction (MI) is a leading cause of mortality and morbidity in Iran. No spatial analysis of MI has been conducted to date. The present study was conducted to determine the pattern of MI incidence and to identify the associated factors in Iran by province. This study has two parts. One part is prospective and hospital-based, and the other part is an ecological study. In this study, the data of 20,750 new MI cases registered in Iranian Myocardial Infarction Registry in 2012 were used. For spatial analysis in global and local, spatial autocorrelation, Moran's I, Getis-Ord, and logistic regression models were used. Data were analyzed by Stata software and ArcGIS 9.3. Based on autocorrelation coefficient, a specific pattern was observed in the distribution of MI incidence in different provinces (Moran's I: 0.75, P < 0.001). Spatial pattern of incidence was approximately the same in men and women. MI incidence was clustering in six provinces (North Khorasan, Yazd, Kerman, Semnan, Golestan, and Mazandaran). Out of the associated factors with clustered MI in six provinces, temperature, humidity, hypertension, smoking, and body mass index (BMI) could be mentioned. Hypertension, smoking, and BMI contributed to clustering with, respectively, 2.36, 1.31, and 1.31 odds ratio. Addressing the place-based pattern of incidence and clarifying their epidemiologic dimension, including spatial analysis, has not yet been implemented in Iran. Report on MI incidence rate by place and formal borders is useful and is used in the planning and prioritization in different levels of health system.

Учет влияния колебаний температуры обмотки статора на термический ресурс асинхронного двигателя

The work is aimed at solving the problem of reducing the accident rate of induction motors, increase the service life and efficiency of their use by improving the accuracy of the estimation of the thermal state at the design stage and during the exploitation. The paper discusses the problem of determining the limits of applicability of the average loss method for estimating the thermal state of asynchronous motors in intermittent mode and refinement of this method, taking into account the nonlinear coupling between rate of aging of insulation and temperature, as well as the ratio of the cycle parameters and the thermal time constant of the motor. We used analytical methods and computer experiment, based on the five-mass thermodynamic model of the induction motor. It is found that there exist such combinations of parameters of cycle in intermittent mode for which evaluation of the thermal state of the induction motor by the average loss method is incorrect. We propose a refined method of estimating the thermal state of the induction motor by the traditional average loss method by introducing a correction coefficient that takes into account the nonlinear coupling of the rate of aging of insulation from the stator winding temperature, we obtain formulas for the calculation of this coefficient. It is shown that within the formal borders of intermittent mode (cycle time no more than 10 min), divergence between the results obtained analytically and via five masses thermodynamic model of the induction motor used in the computational experiment is quite small and does not exceed 6...8%.

With what implications? An assessment of EU migration governance between Union regulation and national diversity

The analysis of EU migration policy has been focused primarily on evaluating its relationship to EU law, or its application to individual member states. This article argues that neither focus can address the full implications and effects of EU migration governance. The Union’s migration and free movement policies set out to organise populations both within and beyond its formal borders. They are part of the broader governance of the European Union as an integrated market, and as an international policymaker. As such, the characteristics and effects of migration governance across the EU as a whole need to be assessed. At the EU level, EU policy and law on migration creates the illusion of policy coherence, applied to all member states, incomers and residents. Yet these apparently coherent EU policies always co-exist with three confounding factors: 1) national and local variation in migration, integration and social policies; 2) national and local labour market variation, particularly in the role of informal economy, and 3) profound member state hierarchies in the EU’s political economy, reinforced by the ongoing crisis. However, this does not mean that the EU’s migration policymaking is irrelevant to member states. Rather, migration governance in the EU is co-produced by the cross-cutting and sometimes contradictory policies of other actors. With its illusion of policy coherence, this co-produced governance both disguises and entrenches significant hierarchy among member states. It contributes to an EU polity which manages diversity through inequalities.

Modern Conceptual–Theoretical Transformations of Political Leadership

Scientific discussion on political leadership increasingly takes on the form of interdisciplinary argumentation, in which different research perspectives, models and explanatory conceptual grids overlap. This state of affairs is on the one hand dictated by the contemporary trends in scientific research, especially in the broadly defined social sciences, where the cognitive, explanatory or descriptive relevance is achieved only by taking into account a broader, inter-disciplinary nature of scientific knowledge. In this sense, a thorough, reliable research practice consists primarily in crossing the formal borders of scientific disciplines, where researchers renounce the “complex” of detailed and firm definitions of their own subject of study to turn instead towards integration of knowledge from various, often very different, areas. The above is mainly due to the dispersion of objective scientific knowledge, which is conditioned, among others by: scientific and technical progress, the phenomenon of intertextuality (modern researchers in humanities concentrate their research effort on the texts and practices associated with this phenomenon, which means that their primary method in analyses of political phenomena is to fortify the text – specifically, to prepare the scientific text in such a way as to meet the standards of scientific writing and withstand criticism in the absence of the writer; as well as conceptual-theoretical pluralism present in social sciences. On the other hand, it is the result of scientific analysis of the given forms and practices of leadership, where nowadays greater attention is paid to the multi-dimensionality of leadership processes in politics, related to: the multi-level nature of concepts and research (meso, micro and macro-theoretical level analyses) and the need to take into account a large number of variables in the study of leadership (personality and environmental, situational, institutional factors, economic, political or religious variables). The consequence of this state of affairs is the multi-paradigm character of leadership, which in this case means that very often highly different ways of defining and explaining the complex relationship between a particular political leader and followers co-exist within the discipline. In addition, the multiplicity of paradigms of political leadership is a feature demonstrating the interdisciplinary nature of knowledge generated by political science, where various claims, theses, observations or conclusions complement each other, for example those originating in disciplines such as sociology, law, psychology, management sciences and cultural studies.

The Legality of Liberal Revolution

Since the fall of communism, liberals have sought to reclaim the mantle of revolution. This new age of liberal revolution, they argue, culminates in a transformative ‘moment’ when the people unite to throw off their shackles and establish a democratic constitution. These founding moments are therefore extraordinary periods of unconstrained politics, where the sovereign people transcend the formal borders of institutionalized politics and legality to draft the constitutional boundaries of their new liberal order. Russian President Boris El’tsin placed his violent and illegal dissolution of the Russian Parliament and period of authoritarian dictatorship within this tradition of liberal revolution. Throughout 1993, El’tsin justified his decision to disband Parliament as the necessary action of an agent of the people in a period of extraordinary (and extralegal) politics. Western commentators have generally placed Russia’s constitutional foundation within this revolutionary paradigm of extraordinary politics. In Russia, however, both El’tsin’s methods and this revolutionary tradition are increasingly viewed with suspicion. This viewpoint is best expressed in the writing of the Chairman of the Russian Constitutional Court, Valerii Zor’kin. Steeped in the anti-revolutionary ideology of the late tsarist Russian constitutionalists, Chairman Zor’kin argues that El’tsin’s actions at the Russian founding helped spawn a culture of lawlessness that has undermined Russian democracy. Although Zor’kin’s approach is flawed, it is an important reminder for liberal constitutional thinkers to reexamine the concrete effects of a desire for a democratically pure founding moment.

Absence du romanesque dans le roman hybride de Charles Nodier – Adèle

This paper deals with intentional breakaway of novel elements in romantic story published in 1820. On the one hand, the book belongs to the rich tradition of epistolary, on the other, it also gives un example of how formal borders can be transgressed between novel composed of letters and novel written as intimate diary, what leads to the disappearance of typical novel elements in texts from the turn of XVII and XVIII c. This absence of fiction appears firstly in paratext (especially in preface to the novel), where the author presents his own concept of novel, and then in letters.

English

A proxeny decree found in the temple of Pherai (SEG 23, 418), dating to the late fifth/middle of the fourth century BC, has a wording paralleling with a fifth-century Athenian proxeny decree, IG I2 174 (IG I2 93). The Proxeny and related honors had been awarded not simply within the confines of the polis of Pherai, but beyond the physical limits of the city. The Pheraians, like the Athenians before them, exercised some form of political hegemony over territories which lay beyond the formal borders of their polis.

Belgrade: Intra-urban daily migrations of labor, pupils and students

Daily migrations of population represent a very significant and developed social phenomenon which, in the conditions of transition in Serbia, does not have the previous spatial and demographic expressiveness. Nevertheless, the complex significance of the scientific explanation of convergent and divergent daily migrations of the centers of larger and smaller functional capacity is indisputable. Consequently, the intra-urban daily movements of labor, pupils and students will be dealt with within the planned and formal borders of the Belgrade settlement among 10 urban municipalities. According to a special statistical data processing of the 2002 population census, 316 817 of its permanent residents participated in these movements or 4.2% of the total population of Serbia without the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohia, whereof most of them are workers. Their daily movement and commute within the borders of the city contributes to a great extent to the dynamical circulation of people and intensive transportation flows among some parts of Belgrade, as well as the changes in the concentration of their total population throughout the working day.

Quasi‐legal commerce in southeast asia: Evidence from myanmar

AbstractThe historical absence of formal political borders in the mainland Southeast Asian region, combined with the nature of the geography, mean that unofficial and illegal forms of crossborder movement and economic activities are pervasive and significant throughout the region. This is particularly true in Myanmar (formerly Burma), where pressure on international firms to comply with a boycott of the country, togeth‐er with the covert activities of the government conspire to make border trade a viable form of international business. Although illegal trade such as smuggling is perhaps a universal feature of international economic activities, what is more interesting is the phenomenon of quasi‐legal trade, which includes such activities as parallel importing and reimporting, and advertising by proxy. In many cases, there is evidence that multinational firms collude with distributors, quasi‐legal importers, and government officials to enable the continuation of the marketing of their brands within a country in which this would otherwise be prohibited. This article reports on research conduct‐ed in Myanmar during 1997 and 1998 concerning this issue. The study included a wide‐ranging program of qualitative research with in‐depth interviews of leading overseas executives, intermediaries, and government officials. This research in Myanmar is unique, and it was conducted under considerable difficulties and extreme need for security and provision of confidentiality. In describing the role of multinational companies and others in pursuing quasi‐legal border trade, the article makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the business environment in Myanmar and, more generally, in Southeast Asia. The wider implications of this for international marketing are also described. � 2001 John Wiley &amp; Sons, Inc.