Geographical Periphery Research Articles

Balancing power and prosperity: China’s geo-economic engagement with the Gulf Cooperation Council

Since the 1990s, China’s engagement beyond its geographical periphery, especially with Asian regions, has grown exceptionally, which is best evident in the Gulf sub-region and Western Asian nations. Indeed, energy-based interactions were the first to be established with Gulf Arab countries, and today, more than two decades after the Cold War, such relationships have evolved into tighter partnerships and engagement networks. Thus, in the last decade, China has increased its economic and political footprint in the Gulf region, as it has become one of the region’s largest external investors and trade partners. In its relations with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, China faces varying challenges as each country pursues its interests, making the Chinese strategy in the region more complex. The Gulf countries have had to balance their relationship between the US as a security guarantor and China as an important economic partner. They strive to maximize their political and economic interests in the process. The main contention of this paper is that the GCC should not be viewed as a homogenous entity and that the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a flexible approach designed to bolster China’s economic objectives in each Gulf country. Our research scrutinizes China’s geo-economic strategy and geopolitical aims about the Gulf States’ aspirations to maximize their economic ties with China. Against this background, this paper discusses the political and economic relationships between the People’s Republic of China and the Gulf Arab states: Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

Spatial and Ethno-national Health Inequalities: Health and Mortality Gaps between Palestinians and Jews in Israel.

This research adopts an analytical spatial perspective to explain ethno-national health inequality between Palestinians and Jews in Israel. The work identifies the forces that instigated and maintained the spatial segregation of Palestinians and elaborates the role of segregation in generating health gaps between Palestinians and Jews. The analysis suggests a novel conceptualization of two types of segregation: (a) exclusion from the center and confinement to the periphery and (b) segregation within the geographic periphery. Using administrative data on COVID-19 incidence, hospitalization, and death and various health indicators for localities, I devise a decomposition method that evaluates the relative contribution of each type of segregation to the total health gap. The findings indicate that the segregation of Palestinians from the center and their confinement to peripheral regions are crucial determinants of their poor health outcomes and that the segregation of the Palestinian community within the geographic periphery also contributes to poorer health.

Unnoticed Women Architects in the Spanish (South)Eastern Mediterranean Region

This paper reveals the first results of the study carried out within the framework of the research project «A Situated View: Women’s Architecture in Spain from Peripheral Approaches, 1978-2008», in the context of the regions of Valencia and Murcia in Eastern and Southeastern Spain. It deals with the architectural production effectuated exclusively by women architects—alone or together with other women—in the period spanning from 1978 to 2008, i. e., between the democratic transition and the global financial and economic crisis beginning late in 2007. The research brings together bibliographical survey and fieldwork based on direct contact and conversations with women architects, many of whom were absent from the specialised media. Works of different type, use and scale are explored to reveal their increasing production in the last decade of the study, a record of diversity of uses in which residential buildings and works with an average surface area between 1,000 m2 and 10,000 m2 prevail, as well as new buildings as opposed to renovations or refurbishments. This research vindicates the names of women architects, such as Pilar Amorós, Lola Alonso, Lourdes García Sogo, Anna Bofill, and Rufina Campuzano, among other women architects from several generations, and architecture from the Spanish geographic periphery, with the aim of exposing and highlighting a plurality in the ways of making and understanding architecture that completes the historiography. This paper thus consists of a historiographical review open to new contributions and to fill the gaps detected to date.

Groundwater overdraft is water dispossession

The Coachella Valley sits at the geographic periphery of Los Angeles. Despite its physical and political marginality, the Coachella Valley is a key site of agricultural production in Southern California. Access to water is essential for ensuring the region's centrality in economic and social reproduction. Today, access to water for industrial production is primarily achieved through ongoing water dispossession. Using archival and policy documents, I analyze how United States settlers leveraged multiple mechanisms for water dispossession to expand the region's growth. Literature on water dispossession focuses on forms (water rights, grabbing, allocation, diversion, or contamination) that advance either settler colonialism or capitalism. This article demonstrates how successful white settlement in the Coachella Valley could only happen through Indigenous water dispossession. I identify an understudied form of water dispossession: groundwater overdraft. I illustrate that groundwater overdraft is not just a characteristic of early U.S. settler colonialism in the Coachella Valley; it is ongoing. In addition, the economic and environmental drawbacks to overdraft are resolved by expanding water dispossession. Analyzing groundwater overdraft as water dispossession, questions this premise. Illuminating the structural processes at play in water dispossession exposes the need to address dispossession, rather than simply overdraft, through both policy and cultural changes.

Maintaining Community Resilience through Urban Renewal Processes Using Architectural and Planning Guidelines

The article deals with community resilience-oriented urban renewal in a geographical periphery, and the characteristic patterns of public housing built in the 1950s and 1960s. When the existing fabric is well-established and effectively serves the residents, demolition and redevelopment may not be the most strategic approach if they undermine the internal resilience of public housing based on functionality. The article addresses the question of how to add new construction and a new population to these patterns of public housing in the periphery without affecting the community resilience of longtime residents and the sense of urban vitality and innovation of the new population. In order to address this question, we examined the built environment’s qualities in relation to the population’s resilience. Specifically, we conducted a quality analysis of the built environment focusing primarily on walkability and connectivity, diversity and land uses, open public spaces, and visibility to internal and external views. The findings of the analysis recommend developing a multiple urban spatial network relying on the longtime community’s resilience and a new spatial network for the newcomers. This is a potentially win–win solution. The old neighborhoods remain, while at the same time an additional layer of housing and other land uses will be developed along the edges of existing neighborhoods. The proposed analysis will be demonstrated on the peripherical city of Kiryat Yam.

To what extent can remote treatment address geographic barriers to psychotherapy?

Abstract Background The COVID-19 pandemic led to a surge in remote psychotherapy, suggesting it might also be a good way to overcome distance barriers to treatment post-pandemic. This study examined patterns of receiving psychotherapy before and after the COVID-19 outbreak, as well as patients’ perceptions of remote care. We conducted an internet survey of 400 Israelis who received psychotherapy in 2020 and 10 in-depth interviews with patients. Results 57% of patients from Israel's geographic periphery reported receiving remote treatment, compared to 30% of patients from central Israel (p < 0.01). Among those who began treatment before the onset of the pandemic, 76% reported receiving remote treatment or combined remote and face-to-face treatment after the pandemic's outbreak. In contrast, only half of those who began treatment after the onset of the pandemic received remote treatment. The interviews indicated that it is harder to start treatment and establish a therapeutic alliance with the therapist remotely than to continue therapy that had started face-to-face. Patients who experienced remote therapy were more likely than others to rate it as effective as face-to-face therapy in terms of its ability to achieve treatment goals (44% vs. 20%), to foster dialogue on sensitive issues (48% vs. 34%) and to create a therapeutic relationship with the therapist (41% vs. 25%). Additionally, they were less likely to identify interpersonal communication difficulties as a drawback of remote therapy (55% vs. 78%) and more likely to be willing to continue using it post-pandemic (25% vs. 5%), (all p < 0.01). Conclusions The findings suggest that for some patients, remote psychotherapy can be an effective way to address geographic barriers to psychotherapy. However, most patients still prefer face-to-face therapy. Offering remote treatment after establishing a therapeutic connection via face-to-face treatment will probably be more popular among consumers than strictly remote care. Key messages • For some patients, remote psychotherapy can be an effective way to address geographic barriers to psychotherapy, especially when a therapeutic alliance has already been established. • Most patients prefer face-to-face therapy. However, patients who experienced remote care were more likely to rate it as effective as face-to-face therapy and to continue using it after the pandemic.

COVID-19 Responses and the European Border Regime in Croatia and Serbia: Spectacularizing Borders and Sovereignties

This article focuses on multiple bordering practices introduced in the context of the initial COVID -19 responses in Croatia and Serbia. These practices, often focused on the imposition of mobility control, were differently framed, executed and challenged in these two contexts and demonstrated a long-term restructuring of the European border regime at the gates of the EU . The paper outlines and contextualizes constant interplay and mutual stimulation of movement suppression and movement resilience in response to the new virus, blurring and sharpening borders, as seen from these two states at the political and geographical peripheries of Europe. Croatia and Serbia employed spectacularization and invisibilization of movement control, which steadily fostered the further compartmentalization of the population in both countries but with notable differences, especially regarding the control over unwanted migration toward the EU . In the period under discussion, borders were activated, imposed and challenged, exposing the changeability of relations between the EU border regime and the sovereign-nation states which comprise it. Different positions of Serbia and Croatia in the EU border regime also led to differences with regard to movement control, bordering, encampment and the repression exhibited toward people on the move. Old and new typologies of movement repression were tested and employed within the COVID -19 crisis framework, resulting in the further compartmentalization of societies and exclusions

Deep Ocean and Caves: the Ultimate Frontiers in Tourism

In the ever-shrinking world, the tourism industry is looking for new spaces to explore. It is redefining the known ones and reaching for new ones, which are often located right on geographical peripheries. While it may seem that only space travel remains a challenge for tourism today, terrestrial environments of the deep ocean and deep caves are still beyond the reach of not only mass tourism, but tourism in general. The goal of the article is to identify objective and subjective, stable or variable, external and internal conditions that explain why the deep ocean and caves represent the ultimate frontiers for tourism. The author questions to what extent this situation will continue in the future and discusses the attractiveness and development prospects of various niche forms of tourism based on the features of the underworld and deep waters which, at first sight, constitute barriers or threats to most tourism activities.

Association between Spirodela polyrrhiza and blue green algae in aquatic habitats and in vitro conditions in relation to metabolite concentrations under monoculture and co-culture

Spirodela polyrrhiza samples were collected from various locations within the geographical periphery of Malda district in West Bengal, India. Samples collected from all sites were associated with algal colonies comprised of diatoms and blue green algae. Such association of different algal groups and greater duckweed in their natural habitat occurred in the lower epidermis of the fronds. Among the members of Cyanophyceae, Oscillatoria sancta was found to be abundantly associated with the fronds under in vivo conditions. To mimic the in vivo association, axenic monocultures of both S. polyrrhiza and O. sancta were maintained separately or by co-cultivation. Association with O. sancta under in vitro growth conditions prolonged the stationary growth phase of greater duckweed significantly. A growth-promoting association between the two species was shown by increased concentration of some metabolites of S. polyrrhiza. Correlation between growth of the two species were confirmed.

Choosing between energy and ecologies of health: Understanding developmentalism, state formation and local life worlds

AbstractEnvironmental crises, precipitated by a globally dominant model of developmentalism, have changed the lives of less visible communities in geographical peripheries. This study draws on our participant observation of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) in general as a massive infrastructural development project and the Qadirabad coal power plant as one of many CPEC projects where developmentalism and local lives intersect with each other. We have presented evidence of how massive development projects bring about consequential but disguised social and environmental impacts on locals. The locals' narratives show that the Qadirabad project has brought about economic, agricultural and environmental degradation in their lives. They believe that the governments in Pakistan are conscious of foreign projects with adverse effects on the everyday lived realities of the people but willfully choose to ignore them.

GROßSTÄDTE ALS TOPOI DER MIGRATIONSKRISE IN DEUTSCHSPRACHIGER LITERATUR AM ANFANG DES 21. JAHRHUNDERTS

The following paper offers a transgeneric analysis of three contemporary German literary texts which shows how the plot setting - which is in all these cases an urban environment, i.e. a city – can be described as a topos to address ongoing migration crises. These urban places of action and the depicted migration crises create a state of paradox and irony: big cities attract the population and represent a place that is desirable to live in, yet they seem to marginalize and ostracize the very groups that migrate towards them. The research presented in this paper stems from an ongoing research project that deals with the phenomenon of crisis in contemporary English, German and Croatian literature, with an emphasis on systems in crisis, where the systems are defined from a sociological perspective as the family, the local community, the state, the region, and so on. The research was conducted within the installation research project “UIP-2020-02-3695 Analysis of Systems in Crisis and of New Consciousness in 21st Century Literature” (2021.-2026) funded by the Croatian Science Fund. The aim of the project is to prove the hypothesis that what we have at hand is a predominantly subversive attitude on the part of literature towards the phenomenon of crisis and towards systems in crisis. The research done in the first year of the project (2021) shows that of the 126 German-language prose and drama texts included in the corpus, focusing on texts published from 2000 to 2021, 29 deal explicitly with crises in the local community or in the city and 23 with migration crises (cf. Novak et al. 2021, p. 3). The literary works selected for analysis, which offer urban areas as the setting of the narrative, show how, at the expense of the protagonists’/characters’ isolated experience, a shared, global view is illustrated that might indicate literary trends in dealing with contemporary problems in society, such as the attitude towards the ‘other’, the marginalized, or the ‘different’. Paradoxically, at the same time, through the way they subtly address these problematic attitudes, the literary texts become topoi that allow space for criticism. The novel and two plays that are the focus of this research have all been published in German since the year 2000 and are part of the project’s corpus. They have been selected as representative examples of how the urban, civilized, dominant community acts and reacts when it comes into contact with the ‘other’. They encompass both the individual and the collective, tragedy and comedy, but also social satire which addresses many problems of the world we consider to be structured and ordered, revealing that it is in reality a place of complex dynamics of centricity versus provinciality and inclusion versus exclusion. The paper takes a close look at Robert Menasse’s novel Die Hauptstadt (2017), Philipp Löhle’s play Wir sind keine Barbaren! (2015) and Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz’s play Phantom (Ein Spiel) (2015). The transgeneric analysis of the selected literary texts shows how the migration crises in the big cities are not explicitly addressed, but rather pushed to the sides and margins – both literally and figuratively - and overlooked, and thus made even deeper within the system of the narrative (that is, in the narrative of both the prose as well as the drama text). In all three examples, the “we” is often emphasized as dominant, while “the others” are marginalized, both geographically and symbolically, due to this dominance. The migrants/refugees appear and remain on the geographical periphery, while also not even being recognized, and listened to, or else they become condemned to a life in symbolic parallel worlds. The community in all three examples acts globally in the economic and communication-strategic sense, but limits its self-image and the conception of “we” locally, and in doing so emphasizes the meaningfulness of their own tradition, while diminishing the existence of the others.

Modern Shia Islamic and Jewish Political Theosophy: An Elective Affinity?

The present study will focus on core parallels and nodes of theopolitical exchange between the two most politically and theologically consequential jurist “theosophers” of the twentieth century, the Religious Zionist founding father, the Jewish Rav Avraham Yitzchak Hacohen Kook (1865–1935), and the Shia Islamic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900–1989). Unquestioned masters of the tradition of both medieval philosophy and mysticism, as well as the theosophies of the early-modern and modern eras, both Kook and Khomeini attempted to embed the rhetoric of theosophy within revolutionary notions of both clerical religious authority and the necessity of their respective nomoi to assume political form. The study will also correlate contemporary Shia reformist theosophies undergirded with anti-theocratic exoteric postures with pre-WW2 German-Jewish “existence philosophies” as represented by Franz Rosenzweig, noting a common appreciation for what the study will term “theopolitical risk”. It argues that the retrieval of medieval Judeo-Islamic political philosophy for the successful negotiation of reason and revelation in modernity against both theocratic juridical extremism and the iron cages of positivistic-realist secularism must be rethought in light of the theopolitics coursing through Iran and Israel, two states at the geographic periphery though fully within the horizons of the Modern West.

Decolonizing Irishness: Assertions of Afro-Irish Self-Determination in Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley’s Seaview and Melatu Uche Okorie’s This Hostel Life

Nicky Gogan and Paul Rowley's 2008 documentary film Seaview and Melatu Uche Okorie's 2018 short-story collection This Hostel Life raise questions about Ireland's postcolonial position on the economic and geographic periphery of Europe amid the added complexity of emerging racial formations. These texts critically depict the racial and cultural barriers that produce a voyeuristic bifurcation between an implied white Irish citizen and a racialized non-citizen. Seaview invokes this voyeuristic bifurcation to critique the segregation and isolation of asylum seekers detained in Direct Provision (DP) centres from the rest of Irish society. Yet moments of ambiguity in filmic strategies of who is looking and who is seen emphasize ongoing colonial and neocolonial histories that continue to impact identity formations in Ireland. The possibilities and limitations of representing Afro-Irish self-determination arises as a site of contestation in Okorie's 2018 collection of three stories This Hostel Life. The second short story, “Under the Awning,” is a frame narrative that reclaims the liminal elements of second-person narration to assert emerging forms of Afro-Irish self-determination. This story exposes layers of racialization as it also indicates multiple possible voices materializing across multiple possible Irelands. In the seemingly disparate genres and media of documentary film and the short story, Seaview and This Hostel Life structurally challenge Irish racial formations that conform to a default colonial white norm. Reading these texts together exposes connections between postcolonial national identity and colonial racial formations that postcolonial nations willingly or unwillingly inherit through globalized economies and internationally integrated immigration reforms. By critically challenging racializing contexts and narratives during and after the Celtic Tiger, Seaview and This Hostel Life expand the representational possibilities for Afro-Irish self-determination in twenty-first century Irish literature and film.

Pathways towards integrated cross-border marine spatial planning (MSP): insights from Germany, Poland and the island of Ireland

ABSTRACT Marine Spatial Planning is labelled as ‘an idea whose time has come’ based on its applicability to address spatial conflicts and deliver sustainable use. Legislation such as the EU MSP Directive 2014/89/EU and the UK Marine and Coastal Access Act 2009 requires that neighbouring marine spatial plans are coherent and coordinated to address cross-border issues. However, the implementation of MSP in cross-border areas is complex due to different administrative processes, fiscal and legislative procedures. This study argues that cross-border MSP is challenging in areas that are faced with historically contested borders which limit effective delivery of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Two contested case study regions: Germany, Poland and the island of Ireland are compared. To help understand contemporary issues, a bespoke theoretical evaluative framework, the ‘Wheel of Integration and Adaptation’ is used to identify the challenges of cross-border MSP. An in-depth review of planning documents, policies, legislation was undertaken alongside interviews. This demonstrated that in contested areas, cross-border MSP must contend with the following challenges: ‘inter alia’ geographical peripheries syndrome, schema overload, limited transparency and blue justice, diplomatic consultation processes and differences in planning philosophies. This paper concludes by presenting five interventions as steps toward advancing cross-border MSP.

The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1842–1962 by Kyle J. Gardner

Gardner gives us a comprehensive account, at once compelling and authoritative, of what he calls the “frontier complex” along the high Himalayas from its early exploration to the 1962 war between India and China. An initial introductory chapter examines the meanings of frontiers, borders, and borderlands in the context of contemporary theories of space and place. He then proceeds to an account of the precolonial history of Ladakh. This high desolate plateau, Gardner insists, was no “geographic periphery,” but a “religious, political and commercial nexus” sustained by trade (above all in pashmina wool, used in fine shawls) between Central Asia, Tibet, and India (28, 59). The territory possessed no marked borders, only “border points” where kingdoms met and taxes were levied.Tension emerged between two visions of a border for Ladakh as the British began exploring into the Himalayas from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Was it to be a “bounded” territory, with a boundary devised to exclude hostile neighbors from advancing into India? Or were the existing “open” borders to be expanded by developing roads and communication? Boundaries of course, as Gardner describes in a fascinating chapter, require surveys, which are meant to produce maps. But in this remote, arid region, the normal “scientific” trigonometric practices of the Survey of India proved impractical. Hence the British devised what they called the “water-parting principle” whereby the edge of a watershed—in this case that of the Indus River—was used to establish a border (81). But the origins of the Indus lay high on the slopes of unmarked and unclimbed ridges, while the local streams themselves, as one official put it, were of a “tortuous, shifting, and erratic character” (71). As a result, even up until 1947, maps of India included no northwestern borders at all. The “cartographical thinking” that imbued maps with authority had failed (62, 88).Control required communications. In 1850 the British began construction of the Hindustan-Tibet Road, followed in 1870 by the Treaty Road negotiated with the Kashmir maharaja to expand access to Central Asian markets. As acknowledgement of British supremacy, the Kashmir maharaja was obliged to submit an annual tribute of one horse and twelve “shawl” goats. (Alas, taken from their lofty habitat, the goats invariably died.) In any case, by the century’s end British interests had shifted from trade to security. Roads initially meant to facilitate movement had, especially with the growth of Russian encroachment, been transformed into “tools for restricting potentially dangerous ‘trans-frontier’ people” (131). In this new climate of “invasion anxieties,” Boundary Commissions flourished, and adventurers like the “frontier hero” Francis Younghusband set out to “open” Tibet. Still, throughout, “a motley assortment of nomads, traders, and goats” remained as “symbols of the limits of imperial state legibility” (178, 179).The concluding chapter takes the reader into the Independence era. In a time of nationalism, nations required boundaries. A geography integrated into the “geobody” of the nation also demanded, in an era of geopolitical rivalries, “a strong and scientific borderline” (229). This left Ladakh in a paradoxical position as both central to emerging national rivalries and yet as an increasingly isolated and ambiguously defined territory. The outcome was Jawaharlal Nehru’s 1955 drawing of a definite, but undemarcated, boundary line, and the consequent Chinese advance across the Aksai Chin plateau. The 1962 war produced the Actual Line of Control, a border, as Gardner points out, based on no particular geographic principle, but nevertheless one central to the Indian nation, even “something to die for” (253).This impressive volume will engage the interest not only of scholars of South Asia but also of geographers, political scientists, and environmental historians who seek to understand the interplay of geography, geopolitics, and the making of states.

Russia’s Hero Cities: From Postwar Ruins to Soviet Heroarchy by Ivo Mijnssen

Reviewed by: Russia’s Hero Cities: From Postwar Ruins to Soviet Heroarchy by Ivo Mijnssen Adrienne M. Harris Russia’s Hero Cities: From Postwar Ruins to Soviet Heroarchy. By Ivo Mijnssen. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2021. xxii+310 pp. £33. ISBN 978– 02–5305622–1. In this volume Ivo Mijnssen uses the thirteen ‘Hero Cities’ of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus as a lens to understand how Soviet officials shaped war memory through ritualized space. He argues that the designation of hero cities created an idealized narrative of collective heroism which served the state’s needs. Furthermore, ‘as products of the Brezhnev era [. . .] the Hero Cities provide insights into the social and political dynamics of the late USSR’ (p. 6). Though the monograph covers all thirteen ‘quasi-sacred cities’ (p. 2), Mijnssen devotes most of his analysis to two cities on the geographic periphery, Tula and Novorossiysk. He shows how designation as a Hero City effected both large-scale change, such as monuments, and smaller-scale change, since the material benefits accompanying these designations and monuments created spaces for the performance of calendrical and life rituals. His book traces how this ‘honorary status shaped [the Hero Cities], their inhabitants, and the Soviet Union—both during the Brezhnev era and beyond’ (p. 9). Mijnssen’s thoughtful interpretation of a wide variety of source material distinguishes this monograph: he uses national and local archival documents, oral interviews (between 2012 and 2013), speeches and resolutions, newspaper articles, and material culture (stamps, postcards, coffee-table books, and tourist guides). Extensive notes demonstrate the rich body of secondary works with which he engages. Maps, charts, reproductions of published and archival photographs, photographs from interviewees’ personal collections, and Mijnssen’s own photographs illustrate the volume’s arguments. After briefly describing the individual Hero Cities, Mijnssen introduces the concept of the hero in the first chapter. He [End Page 734] identifies a ‘socialist contract born of the trauma’ of the Great Patriotic War (p. 6) and points to the multifaceted processes at play in the designation ‘Hero City’. Chapter 2 addresses the emergence of an official, idealized war memory under successive governments from Stalin to Brezhnev, while the third and fourth chapters analyse Tula, the last city awarded this designation during the Brezhnev era. In Chapter 3 Mijnssen discusses the multifaceted nature of war commemoration in the USSR, such as the erasure of women from war memory, contested memories of the war and taboos, Brezhnev-era expectations for youth and their activities, veterans’ material conditions, and various rituals. Chapter 4 details deficits experienced by Tula in both food and housing stocks, expectations for material privileges, and subsequent disappointment when ‘the state was less able to uphold its side of the socialist contract—the improvement of living conditions’ (p. 132). Only two hundred kilometres from Moscow, Tula exemplifies the gap between Moscow and regional cities. The next two chapters focus on a city which was privileged by Brezhnev’s favour, Novorossiysk. After addressing the city’s role in the war effort, Mijnssen turns to previously taboo subjects: deportation and repatriation, experiences under occupation, and the problems that partisan activity created for civilians. He details youth activity, including both spontaneous play in the battle-scarred wastelands surrounding the city and state-sanctioned, highly ritualized activities at memorial sites. Chapter 6, subtitled ‘Wartime Glory and Window to the World’, investigates Brezhnev’s affection for this city and its reconstruction and development under his patronage. The final chapter continues chronologically from the end of Chapter 2, as Mijnssen examines the dissolution of official war memory that occurred after Brezhnev’s death and during perestroika, and the resurrection of this cultural memory under Putin. He discusses the Immortal Regiment and the Cities of Military Glory, as well as the role played by Sevastopol and Kerch in rhetoric justifying the annexation of Crimea. He disagrees with those who identify ‘the state’s use of the past to promote authoritarian tendencies’ as re-Stalinization, arguing instead that Putin aims for a ‘re-Brezhnevization under the conditions of capitalism’ (p. 251). Although Mijnssen grounds his arguments in Jan Assmann’s work on collective memories and cultural memory, readers seeking rich theoretical discussion should look...

Transmigration programs and migrant positions in rural community knowledge networks

Controversial transmigration programs have moved millions of people from the cores of domestic economies to national geographical peripheries to ostensibly facilitate a more equitable resource distribution. However, it is not well understood how transmigrants become accepted and how they position themselves within the local networks of migrant-receiving rural communities. We examine how ethnicity and transmigratory experience affect informal knowledge-sharing networks in 16 coffee and cocoa farmer groups in Lampung, Indonesia. Drawing on these social networks and key socio-economic characteristics of 315 farming group members, we examine core-periphery network structures and centrality distributions within these farming groups. We show that individuals from the majority ethnomigration group who are the descendants of Javanese migrants tend to form the core of the local farmers’ knowledge networks, apparently benefiting both from strong cultural links to the central regions of the country in Java as well as strong embeddedness in local communities. Our findings also call attention to possible marginalization of original members of peripheral rural communities in central government-sponsored transmigration and export-oriented agricultural extension programs.

Technological, institutional, and geographical peripheries: regional development and risk of poverty in the European regions

In this paper, we analyze the interrelation between technological, institutional, and geographical peripheries. By distinguishing between the quality and quantity of access to information and communication technologies, together with institutional and geographical factors, and using a sample of 229 European regions during the period 2007–2018, we find that the diffusion and quality of information and communication technologies foster economic development and decrease the risk of social exclusion. A similar effect is found for institutional and geographical factors, suggesting that the interplay of these three determinants may be crucial to set up place-based policies.

Policy on Enhancing Access to Higher Education: The Israeli Case

Israel’s new higher education policy, introduced by the Council for Higher Education (CHE) in 1994, was intended to make higher education accessible to population groups on the social and geographical periphery of Israel and narrow social gaps. This article will examine the following main question: Does access to higher education abet social mobility and narrow social disparities? This article emphasises the changes in the role of academia as a gateway to occupations that allow for high social mobility. Previous research has not focused on this qualitative gap. This article asserts that the increase in enrolment in subjects that do not lead to high income in non-affluent localities may perpetuate the qualitative gaps between these localities and affluent ones. This affects the outputs of the academic system; the quality gaps are beginning to have impacts not only among localities in Israel but also on international comparison tests.

The geographic periphery as architecture for leadership practice with Swedish primary school principals: a peripatetic leading practice

ABSTRACT This paper aims to report a study that develops knowledge of the geographic periphery as architecture for leadership practices by principals in small primary schools with no more than four teachers. The geographic periphery has different prerequisites from geographic centers. Sweden is a rural country that also has large cities which attract people for economic and social reasons. There is limited research on the nature of school leadership in rural contexts. This paper addresses these limitations through an ethnographic study, with participatory observations in village schools and a follow-up conversation with principals and teachers. The main findings illuminate place as a physical as well as discursive and social dimension. The rural leadership practices considered peripatetic differ in Sweden, and internal and external recruitment is of importance for leadership practice. To organize and ensure equality in education, more knowledge of rural education is needed.