Cordon Sanitaire Research Articles

Forests as the key component of green belts surrounding urban areas

The development of Polish cities leads to the urbanization of the surrounding rural areas. This process induces changes in the land-use structure, which is manifested by the expansion of urbanized and developed areas at the expense of open areas. The National Urban Development Plan until 2030 has introduced the concept of obligatory green belts around metropolitan and regional hubs to prevent uncontrolled suburbanization and to promote rational urban development. Green belts are protective areas that serve numerous functions, increase the quality of life and promote the ecological cohesion of space. Green belts limit urban sprawl and maintain urban open spaces that are accessible to city residents for recreational purposes. They also contribute to the local climate and act as sanitary cordons. The main components of green belts are green spaces, river valleys and forests. Therefore, the size as well as the distribution of forests around urban centers are important considerations. This study analyzes the distribution and spatial continuity of forests and the spatial relationships (spatial autocorrelations) between the forests situated in the rural suburbia of Olsztyn in north-eastern Poland. Suburban municipalities were analyzed at the level of cadastral districts (villages). The aim of the analysis was to evaluate the spatial continuity of forests by grouping similar objects and identifying areas which could be included in green belts. The location quotient (LQ) and Gini’s coefficient were taken into account in the analysis of the spatial distribution of forests. Local Moran’s statistics were calculated and spatial clusters were identified to illustrate the diversity of the examined suburban space based on the similarity of the neighboring objects (cadastral districts) and to determine the statistical significance of these relationships. The results of the study reveal spatial irregularities and disproportions in the distribution of forests in the suburban zone of Olsztyn as well as the presence of local instabilities and discontinuities. The applied methods are a useful tool for evaluating, planning and optimizing the spatial distribution of forests around large urban centers. Spatial management solutions in the suburban zone should aim to eliminate spatial discontinuities and improve the quality of life of the local communities.

Eurosceptics in trilogue settings: interest formation and contestation in the European Parliament

Trilogues have been studied as sites of secluded inter-institutional decision making that gather the Council of the European Union, the European Parliament (EP) and the European Commission. Trilogues, however, are not exempt from formal and informal party-political dynamics that affect intra- and inter-institutional contestation. The increase in Eurosceptics in the 2014 EP elections offers an opportunity to investigate their efforts to shape the position and behaviour of the EP negotiating team in trilogues. Therefore, this article investigates to what extent Eurosceptic party groups participate in trilogue negotiations and how mainstream groups deal with their presence. The analysis shows that the opportunities to participate in trilogues and shape the EP’s position are higher for those perceived as soft Eurosceptic MEPs, while mainstream groups apply a ‘cordon sanitaire’ to those perceived as being part of hard Eurosceptic groups – which reduces the chances of MEPs from those groups being willing to participate in parliamentary work.

Les mots d'insurrection sur Pyrenees: chansons et proclamations seditieuses en circulation sur le cordon sanitaire durant le Trienio Liberal

The seditious prints in the form of proclamation or song are considered as a means of conversion and effective mobilization to a project of revolt by the men of the first nineteenth century. Thus, taking advantage of the concentration of part of the royal army on the Pyrenean border to form a Cordon sanitaire, the enemies of the Bourbons circulate their writings of subversion from autumn 1821 to spring 1823.Through the semantic and lexical study of several clandestine leaflets of revolt, this article focuses on this specific means of politicization aimed at individuals with a lacunary or non-existent political culture. The seditious print, by its wish to synthesize thirty years of ideological influences, proves to be an excellent way to seize the ordinary words of opposition to the restored monarchy and to perceive the threads that the subversive elites use to move a popular power still worryingFecha de envio / Submission date : 18/12/2018Fecha de aceptacion / Acceptance date : 23/02/2019

Mobility Restrictions for the Control of Epidemics: When Do They Work?

Background: Mobility restrictions - trade and travel bans, border closures and, in extreme cases, area quarantines or cordons sanitaires- are among the most widely used measures to control infectious diseases. Restrictions of this kind were important in the response to epidemics of SARS (2003), H1N1 influenza (2009), and Ebola (2014). However, they do not always work as expected. Methods: To determine when mobility restrictions reduce the size of an epidemic, we use a model of disease transmission within and between economically heterogeneous locally connected communities. One community comprises a lowrisk, low-density population with access to effective medical resources. The other comprises a high-risk, high-density population without access to effective medical resources. Findings: Unrestricted mobility between the two risk communities increases the number of secondary cases in the low-risk community but reduces the overall epidemic size. By contrast, the imposition of a cordon sanitaire around the highrisk community reduces the number of secondary infections in the low-risk community but increases the overall epidemic size. Interpretation: Mobility restrictions may not be an eective policy for controlling the spread of an infectious disease if it is assessed by the overall final epidemic size. Patterns of mobility established through the independent mobility and trade decisions of people in both communities may be sucient to contain epidemics. Funding Statement: Baltazar Espinoza and Carlos Castillo-Chavez were funded by the National Security Agency (NSA Grant H98230-J8-1-0005) and by Data Science Initiative at Brown. Charles Perrings was funded by NSF grant 1414374, and by UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council grant BB/M008894/1. Declaration of Interests: All authors declare no conflicts of interest.

Handel Manuscripts and the Profits of Slavery: The "Granville" Collection at the British Library and the First Performing Score of Messiah Reconsidered

The artifacts of slavery are not only the manacles, branding irons, and whips, or the slaves' own possessions, but also the musical scores and instruments funded by slavery's profits. Like other wealthy families, those that engaged directly in the slave economy sought to enjoy the best cultural offerings of the day, which included hiring musicians to entertain and to teach, and purchasing manuscripts and printed scores of favorite works. This article offers two examples of Handel-related manuscripts that were purchased in part thanks to profits derived from the slave economy: the "Granville" Collection at the British Library, and the first performing score of Messiah now held by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. No cordon sanitaire protected music collecting from slavery's stain.

Editor’s Note

Editor’s Note Christopher Keep In the second chapter of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57), it is unclear which “plague” has prompted the medical authorities in Marseille to detain foreign travellers en route from “the East” (13). Dickens sets the story some thirty years before the novel’s original serialization, at which time Marseille was locked down owing to an outbreak of smallpox, one that would eventually claim 1,507 victims, or 1.2% of the city’s population (Barbieri and Drancourt S7). But Dickens’s association of the disease with the Orient, and the text’s emphasis on environmental rather than person-to-person transmission, suggests he may have had cholera, which swept through much of Europe in the early 1830s, in mind (Wright 261). The lack of an explicit identification of the contagious disease in question is, of course, pretty much the point: Dickens is less interested in scientific questions concerning the global spread of a virus than in the affective and psychological dimensions of what it means to live in quarantine. Feeling himself constantly watched by his ever-vigilant warders, Mr. Meagles appears to have internalized the panoptic gaze and convinced himself that he must, indeed, be one of the infected. “That’s my grievance,” he tells Arthur Clennam. “I have had the plague continually, ever since I have been here. I am like a sane man shut up in a madhouse; I can’t stand the suspicion of the thing. I came here as well as ever I was in my life; but to suspect me of the plague is to give me the plague. And I have had it—and I have got it” (13). When Clennam remarks that his compatriot in isolation seems, nonetheless, “to bear it very well” (13), Meagles vehemently denies the claim until his wife encourages him to take consolation in the presence of and good cheer afforded by their daughter, Pet. Meagles concedes the point and Clennam, too, remarks that such company “has had the result of making even quarantine enjoyable” (13). Dickens’s depiction of life in quarantine, where listlessness and boredom strangely mix with a sense of deep foreboding and doom, and the fear for one’s own health seems to be as contagious as the virus that necessitated the establishment of the cordon sanitaire in the first place, will seem very familiar to many readers who come to these pages in the midst of the pandemic occasioned by the coronavirus. As I write these words, in April 2020, a third of the global population is under some form of lockdown while health-care workers struggle to tend to the overwhelming numbers of the afflicted and essential service providers strive to maintain basic needs. For many academics, this means being cut off not only from our daily contact with students and colleagues but from the libraries, archives, and other [End Page v] resources that are essential to our research. These are small sacrifices, to be sure, and many are making them, like Mrs. Meagles, cheerfully, knowing that they will be temporary and are in the name of the greater public good. Moreover, many organizations and institutions have responded to the present crisis with both ingenuity and generosity. Working with individuals, libraries, and universities across the world, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Internet Archive, for example, has established what it calls a “National Emergency Library.” This service makes available more than 1.4 million digital copies of books and other materials for the duration of the current health crisis—the references above to Little Dorrit come from just this source, as my dog-eared copy languishes behind the locked doors of my departmental office. Moreover, Johns Hopkins University Press is making all the journals for which it is responsible, typically accessible only by scholars and researchers through their universities and colleges, available to the general public through the Project Muse digital platform. This means that the entire run of Victorian Review, from its first issue in 1972 to the one you are reading now, can now be read by anyone in the world with access to the Internet, at least for the duration of the...

Social network to inform and prevent the spread of cocoa swollen shoot virus disease in Ghana

The cocoa swollen shoot virus disease is a major factor limiting cocoa (Theobroma cacao L.) productivity for West African farmers. The only treatment against this disease is to cut infected trees and replant with disease-free planting material. Research has recommended the prevention measures: (i) cordon sanitaire (leaving 10-m-wide cocoa-free zone around cocoa), (ii) barrier cropping, (iii) using partly tolerant hybrids, and (iv) removing specific alternative host tree species. Here, we evaluate the current adoption of these measures and identify their adoption constraints. We conducted a quantitative survey with 396 farmers in the Eastern and Western Regions of Ghana, held six focus group discussions and hosted a multi-stakeholder validation workshop with 31 key actors in the cocoa value chain. Our results indicate that the adoption of prevention measure against the disease remains limited. Farmers with a more extensive social network (number of family members/close friends who already adopted a particular measure), a larger farm size, more secure land tenure rights, and more knowledge about the measures were more likely to adopt them, especially barrier cropping, hybrid seedlings, and removing alternative host trees. Lack of knowledge about the measures was the single biggest barrier for their adoption, with 51% of the participating farmers not even being aware of any prevention measures. Here, we show for the first time that the social network is the main information source for farmers, which agrees with the finding that the flow of information between farmers and other stakeholders is a critical factor affecting knowledge spread and consequently adoption. Our results provide crucial insights for the elaboration of an implementation action plan to boost the dissemination of feasible prevention measures against the cocoa swollen shoot virus disease in Ghana in order to efficiently cover farmers’ needs for information (technical advice) and inputs (access to hybrid seedlings).

Cordons Sanitaires and the Rationalisation Process in Southern Europe (Nineteenth-Century Majorca).

Never before the nineteenth century had Europeans, especially in the south, adopted cordons sanitaires in such great numbers or at such a fast rate. This article aims to analyse the process of the rationalisation and militarisation of the cordons sanitaires imposed in the fight against epidemics during the nineteenth century on the Mediterranean island of Majorca (Spain). These cordons should be understood as a declaration of war by the authorities on emerging epidemics. Epidemics could generate sudden and intolerably high rises in mortality that the new liberal citizenship found unacceptable. Toleration of this type of measure was the result of a general consensus, with hardly any opposition, which not only obtained the support of scientists (especially in the field of medicine) but also of most of the local and provincial political elite, and even of the population at large.

The American Midwest and the Early Cold War

The American Midwest and the Early Cold War Bernard Lemelin Robert H. Ferrell, Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2015. 142 pp. $19.95. Lawrence S. Kaplan, The Conversion of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg: From Isolation to International Engagement. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015. 294 pp. $45.00. Lawrence J. Haas, Harry and Arthur: Truman, Vandenberg, and the Partnership That Created the Free World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 313 pp. $29.95. Hendrik Meijer, Arthur Vandenberg: The Man in the Middle of the American Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 414 pp. $35.00. William Langer (North Dakota), Henrik Shipstead (Minnesota), Robert Taft (Ohio), Arthur Capper (Kansas), Charles Wayland Brooks (Illinois), Kenneth Wherry (Nebraska), Forrest Donnell (Missouri), William Jenner (Indiana), these were the names of a number of prominent isolationist members of the Congress from the Midwest during the early Cold War era. In the same period, however, this region was home to two significant internationalist politicians, Harry Truman (Missouri) and Arthur Vandenberg (Michigan), who have both been the focus of the recent monographs mentioned above. In his book entitled Harry S. Truman and the Cold War Revisionists, Robert Ferrell, one of the main biographers of Truman, castigates the group of historians known as the revisionists who have undertaken to disparage the foreign policy of the thirty-third American president since the 1960s. Among them were Gar Alperovitz, Barton Bernstein and Lloyd Gardner. For [End Page 142] the prolific scholar, who reminds that the conventional military strength of the United States in 1945–1950 was far from impressive, such an indictment is profoundly irrelevant to the basic idea of revision in history: "Th ere is nothing wrong … with the notion … of revisionism, taken by itself. My generation of historians, who began their studies in the years just after the war of 1941–1945 … appreciated the essays of the best-known historian of the time, Charles A. Beard, who declared that revision was the essence of scholarship. … We are all revisionists." Adds the eminent historian: "But the [C]old [W]ar revisionists who attacked … Truman did not understand the time in which he was president nor the man himself."1 Based on various primary sources (e.g., Truman papers, Department of State's Foreign Relations of the United States and memoirs of Dean Acheson), Ferrell's brief monograph particularly flays the three main theories advanced by the revisionists for the year 1945. The first one lies in the fact that President Franklin Roosevelt was "a subtle, sophisticated operator in foreign relations … and that President Truman was pretty much the opposite." The second theory consists in the conviction that the American nation, after the Yalta Conference, "sought to intervene in Russia's security zone in Eastern Europe, trying to gain influence, perhaps even dominance, over the cordon sanitaire of weak nations lying between Western Europe and the Soviet borders." The third hypothesis held by the revisionists, and notably Gar Alperovitz in its controversial Atomic Diplomacy (1965), was that the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, "not so much to end the war … but to impress the Russians, who were giving trouble in Eastern Europe." Concerning this last assumption, Ferrell stresses that an invasion of Japan would have definitely cost far more casualties than some nuclear revisionists had believed, asserting that the invasion of Luzon and Okinawa had cost respectively 31,000 and 63,000 U.S. casualties.2 Although Ferrell's volume exhibits several strengths (cogency of the overall demonstration, accuracy of facts, etc.), readers familiar with Truman's foreign policy, and acquainted for instance with the works of scholars on the atomic bomb such as Robert Maddox and J. Samuel Walker, will hardly find novelty in this book. In his monograph The Conversion of Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, Lawrence Kaplan, an expert on NATO, aims to follow "the odyssey of a major political figure from arch-isolationism in the 1930s to ardent internationalism after World War II." For the author, who consulted the rich Vandenberg papers located at the Bentley Library (University of Michigan), [End Page 143] the Midwest senator played a pivotal role in the conversion of...

Laicidad positiva, igualdad consiguiente: diálogo sobre el artículo 16 de la Constitución española

The constitutional notion of “inclusive secularity” puts forward a rupture with the negative dimension that has normally characterized secularist points of view. This demands the rethinking of the notion of secular State. The old obsession with a separation that kept a cordon sanitaire between public authorities and the religious factor, yields to a cooperation that acknowledges religion as a factor as positive and worthy of support as culture or sport. Constitutional Court’s Judgments such as 46/2001 and 34/2011 put into practice the constitutional mandate that requires a cooperation that reflects the Spanish society’s beliefs, discarding a mere equal treatment in dealing with religious communities.

Strategies of mainstream parties towards their right-wing populist challengers: Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland in comparison

Although right-wing populist parties (RPPs) have established themselves in most European countries, the academic discourse on political strategies towards them has been slow to start. This article compares the strategic reactions of the mainstream parties in the Nordic countries. The main findings are threefold: (1) in Denmark, Norway and Finland there has been a gradual change from various disengage to engage strategies over time, while in Sweden there has always been a strong cordon sanitaire; (2) one key difference has been in the speed and extent of the strategy changes; and (3) the choice of strategies, which is a very complex process, can be traced back to a combination of factors at the individual, party and systemic levels. There is a need for more research into the impacts and effectiveness of the strategies, the timing of the choice of strategies and the potential learning effects of political parties.

Social media and the cordon sanitaire

Abstract Much research has sought to map the spread of extreme and populist political ideologies across Western Europe. Despite this, it often fails to explain how these ideologies move from the political fringes to positions of influence, subverting the traditional cordon sanitaire around extreme views. As a result of recent successes by populist actors, a more nuanced understanding of this process is required. This paper posits an explanation for this success, suggesting that the growing pluralisation of the online media environment and the impact of social media content sharing are key to understanding how fringe political actors avoid both overt and implicit barriers to popularising extreme positions. Using data from the British Election Study, this paper offers a quantitative test of this approach, finding an inconsistent relationship between social media use and extreme political opinions. Potential explanations for this are discussed alongside possible directions for future research.

Zmienność czy konsekwencja? Problem relacji Polski ze Związkiem Sowieckim w publicystycznej refleksji Aleksandra Bocheńskiego od lat trzydziestych XX wieku do 1952 roku

The purpose of the article is to analyze the transformations of the relations betweenPolandand theSoviet Unionin Aleksander Bochenski’s journalism since the 1930s to 1952. The author also tries to establish if they were an effect of international situation or maybe stemmed from the journalist’s ideological views. The analysis of historical sources has proven the existence of two stages in Bochenki’s writings about the Soviet Unionin this period. Before 1939, he called for the liquidation of this state by Polandthrough military aggression, the liberation of bordering nations and the creation of a “sanitary cordon” between Polandand Russia, which was in Polish interest. The publicist perceived the Soviet Union as another form of imperial Russia. He disregarded ideological issues. Thus, in the years 1939–1945, he sought the possibility of agreement with Germany. However, at the end of the war, when the Soviets occupied Poland, Bochenski referred to 19 th century positivism and he thought about a compromise with communists. As a result, he become involved in the creation of the progressive Catholics movement. He claimed that the Soviet Union was the only guarantor ofPoland’s western border and thatPoland should become a credible ally of Moscow. The analysis of Bochenski’s narrative about the Polish-Soviet relations allowed to perceive him as a political realist. His attitude to theSoviet Uniondepended on the correlation between geopolitical situation and national interests, which could justify both the strive to liquidate this state and to agree with it.

ВОЕННО-ПОЛИТИЧЕСКОЕ ВЛИЯНИЕ США И ЗАПАДНОЙ ЕВРОПЫ В ВОСТОЧНО-ЕВРОПЕЙСКОМ РЕГИОНЕ

The subject of the study is the military policy of the United States and Western European countries in the Eastern European region. The article shows the focus of the US and Western Europe to con-solidate and expand its influence in the East European region and the establishment of the post-Soviet space “cordon sanitaire” around Russia. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of the West's desire to use the Eastern European countries to create a zone of instability in the countries bordering on Russia and Euro-Atlantic integration processes in Eastern Europe. The main conclusion of the study is that the United States and Western European countries are using all possible, including clearly contrary to inter-national law, the methods (a good example is the Ukraine) to engage the countries of Eastern Europe and, in particular, the former Soviet republics into the orbit of its influence. At the same time for the sake of their own interests, they are ready to accept a purely political decision to integrate into Euro-Atlantic structures, even those countries that do not meet the criteria of the West.

Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species by Neel Ahuja

Reviewed by: Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species by Neel Ahuja Alison Bashford Neel Ahuja. Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. xix + 262 pp. Ill. $24.95 (978-0-8223-6063-6). After decades of publications on biosecurity, Ahuja's title—Bioinsecurities—promises something different. On the one hand, there is much that is familiar to a generation of medical historians for whom the connection between microbes, humans, nonhumans, and national and imperial polities and politics is standard fare. Ahuja rehearses scholarship on the racialization of borders and epidemic control, and a Foucauldian generation's work on the government and risk management of communicable disease. On the other hand, there is a larger argument that is more novel. Ahuja tracks how, over the twentieth century, fear of disease became a kind of hope, an optimism. It all underwrote, and produced, not so much a security state as an apparently protective state; "the imperial state as protector of life" (p. 5). This book is a cultural study of infectious disease and U.S. empire, drawn in part from the long tradition of histories of colonial medicine, but in far larger part from post-Foucault, feminist, and postcolonial science and cultural studies. What makes this a 2016 scholarly intervention and not, say, a 1996 or 2006 cultural history of disease, government, freedoms, and biosecurity is Ahuja's integration of animal studies and interspecies analysis. The book is part of Duke's "Anima" series. At the same time, and with some benign contradiction, he takes a strong cue from scholarship on "affect," the power of emotional and visceral responses largely of humans. Bioinsecurities is structured by "space," "time," and "scale." The opening chapters are organized around the geographies of health segregation. These will be most familiar to medical historians. Ahuja considers two sites where imperial/ racial management and microbial/health management coincided: Hawaii, with a focus on the leper colony on Molokai; and the segregation of the venereally infected, or suspected, in the Panama region in wartime. Ahuja seeks to align these segregative impulses with a U.S. ambition toward benign empire. The chapter on regulation of sex workers and control of venereal disease argues that antimalarial campaigns were its inspiration. The idea that mobile, not stationary, sanitary cordons were constructed around soldiers is interesting. And Ahuja's suggestion that local antimalarial campaigns were the model is worth considering in an historical field that tends to presume inspiration from the longer history of spatial/sexual management of venereal disease. The chapter on leprosy in Hawaii argues against the idea that segregative sites were "camps" for annihilation or extermination. Rather they were a productive part of the government of civic subjects, even of liberal reform. But who argues, or ever argued, the former? In fact, this interpretation of sites of medical segregation, including leper colonies, is long-accepted. That sites of modern medical isolation were almost always sites of civic production was already familiar long before Agamben, camps, bare life, and necropolitics entered scholarship via adjacent disciplines, and that some time ago. [End Page 674] The "time" section tracks a shift toward a pharmaceutical model of prevention, with an interest in vaccines. This chapter is far more novel, documenting primate research undertaken in the development of polio vaccines. Ahuja analyzes NIH-initiated, but offshore-located, primate research laboratories in Puerto Rico and in Central Africa. He thus moves forward in time (to the decolonizing years and Cold War era), but the ambition to conceptualize this chapter through and about time is not entirely successful. The successive space/time/scale logic of his book seems imposed rather than organic, at least in this chapter. And yet the "scale" logic does assist our understanding of security and bioinsecurity in the final two chapters. "Scale," for Ahuja, signals the emergence of international health in more recent decades, as well as the broadening drug-based prophylaxis on a global level. He analyzes smallpox; not the classic eradication program, but refreshingly the smallpox vaccination program in the Iraq War. The final chapter concerns early HIV/AIDS prevention, and its entanglement with Haitian refugees. Here, the return...

The Norwegian Progress Party: An Established Populist Party

This article sheds light on one of Europe's successful right-wing populist parties, the Norwegian Progress Party. Since 2013 the party has been in a coalition with the Conservative Party. The history, ideology and position of the party in the Norwegian political system are factors that explain how a centre–right party and a populist one have been able to form a viable coalition. Over time the Progress Party has become increasingly well integrated into the political system. The fact that no cordon sanitaire or total boycott policy was implemented against it may explain why the party developed a more moderate and pragmatic approach than most other right-wing populist parties. In turn, this made it possible for the Conservative Party to offer to form a coalition with the Progress Party and placed the centre–right in the strategic position of cooperating with parties both in the centre and to the right.

Altitudes towards a cordon sanitaire vis-a-vis extremist parties: Instrumental pragmatism, affective reactions, and democratic principles

Altitudes towards a cordon sanitaire vis-a-vis extremist parties: Instrumental pragmatism, affective reactions, and democratic principles

A Crouching Village: Ebola and the Empty Gestures of Quarantine in Monrovia

AbstractIn its scale, its virulence, and, most significantly, its urbanity, the 2014‐2015 outbreak of Ebola Virus Disease (EVD or simply Ebola) in the Mano River region of West Africa seemed to challenge the basic tools of modern public health. As a result, the government of Liberia took the extraordinary step of implementing a cordon sanitaire around one of the poorest neighborhoods in the capital city, Monrovia. Observers labeled both the quarantine and the ensuing riots as barbaric acts not seen since the plagues of the Middle Ages. This characterization masked the real history of racial separation that defines many African cities, and cast Monrovia's poorest residents as morally bankrupt, primitive savages. In this article I instead explore the quarantine as an instance of the repetition of a familiar urban form, and read the ensuing violence in Monrovia's West Point neighborhood not as an ethical problem but as an “empty” political gesture. [Liberia; Ebola; Quarantine; Urban Planning; Urban Violence; Monrovia]

Distribution and Dispersal of Phlebotomus papatasi (Diptera: Psychodidae) in a Zoonotic Cutaneous Leishmaniasis Focus, the Northern Negev, Israel.

BackgroundZoonotic cutaneous leishmaniasis has long been endemic in Israel. In recent years reported incidence of cutaneous leishmaniasis increased and endemic transmission is being observed in a growing number of communities in regions previously considered free of the disease. Here we report the results of an intensive sand fly study carried out in a new endemic focus of Leishmania major. The main objective was to establish a method and to generate a data set to determine the exposure risk, sand fly populations' dynamics and evaluate the efficacy of an attempt to create "cordon sanitaire" devoid of active jird burrows around the residential area.Methodology/Principal FindingsSand flies were trapped in three fixed reference sites and an additional 52 varying sites. To mark sand flies in the field, sugar solutions containing different food dyes were sprayed on vegetation in five sites. The catch was counted, identified, Leishmania DNA was detected in pooled female samples and the presence of marked specimens was noted. Phlebotomus papatasi, the vector of L. major in the region was the sole Phlebotomus species in the catch. Leishmania major DNA was detected in ~10% of the pooled samples and the highest risk of transmission was in September. Only a few specimens were collected in the residential area while sand fly numbers often exceeded 1,000 per catch in the agricultural fields. The maximal travel distance recorded was 1.91km for females and 1.51km for males. The calculated mean distance traveled (MDT) was 0.75km.ConclusionsThe overall results indicate the presence of dense and mobile sand fly populations in the study area. There seem to be numerous scattered sand fly microsites suitable for development and resting in the agricultural fields. Sand flies apparently moved in all directions, and reached the residential area from the surrounding agricultural fields. The travel distance noted in the current work, supported previous findings that P. papatasi like P. ariasi, can have a relatively long flight range and does not always stay near breeding sites. Following the results, the width of the "cordon sanitaire" in which actions against the reservoir rodents were planned, was extended into the depth of the agricultural fields.

Ruin and Organization Studies

In this paper we offer a preliminary study of the various ways in which ‘ruin’ has significance for organization studies. One important motif associated with both modern and romantic treatments of ruins concerns the revelatory impressions they make. In this respect the tradition of ruin writing will talk of their ‘beauty’, their ‘strangeness’ or their capacity to ‘intimidate’, which somehow never fails to strike a responsive nerve in us. In order to attend to this elusive phenomenon we must necessarily breach some of the self-imposed boundaries of our ‘discipline’. Taking up this challenge we follow W. G. Sebald in his use of contiguity as both method and textual structuring device, allowing us to drift across iconic ruin images, ruin theories and our own ruinous research experiences. This helps us learn how to ‘dwell’ in the ruin – without any impatient reaching after fact or explaining away ruins in the terms of an established tradition of theorizing in organization – and open up new analytic spaces and associations for organizational researchers. These concern specifically (a) a distinctive approach to time, history and memory; (b) an increased awareness of the multiplicity of forces impinging on organization, forces from which we so easily retreat behind the cordon sanitaire of organization-studies-as-usual; and (c) a cognisance of how the very way we write is a mode of doing organization that is crucial for our ability and willingness to look into ‘all corners of reality’ so that we might better grasp organizational phenomena.