Loss Of Territory Research Articles

The Lost Territories: Thailand's History of National Humiliation

It is a cherished belief among Thai people that their country was never colonized. Yet politicians, scholars, and other media fi gures chronically inveigh against Western colonialism and the imperialist theft of Thai territory. Thai historians insist that the country adapted to the Western-dominated world order more successfully than other Southeast Asian kingdoms and celebrate their proud history of independence. But many Thai leaders view the West as a threat and portray Thailand as a victim. Clearly ThailandAEs relationship with the West is ambivalent. The Lost Territories explores this conundrum by examining two important and contrasting strands of Thai historiography: the well-known Royal-Nationalist ideology, which celebrates ThailandAEs long history of uninterrupted independence; and what the author terms oNational Humiliation discourse,o its mirror image. Shane Strate examines the origins and consequences of National Humiliation discourse, showing how the modern Thai state has used the idea of national humiliation to sponsor a form of anti-Western nationalism. Unlike triumphalist Royal-Nationalist narratives, National Humiliation history depicts Thailand as a victim of Western imperialist bullying. Focusing on key themes such as extraterritoriality, trade imbalances, and territorial loss, National Humiliation history maintains that the West impeded ThailandAEs development even while professing its support and cooperation. Although the state remains the hero in this narrative,it is a tragic heroism defined by suffering and foreign oppression. Through his insightful analysis of state and media sources, Strate demonstrates how Thai politicians have deployed National Humiliation imagery in support of ethnic chauvinism and military expansion. He shows how the discourse became the ideological foundation of ThailandAEs irredentist strategy, the stateAEs anti-Catholic campaign, and its acceptance of pan-Asianism during World War II; and how the ostate as victimo narrative has been used by politicians to redefine Thai identity and elevate the military into the role of national savior. The Lost Territories will be of particular interest to historians and political scientists for the light it sheds on many episodes of Thai foreign policy, including the contemporary dispute over Preah Vihear. The bookAEs analysis of the manipulation of historical memory will interest academics exploring similar phenomena worldwide.

Do Territorial Control and the Loss of Territory Determine the use of Indiscriminate Violence by Incumbent Actors? An Examination of the Syrian Civil War in Aleppo over 45 weeks.

This study tests the ‘control-collaboration’ model detailed by Stathis Kalyvas in The Logic of Violence in Civil War (2006). The control-collaboration model makes various theoretical claims on the relationship between territorial control and the use and motivations of violence (whether selective or indiscriminate). This study tests two of the key claims made in the model: 1. There is an inverse relationship between level of territorial control and the use of indiscriminate violence; and, 2. The loss off territory encourages the use of indiscriminate violence. Using data on civilian and child deaths taken from the ‘Syrian Martyr Database’, this study examines the relationship between territorial control and territorial loss, and the use of indiscriminate violence by incumbent (Syrian state) forces. Examining the levels of territorial control/loss and the extent of civilian and child casualties in Aleppo, Syria, results of the study largely support the theoretical assumptions outlined by Kalyvas.

Glial coverage in the optic nerve expands in proportion to optic axon loss in chronic mouse glaucoma

Within the white matter, axonal loss by neurodegeneration is coupled to glial cell changes in gene expression, structure and function commonly termed gliosis. Recently, we described the highly variable expansion of gliosis alebosco@neuro.utah.edu in degenerative optic nerves from the DBA/2J mouse model of chronic, age-related glaucoma. Here, to estimate and compare the levels of axonal loss with the expansion of glial coverage and axonal degeneration in DBA/2J nerves, we combined semiautomatic axon counts with threshold-based segmentation of total glial/scar areas and degenerative axonal profiles in plastic cross-sections. In nerves ranging from mild to severe degeneration, we found that the progression of axonal dropout is coupled to an increase of gliotic area. We detected a strong correlation between axon loss and the aggregate coverage by glial cells and scar, whereas axon loss did not correlate with the small fraction of degenerating profiles. Nerves with low to medium levels of axon loss displayed moderate glial reactivity, consisting of hypertrophic astrocytes, activated microglia and normal distribution of oligodendrocytes, with minimal reorganization of the tissue architecture. In contrast, nerves with extensive axonal loss showed prevalent rearrangement of the nerve, with loss of axon fascicle territories and enlarged or almost continuous gliotic and scar domains, containing reactive astrocytes, oligodendrocytes and activated microglia. These findings support the value of optic nerve gliotic expansion as a quantitative estimate of optic neuropathy that correlates with axon loss, applicable to grade the severity of optic nerve damage in mouse chronic glaucoma.

Infrastructural Hope: Anticipating ‘Independent Roads’ and Territorial Integrity in Southern Kyrgyzstan

This article explores the affective force of infrastructural intervention. It focuses on the construction, successful in one case, locally stalled in the other, of so-called ‘independent roads’ along Kyrgyzstan's porous land-border with Tajikistan. Chinese-built and funded through an array of international lending organisations, such roads are determinate interventions in the social life of a marginal border region. They are also the site of intense local anticipation: the object both of hope for a materially secure future and of anxieties of entrapment. The very alignments that enable a new road to come into being – the mobilising of elected representatives, the appeal to languages of abandonment and territorial loss – are themselves anticipatory and experimental moves. The category of ‘infrastructural hope’ is developed to explore this articulation of material politics with diffuse elite and vernacular desires for a territorially secure future. The article considers the implications of this entanglement for the anthropology of infrastructure and for the analysis of trans-boundary tension in Central Asia.

Singapore and the South China Sea: Being an Effective Coordinator and Honest Broker

The South China Sea has long been a source of regional tension, and disputes have heated up significantly in recent years. Disagreements over competing territorial sovereignty and maritime claims between Brunei, China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam are the main source of this tension. Singapore, as a non-claimant country to the South China Sea disputes, does not take sides nor judge the merits of the rival claims. It has consistently urged parties to manage their differences calmly and peacefully in accordance with international law, including [United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea].1Not being a claimant does not mean that Singapore has no interest in the South China Sea. Much to the contrary, as a small state, it has an interest in ensuring that all claimant states always act in accordance with international law, including UNCLOS.2 Moreover, as an island state, Singapore has an interest in ensuring that international law preserves freedom of navigation and overflights and that such law is interpreted and applied consistently. Finally, as a Southeast Asian state, Singapore has an interest in ensuring that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) remains cohesive and united and that its processes effectively advance common interests by engendering a high degree of cooperation and integration among all member states. However, little progress has been made in negotiating a binding code of conduct (C°C) in the South China Sea since the adoption of the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea (D°C). Singapore, as the current country coordinator for ASEAN-China dialogue relations, hopes to make progress on that front.This essay examines Singapore's interests and role in the South China Sea in four areas: the commitment to upholding the rule of law in the relations between states, the defense of the right to freedom of navigation and overflight, the attention Singapore gives to ASEAN and the role of multilateralism in the region, and its current role as country coordinator of ASEAN-China dialogue relations.Rule of LawSingapore consistently has advocated for all parties to manage their differences calmly and peacefully in accordance with international law, including the 1982 UNCLOS. As a small country, Singapore has a fundamental interest in the peaceful settlement of international disputes in accordance with international law and its sanctioned processes rather than on the basis that might is right.3 Sovereignty disputes are governed by customary international law on the acquisition and loss of territory, not by the 1982 UNCLOS-a rather common misperception. Having presided over negotiations of the 1982 UNCLOS, Tommy Koh has iterated on various occasions that UNCLOS contains no provisions on how to resolve sovereignty disputes over islands or other geographic features. 4 The convention does set the various maritime zones that such features could potentially generate, defines the rights and obligations in those maritime zones, and in the event that there are overlapping maritime claims, determines how the maritime boundaries can be delimited in accordance with international law. Alas, claimant states in the South China Sea have taken unilateral actions in disputed areas, such as reclaiming and building artificial islands, conducting oil and gas exploration and exploitation, and increasing military and enforcement presence, all worrying trends.At this stage, where disputes are unlikely to be resolved by negotiation, Singapore advocates reliance on rules-based regimes and mechanisms to ensure peaceful settlement of the matter. Under no circumstances should force or the threat of force be used to settle disputes among states. Practical recommendations for managing the current level of tensions include a sweeping halt to all unilateral actions contrary to international law and for claimants to clarify the extent of the various claims. …

“You Will Always Have the Poor”: A Reflection on the Paradox of Justice as Law

Calls for, and arguments around, fairness and justice are an essential element of international law; more so in certain areas – environment and natural resources, development – than in others, namely, the structural design of the discipline, State responsibility, formation of custom and acquisition of territory. The article thus considers the question whether there is an obligation of fair entitlement in international law, with particular reference to various matters of territory. With reflections on the discrete questions of territorial loss through sea-level rise and the role of equity in maritime delimitation, the article considers the role of fairness and justice in international law. The article concludes nevertheless that though fairness is an important and emotive value to strive for within legal and political discourse, it can become a dangerous entitlement when it trumps or usurps established rules of international law.

The lost territories: Thailand's history of national humiliation

It is a cherished belief among Thai people that their country was never colonized. Yet politicians, scholars, and other media fi gures chronically inveigh against Western colonialism and the imperialist theft of Thai territory. Thai historians insist that the country adapted to the Western-dominated world order more successfully than other Southeast Asian kingdoms and celebrate their proud history of independence. But many Thai leaders view the West as a threat and portray Thailand as a victim. Clearly ThailandAEs relationship with the West is ambivalent. The Lost Territories explores this conundrum by examining two important and contrasting strands of Thai historiography: the well-known Royal-Nationalist ideology, which celebrates ThailandAEs long history of uninterrupted independence; and what the author terms oNational Humiliation discourse,o its mirror image. Shane Strate examines the origins and consequences of National Humiliation discourse, showing how the modern Thai state has used the idea of national humiliation to sponsor a form of anti-Western nationalism. Unlike triumphalist Royal-Nationalist narratives, National Humiliation history depicts Thailand as a victim of Western imperialist bullying. Focusing on key themes such as extraterritoriality, trade imbalances, and territorial loss, National Humiliation history maintains that the West impeded ThailandAEs development even while professing its support and cooperation. Although the state remains the hero in this narrative,it is a tragic heroism defined by suffering and foreign oppression. Through his insightful analysis of state and media sources, Strate demonstrates how Thai politicians have deployed National Humiliation imagery in support of ethnic chauvinism and military expansion. He shows how the discourse became the ideological foundation of ThailandAEs irredentist strategy, the stateAEs anti-Catholic campaign, and its acceptance of pan-Asianism during World War II; and how the ostate as victimo narrative has been used by politicians to redefine Thai identity and elevate the military into the role of national savior. The Lost Territories will be of particular interest to historians and political scientists for the light it sheds on many episodes of Thai foreign policy, including the contemporary dispute over Preah Vihear. The bookAEs analysis of the manipulation of historical memory will interest academics exploring similar phenomena worldwide.

Infanticide in wolves: seasonality of mortalities and attacks at dens support evolution of territoriality

Evidence for territoriality is usually correlative or post hoc as we observe the results of past selection that are challenging to detect. Wolves (Canis lupus) are considered territorial because of competition for food (resource defense), yet they exhibit classic intrinsic behaviors of social regulation (protection against infanticide). This emphasis on prey and infrequent opportunity to observe wild wolf behavior has led to little investigation into the causes of or competitive underpinnings in the evolution of wolf territoriality. We report 6 cases of territorial wolf packs attacking neighboring packs at or near their den; 2 attacks were observed in detail. In all cases, except perhaps one, the attacking pack killed adult wolves either at the den or near it; in 4 cases, pups were probably lost. Loss of pups led to future loss of territory and in one case pack cessation. Intraspecific killing (measured in collared adults only) peaked in April, the month when pups were born and helpless in dens, even thou...

How to Uphold the Territorial Integrity of Ukraine

AbstractRussia's absorption of Crimea violated the norm of territorial integrity, which protects states against involuntary loss of territory to other states. This article addresses two different arguments on how to deal with this violation: (1) That Ukraine lost Crimea for good and that this should be acknowledged, both politically and legally, if one seeks to forestall forcible change of interstate boundaries elsewhere; and (2) that third party countermeasures against Russia can roll back its territorial gains in Ukraine, but only if they are much more materially robustthanthey have been so far. Whilemutually incompatible, the arguments raise an important issue—how to uphold international legal norms in particular situations—an issue to which scholars of international law do not pay much detailed attention. Yet doing so is important because international legal norms leave governments with wider decision-making discretion than is commonly presumed, and different ways of upholding a norm are predisposed to generate different effects, including legal effects. Having examined the two approaches, the article argues that the best way to uphold the territorial integrity of Ukraine is by staking a middle ground between them, placing emphasis on the policy of non-recognition.

Unequal Ground: Homelands and Conflict

AbstractAlthough there is a deep and wide consensus that international conflict over territory is especially common and destructive, there is less agreement over what it is about territory that leads to these outcomes. Understanding the role of territory in international conflict requires complementing realist and materialist understandings of the value of territory with one grounded in the constructivist theories that dominate studies of nationalism and geography. Doing so recognizes that homeland territoriality, because it raises the value of a specific territory and provides an imperative to establish sovereignty over it, plays a distinctive role in driving international conflict. This article presents a systematic, replicable operationalization of the homeland status of territory that, because it is consistent with constructivist theories of nationalism, can be used to integrate constructivist understandings of the role of territory into quantitative studies of territorial conflict. This measure is then used to test the implication that the loss of subjectively defined homeland territory increases the likelihood of international conflict relative to the loss of nonhomeland territory. The findings that dividing homelands is especially likely to lead to conflict are corroborated by a second novel measure of the homeland status of territory that is based on the identification of co-ethnics in a territory before the border was drawn.

The Khmer Lands of Vietnam: Environment, Cosmology, Sovereignty by Philip Taylor (review)

Reviewed by: The Khmer Lands of Vietnam: Environment, Cosmology, Sovereignty by Philip Taylor Patrick Jory The Khmer Lands of Vietnam: Environment, Cosmology, Sovereignty Philip Taylor Singapore NUS Press 2014 336 pp. ISBN: 978-9971-69-778-5 In recent years borderlands have become a popular site for ethnographic research. One of Southeast Asia’s most fascinating borderlands is found in the Mekong delta region of southern Vietnam, that region known to Khmers as ‘Kampuchea Krom’, or ‘lower Cambodia’. Home to somewhere between 1 and 7 million Khmers (depending on whether one accepts the official census data or the lower end of Khmer estimates), its Khmer minority has a problematic relationship with both the state of Vietnam and Cambodia. To the Vietnamese officials the Khmer Krom, as they call themselves, are regarded condescendingly as a ‘parochial and disengaged ethnic minority whose innate characteristics keep them backward and poor’ (p. 3). To their ethnic kin in Cambodia, while Kampuchea Krom forms a crucial part of the narrative of the national loss of territory, the Khmer identity of its contemporary inhabitants is in doubt. The fact that many cannot write Khmer, or that they speak Khmer with Vietnamese accents, leads some Cambodians to view them as ‘Vietnamese souls in Khmer bodies’ (p. 3). Like many peoples of borderlands regions elsewhere, the Khmer Krom themselves are acutely aware of their marginalized status. It is this status that Taylor seeks to re-examine and question in his captivating book, The Khmer Lands of Vietnam. This is surely the most thorough study of this region and its Khmer minority ever undertaken. It is based on a remarkable amount of fieldwork. Taylor conducted 17 fieldtrips to the region, during which he visited over 400 villages. Some trips lasted up to six months. He also visited villages across the border in Cambodia proper. But the real methodological achievement of this study is its systematic study of the unique ecology of this region. Not content to conduct a general study of the region, Taylor divides the region up into seven sub-regions, each defined by a distinct ecology: the ‘coast dune belt’; the ‘coastal river dune complex’; ‘freshwater rivers’; ‘saltwater rivers’; ‘flooded mountains’; ‘oceanside mountains’; and ‘northeast uplands’. This in itself challenges the idea of a single narrative of the Khmer Krom. [End Page 136] The recurring theme is scarcity of land and water, and how the Khmer of the different regions manage these resources, often in highly innovative ways. Taylor’s method is to begin each chapter with a thorough description of the distinct ecology of each of these sub-regions. From there he proceeds to describe the livelihood that each particular ecology makes possible, the social organization it supports, and the cultural expression, mythology, and cosmology that arise from it. While not as pronounced as the ecological descriptions, each chapter integrates a historical dimension that explains the narrative of marginalization. Kampuchea Krom was one of the most affected regions in Southeast Asia during the political instability of the second half of the twentieth century. Decolonization, the First Indochina War of 1945–54, the ‘American War’, and the border conflict of 1978–9 have had disastrous consequences for the Khmer Krom. War led not only to death and injury and material destruction, but also to mass evacuation or forced resettlement and ultimately the loss of Khmer land. More recently, the Vietnamese government’s policies of agricultural modernization and economic liberalization, beginning in the mid-1980s, have often resulted in the further economic marginalization of the Khmer Krom. Lacking sufficient capital required for intensive farming, many Khmers have ultimately been forced to sell their land, exacerbating the problem of landlessness. Taylor also describes the social and cultural consequences of environmental decline, as the once vast natural resources of the region—dense forests, wild animals, multiple species of fish, plants, herbal medicine, and clean water—are depleted through deforestation, the use of pesticides, and mining. The local economy has become increasingly dominated by ‘external economic agents’. The resulting economic marginalization has in many cases led to a loss of cultural confidence. One of the many highlights of the book is the tales that Taylor gleaned from his informants which stand...

Two Observatories in Istanbul: from the Late Ottoman Empire to the Young Turkish Republic

From the 17 century onward, the Ottoman Empire entered a phase of weakening, as a consequence of many factors including the dissolution of political stability, the loss of territory and decreasing revenue. In the second half of the 19 century, as an attempt to reinforce power of the central authority, the Ottomans undertook major reforms called Tanzimat. During this period, individuals started to establish professional and learned associations similar to those in the West which eventually led to the creation of a Faculty of Science and to the Ottoman University (Darulfunun, 1900). In this context of reform and opening to the West, the Imperial Observatory (Rasathane-i Amire) was founded in 1868 with the support of France. Its primary aim was to exchange data between European and Ottoman meteorological stations. The Imperial Observatory occupied several locations before reaching its final setting in Kandilli (1911), on the Asian side of the Bosphorus where other activities were developed such as sismology, astronomy, meteorology and magnetic studies. Following the spirit of the newly founded Republic in 1923, a serious reform of the academic programmes and a purging of the staff of the Ottoman University led to the establishment of the Istanbul University in the historical quarter of Beyazit (1933). The Istanbul astronomical Observatory was founded in the same year and its construction started in 1935. The university reform was largely influenced by the presence of German and other European scholars, many of them Jewish, escaping from Nazi persecution. In particular, Erwin Finlay-Freundlich from Potsdam Observatory became the first director of Istanbul Observatory. Kandilli and Istanbul University observatories are briefly presented here, stressing the main steps of their creation and their astronomical heritage.

From the Global to the Local: The Development of Indigenous Peoples’ Land Rights Internationally and in Southeast Asia

Despite a noticeable shift in recent years, indigenous peoples in Asia continue to experience many forms of human rights violations, with the most serious perhaps being the loss of traditional lands and territories. The purpose of this paper is to examine indigenous peoples’ land rights and its application in Southeast Asia. To that end, the paper will provide an overview of the development of indigenous peoples’ land rights internationally; offer regional perspectives from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the African Commission for Human and Peoples’ Rights; analyze the concept of indigenous peoples in Asia, juxtaposing it with concurrent difficulties being experienced on the African continent; examine three countries (Cambodia, the Philippines, and Malaysia) that recognize indigenous peoples’ land rights to some extent, whether through constitutional amendments, legislative reform, or domestic jurisprudence; and highlight the implementation gap between the rights of indigenous peoples in law and practice.

Historical Northern spotted owl habitat and old-growth dry forests maintained by mixed-severity wildfires

Reconstructing historical habitat could help reverse declining animal populations, but detailed, spatially comprehensive data are rare. For example, habitat for the federally threatened Northern spotted owl (NSO; Strix occidentalis caurina) was thought historically rare because low-severity fires kept forests open and habitat restricted to fire refugia, but spatial historical data are lacking. Here I use public land-surveys to spatially reconstruct NSO habitat and old-growth forests in dry forests in Oregon’s Eastern Cascades in the late-1800s. I used reconstructions of forest structure across about 280,000 ha, including 9,605 tree records and 2,180 section-line descriptions. I was able to reconstruct likely NSO nest trees, nest stands, and foraging and roosting habitat, based on modern NSO habitat studies. Historical nest stands, including sufficient nest trees, were predicted across 22–39 % and foraging and roosting habitat across 11–68 % of the study area, thus neither were rare. More habitat than expected occurred in forests with preceding mixed-severity fires. Early post-fire succession produced foraging and roosting habitat. Mid- to late-succession produced nesting habitat. Late-succession after high-severity fires can also provide NSO habitat. Old-growth forests, covering 76 % of study-area forests, also likely link to preceding mixed-severity fires. Mixed- and high-severity fires strongly shaped historical dry forests and produced important components of historical NSO habitat. Focus on short-term loss of nest sites and territories to these fires is mis-directed. Fuel treatments to reduce these natural fires, if successful, would reduce future habitat of the NSO in dry forests.

Regionalism in West Bengal: A Critical Engagement

The central argument of the article is that West Bengal’s regionalism is a two level game. The state’s predominant regionalism is financial, set in antagonistic terms vis-à-vis the Centre. This financial or economic regionalism is paradigmatic to West Bengal. The tragedy of Partition; exceptional sensitivity to any prospect of further loss of territory; a sense of betrayal and helplessness; blaming others rather than engaging in critical introspection about its secular decline as a front ranking industrial state; and the political dominance of the middle class espousing a so called “bhadralok” identity are pivotal factors in explaining the relentless dynamics of West Bengal’s financial regionalism, regardless of the party in power. West Bengal has constructed a sub-textual identity raised on soft Bengali nationalism bereft of overt and exclusivist cultural markers.

Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space by Kristin Kopp (review)

Reviewed by: Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space by Kristin Kopp Kristin Poling Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space. By Kristin Kopp. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012. Pp. viii + 255. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-0472118441. In Germany’s Wild East, Kristin Kopp adds a compelling case to the growing body of scholarship arguing for the inclusion of Poland within studies of German colonialism. Focusing on the discursive colonization that she sees as the necessary complement of material colonization, Kopp argues that from the middle of the nineteenth century on Germans understood Polish space with a diffusionist worldview much like the Eurocentric diffusionism that J.M. Blaut found to underwrite English and French overseas colonial projects in the same era (The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographic Diffusionism and Eurocentric History [1993]). Accordingly, Germans saw themselves as cultural agents capable of expansion and improvement, while understanding Poles as the passive beneficiaries of German culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, Kopp argues that this diffusionist worldview provided an “inner connection between all German settlements” (2), whether overseas or in the Slavic [End Page 673] East. Reinventing the long history of settlement in the East going back to the Middle Ages as a story of persistent German colonization legitimized new overseas colonial ambitions by grounding them in centuries of history and German identity. At the same time, the proximity and instability of the German-Polish border produced anxieties about Germans’ effectiveness as colonizers and their supposedly unique vulnerability to the threat of “reverse diffusion,” whether in the form of territorial loss or cultural regression on the borders of settlement. Kopp writes with clarity and great appeal about a wide range of sources, including literature both high and low, maps, and film. While she is at times revisiting well-treaded ground, particularly in the first three chapters on representations of Poland in literary sources, she brings something new to her analyses of Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben (1855), Clara Viebig’s Das schlafende Heer (1904), and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895). Using the lens of colonial discourse and providing rich historical contextualization for each of her studies, Kopp gives a nuanced interpretation of how representations of German-Polish relations evoked global colonial geographies, while also challenging the stable boundary between colonizer and colonized. This is well demonstrated by her examination of the image of the “black Pole” in inner colonial literature from the period around 1900. These novels valorized German settlement campaigns in the eastern reaches of Prussia that were intended to displace Poles and tip the population balance in ethnically mixed areas to create a German majority. Kopp argues that the repeated identification of blonde Germans and dark-haired Poles in expansionist novels evoked the racial categories of overseas colonial literature, but also “reveal[ed] an anxiety of racial containment” (78) that was all the more pronounced because the actual borders between German and Pole were uncertain. The final two chapters treat postcolonial discourse about the German East after World War I. In the first of these, Kopp shows how mapmakers deployed cartographic tools to legitimize German irredentist and expansionist claims, with reference to the chapter’s ample and useful illustrations. One way in which cartographers justified German eastward expansion was by mapping not just the bounds of German settlement, but also the more elusive territory of German Kulturboden, that expansive area deemed to have been shaped by German culture at some point in the past, even if containing negligible German population in the present. In the face of postwar losses, the emphasis on Kulturboden allowed a retreat to a happier past while justifying more aggressive German territorial claims. The fifth and final chapter, then, looks at the idea of Kulturboden in the interwar period through a captivating close reading of Fritz Lang’s two-part Nibelungen (1924). Kopp persuasively argues that the film is about not only the trauma of border violations, but also the status of eastern lands as German Kulturboden degraded by its primitive Asiatic inhabitants. To represent the threat from the East, Lang assembled the visual world of the Huns out of a mishmash...

Thailand. State and uncivil society in Thailand at the temple of Preah Vihear By Puangthong R. Pawakapan Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013. Pp. 125. Maps, Tables, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

State and uncivil society in Thailand at the temple of Preah Vihear By PUANGTHONG R. PAWAKAPAN Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013. Pp. 125. Maps, Tables, Notes, Bibliography, Index. doi: 10.1017/S0022463414000496 The temple of Preah Vihear remains a prominent issue in the slow-burning civil war that has gripped Thailand since 2006. The eleventh-century ruins are located on what became the border between French Indochina and the Kingdom of Siam in the early twentieth century. After a Thai attempt to appropriate the temple in the 1950s, the International Court of Justice confirmed Cambodian ownership in 1962. Both countries accepted this decision until Cambodia's 2008 application to designate Preah Vihear as a World Heritage site reignited a crisis in Thai-Cambodian relations. Thai nationalists argued that the listing represented a 'loss of territory', and the growing controversy led to resignations within the Thai cabinet. By 2009, the Abhisit government attempted to block its World Heritage listing using the threat of both a trade embargo and military intervention against Cambodia. Fifty years after the original border dispute, tensions over Preah Vihear had undone decades of bilateral cooperation. How did this happen? State and uncivil society in Thailand offers a brief, but thorough, analysis of this latest quarrel over Preah Vihear by placing it within the context of Thailand's domestic politics and long-term foreign policy. It places blame for the political crisis squarely on the shoulders of the People's Alliance for Democracy (PAD), a coalition of groups whose only shared trait was hostility towards former Thai prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra and his allies. By carefully examining the PAD narrative on relations with Cambodia, Puangthong reveals its many inaccuracies. For example, the book points out that there has never been any substantial evidence to support PAD's accusation that by signing off on the World Heritage proposal, the Thai government had traded territorial sovereignty in return for Thaksin's right to lucrative gas concessions in Cambodia (p. 4) The allegation of corruption overlooks the fact that the heritage project had been endorsed by several Thai governments as part of a larger programme to strengthen socioeconomic ties with Cambodia. Academics who dared raise these objections were met with PAD accusations that they had been paid by Thaksin. The PAD campaign to discredit government policy on Preah Vihear succeeded, in large part, because it exploited popular ignorance of past border disputes, thereby transforming the temple into a litmus test on Thai patriotism. University academics and the Thai media helped create an atmosphere of nationalist hysteria by misleading the public regarding the temple site's history of contested sovereignty. …

Two Halls of Hangzhou: Local Gazetteers and the Grading of Geography for a Song Dynasty City

This article examines the shifting geo-political significance of Hangzhou as presented in two local gazetteers dating from the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1276). Focusing on literary works quoted in both of these gazetteers that describe two of Hangzhou’s famous halls on West Lake, I argue that geographic discourses on these halls manifest a tension between two conflicting presentations of Hangzhou’s geo-political significance as understood by literati elite of the Southern Song. In writings concerning the Hall of Possessing Beauty (Youmei tang 有美堂), Hangzhou was viewed as a city of rising economic and cultural importance during the Northern Song. Writings on the Hall of Centrality and Harmony (Zhonghe tang 中和堂), in contrast, depict Hangzhou as an imperial refuge for a court in flight and associate it with the motif of territorial loss during the Southern Song when the city became the dynastic capital. By examining how these two views of Hangzhou are contrasted, this essay concludes that gazetteers functioned to grade and rank different kinds of landscapes in order to make geo-political arguments about the proper reconstitution of the empire during the Southern Song.

Citizenship in Russia and the Soviet Union

Citizenship in Russia and the Soviet Union Yanni Kotsonis Eric Lohr , Russian Citizenship: From Empire to Soviet Union. 278 pp. Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press , 2012 . ISBN-13 978-0674066342 . $59.95 . Anyone who has worked with Russian and Soviet primary sources will have noticed the regular influx of foreign-born or foreign-subject persons. The phenomenon has not been studied systematically. Setting aside some of the emperors and empresses, we find ministers from Serbia, the Ionian Islands, Moldova, the German states, and Britain. We find specialists and lower-level bureaucrats, officers, soldiers, and sailors from Scandinavia, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. In the private and semi-private sectors we find foreign-born entrepreneurs, industrialists, bankers, and academics in abundance. Russia, it seems, was a real career option. On a larger scale, every conquest brought new populations into the empire, every loss of territory brought refugees and stimulated expulsions (which are well studied in recent years, by Eric Lohr in particular).1 In the Soviet period, foreign-born persons left their imprint on the sources. We find Communists and sympathizers who were not from the Russian Empire or the USSR, and we find engineers and laborers seeking work in the booming construction site that was the Soviet Union. Russians, in turn, populated the cities of the world and occupied places high and low, the more visible ones as refugees and émigrés, and many more combining a prosaic desire for higher living standards with quests for liberties of one sort or another. The historiography has already provided some good starts on the question of mobility, and an abundance of works on the post-1917 [End Page 665] emigration, but what was the legal status of any person who crossed an imperial or Soviet border for whatever reason?2 Thanks to Eric Lohr’s Russian Citizenship, we now have a point of reference. Lohr makes the case that there was no overarching principle that might have guided legislators, in the way that blood operated in Germany or language and culture operated in France. Nor was there a clear and elaborated set of statutes, in the tradition of the United States or Canada. Instead there was a series of ad hoc arrangements (“separate deals”) for each group of arriving, departing, or returning people. These practices permitted entry to, say, one group of Ottoman subjects but not another, one wave of Chinese laborers but not others, one group of Polish speakers but not others. Since the 1860s, there had been efforts to standardize the practices, but all along and into the 1920s and beyond, different rules or practices applied to different people. The historical contradictions are clear to see and the book invites us to explore them. As German speakers were subjected to a cruel uprooting in 1914, many of the Russian imperial commanders were themselves German speakers. As Jews were subjected to sustained discrimination and moments of exceptional brutality, other Jews populated the Provisional Government and later the Soviet bureaucracy in large numbers. As one group of White Army veterans was invited back to the Soviet Republic, others were banned and still others were not allowed to leave. As shiploads of noncommunist academics and professionals sailed out of the Gulf of Finland into forced exile, others were enticed to return or stay. By the 1930s, autarky prevailed: an inward-looking USSR focused on retaining and cultivating its own population and showed little interest in populations elsewhere. There was, however, an enduring tendency that lends unity to this patchwork. Lohr terms it “attract and hold.” This might best be described as an impulse rather than a coherent policy, because it was not elaborated and systematized, and it often transcended the letter of the law. The expulsion of political enemies and the refusal of return in the aftermath of the Civil War (what Lohr memorably terms “the great denaturalization”) was exceptional and the USSR quickly reverted to the practice of keeping its citizens in place and preventing departures. According to Lohr, the Soviet Union was distinguished from the empire not by its tendency to keep its population in place but by the fortress mentality and well-guarded borders by which the tendency was [End...

Siam Mismapped

This paper examines the territorial dispute over the Preah Vihear temple on the Thai–Cambodian border. It sheds new light on discussions of the geo-body and nationalism by engaging with cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard's notions of the simulacrum and hyperreality in association with maps. The dispute over the temple of Preah Vihear has centred on one particular map, known as the Annex 1 map, which locates the temple in Cambodian territory. The map has not remained an inanimate object, but has instead become a ‘living thing’ and attained something of a ‘soul’. As a result, any sense of mismapping which results in the loss of territory is no other than the equivalent of a loss of the biological body, as a result of which real conflict ensues. This paper reveals the historical process of how the Annex 1 map has become a simulacrum in Baudrillard's sense of the term, to the extent that it creates an instance of hyperreality to which people are emotionally attached.