Protohistoric Landscapes in Sardinia (Italy): Territorial Control and Exploitation of Natural Resources in the Middle and Late Bronze Ages

During the Bronze Age, in many Western Mediterranean areas (Spain, France, Italian peninsula, islands), we can observe the development of a series of fortified centers and structures, often on high places, aimed to the defense of strategic locations and resources. These fortifications, which began to be built from the Copper Age, are the answer to a need for possession and control of the territory linked to a greater degree of social complexity, with an ever-increasing hierarchy and the rise to power of persons or groups who very often show the possession of weapons and, consequently, can be related to warlike activities. In Sardinia, Nuragic phenomenon developed during Protohistoy: an extraordinary culture ranging from the Middle to Late Bronze Age (XVIII-XII centuries BC), some of whose features could last from Final Bronze Age until the beginnings of Iron Age (XI-VIII centuries BC), characterized by the building of great monuments, especially nuraghi, cyclopean-type constructions similar to towers. These great buildings have multiple functions, but in particular were used to surveil the whole island territory. We have mainly carried out different GIS analyzes on different sample areas with the aim to reading the visual-perceptive aspects and to try to research about the relationship between settlements and territory and the mobility systems across different territories through the applying of the least-cost path analysis. Reconstruction of certain characteristics of Sardinian Protohistoric Landscape in these areas is achieved. GIS-based analysis show how these territorial control systems, consisting of several nuraghi and settlements, were intended to control the most important natural and economic resources and transit routes.

The Construction of Territories in the Qin Empire

This essay revisits the territoriality of the Qin empire by examining the spatial division underneath its commandery-county system. With the universal implementation of centralized administration, scholars usually believe that the Qin empire exerted strong control across its territories. But new Qin sources suggest otherwise. It is evident that the Qin regime devised multiple schemes to structure its empire into three concentric zones with asymmetrical political relations. The respective features and functions of these zones were consonant with those of the center, semiperiphery, and periphery in the “core-periphery” model. The regime’s spatial strategy can be understood as a compromise made to accommodate the diverse landscape in different parts of its vast empire, especially in the newly conquered regions. This reminds us that despite having installed the unitary commandery-county system, the territorial control wielded by the Qin regime in its new territories was tenuous at best.

Undoing disaster colonialism: a pilot map of the pandemic's first wave in the Mapuche territories of Southern Chile

PurposeThe authors use media research and crowdsourced mapping to document how the first wave of the pandemic (April–August 2020) affected the Mapuche, focussing on seven categories of events: territorial control, spiritual defence, food sovereignty, traditional health practices, political violence, territorial needs and solidarity, and extractivist expansion.Design/methodology/approachResearch on the effects of the pandemic on the Mapuche and their territories is lacking; the few existing studies focus on death and infection rates but overlook how the pandemic interacts with ongoing processes of extractivism, state violence and community resistance. The authors’ pilot study addresses this gap through a map developed collaboratively by disaster scholars and Mapuche journalists.FindingsThe map provides a spatial and chronological overview of this period, highlighting the interconnections between the pandemic and neocolonialism. As examples, the authors focus on two phenomena: the creation of “health barriers” to ensure local territorial control and the state-supported expansion of extractive industries during the first months of the lockdown.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors intersperse our account of the project with reflections on its limitations and, specifically, on how colonial formations shape the research. Decolonising disaster studies and disaster risk reduction practice, the authors argue, is an ongoing process, bound to be flawed and incomplete but nevertheless an urgent pursuit.Originality/valueIn making this argument, the paper responds to the Disaster Studies Manifesto that inspires this special issue, taking up its invitation to scholars to be more reflexive about their research practice and to frame their investigations through grounded perspectives.

Blowback or overblown? Why civilians under threat support invasive foreign intervention

How do military tactics shape civilian support for foreign intervention? Critics contend that invasive tactics undermine popular support by alienating the civilian population. Counterexamples suggest that civilians will support invasive tactics when foreign counterinsurgents are willing and able to mitigate a proximate threat. I reconcile these divergent findings by arguing that civilian support is a function of threat perception based on three interacting heuristics: social identity, combatant targeting, and territorial control. To evaluate my theory, I enumerate a survey among Iraqi residents in Baghdad during the anti-ISIS campaign. Respondents preferred more invasive tactics when foreign counterinsurgents assisted the most effective local members of the anti-ISIS coalition. Across sectarian divides, however, respondents uniformly opposed the deployment of foreign troops. These findings suggest that in regime-controlled communities, civilians will support counterinsurgents who are invasive enough to mitigate insurgent threats, but not too invasive as to undermine local autonomy.

Poder y Sacralización del Paisaje en los Andes Centrales: Una aproximación

Este articulo está basado en estudios realizados en los andes centrales, principalmente lo que corresponde a los departamentos de Lima, Ancash y Junín, logrando identificar asentamientos prehispánicos en estrecha relación a los asentamientos actuales, articulados a una geografía sagrada claramente identificada por la gran mayoría de las comunidades actuales. Esta sacralidad del paisaje obviamente se remonta a la época prehispánica y en muchos de los casos tienen su continuidad en la memoria de las comunidades actuales donde se guarda la esencia fundamental de su origen. Para entender esta sacralidad y la sacralización, identificamos los indicadores conceptuales que sostienen lo sagrado en el pensamiento del hombre tomado en cuenta los conceptos ontológicos de lo sagrado y lo profano y su relación con el paisaje socializado. Cuando lo sagrado y lo simbólico es manipulado por los grupos de poder, entonces la sacralidad y la sacralización también son asumidas como mecanismos de control, no solo de lo ideológico, sino también la apropiación territorial, control de los sistemas de producción, de la acumulación de riqueza basada en ofrendas y tributos. Por ello nuestro propósito es de alguna manera aproximarnos a identificar y aislar algunos de los rasgos y factores causales del proceso de sacralización del paisaje tomando en cuenta el segmento de tiempo transcurrido desde su origen. This article is based on studies carried out in the central Andes, mainly in the departments of Lima, Ancash and Junín, identifying pre-Hispanic settlements in close relation to the current settlements, articulated to a sacred geography clearly identified by the great majority of the current communities. This sacredness of the landscape obviously dates back to pre-Hispanic times and in many cases has its continuity in the memory of the current communities where the fundamental essence of its origin is kept. To understand this sacredness and sacralization, we identify the conceptual indicators that sustain the sacred in human thought, taking into account the ontological concepts of the sacred and the profane and their relationship with the socialized landscape. When the sacred and the symbolic are manipulated by power groups, then sacredness and sacralization are also assumed as mechanisms of control, not only of the ideological, but also of territorial appropriation, control of production systems, of the accumulation of wealth based on offerings and tributes. Therefore, our purpose is to identify and isolate some of the features and causal factors of the process of sacralization of the landscape, taking into account the segment of time elapsed since its origin.

The edge of Kaladan

Using the case of India’s mega-infrastructure build-up, the Kaladan Multimodal Transport Project (KMMTP) in the ‘remote’ and ethnically contentious borderlands between India and Myanmar, this chapter takes an ethnographic approach to understand the meaning of spectacular connectivity and infrastructure on remote borderlands. Based on six months of fieldwork, the chapter explores the voices, visions, spatial and ethnic worlds of border residents who subsequently have to position themselves and their remoteness to absorb the Indian state’s spectacular new connective infrastructure. The chapter narratively traverses along this newly constructed road, to the very edge of a hitherto informal and flexible border with Myanmar. In doing so, it highlights the need to investigate the banal, unspectacular and interethnic lived realities of the borderland. The chapter argues that spectacular infrastructures such as the KMMTP are harnessed in the pursuit of territorial control, making the remote legible and for extracting profits. The chapter introduces the analytic of the ‘spectacle’ to demonstrate how powerful states and ethnic communities rely on grand infrastructural spectacles and cross-border projects often at the expense, erasure and displacement of those at the edge of borderlands, who have the least stake in shaping such spectacular infrastructures.

Practice of Board of Appeals of FAS of Russia (scientific review ofthe most significant cases considered in the third quarter of 2020)

This review of the decisions of the “departmental appeal”, which has already become a tradition, contains comments on three cases considered by the Board of Appeals of the FAS of Russia in the third quarter of 2020. The first of the considered cases is devoted to the issues of enforceability of warnings, including qualifications of actions under paragraph 5 of part 1 of article 10 of the Law “On protection of competition”. Other two cases are related to the issues of proving anticompetitive agreements. However, in one case, the Board of Appeals of the FAS of Russia evaluated indirect evidence of cartel agreements, established territorial control, and in another case — the relevance of qualification of actions of legal entities under paragraph 4 of article 16 of the Law “On protection of competition”.

Conclusion

Italy fought the Great War in pursuit of a Greater Italy; to that end, all the resources of nation and empire were mobilised. The end of the First World War saw the demise of the liberal emigrant model in Italy, in which diaspora communities were still colonies, in favour of a more conventional vision based solely on direct territorial control. Tracing the growth of Italian colonial ambitions from 1911 through to 1923 as against the objective decline and weakening of its real empire highlights the extent to which it was an empire of fantasy as much as reality. Nonetheless, though in many ways insubstantial, empire and above all the idea of empire exerted enormous influence on Italian attitudes, policies, and priorities in the era of the First World War, with devastating long-term consequences.

Pandemic State Failure, Hydrocarbon Control, and Indigenous Territorial Counteraction in the Peruvian Amazon

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Peruvian government failed to protect its sparsely populated Amazon region. While infections were still rising, resource extraction was quickly approved to continue operations as a declared essential service that permitted an influx of workers into vulnerable indigenous territories despite weak or almost absent local healthcare. This article analyzes territorial counteraction as an indigenous response to pandemic national state failure, highlighted in a case of particularly conflictive stakes of resource control: Peru’s largest liquid natural gas extraction site Camisea in the Upper Amazon, home to several indigenous groups in the Lower Urubamba who engaged in collective action to create their own district. Frustration with the state’s handling of the crisis prompted indigenous counteraction to take COVID-19 measures and territorial control into their own hands. By blocking boat traffic on their main river, they effectively cut off their remote and roadless Amazon district off from the outside world. Local indigenous control had already been on the rise after the region had successfully fought for its own formal subnational administrative jurisdiction in 2016, named Megantoni district. The pandemic then created a moment of full indigenous territorial control that openly declared itself as a response and replacement of a failed national state. Drawing on political ecology, we analyze this as an interesting catalyst moment that elevated long-standing critiques of inequalities, and state neglect into new negotiations of territory and power between the state and indigenous self-determination, with potentially far-reaching implications on state-indigenous power dynamics and territorial control, beyond the pandemic.