Few places are more revealing than the Alps to grasp the uneven EU core-periphery dynamics intrinsic to the EU border regime. In 2015, the reintroduction of controls at northern Italian borders, as a response to asylum seekers’ mobility, gave rise to a series of conflicts, contradictions and solidarities which this book explores. The ethnographic analysis of the everyday life of the French/Italian and Austrian/Italian borders makes visible the impacts of governance strategies which promote social polarization to contain potentially subversive moments of disruptions and transgressions. By contextualizing the governance of borders and migration in a broader framework, which includes the governance of EU states’ debt, Alpine Border Conflicts focuses on the effects of border regimes not only on migrants but also on EU societies.
The Patagonian Sublime provides a vivid, accessible, and cutting-edge investigation of the green economy and New Left politics in Argentina. Based on extensive field research in Glaciers National Park and the mountain village of El Chaltén, Marcos Mendoza deftly examines the diverse social worlds of alpine mountaineers, adventure trekkers, tourism entrepreneurs, seasonal laborers, park rangers, land managers, scientists, and others involved in the green economy. Mendoza explores the fraught intersection of the green economy with the New Left politics of the Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner governments. Mendoza documents the strategies of capitalist development, national representation, and political rule embedded in the “green productivist” agenda pursued by Kirchner and Fernández. Mendoza shows how Andean Patagonian communities have responded to the challenges of community-based conservation, the fashioning of wilderness zones, and the drive to create place-based monopolies that allow ecotourism destinations to compete in the global consumer economy.
This book provides case-studies of how teachers and practitioners have attempted to develop more effective ‘experiential learning’ strategies in order to better equip students for their voluntary engagements in communities, working for sustainable peace and a tolerant society free of discrimination. All chapters revolve around this central theme, testing and trying various paradigms and experimenting with different practices, in a wide range of geographical and historical arenas. They demonstrate the innovative potentials of connecting know-how from different disciplines and combining experiences from various practitioners in this field of shaping historical memory, including non-formal and formal sectors of education, non-governmental workers, professionals from memorial sites and museums, local and global activists, artists, and engaged individuals. In so doing, they address the topic of collective historical traumas in ways that go beyond conventional classroom methods. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book provides a combination of theoretical reflections and concrete pedagogical suggestions that will appeal to educators working across history, sociology, political science, peace education and civil awareness education, as well as memory activists and remembrance practitioners.
Stretching 1,200 kilometres across six countries, the colossal mountains of the Alps dominate Europe, geographically and historically. Enlightenment thinkers felt the sublime and magisterial peaks were the very embodiment of nature, Romantic poets looked to them for divine inspiration, and Victorian explorers tested their ingenuity and courage against them. Located at the crossroads between powerful states, the Alps have played a crucial role in the formation of European history, a place of intense cultural fusion as well as fierce conflict between warring nations. A diverse range of flora and fauna have made themselves at home in this harsh environment, which today welcomes over 100 million tourists a year. Leading Alpine scholar Jon Mathieu tells the story of the people who have lived in and been inspired by these mountains and valleys, from the ancient peasants of the Neolithic to the cyclists of the Tour de France. Far from being a remote and backward corner of Europe, the Alps are shown by Mathieu to have been a crucible of new ideas and technologies at the heart of the European story.
This textbook offers valuable insights into the nexus between geography, geopolitics, and humanitarian action. It elucidates concepts regarding conflict and power, as well as the role of the state and the international community in mitigating and preventing violence and war. Here the material and non-material, existential or imagined reasons for conflict are deconstructed, ranging from land and resource grabs to Utopian ideals that can degenerate into dystopias, as with Daesh’s caliphate in Syria and Iraq. In turn, the issues discussed range from the local to wider national and global levels, as do their resolution mechanisms. Due to insecurities, the impacts of globalization, divisive nationalistic and isolationist reactions emerging in some democracies including the USA, the UK’s Brexit stress, and the ominous rise of populist parties across continental Europe (from France and the Netherlands to the Visegrád Group, the Balkans, and Greece), citizen fatigue has become increasingly evident, reflected in ever-growing socio-political malaise and violence. As the impact of any humanitarian disaster is proportional to the level of development of the area affected, concepts and categories of humanitarian action are explored, along with development issues at their core, especially in the Global South. Broadly speaking, humanitarian disasters fall into the categories of natural, human-made, technological, or complex; here, however, the focus is on human-made crises. Attempts at greater regulation, national and international organization and multilateralism to prevent violent conflicts, as well as enhanced responses to humanitarian emergencies, need to be supported now more than ever before. This textbook will appeal to graduate and upper undergraduate students and practitioners in the fields of geography, geopolitics, humanitarian action and geographies of conflict and war. In addition to the main content, it includes exercises, questions and sections for autonomous student learning.
Conflict Landscapes explores the long under-acknowledged and under-investigated aspects of where and how modern conflict landscapes interact and conjoin with pre-twentieth-century places, activities, and beliefs, as well as with individuals and groups. Investigating and understanding the often unpredictable power and legacies of landscapes that have seen (and often still viscerally embody) the consequences of mass death and destruction, the book shows, through these landscapes, the power of destruction to preserve, refocus, and often reconfigure the past. Responding to the complexity of modern conflict, the book offers a coherent, integrated, and sensitized hybrid approach, which calls on different disciplines where they overlap in a shared common terrain. Dealing with issues such as memory, identity, emotion, and wellbeing, the chapters tease out the human experience of modern conflict and its relationship to landscape. Conflict Landscapes will appeal to a wide range of disciplines involved in studying conflict, such as archaeology, anthropology, material culture studies, art history, cultural history, cultural geography, military history, and heritage and museum studies.
The IUCN Academy of Environmental Law Research Studies' third colloquium brought together more than 130 experts from 27 nations on nearly every continent. This book brings together a number of papers presented there and offers a global perspective on biodiversity conservation and the maintenance of sustainable cultures.
Eurasia offers a wide-ranging and original interpretation of territory, boundaries and borderlands in Europe, Asia and the Far East. This forms part of a unique series of books focussing on world boundaries which embrace the theory and practice of boundary delimitation and management, boundary disputes and conflict resolution, and territorial change in the new world order.
What was the relationship between the Alps and the Resistance during the Italian Social Republic? This book explores the function of the Alps as a center of battles, violence, and opposition to fascism, as well as the cradle of political debate destined to forge modern Italian and European democracy.
