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Halford Mackinder has had a posthumous existence that many of us might envy. Long after his earthly demise, some of his ideas, particularly that of the “geographical pivot of history,” keep coming back to life. Currently, some well-known pundits in US foreignpolicy circles, typically thought of as neo-conservative and keen on a “muscular” US military presence around the world, have re-discovered Mackinder’s geographical determinism as providing a seemingly naturalistic account for the approaching rebirth of the “yellow peril” (the rise of China) and offering as it did at the turn of the last century a timeless rendering of the challenges to the democratic maritime powers from the despotic land powers of Eurasia. The widely cited American journalist Robert Kaplan (2010: 22), for example, frames the emerging “geography” of China’s power almost entirely in these terms. It is timely, therefore, to have a new intellectual biography of Mackinder that not only critically engages with the central themes of his geopolitics but that does so by both situating them in the historical context of the early twentieth century and showing why they remain attractive in some quarters by dint of their effective depoliticization of the very world politics that they underwrite. This book matters, therefore, in a number of distinctive ways. That was why a session devoted to it was so worth organizing at the Washington DC AAG Annual Meeting in April 2010.

Two techniques that explore how minimising the effects of dynamical interactions can lead to an improved understanding of underlying structural information in real and reciprocal space are reviewed and extended. In this special issue dedicated to David Cockayne, the techniques of dislocation tomography and precession electron diffraction described in this paper echo very strongly David's interests in weak-beam imaging of dislocations and structure determination using kinematic diffraction. The weak-beam dark-field (WBDF) technique has been extended to three dimensions to visualise networks of dislocations in a number of materials systems. Some of the issues that arise from using this technique are explored. It is shown how the overall reconstruction can be improved through careful image processing. Using STEM medium-angle annular dark field (MAADF) imaging many of the artefacts seen in the WBDF technique are minimised, with a significant increase in the ease of acquisition and processing the data. Recent ...

Artificial multiferroic structures are of great interest as they combine two or more functionalities together. One example of these structures are magnetostrictive films grown on top of piezoelectric substrates; allowing the magnetisation hysteresis loop of the magnetostrictive film to be manipulated using an electric field across the structure rather than a magnetic field. In this paper, we have studied the multiferroic structure NiFe/FeCo/Ti/Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)-PbTiO3 (PMN-PT) as a function of the electric and magnetic field. Soft magnetostrictive bilayer films (NiFe/FeCo) are studied, as often applications require soft magnetic properties (small coercive and anisotropy fields) combined with larger magnetostrictive constants. Unfortunately, FeCo films can have coercive fields that are too large, while NiFe films’ magnetostriction constants are almost zero; thus, combining the two together should produce the “ideal” soft magnetostrictive film. It was found that the addition of a thin NiFe film onto the FeCo film reduced the coercive field and remnant magnetisation on the application of an applied voltage in comparison to just the FeCo film. It was also determined that for the NiFe/FeCo bilayer the magnetisation switchability was ~100% on the application of 8kV/cm, which was higher than the monolayer FeCo films at the same applied field, demonstrating improvement of the multiferroic behaviour by the soft magnetic/magnetostrictive bilayer.

When Henry Lyons was appointed as the first lecturer in Geography at the University of Glasgow in 1909, he had just returned from several years as the Director General of the Survey of Egypt. One hundred years later witnessed the publication of a book drawing together a collaborative project in Egypt involving members of the Department. This paper reflects upon this interest in Egypt by geographers at the University of Glasgow, and, in so doing, critically examines the changing nature of scientific knowledge and practice over the intervening century.

In this paper we will critically consider the different ways in which history and belonging have been treated in artworks situated in the Citadel development in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland. We will focus upon one artwork, Constellation by Stephen Hurrel, as an alternative to the more conventional landscapes of heritage which are adjacent, in order to examine the relationship between personal history and place history and argue the primacy of participatory process in the creation of place and of any artwork therein. Through his artwork, Hurrel has attempted to adopt a material process through which place can be created performatively but, in part due to its nonrepresentational form, it proves problematic, aesthetically and longitudinally, in wholly engaging the community. We will suggest that, through variants of ‘new genre public art’ such as this, personal and place histories can be actively recreated through the redevelopment of contemporary urban landscapes, but we will also highlight the complexities and indeterminacies involved in the relationship between artwork, people, and place.

There has recently been much said about the end of public space. In contemporary cities, the public sphere is increasingly been seen as comprised of dead public spaces, privatised shopping malls and gated communities, eroding the essence of city life. However, in this paper it is argued that this particular vision of contemporary public space is skewed by the concentration of research in city centres, and in particular in the recapitalised, flagship spaces associated with urban restructuring. The paper questions the extent that the inclusivity and accessibility of local public spaces is under threat and whether democratic practices unfold to threaten such local public spaces, drawing on the recent experience of two inner-city neighbourhoods in Glasgow.

This article discusses the role of public art in the built form of western cities. Increasingly public art is being seen as an unquestionably good thing in urban regeneration discourse, in particular for its ability to (re)create urban communities. In part, this reflects the influence of `new genre public art' approaches which privilege art as process over art as product. However, this reading of new genre public art works can overlook the wider networks through which presence is facilitated, the very materiality of the artistic things produced, and how they are subsequently incorporated into everyday life. These agendas for the critical appreciation of public art will be developed through the example of the Five Spaces public art project in Glasgow, Scotland.

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography aims to account for the intellectual and worldly developments that have taken place in and around political geography in the last 10 years. Bringing together established names in the field as well as new scholars, it highlights provocative theoretical and conceptual debates on political geography from a range of global perspectives.

We have developed a new method of tomographically reconstructing extended three-dimensional dislocation networks using weak-beam dark-field (WBDF) imaging in a TEM. A series of WBDF images is recorded every few degrees over a large tilt range, while ensuring that the dark-field reflection used for imaging maintains a constant deviation parameter. With suitable filtering of the WBDF images prior to tomographic reconstruction, the three-dimensional distribution of dislocations is reproduced with high fidelity and high spatial resolution. The success of this approach is demonstrated for heteroepitaxial Mg-doped GaN films. The fidelity of the tomographic reconstruction varies with the dislocation line-vector and elastic anisotropy of the material.

By combining weak-beam dark-field imaging with tomography, we have been able to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure of dislocation arrays in GaN. With a mixture of both threading and in-plane dislocations, owing to plastic relaxation of the film, we look at how well each dislocation is reconstructed and what limits are imposed by way of dislocation density and material anisotropy.

In this article, it is shown how cultural policy, and in particular public art, intersects with the processes of urban restructuring and how it is a contributor, but also antidote, to the conflict that typically surrounds the restructuring of urban space. The particular focus of the paper is on investigating how public art can be inclusionary/exclusionary as part of the wider project of urban regeneration. The first part of the paper examines examples in which public art intervention has attempted to generate inclusion. Subsequently, attention focuses more on examples in which the public art has been perceived as an aspect of cultural domination and has thus provoked resistance. Throughout, it is argued that the processes through which artworks become installed into the urban fabric are critical to the successful development of inclusion.

As a result of the failure of formal top-down development, there has recently been increased interest in the possibilities of drawing upon the indigenous knowledges of those in the communities involved, in an attempt to produce more effective development strategies. The concept of indigenous knowledge calls for the inclusion of local voices and priorities, and promises empowerment through ownership of the process. However, there has been little critical examination of the ways in which indigenous knowledges have been included in the development process. Drawing upon postcolonial theory, this article suggests that indigenous knowledges are often drawn into development by both theorists and development institutions in a very limited way, failing to engage with other ways of perceiving development, and thus missing the possibility of devising more challenging alternatives.

This paper offers a contribution to the recent emergence in geography of studies of travel writers and the production of other representations of the non-Western world. I consider a rather different text to those normally studied in that the book, Empire of Signs by Barthes, purports not to represent any real place. A number of writers, influenced by Said's pathbreaking work Orientalism, have considered whether Barthes perpetuates Orientalist images. Rather than structure my argument around the binary of Orientalist/not-Orientalist I will consider the ways that Barthes subverts the structure of Orientalism from within. Barthes counterfeits travel: playing with the concept of ‘wonder’ which halted the representational language of more conventional travellers. Through the construction of his own ‘hyper-Orientalist’ account, Barthes produces a poststructural ethics which I argue offers some important reflections on the politics of representation both of travel writing and of academic critiques of it.

This chapter draws on Derek Gregory’s idea of the ‘colonial present’ in an attempt both to politicize the postcolonial and to embed postcolonial concerns at the heart of geopolitics. It addresses the geopolitical position of Africa in the US-sponsored ‘war on terror’ by exploring the tensions that exist between biopolitical processes of security and development. It concludes with a discussion of alternative modernities which suggests that other forms of biopolitics are being practised, in Africa and elsewhere, that subvert the imperial ambitions of the colonial present even if they do not always succeed in resisting it.

1. Introduction 2. Feminism and Difference 3. Feminism and Political Theory 4. Development, Post-colonialism, and Political Theory 5. Scale 6. Spheres of Politics 7. Politics of Mobility and Access 8. Political Acts 9. Methodologies 10. Geography, Space, Politics 11. Territory and Territoriality 12. Geopolitics, Empire and Imperialism 13. Globalization, Regionalization and International Trade 14. Nation and Nationalism 15. The State 16. Electoral Geography and Political Participation 17. Local State, Public Services, and Locational Conflict 18. Protest, Resistance and Social Movements 19. Crossing Borders: Migrants, Refugees and Human Rights 20. Politics of the Environment Conclusion

This paper is a continuation of one published in 1993. In the earlier piece, I joined the call for a ‘critical geopolitics’. Here I want to both illustrate and develop the programmatic calls of critical geopolitics with the use of an empirical example. Critical geopolitics has demanded the siting of any geopolitical praxis—a refusal to accept the abstract logic of geopolitics but instead embody it in historically and culturally specific interests. In line with this, I contextualize the production of a geopolitical discourse by studying both the text produced and the institutional location within which it was generated. The example used is the popular American magazine the Reader's Digest and its changing perception of the Soviet Union and communism between 1930 and 1945.

We review the progress in the electron tomography of dislocation microstructures in the transmission electron microscope (TEM). Dislocation contrast is visible both in conventional TEM and scanning TEM (STEM) modes and, despite the complicated intensity variations, dislocation contrast can be isolated using computational filtering techniques prior to reconstruction. We find that STEM annular dark-field (STEM-ADF) imaging offers significant advantages in terms of dislocation contrast and background artifacts. We present several examples, both in semiconducting and metallic systems, illustrating the properties of 3D dislocations. We present the high-angle triple-axis (HATA) specimen holder where the diffraction condition can be chosen at will and dislocation tomograms of multiple reflections can be combined. 3D dislocations are analyzed in terms of dislocation density and dislocation nodal structures. Several avenues of study are suggested that may exploit the 3D dislocation data.

Subaltern geopolitics is a concept we use in this special issue to look past the binary vision of geopolitical reasoning and much critical engagement with it and to go beyond the endlessly critical nature of some critical geopolitics, to offer alternative ways of imagining and doing geopolitics. Engaging with postcolonial, feminist and anti-geopolitical interventions, the papers included here present subaltern imaginaries that offer creative alternatives to mainstream geopolitical scripts. The concept of subaltern makes direct reference to postcolonial notions of power relations, suggesting a position that is not completely other, resistant or alternative to dominant power, but instead one that occupies an ambiguous position of marginality.

Currently, hegemonic geographical imaginations are dominated by the affective geopolitics of the War on Terror, and related security practice is universalised into what has been called “globalized fear” ( Pain, 2009 ). Critical approaches to geopolitics have been attentive to the Westerncentric nature of this imaginary, however, studies of non-Western perceptions of current geopolitics and the nature of fear will help to further displace dominant geopolitical imaginations. Africa, for example, is a continent that is often captured in Western geopolitics – as a site of failed states, the coming anarchy, passive recipient of aid, and so on – but geopolitical representations originating in Africa rarely make much of an impact on political theory. This paper aims to add to critical work on the so-called War on Terror from a perspective emerging from the margins of the dominant geopolitical imagination. It considers the geopolitical imagination of the War on Terror from a non-Western source, newspapers in Tanzania.

The recent emergence of a new ‘critical geopolitics’ has opened up traditional geopolitical texts for thorough interpretation. Yet there is little work which contextualizes traditional, elite geopolitical texts within the institutions of their social reproduction. The media are the prime example of a site of representation at which elite texts are interpreted in the terms of popular culture and assessed in these terms. It is also through socialization at these sites that elites form their interpretative structures. This paper will make the case for the importance of studying popular conceptions of geopolitics in America through an examination of the popular magazine The Reader's Digest from 1980–1990.

I reflect on the methodological challenges of undertaking oral history research that attempts to address issues of security and violence that occurred in the past. When such issues become entangled with individual (and group) senses of identity and autobiography, there are challenges to do with nostalgia, forgetting and non-disclosure. I draw on current research into post-colonial identities in Tanzania.

Electron tomography requires a wide angular range of specimen-tilt for a reliable three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction. Although specimen holders are commercially available for tomography, they have several limitations, including tilting capability in only one or two axes at most, e.g. tilt–rotate. For amorphous specimens, the image contrast depends on mass and thickness only and the single-tilt holder is adequate for most tomographic image acquisitions. On the other hand, for crystalline materials where image contrast is strongly dependent on diffraction conditions, current commercially available tomography holders are inadequate, because they lack tilt capability in all three orthogonal axes needed to maintain a constant diffraction condition over the whole tilt range. We have developed a high-angle triple-axis (HATA) tomography specimen holder capable of high-angle tilting for the primary horizontal axis with tilting capability in the other (orthogonal) horizontal and vertical axes. This allows the user to trim the specimen tilt to obtain the desired diffraction condition over the whole tilt range of the tomography series. To demonstrate its capabilities, we have used this triple-axis tomography holder with a dual-axis tilt series (the specimen was rotated by 90° ex-situ between series) to obtain tomographic reconstructions of dislocation arrangements in plastically deformed austenitic steel foils.

The manipulation of the strain-mediated magnetoelectric (ME) coupling strength is investigated by inserting a thin Ti layer (0–10 nm) between a 50 nm Co50Fe50 layer and a (011) oriented lead magnesium niobate-lead titanate (PMN-PT) substrate. A record high remanence ratio (Mr/Ms) tunability of 100% has been demonstrated in the 50 nm CoFe/8 nm Ti/PMN-PT heterostructure, when a total in-plane piezoelectric strain of −1821 ppm was applied at an electric field (E-field) of 16 kV/cm. The ME coupling strength is gradually optimized as the Ti layer thickness increases. Magnetic energy calculation showed that with increasing Ti layer thickness the uniaxial magnetic anisotropy energy (Euni) was reduced from 43 ± 1 kJ/m3 to 29.8 ± 1 kJ/m3. The reduction of Euni makes the strain effect dominant in the total magnetic energy, thus gives an obvious enhanced ME coupling strength.