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promote refugee livelihoods. Broadly described as ‘mental maps representing spaces to which people relate and with which they identify’ ( Boudreau, 2007 : 2596), spatial imaginaries allow us to analyse underpinning assumptions and understandings of technology produced in association with the practices of using technologies to create livelihoods in specific circumstances and contexts of forced migration. Data about the efficacy and impact of digital work on refugees’ lives are limited. This
This book offers a nuanced and detailed examination of Russia’s international activity. In broad terms, the book contributes to two of the most important current debates about contemporary Russian actions: whether Moscow is acting strategically or opportunistically, and whether this should be understood in regional or global terms. The book goes against the majority opinions on both questions, and introduces contributions in a number of under-researched themes. It argues that Moscow is not acting in a simply ad hoc, reactive way, but in a consistently strategic manner, and that this is best understood not by analysing Russia’s return to specific regions, but in a more holistic way with a global horizon, linking activity across different regions. This means that the Russian challenge is likely to continue rather than fade away.
The book addresses core themes of Russian activity – military, energy, and economic. But it offers an unusual multi-disciplinary analysis to these themes, incorporating both regional and thematic specialist expertise. Underpinned by detailed analyses of the revolution in Russian geospatial capabilities and the establishment of a strategic planning foundation, the book includes chapters on military and maritime strategies, energy security, and economic diversification and influence. This serves to highlight the connections between military and economic interests that shape and drive Russian strategy.
determined during the crisis; in other words, what might be described as the Derbyite ‘mental map’. Whatever its merits or flaws, the policy which the Government pursued in 1859 was consistent with the policy which Derby and Malmesbury had advocated since the late 1840s. It exhibited all the same features, and grew out of the same assumptions, that had marked Derbyite Conservative attitudes to foreign policy for a decade. Although it sought to preserve peace and/or limit war, it was determinedly non-interventionist; or, rather, it was not interventionist in the
all the tools of state in an effective, integrated manner over the 2020s? Nevertheless, Russian activities in specific regions warrant being seen in the wider context of Moscow's global horizon and stated intent to act as a player with global interests and reach. Debate about whether Russia qualifies as a “great power” will undoubtedly continue, but the Russian leadership is – in more practical terms – attempting to position Russia as a ubiquitous power. Understanding this mental map of Russia as a ubiquitous power is essential as the US and UK
This chapter tackles seascape as a symbolic space. It explores the political symbolisation and the symbolic power of the sea via a twofold empirical focus. The first move examines the maritime imagining of a nation-space with the example of Estonia’s ex-president and ethnographer Lennart Meri’s historical travelogue Hõbevalge [Silver White] (1976). This imaginative reconstruction of Estonia’s ancient seafaring history and connectivities with the Baltic Sea region and beyond was a conscious exercise in linking a forgotten Baltic province to the mental map of a Nordic-Baltic region. Silver White provided a national mythology for a small nation which was denied an autonomous political present and future as part of the Soviet Union. As a second move, the chapter looks at the emerging maritime posture and posturing of NATO in the Baltic Sea region. Proceeding from Catherine Bell’s understanding of ritualisation as a culturally strategic way of acting in the world and exercising power, NATO’s maritime presence in the Nordic-Baltic space emerges as a case of ritualised performance of deterrence towards Russia. In both instances of cultivating a national mythscape via the sea and performing a multinational military alliance via exercising extended maritime deterrence, the Baltic Sea emerges as a crucial arena for creating and enacting political subjectivities and communities in world politics.
book, The Image of the City (1960), by the American urban planner Kevin Lynch. In this book, Lynch discusses the ways in which we form mental maps of urban areas, through what he calls their ‘imageability’. He argues that our mental maps of cities are built out of paths (streets, pavements, other channels in which people travel); edges (perceived boundaries); districts (relatively large sections of the city that have a ‘character’); nodes (focal points, intersections or loci); and landmarks. It seems to me that, through your focus on signs, markers, paths and so on
considerable success, and by the end of the 2010s, Moscow was playing an active role not only in Libya and the Central Mediterranean, but also in other parts of Africa, and, as noted above, in many other regions across the globe, too. The second theme is about “mental maps”: the “landscape of the official mind”, or how Moscow sees the world and divides it up. Mental maps are a mix of objective knowledge and subjective perceptions that reflect the construction of the world around us. They are symbolic representations of spatial
offers. It explores how the legacy of the Soviet project has provided Russia with an unparalleled geospatial resource and with a “mental map” that underpins an ability to conduct globally integrated operations. This is becoming increasingly relevant when the importance of mental maps and geographic communication is only growing in an era of new global challenges and renewed Great Power Competition. 2 The chapter also explains how Russia's subsequent investment in core geospatial technologies, such as its GLONASS
perceived to be predominantly Protestant, Catholic or mixed. This proved to be a successful approach and offered insights into a number of the themes that had emerged in the interviews, such as the impact that individuals’ age, gender and personal experiences had upon their ‘mental map’ of the local area. The mapping exercise revealed some considerably differing perceptions of the
use of local resources and it helps recuperate local memory. Maps help identify the threat of displacement and development projects and they suggest alternatives to managing territorial conflicts (Montoya Arango et al. 2014: 196). They also help communities demonstrate their historic and cultural presence on the territory (Vélez Torres et al. 2012). The map Martina made is not without its flaws since cognitive or mental maps can be quite different from reality. They are ‘incomplete, distorted, schematised and augmented’ (Downs and Stea 2011: 315). Placing the