Sociology
The area of Germany which became the Soviet Occupation Zone/German Democratic Republic (GDR) bore the brunt of the Soviet offensive of 1945. This last phase of the Second World War on German soil produced a sensational death toll. Yet, a systematic registration of war burials on GDR soil did not take place until the 1970s. This article analyses a particular facet of knowledge production and mass death by turning to the process of accounting for Second World War burials through lists and statistics in the socialist GDR, with a particular focus on key policy changes in the 1970s. Unpacking the reasons which prompted a large-scale registration of war burials some twenty-five years after the end of the war, I argue that the process of accounting for war deaths was shaped by both domestic and foreign politics, and in particular by evolving relations with non-socialist countries. I also demonstrate that international requirements for the visibility and accountability of war burials, as enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, generated tensions with a domestic ‘politics of history’ which required the invisibility of particular categories of dead.
This article intends to shed light on the influence of gas warfare on the management of dead bodies of violence. It shows that this new type of weapon prompted the setting up of new military centres dedicated to forensic research within the French army. This work notably involved carrying out numerous autopsies on the bodies of deceased intoxicated soldiers. By looking at the reports produced and the work of forensic pathologists, the article demonstrates how dead bodies became a site of knowledge production. It also investigates the tensions related to the treatment of dead bodies resulting from this widespread practice of autopsy. The reports produced also provide precise descriptions of the last moments of the soldiers who died in ambulances or hospitals. Finally, by cross-referencing these sources with soldiers’ grave registers, it is possible to grasp the afterlives of autopsied bodies and the diverse fates of soldiers who fell at the front.
This is the first study dedicated to discussing perspectives on proposals to transfuse blood from people killed in conflict zones. It attempts to present a rounded picture of why the idea has apparently failed to translate into practice. Drawing on a range of sources, from scientific research on ‘cadaver’ blood transfusions to discussions around planning for mass casualty events, the article shows how professional interest in the transfusion possibilities of blood taken from the battlefield dead evolved from Soviet research in the 1930s, spread internationally and endured after the Second World War. It then demonstrates that a range of issues, from taboos to practicability, require consideration if past challenges to utility are to be reliably understood. It notes, too, that some early obstacles may, today, be outdated.
This article shows how the medicalisation of death in wartime can be seen as integral to a broader medicalisation of war that it both stems from and sustains. More specifically, it highlights the pivotal role of post-mortem examinations – which were widely performed in French military hospitals during the First Indochina War – in advancing clinical knowledge and monitoring the quality of care, as the only way of providing diagnostic certainty. Pathology procedures also contributed to the introduction of therapeutic innovations, which were largely the result of ongoing interactions both within the armed forces medical service and with the wider military and civilian French and international medical community.
The book’s conclusions are briefly presented in the last chapter. Given that each chapter offers its own concluding reflections, this chapter returns to the question of urban comparison within African peripheries and considers the value of comparison for advancing understanding in these complex urban spaces. It briefly addresses the book’s contribution to core literatures detailed here at the start of this chapter, but primarily it returns to our conceptual framework and our five logics of African urban peripheries to consider their value and limitations. Finally, the chapter considers the policy implications, very generally, of some of the arguments and evidence presented in this text.
This chapter uses data from key informant interviews and resident diaries and interviews to examine the varied governance structures shaping the peripheries in both South Africa and Ethiopia. It opens with a discussion of key conceptual framings relevant to understanding governance trends in urban peripheries and moves to review the multiscalar institutional bodies, administrative structures, local committees and key figures including ward leaders and ‘strongmen’ operating in, and responsible for, the peripheral spaces in city-regions. Within this review the chapter offers brief reflections on hybridity, the limitations of the state and the role of the private sector shaping decision-making. It turns to an analysis of borders and boundaries as central to particular governance contestations and analyses state–citizen relations using the insights drawn from the book’s overarching ‘lived experiences’ approach. Throughout the chapter, conceptualisations of the periphery, developed in the Introduction, are drawn on to analyse particular governance arrangements and practices, including new structures within vanguard peripheries, ‘transitioning peripheries’ possessing hybrid governance structures and auto-constructed peripheries where informalised mechanisms of leadership are evident, alongside weakened state structures which are obligated to serve ‘inherited peripheries’.
This chapter locates diverse forms of housing found in seven South African case study sites on the urban edges of Gauteng and eThekwini relative to a historical view of urban policy. It contextualises the origins and contemporary dynamics of inherited as well as more recent peripheral settlements. Experiences and perceptions from residents’ interviews and diaries explain their links to these areas and include expressions of hope and optimism as well as dejection with life there. The long shadow of apartheid colours but does not define people’s continued occupation of areas that were intentionally dislocated from urban centralities, while post-apartheid state housing, often peripherally located, surfaces complex relationships with speculative development and economic activity or its absence. The chapter discusses also the differing roles played by informal settlements and other forms of auto-construction in our study sites. The lens of peripheral logics illuminates people’s housing experiences and motivations, the pull of state and other housing-related investment, sometimes in contradictory ways, and the dynamism as well as sedimentation in this housing landscape.
This chapter examines the evolution and ‘lived experience’ consequences of housing policy in Ethiopia in recent decades, which was radically transformed by the introduction of the Integrated Housing Development Programme (IHDP) from 2005. This was a major ‘vanguard’ investment aimed at transforming the economic and social character of the urban periphery. The chapter situates this programme in relation to broader developments in Ethiopian housing policy, including the cooperative housing programme that was initiated in the 1970s but continued into the twenty-first century. It then explores some of the tensions at the heart of the IHDP, which set out to produce ‘affordable’ housing at the same time as being part of an economic growth and homeownership agenda, leading to escalating prices and rents as well as mass displacement. The lived experience of housing of various kinds in our case study areas is then examined. The chapter concludes that ultimately the apparent promise of the ‘vanguard periphery’ in these areas was partly undermined by limitations in infrastructural capacity but also by the simultaneous creation of auto-constructed, speculative and potentially future ‘inherited’ peripheries.
This chapter introduces the book, locating it within literature on urban peripheries, noting its insights but also limitations, particularly its ability to engage with the complexities of urban change as narrated by residents in these spaces. The book then details the methodological approach which combines an analysis of drivers of change with an understanding of lived experiences using mixed methods (social surveys, diaries, interviews) and the adoption of a comparative urbanism approach, drawing on both genetic and generative tactics informing our case study analyses and conceptual framings. We provide an understanding of African peripheries through a focus on three case study city-regions – Gauteng and eThekwini in South Africa and Addis Ababa in Ethiopia – and seven urban peripheral areas within these. We introduce the Accra cases used within the chapter on Ghana, where the urbanisation of land under traditional tenure systems and the conflict and politics of land are examined. Next, we outline five logics of urban peripheral development (speculative; vanguard; auto-constructed; transitioning; inherited), which we developed inductively through our research and which unpack the urban periphery concept in new ways. The value of these lies in their recognition of how logics of peripheral development can co-exist, hybridise and bleed into each other to differing degrees in specific places and at different temporal junctures. Importantly, our five logics also facilitate conceptual as well as substantive comparison across and within our seven cases and arguably beyond into other African peripheral contexts. Finally, the chapter outlines the structure of the book to follow.
Focusing on Ethiopia and South Africa, this chapter explores the dynamics and drivers of investment and economic change on urban peripheries in the case studies, focusing on areas where there has been significant private and public investment at some point: Tulu Dimtu and Yeka Abado in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and in South Africa, Lufhereng in Johannesburg, Ekangala in the City of Tshwane and northern eThekwini. Taking each country in turn, it presents some of the general policy trends and frameworks shaping investment in each national context, and some of the ways in which these are experienced, before considering the city-regions and case study areas. Using empirical evidence, it highlights the diverse trajectories of these places, key actors and agencies, and some of the specific major investment projects that have been shaping our case study peripheries. It adds substance to concepts of speculative, vanguard and inherited peripheries which are developed and presented in the Introduction to this book, in relation to the case studies.