Academic literature on the topic 'Here lies its profoundly political potential'

In spite of their distinctive normative and political differences, critical organizational scholars use a vocabulary which in several respects resembles that adopted by right-wing populists. This vocabulary, we argue, consists of components that can be deployed in the pursuit of radically conflicting goals. At its heart lies a profoundly antithetical stance toward bureaucracy and the state. In this article, we explore the components of this vocabulary as well as the role they play in both populist- and critical organizational theory-variants. In doing so, we further discuss the lack of critical potential this vocabulary has in the present. For critical organization scholars, we argue, this should perhaps lead to a renewed consideration and reflexivity concerning not only the merits of bureaucracy and the state, but also of how to conduct critique in populist times.

Abstract Alternative polyadenylation (APA) profoundly expands the transcriptome complexity. Perturbations of APA can disrupt biological processes, ultimately resulting in devastating disorders. A major challenge in identifying mechanisms and consequences of APA (and its perturbations) lies in the complexity of RNA 3′ end processing, involving poorly conserved RNA motifs and multi-component complexes consisting of far more than 50 proteins. This is further complicated in that RNA 3′ end maturation is closely linked to transcription, RNA processing and even epigenetic (histone/DNA/RNA) modifications. Here, we present TREND-DB (http://shiny.imbei.uni-mainz.de:3838/trend-db), a resource cataloging the dynamic landscape of APA after depletion of >170 proteins involved in various facets of transcriptional, co- and post-transcriptional gene regulation, epigenetic modifications and further processes. TREND-DB visualizes the dynamics of transcriptome 3′ end diversification (TREND) in a highly interactive manner; it provides a global APA network map and allows interrogating genes affected by specific APA-regulators and vice versa. It also permits condition-specific functional enrichment analyses of APA-affected genes, which suggest wide biological and clinical relevance across all RNAi conditions. The implementation of the UCSC Genome Browser provides additional customizable layers of gene regulation accounting for individual transcript isoforms (e.g. epigenetics, miRNA-binding sites and RNA-binding proteins). TREND-DB thereby fosters disentangling the role of APA for various biological programs, including potential disease mechanisms, and helps identify their diagnostic and therapeutic potential.

China's expansion into Africa has attracted a great deal of criticism, particularly regarding its implications for human rights on the continent. However, the nub of the problem is found within Africa itself, within the neo-patrimonial regimes that dominate the continent. Obviously, there is justifiable disquiet that Beijing's Africa policies may undermine political and economic reform on the continent. Nevertheless, the reasons for Africa's current predicament are complex and erecting a potential scapegoat to blame for Africa's woes makes little sense. Before critiquing China's role in Africa vis-à-vis governance and human rights, analysts need to understand both China's particular human rights discourse and the nature of most African states, for it is here that the real problem lies.

The coronavirus pandemic has actualised the “Global Risk Society” concept. The purpose of this article is to examine the emergence of an international decarbonisation regime in terms of the values of the “global risk society” as updated by the coronavirus pandemic. Under the conditions of “new normality”, new values that determine the socio-political development of society are taking shape. Relying on the “Global Risk Society” theory, the authors derive its emerging values, the emergence of which is associated with the pandemic and its socio-economic effects. Thus, new values include the abandonment of faith in progress and a focus on crisis management (resilience), global solidarity as a key condition for survival, the search for a balance between freedom and security, effective response and regulation, “open innovation” as part of the “global commons”, rethinking of the value of consumption, and finally, the value of the climate agenda as a global green imperative comes to the fore. These values are of importance for a global climate agenda as well, which has become more acute during the pandemic. A key actor here is the European Union, which, through its policy of normative power and environmental ethics, is shaping a new international decarbonisation regime as an instrument for realising these values. And this “new ethic” has no national boundaries. Such international regime aims to create a regulatory framework for responding to climate risks that has the potential to profoundly affect global development and lead to a fundamentally new international climate order.

Since early 2018, the US–China ‘trade war’ has increased tariffs on a wide range of Chinese products, including solar panels. The tension between the US and China in solar sector, if left unchecked, will not only harm the bilateral relationship between the two trade powers but also impede climate change mitigation as higher costs will slow down the deployment of solar products. The article begins by tracing the rapid development of the solar energy sector in China, before reviewing US trade measures to counteract the increased imports and protect its domestic industry. The article then proceeds to examine the WTO rules, finding that China is likely to prevail in the dispute on claims made under the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the Agreement on Safeguards. However, while WTO litigation may be a necessary step it is not sufficient. China must also take the opportunity to solve deeply-rooted problems in its solar industry, namely solar overcapacity and heavy reliance on export markets in a limited number of countries that render Chinese solar manufacturing susceptible to trade restrictions imposed by other countries. Addressing these issues will not only remove a major irritant to the US and other trading partners but would also solidify the position of the industry within the country. The article recommends two options for China: first, explore domestic market potential for solar energy so as to absorb manufacturing capacity. The key here lies in progressively scaling up domestic solar consumption, which is essential in promoting China’s solar development in a healthy and sustainable manner. Second, strengthen ties with countries along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in solar trade and investment. Exporting Chinese solar technologies and building solar power infrastructure in BRI countries not only alleviates China’s over-dependence on a limited number of advanced economies’ markets but also contributes to ‘greening’ the BRI and global climate change mitigation.

Gevninge – the gateway to LejreGevninge is one of many Danish villages characterised by having extensive modern housing estates built around a medieval core. The oldest part of the village, with a late Romanesque church, lies on the west side of a small river, Lejre Å, about 2 km from its mouth at Roskilde Fjord (fig. 1).Both in the 1880s and in the 1970s, remains of human skeletons were found in Grydehøj to the west of the old village core (fig. 2). These clearly originate from burials, but the finds are undated. In 1974, remains of an inhumation grave from Viking times were found a short distance from a sunken road which, up until the 18th century, was part of the main road between Kalundborg and Roskilde. In 1979, a gilded bronze strap-end mount from the 8th century AD was found less than 200 m south of the sunken road, but it was first in the winter of 1999-2000 that settlement remains from Viking times were discovered.The archaeological investigationsThe excavation in 2000 uncovered 3600 m2 of settlement remains; these had been heavily damaged by site development in the 1960s and 1970s (fig. 3). On the basis of the evidence available, it is impossible to determine whether these represent several phases of a single farmstead or a portion of a larger settlement. The absence of any traces of structures in the northern evaluation trenches indicates that the settlement did not extend to the north of the sunken road where the graves were found. The terrain falls relatively steeply away from the excavation to the east towards Gevninge Bygade and, although it is possible, it seems rather unlikely that the Viking Age settlement extended in this direction. Relative to the topography, an extension to the south and west seems most obvious.There is no doubt that the site should be assigned to the Viking period. House I is unlikely to be earlier than 10th century (fig. 4), whereas the rectangular pit-house belongs to the end of the same century or the subsequent one. House II (fig. 5) and the other pit-houses are – typologically – less useful for a precise dating of the site. The metal artefacts, including the strap-end mount and a handful of coins from the time of the Civil War, span the period from the 8th to the 14th century, but the majority belong in the 9th-10th centuries (figs. 9-13). Pottery is the most common artefact type and occurs as un-ornamented flat-bottomed settlement wares and Baltic ware (fig. 8). The former have typically inwardly curved rim sections, the sides of the vessels are un-ornamented and they are generally bucket-shaped (fig. 14). The Baltic ware pottery is characterised by more angular rims, which have often been finished off using a wooden shaping tool. Decoration is mostly in the form of encircling grooves, waved furrows and a series of slanting or circular impressions. Compared with the other finds from the structures, the Baltic ware from the excavation belongs in the latter part of the 10th century and up into the 11th century.Traces of crafts were not conspicuous. In one pit-house there were several un-fired clay loom weights, while two deep postholes in the bottom of another pit-house are interpreted as the base for a loom. The distaff whorls and – possibly – the few bone and antler needles also belong to textile production (fig. 7). Iron slag, which definitely was not one of the most conspicuous aspects, originates from “fire-based” crafts. Textile production and iron working are the crafts typically seen at agrarian sites, with the former occurring most frequently.On the basis of the buildings, the traces of crafts and the majority of the finds, the site must be categorised as an average farmstead from Viking times. The site did, however, include four unusual finds: a gold armring (figs. 12 and 13), part of a gilded bronze helmet (fig. 10), a bronze bucket and a winged spearhead. These finds give food for thought, nourished by Gevninge’s location in the landscape, combined with its proximity to the legendary Lejre.A main transport junctionThe area south of Gevninge is characterised by a series of branching streams which meet at Gammel Lejre and continue towards Roskilde Fjord in the form of Lejre Å. To the west and southwest there is an area of about 50 km2 with a more-or-less pronounced moraine landscape. Large parts of this have lain through historical times as rough ground, common and forest. This landscape type forms a very clear contrast to the area east of Lejre Å - a flat and fertile plain extending out to the Øresund and Køge Bugt. In landscape terms, this is a border area, running north-south, where crossing points had to be chosen with care. Gammel Lejre, which from the 5th to the 10th century was an important chieftain’s or royal farmstead with magnificent halls, huge long-houses and a cult site, is well-suited to the passage of east-westbound traffic (fig. 15). In the flat terrain to the east of Lejre Å, maps from the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century show no road network prior to the construction of two highways in the second half of the 18th century. These run in a straight line from Roskilde to Ringsted and Kalundborg, respectively. Between them, Ledreborg Allé can be seen; it was constructed at the same time and probably replaced a road running eastwards from Gammel Lejre. To the west of Lejre Å, the undulating landscape, with its numerous small, steep hills, small lakes, watercourses and wetlands, presented greater challenges. There was an alternative crossing point about 4 km to the northwest, close to the fjord. Today, this place is called Borrevejle, which means “the ford at the edge” (fig. 16). From Borrevejle, the road led to Gevninge and – via the sunken road to the north of the Viking Age settlement – down to Lejre Å. Here lay the ford Langvad, from where the road ran eastwards, south of Lyngbjerg Mose, towards Kattinge. The fact that the roads around 1800 led towards Kattinge is linked with the opportunity here to cross the system of watercourses and lakes which extended from Gammel Lejre and past Kor­nerup to a lake, Store Kattinge Sø, by Roskilde Fjord. At both ends of the lake there were lock bridges to allow passage. Store Kattinge Sø was originally a bay which was dammed in the High Middle Ages so that the water level today lies at +2.5 m. In Viking times the lock bridges at Store Kattinge Sø did not exist, the amount of water on the Kornerup Å drainage system was therefore less, and the possibilities for passage were decidedly different.The road eastwards from the ford in Gevninge could well have gone via Kattinge and crossed the watercourse between Lille Kattinge Sø and the bay. Around 1800, the road continued through Kongemarken, where a Viking Age inhumation grave, a Christian burial ground from the Late Viking and Early Medieval times, as well as remains of a settlement from the same time, have all been found. From here, the road swings northwards, across Gedevad and onwards to the east to the bishop’s thorp, Bistrup, and the village of Bjerget (St. Jørgensbjerg) with St. Clemens’ church on Roskilde Fjord. Neither of these two settlements can, with certainty, be traced back to before AD 1000. It is therefore an obvious possibility that eastward traffic from Kongemarken took a more southerly route, which – perhaps – is indicated by settlement remains and stray finds between Roskilde and Svogerslev Sø (see fig. 16). In this respect, it is worth mentioning that the two stray finds from Viking times from the Borrevejle area lie in association with the old road routes. Similarly, the small hoard of silver rings from Lyngbjerg Mose was found where the road from Gevninge to Kattinge ran from about 1800.From the above, it is apparent that there were two significant possibilities for the passage of east-west land traffic in the Gevninge-Lejre area. Both have topographic advantages and disadvantages, and identification of one as being more important than the other can be based on no more than a guess. However, inclusion of the waterways does contribute a new angle when addressing this question.The sea route to LejreThe Isefjord complex comprises a western and an eastern branch which both extend more than 35 km inland into Zealand. The western arm, Isefjord, is deep and wide and only has narrow passages around Orø (fig. 17). Despite the fact that Isefjord is the most accessible route from a seaward perspective, it is unlikely to have been the route taken by people travelling to Gammel Lejre. The distance over land to the Isefjord is almost three times as great as the shortest route between Gammel Lejre and Roskilde Fjord, and more than half of this distance comprises gently undulating rough ground with numerous ponds and wetlands.Roskilde Fjord is characterised by narrow navigation channels and variable water depth, but these naturally-determined sailing conditions would not have been a problem for people who knew the fjord. The bay, Lejre Vig, is the place closest to Gammel Lejre. The sea route leading to the bay is protected by a natural feature – a transverse bar, which extends from Bognæs in the south to Selsø in the north. The mouth of Lejre Å is, in topographical terms, a well-suited site for a landing place, but there is a lack of archaeological evidence for the existence of such a feature. Given the lack of a demonstrable landing place by the fjord, attention can be focussed on Lejre Å as being Gammel Lejre’s link with the sea.Streams and rivers as travel routesToday, very few watercourses in Denmark appear as being navigable. A very great proportion of them no longer have a natural appearance or water flow. This is primarily due to intensive efforts during the last 200 years to drain wet meadows and fields. Any evaluation of the navigability of a watercourse in Viking times is associated with a number of variable and, in part, unknown factors. Accordingly, any conclusions are vitiated by a degree of uncertainty, not least in the case of smaller watercourses. The width and depth of the stream or river is decisive in determining the size of vessel which can be navigated. The fall and natural course of a watercourse, which in places is sharply meandering with a variable water depth, will be limiting factors relative to the size of the vessel which is able to pass (fig. 18).The appearance of Lejre Å on maps from the 19th century can give some indication of the conditions prior to the time when drainage and water extraction were initiated. It seems that the course of the stream was relatively straight from its mouth up to Gevninge. However, at Gevninge Church there was a very sharp turn and this is still in existence. To the south of the village, the stream is considerably narrower and substantially more winding. Particularly from Kornerup and southwards towards Gammel Lejre, the course is, in places, strongly meandering. Overall, the stream has a fall from Gammel Lejre to its mouth of 7 m, which corresponds to a gradient of 1‰. The fall is not, however, evenly distributed. From Gammel Lejre, and about 1.5 km down its course, the stream falls 2.79‰, whereas the fall over the next 750 m is 1.31‰. From here to the ford in Gevninge, the fall is 0.5‰, with the last section to the mouth of the river having a fall of 0.34‰. Ole Crumlin-Pedersen has suggested that a watercourse is navigable – all things being equal – as long as the fall is less than 2‰. Alone on this basis, it is unlikely in the past that vessels sailed all the way to Gammel Lejre. It is therefore an obvious possibility that Gevninge was the place where the change was made from waterway to roadway.The distance from Gevninge to Gammel Lejre is 3.7 km by road, as shown on maps from around 1800. The road departs from an area where Viking Age settlement has been excavated and it follows the contours of the landscape in such a way that steep passages are avoided. The route taken by this road, rather than the river, constitutes the probable link between the two places.ConclusionGammel Lejre was not established at some random place in the landscape. With regard to resources, it was a border area between the hamlets of the Eastern Zealand plain and the Central Zealand forest settlements. In addition, it provided a satisfactory, potential crossing point east-west over the steam systems from the south. There is archaeological, legendary and historical evidence showing that Gammel Lejre was a very special place in the Late Iron Age and Viking times. This special position arose from its role as a cultic and power-political centre.The same situation was probably the case at the Tissø complex in Western Zealand, which was established at the beginning of the Late Germanic Iron Age. Tissø lies slightly more than 6 km from the coast, and both its name and finds from the lake demonstrate the cultic significance of the site. Almuth Schülke has pointed out that the Tissø complex lies virtually on an island, with the lake to one side and wetlands and watercourses to the other. Access to Tissø was made difficult by natural barriers in the landscape which conferred exclusiveness and – not least – the possibility of controlling traffic to the settlement.The topographically determined limitations on potential access to Gammel Lejre are not as clear as in the case of the Tissø complex. Watercourses and wetlands to the south and east form a natural border, and the rough ground of the common landscape to the west contains its own obstacles. None of these barriers was insurmountable but they could well have functioned as a border zone around Gammel Lejre. In the area of common from Borrevejle in the north to Ledreborg Castle in the south, a couple of settlements have been demonstrated along with three graves and a few stray finds from the Roman Iron Age. Similarly, in the Middle Ages there were at least five thorps here, which were later abandoned. For the central period relative to Gammel Lejre, the 5th-10th centuries AD, there are no finds from this area. It was not necessarily a conscious choice that the area lay abandoned. The same tendency to abandon poorer soils at the beginning of the Late Iron Age can be seen elsewhere, such as, for example, in Nordskoven at Jægerspris and on Halsnæs at the northernmost part of Roskilde Fjord. Neither is it unusual that areas such as these were then re-occupied for thorp settlement in the Early Middle Ages. This does not, however, change the fact that the area to the west of Gammel Lejre appears to have lain as a wilderness in Viking times. Apart from one artefact with no details of its exact find spot, there are no recorded finds from the Late Iron Age bet­ween the central site and Elverdamsåen, a watercourse lying about 10 km to the west.Access to Gammel Lejre was obviously regulated so that approved people could enter and intruders were held at a distance. Gevninge was a link in this invisible fence. Gevninge is located where roads running east-west meet to avoid Central Zealand’s areas of hilly rough ground, and where watercourses could be crossed relatively unproblematically. Furthermore, Gevninge was a landing place and offloading point for vessels that were able to enter the lower part of Lejre Å. Larger vessels could perhaps have lain at the mouth of the stream or innermost in Lejre Vig, but from here people would anyway have been directed to follow the road from Gevninge to Gammel Lejre.Seen in the light of this situation, Gevninge could have been the home of the Lejre King’s entrusted servant. He not only controlled the traffic through the area and access to Gammel Lejre, he also represented the Lejre king and, on his behalf, received distinguished personages and – who knows – perhaps escorted them to important meetings in the exclusivity of the magnificent hall. With this position in society, Lejre’s gatekeeper probably received gifts of golden rings, magnificent weapons and vessels from Lejre’s pugnacious king.Jens UlriksenRoskilde Museum

Perfect vision for the path ahead? As I write this editorial it seems that once again, we stand on the threshold of yet another significant date. The fortieth anniversary of ISCPES and also that of this journal, that has been the voice of the society’s contribution over that period, has been and gone. This time it is 2020 that looms on the near horizon. It is a date that has long been synonymous with perfect vision. Many may perhaps see this as somewhat ironic, given the themes surrounding change and the directions it has taken, that have been addressed previously in these pages. Perfect vision and the clarity it can bring seem a far cry away from the turbulent world to which we seem to be becoming accustomed. So many of the divisions that we are facing today seem to be internal in nature and far different from the largely: nation against nation; system against system strife, we can remember from the cold war era. The US, for example, seems to be a nation perpetually at war with itself. Democrats v Republicans, deplorables v elites - however you want to label the warring sides - we can construct a number of divisions which seem to put 50% of Americans implacably opposed to the other 50%. In the UK, it has been the divide around the referendum to leave the European Union – the so-called Brexit debate. Nationally the division was 52% to 48% in favour of leaving. Yet the data can be reanalysed in, it seems, countless ways to show the splits within a supposedly ‘United’ Kingdom. Scotland v England, London and the South East v the English regions, young v old are just some of the examples. Similar splits seem to be increasing within many societies. Hong Kong has recently been the focus of world interest We have watched this erstwhile model of an apparently successful and dynamic compromise between two ‘diverse’ systems, appear to tear itself apart on our television screens. Iran, Brazil, Venezuela are just three further examples of longstanding national communities where internal divisions have bubbled to the surface in recent times. These internal divisions frequently have no simple and single fault line. In bygone times, social class, poverty, religion and ethnicity were simple universal indicators of division. Today ways of dividing people have become far more complex and often multi-dimensional. Social media has become a means to amplify and repeat messages that have originated from those who have a ‘gripe’ based in identity politics or who wish to signal to all and sundry how extremely ‘virtuous’ and progressive they are. The new technologies have proved effective for the distribution of information but remarkably unsuccessful in the promotion of communication. This has been exemplified by the emergence and exploitation of Greta Thunberg a sixteen-year-old from Sweden as a spokesperson for the ‘Extinction Rebellion’ climate change lobby. It is a movement that has consciously eschewed debate and discussion in favour of action. Consequently, by excluding learning from its operation, it is cutting itself off from the possibility of finding out what beneficial change will look like and therefore finding a way by which to achieve it. Put simply, it has predetermined its desired goal and defined the problem in inflexible terms. It has ignored a basic tenet of effective problem solving, namely that the key lies in the way you actually frame the problem. Unfortunately, the movement has adopted the polarised labelling strategies that place all humans into the category of either ‘believers’ or ‘deniers’. This fails to acknowledge and deal with the depth and complexity of the problem and the range of our possible responses to it. We are all the losers when problems, particularly given their potential significance, become addressed in such a way. How and where can human behaviour learn to rise above the limits of the processes we see being followed all around us? If leadership is to come, it must surely come from and through a process of education. All of us must assume some responsibility here – and certainly not abdicate it to elite and powerful groups. In other words, we all have a moral duty to educate ourselves to the best of our ability. An important part of the process we follow should be to remain sceptical of the limits of human knowledge. In addition, we need to be committed to applying tests of truth and integrity to the information we access and manage. This is why we form and support learned societies such as ISCPES. Their duty is to test, debate and promote ideas and concepts so that truth and understanding might emerge from sharing and exploring information, while at the same time applying the criteria developed by the wisdom and experience of those who have gone before. And so, we come to the processes of change and disruption as we are currently experiencing them at International Sports Studies. Throughout our history we have followed the traditional model of a scholarly journal. That is, our reason for existence is to provide a scholarly forum for colleagues who wish to contribute to and develop understanding within the professional and academic field of Comparative Physical Education and Sport. As the means of doing this, we encourage academics and professionals in our field to submit articles which are blind reviewed by experts. They then advise the editor on their quality and suitability for publication. As part of our responsibility we particularly encourage qualified authors from non-English speaking backgrounds to publish with us, as a means of providing a truly international forum for ideas and development. Where possible the editorial team works with contributors to assist them with this process. We have now taken a step further by publishing the abstracts in Portuguese, Spanish and Chinese on the website, in order to spread the work of our contributors more widely. Consistent with international changes in labelling and focus over the years, the title of the society’s journal was changed from the Journal of Comparative Physical Education and Sport to International Sports Studies in 1989. However, our aim has remained to advance understanding and communication between members of the global community who share a professional, personal or scholarly interest in the state and development of physical education and sport around the world. In line with the traditional model, the services of our editorial and reviewing teams are provided ex gratia and the costs of publication are met by reader and library subscriptions. We have always offered a traditional printed version but have, in recent years, developed an online version - also as a subscription. Over the last few years we have moved to online editorial support. From 2020 will be adopting the practice of making articles available online immediately following their acceptance. This will reduce the wait time experienced by authors in their work becoming generally available to the academic community. Readers will no doubt be aware of the current and recent turbulence within academic publishing generally. There has been a massive increase in the university sector globally. As a result, there has been an increasing number of academics who both want to and need to publish, for the sake of advancement in their careers. A number of organisations have seen this as providing a business opportunity. Consequently, many academics now receive daily emails soliciting their contributions to various journals and books. University libraries are finding their budgets stretched and while they have been, up until now, the major funders of scholarly journals through their subscriptions, they have been forced to limit their lists and become much more selective in their choices. For these reasons, open access has provided a different and attractive funding model. In this model, the costs of publication are effectively transferred to the authors rather than the readers. This works well for those authors who may have the financial support to pursue this option, as well as for readers. However, it does raise a question as to the processes of quality control. The question arises because when the writer becomes the paying customer in the transaction, then the interests of the merchant (the publisher) can become more aligned to ensuring the author gets published rather than guaranteeing the reader some degree of quality control over the product they are receiving. A further confounding factor in the scenario we face, is the issue of how quality is judged. Universities have today become businesses and are being run with philosophies similar to those of any business in the commercial world. Thus, they have ‘bought into’ a series of key performance indicators which are used to compare institutions one with another. These are then added up together to produce summative scores by which universities can be compared and ranked. There are those of us that believe that such a process belittles and diminishes the institutions and the role they play in our societies. Nonetheless it has become a game with which the majority appear to have fallen in line, seeing it as a necessary part of the need to market themselves. As a result, very many institutions now pay their chief executives (formerly Vice-Chancellors) very highly, in order to for them to optimise the chosen metrics. It is a similar process of course with academic journals. So it is, that various measures are used to categorise and rank journals and provide some simplistic measure of ‘quality’. Certain fields and methodologies are inherently privileged in these processes, for example the medical and natural sciences. As far as we are concerned, we address a very significant element in our society – physical education and sport - and we address it from a critical but eclectic perspective. We believe that this provides a significant service to our global community. However, we need to be realistic in acknowledging the limited and restricted nature of that community. Sport Science has become dominated by physiology, data analytics, injury and rehabilitation. Courses and staff studying the phenomenon of sport and physical education through the humanities and social sciences, seem to be rarer and rarer. This is to the great detriment of the wellbeing and development of the phenomenon itself. We would like to believe that we can make an important difference in this space. So how do we address the question of quality? Primarily through following our advertised processes and the integrity and competence of those involved. We believe in these and will stick with them. However, we appreciate that burying our heads in the sand and remaining ‘king of the dinosaurs’ does not provide a viable way forward. Therefore, in our search for continuing strategy and clear vision in 2020, we will be exploring ways of signalling our quality better, while at the same time remaining true to our principles and beliefs. In conclusion we are advising you, as our readers, that changes may be expected as we, of necessity, adapt to our changing environment while seeking sustainability. Exactly what they will be, we are not certain at the time of going to press. We believe that there is a place, even a demand for our contribution and we are committed to both maintaining its standard and improving its accessibility. Comments and advice from within and outside of our community are welcome and we remain appreciative, as always, of the immense contribution of our international review board members and our supportive and innovative publisher. So, to the contributors to our current volume. Once again, we would point with some pride to the range of articles and topics provided. Together, they provide an interesting and relevant overview of some pertinent current issues in sport and physical education, addressed from the perspectives of different areas across the globe. Firstly, Pill and Agnew provide an update to current pedagogical practices in physical education and sport, through their scoping review of findings related to the use of small-sided games in teaching and coaching. They provide an overview of the empirical research, available between 2006 and 2016, and conclude that the strategy provides a useful means of achieving a number of specific objectives. From Belgium, Van Gestel explores the recent development of elite Thai boxing in that country. He draws on Elias’ (1986) notion of ‘sportization’ which describes the processes by which various play like activities have become transformed into modern sport. Thai boxing provides an interesting example as one of a number of high-risk combat sports, which inhabit an ambiguous area between the international sports community and more marginalised combat activities which can be brutal in nature. Van Gestel expertly draws out some of the complexities involved in concluding that the sport has experienced some of the processes of sportization, but in this particular case they have been ‘slight’ in impact rather than full-blown. Abdolmaleki, Heidari, Zakizadeh XXABSTRACT De Bosscher look at a topic of considerable contemporary interest – the management of a high-performance sport system. In this case their example is the Iranian national system and their focus is on the management of some of the resources involved. Given that the key to success in high performance sport systems would appear to lie in the ability to access and implement some of the latest and most effective technological information intellectual capital would seem to be a critical component of the total value of a competitive high performance sport system Using a model developed by a Swedish capital services company Skandia to model intangible assets in a service based organisation, Abdolmaleki and his associates have argued for the contribution of human, relational and structural capital to provide an understanding of the current place of intellectual capital in the operations of the Iranian Ministry of Sport and Youth. An understanding of the factors contributing to the development of these assets, contributes to the successful operation of any organisation in such a highly competitive and fast changing environment. Finally, from Singapore, Chung, Sufri and Wang report on some of the exciting developments in school based physical education that have occurred over the last decade. In particular they identify the increase in the placement of qualified physical education teachers as indicative of the progress that has been made. They draw on Foucault’s strategy of ‘archaeological analysis’ for an explanation of how these developments came to be successfully put in place. Their arguments strongly reinforce the importance of understanding the social and political context in order to achieve successful innovation and development. May I commend the work of our colleagues to you and wish you all the best in the attempt to achieve greater clarity of vision for 2020!

This article offers a relational analysis of the use of armed drones in the ‘war on terror’. Drawing from Erin Manning’s writings on movement, relations, and the posthuman, I explore how bodies and spaces are read as digitised data in the processes of the drone assemblage, reducing movement to displacement and undoing relations of becoming. The drone’s violence lies in its crippling of bodies’ capacity to respond to their immediate environments and relations. The point of departure for this article is the concept of the ‘virtual’ as drawn out by Manning: the indeterminate potential of movement which moves bodies and relations. My analysis revisits the transcripts of Uruzgan drone attack in Afghanistan in 2010, a case that has been extensively studied in the critical literature on drones to offer conceptions of what it means for the drone to be a posthuman entity. Instead of situating the drone as a posthuman object, I examine it from a posthuman methodology where the focus is on relations, rather than determinate actors or outcomes. My intervention here is twofold: to propose a framework for understanding the drone’s violence in its processes of disrupting and undoing relations, and relatedly to argue for the methodological and theoretical value of the posthuman. Numériser le virtuel: Mouvement et relations dans la guerre des drones

In this article, I trace ‘re-membering’ as a feminist practice in the context of gendered activism under military occupation in Kashmir. Drawing on its anticolonial feminist roots, I conceptualise re-membering as practices that do not simply put together what has been severed or dismembered by coloniality but they also, in doing so, propose different frames of looking. I think through re-membering by focusing on two intertwining sites of gendered and feminist activism in Kashmir: protests that re-member the disappeared and activist representation under military occupation. A feminist analysis of these activist strategies grounded in anticolonial thinking suggests that re-membering in the specificity of its emergence under conditions of heightened control does multivalent work: it contests dominant claims and the coloniality of the Indian state, thereby exposing the continuum of violence including its carceral, psychic, discursive forms that co-constitute and perpetuate the occupation of Kashmir. As such, it insists on accounting for historical and contextual specificities as necessary conditions for imagining an expressly anticolonial feminist politics that can open possibilities of epistemic and political transformation towards knowing Kashmir and people’s struggles differently. It is here that the epistemic potential of re-membering lies: in overturning the terms of conversation as decolonial feminist scholarship has long insisted.

In this article we seek to expand on the developing interest in Slow Violence and how it relates to immigration and asylum, by exploring how such violence is resisted. Following Foucault’s insight that in order to better understand power, it helps to study resistance to it, we draw on original research into acts of protest by refugees and asylum seekers in Scotland, and connect this to existing research on experiences of and resistance to the UK asylum system. In so doing we offer ‘Slow Resistance’ as a potentially useful concept with which to understand resistance not just to a particular configuration of power relations, but to a particular form of violence. The conceptual utility of Slow Resistance lies in its ability to illuminate: the particular operations of power/violence in the UK asylum system; the multiple forms of resistance to this violence/power; how these forms of resistance may be connected (thus discouraging the ‘silo-ing’ of analysing different forms of resistance); and how time is creatively engaged with by such forms of resistance. If, as has been argued, a particular challenge of slow violence is representational – how to devise arresting images and stories adequate to this form of violence – then resistance has the potential to focus our attention on it, and to gradually prepare the ground for meaningful change. While developed here in relation to the UK asylum system, slow resistance is a concept that we think can be useful in a wide range of contexts in which slow violence operates.

This chapter introduced the notion of guerrilla democracy. Theoretically, it is the culmination of the fundamental analysis of the mobility of power and virality of hegemony. These insights build on the last chapter, which focused on the infectious character of hegemonic networks and the possible contagions of counter-hegemonic networks. Specifically, guerrilla democracy is the ability to contagiously reimagine and reconnect the social. It is rooted in a guerrilla ethos of subversion for the purpose of disruptive creation – the effort to undermine and supplant an existent and seemingly more powerful status quo through alternative modes of existence that have the potential to become a viral political pandemic. Its strength lies in its capacity to harness the same dynamism and context – specific adaptability as found in hegemonic epidemics. Further, this guerrilla ethos is joined to a radically democratic politics. More precisely, it is concerned fundamentally with questions of “who counts” and importantly, “how they are counted”. It is an often revolutionary demand to overcome the “deprivation of voice”, here expanded to mean which individuals and group’s views are being marginalised and which potential social connections are being rendered invisible.

This paper investigates the Gülen movement’s repertoires of action in order to determine how it differs from traditional Islamic revivalist movements and from the so-called ‘New Social Movements’ in the Western world. Two propositions lead the discussion: First, unlike many Islamic revivalist movements, the Gülen movement shaped its identity against the perceived threat of a trio of enemies, as Nursi named them a century ago – ignorance, disunity, and poverty. This perception of the opposition is crucial to understanding the apolitical mind-set of the Gülen movement’s fol- lowers. Second, unlike the confrontational New Social Movements, the Gülen movement has engaged in ‘moral opposition’, in which the movement’s actors seek to empathise with the adversary by creating (what Bakhtin calls) ‘dialogic’ relationships. ‘Moral opposition’ has enabled the movement to be more alert strategically as well as more productive tactically in solving the everyday practical problems of Muslims in Turkey. A striking example of this ‘moral opposition’ was witnessed in the Merve Kavakci incident in 1999, when the move- ment tried to build bridges between the secular and Islamist camps, while criticising and educating both parties during the post-February 28 period in Turkey. In this way the Gülen movement’s performance of opposition can contribute new theoretical and practical tools for our understanding of social movements. 104 | P a g e Recent works on social movements have criticized the longstanding tradition of classify- ing social movement types as “strategy-oriented” versus “identity-oriented” (Touraine 1981; Cohen 1985; Rucht 1988) and “identity logic of action” versus “instrumentalist logic of ac- tion” (Duyvendak and Giugni 1995) by regarding identities as a key element of a move- ment’s strategic and tactical repertoire (see Bernstein 1997, 2002; Gamson 1997; Polletta 1998a; Polletta and Jasper 2001; Taylor and Van Dyke 2004). Bifurcation of identity ver- sus strategy suggests the idea that some movements target the state and the economy, thus, they are “instrumental” and “strategy-oriented”; whereas some other movements so-called “identity movements” challenge the dominant cultural patterns and codes and are considered “expressive” in content and “identity-oriented.” New social movement theorists argue that identity movements try to gain recognition and respect by employing expressive strategies wherein the movement itself becomes the message (Touraine 1981; Cohen 1985; Melucci 1989, 1996). Criticizing these dualisms, some scholars have shown the possibility of different social movement behaviour under different contextual factors (e.g. Bernstein 1997; Katzenstein 1998). In contrast to new social movement theory, this work on the Gülen movement indi- cates that identity movements are not always expressive in content and do not always follow an identity-oriented approach; instead, identity movements can synchronically be strategic as well as expressive. In her article on strategies and identities in Black Protest movements during the 1960s, Polletta (1994) criticizes the dominant theories of social movements, which a priori assume challengers’ unified common interests. Similarly, Jenkins (1983: 549) refers to the same problem in the literature by stating that “collective interests are assumed to be relatively unproblematic and to exist prior to mobilization.” By the same token, Taylor and Whittier (1992: 104) criticize the longstanding lack of explanation “how structural inequality gets translated into subjective discontent.” The dominant social movement theory approaches such as resource mobilization and political process regard these problems as trivial because of their assumption that identities and framing processes can be the basis for interests and further collective action but cannot change the final social movement outcome. Therefore, for the proponents of the mainstream theories, identities of actors are formed in evolutionary processes wherein social movements consciously frame their goals and produce relevant dis- courses; yet, these questions are not essential to explain why collective behaviour occurs (see McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald 1996). This reductionist view of movement culture has been criticized by a various number of scholars (e.g. Goodwin and Jasper 1999; Polletta 1997, 1999a, 1999b; Eyerman 2002). In fact, the debate over the emphases (interests vis-à-vis identities) is a reflection of the dissent between American and European sociological traditions. As Eyerman and Jamison (1991: 27) note, the American sociologists focused on “the instrumentality of movement strategy formation, that is, on how movement organizations went about trying to achieve their goals,” whereas the European scholars concerned with the identity formation processes that try to explain “how movements produced new historical identities for society.” Although the social movement theorists had recognized the deficiencies within each approach, the attempts to synthesize these two traditions in the literature failed to address the empirical problems and methodological difficulties. While criticizing the mainstream American collective behaviour approaches that treat the collective identities as given, many leading European scholars fell into a similar trap by a 105 | P a g e priori assuming that the collective identities are socio-historical products rather than cog- nitive processes (see, for instance, Touraine 1981). New Social Movement (NSM) theory, which is an offshoot of European tradition, has lately been involved in the debate over “cog- nitive praxis” (Eyerman and Jamison 1991), “signs” (Melucci 1996), “identity as strategy” (Bernstein 1997), protest as “art” (Jasper 1997), “moral performance” (Eyerman 2006), and “storytelling” (Polletta 2006). In general, these new formulations attempt to bring mental structures of social actors and symbolic nature of social action back in the study of collec- tive behaviour. The mental structures of the actors should be considered seriously because they have a potential to change the social movement behaviours, tactics, strategies, timing, alliances and outcomes. The most important failure, I think, in the dominant SM approaches lies behind the fact that they hinder the possibility of the construction of divergent collective identities under the same structures (cf. Polletta 1994: 91). This study investigates on how the Gülen movement differed from other Islamic social move- ments under the same structural factors that were realized by the organized opposition against Islamic activism after the soft coup in 1997. Two propositions shall lead my discussion here: First, unlike many Islamic revivalist movements, the Gülen movement shaped its identity against perceived threat of the triple enemies, what Nursi defined a century ago: ignorance, disunity, and poverty. This perception of the opposition is crucial to grasp non-political men- tal structures of the Gülen movement followers. Second, unlike the confrontational nature of the new social movements, the Gülen movement engaged in a “moral opposition,” in which the movement actors try to empathize with the enemy by creating “dialogic” relationships.