Greenland was used by the US as a platform and as an extended arm within its security and foreign policy during the World War II and the cold war. After this things changed, although Greenland remained important in Danish-US relations under the umbrella of NATO. Nowadays, the geostrategic position of Greenland between North America and Europe is gaining fresh prominence in the race for natural resources in the Arctic. Many issues arise from the prospective opening of the Arctic, all of which may have fateful impacts on future development in the region. Climate change, claims related to the extension of the continental shelf, exploitation and exploration of natural resources, together with the protection of indigenous peoples are all current issues that must be taken into consideration in the context of security and foreign policy formation in Greenland. The future of the Thule Air Base is also relevant. This article reviews developments from the World War II to the present regarding international relations from a Greenlandic perspective. As a self-governing sub-national territory within the realm of Denmark, Greenland does not have the ultimate decision-making power within foreign and security policy. The new Self-Government Act of 2009, however, gives Greenland some room for manoeuvre in this respect.

This article argues that a one-sided focus on official sources has dominated historical research on urban green space. The absence of the users’ perspective obscures a substantial part of its significance. This article, which aims at complementing rather than contradicting existing research, will show that the different perspectives and practices of city dwellers widen our understanding of the history of urban green spaces. The article will also consider the value of often marginalized, unofficial green spaces like ramparts and wastelands at the urban fringe.

Climate change has been identified as compromising food security in many case studies with Inuit communities in Canada. Largely neglected in the scholarship however, is research focusing on the gendered dimensions of Inuit food security in a changing climate. This paper reports on a community based participatory research project involving semi-structured interviews with Inuit women (n = 42), 10 focus groups (n = 40), key informant interviews (n = 8), and participant observation, to identify and characterise the determinants of food security among Inuit females in the community of Arviat, and examine the role played by climate and climate change. Results indicate that significant changes in climate being observed are not currently affecting female food security, with socio-economic-cultural factors primary determinants of food security. The nature of the traditional food system in Arviat based on harvesting land mammals reduces sensitivity to changing sea ice conditions which have been problematic in other Inuit communities. However, dependence on a limited number of animals for diet (primarily caribou, arctic char) increases sensitivity to potential future disruptions caused by climate change to these species and reduces response diversity as a coping mechanism.

Between 1822 and the late 1830s a highly personal priority dispute was fought between the celebrated surgeon and anatomist Sir Charles Bell and his ex-student Herbert Mayo. The dispute was over the motor and sensory functions of the Vth and VIIth cranial nerves. Over the course of the 1820s and the 1830s, the competing claims of Bell and Mayo were presented in newspapers, journals, and textbooks. But by the time of Bell’s death in 1842, Mayo had been discredited, a seemingly tragic footnote in the history of nervous discovery. And yet, with the benefit of hindsight, Bell’s case was at best disingenuous. His success was not due to any intrinsic scientific merit in his argument, but rather his ability to create a narrative that undermined the credibility of Mayo. However, only when Mayo’s public performances elided with Bell’s descriptions did this ploy succeed. As a result, the dispute illuminates the importance of credibility to the creation of an idealised scientific medical practitioner.

We describe and analyse how Newcastle was transformed from a relatively stagnant British city at the dawn of the nineteenth century to one of the most vibrant cities in the world by the early twentieth century. We use two frameworks to chart and explain this momentous change: Wallerstein's model of hegemonic cycles to locate Newcastle's late development in a world-historical context, and Jacobs’ theory of city economic growth to understand the processes of change within the city and its region. These lead to an empirical focus on three investigations: first, how Newcastle grew geographically to become a multi-nodal city region (Tyneside plus Wearside); second, how the Newcastle city economy grew and developed into a very complex division of labour; and third, how this generated a new modern metropolitan cultural world.

This paper examines the criminalisation of symbols of the past. It considers the 2011 judgment of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal. In this compact and well-ordered decision, the Tribunal, with reference to key European examples, assessed critically the constitutionality of criminal law provisions that prohibit the dissemination and public use of symbols of the past pertaining to fascist, Communist or other totalitarian content. Its ruling, which found amendments to the law in Poland that tightened up restrictions on the use of totalitarian symbols to be unconstitutional, is considered within three important contexts: first, the broad European context, where the concept of totalitarian crimes has become subject to EU human rights legislation relating to the freedom of expression; second, the context of post-dictatorial Europe, where specific states have addressed the use of totalitarian symbols in their respective criminal laws; and finally, the context of transitional justice, where criminalising symbols of the past has become a central and permanent feature in European narratives about justice. Significantly, these cases reveal the temporal element of transitional justice. The paper discusses the two case-studies most relevant to Poland, namely those in Germany and Hungary. Reference is also made to the Baltic States, which, together with Poland, have made a concerted effort to bring the notion of totalitarian crimes and histories to the attention of Europe. The paper concurs with the contention that cases concerning the use of symbols provide an excellent illustration of where memory and law intersect. Using historical, comparative and contextual methodologies the paper demonstrates the legal and philosophical complexities of criminal uses of symbolism, the political realities, and the key dimension of transitional justice and its relationship to expression, law and memory.

This paper surveys recent trends in the development of the sociology of law in Denmark. The overall argument of the paper is that, currently, the sociology of law in Denmark is marked by a striking sociological and more specifically institutional and empirical turn. This new direction in scholarship suggests not only a renewed research focus on the institutional dimensions of law but it also – and very differently from work from the 1980s and 1990s – suggests a re-orientation towards sociology more generally. A clear consequence of this return to the sociological core of the sociology of law has been an empirical orientation towards how law is practised, how legal institutions work and, as part of that, how the legal profession takes part in both legal change and transformations of state and society. This new research relies not only on general sociological theory and method but also on the more specific elite sociology, sociology of professions and sociology of knowledge.

It was a hot afternoon on 10 April 1950, in the town of Chapra in the eastern Indian province of Bihar. As most people had retired indoors to avoid the heat, the women's clothing store run by Kedar Nath had suddenly become a hive of activity. His munib (accountant) had gone home early on receiving news of the sudden illness of his son, and his shop had been visited by the local Magistrate and the Deputy Superintendent of Police, the leading figures in the district administration. The Magistrate, Mr S. K Ghatak, ordered Kedar Nath to open up his stores and make his registers available, and in this process discovered that Nath had twenty-five more saris than were accounted for in the stock register. Kedar Nath's relation protested that the saris had been bought that very morning, and that his munib's unexpected absence had resulted in the stocks not being updated immediately. The district officials were not convinced and Kedar Nath was arrested for not having proper accounts of the clothes in his stock. The district court convicted Kedar Nath for violating the terms of Bihar Cotton, Cloth and Yarn (Control Order) 1948, and the Essential Supplies (Temporary Powers) Act 1946 (ESA), and sentenced him to a fine and a month of rigorous imprisonment.

Using an approach derived from sociological functionalism, this paper proposes a distinctive reconstruction both of the history of constitutionalism and of the changing form of constitutional law in global society. It argues that constitutional norms form adaptive principles for stabilising the inclusionary legal and political functions of society. Classical patterns of legal/political inclusion tended to rely on democratic forms of will formation (constituent power). Contemporary patterns of legal/political inclusion rely, in contrast, on rights. The shift in emphasis from constituent power to rights forms the constitutional foundation for the emerging global political system.