The Community And Its Regions

The ‘Year’ That Changed How We View the North This book is about a new theoretical approach that transformed the field of Arctic social studies and about a program called International Polar Year 2007–2008 (IPY) that altered the position of social research within the broader polar science. The concept for IPY was developed in 2003–2005; its vision was for researchers from many nations to work together to gain cro- disciplinary insight into planetary processes, to explore and increase our understanding of the polar regions, the Arctic and Antarctica, and of their roles in the global system. IPY 2007–2008, the fourth program of its kind, followed in the footsteps of its predecessors, the first IPY in 1882–1883, the second IPY in 1932–1933, and the third IPY (later renamed to ‘International Geophysical Year’ or IGY) in 1957–1958. All earlier IPY/IGY have been primarily geophysical initiatives, with their focus on meteorology, atmospheric and geomagnetic observations, and with additional emphasis on glaciology and sea ice circulation. As such, they excluded socio-economic disciplines and polar indigenous people, often deliberately, except for limited ethnographic and natural history collection work conducted by some expeditions of the first IPY. That once dominant vision biased heavily towards geophysics, oceanography, and ice-sheets, left little if any place for people, that is, the social sciences and the humanities, in what has been commonly viewed as the ‘hard-core’ polar research.

This collection examines historical and contemporary social, economic, and environmental impacts of mining on Aboriginal communities in northern Canada. Combining oral history research with intensive archival study, this work juxtaposes the perspectives of government and industry with the perspectives of local communities.

The contributions to this volume analyse the role of sub-national institutions in the regional economic development process in the Community's less developed countries: Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain and Italy. They are structured on the basis of individual country reports providing background to the debate on decentralization in each national context and the regional role in economic development. The volume also contains an extensive analysis of the impact of European Community sectoral policies on the alleviation of regional disparities and an in-depth analysis of the EC's Integrated Mediterranean Programmes on the basis of a systematic content analysis of the programmes and field research conducted on six IMP programmes in Greece, Italy and France.

What are the imagined communities that compel men to kill or to die for an idea of a nation? This notion of nationhood had its origins in the founding of the Americas, but was then adopted and transformed by populist movements in nineteenth-century Europe. It became the rallying cry for anti-Imperialism as well as the abiding explanation for colonialism. In this scintillating, groundbreaking work of intellectual history Anderson explores how ideas are formed and reformulated at every level, from high politics to popular culture, and the way that they can make people do extraordinary things. In the twenty-first century, these debates on the nature of the nation state are even more urgent. As new nations rise, vying for influence, and old empires decline, we must understand who we are as a community in the face of history, and change.