Suchergebnisse

The achievement of a century of "Mahanism" was the Pax Americana that prevailed by the early 1990s. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the United States has sought to sustain the Pax Americana by practicing the "thousand-ship navy" strategy, or "Mullenism," and to expand its command of the sea to the rivers, harbors, and shorelines of other coastal states. Once the idea of the "thousand-ship navy"- now called the Global Maritime Partnership- was embedded at the heart of the 2007 Maritime Strategy (the "Cooperative Strategy"), Mullenism became more acceptable and persuasive. Faced with the rise of a seafaring China, the United States is now consolidating its maritime strategy. Established to realize the landward push of command of the sea, the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command (NECC) is the core operational mechanism of the United States Pacific Command (PACOM) programs Pacific Partnership and Pacific Angel, both of which are incarnations of the Cooperative Strategy. The future of the Cooperative Strategy, or Mullenism, is likely to consist of NECC complexes for shaping the security environment in peacetime, and for the complete obliteration of the enemy from the sea in times of crisis. The United States enjoys a big lead over China in terms of hard power and soft power, and "smart power," which is a combination of the two, enables the U.S. Navy to dexterously insinuate the NECC into regional coastal states to advance Mullenism and pave the way for AirSea Battle, designed to launch a blinding campaign against the battle networks of the Chinese People's Liberation Army. This will ensure that the U.S. Navy has operational freedom of maneuver and command of the waters surrounding China. The United States has quietly started engineering a "NATO at sea" and is confident that it can bring together rival countries such as China, India, and Japan under the single umbrella of a global maritime partnership and maintain peace and stability in the Asia-Pacific. In the future, the United States will continue to adopt a hedging strategy toward China. The Pax Americana may well continue as long as the present incarnation of the Cooperative Strategy or Mullenism stays afloat. (Issues Stud/GIGA)

In Mandarin, the English word 'nature' translates as ' ziran' (自然zìrán) in science, biomedicine and everyday life. At the same time, ziran indexes a second older set of meanings that make little immediate sense in English. Current in many Chinese medical practices as well as in classical Chinese philosophy, these include 'what is spontaneously so' or 'let the character of the self unfold'. In this article we explore how these two families of meaning are related by particular Taiwanese Chinese medical practitioners as they describe how they negotiate the relations between biomedicine and Chinese medicine in daily professional practice. At the same time, inspired by related logic-shifting writing in anthropology, postcolonial studies and postcolonial STS, we draw on the 'art of patterning' (辨證 biàn zhèng) to understand how ziran-nature relations are specified in those accounts. Patterning is the art of specifying the shifting arrangements and misalignments that lead to ill health. Treating this as a way of thinking about ziran-related overlaps between biomedicine and Chinese medicine, we show that patterning attends not to objects 'out there' but to appearances (象xiang, xiàng). Put into use as an STS term of art it therefore shifts the epistemological basis of inquiry because case-stories no longer reveal underlying mechanisms, but instead narrate patterned appearances. One implication of this is that any particular pattern diagnosis lies alongside a galaxy of alternatives that might be equally good to think with. Within the limits set by referential academic conventions, we thus attempt a postcolonial shi (勢)-inflected STS in this paper by resisting the use of a single analytical framework, instead setting different forms of patterning alongside one another.

This paper contributes to debates on urban governance and mobility through a case study of the transformation of public bike sharing schemes in Shanghai (China) from fixed/docked (PBSS 1.0) to flexible/dockless (PBSS 2.0). Based upon stakeholder interviews and observations between 2015 and 2017, we use the concept of a dispositive to foreground two related processes. The first is the reformulation of the governmental dispositive that coalesces around PBSS in Shanghai. We show how the relations within the dispositive shift from more hierarchical, bounded, regulated and state-led to those characterised by a more dispersed, disconnected, horizontal and distant set of social relations. Second, we show how this dispositive both produces and is produced by an emergent environmentality that manifests in a fixed territoriality in PBSS 1.0 and a more fluid and deterritorialised digital environmentality in PBSS 2.0. In framing this shift, we demonstrate how PBSS 2.0 produces a new dispositive of urban governmentality where the conduct of users is dispersed through a much less co-ordinated network of actors and technologies. Ultimately we argue that it is no longer possible to separate physical and virtual mobility when trying to understand the internal dynamics and external manifestations of mobility governance, which in our example are characterised by less localised and less hierarchical relationships that are more fluid, voluntary and physically distant.