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Geographical Dimension (geographical + dimension)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences66%

Selected Abstracts

THE GEOGRAPHICAL DIMENSIONS OF AL-QA'IDA RHETORIC

GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW, Issue 3 2005
JOSEPH J. HOBBS
ABSTRACT. This article examines the geographical ideology of al-Qa'ida. The central questions are to what extent al-Qa'ida terrorism is motivated by a desire to control geographical space, and how the organization defines that space as place in its communiqués. The study also asks whether al-Qa'ida's geographical rhetoric reveals the nature or locations of future attacks. Principal sources are statements and interviews by and with al-Qa'ida leaders. al-Qa'ida classifies distinctive geographical realms of legitimization, preparation, and action. Its geographical concerns and ambitions are hierarchical and based principally on perceptions of sacred space. The holy places of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem are the cornerstones of a greater Islamic holy land that al-Qa'ida seeks to rid of non-Islamic-especially U.S. and "Zionist"-elements and replace with a new caliphate. Terrorism directed principally against American civilians in the United States is one of the main tactics by which al-Qa'ida says it hopes to achieve its goals in geographical space. [source]

Revolting Geographies: Urban Unrest in France

GEOGRAPHY COMPASS (ELECTRONIC), Issue 5 2007
Mustafa Dikeç
This article provides an account of urban unrest in France, with particular emphasis on the revolts of 2005 in the banlieues. It looks at some of the reasons behind the revolts, including social disadvantage, discrimination, repression, and the tensions arising from France's alleged universalism, colonial history and post-colonial present. Then, by putting the 2005 revolts in context and comparing them to previous incidents, it points to their distinctive geographical dimension. This geographical focus shows that there is a constantly expanding geography of revolts, that this geography overlaps with geographies of inequalities, discrimination and repression, and suggests that there is a logic of resistance behind the revolts. [source]

The voice of historical biogeography

JOURNAL OF BIOGEOGRAPHY, Issue 2 2001
Jorge V. Crisci
Historical biogeography is going through an extraordinary revolution concerning its foundations, basic concepts, methods, and relationships to other disciplines of comparative biology. There are external and internal forces that are shaping the present of historical biogeography. The external forces are: global tectonics as the dominant paradigm in geosciences, cladistics as the basic language of comparative biology and the biologist's perception of biogeography. The internal forces are: the proliferation of competing articulations, recourse to philosophy and the debate over fundamentals. The importance of the geographical dimension of life's diversity to any understanding of the history of life on earth is emphasized. Three different kinds of processes that modify the geographical spatial arrangement of the organisms are identified: extinction, dispersal and vicariance. Reconstructing past biogeographic events can be done from three different perspectives: (1) the distribution of individual groups (taxon biogeography) (2) areas of endemism (area biogeography), and (3) biotas (spatial homology). There are at least nine basic historical biogeographic approaches: centre of origin and dispersal, panbiogeography, phylogenetic biogeography, cladistic biogeography, phylogeography, parsimony analysis of endemicity, event-based methods, ancestral areas, and experimental biogeography. These nine approaches contain at least 30 techniques (23 of them have been proposed in the last 14 years). The whole practice and philosophy of biogeography depend upon the development of a coherent and comprehensive conceptual framework for handling the distribution of organisms and events in space. [source]

DNA barcoding Central Asian butterflies: increasing geographical dimension does not significantly reduce the success of species identification

MOLECULAR ECOLOGY RESOURCES, Issue 5 2009
VLADIMIR A LUKHTANOV
Abstract DNA barcoding employs short, standardized gene regions (5' segment of mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I for animals) as an internal tag to enable species identification. Prior studies have indicated that it performs this task well, because interspecific variation at cytochrome oxidase subunit I is typically much greater than intraspecific variation. However, most previous studies have focused on local faunas only, and critics have suggested two reasons why barcoding should be less effective in species identification when the geographical coverage is expanded. They suggested that many recently diverged taxa will be excluded from local analyses because they are allopatric. Second, intraspecific variation may be seriously underestimated by local studies, because geographical variation in the barcode region is not considered. In this paper, we analyse how adding a geographical dimension affects barcode resolution, examining 353 butterfly species from Central Asia. Despite predictions, we found that geographically separated and recently diverged allopatric species did not show, on average, less sequence differentiation than recently diverged sympatric taxa. Although expanded geographical coverage did substantially increase intraspecific variation reducing the barcoding gap between species, this did not decrease species identification using neighbour-joining clustering. The inclusion of additional populations increased the number of paraphyletic entities, but did not impede species-level identification, because paraphyletic species were separated from their monophyletic relatives by substantial sequence divergence. Thus, this study demonstrates that DNA barcoding remains an effective identification tool even when taxa are sampled from a large geographical area. [source]

Geographies of the financial crisis

AREA, Issue 1 2009
Manuel Aalbers
Real estate is, by definition, local as it is spatially fixed. Mortgage lending, however, has developed from a local to a national market and is increasingly a global market today. An understanding of the financial crisis is ultimately a spatialised understanding of the linkages between local and global. This article looks at the geographies of the mortgage crisis and credit crunch and asks the question: how are different places affected by the crisis? The article looks at different states, different cities, different neighbourhoods and different financial centres. Investors in many places had invested in residential mortgage backed securities and have seen their value drop. Housing bubbles, faltering economies and regulation together have shaped the geography of the financial crisis on the state and city level in the US. Subprime and predatory lending have affected low-income and minority communities more than others and we therefore not only see a concentration of foreclosures in certain cities, but also in certain neighbourhoods. On an international level, the long-term economical and political consequences of this are still mostly unknown, but it is clear that some financial centres in Asia (including the Middle East) will become more important now that globalisation is coming full circle. This article does not present new empirical research, but brings together work from different literatures that all in some way have a specific angle on the financial crisis. The aim of this article is to make the geographical dimensions of the financial crisis understandable to geographers that are not specialists in all , or even any , of these literatures, so that they can comprehend the spatialisation of this crisis. [source]