Abstract: Although great strides have been made toward forecasting state-level instability, little progress has been made toward the prediction of outbreaks of urban unrest. This article presents a method for the assessment of cities' vulnerability to large-scale urban unrest. Forty-five factors correlated with urban unrest are identified and weighted by an expert panel. Based on expert elicitation through an iterative Delphi exercise, the explicitly methodological discussion describes both the process and the resulting assessment framework. Results include a tool that will allow users to rank cities on their vulnerability to large-scale urban unrest.

In a letter dated November 1883, Paul Cambon, the resident minister of France's protectorate of Tunisia, confided to his wife that “if the Capitulations aren't suppressed, we'll find ourselves backed into a corner [nous voilà acculés].” These Capitulations—similar to legal arrangements prevailing in the Ottoman Empire, of which Tunisia had been a semiautonomous province until the French conquest in 1881—granted a number of legal immunities to foreign nationals and holders of foreign “patents of protection.” Why would the senior administrator of France's new protectorate worry about the legal status of nationals belonging to the rival states it had outmaneuvered to win Tunisia? After all, France had just signed a treaty promising to protect the Tunisian bey's dynasty in exchange for the right to “occupy all areas deemed necessary for the reestablishment of order and security of both borders and coastline." The treaty seemed to settle the question of which European state controlled Tunisia. Instead, I will argue, it marked the beginning of a new phase of imperial rivalry, as European powers found novel ways to compete for influence in the protectorate by exploiting fissures in the rule of law. In turn, individuals in Tunisia sought to exercise power over their everyday lives by doing the same, playing the protectorate's multiple jurisdictions off each other to settle quotidian social conflict. These two forms of power struggle did not merely overlap; they were intertwined. Local disputes—between the administration and taxpayers, creditors and debtors, or husbands and wives, among others—exposed and exacerbated divisions between European states.

Abstract

The publication of the "Danish cartoons" generated a continuing conflict between freedom of expression and religious tolerance. The article examines the history of cartoon satire, invoking past examples of racial and religious discrimination in cartoons while emphasizing the important role cartoonists have played in criticizing and checking the exercise of power. The legal implications of the "Danish cartoons" is analyzed through the lens of international human rights law, in particular the concepts of hate speech, racial discrimination and religious defamation. Finally the present movement in the UN towards "cartooning for peace" is promoted.

Terrorism acts as driver for diverse policies of pre-emption, prevention and prediction, including the substantial growth of surveillance. Frequently, terrorism is framed in terms of risk, with certain places,

As one leaves, another enters the fray... Geoff Manaugh, who blogs - famously - at BLDGBLOG, is joining CTlab. He won't be blogging much, but he will be contributing his insights and energies to CTlab as it moves forward. First step: he'll be one of two speakers who make up CTlab's first public event in a few weeks in London. We're looking forward to his dynamism, and to speaking more directly to the architectural niche that he represents. A more detailed write-up on that will follow sometime later today, and Geoff will be posting a brief hello himself, sometime this week.

New: the MIT Media Lab, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London, Kazys Varnelis' Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University, and Eyal Weizmann's Roundtable: Research Architecture at Goldsmith's, University of London.