Explore the vast range of titles available.

The next indication that the dominant discourse of reconstruction was shifting was noted in the Seattle Times of 23 January 2003, with U.S. Secretary of State, Colin Powell's denial that the U.S. was interested in using Iraqi oil to pay for the war or the damages the U.S. military would inflict on the country's infrastructure. Secretary of State Colin Powell \"insisted yesterday that the United States has no plans to claim Iraq's oil fields or use its petroleum revenue to recoup the cost of a possible war or for post-war reparations, saying proceeds would be held 'in trust' for ordinary Iraqis.\" The suggestion that the oil revenues will be used or will not be used by the U.S. comes to the foreground during the following six weeks, most notably again in Newsday on 12 March when U.S. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld stated that \"the money to administer Iraq after a war could come not only from the United States but also from seized Iraqi assets, the oil-for-food sanctions program, and donations from other countries... It's not as if the country is destitute.\" Here it is clear that there is either internal disagreement within the Bush Administration, or could note a shift in U.S. policy on who and what will pay for reconstruction in Iraq. Probably the most explicitly critical report is published a mere 48 hours prior to the beginning of the U.S. war against Iraq. The Guardian (17 March) suggests that \"nobody has yet been so cynical as to suggest that the U.S. will devastate Iraq to benefit the U.S. companies, yet the language being used behind the scenes suggests such thoughts may have crossed minds usually sceptical enough to dismiss such outrageous conspiracies.\" Another report indicates that U.S. development agencies are affected by the shift in reconstruction discourse. A USAID representative \"said the U.S. [reconstruction contract] process was technically open to outsiders, but that in this case there were sufficient interested [U.S.] companies to render that unnecessary.\" The Guardian rephrases the rhetoric: \"As the American tanks leave, the American bulldozers move in to repair a shattered country.\" The perpetrators of destruction are now conveniently in charge of reconstruction and contracts will reward supporters of the destruction. Although this analysis denotes a shift in U.S. reconstruction discourse, it may also indicate a global phenomenon. Indeed, the U.S.-led Iraqi government will implement an infrastructural and societal reconstruction plan funded by Iraqi oil revenues and catered to U.S. reconstruction corporations. This system allows for the U.S. military to destroy particular Iraqi infrastructure, and likely, for the new Pentagon Office to claim the reconstruction projects to be completed by U.S. businesses. In fact, reconstruction will now be delivered by militaries and corporations vying for lucrative contracts rather than by the international humanitarian community. Such a collaborationist system becomes problematic within the understanding that post-war reconstruction has traditionally been applied as first, humanitarian aid, and then second, as economically beneficial to the agencies involved, as well as for the civilians in war-torn societies.

None need to be reminded of the impact of the ravages of war. Peoples, economies, and political systems all suffer, as do many material icons of cultural heritage. Throughout history, revered monuments and shrines, buildings and sites with historical, aesthetic, or scientific value are destroyed. And often they are deliberately targeted in an attempt at destroying identities. Indeed, identicide and cultural cannibalism are diagnostic features of war, ancient and modem.(1) Some societies have gone to great lengths to erase all traces of other cultures from their landscapes. Sacred sites have been despoiled. Vernacular places have been destroyed, and visual prompts of cultural identity have been elided from familiar places. Paradoxically, this has taken place in Bosnia and Afghanistan even as the rest of the world attempts to preserve and protect sites of cultural heritage as part of our shared patrimony. This paper is concerned with the intentional destruction of symbolic landscapes during warfare. Two extraordinary cases of identicide and cultural cannibalism in recent years were the purposeful destruction of the Bridge of Mostar in Bosnia and the bombing of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan. The impact of war on cultural heritage has spurred a global heritage protection movement.(16) The Western World has been concerned with the protection of cultural property for more than a century. The Lieber Code (1864) and the Brussels Declaration (1874) led to The Hague Convention, which in 1907 adopted the \"laws and customs of land warfare.\"(17) This protocol set out the rules of warfare and the protection of PoWs, civilian populations--and cultural property. Subsequently, the League of Nations codified the protection of cultural property, but it was not until 1946 that the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) took over the protection mandate of the League of Nations and concentrated on peacetime protection. In 1954, The Hague Convention approved the \"protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict.\" Further, the UNESCO convention of 1972 encourages signatories to protect their natural and cultural heritage by promoting international co-operation in conservation, providing technical assistance, and offering emergency assistance for world heritage sites in immediate danger.(18) Since 1946, UNESCO has sponsored the identification, protection, and preservation worldwide of cultural and natural heritage considered to be of outstanding value to humanity. To date, 190 states parties have signed the UNESCO convention. (1) Identicide is the act of destroying vernacular and symbolic place during war with the intention of erasing cultural identity and a sense of social belonging, see Sarah Meharg, Making It and Breaking It and Making It Again: The Importance of Identity in the Destruction and Reconstruction of War-torn Societies, (1999). Further, cultural cannibalism is the intentional elimination of symbolism representing a culture, perceived as threatening or contested. It could be argued that identicide and cultural cannibalism are, in fact, conceptually the same, but one distinction must be made. That is, identicide occurs when groups contest and aim to destroy one another's places of identity, while cultural cannibalism is a diagnostic tool for the destruction of shared world culture and heritage for immediate political, religious, or ideological goals. The Taliban, for example, are aiming to destroy a contested Buddhist landscape impregnated with historical Afghan significance to reach the short-term goal of creating a pure Islamic state. They are in fact, destroying shared cultural patrimony, and cannibalizing culture.

This thesis is concerned with the intentional destruction of landscapes of identity during warfare and their post-war reconstruction. The concepts in this project are situated within the context of the geography of place and within the constructs of the notion of landscape as a cultural practice in creating and supporting a sense of identity. The targeting of landscapes of identity during warfare, identicide, is of utmost interest to this study because it is a diagnostic feature of contemporary warfare employed by belligerents against contested symbols within landscapes of identity. The complex outcomes of the effects of conflict upon people and their lived-in landscapes are something with which geography is concerned. This study examines how the link between people and their places strengthens identities, and in particular, the destruction of this link during contemporary armed warfare that can lead to trauma and a sense of anomie. Moreover, the applicable laws and standards that offer protection to cultural landscapes are explored and some insights are offered regarding why such destruction continues with impunity. In the event of war, it can be argued that landscape has four dominant layers. First, the pre-war landscape that exists prior to the onset of armed conflict. Second, the war-ravaged landscape which exists during the throes of aggression. Third, the post-war landscape of emergency reconstruction, third-party intervention, and the ruins of culture appears. Lastly, a layer of territorialized spaces emerge that are, in part, created by particularistic foreign groups aiming to further homogenize the lived-in landscape. The implications of post-war reconstruction of such landscapes become a complex issue for groups that provide the materials, expertise, and resources for long-term, post-war peace and stability. International Community involvement in the Balkans, specifically in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is examined to understand current post-war reconstruction policies and praxis. Moreover, third-party involvement, a sort of humanitarian neo-colonialism, contributes to the sponsored reconstruction of post-war cultural landscapes, particularly noted by the territorialization of place after contemporary armed warfare. This study raises the notion of terrains of opportunity created by warfare but appropriated by the pathologies of nationalism and fundamentalism that tend to polarize the landscape to produce the problematic fourth layer of landscape. Three case studies illuminate these theoretical implications: the Sarajevo National and University Library, Bosnia and Herzegovina; the Bridge of Mostar, Bosnia-Herzegovina; and the Old Town of Dubrovnik, Croatia. Each demonstrates that the International Community's post-war reconstruction praxis hinges upon economy-building motives, despite the conciliatory discourse permeating the projects. Although the three cases are situated within the former Yugoslavia, the theories of identicide and the territorialization of landscapes after war can be sensitively applied to war-torn societies beyond the Balkans.

For thousands of years, the library represented a fortress of closely guarded knowledge, a private citadel of information that its builders viewed as both precious and dangerous. Among the foremost targets of a conquering army would be a great city’s library—to be either carried away as booty or put to the torch, in an effort to tear the heart from an alien civilization.

Identicide is the conscious intent to destroy the physical manifestations of a society in order to destroy cultural identity and to erase any signs of previous existence. When a community is affected by identicide, and significant cultural places and symbols are destroyed, there is a weakening of cultural identity because the cues of being have been altered or destroyed and disorientation and disassociation result. The salience of place-making in war-torn societies is key to the reconstruction process of cultural identity. This thesis examines how people and cultures construct identity through place-making, and also, how people are able to deconstruct it, through place-breaking. Damage to cultural identity can occur in times of war, and a case study of the Bridge of Mostar, Bosnia is used to illustrate the use of identicide and the subsequent reconstruction of identity. Policies concerning war-time protection and the protection of cultural property are examined. Identicide is a profane war tool dealing damage to civilian life. The systematic and deliberate intentions behind this war strategy are highlighted. Conclusions are made regarding the usefulness of reconstructing place in order to reconstruct cultural identity in war-torn societies. The merging of hard and soft reconstruction practices is identified as a new methodology in post-war reconciliation.

Sex chromosomes in cannabis and hop were identified a century ago because of their obvious visible differences in size (heteromorphy). However, we know little about the genes they contain that control the development of the inflorescences. Here we assembled genomes, with phased sex chromosomes, for hop and cannabis. The XY chromosomes share an origin prior to the divergence between the genera >36 MYA. Due to the inheritance patterns of the XYs, the male-specific region of the Y is highly-degenerated, with substantial gene loss, while the X shows faster rates of molecular evolution. Consistent with the theory that these species lack an active-Y system, no clear sex-determining genes reside on the Y. Instead, an X-linked homolog of aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate synthase ( ), that is involved in the ethylene biosynthesis pathway, determines the fate of the female inflorescence. Beyond sex determination, the sex chromosomes contribute to the sexual dimorphism in ecology and physiology and have played a role in the domestication and breeding of these species.

Hybridization is a major force driving diversification, migration, and adaptation in Quercus species. While population genetics and phylogenetics have traditionally been used for studying these processes, advances in sequencing technology now enable us to incorporate comparative and pan-genomic approaches as well. Here we present a highly contiguous, chromosome-scale and haplotype-resolved genome assembly for the southern live oak, Quercus virginiana, the first reference genome for section Virentes, as part of the American Campus Tree Genomes (ACTG) program. Originating from a clone of Auburn University’s historic “Toomer’s Oak,” this assembly contributes to the pool of genomic resources for investigating recombination, haplotype variation, and structural genomic changes influencing hybridization potential in this clade and across Quercus. It also provides insights into the architecture of the putative centromeric regions within the genus. Alongside other oak references, the Q. virginiana genome will support research into the evolution and adaptation of the Quercus genus.

Ancient heteromorphic sex chromosomes are common in mammals, but not in plants. Sex chromosomes in the plant family Cannabaceae, which includes species like hops and hemp, were identified a century ago because of their obviously heteromorphic XYs. However, we know very little about their structure, nor their role in the development of the economically, medicinally, and culturally important flowers. Here we assembled genomes, with phased sex chromosomes, for three XY male hops (Humulus sp.), two XY male Cannabis, and two monoecious Cannabis individuals. Most of the non-recombining regions evolved prior to the divergence between Cannabis and Humulus around 47 MYA supporting this sex chromosome origin is among the oldest known in flowering plants. The Y chromosomes are highly-degenerate, with very few genes remaining, and show substantial rearrangements, while the X also shows faster rates of molecular evolution. The Cannabaceae sex chromosomes contain critical genes for flower development and the production of key compounds like bitter acids and cannabinoids, which are important traits for the plants. The sex chromosomes thus have played a vital role in the domestication and breeding of these species, and more generally, the Cannabaceae family.Competing Interest StatementD.V. is a board member of the 501(C)3 non-profit Agricultural Genomics Foundation and the sole owner of the company CGRI, LLC