Scholars, practitioners and activists generally agree that investor interest in land has climbed sharply, although they differ about what to call this phenomenon and how to analyse it. This ...introduction discusses several contested definitional, conceptual, methodological and political issues in the land grab debate. The initial 'making sense' period drew sweeping conclusions from large databases, rapid-appraisal fieldwork and local case studies. Today research examines financialisation of land, 'water grabbing', 'green grabbing' and grabbing for industrial and urbanisation projects, and a substantial literature challenges key assumptions of the early discussion (the emphasis on foreign actors in Africa and on food and biofuels production, the claim that local populations are inevitably displaced or negatively affected). The authors in this collection, representing a diversity of approaches and backgrounds, argue the need to move beyond the basic questions of the 'making sense' period of the debate and share a common commitment to connecting analyses of contemporary land grabbing to its historical antecedents and legal contexts and to longstanding agrarian political economy questions concerning forms of dispossession and accumulation, the role of labour and the impediments to the development of capitalism in agriculture. They call for more rigorous grounding of claims about impacts, for scrutiny of failed projects and for (re)examination of the longue durée, social differentiation, the agency of contending social classes and forms of grassroots resistance as key elements shaping agrarian outcomes.
The politics of sustainability transitions Avelino, Flor; Grin, John; Pel, Bonno ...
Journal of environmental policy & planning,
10/2016, Letnik:
18, Številka:
5
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Sustainability transitions are processes of fundamental social change in response to societal challenges (Grin, Rotmans, & Schot, 2010 Grin, J., Rotmans, J., & Schot, J. (2010). Transitions to ...sustainable development; new directions in the study of long term transformative change. New York, NY: Routledge.; Markard, Raven, & Truffer, 2012 Markard, J., Raven, R., & Truffer, B. (2012). Sustainability transitions: An emerging field of research and its prospects. Research Policy, 41(6), 955–967. They reflect a particular diagnosis of persistent social problems, in which persistence is attributed to the path dependency of dominant practices and structures (i.e. ‘regimes’), whose resolution requires structural and long-term change. By their nature, transitions involve politics in the broadest sense of the word. This Special Issue reasserts the conviction that the politics of transitions warrants more attention and better integration in transition studies and the papers included here cast light on this from a range of fields, including environmental governance, post-structuralist theories, political science, policy studies, science and technology studies, practice theory, political geography and development studies. This disciplinary diversity reflects the wide-ranging and multi-dimensional nature of transitions, anchored in the concept of politics typified by Leftwich.
This article proposes a framework for considering materiality in the field of geopolitics: assemblage and complexity theories. Drawing on literatures beyond the field to imagine a posthuman ...geopolitics, this article argues for a relational ontology that emphasizes the complex interactions among the elements of an assemblage. These interactions produce emergent effects which themselves reshape the assemblage’s elements. This has implications for understandings of agency, subjectivity, and systemic change. The article concludes by highlighting the methodological and ethical challenges that such a project would face.
This study is the first to measure urban-rural electoral divides in a way that facilitates comparisons beyond majoritarian democracies of the UK and North America. Based on national election results ...at the lowest available geographic level in fifteen countries covering roughly five decades, we present a measure for each election and political party, enabling comparisons over time and between countries with different electoral and party systems. We show that long-term increases in urban-rural divides have been most pronounced in the US, the UK, and Canada, but these divides have also emerged in several European multiparty systems in recent decades, largely because of growing smaller parties with predominantly urban or rural support. Overall urban-rural electoral divides remain lower in these systems due to continued presence of mainstream parties with geographically diverse support. Our contribution paves the way for a comparative research agenda on causes and consequences of urban-rural electoral polarization.
While Michael Billig’s ‘banal nationalism’ points to the significance of the trivial reproduction of national representations in everyday routines, feminist political geographers have highlighted how ...the nation is brought into being through embodied and emotional practices. Building upon and extending these notions of the nation as represented and embodied, the paper argues that the nation also takes shape through bodily encounters and joyful as well as painful affections. In what we call ‘affective nationalism’, the nation emerges in moments of encounter between different bodies and objects through embodying, sharing, enjoying or disliking what feels national. We combine a Deleuzian reading of affect that discloses the mechanisms of material becomings with feminist scholarship sensitive to how bodies affect and are affected differently by materially produced nationalisms. Based on ethnographic field research in Azerbaijan, which we present in three vignettes, we untangle the affective becoming of national bodies, objects and places during a publicly staged ceremony of the collective remembrance of martyr and the celebration of a national holiday within the realm of a family. The paper makes two contributions to researching affective nationalism. First, it enquires into how people identify with Azerbaijan through their capacities to affect and to be affected by what feels national and, second, it explores how affective nationalism can be captured through vignettes of affective writing.
Abstract Objective The purpose of this article is to examine what drives individual attitudes toward their governor with a focus on the role of place attachment as a means of diffuse support. Methods ...Using original surveys from March and May 2020, we test the role of place attachment in explaining gubernatorial approval. Results We find state or place attachment is a strong predictor of gubernatorial approval especially among individuals who live in a state with a governor from the other party. Conclusion State attachment can be an important and unique influence on political attitudes toward state politics.
Political Geography and the environment Benjaminsen, Tor A.; Buhaug, Halvard; McConnell, Fiona ...
Political geography,
January 2017, 2017-01-00, 20170101, Letnik:
56
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Ever since its inception in 1982, Political Geography has stressed breadth in the journal's understanding of the subdiscipline. Over the years, concern for disciplinary breadth has been joined by ...concern for geographic and linguistic breadth as the journal has sought to incorporate quality works from beyond the Anglo-American Global North that has long provided the bulk of the journal's content. Over the past decade, several of the editorials that open each January volume of the journal have reminded readers (and ourselves) of these goals: in the past 10 years, appeals to topical, geographic, or linguistic diversity have played a prominent role in four such editorials (Buhaug, McConnell, Sharp, Sidaway, & Steinberg, 2016; O'Loughlin, Raento, Sidaway, & Steinberg, 2011, 2012, 2008).
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