Relational or abyssal? Pugh, Jonathan
Political geography,
June 2022, 2022-06-00, 20220601, Letnik:
96
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Steinberg's excellent AAG Political Geography plenary paper - 'Blue Planet, Black Lives: Matter, Memory, and the Temporalities of Political Geography' - is a powerful illustration of how ocean ...scholars increasingly foreground a relationally entangled world of wet and more-than-wet ontologies. It is within the parameters of a broader 'relational turn', of relational ontologies, that Steinberg sets up the stakes: exploring "how the ontological challenges posed by the ocean's materiality and the porous boundaries of marine ecologies and economies aligns with scholarship emanating from Black and Caribbean thought to rethink the linear histories and unitary identities that underpin modernist narratives". Here, on the one hand, Steinberg encourages relational engagement with "the water's depths, its phenomenological affordances, its absorptive liquidity, its sonic resonances, its blinding darkness, its incessant mobilities (both periodic and chaotic), its lifegiving, and life-taking, molecular structure." On the other, he acknowledges the limits of everything dissolving, maintaining the importance of a political project and subject with directed goals.
Assemblage and geography Anderson, Ben; McFarlane, Colin
Area (London 1969),
06/2011, Letnik:
43, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In this introduction to the special section on 'Assemblage and geography', we reflect on the different routes and uses through which 'assemblage' is being put to work in contemporary geographical ...scholarship. The purpose of the collection is not to legislate a particular definition of assemblage, or to prioritise one tradition of assemblage thinking over others, but to reflect on the multiple ways in which assemblage is being encountered and used as a descriptor, an ethos and a concept. We identify a set of tensions and differences in how the term is used in the commentaries and more generally. These revolve around the difference assemblage thinking makes to relational thought in the context of a shared orientation to the composition of social-spatial formations.
Intimate war Pain, Rachel
Political geography,
January 2015, 2015-01-00, 20150101, Letnik:
44
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Contending that domestic violence and modern international warfare are part of a single complex of violence, this paper identifies their shared intimate dynamics. Both violences operate through ...emotional and psychological registers that are as central to their effectiveness as incidents of direct physical harm. While these dynamics are intimate, they are present across scale, and read here through a feminist lens on intimacy-geopolitics where neither framing has primacy. Research on the connections between domestic violence and international warfare is longstanding, most recently highlighting how intimate violence is produced within warzones. The analysis here begins instead from intimate dynamics, to draw out the warlike nature of domestic violence in peacetime. Tactics of modern warfare are juxtaposed with the dynamics of domestic violence in suburban Scottish homes: shock and awe, hearts and minds, cultural and psychological occupation, just war and collateral damage. Resisting the temptation to regard domestic violence as everyday militarism, the relation is rotated: both violences continuously wind through the intimate-geopolitical. This spatial reconfiguration is structured by gender, race, class, nation and citizenship, resulting in uneven impacts from all kinds of intimate war. The interweaving of military and intimate themes is intended as a casting-off point for progressing political geographies that are attentive to intimacy as foundational in the workings of power across scale.
: Territory is the quintessential state space and appears to be of growing political importance. It is also a key concept in geography, but it has not been subject to as much critical attention as ...related geographical terms and remains under‐theorised. Taking my cue from Timothy Mitchell's suggestion that the state should be understood as the effect of social practices, I argue that the phenomenon that we call territory is not an irreducible foundation of state power, let alone the expression of a biological imperative. Instead, territory too must be interpreted principally as an effect. This “territory‐effect” can best be understood as the outcome of networked socio‐technical practices. Thus, far from refuting or falsifying network theories of spatiality, the current resurgence of territory can be seen as itself a product of relational networks. Drawing on an empirical case study of the monitoring of regional economic performance through the measurement of gross value added (GVA), I show that “territory” and “network” are not, as is often assumed, incommensurable and rival principles of spatial organisation, but are intimately connected.
While the focus on the ‘everyday’ in qualitative human geography has greatly increased the need for, and relevance of, ethnographic methods, Megoran argued that this is particularly true for ...political geography as it has the potential to challenge its focus on elite discourse, allowing researchers to bring forward multiple voices to investigate the becoming of political events. More recently, assemblage theory has gained traction in political geography, not only because of its capability to include the role of the material and the affective, but also revealing the links between micro‐ and macro‐politics by showing how agency emerges out of complex relations. In the first part of this paper, we present an overview of the recent uses of ethnography in political geography that have not embraced assemblage. Second, we explore the theoretical conceptualisations of, and opportunities provided by, an assemblage approach. Third, we go through the use of assemblage ethnographies in political geography, with a particular focus on Pooya's experience of research with Iranians in London. In this, he embraced a variety of ethnographic approaches, including ‘auto‐ethnography’, ‘netnographies’, ‘participant sensation’, in combination with observations, participatory workshops and activism. Showing the role of ethnography as a qualitative tool for political geographers to interrogate discursive social constructions, we argue that it holds even more promise for analysing and intervening in the emergent politics of socio‐material‐affective assemblages.
Precision-strike warfare from a distance is frequently presented as a particularly democratic way of war. Governments of democratic states avoid boots on the ground, as they fear not getting ...re-elected should a war result in many casualties and high economic costs. From the perspective of 'liquid modernity' (Bauman
2000
), where power is uncoupled from the control of territory, liquid warfare, a way of war that eschews territorial confinement and related responsibilities for order-building, should be a tempting option for autocratic states and non-state armed groups (NSAGs), too - if they have the technological means at their disposal. Based on socio-spatial concepts from political geography, this article develops a typology of liquid and solid warfare and probes, whether and how the proliferation of precision-strike technology to Saudi Arabia and the Houthis has influenced the socio-spatial dimension of their warfare in the internationalised Yemeni civil war. The findings suggest that liquid warfare is not necessarily confined to Western, democratic conduct of war, posing the question whether these labels do fit anymore.
Feminist geolegality Brickell, Katherine; Cuomo, Dana
Progress in human geography,
02/2019, Letnik:
43, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
In this paper we outline the case for feminist geolegality, a project that integrates legal geography and feminist geopolitics. The approach captures the myriad ways that law intermeshes with ...intimate corollaries of geopolitics and geoeconomics. It includes yet surpasses scholarship on international lawfare and military conflict to examine intimate wars that law mediates in the more mundane battlefields of everyday life. The body and home act as heuristic sites to review existing work and future trajectories of feminist geolegality. Its significance is marked further by the era of Trumpism, the gendered spatial and temporal legal implications of which are explored.
Abstract
This commentary addresses the dimensions of Russia's ‘spatial anxiety’—its inability to come to terms with the territorial delimitations of neighbouring states and, consequently, the ...preoccupation of mainstream political geography with the study of Russia‐centric territorial representations. Although geographical inquiry contributed substantially to understanding Russian territorial politics, most studies are often reduced to an analysis of the official Russian geographical canon. The purpose of this commentary is to unpack these disciplinary approaches by drawing attention to the local, indigenous and peasant geographies that the statist perspectives have unearthed and utilised, while at the same time accentuating the two assumptions that this project might imply—on the re‐territorialisation of the federation and the decolonisation of Russian area studies.
Short Abstract
This commentary addresses the dimensions of Russia's ‘spatial anxiety’ by drawing attention to the local, indigenous and peasant geographies that the statist geographical canon has unearthed and utilised. This involves paying special attention to the two assumptions that this project might imply—on the re‐territorialisation of the federation and the decolonisation of Russian area studies.
Taxation in general and tax evasion in particular are inherently geographical in nature, but only a small number of geographers have focused on them. In this progress report I present geographers’ ...research on offshore financial centres alongside the work of researchers from other disciplines to present an overview of what we know about the geographies of tax evasion and avoidance. It is argued that not only much regulatory work but also much research remains to be done on tax havens.
This article reviews, synthesizes, and extends the theoretical underpinnings of existing research on state-diaspora relations, highlighting the fragmented, case-study oriented and a-theoretical ...nature of most existing work in this area, emphasizing the need to compare and theorize state-diaspora relations and suggesting topics and methods through which this can be done. First we describe the range of phenomena under examination and review the various strands of literature informing this area of research. From there we discuss the contribution of this special section of Political Geography and point the way towards a future research agenda that includes a comparative dimension, employs quantitative and qualitative methods, and engages theoretical debates in relation to policy diffusion, governance and norm formation.
•Reviews and extends the theoretical underpinnings of research on state-diaspora relations.•Emphasizes the need for comparative research and new theoretical insights in the study of diaspora policies.•Proposes a research agenda that addresses the gaps in the literature on state-diaspora relations and identifies new areas for empirical and theoretical work.
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