Recent work in political geography and Marxist, critical political economy has
refocused attention on the interrelations between political economy and
geopolitics. This paper examines the ...contributions of Antonio Gramsci to the
theory of geopolitical economy and the production of territory. Doing so enables
two key insights. First, explaining the production of territory requires
unraveling multiple—sometimes competing—levels of geopolitical and geoeconomic
power relations. It follows that geopolitical economy requires historicizing the
practices of territorialization. The second point is that the practice of
territorialization is today everywhere bound up with the project of producing
and reproducing capitalist (i.e. class) social relations, including the
capitalist form of the state as a social relation. To support this claim, we
examine recent US–China hegemonic competition in regional, geoeconomic
strategies—US’s “Trans-Pacific Partnership” and China’s “One Belt, One Road”
Initiative.
In recent years, the U.S. military-intelligence community has shown a growing interest in human geography. This article examines the available literature to consider this trend. I contend that the ...growing military-intelligence use of human geography, both as a concept and as a practice, deserves critical scrutiny. Although military involvement in geographical research is a long-standing and well-recognized fact, the growing emphasis on human geography per se marks a notable shift: not only a change in terminology-from anthropology of human terrain to human geography and geospatial intelligence-but also a shift in underlying military strategy and concepts. Because this shift has potentially profound implications for the discipline, substantive debate over the military's employment of human geography is urgently needed.
The debate concerning replicable scientific research has reached geography's shores. This has exposed old fault lines in our discipline, because some forms of geographical inquiry are more amenable ...to replicability than others. If there is a corner of the discipline that seems especially ill-suited to replicability, it is critical human geography. Almost no work in the subfield exhibits the combination of qualities-explicit and replicable methods; large, numerical data sets; full reporting-that enable reproducibility. Should we care? Although the inability of critical human geographers to reproduce our research results does not constitute a crisis, it is a matter worthy of reflection. Even if it proves difficult to realize, the challenge of designing replicable research promises to generate insights into the relative rigor of our disciplinary practices. Moreover, by clarifying the limits on replicability in social inquiry, we should be better positioned to weigh and mediate between competing values, for instance, the potential conflict between the principle of scientific integrity and the protection of vulnerable research subjects. I contend that producing a rigorous and reproducible geographical research, while also respecting the dignity of subaltern social groups, would require significant changes to standard research practice. To flesh out these claims, I offer concise reflections on the literature from critical human geography research with subaltern social groups.
ABSTRACT
In 2013 there was a spike in the illegal export of rosewood, a highly‐valued tropical hardwood, from Belize. Hewn by Maya workers at night, logs were sold to Chinese buyers. Although ...protected by international conservation agreements, container‐loads of rosewood were exported unprocessed, unmarked and untaxed. This article examines the rosewood exports, providing a critical analysis that seeks its underlying causes and lessons for development. Drawing on extensive archival research, interviews with multiple actors, and data on China's rosewood imports, the authors show that the exports reflect a long‐standing pattern: the extraction and export of unprocessed primary commodities from Belize's forests. However, contemporary patterns are not simply repeating colonial history. On the demand side, the recent rosewood boom was triggered by a rapid rise in demand from urban, middle‐class consumers in China, stimulating a new commodity chain. On the supply side, the ‘rosewood crisis’ was facilitated by a peculiar legal‐political conjuncture: it occurred during a period after the Maya communities had won legal rights to their forests through the courts, but before the state had recognized those rights. Thus the incomplete recognition of indigenous land rights collided with long‐standing patterns of forest extractivism and explosive demand in China.
In the face of climate change, along what path might we attempt transformation that could create a just and livable planet? Recently we proposed a framework for anticipating the possible ...political-economic forms that might emerge as the world's climate changes. Our framework outlines four possible paths; two of those paths are defined by what is called "Leviathan," the emergence of a form of planetary sovereignty. In this article we elaborate by examining the adaptive character of emergent planetary sovereignty. To grasp this, we need a theory that can see through our ostensibly "postpolitical" moment to grasp not the disintegration but the adaptation of the political. What does it mean to say the political adapts? Reduced to its essence, it is to say that if the character of political life prevents a radical response to crisis, then it is the political that must change. A materialist attempt to elaborate on this question must begin by reflecting on the manifest inequalities of power in the current mode of global political-economic regulation. After doing so, we conclude by arguing for a return to the concept of natural history.
The post‐development school associated with the thought of Arturo Escobar treats development as a discursive invention of the West, best countered by ethnographic attention to local knowledge of ...people marginalised by colonial modernity. This approach promises paths to more equitable and sustainable alternatives to development. Post‐development has been criticised vigorously in the past. But despite its conceptual and political shortcomings, it remains the most popular critical approach to development and is reemerging in decolonial and pluriversal guises. This paper contends that the post‐development critique of mainstream development has run its course and deserves a fresh round of criticism. We argue that those committed to struggles for social justice must critically reassess the premises of post‐development and especially wrestle with the problem of representation. We contend that Gayatri Spivak's work is particularly important to this project. We review some of Spivak's key texts on capitalism, difference, and development to clarify the virtues of her approach.
Resumen
El pos‐desarrollo, la corriente de pensamiento asociada con Arturo Escobar, trata el desarrollo como una invención discursiva de Occidente, la cual es contrarrestada de mejor forma a través de la atención etnográfica a saberes locales de los pueblos marginalizados por la modernidad colonial. Este enfoque ofrece alternativas al desarrollo que son más equitativas y sustentables. El pos‐desarrollo ha sido criticado rotundamente en las últimas décadas. Pero, a pesar de sus deficiencias conceptuales y políticas, sigue siendo la crítica más popular al desarrollo y está resurgiendo en teorías decoloniales y de pluriverso. Este trabajo plantea que la corriente de pos‐desarrollo como crítica del desarrollo dominante ha sido agotada, y que el desarrollo merece una nueva mirada crítica. Proponemos que los comprometidos con las luchas por justicia social deben revisar las premisas del pos‐desarrollo y lidiar especialmente con la representación como una problemática central al desarrollo. Sostenemos que la obra de Gayatri Spivak es clave para este proyecto. Ofrecemos una reseña de algunos textos claves de Spivak sobre capitalismo, diferencia y desarrollo, aclarando sus aportes para una evaluación crítica del desarrollo dominante.
The Value of Nature to the State Robertson ‡, Morgan M.; Wainwright, Joel D.
Annals of the Association of American Geographers,
07/2013, Letnik:
103, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
In recent years geographers have produced a considerable literature on the creation of markets in environmental goods and services. This literature reveals numerous complications with such ...market-based conservation strategies, yet it has failed to address the conception of value that underlies capitalism and drives the capitalist state. To address this gap, we offer an analysis of how the concept of the value of nature has been taken up in U.S. environmental regulatory debates over the creation of markets for wetland services, where state actors creating new regulations must attempt to specify the value of nature. In 2008 the U.S. government adopted a rule governing the creation and sale of wetland credits. This rule initially attempted to define value as a way of both grounding the credit commodity in underlying phenomena and defining the object that state intervention was designed to protect. But in final negotiations and drafting the term became so controversial that its definition was deleted and its use radically restricted. To draw meaning from this situation, we draw on nineteenth-century debates over value in political economy. Our central finding is a cyclical tendency for conflicts to arise over whether to define value as something either inherent (e.g., to a physical process) or essentially relative. Agents of the state involved in creating environmental policy today are caught in the same dilemma as were value theorists of the mid-1800s: They recognize that they must specify the value of nature in justifying state environmental strategy and the expansion of capital into ecosystem services but struggle with the limits of doing so by extracting elements of nature and placing them in capitalist value form. Political ecologists and others will similarly struggle to understand the basis on which capitalist states confront nature-even as the consequences of this encounter are increasingly well documented-without a return to value theory.
Like indigenous peoples across the hemisphere, the Maya of southern Belize have long struggled to decolonize their ancestral lands. For over four decades, the 'Maya movement' has clashed with the ...state, yielding mixed results. After a series of favorable court decisions, the Maya communities have won legal claim to their lands. However, the government of Belize has not substantively addressed this decision, and the rural Maya communities of Toledo remain the poorest in the country. This paper analyses one exceptional period, 1997-2004, when the Maya movement aligned itself with progressive state leaders to advance a set of goals, including but not limited to land rights. I argue that a combination of factors made the 1997-2004 conjuncture decisive for shaping present conditions in Toledo.
How do certain social conflicts come to fall within the law? How does the law come to have its space? I argue that law emerged in British Honduras through a structure of racial differentiation. The ...law arrived as a mode of ordering space, bodies, and justice that realizes an immanent structure of racial difference. Racial difference thus founds the space of law. To advance this argument, I examine the record of the first criminal trial prosecuted in the place now called southern Belize—for the murder of an unnamed Indigenous woman by an enslaved Black man. Through an analysis of the trial record that draws upon Jameson’s reading of Greimas’s semiotic method, I show that the standing of the trial, as well as the evaluation of evidence, hinge upon the delineation and operation of racial categories. While British colonialism has ended, these categories persist.
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