Cartographical collections in America

ABSTRACT

The importance of maps in the construction of national territories has already received much attention from scholars; however, the discussion has mostly centred around the creation of political boundaries in emerging regions or states. Ethnic cartography, on the other hand, remains little studied, despite the fact that it also produced powerful symbolic meanings, advanced science and became a tool for various political ideologies. This article introduces the role that the mapping of ethnic territories played in political discourse in nineteenth-century Russia.     

The image of the city in modern literature

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship.

All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century – repatriation, resettlement and local integration – are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation–state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership – and through this of access to citizenship rights – that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights?

This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled.

Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation – or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation – became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’.     

New collaborations in old institutional spaces: setting a new research agenda to transform Indigenous-settler relations

ABSTRACT

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people navigate the social and political order of the Australian settler state in ways that seek to increase their personal freedoms and political autonomy. For some groups this means seeking a firmer place within the social, political and economic life of Australia, and for others it means navigating away, towards a more distant relationship based in the resurgence of Indigenous nationhood. This navigation is composed of multifaceted and multidirectional relations between Indigenous Australians, settler Australians, and the settler state. As a discipline, political science must move beyond the study of settler institutions and begin to engage more comprehensively in research that considers the dynamics and structures of Indigenous-settler relations as a matter of priority.     

Establishing political priority for regulatory interventions in waste management in Australia

ABSTRACT

This paper establishes a multi theory framework to help explain factors and conditions promoting a political priority for policy change. The framework’s analytical utility is illustrated through its application to a case study of waste management in Australia. A lack of political momentum to prioritise regulatory interventions has contributed to uncoordinated responses by the Australian federal and state governments resulting in unsustainable approaches to waste management. Lessons are derived from the analysis that provide insights into the potential for establishing political priority for policy change from uncoordinated voluntary schemes to more coordinated regulatory approaches.     

British School Atlases, 1880–1930: Questions of Relevance,Credibility and Authorship in the Production of Geographical Knowledge

Abstract

The focus in this article is on school atlases produced in Britain in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries and on what is revealed, both in their pages and in the processes behind their compilation, about the people who were producing and using such map books. The Bartholomew Archive, in Edinburgh, has proved to be an exceptionally rich source of hitherto unexamined data on the business and personal activities of one of the leading producers of school atlases, the local firm of John Bartholomew and Son, which was active in map making and publishing between 1880 and 1987. The sociology and pattern of communication of publishing, explored by book historians and historians of science, geography and cartography in other contexts, are here considered in relation to the atlases that were produced in Britain for schools in the United Kingdom and in other parts of the Empire in the period 1880–1930. Particular attention is paid to the efforts of mapmakers, publishers, geographers and other professionals to ensure the relevance of the maps selected in school atlases for specific audiences, to guarantee the credibility of the information communicated through these atlases, and to negotiate questions of authorship.     

Maps and Memory: Readings of Cartography in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Song China

ABSTRACT

This essay traces the early history of the genre of the empire map in China, examines twelfth-century steles and printed maps of the Chinese territories, and analyses contemporary viewings and readings of maps in this genre. It argues that such maps reached a much broader readership of literate elites over the course of the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and acquired new political significance as maps became powerful symbols in debates concerning the pros and cons of negotiated peace.     

Between Leibniz and Kant: The Political Thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt

Abstract

In his early text, The Limits of State Action, Wilhelm von Humboldt raises the Kantian question of the permissibility and legitimate extent of political and juridical coercion, as his contribution to a debate amongst Kantians launched by the publication in 1785 of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In arguing for a minimal state, concerned exclusively with internal and external security of its members but not at all with their felicity, Humboldt inflects Kantian political thought in the direction of a liberal laissez-faire state, in marked contrast to the strong interventionism that his fellow-Kantian Fichte derived from similar Kantian grounds. The article argues that the underlying conception of the individual retained by Humboldt has markedly Leibnizian traits, namely the notion of freedom as the spontaneous unfolding of a highly personal, monadic developmental trajectory toward perfection, which ought not to be impeded or homogenized by unnecessary state intervention. Humboldt thus represents not only a ‘rightist’ libertarian reading of Kant, but a particular appropriation of significant Leibnizian themes. His combination of these sources is compared with that of other contemporary theorists like Hufeland and Fichte.     

Wrapped in Two Flags: The Complex Political History of Nunavik

ABSTRACT

During the first half of the twentieth century, northern Quebec was under federal jurisdiction. Tired of English Canadian supremacy and increasingly aware of northern Quebec’s considerable natural resources, which could provide a solid basis for future moves toward independence, the Quebec government began to take over responsibility for its northern territories in the 1960s. It established a regional administration to take charge of its northern affairs and sent officers to northern Quebec’s remote communities. For two decades, both governments administered the region and imposed two political systems on the local Inuit. This article is based on lengthy fieldwork and archival research. The historical background is described to show how Nunavik has developed as a political and social entity through its relationships with the Quebec and Canadian governments. This conflictual situation has created tensions in the Inuit community, resulting in political dissensions over the goal of self-government. Finally, this article details how the Inuit have exploited federal–provincial tensions to further their own interests.     

Asymmetric Encounters in Native Canada

Occasionally in recent decades, relations between the Canadian state and particular Native communities have spiralled into open confrontation and violence. While such instances reflect the failure of conciliatory or decolonizing politics within a liberal–democratic milieu, scholarship has barely begun to analyze these events in a systematic fashion. This article applies to long-standing questions about political behaviour to the study of Native-state relations in Canada. By this, the authors particularly mean the dynamics of Native peoples' mobilization and institutional engagement. Examining several recent cases of open confrontation, this article looks for the basic circumstances in which violence arises, and how confrontation alters internal political dynamics in Native communities.     

Territorially-nested urbanization in China - the case of Dongguan

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the question of extended urbanization by arguing for the need to overcome dualistic views to properly address the political specificities of urbanization in China. To this end, this paper understands state-territorial relations as a process of étatization by drawing on the particular literature on the role of the party-state in urbanization. Through a brief history of Guangdong, it elaborates on the political modalities of territorialization through China’s administrative rank system. This has enabled the party-state to mediate the production of urban space. From this, I arrive at the concept of “territorially-nested urbanization”, moving beyond limited accounts of hierarchical state powers in Chinese urban studies. Next, from a short periodization of Dongguan’s urbanization, the paper exemplifies how a particular mode of territorialization has evolved into tense relationships between the city and towns in the ongoing dilemma of multi-centered versus concentrated direction of urbanization. Based on insights from in-depth fieldwork, the last part of this paper illustrates the contradictory mobilization of village collectives within extended state power through local government, and the development of villagers’ politics and activism in contested land transformations.     

Management and Community: Some Problems with New Labour

Abstract

This essay examines some tendencies in New Labour's political rhetoric, in particular its reduction of what counts as political and what counts as community. What will be argued is firstly, that the quest for managerial efficiency has functioned to reshape political discourse. This has come about primarily through the attempted removal of political control from economic and public life through the rhetoric of audit and the proliferation of executive agencies and other quangos. Secondly, I will also claim that the language of something called ‘the value of community’, despite being the primary moral principle underpinning the whole New Labour agenda, is politically virtually redundant, principally because its sphere has been reduced to the ‘voluntary’ sector. This redrawing of the boundaries of politics does not augur well for the long-term survival of the British political system: serious questions about the role of the state and the future of democracy emerge from the policies of the past five years and will be discussed briefly in the final section.     

New State Spaces,Agency and Scale: Devolution and the Regionalisation of Transport Governance in Scotland

Abstract: New state spaces can be seen as products of the interaction between emerging initiatives and pre‐existing institutional arrangements ( Peck 1998 , Space and Polity 2:5–31). In the devolved territories of the UK devolution has created new political centres of policy formulation and this paper is concerned with how devolved policy initiatives are reshaping and rescaling sub‐national spaces of governance. We focus on the rescaling of transport governance in Scotland through a nationally orchestrated process of regionalisation involving the creation of Regional Transport Partnerships (RTPs), an initiative that has been shaped by tensions between changing national political objectives and local interests. Our approach draws on Neil Brenner's “new state spaces” (NSS) framework, which has value in emphasising the historically embedded and path‐dependent nature of restructuring processes. At the same time, its abstract nature leads the NSS approach to privilege the broad processes that generate new configurations of state power over the complex politics associated with the restructuring of particular spaces. In response, we suggest a new theoretical synthesis that draws NSS together with the ancillary notions of “regional armatures” and “the politics of scale” to provide a stronger purchase on the political agency and struggles that “form” and “mould” particular spaces.     

Drones,Hobbes, and Liberal Enchantment

ABSTRACT

This article reconceptualizes military drones by drawing on early-modern debates about the sanctity of political power. Ian Shaw has claimed that the proliferation and automation of drones threatens to subject humanity to a robotic regime of control, which he describes as the ultimate instantiation of Thomas Hobbes’s artificial sovereignty. I argue instead that the United States’ drone strategy is closely informed by a liberal political theology that can be traced back to Hobbes’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century opponents, Samuel Clarke and Nehemiah Grew. These physico-theologians held that constitutionally balanced polities such as Britain were important vessels for divine providence. Today, a parallel faith that the United States represents humanity’s best hope is used to justify the extralegal and secretive bombing of territories that are deemed to be profane in comparison with America. Hobbes’s demystification of politics in Leviathan provides the platform for a critique of this modern form of liberal enchantment.     

Two AHA Sessions: The Revolutionary Mr. Kuhn and the Evolutionary Mr. Bertalanffy

Abstract

Quantitative methods of content analysis have become established in most subfields of political science, but remain relatively unutilized in studies of political theory, despite the exclusive focus of that subfield on textual sources. This article develops a variation of content analysis—termed usage analysis—and employs it to resolve a standing debate in scholarship on Cicero's political theory regarding the synonymy of the major Latin terms for the state (civitas and res publica). The resulting distinction between these concepts then informs an exposition of Cicero's ideal state not as the Roman Republic itself or the mixed constitution alone, but as a universal, everlasting political society supported by justice, a mixed constitution, and active citizenship.     

Political economy and social legislation in Germany,ca 1870–1890

Summary

This article examines the nature of academic political theory in Britain in the post-war period, examining in particular the degree to which theorists were able to mount normative theoretical arguments. Traditionally, commentators such as Brian Barry and Perry Anderson have argued that political theory in this period was largely dead between 1945 and 1970 due to the impact of positivism, but I argue this is mistaken for two main reasons. First, it fails to distinguish between the different forms that positivism took in the post-war era. Thus although it is true many theorists tended to claim that moral and political values could (or should) not be discussed rationally, their reasons for doing so varied considerably. For while theorists such as A. J. Ayer and T. D. Weldon justified their positions theoretically, with arguments drawn from behaviourist social science or innovations made in linguistic philosophy, others, such as Ralf Dahrendorf and Anthony Crosland, argued that it was the perceived success of post-war welfare states or the alleged failure of political ideologies that made traditional political theory irrelevant. Second, following on from this, I argue that delineating more accurately how positivism actually operated helps to explain how political theorists were able to pursue their discipline normatively—albeit that few reacted to all aspects of positivism. Thus if some (such as Karl Popper) were more concerned to insist that political philosophy had something to say in practice, others (such as Michael Oakeshott), reacted more strongly against the proposition that human behaviour can be understood purely causally. Finally, I examine the impact of ordinary language philosophy on post-war political theory, and argue that rather than simply damaging the cause of normative political theory by encouraging a myopic concentration on the linguistic analysis of particular moral and political concepts, over the longer term its effects were much more positive, since it helped to focus attention on the irreducibly normative dimension of political concepts.     

The use of scripture in the temple scroll and the status of the scroll as law

Abstract

The narrative sections of the Hexateuch seem to reflect an Israelite pre‐history which contained experience of both tribal and city‐state life, but the history is presented in a tribal form. It is suggested that this is explained by a particular ideology underlying the narratives and rituals; that real tribes existed in the national memory, and these carried religious and political values which it was felt important to preserve. Such values, however, could not have survived without the support of a state apparatus, especially the Jerusalem temple and the Davidic kingship.

The paper concludes that this tribal ideology was related both to law and to the role of the Yahweh prophets, whose influence helped to counteract development of too much power in the kingship. As the structural tribe weakened with the advance of bureaucracy, tribal ideology strengthened, taking on a political function and becoming articulated with the bureaucratic process. Tribal ideology interacted with state‐type traditions inherited from the Cana‐anite element, producing a religious and political pluralism in Israel which gave her a distinctive character.

A return is made to the classic scholarship of Mowinckel, von Rad and Weiser, for construction of a hypothetic framework for further examination of Hebrew tribal values. Through the insights of these authors, together with sociological considerations drawn from modern ethnographies, it is felt that understanding of the tribe/state paradox in Israel may be heightened. In this respect, the paper opposes the position of the “social evolutionary” school, which fails to explain the place of tribal values in the Hebrew literature. Parallels seen as relevant to Israelite history and culture come from special tribal forms, specified within the paper.     

Political humanitarianism in the 1930s: Indian aid for Republican Spain

Abstract

This article examines Indian humanitarian help for Republican victims during the Spanish Civil War. It focuses in particular on aid initiatives by the Indian national movement, which were embedded in the larger quest for independence from British colonial rule. By creating their own humanitarian programme in favour of Republican Spain, Indian nationalists dissociated themselves from Britain’s foreign policy and tried to orchestrate a politics of moral superiority for themselves. The article also explores Indian participation in transnational networks of Left solidarity. Established to generate political and humanitarian support for Republican Spain, Indian actors concurrently utilized these networks to enhance their status in the international community and to advance their own end of an independent state.     

Below the Belt? Territory and Development in China's International Rise

China's internationalization has been heralded by some as a new era of South–South cooperation. Yet such framings of development are pitched at an abstract space of the ‘global South’ which conceals more than it reveals. With some theory moving towards ontologies of ‘global development’, we need to capture both the connectedness and the local specificity of increasingly diffuse processes. This article sets out a more fine‐grained understanding of how political territories and processes are imagined and produced by and through China's internationalization, focusing on infrastructure as a ‘technology’ of territorialization. Much of the focus on China's internationalization has been on state‐to‐state relations, but this obscures the ‘omni‐channel politics’ that China practises. Using a critical literature review and illustrative case study, this article develops the idea of omni‐channel politics to posit a view of ‘twisted’ territories in which political processes and development outcomes are more complex and contingent.     

Liberalism in Progress—From Equal Rights to Global Participation

Abstract

Michael Walzer defends a political liberalism that upholds the right to share in substantive goods as well as to enjoy civil liberties, and that supports the value and rights of particular ethnic, cultural, and religious communities. But Walzer tends to see the political sphere as one in which conflict continually threatens, and particular commitments must be suppressed or constrained. I propose what might be termed a "progressive" politics, in which particular identities and relationships are appreciated as the bases of meaningful social agency, and in which particular communities come together around problems of mutual concern to establish common ground and working relationships in a participatory democracy.