Geographical Perspectives on Producer Service Industry Research in Australia

In contrast to the situation in North America and Europe, producer services research in Australia has largely focused on their international role rather than their domestic one. The growing internationalisation of the Australian economy in the last decade has been closely interrelated with the progressive internationalisation of producer service industries. International banking and finance as well as trade-related services have had significant urban impacts in major cities. Australia's growing linkages with East Asia are having impacts on the geography of service industries. However, little is known about the urban and regional implications of economic restructuring in these industries. There are important urban and regional implications resulting from the externalisation of services from manufacturing, as well as from the shedding of labour on the part of large service industry organisations. Similarly, little attention has been given to urban and regional implications of producer services by policy makers either at a federal or state government level.     

Horror,hubris and humanity: the international engagement with Africa, 1914–2014

This article examines the international engagement with Africa from the First World War and the apex of colonial rule through to the present day. It is argued that there have been dramatic shifts throughout this period—from increasing interventionism on the part of the colonial state, to decolonization and the emergence of nation‐states with independent foreign policy programmes, to the predations and influences of the Cold War, to the developmentalism and humanitarianism of the contemporary era. Yet, there has also been marked continuity in terms of policy, perception and practice. In particular, Africa has long been seen in terms of economic opportunity—a place where markets and raw materials abound—and of military and political threat, a place in which intrinsic instability makes external intervention both desirable and inevitable. While immediate contexts have changed over time, the international engagement with the continent remains essentially economic and military. A concern for democratization and development represents a relatively new element, although even this can be traced to the paternalistic humanitarianism of the colonial era and, earlier still, moral stances toward Africa in the nineteenth century.     

Absent Regions: Spaces of Financialisation in the Arab World

This paper examines processes of financialisation in the Arab world, a region that has been almost completely absent from the wider financial literature. The paper shows that financialisation is much more than simply the expansion of financial markets within neatly bounded sets of social relations operating at the national scale. In the Arab world, financialisation has been marked by the growing weight of regional finance capital—most specifically, those capital groups based in the Gulf Cooperation Council—in circuits of capital operating at all scales. This has important implications for processes of class and state formation. Approaching financialisation in this manner—moving away from methodologically nationalist assumptions and the literature's largely singular focus on the advanced capitalist core—brings into focus the significance of cross‐scalar accumulation patterns, their spatial hierarchies, and geographic unevenness. The paper thus reaffirms the need for a more spatially sensitive approach to financialisation.     

国内区域贸易、国际贸易与国家竞争力

大国国内区域贸易与国际贸易关系主要表现在两个方面:一是国内区域贸易与国际贸易存在一定程度上的相互替代的关系;二是国内区域贸易与国际贸易存在相互促进的关系,发展国内区域贸易能提升大国在国际经济中的竞争力。     

Taming Foreign Exchange Derivatives Markets? Speculative Finance and Class Relations in Brazil

This article provides a critical interrogation of the Brazilian tax on foreign exchange derivatives deployed between 2011 and 2013. It analyses the drivers of the policy‐making process that led to implementation of the measure, locates it within the broader policy response regarding the management of cross‐border capital flows and speculative finance, and assesses its political economy significance in light of class dynamics. The author makes three arguments. First, this innovative policy tool must be interpreted in terms of the emergence of a specific form of state power allowing for the continuation of finance‐led strategies of accumulation, while mitigating some of their worst consequences. Second, this form of state power internalizes the subordinate positionality of Brazil in the global financial and monetary system. Third, while financialization processes have eroded the efficiency of a number of policy tools, this policy experiment demonstrates the possibility of regulating complex financial markets, provided that appropriate resources are dedicated to the task, and that there is the political will to do so. The article concludes by discussing theoretical implications, for how to theorize state and financialization, as well as political implications.     

The Country,the City and the State in the Australian Settlement

The Australian Settlement, as formulated by Paul Kelly, had a sixth pillar: a settlement between the city and the country in which the state compensated people living in the country for the costs of remoteness and sparse settlement. This was underpinned by the reliance of Australian export performance on agriculture, by nation-building commitments to peopling the continent, and by agrarian beliefs in the virtues of country life. Australia's egalitarianism had a spatial and regional as well as a class dimension. Changes in Australia's economy, demography, and political culture have eroded these foundations, leaving rural Australia vulnerable to the neoliberal agenda. The dismantling of tariffs, the restructuring of agriculture, microeconomic reforms driven by National Competition Policy, and regional policy which stresses self-reliance, all treat rural Australia as a minor part of the nation rather than its economic and cultural foundation, and reject claims to special treatment. To give country Australia its own pillar makes visible the magnitude of the historic shifts which have taken place in the state's relationship to rural Australia since 1983 and brings it into the main frame for understanding Australia's abandonment of protective statism.     

Capitalism and the emergent world order

The two‐centuries‐old hegemony of the West is coming to an end. The ‘revolutions of modernity’ that fuelled the rise of the West are now accessible to all states. As a consequence, the power gap that developed during the nineteenth century and which served as the foundation for a core–periphery international order is closing. The result is a shift from a world of ‘centred globalism’ to one of ‘decentred globalism’. At the same time, as power is becoming more diffuse, the degree of ideological difference among the leading powers is shrinking. Indeed, because all Great Powers in the contemporary world are in some form capitalist, the ideological bandwidth of the emerging international order is narrower than it has been for a century. The question is whether this relative ideological homogeneity will generate geo‐economic or geopolitical competition among the four main modes of capitalist governance: liberal democratic, social democratic, competitive authoritarian and state bureaucratic. This article assesses the strengths and weaknesses of these four modes of capitalist governance, and probes the main contours of inter‐capitalist competition. Will the political differences between democratic and authoritarian capitalists override their shared interests or be mediated by them? Will there be conflicting capitalisms as there were in the early part of the twentieth century? Or will the contemporary world see the development of some kind of concert of capitalist powers? A world of politically differentiated capitalisms is likely to be with us for some time. As such, a central task facing policy‐makers is to ensure that geo‐economic competition takes place without generating geopolitical conflict.     

Distinctions,distinctions: ‘public’ and ‘private’ force?

This article evaluates recent literatures within International Relations on so‐called ‘private force’. It suggests that the conceptual weaknesses of much of this literature can be accounted for, in part, by a misunderstanding of the historical and sociological importance of the way power is organized and legitimated through shifts in the public—private distinction. This distinction is one of the primary mechanisms, if not the primary mechanism, for organizing political, economic and, therefore, military power. For the sake of historical accuracy and conceptual integrity scholars should abandon the terminology of ‘public’ and ‘private’ force. Tracing how public‐private distinctions shift and change as an effect of political power is a joint task for historical sociology and international political theory     

地缘政治关系简析

本文从地缘政治学分析国际政治大国与全球地理环境之间的关系实质,即地理位置、综合国力和战略利益在地域政治体系中的相互联系、制约和影响,及变化规律.     

Diamond Mining in Canada's Northwest Territories: A Colonial Continuity

Abstract: The Canadian diamond industry has been lauded as a new approach to resource extraction, one whose institutions are characterized by a greater attention to Indigenous rights and the environment. However, an institutional analysis obfuscates the terrain of unequal relations that is the context for the Canadian diamond boom; an analysis of the effectiveness of social and environmental policies in relation to the extraction of diamonds in the Canadian North suggests that there is an intent on the part of those instigating this extraction (that is, the Canadian state, Canadian capitalist interests and international capitalist interests) to protect the Northern environment and to provide economic benefits to Northern Indigenous communities. This piece argues, instead, that this assumption is erroneous and that the Northern mining industry is part of Canada's project of internal colonization of Indigenous communities, a project that has intensified and expanded in the neoliberal era.     

The limits to China's non-interference foreign policy: pro-state interventionism and the rescaling of economic governance

China's foreign policy has been long committed to a principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of sovereign countries. While one could easily point out past and present-day inconsistencies in its implementation, this article argues that defenders and critics of the principle both rely on a limited interpretation of ‘interference’ or ‘intervention’ based on an ideology of Westphalian sovereignty. Particularly problematic is the conceptual distinction between the ‘political’ or ‘diplomatic’, on the one hand, and the ‘economic’, on the other. As Polanyi's concept of embeddedness reminds us, markets, society and politics occur simultaneously, and can only act as discrete realms in epistemological abstractions. It is thus argued that non-interference is a semi-formal institution that governs China's diplomatic engagements and affects its economic activities. While the totality of China's interactions with the world has diverse and sometimes contradictory impacts on global governance, non-interference itself has apparent consequences for the rescaling of regional economic governance. Specifically, this article contends that Chinese non-interference results in the empowerment of political elites at national levels, and thus in the (re-)emergence of the nation state as a gatekeeper and facilitator of the advancement of capitalist enterprises. As a result, through non-intervention, China's foreign policy undermines supranational regulatory approaches and fosters state-based regional architectures.     

新区域主义的发展及对中国区域经济发展模式的影响

在当今全球化与区域化趋势并存的时代,新区域主义以其强调区域竞争、保护地方经济社会多样性的主张,引起学术界的广泛兴趣。新区域主义源于20世纪80年代后期,这一期间国际社会经济环境的激烈变动,导致新旧区域主义在政治经济、国际贸易、经济系统、区域发展目标等方面存在根本的差别。在全球化和后冷战结构的制约下,新区域主义主要表现为大区域主义、小区域主义及国家内部的各类区域组织三种形式。论文针对中国现行的区域发展模式在新区域主义的冲击下,暴露出的薄弱环节,提出中国的区域经济发展战略应从三个层次展开。     

The Great War of Enclosure: Securing the Skies

Swarms of police drones, fleets of overhead delivery bots, and flocks of private security drones are set to multiply the complex interfaces between state, capital, and sense. This paper explores the military and economic enclosure of the atmosphere by drones. For centuries, capitalist enclosure has privatized and secured common spaces: territorializing new power relations into the soil. Enclosure now operates through an increasingly atmospheric spatiality. The birth of airpower enabled new vertical regimes of state power, capital accumulation, and violence. Now, drones are materializing both intimate and pervasive colonizations of local, national, and international airspace. Crucially, this discloses new morphologies and ontologies of urban (in)security, in which an atmospheric state polices deterritorialized aerial circulations. Such a reenchanted atmosphere collapses the geopolitical and geoeconomic in uncertain robotic orbits. This paper, which connects past and present, is driven by a deeper concern for the existential dimensions of dronified skyscapes, subjects, and violence.     

Geographical Takes on Three Decades of Economic Reform in Australia

The idea of an economy taking a geographical journey highlights the importance of changing spatialities and how these shape and result from economic change. It also focuses on the geographical scaling of key processes. Using these insights, this paper explores three decades of economic change in Australia in which the nation State has played a central role in the operation of markets and accumulation processes, albeit with dramatic shifts in the qualitative nature of that role. Such shifts have been crucial during the emergence of Australia's particular variety of neoliberalism. The paper explores the liberalisation of Australia's financial and corporate environment, trade policies and the industrial relations environment. The three cases suggest contradictions inherent in the State's adherence to a neoliberal reform agenda, in the name of globalisation, while facing: first, political needs to retain sovereignty over national security and tighten border protection; and second, multi‐scaled political processes including clashes with State governments grappling with regional and local impacts of change. There has been no simple roll‐out of neoliberalism in Australia since the mid 1990s. Geographical scales, constructed contingently by social and political agents, have contributed in fundamental ways to the power and direction of economic reform. Despite powerful re‐scalings to both global and local levels over the past three decades, there is no evidence of a diminished role for the nation State.     

Multilevel (mis)governance of palm oil production

The palm oil industry exemplifies the ‘regionalisation without regionalism’ pattern seen in other industries in Asia: extensive, regionally concentrated transnational economic integration accompanied by a low level of formal regional institution-building. Production is concentrated in Malaysia and Indonesia, and Asian countries account for a major share of the market for intermediate products. The ownership structure of palm oil production reflects the dominance of transnational Malaysian and Singaporean firms. There is no authoritative regional institution governing production, investment standards or labour in the industry. A patchwork of both enabling and regulatory governance institutions supports the industry. These are formal and informal, public and private, and are situated at multiple levels: within, below and across the nation state. Although the governance structure surrounding the palm oil industry has supported it well in terms of production volumes and profits, large externalities—environmental and social costs—persist. This article argues that the governance failures associated with the industry stem from different stakeholders' competing interests in contexts of highly unequal wealth and power distribution. Misgovernance is not an unintended consequence of institutions failing to keep up with markets in scale and scope, but is embedded in the multilevel governance regime that supports, and partially regulates, the industry.     

尺度重组与地域重构:城市与区域重构的政治经济学分析

尺度重组和地域重构理论是当前从政治经济学视角研究全球化时代城市与区域空间重构和治理重构的热点理论。本文运用马克思主义地理学的研究方法,结合对当代资本主义运行方式的分析,对尺度重组和地域重构理论进行了深入的解析,并阐明了它们之间内在的、本质的联系。研究认为,尺度重组和地域重构是一个一体两面的过程,当资本为了克服危机而在地域组织上进行去地域化与再地域化时,地域组织(城市和国家)也同时发生了尺度重组,它们描述的是同一个资本转型的过程。     

Spatial Shifts in the Population of Moscow Region

An American geographer and senior Russian demographer/migration specialist examine spatial shifts in the distribution of population within Moscow city and Moscow Oblast in response to major social and economic changes occurring in the aftermath of the USSR's disintegration. This second installment (for the first, see Ioffe and Zayonchkovskaya, 2010) in a three-part study devoted to exploring the consequences and spatial manifestations of Russia's shrinking population is focused on the one relatively small part of that country that is expected to experience population growth over the next one and one-half decades (albeit strictly due to in-migration rather than natural increase). Particular attention is devoted to the effects of emerging real estate and land markets during the post-Soviet period, on the restructuring of the regional settlement system focused on the Russian capital, as well as the insights to be derived (based on a case study) from investigating processes of spatial population shifts at multiple scales.     

The internationalization of the Chinese state

In the last decade, responding in part to an important increase in the number of Chinese state-owned enterprises operating overseas, the study of China’s international relations has gained academic prominence. Research often emphasizes the ways in which domestic characteristics of the Chinese state shape the nature of its transnational engagement. However, the transformations experienced by the state in processes of internationalization remain largely under-researched. This article problematizes the internationalization of the Chinese state, analyzing it as a process of gradual re-territorialization, which induces power redistributions and cultural transformations. Using a variety of examples for illustrative purposes, and drawing upon multidisciplinary work on the state, the article argues that the Chinese state is undergoing a process of decentred internationalization that is the effect of an entrepreneurial statehood rationale. Contrary to essentialist and orientalizing meta-narratives, the analysis of shifting cultures and power redistributions within the internationalized state opens up new avenues for academic enquiry on the micro-politics of everyday affairs in international relations.     

Indian foreign policy and contemporary security challenges

India is fast emerging as an important player in regional and international arenas. However, it continues to be beset by a number of security challenges, both internally and externally. On the assumption that India's foreign policy has evolved in step with its domestic politics, this article briefly surveys the evolution of Indian domestic politics and foreign policy before discussing some of the domestic and international (including regional) security challenges India faces today. The article concludes that although economic diplomacy does at present serve India well in projecting power internationally, achieving great power status in the future will rest on the resolution of key political and security challenges.