What is a Salafi Reformist?

Abstract

Tariq Ramadan is one of the most prominent and controversial Western Muslim political thinkers today. He has been called everything from a moderate liberal Muslim thinker to a radical Islamist in disguise. He calls himself a Salafi reformist. According to him, Salafi reformists read the sacred texts of Islam dynamically, using reason, and reject literalist readings. Yet Ramadan also calls Sayyid Qutb a Salafi reformist. The problem is that, by most accounts, Qutb is the quintessential radical Islamist. This raises the question of what Ramadan thinks actually makes someone a Salafi reformist, and what this can tell us about his political teaching. To answer this question, I put Ramadan and Qutb into conversation. I argue that, while Ramadan meets his own criteria for being a Salafi reformist, Qutb does not. I suggest some reasons why Ramadan may not share this view; his political theology tells a different story.     

Population pressure,political institutions,and protests: A multilevel analysis of protest events in African cities

Why do some of Africa's urban areas experience higher rates of protest incidence than others? Numerous authors have highlighted the role of urbanisation and democratisation in determining cross-national variation in the rates of urban protest. Yet understanding has been hindered by failures to measure mechanisms at the appropriate spatial scale, analyse a sufficiently representative sample of urban centres, de-confound local and country-level factors, and consider what it is about specific urban centres that shapes variation in protest incidence. This paper presents new evidence on the determinants of protests in African urban centres by linking georeferenced data on urban settlements from the Urban Centres Database to the location of protest events taken from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Dataset. Fitting a series of multilevel regression models with cross-level effects, we simultaneously estimate variation in protest incidence as a function of local- and country-level factors and the interactions between them. Our results indicate that variation in protest incidence between urban centres can be explained by a combination of local-specific and country-level contextual factors including population size and growth, regime type, civil society capacity, and whether an urban centre is politically significant. These findings advance our understanding of how political and demographic factors interact and influence protest incidence in urban Africa.     

By Any Means Necessary: Urban Regeneration and the “State of Exception” in Glasgow's Commonwealth Games 2014

When compulsory purchase for urban regeneration is combined with a sporting mega‐event, we have an archetypal example of what Giorgio Agamben called the “state of exception”. Through a study of compulsory purchase orders (CPOs) on the site of the Athletes' Village for Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games, we expose CPOs as a classed tool mobilised to violently displace working class neighbourhoods. In doing so, we show how a fictionalised mantra of “necessity” combines neoliberal growth logics with their obscene underside—a stigmatisation logic that demonises poor urban neighbourhoods. CPOs can be used progressively, for example to abrogate the power of slum landlords for social democratic ends, yet with the increasing urbanisation of capital they more often target marginalised neighbourhoods in the pursuit of land and property valorisation. The growing use of CPOs as an exceptional measure in urbanisation, we argue, requires urgent attention in urban political struggles and policy practice.     

Responding not Believing: Political Theology and Post-Secular Societyzxht

Abstract

In the past decade social theorists and Continental philosophers have returned again to an engagement with Christianity and the legacy of Christian belief. This is framed in the context of a Europe seen in transition to a post-secular identity and, often implicitly, against what is seen as an encroaching Islamic presence within Europe. This move has often brought together Marxist, post-Marxist, and Catholic-legacy philosophers, together with philosophical Protestants in an attempt to recover what I term a political theology of response. Response, in opposition to belief, signals an alternative post-secular turn of attempted inclusion out of a perceived shared cultural legacy. This essay asks if, in such a cultural-philosophical turn, the alternative post-secular turn of a political theology of response signals that belief remains within the private sphere as we seek to engage in a public conversation of non-believing "response"?     

Covid-19 is an unnatural disaster: Hope in revelatory moments of crisis

Abstract

The unfolding COVID-19 pandemic has closed borders, grounded planes, quarantined more than half of the world’s population, triggered anxiety en masse, and shaken global capitalism to its core. Scholars of the political ecology of disasters have sought to denaturalize so-called “natural” disasters by demonstrating their uneven consequences. Work in the political ecology of health similarly accounts for how risk of illness and disease are socio-economically mediated. While this scholarship has demonstrated the need to contextualize the unequal fallout from ecological and health disasters in ways that reveal the festering wounds of structural inequality, we know much less about how hope is cultivated in moments of crisis. The current revelatory moment of the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity to find hope in the rubble through the deconstruction of framings of crisis as “error” and by homing in on the current and potential role of tourism to contribute to a more socially and environmentally just society. This reframing the pandemic as an "unnatural" disaster opens new debates at the intersection of tourism geographies and political ecologies of hope in revelatory moments of crisis.     

“Words fail us”: Beckett,Leacock, and Johnson

ABSTRACT

This article will look at political treatments of language in Samuel Beckett’s early novel Watt and place the novel’s linguistic scepticism in conversation with three authors, the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the language theorist Felix Mauthner, and the English-born, Canadian parodist Stephen Leacock. The paper will argue that Beckett, like Leacock, engages in Mauthnerian critiques of language, destabilising Johnsonian formulae for language standardisation. But while Leacock fails to develop the political implications of his critique of language, Beckett’s understanding of language standardisation is implicitly political, informed by Johnson’s conception of speech as the predicate of national identity, a standard for inclusion which Watt gleefully antagonises. Challenging nationalist calls for controls on language, Watt interrogates the ways that campaigns for linguistic unity will engender exclusionary attitudes towards the nonconforming and bar access to that speech and identity which falls outside of normative frameworks.     

The Urban Village,Agrarian Transformation,and Rentier Capitalism in Gurgaon,India

Gurgaon, India's “millennium city”, is today synonymous with India's embrace of global real estate capital and private sector‐led urban development. This paper asserts that Gurgaon's spectacular urbanisation has been fundamentally underpinned by an uneven process of land acquisition, exemption and agrarian transformation. Shifting away from dispossession‐centred analyses of contemporary urbanisation in India, this paper explores Gurgaon's “urban villages” to consider the uneven integration of agrarian classes into emerging urban real estate markets. Through an examination of differential experiences of land acquisition and agrarian social change among Gurgaon's landowning classes, the paper seeks to trace complex and nonlinear processes of agrarian transformation which make possible landscapes of global accumulation.     

Any Labour Geographies in Urban Theory? Workers Meet Lefebvre and Harvey (Yet Again)

This paper examines the urban theory of Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey to construct an urban perspective on labour geographies. Lefebvre understood work in a work–nonwork continuum beyond binarism, and Lefebvre and Harvey hailed the outpouring of working-class agency from cities. However, they may have obscured the role of labour movements in urbanisation when identifying the living-place (such as streets, neighbourhoods, or housing) as the primary seat of urban agency. Learning from labour geographers in the 1990s, I query this ambiguity to enhance the urban theory of Lefebvre and Harvey, conceive of the urban scale as the site of unfinished industrial/urban dialectics, and conceptualise labour agency as a producer of transformative continua in urbanisation. Interpreting Toyota’s factories as rescaled pivots of industrial urbanisation, I explore how Japanese labour movements challenged just-in-time production, its union form, and its work/nonwork divides, producing new urbanising continua—even planetary ones—between different transformative agencies.     

Die geskilpunte in die investituurstryd

Abstract

Representations of urban Africans in ‘black films’ have kept pace with changing apartheid policies and legislation governing the migration of Africans to South African urban centres. ‘Black films’ have gone from depicting Africans in urban centres as an undifferentiated mass to more nuanced and complex representations that reflect a changing society. However, what has remained constant in all the films discussed in this paper is the thematic preoccupation with African crime and criminality, as well as the compulsion to moralise that crime doesn't pay.     

Storm Drains as Assemblages: The Political Ecology of Flood Risk in Post‐Colonial Bangalore

Cities around the world are increasingly prone to unequal flood risk. In this paper, I “materialize” the political ecology of urban flood risk by casting stormwater drains—a key artifact implicated in flooding—as recombinant socionatural assemblages. I examine the production of flood risk in the city of Bangalore, India, focusing on the city's informal outskirts where wetlands and circulations of global capital intermingle. Staging a conversation between Marxian and Deleuzian positions, I argue, first, that the dialectics of “flow” and “fixity” are useful in historicizing the relational politics of storm drains from the colonial to the neoliberal era. Second, flood risk has been heightened in the contemporary moment because of an intensified alignment between the flow/fixity of capital and storm drains. Storm drains—and the larger wetlands that they traverse—possess a force‐giving materiality that fuels urban capitalism's risky “becoming‐being”. This argument raises the need for supplementing political‐economic critiques of the city with sociomaterialist understandings of capitalism and risk in the post‐colonial city. The paper concludes with reflections on how assemblage thinking opens up a more distributed notion of agency and a more relational urban political ecology.     

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.     

Negotiating Green Space with Landed Interests: The Urban Political Ecology of Greenway in the Pearl River Delta,China

Land‐centred urbanisation has precipitated shortage of green space in Chinese cities. However, in the Pearl River Delta, an ambitious greenway system has recently managed to flourish. It is intriguing to ask how this has become possible. Informed by the perspective of urban political ecology, this paper finds that the greenway project in the Pearl River Delta represents a set of politically realistic endeavours to alleviate urban green space shortage by adapting to, rather than challenging, powerful landed interests. Three interlocking dimensions about land—municipal land quota, rural land use claims, and real estate development—have influenced why, where and how greenways have been created. Based on these findings, we argue that research on China's politics of urban sustainability necessarily needs to understand the country's land politics.     

Regional contrasts in the growth of Canadian cities

Summary

As a result of the growth of the last five decades, Canadian cities have advanced from a subordinate to a dominant position in the population pattern and the economic life of the Dominion. Their rates of growth, moreover, faithfully reflect major changes in the settlement of the regions of which they are a part. In addition, they are significant as measuring the progress of urbanisation on the poleward margin of the urban area of North America.     

Urban foraging and the relational ecologies of belonging

Through a discussion of urban foraging in Seattle, Washington, USA, we examine how people's plant and mushroom harvesting practices in cities are linked to relationships with species, spaces, and ecologies. Bringing a relational approach to political ecology, we discuss the ways that these particular nature–society relationships are formed, legitimated, and mobilized in discursive and material ways in urban ecosystems. Engaging closely with and as foragers, we develop an ethnographically grounded ‘relational ecologies of belonging’ framework to conceptualize and examine three constituent themes: cultural belonging and identity, belonging and place, and belonging and more-than-human agency. Through this case study, we show the complex ways that urban foraging is underpinned by interconnected and multiple notions of identity, place, mobility, and agency for both humans and more-than-human interlocutors. The focus on relational ecologies of belonging illuminates important challenges for environmental management and public space planning in socioecologically diverse areas. Ultimately, these challenges reflect negotiated visions about how we organize ourselves and live together in cosmopolitan spaces such as cities.     

Postcolonial polar cities? New indigenous and cosmopolitan urbanness in the Arctic

ABSTRACT

The arrival into geography, and especially urban geography, of a frame of questioning coming from postcolonial studies has contributed to a fascinating debate about what a “postcolonial” city is and how the urban duality between ethnically, socially, and spatially segregated “European” towns and “native” settlements is being reformulated and transformed. Obviously, Arctic cities are not postcolonial in the political sense of being independent from the former colonial centre – although this process may be under way in Greenland – but they have seen a progressive move from a Eurocentric culture toward greater hybridization. This article looks into two new trends that contribute to making Arctic cities postcolonial: first, the arrival of indigenous peoples in cities and the concomitant diminution of the division between Europeans/urbanites and natives/rurals; and second, the arrival of labour migrants from abroad, which has given birth to a more plural and cosmopolitan citizenry. It advances the idea that Arctic cities are now in a position to play a “decolonizing” role, in the sense of progressively erasing the purely European aspect of the city and making it both more local and rooted (through indigenous communities) and more global and multicultural (through foreign labour migrants).     

Between the South Sea and the mountainous ridges: biopolitical assemblages in the Spanish colonial Americas

SUMMARY: Although the historical archaeology of the Spanish colonial world is currently witnessing an explosion of research in the Americas, the accompanying political economic framework has tended to remain little interrogated. This paper argues that Spanish colonial contexts bring into particular relief the entanglements between ‘core’ capitalist processes like ‘antimarkets’, dispossession and the disciplining of labour with the specific biopolitical ecologies assembled through co-option, coercion and accumulation. This perspective is explored through two archaeological case studies from Peru and Guatemala, where competing concerns about altitude, climate, disease, violence and populations of differentiated labouring bodies (both human and non-human) came to the fore in unexpected ways. The resulting discussion challenges the reliance on abstract analytical totalities like ‘capitalism’ and ‘colonialism’, and shifts attention towards the diverse assemblages of actors that shaped and continue to shape the processes central to political economic analyses.     

Negotiating Nuclear Control: The Zangger Committee and the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group in the 1970s

ABSTRACT

In the 1970s, the Zangger Committee and the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group published guidelines on nuclear trade that drew a line between peaceful and dangerous nuclear technology, defining what was sensitive enough to require safeguarding and what was not. Given the ambivalence of nuclear technology, how was that line drawn? Historically, the understanding of whether a nuclear item is benign, sensitive, or especially sensitive has changed in response to the shifting balance between political, commercial and non-proliferation interests. The 1970s, however, merit special attention; they saw an unprecedented codification of nuclear sensitivity in the form of the published trigger lists that are still used today. In the absence of clear technical criteria, what interests and perceptions determined the sensitivity of specific nuclear items by the nuclear suppliers in the 1970s? Archival sources provide a unique insight into how the trigger lists and guidelines were negotiated and with what aims and considerations. This paper finds that nuclear sensitivity was driven by commercial interests in ensuring a level, and open commercial playing field, political interests in securing co-operation and practical interests in implementation and reputation, all of which outweighed technical considerations of how nuclear technology exports might assist a nuclear weapons programme.     

Connolly's Mysterious Trinity Machine: A Panentheistic Reading

Abstract

Drawing Connolly's work into a conversation with Christian theology of a feminist and process persuasion, this article explores and builds upon the way in which Connolly offers a third way between the theistic certainties of George Bush's "Christian America" and the crass secularism of those who are and were appalled by the latter's religious fundamentalism. Discerning a secret Trinitarian structure in Connolly's immanent naturalism, though not the Father, Son and Ghost, the article explores the potentials for developing a counter-apocalyptic strategy for political theology that can counter fundamentalist drives and lay the basis for releasing new energies of earthly becoming.     

The transition from polis to kastron in the Balkans (III-VII cc.): general and regional perspectives

Abstract

Much of the evidence for the changes which scholars perceive in the Late Roman-to-Early Byzantine periods (the ‘Late Antique era’) and in the ‘Dark Age’-to-Middle Byzantine periods in the eastern empire, that is, changes occurring between the mid third and the eighth-to-ninth centuries, whether this evidence is textual, archaeological, or topographical, concerns in one way or another what might be called the upper levels of the settlement-system. These levels consist of settlements or sites distinguishable at various times from the undefended rural majority (or what in most areas forms the majority) of settlements by status (i.e., civic, that of a polis), form, size, situation, or associated functions. They may for present purposes be simply categorised as civic urban settlements, non-civic urban settlements, and non-civic nonurban fortifications or fortified settlements. To study the fate of such places, as settlements and as communities, is to confront the cultural, economic, and internal political history of the period in all its complexity, a task which in most respects is inconceivable without recourse to archaeology and topography. The following observations concern the need to rectify some imbalances in the emphases of research which distort some general analyses of the history of Late Antique and also Middle Byzantine settlements, and so distort our view of cultural, economic, and political change in the periods named.     

Exemplary Cities in China: The Capitalist Aesthetic and the Loss of Space

ABSTRACT

Since the late twentieth century, the subject of China becoming urban has appeared in the scholarship across the disciplines while spectacular images of China’s cities, and narratives about their developmental achievements, have proliferated in global media. Simultaneously, the parallel “spatial turn” in social thought invigorated geographical approaches to cities and urban change. Yet at this promising meeting ground, between contemporary geographical thought and urban-industrial transformation in China, research has tended to demonstrate a “loss of space” through patterns of dependence on analog circulation of exemplar paradigms that derive from the history of the capitalist city and liberal political economy. What drives this condition and what do we know about its practices and proliferation? This inquiry challenges research design and the politics of theory to consider how routine adoption of capital-centric concepts for research on cities in China arguably reflects the priority of paradigms in the disciplines and their conjunctures with exemplarity in Chinese society and political philosophy. These interstices facilitate application of analog models, and selective adoption of empirical information to suit them, with the paradoxical result of portraying cities in China through multiple capitalist aesthetics including a relatively narrow range of empirics framed by market-based social thought.