The governmentalities of infrastructure and services amid urban conflict: East Jerusalem in the post Oslo era

Urban conflict in Jerusalem has mainly been studied through the lens of spatial and functional segregation and discriminative fragmentation between Israeli and Palestinian localities. This article adopts a governmentality approach to the study of the politics of urban infrastructure and services in urban conflict, and argues that a governmentalization process of East Jerusalem by Israel has evolved in the last two decades that has been enacted mainly through the control and management of Palestinian urban infrastructure and services. Since, as manifestations of resistance to Israeli occupation, many of the Palestinian urban functionalities historically operated separately from Israeli state apparatuses, this new development and its consequences indicate an increasing dependency and forced adaptation of Palestinians in Jerusalem to Israeli rule. Based on analysis of Palestinian public transport and education systems, the article demonstrates how the “soft” power of governmentality – mediated through the control and management of urban infrastructure and services – diffuses among the Palestinian population and in space, restructuring them as objects and subjects of Israeli administration and governmental order. In this light, urban infrastructure and services appear in the course of urban conflict as an arena of governmentality and counter-governmentality. On the one hand they serve as a site where identities are practiced and defended; on the other, they may mediate and facilitate the restructuring of political subjectivities and normalization of political structures and hierarchies.     

Singing the new Nepal

Nepal's adoption of a new national anthem in 2007 reflected a decision to establish a new social and political order that was republican, federal and inclusive of the country's many minority communities. It came after a ten‐year internal conflict, and was followed by the abolition of the Shah monarchy that had ruled the country since the late eighteenth century. This article describes the historical and political context of the decision to replace the old anthem, the selection of the new anthem, and the debates that arose in the Nepali media and public sphere after its lyrics and the identity of its author were made known. The discussion refers to arguments made by Karen Cerulo about the relationship between the syntactic structure of national anthems and the stage reached in the process of political modernisation of the nation‐state in question, and provides some comparative perspectives on the Nepali case.     

The metropolitanization of Israel's settlement policy: The colonization of the West Bank as a strategy of spatial restructuring

Israel's West Bank settlements are a central point of contention in the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Overall, however, their rapid proliferation has been generally understood through the lens of an ideologically centered approach that highlights, specifically, the centrality of the national religious settlers' movement. Against this background, the article focuses on the overlooked reality of large, state-sponsored suburban settlements – and in particular on the role of the Israeli Ministry of Housing in their establishment between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. Building on contributions in the field of political economy and political geography, we conceive the actions of the Ministry in the occupied West Bank as a result of a broader strategy of spatial restructuring. By considering both economic and political imperatives underlying this strategy, our analysis offers a more comprehensive assessment of the factors behind Israel's settlement policy. Drawing on a broad range of empirical sources, from archival material to in-depth interviews with Israeli planners, we argue that the proliferation of settlements has been largely the outcome of a process of metropolitanization – i.e. of the dynamics of urban development of Israel's main metropolitan centers and the adoption of a new, post-Keynesian policy paradigm based on market-oriented economic development. This process has constituted a major factor for the settlements' growth and, ultimately, in the emergence and naturalization of a new territorial configuration in the area of Israel/Palestine.     

Barrio resurgence in Buenos Aires: Local autonomy claims amid state-sponsored transnationalism

This paper argues that observing neighborhood movements through the lens of territorial state restructuring holds theoretical promise. Contemporary struggles over municipal decentralization need to be located within broader state re-scaling processes. Seeking to contribute a Latin American perspective to the largely Anglo-American field of urban neoliberalization research, this study engages with the emergence of local autonomy claims in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Middle-class activists and organizations advanced such claims against the background of thorough transnationalism, in what may be interpreted as a localist political reaction to the socio-spatial consequences of urban and state restructuring. Field evidence is used to assess the ultimate political efficacy and democratic implications of their political agency, particularly in what concerns municipal decentralization. It is argued that curtailing the empowerment of barrio districts were the following conditions: mayoral opposition to communal reforms; ongoing cross-scalar tensions between the city and national government; and the barrio-centric issue framings of activists, which hampered social recruitment in an increasingly heterogeneous and transnationalized urban space.     

Gernika,Guernica, Guernica?: Contested meanings of a Basque place

The town of Gernika/Guernica is the center for meaning and territorial continuity of Basque nationalist identity. The town and its symbolism represent the history of national conflict with the Spanish state. It is also the focal point of local disagreements; within Basque nationalism itself and between regional urban centers. The town's significance in the Spanish Civil War, representation in Picasso's painting Guernica, and commemoration in the Americas by Basque emigrants has made it a globally significant place. The contest of meanings related to Gernika/Guernica underscores the significance of naming, monuments, ritual, resistance, oppression, and conflict in the creation and maintenance of national identities. In its examination of the politics of a Basque place, the joining of the forces of geography and history proves to be useful in the analysis of meaning in place- and time-specific political processes. From this perspective, the recent development from conflict toward harmony in Basque politics is reviewed.     

The structuring of political territory in early printed atlases

Abstract

The atlas emerged as a cartographic and bibliographic response to early modern Europeans’ search for geographical order in a rapidly changing world. In particular, atlases were mediators in the restructuring of European ideas about political territory which culminated in the emergence (by the end of the eighteenth century) of the territorial state and its progeny, the nation‐state. For more than two centuries atlases defined political territories ever more precisely for their readers and expressed hierarchical relationships among those territories, while giving form to the political territoriality and geopolitical orientations of particular nations.     

The Transnationalisation of Competing State Projects: Carbon Offsetting and Development in Sumatra's Coastal Peat Swamps

Indonesia's peatlands can be considered as conflict arenas where different state projects and actors compete. The case presented here stands for a new conservation controversy. The Berbak Carbon Initiatives overlap with a settlement project, inducing struggles among different state apparatuses, transnational actors, and peasants. This article is based on a novel conceptual approach building on political ecology, politics of scale and state theory for investigating divergent and transnationalised state projects. Empirically we draw on qualitative research conducted in the province of Jambi, Sumatra. We argue that the territorial conflicts mirror the contradictory interests of different state apparatuses influenced by conservation‐oriented and development‐oriented actors in society but also by supra‐national planning institutions. In our case, the contestation becomes visible through inconsistent notions of development and property. We show how political change challenges the implementation of a forest carbon project, illustrating the high risks of mitigating climate change through offsetting.     

Understanding large-scale institutional change

A remarkable reform in modern Swedish political history was the transformation of the local government structure between 1952 and 1974. In a mere 22 years, the number of municipalities was reduced from 2,498 to 277. This study aims to answer how such large-scale reforms could come about politically, particularly since much of the literature on institutions and political reform asserts that carrying out large-scale political change should be a difficult task. Two opposing stories of institutional change are presented: evolutionary accounts, which see the amalgamations as rational adaptations to changing circumstances, are contrasted with a social conflict perspective, which explains amalgamations in terms of their distributional consequences. By investigating the processes leading up to this vast restructuring of Swedish local political geography, we demonstrate that an understanding of these reforms as rational adaptations to changing circumstances, made on the basis of consensus among leading political actors, is not accurate. The reforms were not as uncontroversial and non-conflictual as they often have been portrayed. Our results weaken the evolutionary approach to institutional change, whilst supporting the social conflict perspective.     

Spatializing the ecological Leviathan: Territorial strategies and the production of regional natures

This paper explores a dual absence — the absence of the state within contemporary geographical analyses of nature; and the absence of nature within contemporary explorations of state power. We argue that the modern state continues to play a crucial role in framing social interactions with nature, while nature is still vital to states within their realization of different forms of material and ideological power. In order to reconnect analyses of the state and nature, this paper combines work on the production of nature and state strategy with Lefebvre's recently translated writings on state space and territory. By focusing on the production of territory (or state space), we explore the interaction of the state and nature in the context of the political management of social and ecological space. We unravel the spatial entanglements of the state and nature through an analysis of the British state's territorial strategies within the West Midlands region. By considering three key historical periods within the history of the West Midlands we reveal how the emergence of the regional space called the West Midlands is a product of the ongoing spatial dialectics of state and nature therein.     

Trans-Himalayan power corridors: Infrastructural politics and China's Belt and Road Initiative in Nepal

This article examines the shifting dimensions of Chinese infrastructural aid in Nepal, focusing on the politics of anticipation and enunciation that shape Nepali perceptions of Chinese-facilitated development and negotiations concerning Beijing's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Drawing from ethnographic research focused on sites of ongoing and planned infrastructure development in Nepal's two northern districts of Rasuwa and Gorkha, we analyze the uncertain remaking of these areas into trans-Himalayan power corridors. Our examination reveals the gamut of transitions, opportunities, reorientations, and expectations that the BRI and other forms of Chinese investment evoke in Nepal, showing how politics articulate infrastructures, and vice versa. After reviewing the historical context of Nepal-China relations, our empirical analysis begins in late 2014 when China became the single largest source of foreign direct investment in Nepal, continues through several rounds of negotiations about the BRI and other forms of Chinese infrastructural investment and aid, and concludes with a review of significant Nepal-China agreements at the Second Belt and Road Forum, held in Beijing in April 2019. Tacking between remote construction sites, scenes of diplomatic debate, borderland villages, investment summits, and speculative media coverage, we demonstrate how the Belt and Road Initiative is differently enacted and co-constructed by a variety of Nepali and Chinese actors who interpret, reimagine, and rhetorically appropriate the BRI within their own narrations of future possibility.     

Globalising Economic Governance,Political Projects,and Spatial Imaginaries: Insights from Four Australasian1 Cities

This paper explores how territorial economic governance is discursively constituted in a globalising and neoliberalising world. It acknowledges both the increasingly recognised formative role of spatial imaginaries in economic interventions and the workings of co‐constitutive political projects that link particular imaginaries with political ambitions and policy strategies. Embracing recent calls for comparative ethnographic urban research at the local‐global interface, it explores currently dominant spatial imaginaries across the four Australasian cities of Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. Based on multiple qualitative methods, this study claims that a considerable number of actor's spatial associations and reference points can be related to particular city‐specific governmental projects; Auckland's Super‐City, Sydney's Global and Green City, Melbourne's Liveable City, and Perth's Vibrant City. It is demonstrated how discursive governance techniques such as ‘story‐telling’, benchmarking, and policy transfer have been pivotal in the activation, circulation, and performance of those spatial imaginaries and their transformation into temporarily dominant visions for strategic urban interventions aimed at repositioning urban actors, spaces, and activities. While spatial imaginaries can be related to differently framed global aspirations, the effects of spatial political projects on urban governance and investment trajectories differ significantly across space. Theoretically, the paper stresses the importance of particular conceptions of territorial relations and time‐ and place‐specific institutional mediation in shaping context‐dependent discursive material governance alignments.     

Local territorial attachment in times of jurisdictional consolidation

Many European countries are changing political boundaries at the local government level. Reforms consolidating local jurisdictions have recently been implemented in a number of countries, and more mergers/amalgamations are ongoing. We examine whether citizens' attachment to their local political unit is affected when municipal maps are redrawn. Our study is based on a dataset from Danish local governments with survey data from before and after a major reform of municipal mergers, and the traditional endogeneity problems are thereby circumvented. Drawing on Scannell and Gifford's tripartite model of person, place and process, we find that person characteristics affect local territorial attachment as well as the intersection between places of residence and the processes leading to the new jurisdiction. It is not an increase in the absolute size of the municipality (i.e., place) or the amalgamation as such (i.e., process) that affects the level of attachment, but rather the relative size of the former municipality compared to the new municipality and thereby the specifics of the redrawing of boundaries. When smaller municipalities are amalgamated with larger municipalities, the local territorial attachment decreases among citizens living in the smaller municipalities but not among citizens living in the larger municipalities.     

Rethinking Power and Authority: Symbolic Violence and Subjectivity in Nepal's Terai Forests

Recent work on authority, power and the state has opened up important avenues of inquiry into the practices and contexts through which power is exercised. Why certain forms of authority emerge as more durable and legitimate than others remains a challenge, however. In this article we bring together two bodies of thought to engage this issue, feminist theories of power and subjectivity and Bourdieu's ideas of symbolic violence, in order to explore how power and authority are reproduced and entrenched. Our purpose is to advance theorizing on power and authority in the context of contentious political situations and institutional emergence. This unusual theoretical synergy allows us to illustrate how power is exercised in relation to natural resource management and the ways in which the conflict/post‐conflict context creates institutional forms and spaces which simultaneously challenge and reinforce antecedent forms of authority. To animate our theoretical concerns, we draw on work in community‐based forestry in Nepal, with a focus on some of the conflicts that have arisen in relation to the valuable Sal forests of the Terai, or lowland plains.     

“Silk Road here we come”: Infrastructural myths,post-disaster politics,and the shifting urban geographies of Nepal

In this paper, we explain how China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) drives urban transformation in Nepal reconfiguring geopolitical and geoeconomic relations and remaking the sociopolitical, cultural and material fabric of hitherto peripheral spaces. Given that BRI infrastructures materialize in parallel with Chinese-funded reconstruction projects, we pay attention to the role of post-disaster politics to unravel how ongoing urban transformation does not only affect the present and the future but also people's histories and post-disaster memories by treating places of (re)building as empty of previous life and history. By drawing on 16 months of fieldwork, we show that despite the evident role of the BRI as an agent of urban transformation, the materialization of most BRI projects depends on geopolitical rivalries, negotiations, unstable local coalitions and escalating social contestation. We conclude that in the post-disaster era, BRI projects have become new vehicles towards Naya [new] Nepal, along with many other infrastructural myths that preceded the country's modern history. Nonetheless, the Naya urban Nepal that is emerging from the ruins of the past is contested and uncertain, a far cry from the days of the Panchayat regime and the civil war, when such gargantuan projects were rarely challenged by Nepali people. This is the unique trajectory of Silk Road urbanization in Nepal: an ultimate path to reach a long due rural-to-urban transition that is inextricably linked with decades of infrastructural violence and precarity and strongly shaped by people's struggles against the unequal geographies of BRI-driven urban transformation.     

Tensions between municipal reform and outdated fiscal levers in rural British Columbia

Debates about the future of small municipalities in Canada are set against a backdrop of economic, political, and social restructuring processes that have displaced former state investment policies in favour of neoliberal public policy approaches. Small municipalities struggle with outdated financial and governance structures and a provincial public policy agenda that asks them to become more creative, innovative, and “entrepreneurial” in their approach and responsibilities. Drawing upon key informant interviews with eight case studies in British Columbia, Canada, this research examines the tensions between municipal reforms mandated by the provincial government over the past 30 years and commensurate fiscal levers and capacities in place to address these broadening responsibilities for small municipalities in volatile staples-dependent regions. Our findings demonstrate how successive provincial governments have mobilized New Public Management objectives through a host of legislative and regulatory changes that have increased the responsibilities and requirements on local governments without commensurate fiscal or jurisdictional capacity.     

Illiberal peacebuilding in a hybrid regime. Authoritarian strategies for conflict containment in Myanmar

The post-Cold War period has seen the rise of international liberal peacebuilding, as an overarching framework for international interventions in intrastate conflicts. In contrast, the current period is marked by decline of liberal peacebuilding, and a simultaneous rise of domestic illiberal peacebuilding. This has created a gap between the predominant theoretical and policy framework and the actual form of peacebuilding in many conflict-ridden societies. The present article addresses this challenge through a contextual case study of illiberal peacebuilding in Myanmar. The case study shows how a dominant state actor – the military (Tatmadaw) – has used both coercion and co-optation to contain armed resistance against militarized and centralized statebuilding and thereby strengthen the state's territorial control and authority. While the SLORC/SPDC military junta (1988–2011) sought to contain ethnic armed organizations through military offensives, ceasefire agreements and illiberal peacebuilding, the military based USDP-government (2011–2015) institutionalized a hybrid regime as a framework for political transformation of EAOs, and tolerated a degree of dual territorial, administrative and resource control at the local scale. These clientelist measures failed to address the substantive issues behind Myanmar's multiple and protracted conflicts. They were also combined with military offensives against non-ceasefire groups and war by other means in ceasefire areas. Moreover, the case study demonstrates that the Tatmadaw used its tutelary power to obstructs substantive conflict resolution through negotiated state reforms. Myanmar's peace initiatives during the last three decades should thus be understood as illiberal strategies for containing ethnic armed organizations rather than attempts at substantive conflict resolution.     

The European Impact on State–Religion Relations in Turkey: Political Islam,Alevis and Non-Muslim Minorities

Since Turkey's application for membership of the European Union (EU) in 1987, the EU has itself been a structural component of Turkey's political transformation. The European impact intensified after Turkey was granted the status of an official candidate at the EU's Helsinki Summit in 1999. Since then, Turkey has issued a series of reform packages with the aim of starting accession negotiations, which began in October 2005. These reforms have initiated a democratic regime that is structurally different from its predecessors in terms of its definition of political community, national identity and the territorial structure of the state. Among many other aspects of the current political transformation such as the resolution of the Kurdish problem and administrative reform, this article concentrates on how the European impact, which I label Europeanisation, has influenced state–religion relations in Turkey. Europeanisation has three major mechanisms that influence actors, institutions, ideas and interests in varying ways: institutional compliance, changing opportunity structures, and the framing of domestic beliefs and expectations. The article concentrates on how these mechanisms operate in the creation of a new regulatory framework of religion in Turkey.     

Concreting the frontier: Modernity and its entanglements in Sikkim,India

Sikkim is a geopolitically sensitive frontier state in India sharing borders with Bhutan, China and Nepal. As distinctions between urban and rural dissolve across the Himalaya, concrete narrates the transformation of these landscapes and the assemblages that hold them together. Using Cloke and Jones’s (2001) notion of ‘dwelling’ we explore Sikkim's concrete manifested in tourism, hydropower and housing to make four arguments. First, concrete is central to the way development is conceived and enacted in Sikkim and offers a critical reading of the ways landscape is imagined, reproduced and politicised. Second, concrete foregrounds the ways peoples' aspirations are materialised in the built environment of a ‘remote’, yet geopolitically significant territory. Third, concrete is an integral component of Sikkim's political culture, part of the assemblage of incongruent elements that undergird the state's dependency. Finally, concrete has further entangled Sikkim within India, producing a loyal border state out of a recently independent polity.     

The Malleability of Participation: The Politics of Agricultural Research under Neoliberalism in Bolivia

This article analyses how neoliberal restructuring encouraged the use of participatory methods in agricultural research in Bolivia and how, at a later stage, participatory development initiatives had to be adapted to prevent conflicts with the post‐neoliberal views of farmer organizations. The article contributes to the debate on the normalization of participatory methods in agrarian development. Engaging with Foucault's work on governmentality and neoliberalism, our analysis goes beyond interpretations of participation which conceptualize it exclusively as a technology of power to discipline subjects. Drawing on a distinction between a liberal and a neoliberal moment in the restructuring of agricultural research, we study the case of PROINPA (Foundation for the Promotion and Research of Andean Products), a national NGO that was once part of the state system for agricultural research but was then privatized. Although PROINPA employed participation mainly to enhance managerial effectiveness, it also facilitated moments of participation from below. We argue that participation designed by this type of NGO is not just ‘technical’ as PROINPA professionals would like to perceive it, nor is it simply ‘political’ as critical views on participation hold. Instead it is malleable in the sense that each actor is involved in finding a new balance between technical, economic and political considerations.     

新国家空间理论的内涵与评价

新国家空间理论是对国家空间重构的系统性描述,它将国家空间看作动态的"过程",而非预定的、固定的"容器"。其核心观点为：①以社会建构的国家空间为研究对象,并关注其多维重构,尤其是尺度重组过程;②关注资本积累方式的转变、国家管制模式转型和行动者的社会政治斗争等多重动因;③关注国家空间选择性及其演变趋势,以及国家空间重构的分层特征。不过,该理论也存在若干不足,如缺乏对行动者的详细探讨、缺乏对尺度和领域以外的空间维度的分析、重构趋势仍有待验证等。尽管如此,新国家空间理论有效整合了人文地理学关于国家治理与空间关系的相关理论,对于全球化研究、城市和区域治理研究以及行政结构重组研究等仍具有重要的借鉴意义。