Practicing decolonial political geography: Island perspectives on neocolonialism and the China threat discourse

Island peoples around the world remain entangled in colonial processes. Western and metropolitan powers are increasingly deploying discourse of a ‘China threat’ to justify neocolonial entrenchment in the form of greater Western militarisation and economic dominance. In this paper, we investigate how Western and metropolitan powers use the China threat and warnings of economic, environmental, demographic, and military disaster to maintain and deepen colonial influence in former colonies, with special focus on four island states and territories: Guåhan/Guam in Oceania, Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland in the Arctic, Okinawa in East Asia, and Jamaica in the Caribbean. We undertake this investigation as a means of practicing decolonial political geography, collaborating as a group of scholars from around the world and drawing upon diverse epistemologies and experiences to inform collaborative research and writing. Due to the complexities we have confronted in our efforts to think outside coloniality, this paper foregrounds our decolonial methodology and process, even as we respect our empirical findings.     

The political logic of discourse: a neo-Gramscian view

This article contrasts Mark Bevir's approach to the history of ideas with a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse. Bevir puts the case for an ‘anti-foundationalist’ approach to understanding ideas, yet he defends a weak rationalism centred on individual intentions as the original source of all meanings. Discourse theorists—specifically Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—also adopt an anti-foundationalist perspective but pursue its implications beyond any rationalism. The advantages of discourse theory are argued to lie in its emphasis on power and conflict in the consitution and transformation of social meanings and identity. Laclau and Mouffe's work, it is claimed, alerts us to a political logic of discourse that Bevir's more rationalist approach to ‘ideas’ sidesteps.     

The political logic of discourse: a neo-Gramscian view

This article contrasts Mark Bevir's approach to the history of ideas with a neo-Gramscian theory of discourse. Bevir puts the case for an ‘anti-foundationalist’ approach to understanding ideas, yet he defends a weak rationalism centred on individual intentions as the original source of all meanings. Discourse theorists—specifically Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe—also adopt an anti-foundationalist perspective but pursue its implications beyond any rationalism. The advantages of discourse theory are argued to lie in its emphasis on power and conflict in the consitution and transformation of social meanings and identity. Laclau and Mouffe's work, it is claimed, alerts us to a political logic of discourse that Bevir's more rationalist approach to ‘ideas’ sidesteps.     

“Living together separately”: Thoughts on the relationship between political science and political geography

In their provocatively titled book, Living Together Separately, Michael Romann and Alex Weingrod argue that the shared terrain of Jerusalem obscures deep divisions in the physical and social lives of its Arab and Jewish ethnic communities (Romann & Weingrod, 1991). Multiple divisions exist not only among peoples sharing a common space; they are also found among communities of scholars sharing common intellectual interests. This has certainly been the case of Political Science and Political Geography during much of the twentieth century. Members of both disciplinary communities seek insights into the role of politics and political structures in human society, yet until recently they have pursued their work within orbits that only rarely intersected. They attended different conferences and symposia, they employed different methodological tools, and they did not draw heavily on each others published work.Recent theoretical and empirical developments have begun to erode the barriers separating Political Science and Political Geography, and a discussion of the relationship between the disciplines is thus both timely and welcome. Professor Elazar is an appropriate person to place at the center of this discussion, for his work as a political scientist is unusual sensitivity to geography. Professor Elazar's comments about research orientations and career constraints provide an interesting point of departure for such a discussion, but to understand the nature and depth of the divide between the disciplines it is important to consider the core intellectual constructs and practices that have characterized Political Science and Political Geography during the twentieth century. These have fostered theoretical orientations and research approaches that are sufficiently different from one another to create significant barriers to interdisciplinary contact.     

Embodying vertical geopolitics: Towards a political geography of falling

The emergence of air power in the 20th Century marked a new era of warfare. Speed, covertness, mobility, and verticality emerged as the buzzwords. This paper examines experimental body-centred encounters with verticality during preparatory parachute training at Ringway Aerodrome 1940–1945. I trace how falling bodies encountered, were organised in, and harnessed space for air-led warfare and, by extension, how vertically moving bodies perform alternative geopolitical realities. First, the paper outlines a political geography of falling and calls for greater critical conceptual thinking on the micro-practices capable of exerting geopolitical influence. Second, I outline three design principles cultivated through military parachuting. Repetition, relationality, and alignment advance theorisations of the organisation of aerial space, and affirm the entangled geographies of embodiment, verticality, and geopolitics. I draw upon the Royal Air Force's practical airborne training programme as a means for enacting ‘high readiness, forced entry’ operations through the amalgamation of man, technological-non-human, and air. The paper argues for the achievement of air power and the performance of aerial supremacy through gravity and falling. This has important implications for unpacking the corporeal mobilities and training practices by which geopolitical realities are known, embodied, made, and articulated, and of the role of elite performances of aerial mobility in disrupting inter/national aerial sovereignty.     

Towards a geography of tolerance: Post-politics and political forms of toleration

This paper argues for a closer inspection of how tolerance and politics interact. Within geography and beyond there is rising concern about post-political situations, whereby potential disagreements are foreclosed and situated beyond the remit of political debate. This is conceptualised as a process of de-politicisation that operates ‘much more effectively’ than alternative ways in which politics can be and has been disavowed (?i?ek, 1999: 198). While ?i?ek associates liberal tolerance with the post-political condition, however, theories of tolerance are at odds over whether it represents an everyday enactment of the political. Although some authors have indeed associated tolerance with a depoliticising tendency (Brown, 2006), others insist that certain types of tolerance are capable of nurturing simultaneous recognition and disagreement, which directly contradicts the conditions of post-politics (Forst, 2003). We therefore ask, contra ?i?ek, whether certain forms of tolerance can be an antidote to the post-political practice of foreclosing politics, and offer a set of considerations pertinent to the geographical analysis of this issue.     

Complexity science and human geography

Complexity science has attracted considerable attention in a number of disciplines. However, this perspective on scientific understanding remains ill defined. In this paper, ideas and approaches from complexity science are reviewed. It appears that complexity science fundamentally is driven by ontological decisions on the part of the investigator. This is a result of the epistemological approach fundamental to complexity as it is currently studied, which is based on the construction of computer simulation models of reality. This methodology requires that researchers decide what exists and is important enough to represent in a simulation, and also what to leave out. Although this points to serious difficulties with complexity science, it is argued that the approach nevertheless has much to offer human geography. Drawing on complexity science, renewed engagements between physical and human geography, and between both and geographical information science seem possible, based on clearly shared concerns with the representation of geographical phenomena. In conclusion, it is suggested that seeing models as a source of geographical narratives may be a useful way to promote constructive engagement between different perspectives in the discipline.     

Strange encounters: a dialogue on cultural geography across the political divide

Disagreement is a fundamental aspect of scholarly inquiry, yet it is exceedingly rare for scholars on opposite sides of the political spectrum to engage in a sustained dialogue across the political divide. This article seeks to contribute to precisely such a dialogue with specific reference to the field of cultural geography. The discussion featured herein consists of an encounter between “critical” and “conservative” approaches to cultural geography in the form of a back-and-forth exchange of arguments and counter-arguments by the interlocutors. The dialogue covers a wide range of issues, including the cultural politics of essentialism, white supremacy, racial segregation, patriarchy, traditional morality, secularism, justice, authority, friendship, difference-as-strangeness, and the very question of disagreement itself. The broader aim of this dialogical intervention is not to find some sort of common ground that will resolve all differences but rather to explore what those differences are with the hope of opening up a space for more constructive dialogue on cultural geography across the political divide.     

The discourse of the past: phenomenology,structuralism and historical geography

Historical geography has to be predicated on a critical examination of past and present discourses, and this necessarily involves a rejection of positivist epistemology. This was, in more general terms, the basis of Husserl's critique, but two alternatives to this are the constitutive phenomenology of Alfred Schutz and the linguistic structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss. Both present major difficulties. Schutz fails to recognize the necessity of a hermeneutic understanding of past societies and cannot account for the genesis and temporality of meaning, while Lévi-Strauss provides for a formalism which is directed towards the structure of the human mind rather than the historically specific structures of particular discourses. The connections and contrasts between these two positions suggest several ways in which the examination of discourse might be constituted in order to contribute to a structural history.     

Geography and political science

Political geography can make distinctive and important contributions to both geography and political science, but this will require attention to the boundaries of these disciplines, emphasis on the comparative advantage of geographers with respect to the study of the shapes of physical space, and systematic consideration of boundaries as problematically institutionalized norms. Mapping, per se, cannot be the core of any discipline.