Scaling health and healthcare: re‐presenting Thailand's HIV/AIDS epidemic with world regional geography students

Authors of world regional geography textbooks have recently become more interested in the broader theoretical changes that have emerged in human geography. Relying on feminist and other critical perspectives, concepts such as space, place and scale are being re‐imagined in this ‘new world regional geography’. This paper intervenes on behalf of a more critical world regional geography by suggesting how world regional geography teachers can educate students about scale as a social construction through the use of empirical data. Relying on fieldwork conducted in Thailand, this paper lays out a lesson on the HIV/AIDS crisis and how different representations of that crisis, from the national to the individual, offer different ‘ways of knowing’ the epidemic. Furthermore, this paper examines how we can push students to consider the ways in which scales of analysis are constructed and constituted through our own geographic practices.     

‘An Old Carriage with New Horses’: Nietzsche’s Critique of Democracy

Debates about Nietzsche's political thought today revolve around his role in contemporary democratic theory: is he a thinker to be mined for stimulating resources in view of refounding democratic legitimacy on a radicalised, postmodern and agonistic footing, or is he the modern arch-critic of democracy budding democrats must hone their arguments against? Moving away from this dichotomy, this article asks first and foremost what democracy meant for Nietzsche in late nineteenth-century Germany, and on that basis what we might learn from him now. To do so, it will pay particular attention to the political, intellectual and cultural contexts within which Nietzsche's thought evolved, namely Bismarck's relationship to the new German Reichstag, the philological discovery of an original Aryan race, and Nietzsche's encounter with Gobineau's racist thought through his frequentation of the Wagner circle. It argues that Nietzsche's most lasting contribution to democratic thinking is not to be found in the different ways he may or may not be used to buttress certain contemporary ideological positions, but rather how his notions of ‘herd morality’, ‘misarchism’ and the genealogical method still provides us with the conceptual tools to better understand the political world we inhabit.     

Pram mobilities: affordances and atmospheres that assemble childhood and motherhood on-the-move

The child-friendly city advocates for children's ‘right to the city’. Much of this advocacy focuses on the independent child, with little attention paid to the accompanied experiences of younger children, such as those travelling in prams. This paper draws on a material feminist perspective to help address this gap. We offer the concept of mother–child–pram assemblage to bring to the fore the corporeal dimensions of everyday pram journeys. By analysing sensory ethnographic materials collected with mothers and young children living in Wollongong, Australia, this paper highlights how the ‘affective affordances’ and ‘affective atmospheres’ of pram mobilities shape urban experience by reference to how motherhood and childhood are achieved on-the-move. We conclude with policy-relevant insights for the child-friendly city.     

Walking,mothering and care: a sensory ethnography of journeying on-foot with children in Wollongong,Australia

This article presents a material feminist perspective into motherhood and walking. Our aim is to explore the process of women ‘becoming mothers’ through journeying on-foot somewhere with children in car-dependent cities. To do so we utilise empirical material gathered as part of a walking sensory ethnography with families living in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage thinking and a feminist care ethics we argue that entanglements with bodies and materials alongside ideas, emotions and affects shape how motherhood becomes and is felt on-the-move through ‘moments of care’. We discuss five moments where care emerges not just as a gendered practice, but as an affective force and embodiment of motherhood; these include: preparedness, togetherness, playfulness, watchfulness, and attentiveness. Instead of assuming the figure of the mother is a given identity; insights are provided into how the dilemmas of becoming a ‘good’ mobile mother are felt through moments of care.     

The new ‘Pacific Century’ and the rise of China: an international relations perspective

The re-emergence of the ‘Pacific Century’, or ‘Asia-Pacific Century’, discourse centred on the rise of Chinese power raises important questions in the discipline of international relations (IR). These questions relate to the conceptualisation of the Pacific Century discourse, its application to the contemporary empirical case, and its relationship and amenability to IR theories. In order to address these questions, the article subjects the concept of a ‘Pacific Century’ to critical analysis through the synergy of three pertinent ‘debates’. First, it creates a novel analytical framework to define and codify the parameters of the Pacific Century debate; a discourse that has until now remained diffuse and inchoate. Second, it engages with the present ‘great debate’ in IR between the traditional/rationalist and critical/reflectivist approaches, applying them in juxtaposition to the notion of a ‘new’ Pacific Century, led by China. Thirdly, then, the article speaks to the ‘rising China’ debate, which currently captivates commentators both in academic and policy-making circles. The article explores how the ‘Pacific Century’ concept is a compound of both ideational and material factors: it is at once both a political/ideological project and a reified intellectual frame of reference. Through this multidimensional analysis, the article aims to shape the re-emerging debate on the Pacific Century, affirm the enduring value of the term, and demonstrate the efficacy of IR theories in deconstructing conceptual problems.     

Masculinity, Identity and Labour Market Change: Some Reflections on the Implications of Thinking Relationally About Difference and the Politics of Inclusion

Abstract In this paper I want to address the connections between the three areas of work: first, the theorisation of identity as relational; second, the significance of difference and diversity in thinking about inequality, labour market restructuring and the social construction of multiple masculinities; and finally, the political implications of taking diversity into account in arguing for a participatory democracy based on ideas about inclusion, respect and responsibility. I want to illustrate these connections in the specific context of a case study about young men in contemporary Britain. In the sections that follow, I focus on each of these areas or concepts in turn, but attempt to demonstrate the connections between the substantive debates in each of the sections. In my conclusion I raise some of the policy implications for building wider social inclusion in democracies by connecting notions of difference and diversity to structural inequalities, or what is sometimes referred to by geographers as ‘the cultural’ and ‘the economic’ dimensions of difference.     

Processional walking: Theorising the ‘place’ of movement in notions of dwelling

This article rethinks dwelling as an active and emergent process through which (re)connections to place are valorised by humans collectively walking with each other in a recursive manner. We revisit Heidegger's notion of dwelling, often criticised for perpetuating enclosure and stasis, by revealing the interconnections between dwelling and movement. Drawing on a two‐century old religious procession—the Manchester and Salford Whit Walks—as an empirical example, our interpretive analysis is centred around three themes. First, we demonstrate how dwelling becomes embodied in performative and collective movement. Second, we examine how dwelling in this context is reinforced through repetition and iteration of that movement. Third, we show how such movement is reliant on repair and maintenance work, which facilitates the (re)emergence of dwelling. We contribute, therefore, empirical insights into how dwelling emerges from a movement through place which, in turn, cements a being in place. Finally, this article has important implications for thinking about how the movement of citizens through processional forms of walking can be a powerful tool for underpinning feelings of dwelling and related concepts of sense of place and civic pride.     

Australian bicameralism as semi-parliamentarism: patterns of majority formation in 29 democracies

The article analyses the type of bicameralism we find in Australia as a distinct executive-legislative system – a hybrid between parliamentary and presidential government – which we call ‘semi-parliamentary government’. We argue that this hybrid presents an important and underappreciated alternative to pure parliamentary government as well as presidential forms of the power-separation, and that it can achieve a certain balance between competing models or visions of democracy. We specify theoretically how the semi-parliamentary separation of powers contributes to the balancing of democratic visions and propose a conceptual framework for comparing democratic visions. We use this framework to locate the Australian Commonwealth, all Australian states and 22 advanced democratic nation-states on a two-dimensional empirical map of democratic patterns for the period from 1995 to 2015.     

Masculinity,place and a binary discourse of ‘theory’ and ‘empirical investigation’ in the human geography of Aotearoa/New Zealand

This paper discusses a binary discourse of ‘theory’ and ‘empirical investigation’ in the human geography practised in Aotearoa (New Zealand)[1]. I attempt to illustrate the way in which such dichotomous thinking articulates with the social construction of a hegemonic masculinity to effect a specific geographic understanding of the world. I suggest that this theory/empirical investigation binary gives rise to at least three significant problems in geographic research: a gendered and hierarchical structuring of geographic thought, a devaluation of the feminised term in the binary, and unworkable ‘mobile positioning’ of the researcher.     

The Heritage of War and the Discourse of Sustainability

Since the concept of sustainability (or sustainable development) became famous through its adoption in the UN’s report, ‘Our Common Future’ in 1987, it has travelled widely to become a global and omnipresent key concept also in the field of heritage. The inclusion into this field was facilitated by the understanding of heritage as resource, which has become the norm within cultural heritage management discourses and strategies. This understanding is increasingly sustained by an associated vocabulary of concepts that promote cultural heritage sites as economically and socio-politically beneficial, emphasising their value as resources for us. This paper explores what happens when this conceptual repertoire of resource thinking is applied to WWII Wehrmacht sites in northern Norway, a heritage that previously has been othered and excluded. How does it impact on the understanding of this particular heritage and how may it be challenged and transformed through encounters with an unruly heritage that potentially defies and distances such conceptualisation?     

Multicultural iteration: Swedish National Day as multiculturalism‐in‐practice

This paper examines the creation of ‘national day’ in Sweden in order to understand how such a holiday works to shape the Swedish nation's relationship with diversity. Analyzing parliamentary debates and press coverage, the author finds that official national day coverage tends to invest the nation with progressive and multicultural meanings, foregrounding immigrant voices. However, this multiculturalism is polysemic, vague and subject to contestation, both from far right ‘traditionalists’ seeking to ‘protect’ Swedishness from outside influences and cosmopolitans who see the nation as outdated and dangerous. The creation of a new national holiday can be seen as a ‘democratic iteration’ wherein democracy is restated and reinvested with meanings, and new lines of cleavage are drawn, and also as a ‘multicultural iteration’ where multiculturalism is invested with new meaning. Finally, the author argues that multiculturalism benefits from polysemy in that the concept can then adapt to changing circumstances, and, thus, survive.     

Elite theory and neo‐elite theory understandings of democracy: An analysis and criticism

Paieto and Mosca, the original elite theorists, in addition to combating socialism developed a new analysis of and set of norms for democratic societies. Some democratic theorists counter‐attacked while others tried to incorporate parts of elite theory into their understandings of democracy. ‘Neo‐elite’ theorists, however, have returned the compliment and tried to turn democratic theory into a sub‐branch of elite theory. In my re‐examination of the work of Pareto and Mosca and criticism of neo‐elitism, it is argued that although neo‐elitists may appear to be more sympathetic to democracy than were Pareto and Mosca, they make less of a contribution to the understanding of democratic government and their work has a greater tendency to give democratic forms an oligarchic content.     

‘Divided Within Itself’: The Parliamentary Labour ‘Right’ and the Demise of Post‐War Revisionist Social Democracy in the 1970s

The article seeks to identify a neglected dimension of the ‘crisis’ and schism of British social democracy in the 1970s from within the ranks of the parliamentary Labour ‘right’ itself. Accounts of the so‐called ‘Labour right’ and its influential revisionist social democratic tradition have emphasized its generic cohesion and uniformity over contextual analysis of its inherent intellectual, ideological and political range and diversity. The article seeks to evaluate differential responses of Labour's ‘right‐wing’ and revisionist tendency as its loosely cohesive framework of Keynesian social democracy imploded in the 1970s, as a means of demonstrating its relative incoherence and fragmentation. The ‘crisis of social democracy’ revealed much more starkly its complex, heterogeneous character, irremediably ‘divided within itself’ over a range of critical political and policy themes and the basis of social democratic political philosophy itself. The article argues that it was its own wider political fragmentation and ideological introspection in the face of the ‘crisis’ of its historic ‘belief system’ which led to the fracture of Labour's ‘dominant coalition’ and the rupture of British social democracy.     

Divergent desires for the just transition in South Africa: An assemblage analysis

In this paper I establish a ‘just transition assemblage’ as a theoretical and empirical case-study to explore the plurality of justice in South Africa's energy transition. The coal phase-out is complicated by the legacies of apartheid, poverty, inequality, unemployment and structural crisis in the state-owned power utility. This transition is loaded with expectation but there is no consensus on what would qualify it as ‘just’. This assemblage analysis clusters desires around two distinct post-carbon imaginaries. The first is an ordering of desires for justice in a diffuse, distributional sense, targeting greenhouse gas emission reductions and looking to smooth the negative impacts of the transition. I label this approach ‘net justice’. This targets more justice overall in defined political spaces, and contrasts with the second orientation around recognising, reconciling, and addressing specific injustices. These desires are distinguished by a contrasting purpose of renewable energy and differing attitudes to its appropriateness or fit. There are incoherent spatial effects, where net justice is shown to be a territorialising project whilst specific injustices need to be de-territorialised. Emphasising desire shows how material and history are enrolled and enlivened, contributing to post-carbon imaginaries. This approach enables injustice and net justice to be understood as conceptually distinct, despite seeming unified calls for a just transition. The primary contribution of this paper is to show how in some cases, popular uses of the terms justice and injustice refer to different things. It forces attention on the question of: ‘justice for whom?’     

Ontological politics of hydrosocial territories in the Salween River basin,Myanmar/Burma

In this paper, we question an often-unchallenged assumption that we all talk about the same ‘thing’ when talking about water. Taking the Salween River in Myanmar as a case study, we draw on a growing body of hydrosocial literature to analyze the multiple ontologies of water. Conceptually, we take each ontology to be constituted of – and enacted within – a human-more-than-human assemblage, the spatiotemporal dimensions of which demarcate a ‘hydrosocial territory.’ We present three illustrations, namely: the role of the Union Government's National Water Resources Committee and how it manifests and is situated within an ontology of ‘modern Water’; a Karen indigenous initiative to establish a Salween Peace Park and an associated revealing of an ‘indigenous’ ontology; and plans for the construction of mainstream hydropower dams and electricity export to neighboring Thailand, where different water ontologies and their hydrosocial territories collide. We examine how multiple ontologies of water are contested through ‘ontological politics’, whereby human actors compete to further their own interests by naturalizing their ontology while marginalizing others. While not downplaying the role violent conflict plays, we argue that in the Salween basin ontological politics are an underappreciated terrain of contestation through which political authority and the power relations that underpin it are (re)produced, with implications for processes of state formation, territorialization and the ongoing peace negotiations.     

Representative democracy and the ‘spirit of resistance’ from Constant to Tocqueville

ABSTRACT

The role of resistance in the politics of modern representative democracies is historically contested, and remains far from clear. This article seeks to explore historical thinking on this subject through a discussion of what Benjamin Constant and Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about resistance and its relationship to ‘representative government’ and democracy. Neither thinker is usually seen as a significant contributor to ‘resistance theory’ as this category is conventionally understood. But, in addition to their more familiar preoccupations with securing limitations on the exercise of political authority and averting majority tyranny, both thinkers wrote extensively on the nature and meanings of resistance in ‘representative governments’ or democratic societies. Both thinkers are examined in the context of revolutionary and Napoleonic discussions about the legitimacy of resistance or ‘right to resist’ oppression, and against eighteenth-century discussions of the ‘spirit of resistance’ since Montesquieu. The article notes conceptual distinctions between resistance, revolution and insurrection in the period, and addresses the broader question of the extent to which early nineteenth-century French liberals sought to ‘institutionalise’ principles of resistance within modern constitutional frameworks.     

Minimal State Theories and Democracy in Europe: From the 1880s to Hayek

Summary

This article deals with laissez faire arguments as distinguishable in Europe between the final decades of the nineteenth century and 1914. The focus is on Herbert Spencer and the British ‘Individualists’, the Italian Vilfredo Pareto, and the Frenchman Paul Leroy-Beaulieu. Analysis concentrates on the relationship between laissez faire formulations and democracy, the latter amounting to the impact of the extension of the franchise on representative government. All the mentioned authors blamed the mechanisms of democratic government for the contemporary growth in state functions. While Spencer focused on the threat of a new class legislation after the demise of aristocratic power, Pareto and Leroy-Beaulieu viewed the pressure of lobbies and parties as the chief cause of the extension of state interventions. This article also aims to detect similarities and differences with more recent formulations. It is argued that Friedrich Hayek's achievement was to reconcile, against earlier perspectives, laissez faire with democracy. The reconciliation rested on a conceptualisation of democracy as a valuable method or procedure, onto which no values should be grafted.     

Unpacking the ‘Emergent Farmer’ Concept in Agrarian Reform: Evidence from Livestock Farmers in South Africa

South Africa has historically perpetuated a dual system of freehold commercial and communal subsistence farming. To bridge these extremes, agrarian reform policies have encouraged the creation of a class of ‘emergent’, commercially oriented farmers. However, these policies consider ‘emergent’ farmers as a homogeneous group of land reform beneficiaries, with limited appreciation of the class differences between them, and do little to support the rise of a ‘middle’ group of producers able to bridge that gap. This article uses a case study of livestock farmers in Eastern Cape Province to critique the ‘emergent farmer’ concept. The authors identify three broad categories of farmers within the emergent livestock sector: a large group who, despite having accessed private farms, remain effectively subsistence farmers; a smaller group of small/medium‐scale commercial producers who have communal farming origins and most closely approximate to ‘emergent’ farmers; and an elite group of large‐scale, fully commercialized farmers, whose emergence has been facilitated primarily by access to capital and a desire to invest in alternative business ventures. On this basis the authors suggest that current agrarian reform policies need considerable refocusing if they are to effectively facilitate the emergence of a ‘middle’ group of smallholder commercial farmers from communal systems.     

Sexualities,subjectivities and urban spaces: a case for assemblage thinking

In this essay, we argue that assemblage thinking has much to offer geographers attempting to conceptualize the interrelationships between sexualities, subjectivities and contemporary urban spaces. In our current research on queer mobilities, we found that despite the explanatory weight provided by mobilities approaches, two fundamental questions remained: how to conceptualise the nature of ‘the queer subject’, and how to better explain why certain kinds of urban spaces still seemed to support these newly mobile queer subjects. Here we speculate on the potential of assemblage thinking to formulate some new theoretical and conceptual responses to these questions. While quite preliminary, there is the potential to understand how interlocking (but temporary and unstable) notions of identities, subjectivities and mobilities (of ideas, people, knowledge, capital, etc.) can be ‘assembled’ in and across urban spaces, recursively reshaping sexualities and places.     

‘Exodus’: The Serb flight from Sarajevo,its legacy,and its role in the political memory of Republika Srpska

This study provides a conceptual and empirical explanation of how and why the leadership of Republika Srpska (RS), which is one of the entities of Bosnia and Herzegovina, formed a specific discourse concerning the flight of Sarajevan Serbs after the 1992–1995 war. Undertaking an analysis of local media, it explores the ‘defensive’ and ‘cohesive’ strategies promulgated by the RS elite that have been pivotal in shaping the idea of Serbhood. The former accentuates victimhood through discursive dimensions of external enforcement, suffering and rupture. The latter channels a sense of collective identity and the notion of ‘statehood’ in RS through narratives of sacrifice and patriotism. These strategies help to advance the concept of Serbhood to counter the war's external near-hegemonic understanding, fuelling denialism and promoting in-group characteristics in the RS society. The legacy of the flight has contributed to moulding the political memory of RS.