Ecosystemic politics: Analyzing the consequences of speaking for adjacent nature on the global stage

This article introduces a conceptual framework for analysing and comparing the broader or unintended effects of cooperation anchored in border-crossing ecosystems. The importance of addressing this lacuna in our scholarship on such sub-global cooperation is underscored by research in political geography that has demonstrated how the creation of scale is an important expression of power relations and how interaction with the materiality of different kinds of spaces necessitates distinct political technologies (and thus may have distinct effects). The article introduces three key analytical angles central to policy field studies in international sociology and demonstrates their utility through a case of the Arctic/Arctic Council. These analytical angles – networks (what are the relationships shaping the field?), hierarchies (who leads and how does leadership work?), and norms for political behavior – capture key consequences and dynamics of ecosystemic politics in a concise fashion that lends itself to cross-case comparison. The Arctic case focuses on the changing network positions and roles of non-Arctic actors over time, as an initial exploration of the broader ordering effects of such forms of cooperation. The findings suggest that most non-Arctic actors have experienced a decline in their centrality in Arctic cooperation, even as the Arctic has received intensified global interest and the number of participants in Arctic Council work has increased. Further comparative work along these lines would leave us better equipped to assess whether states speaking for their own immediate environs is better – and if so, in which ways – than seeking common solutions to global challenges.     

The Geopolitics of the ‘Future Return’: Britain's Century-Long Challenges to Norway's Control over the Spitsbergen Archipelago

Within the context of Arctic geopolitics, the article focuses on British policies toward Spitsbergen or Svalbard over the past century. The 1920 Spitsbergen Treaty accorded Norway sovereignty over the archipelago, but it gave other signatories, including Britain, non-discriminatory access to its natural resources. It is argued that while geopolitical interests have played a role in Britain's policy-making, its main rationale has been a determination to use international law to protect pre-existing mining rights and potential future oil rights in the Svalbard area. Apart from Russia, Britain has been most active in challenging Norway's interpretation of its sovereign rights, especially the view about the treaty's non-applicability to Exclusive Economic Zones and continental shelves. It is shown that the Britain's economic focus was tempered during the Cold War by the need for Western solidarity and for supporting Norway's resistance to Soviet Spitsbergen claims. But having been instrumental in watering down Norway's sovereignty provisions in the negotiations on the Spitsbergen Treaty, Britain has never been prepared to abandon its interpretation of the treaty's stipulations on natural resources and equal access to the archipelago's maritime areas.     

Subjects supposed to know,believe, and enjoy: The geopolitics of ideological transference in the Swedish begging question

This article aims to contribute to the emerging field of psychoanalytic geopolitics by introducing a conceptualization of a geopolitics of ideological transference of political knowledge and belief. This is done through an extensive theoretical application of the Lacanian- Žižekian concepts of the “subject supposed to know,” “subject supposed to believe,” and “subject supposed to enjoy” on an empirical case study. The case concerns the discourse, ideology, and politics of the Swedish state hegemony regarding its handling of the territorial presence of impoverished and excluded EU citizens with Romanian/Bulgarian passport and Roma heritage – popularly called “the beggars” – with a focus on the crisis-laden year of 2015. The government, state, and the media elevated key actors into the ideological status of subjects supposed to know how to end the “beggars’” presence in Sweden in a rational and yet caring way, thus enabling the continuous belief in the Swedish ideology of moral exceptionalism although the practical outcomes effectively hindered the EU citizens from obtaining better life conditions. It is argued that a geopolitics of transference through the application of said concepts enable us to further understand how political actors can simultaneously act cynical and idealist, which both illuminates and complicates notions of what knowledges and beliefs inform politics and political geographies in general.     

The Imperial Visual Archive: Images,Evidence, and Knowledge in the Early Modern Hispanic World

This article examines the role of images as evidence and sources of knowledge in the early modern Hispanic world, arguing for the continued importance of visual epistemology as a technique for producing and circulating knowledge from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Visual materials played a central role in the production of knowledge, scientific and imperial, and served as key instruments for addressing the considerable challenges of distance and place posed by the geographical expanse of the empire. Historiographically, the article highlights the active generation of scientific knowledge in the Hispanic world and connects it to imperial and administrative practices; it highlights trans-regional channels of circulation, demonstrating the connected histories of the viceroyalties and peninsula and the multidirectional trajectories in which information and knowledge moved; and it points out deep connections between earlier and later colonial periods. Methodologically, the essay explores the potential of images as historical sources, suggesting that the high status of images in the early modern Hispanic world led to the creation of an enormous pictorial archive that deserves the same level of scholarly attention and rigor that has been lavished on the textual archive.     

THE GOVERNMENT’S BUSINESS?

The engagement of Swedish industry in the Liberian American–Swedish Minerals Company (LAMCO), which mined iron in Liberia between 1963 and 1989, was the largest Swedish commercial investment in Africa during the Cold War. In this paper I investigate how political and administrative actors of the Swedish government conceptualized the link between private and public interests in the context of LAMCO’s operations, and how this shaped Swedish government policy towards the company and Liberia. I identify two phases: a phase of almost unanimous political support for LAMCO and close Swedish–Liberian relations from ca. 1955 to 1965, and a more fragmented phase following 1965, during which LAMCO was increasingly understood as a political liability. My findings show how business interests could figure into Swedish foreign policy during the Cold War, highlighting the coherence with which Swedish industry and government acted in relation to the commercial interests in Liberia before ca. 1965, but also the lack of coherence – between government and industry as well as within the state apparatus – that followed the turn to a more activist policy after the mid-1960s.     

PLACE BRANDING GOES TO THE NEIGHBOURHOOD: THE CASE OF PSEUDO‐SWEDISH ANDERSONVILLE

As the centre of Swedish immigration to the United States, Chicago developed several neighbourhoods with a strong Swedish presence. However, the only Swedish neighbourhood that remains is Andersonville, although few Swedes continue to reside there today – it has become a “pseudo‐ethnic” neighbourhood. Drawing from interviews with neighbourhood activists, commercial, and political interests, as well as fieldwork focused on the ethno‐visual markers of the neighbourhood, we analyse attempts of these actors to commodify ethnicity at the neighbourhood level. The process of actively using a Swedish identity in Andersonville involves the use of branding, a marketing concept used by places to promote themselves. This article investigates branding on the neighbourhood level, and also the role of ethnicity in the branding process. Brand managers struggle to maintain the Swedishness of the Andersonville neighbourhood as demographic and economic forces threaten to weaken the Swedish brand.     

Postcolonial Denmark: Beyond the Rot of Colonialism?

This article begins by providing a brief overview of Danish colonial and imperial history in the tropics, the Arctic and the sub-Arctic. It then discusses how Danish colonialism relates to a broader regional (Scandinavian/Nordic) and pan-European colonial history. From there it moves on to consider Denmark's postcolonial condition, that is, it identifies issues in contemporary Denmark deriving from Danish (and European) colonialism's aftermath. This unfinished business includes contemporary historiography of the migrant other in Danish society, refugee discourse in the public domain, the early stages of a reconciliation process with former colonies – reconciliation has been placed on the public agenda in both Greenland and the US Virgin Islands (formerly the Danish West Indies) - and the still unfolding process of Greenlandic and Faroese independence. The article maps out how the emerging dis-connections between Denmark and its former colonies are paradoxically juxtaposed with processes of new reinforcement: The U.S. Virgin Islands has emerged as an important tourist destination for Danes (more than 10,000 visitors each year). Ghana is one of the major recipients of Danish development aid. Major restoration programs are and have been conducted in all former Danish tropical colonies. In Greenland, Denmark is using its sovereignty to boost its international status as part of the Arctic council, as a scientific power centre on Polar/Arctic research – not least in relation to climate change. The article concludes by looking at critical approaches to Danish colonial history and its legacy in contemporary Danophone literature.     

Globalization,Modes of Innovation and Regional Knowledge Diffusion Infrastructures

Firms increasingly transcend the boundaries of regional innovation systems in their search for technology and complementary capabilities, and only rarely can they build their knowledge bases on science system output alone. Whereas the former decouple firms from regional user–producer networks, the latter raises important questions concerning the role of local science and education system actors in industrial development. By applying the “modes of innovation” concept on a Norwegian region, this paper discusses how science and education institutions can respond to the challenges of knowledge base complexity and globalization. It concludes that such institutions may play a vital role in supporting knowledge-based development, albeit different from that of academic knowledge exploration followed by linear technology transfer to industry.     

Technology and the construction of oceanic space: Bathymetry and the Arctic continental shelf dispute

How did the Arctic seabed become a political space despite its almost complete inaccessibility to humans? While we can explain the causes of this in geopolitical and economic terms, theorizing the process is more difficult. This article argues that spatial constructions of the Arctic seabed emerge from the interaction among human actors, technologies, and the material environment. This interaction generates representations which are then fed into the overall process of spatializing the seabed. By highlighting the role of technology, this paper offers a way of relating human agency and materiality in the construction of oceanic space. The case study of bathymetry in the ongoing disputes over the Arctic continental shelf illustrates how technological and scientific advancements are embedded into global politics and themselves cause evolutions in the spatial construction of the seabed.     

Breeding for insect-resistant cotton across imperial networks, 1924-1950

This paper investigates the elevated expectations and dramatic downturns of the Empire Cotton Growing Corporation’s African experimentation program. It follows the trials of U.4, an insect-resistant variety bred to withstand continental growing conditions, whose expansion through east and southern Africa was filled with promise but ended in disappointment. My argument has two strands. First, U.4 was a product of imperial connections. It was an amalgam of breeding knowledge accumulated in India, specialized training received in Trinidad, and specimens imported from across the empire. Transnational scientific networks were crucial to the Corporation’s initial breeding successes. Second, the story that follows suggests that imperial scientific experts did not impose the Corporation’s research goals monolithically across a wide range of African environments. Rather, Corporation scientists recognized the diversity of African environments and adapted their breeding programs to match local agro-ecological realities. I suggest that the ECGC breeding program is a story of expert knowledge that incorporated rather than undermined ecological specificity.     

Citizens of Empire: Education and Teacher Exchanges in Canada and the Commonwealth, 1910–40

This article examines how one group of actors actively infused education, citizenship and Canada’s international relationships with a sense of empire in the first third of the twentieth century. Making use of archival and published sources from collections in Canada and Britain, it focuses in particular on imperial citizenship teaching in Canadian schools, a number of education conferences held in the United Kingdom and the exchanges of elementary and high school teachers and school inspectors between commonwealth countries. In this period, politicians and bureaucrats in Canada and other dominions actively connected their education systems to an imperial network at the very moment that others were striving to attain more economic and political autonomy from the British government. Education came to occupy a significant cultural space alongside the trade agreements and constitutional changes that slowly recalibrated the nature of the British imperial system in the interwar period. Imperial education projects were an important feature of the cultural politics of a fading empire, but they were driven by actors in both the imperial centre and the self-governing dominions. This article argues that between 1910 and 1940 teachers and politicians in Canada drew on an international support network, actively fostered new ideas of citizenship, and strove to assert the country’s belonging in the British Empire.     

Governing the future: science,policy and public participation in the construction of the long term in the Netherlands and Sweden

This paper is a historical study of two institutions devoted to the problem of the future – the Dutch WRR (the Scientific Council for Government) and the Swedish Secretariat for Futures Studies – both created in 1972. While there is a growing interest in the social sciences for prediction, future imaginaries and the governance of risk, few studies have examined historically the integration of the category of the ‘future’ or the ‘long term’ in political systems in the postwar years, a period in which this category took on specific meaning and importance. We suggest that governing the long-term posed fundamental problems to particular societal models of expertise, decision-making and public participation. We argue that the scientific and political claim to govern the future was fundamentally contested, and that social struggle around the role and content of predictive expertise determined how the long term was incorporated into different systems of knowledge production and policy-making.     

Colonial Australia,the 1887 Colonial Conference,and the Struggle for Imperial Unity

ABSTRACT

For historians interested in the settler colonial world, one of Professor John Darwin’s most important interventions has been to argue for the reintegration of the dominions into the wider history of the British empire. In re-engaging with the history of Britain’s white settler colonies in North America, Australasia, and South Africa, Darwin’s work has sought to emphasize the place of the dominions in relation to the rise and fall of the British world system, as well as their value as vantage points from which to consider imperial and global history more generally. In this regard, Darwin’s systemic approach has encouraged a more dynamic conception of ‘British world’ history – one deeply embedded in a series of overlapping imperial, regional, and international contexts. This article focuses on a particular moment in imperial history where some of the internal dynamics of the late-Victorian British world system, and the changing place of the settler colonies within it, were brought into sharp relief: the 1887 Colonial Conference. It argues that we might look to the conference as a valuable window onto the impact of Anglo-Australian relations upon the wider struggle for imperial unity in the 1880s.     

Humanitarian encounters: Biafra,NGOs and imaginings of the Third World in Britain and Ireland, 1967–70

This article examines the influence of the Biafran humanitarian crisis on British and Irish conceptions of the Third World. Drawing on evidence from non-government organizations (NGOs) in both countries, it argues that the explosion of non-governmental activity in this period, combined with the unprecedented attention afforded to the relief effort, crystallized a popular vision of the Third World that was rooted in western internationalism and the legacies of the imperial world. The model of humanitarian action pursued by Oxfam, Save the Children, Africa Concern and others transformed non-governmental actors into key mediators between the west and the Third World. Yet, this article argues, the image they presented and the tactics they pursued can only be understood as part of a broader adjustment to a decolonized world. From very different beginnings (British postcolonial responsibilities versus a strong anticolonial narrative in Ireland) considerable similarities emerged between British and Irish NGOs. The response to Biafra was an extension of the missionary and colonial service ethos, and generated a model of relief that privileged humanitarian action over local political and human agency. That paternalistic approach further reinforced traditional attitudes to the Third World through renewed emphases on donation, dependency, expatriate volunteers and western concepts of ‘needs’ and ‘development’. This article concludes, therefore, by arguing that Biafra played a vital role in the shift from imperial humanitarianism to neo-humanitarianism and the rise of liberal humanitarian governance. The vision of an inclusive ‘common humanity’ the NGOs espoused was in practice rooted in a very western understanding of humanitarian responsibilities and a very western image of the Third World.     

Nomadic,ecstatic, magic: Arctic primitivism in Scandinavia around 1900

The aim of this article is to delineate the term “Arctic primitivism” in an aesthetic context and, by means of three examples from Scandinavian artists whose works were also the subject of ethnological discussions, to give an illuminating impression of Scandinavian Arctic primitivism around 1900. First some conceptual considerations about the combination of Arctic and primitivistic discourse will be presented. Then three examples for the “primal conditions” of an aesthetic conception of Arctic primitivism will be discussed: the nomadic, the ecstatic, and the magical. They serve as counter principles to modern categories such as spatial fixedness, linear chronology, and rational thought. Emilie Demant Hatt’s visual art stands for the nomadic principle; the Swedish cartoonist Ossian Elgström deals with ecstatic states; and the poems of Danish “eskimologist” William Thalbitzer show his fascination with indigenous magical incantations as an alternative to rational thought. All examples illustrate the artists’ interest in an authentic and uncorrupted culture, which they reflect on with awareness of inauthenticity and second-hand acquisition. The effects of duplication, simultaneity, and secundarity arising from the three principles drive a reflective discourse on media through which awareness of the crisis of modernity is sublimated, revealed, or made the subject of artistic exploration.     

REGIONALIZING “MODE 2”? THE ADOPTION OF CENTRES OF EXCELLENCE IN SWEDISH RESEARCH POLICY

This article contributes to the ongoing debate on the role of university research for innovation and economic growth, a debate highly influenced by concepts such as Mode 2 and regional innovation systems and clusters. A prominent trend in many EU and OECD countries is to direct research funding towards so‐called Centres of Excellence (CoEs) in order to stimulate the industrial output of scientific research. The implementation of the CoE approach is viewed as an attempt to bridge research and innovation policy. By using Sweden as an example and providing an overview and critical discussion concerning Swedish research policy during the period 2001 to 2007 we show that the rhetoric within research policy has changed and become increasingly intertwined with innovation policy. In practice, however, this is not as evident. The study draws on (a) an analysis of policy literature pointing out regulatory and organizational changes concerning the increasing emphasis on linking research to competitive industrial milieus, and (b) a comprehensive database including 110 CoEs, presenting a detailed picture of university‐industry collaboration, cross‐disciplinarity, and prioritized sectors. We fiind that the CoEs account for a relatively small share of government funding, but may however have a strengthening impact on particular research milieus and industries, especially in the life sciences. Additionally, although contemporary policy rhetoric appears to highlight steering funding to geographically‐concentrated milieus, thereby linking leading university research to regional industrial clusters, this has only been manifested in a few cases – notably in the Vinnväxt programme run by Vinnova, the national agency promoting innovation systems.     

Analyzing frenemies: An Arctic repertoire of cooperation and rivalry

Intensive transnational cooperation and manifestations of the NATO-Russia security rivalry have endured for over 30 years in the post-Cold War Arctic. Drawing upon the concept of repertoires from the social movement literature, this article seeks to make a conceptual contribution as to how we might better analyse and articulate the simultaneity of these practices and narratives of cooperation and rivalry in the circumpolar region. Repertoires are typically defined as bundles of semi-structured/semi-improvisational practices making up a context-contingent performance (for example, by civil society towards the ‘state’). These repertoires are argued to be created and performed in ‘contentious episodes’, rather than structured by long-term trends or evidenced in single events. Translated to global politics, a repertoires-inspired approach holds promise for privileging an analysis of the tools and performance (and audience) of statecraft in ‘contentious episodes’ above considerations of how different forms of global order or geopolitical narratives structure options for state actors. The emphasis on the performance of statecraft in key episodes, in turn, allows us to consider whether the interplay between the practices of cooperation and rivalry is usefully understood as a collective repertoire of statecraft, as opposed to a messy output of disparate long-term trends ultimately directing actors in the region towards a more cooperative or more competitive form of Arctic regional order. The article opens with two key moments in Arctic politics – the breakup of the Soviet Union and the 2007 Arctic sea ice low. The strong scholarly baseline that these complex moments have garnered illustrates how scholars of Arctic regional politics are already employing an episodic perspective that can be usefully expanded upon and anchored with insights and methods loaned from social movement literature on repertoires. The 18-month period following Russia's annexation of Crimea is then examined in detail as a ‘contentious episode’ with an attending effort to operationalize a repertoires-inspired approach to global politics. The article concludes that a repertoire-inspired approach facilitates systematic consideration of the mixed practices of amity and enmity in circumpolar statecraft over time and comparison to other regions, as well as offers one promising answer to the growing interest in translating the insights of constructivist scholarship into foreign policy strategy.     

Geographies of exploration and improvement: William Scoresby and Arctic whaling, 1782–1822

Although historians of the long eighteenth century have broadened our understanding of the concept of improvement beyond the agrarian reforms of a landed elite, to other social groups and geographical settings, the private ownership and access to the resources of the oceans and seas are phenomena that have until recently been largely neglected. This paper examines the concept of improvement in the maritime context by exploring a range of tensions between whaling as a form of economic private self-interest on the one hand and as a source of disinterested, virtuous knowledge about the oceans and the animal kingdom on the other hand. William Scoresby, a leading whaling captain and improver, embodied the spirit of those northern European nations which competed to improve the maritime sphere of the northern ocean by implementing different social and technical schemes of enlightenment. He went further than developing new and more efficient and profitable whaling technologies by cultivating disinterested virtue through providing privately obtained natural history specimens from the Greenland Seas for gentleman of science. This in turn gave him entry to participate in the civic circles of polite science and imperial networks of natural history. Although the ascent from industrial whaling in pursuit of profit to disinterested whaling in pursuit of science and exploration made perfect sense to Scoresby, his implicit social improvement laid him open to criticism from those who for different reasons disapproved of the marriage of industrial artisanship and polite natural history. The complexity of Scoresby's identity as an improver is revealed through Robert Jameson, the Professor of Natural History at Edinburgh University, who jealously controlled access to Scoresby's specimens, research, and publications from the Greenland Seas, while simultaneously promoting Scoresby as an intrepid, disinterested captain capable of representing the nation as an Arctic explorer. Through Jameson's Wernerian Natural History Society, they called on government to finance Arctic exploration to reach the North Pole, benefit science, and subsidise the costs through whaling. Their plans were consistent with a long tradition of commercial improvement serving state interests. The Royal Navy's response, to wrest control of Arctic exploration, was by contrast, not a rejection of improvement per se, but rather a determination to place itself at the centre of improvement, by renewing the Board of Longitude with elite, improvement-minded, gentlemen of science, while damning Scoresby with faint praise as an accomplished artisan.     

Imperial Nightmares: The British Image of 'the deadly climate' of West Africa,c. 1840-74

In the first half of the ninteenth century West Africa became associated with the term 'white man's grave'. This was mostly due to the extremely high European mortality rates resulting from endemic disease, especially malaria. The second half of the nineteenth century is usually described as the birth of tropical medicine, which indicates a development in scientific medicine partially attributed to the empirical experiences of the mid-century. The treatment and prevention of the above-mentioned disease changed substantially in the period. This article discusses the public perception of West Africa in the years between the Niger Expedition in 1841 and the Ashanti campaign in 1874. The two events, which mark the chronological framework of the paper, both played a significant part in the history of malaria as much as in the history of British imperial expansion in the region. Using mostly contemporary printed works, it is argued that despite the development that occurred in the field of medicine and subsequent decline in European mortality, the associated image of 'the deadly climate' of West Africa prevailed between the two events for a variety of political, economic and cultural causes.     

Masculinity and political geographies in England,Ireland and North America

Historians have recently turned their attention to the place of masculinity in the politics of early-modern England. This essay widens that exploration to include the imperial settings of Ireland and North America. Drawing upon a range of English- and Irish-language sources – including political treatises, maps, state papers and court poetry – it contends that manhood, as a relational value between men, helped structure the form and character of politics in the metropole, the kingdom of Ireland and the American colonies. In all of those settings, the definition of acceptable male behaviour was different, the effect being that political action and theory in each place took on unique features. Consequently, the essay cautions against studying England and its colonies as distinct units of historical analysis and calls for further exploration of the particularities of colonial settings and their influence on the imperial centre. Moreover, the essay aims to demonstrate that masculinity, particularly contest over its proper expression, is an agent in historical change, in this case helping to shape political theory and practice as England developed into a multiple monarchy and budding imperial power in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.