“Only Strong States Can Survive in Turkey's Geography”: The uses of “geopolitical truths” in Turkey

Following Critical Geopoliticians' re-formulation of geopolitics as discourse, this article historically traces, politically contextualizes, and empirically analyzes the linguistic practices as found in myriad actors' formal geopolitical writings and public articulations in Turkey. It shows how the production and dissemination of a particular understanding of geopolitics as a “scientific” perspective on statecraft, and the military as an actor licensed to craft state policies (by virtue of its mastery over geopolitical knowledge) has allowed the military to play a central role in shaping domestic political processes. Subsequent to the erosion of bi-partisan consensus on foreign policy from the mid-1960s onwards, civilian actors also began to tap geopolitics but as a foreign policy tool. By the end of the 1990s, geopolitics had become rooted in the discourses of both military and civilian actors shaping (for “better” or for “worse”) Turkey's “foreign” relations with the European Union as well as “domestic” political processes.     

Cross-Border Differences and Unfamiliarity: Shopping Mobility in the Dutch-German Rhine-Waal Euroregion

Many international differences can be experienced in shopping spaces on both sides of a national border. Other languages, unfamiliar goods and unknown spatial codes are only a few of the physical-functional and socio-cultural differences that could cause exciting and stimulating situations but could also be perceived as problematic and deterring. This paper analyses perceptions, motivations and practices of cross-border (non-)shoppers and provides insights into ways in which people from cross-border regions deal with differences and the extent to which they interact across borders. The aim is to both theoretically and empirically substantiate the dynamic concept of (un)familiarity by scrutinizing the impact of “push”, “pull”, “keep” and “repel” factors on shopping (im)mobility in the Dutch-German Rhine-Waal Euroregion. These factors are seen as rooted in dynamic processes of constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing differences between places on both sides of the border. In so doing, attention is paid to changing shopping practices and motivations and influencing changing perceptions of international differences. As such, the paper also discusses “familiarization processes” in cross-border regions. The concluding section provides critical reflections on the current European policy approach towards cross-border regional development. In fact, the paper ends with a plea for more instead of less borders, as borders are markers of international differences which could promote cross-border mobility.     

Emancipatory or Neoliberal Food Politics? Exploring the “Politics of Collectivity” of Buying Groups in the Search for Egalitarian Food Democracies

In the context of apolitical tendencies in food studies, this paper explores how alternative food networks can contribute to developing emancipatory food politics rather than constitute a tool to reproduce neoliberal subjectivities. For this purpose, I contend that the post‐political literature offers a useful approach to examining the concept of food politics by developing a more robust theoretical framework, permitting the establishment of linkages with broader contemporary processes of social change. The analysis of an action‐research process with buying groups in Spain is used to examine the “politics of collectivity” at play, that is, how these initiatives institutionalise “the political”. Specifically I explore the motivations mobilised to construct place‐based ethical repertoires and unveil how these groups govern the relationality of consumption practices in the pursuit of broader processes of change. I conclude by discussing the contribution of these initiatives to building egalitarian food democracies.     

THE EUROPEANIZATION OF REGIONAL DEVELOPMENT: LOCAL STRATEGIES AND EUROPEAN SPATIAL VISIONS IN NORTHERN FINLAND

By exploring the Europeanization of current practices of regional spatial planning, this article sets out to demonstrate the evolution of the European integration project. Specifically, by creating spaces of engagement to which the local and regional actors are “forced” to adapt, the emergence of European spatial planning has made planning practices at the regional level more complex and complicated. As such, the present study contributes to the current understandings of Europeanization by exploring the European integration process through the geographical conceptualizations of space and scale. These conceptualizations are used to illustrate the multidimensionality, complexity and subtlety of the geographies of Europeanization. The empirical investigations show that regional and local spatial policies are strongly engaged – both explicitly through the “technicalities” and implicitly through the “mentalities”– to the spaces of Europeanization. The engagement affects the effectiveness of sub‐regional spatial planning by promoting mismatches between the strategic frameworks and the material practices of the policy. Overall, the article illustrates that the geographies of Europeanization are continuous processes, which take place – often unrecognizably – in manifold discursive and material practices in various geographical contexts.     

Mapping Illegality: The i‐Map and the Cartopolitics of “Migration Management” at a Distance

Cartographies for “migration management” are part and parcel of controversial border practices far from conventional borderlines. Focusing on the i‐Map, this study renders how the European Union's current practices of remote border control are visualised among migration policy circles and expert security actors through a “mapping migration matrix”. The lines portraying migration flows in recurrent maps generate a shared expert language and a common geographical imaginary reinforcing practices of contention and classification of those assumed to move toward the European Union irregularly. It is argued that illegality is constructed in ways that target border crossing long before any border is crossed, making someone illegal at the very moment and place where s/he might decide to migrate. This paper analyses the cartopolitics and limits of cartographic expertise in the production of a “routes thinking” able to legitimise extra‐territorial interceptions and practices of remote border control.     

Defining “Official” Built Heritage Discourses within the Irish Planning Framework: Insights from Conservation Planning as Social Practice

Conservation of built heritage is a key planning process and goal which shapes urban development outcomes across European cities. In Ireland, conservation of the built heritage is a key part of the planning framework, albeit one that is, in comparative terms, only recently established. While it is widely recognized that the underlying rationale for conservation of built heritage varies considerably (from cultural priorities to place marketing), the literature suggests that heritage and conservation professionals perform a key role in controlling decision-making through an official or “authorized” heritage discourse (AHD), emphasizing expert values and knowledge and based around selective heritage storylines often reflecting elite tastes. Drawing on policy and practice in Ireland, in this paper, we contribute to these debates by further unpacking the AHD, exploring tensions within the heritage policy elite through examination of competing views and representations relating to the purpose of built heritage protection. Based on a discourse analysis following interviews with key national actors, we identify two key narratives—a “museum-curatorial” discourse and an “inclusive heritage” discourse—which in turn frame conservation practices. We argue that subtle variations of heritage meanings have the potential to either reproduce (museum-curatorial discourse) or challenge (inclusive heritage discourse) conventional modes of practice, particularly relating to the relationship between built heritage and identity and the role of public engagement.     

ON BEING NOT EVEN ANYWHERE NEAR ‘THE PROJECT’: WAYS OF PUTTING OURSELVES IN THE PICTURE

This paper challenges current constructions of “the project” in radical geography by examining the phenomenon of “missing sisters.” We discuss the social construction of lesbians and disabled women as invisible “others” and how this is manifest in Geography. We argue that disabled women and lesbians have had their experiences and lives marginalized; both in the geographic literature and through practices of exclusion. We call for a reconstructed radical geography which includes lesbians and disabled women, on their own revolutionary terms, in the production of knowledge and in political practice. Such an inclusionary project will enrich our understanding of geographic processes and strengthen our efforts to build political strategies of resistance to contemporary forms of oppression and marginalization.     

Cross-Border Mobility,Unfamiliarity and Development Policy in Europe

In this special issue, we seek to explore experiences, performances and effects of both “unfamiliarity” and “familiarity” across a diversity of inner and outer borders of the European Union. In EU integration discourse, cross-border unfamiliarity is usually considered to obstruct international mobility and diminish opportunities for cross-border cohesion and communities to develop. European development policy, therefore, often focuses on creating mutual understanding in border regions, especially through diminishing the barrier effect of borders. One of the consequences is that more cross-border familiarity is created. However, too much familiarity may also have undermining implications for cross-border mobility, integration and community-building. This special issue, therefore, scrutinizes what “being” and “feeling” (un)familiar imply in cross-border contexts and what consequences both have for spatial practices in and representations of borderlanders in several Euroregions—as well as for European regional development policies aiming for cross-border mobility, integration and community-building.     

Class,Citizenship and Regeneration: Glasgow and the Commonwealth Games 2014

Abstract: Through a focus on “consumer‐citizenship” this paper foregrounds the class practices inherent in urban regeneration. Using Glasgow's 2014 Commonwealth Games (CWGs) as an illustrative example of regeneration, it seeks to highlight the market‐led processes that underpin state interventions. The paper demonstrates how these processes are implemented to transform “problem people, and problem places” ( Damer 1989 , From Moorepark to “Wine Alley”) into sites of “active” consumption and “responsible” citizenship. Yet, access to this “consumer citizenship” is stratified. In doing so, we synthesise conceptual insights from the Marxist‐influenced gentrification literature and the Foucauldian‐inspired housing renewal literature. We forward this to initiate further academic debate and empirical enquiry on the specific issue of mega sporting events.     

The new mimics? Cross-cultural learning in Salvador da Bahia,Brazil

The city of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil attracts considerable numbers of visitors who spend time there in order to participate in local cultural practices, particularly percussion music, capoeira and African–Brazilian dance. This paper investigates the extent of their engagement with those practices and with the wider cultural context. It was found that such participatory cross-cultural learning, adoption and travel can be split into categories and differs markedly from conventional tourism. Theorisations of cultural interaction have frequently concentrated on colonialism or migration, where acculturation is a by-product of political, economic and even military shifts. The concept of “mimicry” as used in postcolonial theory is evoked here and considered in relation to the processes studied. One of the main differences is that the subjects voluntarily expose themselves to a measure of culture shock. Furthermore, the adoption takes place against the predominant global flow of cultural influence from the “West” to the rest. Apart from certain factors which make Bahian culture accessible and attractive, motivating factors for this voluntary movement and orientation are the perception of particular aspects of that culture as “authentic other”, as well as a weakened attachment to place, specifically to Western community and cultural origins.     

1. DECENTERING HISTORY: LOCAL STORIES AND CULTURAL CROSSINGS IN A GLOBAL WORLD

This essay was first presented at the 2010 Ludwig Holberg Prize Symposium in Bergen, Norway, where I, as the prize recipient, was asked to describe my work and its import for our period of globalization. The essay first traces the interconnected processes of “decentering” history in Western historiography in the half century after World War II: the move to working people and “subaltern classes”; to women and gender; to communities defined by ethnicity and race; to the study of non‐Western histories and world or global history, in which the European trajectory is only one of several models. Can the historian hold onto the subjects of “decentered” social and cultural history, often local and full of concrete detail, and still address the perspectives of global history? To suggest an answer to this question, I describe my own decentering path from work on sixteenth‐century artisans in the 1950s to recent research on non‐European figures such as the Muslim “Leo Africanus” (Hasan al‐Wazzan). I then offer two examples in which concrete cases can serve a global perspective. One is a comparison of the literary careers of Ibn Khaldun and Christine de Pizan in the scribal cultures on either side of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The other is the transmission and transformation of practices of divination, healing, and detection from Africa to the slave communities of Suriname in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.     

Strategic Planning in Transition: Contested Rationalities and Spatial Logics in Twenty-First Century Danish Planning Experiments

In this article, we analyse how contested transitions in planning rationalities and spatial logics have shaped the processes and outputs of recent episodes of Danish “strategic spatial planning”. The practice of “strategic spatial planning” in Denmark has undergone a concerted reorientation in the recent years as a consequence of an emerging neoliberal agenda promoting a growth-oriented planning approach emphasizing a new spatial logic of growth centres in the major cities and urban regions. The analysis, of the three planning episodes, at different subnational scales, highlights how this new style of “strategic spatial planning” with its associated spatial logics is continuously challenged by a persistent regulatory, top-down rationality of “strategic spatial planning”, rooted in spatial Keynesianism, which has long characterized the Danish approach. The findings reveal the emergence of a particularly Danish approach, retaining strong regulatory aspects. However this approach does not sit easily within the current neoliberal political climate, raising concerns of an emerging crisis of “strategic spatial planning”.     

Towards justice in planning: A reappraisal

The concept of justice is central to a political activity such as planning. This is reflected in the initial influence of consequentialism, particularly utilitarian conceptualizations, in planning thought and more recently in the application of Rawls' notion of “justice as fairness” and Habermas' “discourse ethics”. However, contemporary normative planning theory has been vigorously criticized by studies which take as their starting point the material realities of planning practices. In this paper it is argued that notwithstanding the crucial contributions of Habermas and Rawls to political philosophy their constitutional level conceptualizations were never intended to be applied to the task of situated judgement associated with the highly contested decisions at the heart of the planning activity. Consequently, the issue for the planning community is not so much can the concepts of justice embodied in Rawls' “justice as fairness” or Habermas' “discourse ethics” be found in practice but could they ever. More generally it has been argued that the inevitable abstraction in liberal theories of justice comes so close to idealization that their ability to help individuals and societies to address the question of “what is to be done?” is seriously called in to doubt. This in turn has led to concern that an adequate account of justice should be able to link abstract principles to context sensitive judgement of particular cases. The paper explores some implications of these debates for the future development of theory and practice in planning.     

Extracting Value from the City: Neoliberalism and Urban Redevelopment

How do states make the built environment more flexible and responsive to the investment criteria of real estate capital? Spatial policies, such as urban renewal funding for slum clearance or contemporary financial incentives, depend on discursive practices that stigmatize properties targeted for demolition and redevelopment. These policies and practices have become increasingly neoliberalized. They have further distanced themselves from those “long turnover” parts of the city where redevelopment needs are great but where the probability of private investment and value extraction is slight. They have become more entwined in global financial markets seeking short–term returns from subsidized property investments. They have shifted their emphasis from compromised use values (embodied in the paternalistic notion of “blight”) to diminished exchange values (embodied in the notion of “obsolescence”). I argue that obsolescence has become a neoliberal alibi for creative destruction and, therefore, an important component in contemporary processes of spatialized capital accumulation.     

Institutional Arrangements and Political Mobilization in the New Italian Regionalism: The Role of Spatial Policies in the Piedmont Region

The paper focuses on the resurgence of the regions as protagonists of the process of the state rescaling in many European countries. In the EU countries this process can be seen as a result of a mix of economic and institutional factors, which have been producing an increasing competition between the central governments and the regional authorities. The rise of the multi-level governance and of the so-called Euroregionalism has reinforced the role of the regional scale in the territorial development: on one hand, with new actors like agencies and organizations engaged in the economic development (FDI attraction, place marketing, innovation and learning), on the other hand by the resurgence of “old” actors, such as the regions, in many cases empowered by processes of institutional devolution. The literature has investigated this re-composition of the political space with regard to the “hollowing out” and the “rescaling” of the state. On the base of these theoretical underpinnings, we discuss some empirical evidence from the Italian experience, in order to show whether and how the regional structures are not only “spaces for policies”, but also “spaces for politics”. Over the last decade, the changes in legal framework, the external inputs from supranational levels of government—the European Commission—and the re-territorialization processes have introduced many elements of innovation in the role of the regions. By illustrating the case of the Piedmont Region, we try to demonstrate that the transition towards the region as an active space of politics can be mediated by the sphere of the policies, especially the spatial ones.     

The Ins and Outs of Iranian Industrial Resilience under Sanctions

This paper draws on export data from four of Iran’s key trade partners—the European Union, China, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Turkey—to examine the robust and positive correlations between the export of parts and machinery to Iran and Iran’s industrial output, as measured by production index data published by the Central Bank of Iran for industrial enterprises with over 100 employees. The period of analysis is 2000 to 2017. It may seem intuitive that the output of Iranian manufacturers depends on the ability of companies to source intermediate goods such as parts and machinery. However, the imposition of sanctions on Iran is shown to have temporarily decoupled the relationship between European industrial exports to Iran and the Iranian industrial production index—the index remained stable even as European exports fell. An analysis of trade data for the other three trade partners included in this study quantitatively substantiates reports noting that in order to sustain the industrial production index, Iran engaged in processes that can be collectively described as “import reflection.” This entails substituting European intermediate inputs with Chinese inputs while also circumventing sanctions pressures on trade by sourcing European inputs via re‐export from the UAE and Turkey. These processes were fundamental to Iran’s economic resilience in the face of multilateral sanctions and have played a central role in Iran’s defense of its industrialized economy and particularly its non‐oil exports as the administration of US President Donald Trump pursues a new unilateral campaign of “maximum pressure” sanctions.     

Wardens of Civilisation: The Political Ecology of Australian Far-Right Civilisationism

The notion of a superior “civilisation” has been a hallmark of the politics of Western institutions and fringe white supremacists alike. Known ideologically as “civilisationism”, it has occupied a prominent position in the ideology of the Australian far-right. Paying tribute to their settler-colonial origins, the far-right has consistently promoted “white civilisation”, even inspiring terrorist attacks. Despite this propensity for violence, far-right civilisationism remains largely unexplored. Through investigating a dataset of Australian far-right content, this paper reveals civilisationism as a significant part of their ideology, an ideology which relies on the idealisation of European technologies and environments to render Indigenous land and people uncivilised. A critical narrative analysis of the data illustrates the ways that these ecological factors are drawn into narrative to articulate Australian far-right civilisationism, an ideology inseparable from the political ecology of European history and colonialism, that today represents a particularly virulent version of its legacy.     

The Possibility of Shamanism: A Genealogy of Anthropological Appropriations

This piece adopts a genealogical approach to the emergence of “neo-Shamanism” as a “spiritual” practice. It argues that the work of Freud and Durkheim collapsed the dichotomy between “primitive” and “civilized” which characterized nineteenth-century evolutionist anthropology. Neither Freud nor Durkheim embraced the consequences of this collapse, and while Bataille attempted to do so, his application of “Shamanism” to modern self-governance was constrained by the terms of the Freudian/Durkheimian framework. Jung did embrace this collapse, positing a universal equivalence between religious forms and psychological processes, and this epistemic shift permitted his interlocutors, Levi-Strauss and Eliade, to inaugurate the discursive frameworks which made “neo-Shamanism” thinkable as an ethical practice for contemporary Westerners. Analyses which suggest that “neo-Shamanisms” are rediscoveries of a primal “spirituality” write from within this framework, neglecting the contingency of historical change, the creativity of anthropological appropriations and the politics of knowledge.     

Urban Policies for the Creative Industries: A European Comparison

Abstract

Although the development of creative industries (CI) has formed into extensive and significant phenomenon in European cities, the conceptualization and generalization of these practices and policies is still rather weak. In addition to the attempts to explain the formation of these kinds of practices in the cities and discuss the path-dependent character of CI policies, the challenging task is to identify the main alternatives and inherent logic of CI policies, especially due to the existing rich and diverse experiences of European cities. This article aims to build a typology of the policy practices relating to CI. We make use of an “ideal types” approach, which focuses on determining a limited number of parameters to characterize alternative CI policies in different (European) cities; this is based on how one kind of CI policy practice can be distinguished from another. The article examines how the CI policies in four post-socialist cities (three of which are located in the Baltic region) contrast with the policies found in a range of other cities in Europe.