The cross-border reterritorialization concept revisited: the territorialist approach applied to the case of Cerdanya on the French-Spanish border

The aim of this paper is to bring new elements into the theoretical discussion so as to better understand the realities of borderlands. Our goal involves projecting a new conceptualization of the cross-border territory and cross-border reterritorialization by refining the analytical framework envisioned by the current literature on border studies. More specifically, we apply the so-called ‘territorialist approach’, an innovative and culturally oriented approach for territorial studies that is rooted in the Italian geographical school. Cross-border territories are conceived as complex territorial units, whereby geographical, socioeconomic and cultural patterns are affected and thus altered by the fixation of international boundaries and territorialization. Nevertheless, the persistence of local cross-border networks, both formal and informal, contributes to the maintenance of a shared local milieu. The European integration processes, especially in view of the European Territorial Cooperation programmes, represent an important framework for supporting local cross-border cooperation and boosting new territorial strategies for borderlands. From this perspective, we hypothesize that new cycles of local cross-border reterritorialization can be observed along the EU borderlands by creating new forms of cross-border territorial capital. The case study of Cerdanya (French-Spanish border) illustrates the application of the theoretical framework by analysing the enduring experiences of cross-border cooperation.     

The league of leagues: Meta-populism and the ‘chain of equivalence’ in a cross-border Alpine area

Radical right populist parties claim to act on behalf of people who need to be protected from a series of risks initiated by ‘others’. Border control is a key topic in the narratives developed by these movements in Europe. However, populist parties located in different states can shape a cohesive discourse across state borders with regard to the protection of the people. They consequently forge a discursive ‘chain of equivalence’ (Laclau & Mouffe, 1985, p. 144) implying the reduction of state-bounded differences while preserving some territorial singularities. This process, which can be termed ‘meta-populism’ (de Cleen, 2017, p. 356) supposes a series of interactions, which are not often analysed in Europe's borderlands. Based on a Critical Discourse analysis, we investigate the building-up of transregional meta-populism powered by two regionalist parties positioned in different states, but located in a single European area: the Regio Insubrica in-between Italy and Switzerland.     

The ‘return to Europe’: intellectual debates on the global place of Czechoslovakia in the interwar period

In the East Central European context, the phrase ‘return to Europe’ has been used mainly in the period after 1989, referring to political, economic and social changes as well as mental relocations towards a ‘Western’ system. However, debates about the national whereabouts on a mental map – whether one was part of Eastern, Central or Western Europe – also abounded in the years following the founding of the nation-states after the First World War. Concentrating on Czech discourses on the national whereabouts both in a European and a global perspective in the years preceding and following the great upheaval of 1918, this article traces the changing Czech national identity, ranging from a self-perception as a ‘small nation’ in the Habsburg Empire to a European power with colonial ambitions after the foundation of the Czechoslovak republic, and finally to the acknowledgement in the 1930s that these ambitions could not be met. The study is based on sources ranging from Czech travelogues mainly to Africa and Asia, but also South America, to economic writings and colonial brochures, which offer a broad range of debates on the role and location of both the Czech nation and the Czechoslovak state both in Europe and the world.     

Hybrid governmentality in practice: Territoriality and biopolitics in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh

This article discusses how the Rohingyas – a forcibly displaced community transformed the everyday lives and the territory of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Since August 2017, Cox's Bazar, a borderland of Bangladesh is hosting more than a million of non-citizens within 32 camps in its two subdistricts. Based on mobile ethnographic research, I argue – a. borderlands are sites where politics of territory intersects politics of identity. The Rohingyas' statelessness and perpetuated marginalization are the outcome of this politics between identity and territory of the nation-states. b. The state prioritizes the security of its citizens from the refugees. Consequentially, the state enacts combined mechanisms of biopolitical and territorial practices that physically demarcate the refugee camps and socially segregate the refugees. I introduce this combination of mechanisms as hybrid governmentality. In Cox's Bazar, the key mechanisms of hybrid governmentality include - labelling refugees based on political rationale and providing them with identification cards, enacting street level surveillance to ensure confinement of the refugees, and maintaining everyday separation between refugees and the citizens.     

‘Why not make films for New York?’: the interaction between cultural,political and commercial perspectives in Swedish film policy 1963–2013

During the last two decades, film support, film policy and the public financing of audiovisual production in Scandinavia and particularly Sweden have undergone extensive change. These transformations may be seen as responses to globalisation, to increased sub-national regional independence as well as to the emergence of ideas related to the nurturing of the ‘creative industries’. They may also be seen to be a consequence of the increasing permeability of the borders of European nation-states. This article traces a history of film policy in a geographically marginal part of Europe that has been characterised by a range of tensions as a result of competing definitions of film as art and commerce. These tensions are traced back to the 1960s when film support were first introduced and the first seeds of conflict – still discernible in the present situation – were planted.     

Contested Cartographies: Empire and Sovereignty on a Map of Sistān,Iran (1883)

ABSTRACT

The papers of Malkam Khān (1833–1908), Iranian ambassador in London from 1872 to 1889, a staunch supporter of Iranian state modernization and a scholar, include an often-overlooked map of the Iran–Afghanistan border dating to 1883. Mirzā Mohammad-Rezā Tabrizi compiled this exceptional piece of nineteenth-century Iranian cartography. The map is an illustration of how quickly the Qajar administration was able to emulate European cartographical discourses to protect its own interests in the context of the so-called ‘Great Game’, that is, the often confrontational Russo–British relations over the control of Central Asia and Afghanistan in the nineteenth century. In this article we show that Iranian officials had developed a much more substantial articulation between cartography and statecraft than is conveyed by the stereotypes in nineteenth-century Western literature, when the capacity of local players to use counter-mapping to their own advantage was often underestimated by European agents. Mirzā Mohammad-Rezā Tabrizi’s map of Sistān exemplifies how the apparently all-powerful Western science that seemingly supported nineteenth-century imperial expansion was rarely left unchallenged locally. The genealogy and circulation of the map also reflects how overly simplistic the postulation of a polarization of ‘Western’ knowledge and ‘Eastern’ attempts at safeguarding local sovereignty can be.     

Welshness in ‘British Wales’: negotiating national identity at the margins

Popular interpretations of national identity often focus on the unifying qualities of nationhood. However, societies frequently draw hierarchical distinctions between the people and places who are ‘most national’, and those who are ‘least national’. Little attention is paid to these marginal places within the nation and the experiences of their inhabitants. This article helps to address this by analysing the ‘less Welsh’ British Wales region of Wales, a country that has traditionally possessed a hierarchical, regionally constituted nationhood. The article studies the British Wales region both ‘from above’ – considering how some areas develop as ‘less national’ – and ‘from below’, introducing empirical ethnographic work into ‘everyday Welshness’ in this area. Whilst previous work on hierarchical nationhood focuses on how hierarchies are institutionalized by the state, this article demonstrates how people at the margins of the nation actively negotiate their place in the nation. Whilst people in this area expressed a strong Welshness, they also struggled to place themselves in the nation because they had internalized their lowly place within the national hierarchy. The article demonstrates the importance of place and social class for national identity construction and draws attention to the role of power in the discursive construction of hierarchical nationhood.     

Borders and belongings in Nordic feminisms and beyond

Abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with feminist grassroots groups and women’s organizations in a Nordic context, this article aims to explore how feminist enactments shape multiple layers of spatiality and belonging. I analyse autoethnographic reflections from two feminist events, both taking place in Malmö in June 2014. Rather than understanding Nordic feminisms as a stable object, I follow in this article the initiative of decolonial scholars to analyze how feminist communities are shaped by affects, enactments and inhabitations which both ‘speak back’ to located conditions and transgress beyond them. I use phenomenology in my engagement with the material and employ a palimpsestic reading mode to trace the multi-layered constructions of spatiality and belonging in feminist performances, identifications and affiliations. As affective value shaped the effects of surfaces or borders of bodies and spaces, theorizations on affect helped me to grasp how complex forms of belonging became entwined with particular performances of geography and history.     

La Méditerranée solide: un espace double en construction

There exists a space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’. This concept was first proposed by the Annales’s co-founder Lucien Febvre in 1944–45, during a course on Europe in the longue durée. The flexible borders of this double space, both conceptual and contextual, remain in construction within the on-going and global reality of the solid Mediterranean’s space. The comparative history of European societies promoted during the interwar period by Marc Bloch, the other Annales founder, contributes to the construction of said space. Examining this space allows us to concretely articulate scales of analysis from the local to the global. The article is based on a comparative analysis of two Italian and Spanish cases that appear to be particular and paradigmatic (‘exceptional normal’, Edoardo Grendi) of – respectively – Italy’s so-called ‘southern question’ (questione meridionale) and the Spanish ‘agrarian question’ (cuestión agraria). Thus the article helps to conceptualize the space of the Méditerranée solide, marked by the complex and long-term Southern European question. The article compares Il Ministro della mala vita (The Minister of the Corruption, 1910) by historian Gaetano Salvemini and Del caciquismo trágico (On Tragical Caciquism, 1913) by republican journalist Pedro Torres. Through these ‘exceptionally normal’ case studies, taken together and explained reciprocally, it is possible to better understand the space of the solid Mediterranean. The social realities of the Spanish cuestión agraria and the Italian questione meridionale, as well as the conditions of local historiographical production on such realities are, indeed, a consubstantial part of the European transnational, global space of the ‘solid Mediterranean’.     

Policy governance from an autopoietic perspective: revisiting Hungary’s regionalization experience

This perspective on Hungary’s post-socialist regional policy governance is informed by an approach that relates region-building and regional governance to social autopoiesis and the self-referential and self-(re)producing nature of social systems such as states. Following debates in regional studies that reflect tensions between the local constitution and external determination of regional governance, we will demonstrate how Hungary has incorporated European Union (EU) policy frameworks through specific appropriations of territorial politics and regional ideas. These appropriations reflect Hungary’s post-socialist transformation not only in terms of responses to global forces, but also as specific spatial practices and regionalization experiences. As we argue, this has in effect resulted in a regionalism without regions – a strategy of Europeanizing territorial politics without creating institutional structures that directly challenge existing power relations. Autopoiesis thus helps explain the resilience of social systems, not only their resistance to institutional change but also their capability to ‘domesticate’ external influences. While criticisms of Hungary’s technocratic and post-political regionalization projects cannot be ignored, our analysis indicates why externally driven intervention in self-organizing governance processes, for example through EU conditionality, has had less impact than expected.     

Social observation in early commercial print media. Towards a genealogy of the social sketch (ca. 1820–1860)

Nineteenth-century journalism has rarely been an object of attention in the humanities and social sciences – despite its political and cultural significance and its documental value. This article explores the verbal-visual social sketch, as it has evolved as a journalistic genre on the expanding market of periodicals in early nineteenth-century Europe. The social sketches (often referred to as ‘panoramic literature’) provide rich ethnographic micro-analysis and often relate to debates held by statisticians, moralists, folklorists, and ethnologists. This article, rather than providing a close reading analysis of selected texts, attempts to trace a genealogy of the sketch of society from a history of knowledge perspective. After placing the consolidation of the social sketch within its socio-medial contexts, the article considers various literary and epistemic ‘regimes’ that have preconditioned and influenced the evolution of this verbal-visual genre of social observation and formulates cross-genre and interdisciplinary perspectives on the refinement and institutionalization of social inquiry throughout the nineteenth century.     

Turnout,preferential voting and vote flows in the E.U. election1

ABSTRACT

This article aims at focusing on four main features of the European elections that were held on 26 May 2019. Firstly, it analyses electoral turnout, both from a diachronic and a geographical point of view. Secondly, it presents electoral data and identifies winners and losers of the vote, not only by comparing 2019 E.U. results to 2014 E.U. results and 2018 political results, but especially focusing on the territorial dimension of electoral dynamics. Thirdly, it discusses flows of vote in five Italian cities (Brescia, Turin, Florence, Naples, Palermo), in order to give a clearer picture of how citizens (potentially) changed their electoral preferences from 2018 to 2019. Fourthly, it focuses on preferential vote, with the aim of distinguishing between parties characterized by ‘micro-personalization’ and ‘macro-personalization’. On many of these aspects, the 2019 European elections in Italy can be understood on the basis of the well-known ‘second-order election theory’. Yet, there are also interesting empirical findings that deviate from this pattern, among which the electoral success of the League – one of the two parties in government at the moment of the elections – merits further attention and can be mostly explained on the basis of government political action. That same electoral success, in addition, represented one of the causes that led to the end of the so-called yellow-green government in August 2019.     

‘Globalization with hardware’: ITER’s fusion of technology,policy, and politics

This article explores the history of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), a fusion energy megaproject currently being built in southern France. It examines three main aspects of the project’s history, focusing largely on the European research community’s perspective. First, it explores how European scientists and science managers constructed a transnational research community around fusion energy after 1960 that was part of Europe’s larger technological integration. This article also expands Gabrielle Hecht’s concept of ‘technopolitics’ to the larger international dimension and explores how the political environment of the late Cold War and the post‐9/11 era helped shape ITER’s history, sometimes in ways not entirely within researchers’ control. Finally, this essay considers ITER as a technological project that gradually became globalized. At various stages in the project’s 30‐year history, we discover processes whereby national borders became less important while social, economic, legal and technological linkages created a shared social space for fusion research on an expanding scale.     

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.     

Vagrant,Convict, Cannibal Chief: Abel Magwitch and the Culture of Cannibalism in Great Expectations

Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations opens with a jolt, as Abel Magwitch – an escaped convict – pounces on the narrator and protagonist, Pip. Despite this rather dramatic introduction, and the pivotal role that he goes on to play in the plot, Magwitch has never been given the sustained critical analysis that he warrants. More often than not he has been treated as one of Dickens’s infamous ‘flat’ characters; a kind of ‘pantomime wicked uncle’, in the words of George Orwell. This is a critical legacy that this paper seeks to redress. Seeing Magwitch as an essential element in Dickens’s critique of mid nineteenth-century society, this paper examines Magwitch’s largely ignored peripatetic and homeless past. By contextualizing Magwitch in his role as a vagrant outsider, and then exploring how this marginal position nuances the cannibalistic appetite he displays in the first pages of the novel, I argue that Magwitch’s violence and ‘savagery’ forms a foil for the more sadistic practices of civilized society. In doing so I position Magwitch at the dark heart of Dickens’s social pessimism, and re-evaluate the culture of cannibalism that we see in Great Expectations.     

Geographies of unease: Witchcraft and boundary construction in an African borderland

African borderlands – such as those between South Sudan, Uganda and Congo – are often presented by analysts as places of agency and economic opportunity, in contrast to hardened, securitized borders elsewhere. We emphasize, however, that even such relatively porous international borders can nevertheless be the focus of significant unease for borderland communities. Crossing borders can enable safety for those fleeing conflict or trading prospects for businesspeople, but it can also engender anxieties around the unchecked spread of insecurity, disease and economic exploitation.Understanding this ambiguous construction of borders in the minds of their inhabitants requires us, we argue, to look beyond statist or globalizing discourses and to appreciate the moral economies of borderlands, and how they have been discursively and epistemologically negotiated over time. Narratives around witchcraft and the occult represent, we argue, a novel and revealing lens through which to do so and our study draws on years of fieldwork and archival research to underline how cartographies of witchcraft in this region are, and have long been, entangled with the construction of state political geographies, internal as well as international.     

The Interregnum: The South's Insecurity Dilemma

Abstract. This article investigates the ‘insecurity dilemma’ facing many Third World states arising from the fact that multiple ethnic communities reside within their borders. In terms of analysing the types of states that exist in the ‘South’, much of the literature on this phenomenon serves to confuse the various elements of state power and, therefore, the reasons for the existence and persistence of internal threats to Third World states. It is posited that the ‘insecurity dilemma’ has three possible sources: a lack of coercive means by the state for imposing its rule; a deficient infrastructure; and a lack of legitimacy. In examining the persistence of the ‘insecurity dilemma’ the article focuses on the third dimension of state power and the possible diminution of challenges from ethnic communities within a state's borders via the process of nation-building. The possibility that it will only be a matter of time before the embryonic states of the South will emulate the success of European states in achieving some degree of domestic consensus is highly questionable when the processes of nation-building are examined, for two reasons. Firstly, the emphasis placed on ‘modernisation’– infrastructural development and state imposition of a national ‘high’ culture – may be misplaced. Secondly, because of their peripheral status in the world economy the assimilative tendencies associated with ‘modernisation’ may take an extremely long time in arriving.     

‘YOUTH RIOTS’ AND THE CONCEPT OF CONTENTIOUS POLITICS IN HISTORICAL RESEARCH

This article analyses European ‘youth riots’ as a social phenomenon after World War II. It also uses a specific riot – the 1948 Stockholm Easter Riots – in order to discuss the limits and potential of some theoretical assumptions underlying the field of historical contentious politics studies, primarily ‘contentious politics’ and ‘claims’. Using police reports and newspapers, the article shows that the riots were part of a European repertoire of post-war ‘youth riots’, but that they also bear similarities to an older popular repertoire of contention in Sweden. However, the riots do not really fit into the concept of ‘contentious politics’, as this concept is built on ‘claim-making’ as a key aspect and the participants did not make explicit claims. This leads to the conclusion that other theoretical tools, inspired by the concept of ‘moral economy’, are better suited for understanding the motivations of the rioters, whose actions are interpreted as a way of defending a perceived moral right of access to the urban public space.     

A colpi di cuore. Storie del sessantotto

This article attempts to tackle the problem of how a colonial culture that was elaborated through the written word may have impacted on an Italian society that was significantly more ‘backward’ than its western European counterparts. The Prima Guerra d'Africa (1885-96) has often been seen as a military campaign desired exclusively by an isolated Italian government in a society that was incapable of using the occasion to develop cultural themes that impacted on the desires and aspirations of the ‘real’ Italy. This supposed societal dysfunction meant that Italy failed to create a ‘culture of imperialism’ in the years of the Scramble for Africa in a way that has now come to be considered of such central importance for the histories of France, Britain or even Germany.

Through an analysis of the role played by primary schools in Italian culture in these years, this article attempts to reverse this view, arguing that even taking into consideration Italy's ‘backwardness’ there was not only a great awareness of what Italy was supposedly doing in Africa but also a serious attempt to load the events that occured there with a meaning that had a much more intimate relationship with Italy's population. Although defeat in Africa meant a major setback in this process, imperialism as a cultural phenomenon continued to be of fundamental importance to the progress of nation building and the development of nationalism in Italy and, Finaldi argues, it should therefore be assigned a place in Italian culture that is much more on a par to that which culture and imperialism are deemed to have held for other European nation-states.     

How clothing design and cultural industries refashioned frontier masculinities: a historical geography of Western wear

Gendered subjectivities emerge historically and geographically, not only in situ, within an ‘authentic’ origin period or site, but through later retrospective commodifications and fantastical popular culture depictions. This article traces the masculine identity of the cowboy as commodified and performed through clothing. The cowboy emerged from colonial origins as a model and myth of frontier masculinity: the ‘rugged outdoor type’. But it was then formularized and stylized when subject to popular culture diffusion, and as accompanying clothing design evolved. Through clothing – advertised by metropolitan manufacturers and consumed across America and beyond – an archetypal, sexualized cowboy ‘look’ thus emerged. The author traces a historical geography of cowboy masculinities in clothing design, from early ‘frontier garments for the outdoor man’ to later Western-wear ‘for that long, lean look’. Related constructions of femininity are also considered, after women's Western-wear clothing lines were produced in the 1950s. To illustrate, I draw on archival brochures, catalogs, and advertising materials from the 1920s to 1970s, as well as discuss the material design of the clothes themselves. I focus especially on the Western snap shirt – an apparel item never actually worn on the nineteenth-century colonial frontier, but that became an ‘essential’ element of the cowboy look, and a vehicle for masculine appearance. Western-wear epitomizes how gendered subject positions are visually constituted in relational fashion via bodies, materials, media, and imagined geographies.