Cinema’s milieux: governing the picture show in the United States during the Progressive era

The regulation of American cinema during the Progressive era was an exercise in governmentality with multiple spatial rationalities operating through networks at multiple scales. Although produced and distributed nationally, moving pictures were consumed locally. The National Board of Censorship governed movie content from New York, where most major film producers were headquartered at that time, yet it was dependent upon the activities of social reformers and officials in cities across the country in monitoring manufacturers’ compliance with its decisions. But as those correspondents often regarded the image on the screen as intimately associated with other aspects of the movie-going experience, local efforts to regulate film often went further, depending upon local concerns about spectators. This paper explores how cinema was problematized in Atlanta and Minneapolis, two regional centers with different sexual and racial politics. It does so by building on recent discussions of spatial rationalities of moral reform efforts, and in this case, how tensions between generative and vitalist spatial rationalities conspired to produce a variable geography of cinema regulation that was networked and multi-scalar, and how these experiments in regulating a new medium of visual communication began to articulate a distinctive perceptual rationality of government.     

Domopolitics, governmentality and the regulation of asylum accommodation

Since the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, asylum seekers in the UK have been dispersed across the country to zones of accommodation on a no choice basis. This paper examines the political practices and governmental rationalities which accompany the allocation of asylum accommodation in Britain through the National Asylum Support Service (NASS). The paper draws on discussions of the UK border as a site of ‘domopolitics’, the governing of the state as a home, to suggest that domopolitics is productive of particular relations of calculation, regulation and discipline through which the lives of asylum seekers are conditioned. These entangled modes of governance, it is argued, find expression in a logic of accommodation which acts to discipline asylum seekers and to reinsert modes of arbitrary sovereign authority into a regime of governmental regulation. The rationalities of governance that accompany accommodation create an account of housing which is deliberately decoupled from feelings of security, as accommodation becomes a key space through which a relation to the border is lived for asylum seekers. Domopolitics is thus shown to be productive of a politics of discomfort for those at the limits of the nation.     

Governmentality,Diaspora Assemblages and the Ongoing Challenge of “Development”

Abstract: Drawing on governmentality debates, I argue that skilled members of the Jamaican diaspora are becoming important actors in an ongoing development strategy to extend the rationality of the market into everyday social relations and institutions. Diaspora members are imagined by states and development institutions to be ideal development partners because of their access to potentially lucrative business, knowledge and capital networks, and their desire to direct them towards socially transformative ends. But, as I shall demonstrate, efforts to incorporate skilled émigrés into national development plans raise important questions about the entanglements between diaspora strategies, state power and enduring local patterns of uneven development. Rather than a space of social transformation, diaspora can also function as a space of stasis that reproduces rather than transforms such patterns. By examining Jamaica's emerging diaspora strategy, I examine not only the governmental role that diaspora groups are increasingly beginning to play, but also their potential to support or disrupt the class, gender and racial asymmetries that have historically governed flows of wealth, opportunity and power across the island.     

Floods,communal conflict and the role of local state institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa

Does the occurrence of flood disaster increase the risk of communal conflict and if so, does trust in state political institutions mitigate the adverse effect? This study addresses these questions by studying the intervening effect of trust in local governmental institutions at a sub-national level. The effect of flood disasters on the risk of communal violence is expected to be contingent on peoples’ trust that local political structures are able to address potential disputes between groups. Violent conflicts, in that sense, are neither inevitable nor directly determined by the occurrence of disasters. They largely depend on the context of a given society and political response to these external shocks. To test this expectation, the study uses survey data on trust in local state institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa from the Afrobarometer (2005–2018), combined with geo-referenced communal conflict and flood data. In line with theoretical expectations, results suggest that flood disasters are associated with communal violence only for administrative districts that are governed by distrusted local state institutions. Conversely, flood disasters tend to be negatively associated with the risk of communal clashes in the presence of highly trusted local government councils and (especially) trusted judicial courts. Changing model specifications and estimation techniques produces similar results. An out-of-sample cross-validation also shows that accounting for political variables, in addition to flood disasters, improves the predictive performance of the model.     

The modern cemetery: a design for life

In discussing the importance of public health anxieties within the birth of modern forms of governmentality, Foucault frequently mentions, but does not develop, the questions that arose about the appropriate disposal of the dead. In this paper, I explore the spatial rationalities of the modern cemetery in England in the mid-nineteenth century. As an illustrative example, I provide a detailed analysis of John Claudius Loudon's proposals for cemeteries. Loudon, a horticultural writer and designer who campaigned vigorously for cemetery reform, became crucial in the reconfiguration of the cemetery. I use Loudon's ideas as a dispositif, a material space that also provides a method of analysis for illuminating the operation of various inter-related governmental spatialisations and techniques. Specifically, I illustrate how the cemetery captures the diversification and widening of dispositional techniques of institutions and, at the same time, integrates hygienic imperatives, aesthetic-moral registers and an array of educational-civic functions. I argue that the cemetery, in real and ideal terms, manifests and intensifies a variety of rural and urban spaces and, paradoxically, generates a model milieu for the living.     

Partnership Networks for Urban Development: How Structure is Shaped by Risk

In delivering public policy, governments worldwide increasingly partner with diverse sets of stakeholders. This spreads commercial risk, but particularly where agendas diverge, introduces new risks related to trust in relationships. The “risk hypothesis” distinguishes between networks for “cooperation” problems, where partners have high individual payoffs for uncooperative behaviors, and “coordination” problems, where partners subscribe to a common goal and uncooperative behaviors are less rewarding. We used mixed‐methods to study networks of local and state government, developers, and consultants that center on joint‐venture partnerships for developing new urban, residential projects. Statistical network methods showed that within the mix of partners involved in development projects, only state governments displayed structural patterns associated with solving “cooperation” problems (rather than coordination). In other words, the patterns of state government interactions showed they are most exposed to risky relationships. In contrast to the state governments’ apparent exposure to risk, qualitative data showed they are not only well trusted but also overall the partnership networks reported very low levels of conflict. By exploring the distribution of “cooperation” and “coordination,” we identified which stakeholders perceived most risk. In our case, how the state governments’ structure interactions in response to risky relationships leads to an overall network characterized by trust.     

Developmentalities and Calculative Practices: The Millennium Development Goals

Abstract: This paper focuses on wide‐ranging governmental discourses that enable new ways of shaping social and economic affairs in the field of development. Directing particular attention to the Millennium Development Goals, we refer to these discourses as developmentalities. As a form of governmentality produced through these Goals, developmentalities draw on the turn of the century to recast certain development problems and offer reformulated solutions to these problems. We argue that they rely on three forms of neoliberal rationalities of government—information profiling, responsibilization, and knowledge networks, and their calculative practices, to shape global spaces and new capacities for individuals and social groups. Our analysis is based on extensive policy documents, reports, and development initiatives affiliated with the United Nations and other organizations, as well as insights derived from in‐depth interviews and conversations with United Nations policy and research personnel from the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).     

Local government reforms in Georgia and their impact on state-society relations

Abstract

This paper studies how the local governance reforms carried out between 1997–2014 shape state-society relations at Georgia’s local level. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, I analyze how the reforms shape practices and actors at the local level. Research interviews with state officials at the national and subnational levels and citizens of the Georgian district Marneuli highlight both government rationalities and how people react to them. I argue that the reforms, which have been declared to promote participation and accountability, hardly contribute to bridging the huge gap between state and society, particularly with respect to the case of the Azeri minority in Marneuli. Thus far, the newly introduced formal actors at the local level, the municipalities, lack power. Societal action in absence of the state and interaction with the state via informal networks remains dominant. The study contributes to literature on state-building and transformation in Georgia by shedding light on the often-neglected local level and to the debate on external democracy promotion and policy transfer by empirically studying the effect of a policy transfer.     

Who Shapes the Politics of Expertise? Co-Production and Authoritative Knowledge in Thailand's Political Forests

Expert environmental knowledge has often been described as a governmental rationality that reduces political debate and facilitates state control. In this paper, I argue instead that this line of reasoning simplifies how knowledge gains political authority, especially when expertise is shared and left unchallenged by diverse actors, including those in conflict with each other. Using the framework of co-production from Science and Technology Studies (STS), I apply this argument to conflicts over the supposed watershed functions of forests in Thailand, where simplified narratives about the impacts of land use on water supply are used as justifications for territorialisation and restrictions on forest land. In particular, I focus on local resistance to the proposed Kaeng Sua Ten dam in northern Thailand in order to demonstrate how protestors have deliberately reproduced formal expertise to empower themselves, but by so doing also reinforcing simplified visions of watershed science and community culture. I argue that exposing the co-production of authoritative knowledge and visions of social order offer greater opportunities for understanding the role of expertise as a political force than analysing competing assemblages based on oppositions of state-led expert knowledge and traditional local practices.     

Fighting over the Forests: Environmental Conflict and Decision‐making Capacity in Forest Planning Processes

This paper tells a story of environmental conflict and the attempted political resolution of issues of planning for native forests in Western Australia. It refers to the Western Australian Regional Forest Agreement and Draft Forest Management Plan processes to demonstrate how a range of actors utilise vari‐ous discourses and network relations in attempts to influence governmental decision‐making capacity. Adapting elements of a model of capacity‐building for environmental decision‐making, the paper indicates how traditional exclusionary decision networks serve to inhibit decision capacity, whilst more inclusive processes may be more likely to cope with challenges of reconciling multiple values and decision‐making for managing the forests in the interests of society as a whole.     

Peace through the lens of human rights: Mapping spaces of peace in the advocacy of Colombian human rights defenders

What kinds of peace do human rights defenders advocate? This question has become controversial in light of heavy criticisms raised against the scholarly paradigm that peace and human rights are co-constitutive universals. In this article, I explore how Colombian human rights defenders navigate potential tensions, erasures, and vested politics in their peace advocacy during the current peace process with the FARC-EP. I follow the trend in the geographies of peace literature to study the articulation of peace with human rights as situated and constitutive practices. My analysis of published activist statements maps out the discursivity of peace advocacy, that is, how human rights defenders articulate different political demands as interconnected conditions for peace and maintain a common activist space that cuts across the uneven geographies of violence in Colombia. The visualization of my results as discursive networks shows how activist practices open social and discursive spaces that integrate multiple understandings of peace, instead of obliterating differences in a single and homogenized, ‘local’ representation of peace. I further submit that elucidating how human rights defenders address peace beyond the end of guerrilla insurgency, the ambiguous role of the state, societal discrimination, and structural transformations helps us nuancing conceptual debates. We can learn from Colombian activists to move beyond rigid conceptual juxtapositions of human rights as either panacea or liberal fuel for conflict and to pay attention to how concepts are animated in political struggles to end violence.     

Managerialism,governmentality and the state: a neo-Foucauldian approach to local economic governance

After decades of relative stability, the 1980s and 1990s witnessed a radical restructuring of local–central relations in Britain. This paper draws on neo-Foucauldian writings on ‘governmentality’ to argue that local state restructuring is a product of the ascendancy of neo-liberalism as a distinct political rationality. Material drawn from empirical research on local economic governance in the Scottish Highlands shows how the functioning of a distinct set of managerial ‘technologies’ — embedded in specific practices such as budgetary management, audit and targeting — is instrumental in giving the central state the capacity to shape local institutional practice. At the same time, however, local institutional actors retain some scope to adapt and ‘translate’ central directives to their own particular purposes. Whilst recent neo-Gramscian contributions argue that local governance must be seen as a product of national state restructuring, the neo-Foucauldian emphasis on governmental technologies specifies the precise mechanisms which give central state authorities the reach and capability to monitor and steer the activities of local institutions. In conclusion, the paper suggests that focusing on the reception of governmental technologies within sub-national institutional sites may offer a productive line of inquiry which can expose the internal contradictions and fissures of neo-liberal programmes.     

Commercial conflict resolution across the religious divide in the thirteenth-century Mediterranean

Commercial conflict resolution in the medieval Mediterranean has been treated by a number of scholars in recent years, notably through the use of documents from the Cairo Geniza and the archives of the Italian port of Genoa. Recent research on this subject, and more specifically on contract enforcement, has focused on contract reinforcement within the Mediterranean Jewish community, largely because of the sources available. Parallels drawn with medieval Italian mechanisms of conflict resolution emphasize differences between public- vs. private-order responses, that is, the reliance on personalized groups in the Islamic world rather than on public institutions typical of the Italian port-cities. These studies do not, however, examine how commercial conflicts were resolved across religious and political lines, despite the growing role of Italian merchants in the trade networks of Islamic North Africa, a role that inevitably led to trade disputes and occasional uncollected payments. Through close textual analysis of 14 Latin and Arabic letters exchanged between Islamic Almohad Tunis and Christian Italian Pisa, this article explores how Almohad commercial agents and governmental authorities sought to maintain positive trade relations across the religious divide while protecting the interests of their own clients and citizens when disputes arose over commercial payments and debt collection. Rather than relying on commercial conflict resolution methods specific to one culture or the other, these documents reveal a middle ground of borrowed vocabulary and procedures. Through these letters, Almohad merchants and officials attempted to negotiate through the bonds of personal trust and reputation established with their Italian counterparts. However, they also appealed to Italian sensibilities with hybridized methods recognizable by the legal and public institutions of both cultures.     

Observing,Collecting and Governing “Ourselves” and “Others”: Mass-Observation's Fieldwork Agencements

This paper explores the relationship between oligoptic visual economies and liberal technologies of government which emerge from a consideration of the field collecting practices of Mass-Observation (MO), a social research movement established in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War which attempted to develop an anthropology of British “everyday” life. Focussing on MO's fieldwork agencements, the paper shows how the project brought together museological methods of collecting and curating with new mechanisms of collective self-watching, and the ways in which these mechanisms became implicated in technologies of government through its archival operations. In the connections it drew between the liberal subjectivities of collective self-watching and surrealist aesthetic practices, MO played a significant role in shaping new governmental rationalities, with implications for both metropolitan and colonial populations, through its interlinked conceptions of “mass” and “morale”. These formed part of a broader scientific–administrative–bureaucratic apparatus which facilitated the classification, ordering and governance of populations and “things” in this and later periods.     

Critical Geographies with the State: The Problem of Social Vulnerability and the Politics of Engaged Research

Abstract: State interventions to govern social vulnerability highlight the complexity of contemporary states, marked by neoliberal agenda but also by progressive interventions and the desire for effectiveness. This paper draws on collaborative research with government agencies on social vulnerability in the Hunter region to assess the desirability of undertaking critical geographies with the state. We see states as contested terrains invested with the institutional capacity to mobilise diverse political projects. We argue that critical research in partnership with states is possible, as are mobilisations of the agency of state institutions to promote progressive policy development. The paper explores how we might use engaged research to intersect with the production and circulation of texts, technologies and practices within the state apparatus to achieve desirable change. While critical research with the state involves uncertainties and compromise, with no permanent resolutions, we conclude that states must remain centred in our critical conversations and praxis. In this paper we advance the case for the critical possibilities of policy‐oriented research with the state. We reflect on experiences of an engaged research project with state government agencies in the NSW Hunter Region involving the production and use of the texts and technologies as state interventions in social vulnerability. Working through the project's reflexive, collaborative methodologies and our use of critical GIS, we highlight the creation of opportunities to change how the components of social vulnerability were conceptualised, contest policymakers’ view of what was “relevant”, and shift framing rationalities and resultant state practices. As such the paper contributes to our knowledge of strategic research practices for pursuing critical, progressive projects with the state. Such engagement involves uncertainties and contingent compromise. Yet, as terrains of contestation wherein diverse political projects are assembled and propelled, states must remain centred in our critical conversations and in our critical praxis.     

The "Moral Hazards" of Microfinance: Restructuring Rural Credit in India

Abstract:  This paper explores how economic ideas are produced, how they travel, and how they are contested, in complex and contingent ways, in particular places. It stems from events that took place in coastal Andhra Pradesh, India, where I conducted fieldwork on microfinance programs during 2007. I begin by tracing how the practices of microfinance—and the ideas and rationalities underpinning them—have been increasingly globalized as a development tool since the 1970s. I then move on to describe the proliferation of various microfinance programs across Andhra Pradesh over the last decade. In the closing section, I consider the implications of a recent protest that took place against commercial microfinance institutions in the region.     

State functioning and state failure in the South Pacific

The South Pacific region features enormous variation in state performance. While Polynesian nations such as Samoa have proved to be relatively successful post-colonial states, Melanesian countries like the Solomon Islands are increasingly categorised as 'weak', 'failing' or 'failed' states. Drawing on a range of comparative studies by economists and political scientists in recent years, this article argues that cross-country variation in ethnic diversity between much of Polynesia and Melanesia is a key factor in explaining differences in state performance across the South Pacific. It shows how different kinds of ethnic structure are associated with specific political and economic outcomes, including variation in political stability, economic development, and internal conflict from country to country. In so doing, it helps explain why some parts of the South Pacific appear to be failing while others are relative success stories - and why this is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.     

The governmentalities of infrastructure and services amid urban conflict: East Jerusalem in the post Oslo era

Urban conflict in Jerusalem has mainly been studied through the lens of spatial and functional segregation and discriminative fragmentation between Israeli and Palestinian localities. This article adopts a governmentality approach to the study of the politics of urban infrastructure and services in urban conflict, and argues that a governmentalization process of East Jerusalem by Israel has evolved in the last two decades that has been enacted mainly through the control and management of Palestinian urban infrastructure and services. Since, as manifestations of resistance to Israeli occupation, many of the Palestinian urban functionalities historically operated separately from Israeli state apparatuses, this new development and its consequences indicate an increasing dependency and forced adaptation of Palestinians in Jerusalem to Israeli rule. Based on analysis of Palestinian public transport and education systems, the article demonstrates how the “soft” power of governmentality – mediated through the control and management of urban infrastructure and services – diffuses among the Palestinian population and in space, restructuring them as objects and subjects of Israeli administration and governmental order. In this light, urban infrastructure and services appear in the course of urban conflict as an arena of governmentality and counter-governmentality. On the one hand they serve as a site where identities are practiced and defended; on the other, they may mediate and facilitate the restructuring of political subjectivities and normalization of political structures and hierarchies.     

Globalising Economic Governance,Political Projects,and Spatial Imaginaries: Insights from Four Australasian1 Cities

This paper explores how territorial economic governance is discursively constituted in a globalising and neoliberalising world. It acknowledges both the increasingly recognised formative role of spatial imaginaries in economic interventions and the workings of co‐constitutive political projects that link particular imaginaries with political ambitions and policy strategies. Embracing recent calls for comparative ethnographic urban research at the local‐global interface, it explores currently dominant spatial imaginaries across the four Australasian cities of Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth. Based on multiple qualitative methods, this study claims that a considerable number of actor's spatial associations and reference points can be related to particular city‐specific governmental projects; Auckland's Super‐City, Sydney's Global and Green City, Melbourne's Liveable City, and Perth's Vibrant City. It is demonstrated how discursive governance techniques such as ‘story‐telling’, benchmarking, and policy transfer have been pivotal in the activation, circulation, and performance of those spatial imaginaries and their transformation into temporarily dominant visions for strategic urban interventions aimed at repositioning urban actors, spaces, and activities. While spatial imaginaries can be related to differently framed global aspirations, the effects of spatial political projects on urban governance and investment trajectories differ significantly across space. Theoretically, the paper stresses the importance of particular conceptions of territorial relations and time‐ and place‐specific institutional mediation in shaping context‐dependent discursive material governance alignments.