Islands as interstitial encrypted geographies: Making (and failing) cryptosecessionist exits

Initiatives to build juridically autonomous cities based on libertarian and anarcho-capitalist ideals have proliferated in the last decade. These include seasteading, charter cities, and “free private cities.” These ventures are part of a movement to build so-called “start-up societies,” which proposes developing experimental, small-scale communities to explore alternatives to the nation-state. Many such projects have turned to islands and island-creation as an interstitial space in which their experiments could unfold and benefit from being located within, but juridically autonomous from, sovereign state territories. Such experiments are linked to and build on the earlier use of islands for plantations, military bases, special economic zones (SEZs) and offshoring. These ventures also often rely on, and are shaped by, blockchain and cryptocurrencies and create what Isabelle Simpson theorizes as “encrypted geographies.” In this article, we seek to better understand how islands are used to create encrypted geographies which in turn create alternative political economies and communities and how, conversely, the imaginary of islands, enclaves and archipelagoes shapes how these alternative territories are conceptualized. We examine several attempts to create such start-up societies in the Caribbean and the Pacific to consider where, how, and why their proponents have taken to islands to establish these new encrypted geographies. The concept of interstitiality can help us understand why islands are privileged sites for the creation of encrypted geographies, and how these are used to transcend state borders yet simultaneously create digitally bordered interstitial spaces that undermine sovereign territories and currencies, empower cyber-kinetic elites, and exclude and marginalize existing island communities, natural ecosystems, and existing oceanic and archipelagic polities, cultures, and societies.     

2. BOOTSTRAPPING,SELF‐BINDING,AND OTHER METAPHORS OF ANTIFOUNDATIONALISM

In Images of History, Richard Eldridge deploys the metaphor of “bootstrapping” to describe the possibility of a mutually constitutive interaction of historical understanding and reflection on political ideals outside of and beyond the notion of a completed theory or teleological development. Although “bootstrapping” does considerable work in the book, it remains relatively unthematized in itself. This article explores the concept of bootstrapping in both Eldridge's book and in a number of disciplines. In doing so, it aims to make three critical observations. First, while Eldridge rightly seeks to energize our sense of historical openness, the argument is usefully enriched by the adjacent field of political theory, where “boot‐strapping” is often paired with “self‐binding” to describe how self‐creating processes might be arrested and stabilized. Second, Eldridge's use focuses on individual dispositions, but the concept of “bootstrapping” points to the need to pursue understanding of collective processes of self‐institution. Third, when extended to the natural world, “bootstrapping” calls for scrutiny of the relationship between human self‐creation and nature as a site of emergence and self‐organizing phenomena.     

Mostafa Malekian: Spirituality,Siyasat‐Zadegi and (A)political Self‐Improvement

Mostafa Malekian has yet to receive much attention in Western academic literature pertaining to Iranian intellectual life, but inside Iran, he has emerged as a popular public intellectual; seen as both a culmination of and rupture with the project of “religious intellectualism.” Rather than offer a revolutionary and politically engaged vision of Islam, or a “reformist” or “democratic” interpretation of Shi?ism, his project seeks to integrate what he calls “rationality” (?aqlaniyat) and “spirituality” (ma?naviyat). As Malekian's project has developed, it has broken, in a number of important respects, with mainstream Islam as practiced in Iran, the religious reformist project, and even organized religion as a whole. This article seeks not only to offer one of the first comprehensive analysis of his existential and social thought in English, but also to analyze his project's deep affinities with a pervasive fatigue vis‐à‐vis collective projects of political emancipation and even “politics” tout court, in the latter phases of the “reformist” President Hojjat al‐Islam Seyyed Mohammad Khatami's tenure.     

Indigeneity,Race, and the Media from the Perspective of the 2019 Political Crisis In Bolivia

This article analyses the disputes over images related to indigeneity and plurinationalism in the post-electoral crisis in Bolivia, focusing mainly on the realm of social media. It pays particular attention to how images such as memes, photographs, and videos produced and circulated by the movement for “democracy” opposed to Evo Morales and by sectors of the Right, project ideals of national unity based on racialised imaginaries that tend to obliterate references to plurinationalism. I also analyse the dichotomous ways in which multitudes and episodes of violence were represented by the two main sides in the conflict, such as the references to “mobs” and “hordes” versus “civic movements” and “resistance” respectively. I conclude by considering examples of promotional materials that the current interim government of President Jeanine Añez has developed since its inauguration, in order to reflect on the ways in which these display certain images of the “permitted Indian” for the national project that the social sector represented by her government is beginning to outline.     

Lessons from Praxis: Autonomy and Spatiality in Contemporary Latin American Social Movements

In the course of the 20th century, left‐libertarian thought and praxis never ceased to be present in Latin America, even during the most difficult years of competition with Marxism‐Leninism and of military repression. But it was above all from the 1990s onwards that particularly original kinds of libertarian thought and praxis began to flourish there. Alongside more or less renewed versions of classical anarchism, new forms of praxis and analysis emerged at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century; from Mexican neo‐Zapatism to a part of Argentina's piqueteros to some expressions of Brazil's sem‐teto movement, many new movements and ideas have developed in the last two decades. These new movements are at the same time remarkably libertarian and by no means reducible to the very honourable but somewhat too restrictive label “anarchism”. In fact, many of them are clearly “hybrid”, in the sense that they are products of both left‐libertarian and Marxist influences. Typically, these Latin American movements share a commitment to principles such as horizontality, self‐management and decentralism (which have never been part of Marxism's typical repertoire of practices and principles); moreover, autonomy is a key notion for most of them. Furthermore, spatial practices, territorialisation among them, are proving decisive for many movements and protest actions. The concept of territory is one of those “geographical” concepts that have been intensely subjected, in recent decades, to strong attempts of redefinition and debugging. In this paper, the territory is fundamentally seen (as a first approximation) as a space defined and delimited by and through power relations, and it is important to see that power (both heteronomous and autonomous power) is exerted only with reference to a territory and, very often, by means of a territory. The kind of power exerted by emancipatory social movements does not constitute an exception to this rule.     

Liberté, égalité, fraternité?: Views from the far‐right fringe in France (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

The current financial, economic, social, and political crisis is widely thought to benefit far‐right parties in many European states. The Front National party, a fixture in French politics for more than two decades, achieved its best result ever in the 2012 presidential elections. This article explores far‐right voters’ accounts of their political life‐stories, analyzing the factors that trigger people's “conversions” to the right, and examining the ways in which this increasing, yet diverse minority views French history, society, and politics. Far‐right supporters legitimize their political convictions and actions in different ways. Some believe that they are part of a “resistance movement”, others draw on what they believe to be sociological or anthropological insights. Many pretend to advocate Republican ideals such as equality and freedom. Democracy stands to gain from drawing this growing part of the population back into mainstream debate, and social scientists may have a role to play in this effort.     

KARL POLANYI AND THE REALITY OF SOCIETY

This essay reconsiders Karl Polanyi's famous thesis about the “embeddedness” of the economy through an examination of two recent books: For a New West, a collection of previously unavailable essays by Polanyi, and Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers's The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique. The guiding thread of this analysis is the claim that a constant in Polanyi's thought was his belief in what he called “the reality of society,” that is, that society exists as a social fact over and above the individuals that constitute it. The essay begins by tracing Polanyi's intellectual development, drawing primarily on the essays found in For a New West. Polanyi's quest to reconcile individual freedom with social solidarity led him first, in the years between the First and Second World Wars, to embrace liberal socialism, before his readings in anthropology persuaded him that traditional economies “embed” the economy in social relations and that the nineteenth‐century liberal project of a “disembedded” economy (through the so‐called free market) is a departure from this anthropological norm. The essay then examines and questions Block and Somers's claim that Polanyi maintained that the economy is always “already embedded,” arguing notably that Polanyi believed that the advent of market society entailed an economy that was actually disembedded from social relations, not merely one that was re‐embedded in an alternative set of institutions.     

Greening the Cage: Exploitation and Resistance in the (Un)Sustainable Prison Garden

The current popularity of prison greening coincides with a reformist project in carceral administration centring the “rehabilitation” and “transformation” of incarcerated people, finding a natural home in the prison garden. In contrast to mainstream literatures that celebrate reform and foreground recidivism, I argue that the prison garden is exploited institutionally for the symbolic power of “green” to help resolve a crisis of legitimacy in prisons, and thereby capitalism, depoliticising the violence of incarceration while reproducing the symbolic conditions of racial capitalism through two different socioecological (prison) fixes. This proceeds in strikingly similar ways to urban sustainable development, which regularly depoliticises and extends racial and spatial injustice across the city. Yet, in its tensions and contradictions, the (un)sustainable prison garden remains a space where radical possibilities can emerge through moments of resistance, constituting various tenets of a precarious carceral food justice praxis.     

Disaster Capitalism and the Quick,Quick, Slow Unravelling of Animal Life

Sea otters have barely survived centuries of colonial and capitalist development. To understand why, I examine how they have been oriented in capitalist social relations in Alaska, and with what effects. I follow sea otters through three overlapping political economic episodes, each of which shapes the next: colonial expansion and the fur trade; petro‐capitalism and the negligent neoliberal state, culminating in the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill; and finally, spill cleanup and “green” capitalism, when sea otters are produced as data points and spectacle. In each episode, I describe (1) sea otters’ orientation in relation to capitalism and the state, and (2) the nature and temporality of violence and ecological loss that attends their orientation. In conversation with theorisations of extinction as a “slow unravelling”, I suggest animal life can unravel less slowly than haltingly—quick, quick, slow—and that the unravelling and animals’ orientation in capitalism are co‐constituted.     

Antagonism,Neo‐liberalism and Movements: Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Abstract: The “movement of movements” has reached an impasse, from which innovation and expansion appear out of reach. Given these circumstances a re‐examination of concepts such as antagonism and class hatred might be timely. Antagonism has never disappeared. It is present in climate‐change politics as much as in those of the Black Bloc—both examples we discuss here. Indeed antagonism permeates capitalism and drives capitalist development. But a politics founded purely on antagonism quickly comes up against its own limits. The transformative power of love—whilst simultaneously coupled in productive tension with antagonism—offers the possibility of exodus.     

The spaces of Australian capitalism: Making “place” out of “space” in The Unknown Industrial Prisoner

Radical geographers have emphasised the centrality of class relations to the production of social space. In particular, this literature makes the distinction between the homogenising “abstract space” of global capital and meaningful, specific social “places.” The tension between the two expresses itself in spatial forms, creating the landscapes of capitalism. This political-economic conception of space and place is generally under-explored in the Australian context, particularly regarding the highly important post-World War II Long Boom period. This article interrogates the spatiality of this epoch through David Ireland's award-winning novel The Unknown Industrial Prisoner. Rooted in the notion of literary geography, which argues that literature “knows” things about the space of the society into which it is born, the article argues that Ireland portrays and handles in a particularly vivid and powerful way the dialectical articulations, simultaneously contradictory and intertwined, of space and place in the spatiality of Australian capitalism. Whilst he ultimately concludes that the powers of capital's abstract space dominate, he nevertheless demonstrates that through explicitly spatial projects of place-making, workers can attempt to impose their own political economy on the spatial form.     

Emergent Geographies of International Education and Social Exclusion

This paper explores the socio‐spatial implications of recent developments in the internationalisation of education, which includes the growth in numbers of foreign students and the establishment of offshore schools. It demonstrates the relationship between emergent geographies of international education in the “West” and social reproduction in both student “sending” and “receiving” societies. Drawing on fieldwork in Hong Kong and Canada, it argues that international education is transforming the spatial scales over which social reproduction is achieved: on the one hand, upper‐middle‐class populations in East Asia are able to secure their social status through the acquisition of a “Western education”, thereby creating new geographies of social exclusion within “student‐sending” societies. On the other hand, primary and secondary schools in Canada are able to harness the benefits of internationalisation in order to offset the negative effects of neoliberal educational reform, thereby facilitating local social reproduction.     

Negative Freedom,Catholic Social Doctrine,and the Conciliar Challenge of the Free Society

The idea of “negative freedom” has been at the heart of modern democratic politics; it has also been an idea regarded warily by Catholic social doctrine. To be sure, Catholic social doctrine now embraces the classic negative political freedoms like freedom of religion and freedom of speech. But the hierarchical magisterium of the Church was slow to arrive at such an embrace. And in the last decades the hierarchical magisterium has renewed its skepticism of the idea, seeing it as both important and often misused. This article considers current criticisms of negative freedom by Catholic social doctrine and seeks to respond to such criticisms by appealing to personalist conceptions of freedom in the philosophy of Charles Taylor and in the theology of Walter Kasper. Overall, the aim of the article is to establish a more sure conceptual basis for negative freedom as an essential component of the commitment by the Catholic Church at the Second Vatican Council to the free society.     

Life and Death Decisions in our Posthuman(ist) Times

Abstract: Geography, like much of social science, is witnessing a resurgence of interest in Michel Foucault's formation of biopower—the power to make live and foster life. This paper seeks to engage with this interest by staging a dialogue between the work of Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow on the one hand and that of Giorgio Agamben on the other. I propose that, while Rose and Rabinow provide a diagnostic for our emerging geographies of “life itself” and outline allied forms of political citizenship known as “biosociality” or “biological citizenship”, it is Agamben who enables us to consider the limit figures to this form of political inclusion. To draw out these limit figures I focus on recent debates surrounding end‐of‐life decisions and provide examples from the Dignity in Dying campaign and the Not Dead Yet movement. Throughout, I situate this paper within recent debates on posthumanism and the posthuman in geography. In doing so I effectively ask: why, in our seemingly posthuman(ist) times, does much of Western politics seek to decide on the form, the right and, inevitably, the limit of human beings?     

Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction

A vagabond, as is well known, moves from place to place without a fixed home. However, vagabondage insinuates a little dissolution—an unsettled, irresponsible, and disreputable life, which indeed can be said of the globalization of capitalist production. This paper reframes the discussion on globalization through a materialist focus on social reproduction. By looking at the material social practices through which people reproduce themselves on a daily and generational basis and through which the social relations and material bases of capitalism are renewed—and the havoc wreaked on them by a putatively placeless capitalism—we can better expose both the costs of globalization and the connections between vastly different sites of production. Focusing on social reproduction allows us to address questions of the making, maintenance, and exploitation of a fluidly differentiated labor force, the productions (and destructions) of nature, and the means to create alternative geographies of opposition to globalized capitalism. I will draw on examples from the “First” and “Third Worlds” to argue that any politics that effectively counters capitalism's global imperative must confront the shifts in social reproduction that have accompanied and enabled it. Looking at the political‐economic, political‐ecological, and cultural aspects of social reproduction, I argue that there has been a rescaling of childhood and suggest a practical response that focuses on specific geographies of social reproduction. Reconnecting these geographies with those of production, both translocally and across geographic scale, begins to redress the losses suffered in the realm of social reproduction as a result of globalized capitalist production. The paper develops the notion of “topography” as a means of examining the intersecting effects and material consequences of globalized capitalist production. “Topography” offers a political logic that both recognizes the materiality of cultural and social difference and can help mobilize transnational and internationalist solidarities to counter the imperatives of globalization.     

PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY'S RETURN

Kojin Karatani's Structure of World History seeks to rescue the philosophy of history and restore to it the relationship between philosophical reflection and historical practice. This connection is particularly pertinent in Karatani's case since he had earlier worked out the philosophical scaffolding of this monumental study in his book Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, which embarked on a “return to Capital once more to read the potential that has been overlooked.” By juxtaposing Marx to Kant and vice versa to discover the importance of exchange over production, he found what was to become the informing principle of his later philosophy of history. While Karatani's accounting of the structure of world history presumes to recount the passage of the world's history from nomadic societies to the present as a condition to rethink “social formations” from a perspective that recalls the form of a stagist philosophy of history attributed to Marx and Engels, he has abandoned its informing principle of the modes of production. Instead, he offers the perspective of modes of exchange, which means waiving any consideration concerning who owns the means of production: the putative “economic base” underlying superstructural representations like the state, religion, and culture upheld by a vulgate tradition of Marxian historical writing and discounted by bourgeois historiography as deterministic. The decision to shift to modes of exchange means rooting the primary mode of exchange taking place first in nomadic societies, rather than forms of production and archaic communal ownership of land. Although his revised scheme still accords priority to the economic, the putative division between base and superstructures still persists, even though the latter are still produced by the former, which is now the mode of exchange. Whereas Marx privileged commodity exchange as dominant, Karatani places greater emphasis on the earliest mode of exchange, which consists of the “pure gift,” associated with early nomadic social formations and reciprocity practices by clans, and seems to offer nomadic/clan communalism as a model that resembles Marx's own strategic linking of the surviving Russian commune and contemporary capitalism. The point to this project is to transcend the hegemonic trinity of capital, nation, and state and satisfy a desire to share with other globalists a vision that aims to overcome the defects of capitalism and the nation‐state and the failure of a Marxian expectation that nation‐states will simply wither away with the final surpassing of capitalism. To this end, Karatani's appeal to Kant offers to inject a moral element absent in the merely economic structure of history that will thus provide the promise of “world peace,” which ultimately requires an abolition of the nation‐state as a condition for realizing a “simultaneous bourgeois revolution” that would finally overcome state and capital and establish a world federation.     

“Vote with your feet”: Neoliberalism,the democratic nation-state,and utopian enclave libertarianism

This paper examines a series of emerging utopian discourses that call for the creation of autonomous libertarian enclaves on land ceded by or claimed against existing states. These discourses have emerged in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and can be seen as a response to the crisis on the part of free-market advocates who critique previous waves of neoliberal reform for failing to radically transform the existing structures of the state. Enclave libertarianism seeks to overcome neoliberal capitalism's contradictory relationship to the liberal democratic state by rethinking the state as a “private government service provider” and rethinking citizens as mobile consumers of government services. Citizens are thus called to “vote with their feet” by opting-in to the jurisdiction that best fits their needs and beliefs. The paper argues that these utopian imaginaries are key to understanding specific new manifestations of post-crisis neoliberalism, and calls for more research into the diversity of discourses and imaginaries that circulate through networks of neoliberal actors beyond specific policy initiatives.     

The Uses of Neoliberalism

Abstract: The term “neoliberalism” has come to be used in a wide variety of partly overlapping and partly contradictory ways. This essay seeks to clarify some of the analytical and political work that the term does in its different usages. It then goes on to suggest that making an analytical distinction between neoliberal “arts of government” and the class‐based ideological “project” of neoliberalism can allow us to identify some surprising (and perhaps hopeful) new forms of politics that illustrate how fundamentally polyvalent neoliberal mechanisms of government can be. A range of empirical examples are discussed, mostly coming from my recent work on social policy and anti‐poverty politics in southern Africa.     

Iran's Reform Movement: The Enduring Relevance of an Alternative Discourse

Given the surprise electoral victory in May 2013 of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, which was attained on a recurrent platform of reform and change, this article seeks to investigate Iran's reform discourse by looking at how it systematically developed under President Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005). Its chief purpose is to delineate the discourse in a retrospective analytical attempt to show why it has proven so resilient and persuasive in theory while briefly explicating the causes of its failure in practice under reformists, which set the stage for the rise to power of populist neo‐conservatives marshaled by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005–2013). Divided in two main parts, it thus seeks to tease out the domestic ideology of reform as theorized by Khatami and his men on the one hand, and the foreign policy of détente and dialogue as performed by the reformist administration on the other. In so doing, the article draws primarily on the original Persian sources produced during the respective period and afterward, including Khatami's own writings as well as theoretical formulations and articulations propounded by his political strategists. Finally, it anticipates that Rouhani's “moderation” project can face the same fate as Khatami's “reform” project if the former does not heed the hard‐earned historical lessons of the latter, even though it is operating in a different sociopolitical context.