The Power to Plunder: Rethinking Land Grabbing in Latin America

In this paper I rethink land grabbing in Latin America by decentering the rhetoric of novelty and the tendency to focus on large‐scale land transactions. To do this, I attend to the longevity of racial thinking bound up in everyday forms of land control. I look at the ways race is salient in the making of land and territorial arrangements. Drawing on my own research in Honduras and Panama, I situate land grabbing in relation to a range of scholarly insights that disclose how the early postcolonial dichotomy of “civilization” and “savagery”, and its inherently whitening logics, re‐appear in contemporary development projects of biodiversity conservation, land administration, and residential tourism. I argue, therefore, that land grabbing is a longstanding process that is routinely operationalized through the state and naturalized through development practices that are underpinned by ongoing racial hierarchies.     

Compulsory voting and right-wing populism: mobilisation,representation and socioeconomic inequalities

ABSTRACT

When all citizens vote, the influence of radical parties decreases. Despite this being a central justification for compulsory voting in the past, it has been absent from contemporary debates. I examine the normative and empirical premises of the ‘moderation thesis’ in relation to radical right-wing populist parties today and suggest that, under certain conditions, compulsory voting can limit these parties’ appeal. First, it replaces the excessive mobilisation of discontented voters with a more universal mobilisation. Second, it addresses the problem of underrepresentation offering a more pluralist type of representation than the populist one. And third, it reverses socioeconomic inequalities that drive support for populism through the egalitarian effects that compulsory voting has on policymaking. My central thesis is this: because compulsory voting embodies inclusivist, pluralist and egalitarian values, it addresses some of the grievances that drive support for right-wing populist parties without carrying the same normative costs as populism.     

The selected representation of contested prison history: memorial exhibitions and tourist experiences

The Jing-Mei Detention Centre, Taipei, is one of the primary sites associated with the ‘White Terror’, which took place during the imposition of Martial Law in Taiwan (1949–1987), by the authoritarian post-war regime of Chiang Kai-shek. Taiwan’s intelligence agencies violated civil rights and liberties. Suspects suffered arrest, interrogation, torture, trial, and imprisonment. The former detention centre has become Jing-Mei Human Rights Memorial and Cultural Park, which is one of two penal facilities dealing with the processing of political prisoners and for the suppression of activists who struggled for human rights. This study focuses on the interpretation by visitors of exhibitions at the site and the process of historical representation at the memorial park. The roles of the relevant parties were identified through interviews with former prisoners. The selection criteria, and the approaches to interpretation employed by the exhibition planners to represent a contested history, were examined. An analysis of visitor experiences and interaction with historical interpretation and layout in the exhibition demonstrated the visitors’ disoriented, yet unified, perceptions. A model of prison history has been developed that selects the memories and materials used to depict the past, unifying the multiple layers of histories during the ‘White Terror’.     

Teaching about political violence: a primer on representation

Geography is not generally viewed as a ‘source’ discipline for political violence studies, but this paper begins with the presumption that geography is well disposed to teach courses on the subject. The key purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that engaging issues of political violence is useful for our pedagogy. In particular, teaching about political violence allows geography to address concerns arising from the ‘crisis of representation’. It does so in two ways. First, it provides another venue for teaching about the ‘the other’ and ‘othered places’ in our curricula. Second, it also allows geography to challenge uncritical tropes about political violence as emerging from some peoples and places and not others. As a case study this paper overviews a course entitled Militia Movements in Comparative Perspective. This course was organized around a theoretical unit and four case study units. The case conflicts were chosen to represent conflicts that crossed ideological (right/left) and geographical (Global North/Global South) divides. The course structure is overviewed and a classroom discussion that highlighted questions about representation is described and analysed. The paper concludes by reviewing current efforts to address violence in the discipline, noting problems with these efforts, and suggesting alternatives to them.     

“The New World” of Karl Barth: Rethinking the Philosophical and Political Legacies of a Theologian

ABSTRACT

It is only recently that a few histories of interwar European political thought have come to acknowledge that its discursive framing of ethical and social crises was closely interwoven with upheavals in the ways Europeans rethought and debated God. The first aim of the present article is to restore to Karl Barth (1886–1968) a central place in promulgating a thoroughly interdisciplinary approach to twentieth-century European ethical and political thought. Secondly, it seeks to correct the commonplace association of Barth’s theological revolution with radical and authoritarian political ideologies by exploring his early political thought and activities, whilst focusing on several of his most politically and intellectually influential ideas. The article concludes with a discussion of the wider implications of rethinking Barth’s role in intellectual history.     

Liberty and Community: A Liberal Resolution

Much has been written in the last few years regarding Leo Strauss's political attachments, especially with respect to his purported influence over American neoconservatives. Problematically, Strauss scrupulously avoided explicit ideological entanglements, rarely addressed particular policy debates, and left little guidance for the statesman or thoughtful commentator interested in drawing practical political inferences from his philosophical writing. To add further ambiguity to already muddy waters, Strauss's discussion of the relation between prudence and philosophic insight coupled with the many and incompatible roles he assigns to the philosopher within the city make it unclear if there is anything at all that philosophy can teach us of political significance. The following essay aims to explain Strauss's view of the political function of philosophy in light of his distinction between classic and modern utopianism and what he calls in On Tyranny "philosophic politics."     

The Low Countries' connection: landscape and the struggle over representation around 1600

In Anglophone geography, the concept of landscape is often defined in visual terms as the expression of a spatial rationality. Historically, the strongly visual qualities of landscape tend to be related to early capitalist developments in Italy and the Low Countries. Yet, recent scholarly interventions have asserted that landscape in early modern Europe also animated so-called ‘platial’ (or place-oriented) practices and ideologies of political representation, justice, and custom. This paper seeks to bring these diverging platial and spatial approaches together through an examination of political and visual representation of landscape in the northern Low Countries around 1600. It is argued that the tensions between platial notions of landscape and spatial rationality were unceasingly pertinent to the protracted struggles over political representation in the Low Countries during the revolt against Spain. Visual representations of landscape provided ways to take in, reflect upon, and codify those struggles. The Dutch landscape remained entangled in a double dialectic in which spatial and platial modes of political and visual representation mutually shaped each other.     

The representation of Mongolia in contemporary travel writing: imaginative geographies of a travellers' frontier

This article analyses the representation of Mongolia in five works of travel writing published since the fall of the country's communist regime in 1990. It argues that this travel writing is characterized by a discourse that generates and circulates an ‘imaginative geography’ of Mongolia as a ‘travellers' frontier’. Support for this argument is derived from highlighting sets of collective, cohesive representations, performances and speaking positions that crosscut the works studied. It is maintained that these have the effect of naturalizing a very particular conceptualization of Mongolia as a frontier destination in the age of globalization and mass tourism. This research adds to an established body of geographical scholarship on travel writing, but departs from it by considering contemporary works rather than ones from the colonial period. In doing so it attempts to illustrate the relevance of contemporary travel writing as an object of study for geographers seeking to explore the anatomy of today's imaginative geographies, which have clear links to, but are not entirely mediated by, the discourses that characterize colonial travel writing.     

The work that parks do: towards an urban environmentality

Cities today are typically framed as sites of capitalist development, while the urban park is theorized as an indirect response to the emerging hegemony of industrial production in the nineteenth century. Yet, this historical framing tells us little about the process through which our notions of ‘the city’ and of ‘nature’ are produced, or how this knowledge affects the formation of urban people's identities. The discursive formation of the capitalist city can be traced to specific historical moments, one of which is the construction of urban parks during the mid- to late-nineteenth century, which I argue was instrumental in producing a new knowledge of the capitalist city by creating a boundary between the social space of the city and the natural space of the park. Using Philadelphia's Fairmount Park as a case study, I draw on archival photographs and annual park commission reports to explore the formation of park subjects during this period and shed light on diverse economic practices that were once widespread in and around the city but whose erasure was ultimately a prerequisite for the successful formation of an urban discourse organized around the construction of the city/nature boundary.     

Racialising global relations: the Rwandan genocide and the ethics of representation

At a time when the historical experience of the Rwandan genocide continues to be invoked to imagine and affirm international responsibility for the suffering of others, this article examines one way in which this event has been made to mean. Through a critical reading of Hotel Rwanda (a feature film) and Shake Hands with the Devil (a memoir), the article examines how the Rwandan genocide has been framed as an event of ‘white’ Western racism towards ‘black’ African injury. Without disputing the veracity of this explanatory framework, this article interrogates its representational politics and ethics. I problematise its continued use of inherently discriminatory racial categories, demonstrate its Eurocentric nature and call for a mode of understanding the ethical significance of the Rwandan genocide that is not limited to an already existing global relation between suffering ‘black’ bodies and potential ‘white’ saviours. In critiquing these texts and this discursive framework, my aim is to enable ways of coming to terms with the genocide that can accommodate the complex connections that do and may exist between non-Rwandans and the 1994 Rwandan genocide.     

Lithium extractivism and water injustices in the Salar de Atacama,Chile: The colonial shadow of green electromobility

This paper analyzes the linkages and feedback between green electromobility, lithium extractivism, and water injustices affecting the Atacameño's indigenous communities in the Salar de Atacama basin (Atacama Salt Flats). Currently, lithium is in high demand in the international markets as a strategic resource for the green electromobility industry, which represents part of the Global North policies established by the Paris Agreement to mitigate climate change's effects. Using both documentary and ethnographic methods based mainly on semi-structured interviews conducted with Atacameño people, public officials, and lithium companies' representatives and workers, we propose a decolonial interpretation of lithium extractivism in brine mining through the lens of Latin American political ecology combined with a decolonial and water justice approach. The results demonstrate how the linkages and feedback between global and local dynamics of lithium mining in the Salar de Atacama constitute a form of green extractivism that further replicates the historical inequalities between the Northern and Southern hemispheres and especially affects the indigenous Andean territories and the water ecosystems in the Global South. We call this phenomenon the colonial shadow of green electromobility. We conclude by exposing the need to rethink global proposals addressing climate change by reducing the commodity demand and aiming for water justice at global and local levels.     

Assessing Representation at Different Scales of Decision Making: Rethinking Local is Better

The nature and quality of representation in public participation is crucial to reaching acceptable environmental decisions that can be implemented. Ten case studies of natural resource management groups involved in agriculture in south western Australia were conducted at four spatial scales—state, regional, land conservation district (shire or county), and subcatchment. Qualitative analysis identified the desirable qualities of representatives, and then compared perceptions of current practice at the four scales against these ideals. Desirable qualities were being an active participant, competency (skills and knowledge), credibility, adopting the group identity and commitment, communicating outside the group, having established social networks, and an ability to function in multiple roles. Analysis across scales suggests that for groups at broader spatial scales of organizing, such as the state level, representation was closer to achieving the desired qualities than at other scales. This finding is contrary to much of the current rhetoric in natural resource management, and environmental management more generally, that "local is better." The article concludes with some thoughts as to why this is the case, suggesting that the success or otherwise of representation, and the public participation in which representatives are involved, is influenced not only by the scale of decision making but also by how representatives are selected and what they are expected to achieve.     

The 2013 ANTIPODE AAG Lecture The Environment Making State: Territory,Nature, and Value

My argument is that the state is fundamental to the value form because it delivers the use values of non‐human nature to the process of capital accumulation. Capital cannot, and historically does not, capture non‐human nature without the participation of the state. The state delivers the utilities of extra‐human nature to the accumulation process by creating property regimes, physical infrastructure, and scientific knowledge. As such, the state is a crucial under‐theorized political membrane in the ecological metabolism of capitalism and the value form. The capitalist states inherently environmental qualities are rooted in its fundamentally territorial qualities. Where are the utilities of non‐human nature found? On the surface of the earth. What institutions ultimately control the surface of the earth? Territorially defined national states. The example of state formation in the early years of the United States is used to illustrate these ideas.     

Moralism in theories of secession: a realist perspective

Moral reasoning is the most common approach to secession in political philosophy. Just‐cause, choice and liberal‐cultural theories rely on moral conceptions of political authority. This article examines an alternative view through an exploration of moral theories of secession from a realist perspective. Realism has recently seen a revival as a form of normative political philosophy and focuses on political disagreement and legitimacy rather than rights and moral analysis. I claim that realism would reject utopianism and moralism present in theories of secession. Instead of regarding secession as a right, realism would frame secession as a political option. According to this view, this article explores a realist theory of secession that would be based on the priority of politics and disagreement among other concepts. This would be a middle‐ground theory, compatible with liberal values and existing moral theories.     

Disease, Social Identity, and Risk: Rethinking the Geography of AIDS

The emergence of new diseases and the re-emergence of 'old' diseases necessitates a relook at what shapes vulnerability to ill health. A framework is proposed that combines a realist approach to mapping vulnerability with feminist and post-structural approaches that focus more attention upon the role of social identities and cultural framings of disease. Too often investigations of disease focus either upon structural determinants of risk such as political policy and the economy, or on discursive definitions of disease that impact its experience. A combination of these approaches would result in a more effective framework for evaluating vulnerability, and subsequently for generating effective disease prevention strategies. The social, economic, political, and cultural context of HIV/AIDS in Malawi is given as an illustration of this framework.     

The experience and the idea of war in the writings of Simone Weil and Marguerite Duras

Abstract

This article considers the works of Simone Weil and Marguerite Duras as witnesses and narrators of the events of the Second World War. Their two perspectives offer a first, original reflection by women intellectuals on war and violence based on direct involvement. Simone Weil construed her idea of ‘force’ from her first-hand experience of the Spanish Civil War and her participation in the French Resistance, in London. Marguerite Duras offered her personal testimony of war violence (in the French Resistance, in France) intertwining fiction and reality, wavering together autobiography and invention. Duras, in the contrary, tried to represent the unrepresentable by connecting her personal to a collective trauma.     

The Transnationalisation of Competing State Projects: Carbon Offsetting and Development in Sumatra's Coastal Peat Swamps

Indonesia's peatlands can be considered as conflict arenas where different state projects and actors compete. The case presented here stands for a new conservation controversy. The Berbak Carbon Initiatives overlap with a settlement project, inducing struggles among different state apparatuses, transnational actors, and peasants. This article is based on a novel conceptual approach building on political ecology, politics of scale and state theory for investigating divergent and transnationalised state projects. Empirically we draw on qualitative research conducted in the province of Jambi, Sumatra. We argue that the territorial conflicts mirror the contradictory interests of different state apparatuses influenced by conservation‐oriented and development‐oriented actors in society but also by supra‐national planning institutions. In our case, the contestation becomes visible through inconsistent notions of development and property. We show how political change challenges the implementation of a forest carbon project, illustrating the high risks of mitigating climate change through offsetting.     

Sweet nationalism in bitter days: a commercial representation of Zionism

ABSTRACT. This article identifies several theoretical approaches to the role of culture in the construction of national identity. Embedded in the presently emerging approach, which emphasises the relations between popular culture/consumerism and national identity, this study focuses on a specific consumer good manufactured in Israel in the early 2000s, the height of the second Palestinian Intifada (uprising): small sugar packets bearing portraits of the patriarchs of Zionism. The analysis of this product, employing semiotic analysis, interviews and focus groups, locates it in the five ‘moments’ of du Gay's ‘circuit of culture’ (i.e. identity, representation, production, consumption and regulation). Three main gen e ral arguments were stated, empirically examined and largely sustained: (1) Consumer goods are used not only for constructing national identity but also as a means for ‘healing’ it; (2) in their ‘healing’ capacity, representations of nationalism on consumer goods do not add new elements to representations offered by the ‘high’ official version of nationalism but replicate them in a simplified way; (3) while trivialising the insights and concepts that originated in ‘high’ culture, consumer goods expose the prejudices, stereotypes and rules of inclusion and exclusion that in ‘high’ culture are often hidden in a sophisticated manner.     

The Platonic Enlightenment

Abstract

Mark Blitz has written an analysis of Plato’s political philosophy that engages with a large proportion of the Platonic corpus. His examination is orientated by Plato’s intention of expressing his views in dialogue form, and animated by Plato’s principle that political philosophy must emerge from the attentive critique of ordinary or political experience. This article raises the question whether Blitz has done justice to the “poetic” (constructed, historical, etc.) character of ordinary experience or doxa, and so of the radical nature of Plato’s political thought.