Technology and the construction of oceanic space: Bathymetry and the Arctic continental shelf dispute

How did the Arctic seabed become a political space despite its almost complete inaccessibility to humans? While we can explain the causes of this in geopolitical and economic terms, theorizing the process is more difficult. This article argues that spatial constructions of the Arctic seabed emerge from the interaction among human actors, technologies, and the material environment. This interaction generates representations which are then fed into the overall process of spatializing the seabed. By highlighting the role of technology, this paper offers a way of relating human agency and materiality in the construction of oceanic space. The case study of bathymetry in the ongoing disputes over the Arctic continental shelf illustrates how technological and scientific advancements are embedded into global politics and themselves cause evolutions in the spatial construction of the seabed.     

Canada and the political geographies of rights

For some observers, liberal rights are politically disempowering, while for others they can provide a basis for mobilization, resistance and the formation of counter-publics. Yet neither of these claims says much about the geography of rights, which provides the focus for our discussion. Rights are geographical in several senses: rights are often about access to space or place; in liberal societies, geographies of private and public shape access to rights; space naturalizes social relations; the politics of scale open up new debates about and strategies for attaining rights within and beyond Canada; and places are both defined and called upon in struggles over rights. In an exploration of two Canadian case studies - gentrification in Vancouver and the status of Filipina domestic workers - we examine the ways in which the geography of rights proves consequential to dominant and oppositional rights claiming. We briefly lay out the meaning and significance of rights, before a discussion of their political significance in the Canadian context.     

Border thinking: Rossport, Shell and the political geographies of a gas pipeline

Rossport is a small, sparsely populated rural area in the west of Ireland. Over the past seven years, some of its residents have been engaged in a struggle against the building of a gas pipeline through their locality by multinational corporations, including Shell and Statoil. Their struggle has garnered opposition and support within Ireland and internationally. This paper takes the story of Rossport as the starting point for a broader discussion of epistemology within political geography. Drawing on the work of Walter Mignolo, in particular his ideas about ‘border thinking’ and the ‘decoloniality of knowledge’, it argues that Rossport offers the possibility for a redeployment of postcolonial thought within political geography.     

Feminist geographies in Aotearoa New Zealand: cultural,social and political moments

Abstract

Aotearoa New Zealand is a nation of promise, potential and enigma: it was the first country in the world where women gained the vote in 1893 and now boasts the youngest woman world leader in 2017. It is also a postcolonial nation where structural racism, homophobia, and sexism persist, yet it has also given legal personhood to a river. Our Country Report foregrounds Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship that responds to, reflects, and sometimes resists such contrasts and contradictions at the national scale. We employ the lens of the 2017 national election to critically engage with current gendered and indigenous politics in the country. Analyzing these politics through three ‘feminist moments,’ our paper highlights the breadth and scope of current Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship and directions.     

Legalism: Law,morals, and political trials

The purpose of this article is to critically undermine two commonly held and closely related contentions regarding the British idealist tradition. The first is that the British idealist tradition went into rapid and terminal decline shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. The second is that J. A. Smith was largely responsible for it. These aims are achieved through a diachronic analysis of Smith's conception of human imperfection as well as an assessment of Smith's intellectual legacy. As this article will show, contrary to the received view, Smith was a philosophical innovator who instigated an intellectual evolution within the British idealist. In particular, this article shows that Smith substituted aspects of his early Greenian philosophy with elements of Italian idealism. As a result, Smith was instrumental in moving British idealism away from its traditional underpinnings and towards more a Croce–Gentilian foundation. It is this neglected philosophical innovation which has given scholars the false impression of the tradition's collapse. By establishing Smith's intellectual innovation this article intends to show that Smith made a much more significant intellectual contribution to the philosophical tradition to which he belongs than has so far been recognised.     

On the nature of the beast: Re-charting political geographies of the European Union

This review paper begins with the premise that since the European Union remains a process of construction with no agreed or pre‐designated end‐point, its power structure is open to a diverse range of interpretations. Moreover, the apparent novelty of the EU renders it hard to characterize according to familiar taxonomies. The novelty lies in part in the complex territorial configurations of authority in the EU. Different conceptualizations of the EU are varied readings of the structure, balance and scales of authority — which thereby invoke different actions and spaces of possibility.     

Unsettling feminist geopolitics: forging feminist political geographies of violence and displacement

Feminist geopolitics has analyzed violence across scales and critiqued the dominant epistemology of political geography for almost two decades. What theoretical and political purchase does it have today, given the potpourri of perspectives and reimaginings of the idea? Current research on violence, human displacement and the security of people out of place is used to explore answers to this question, finding that feminist political geography – a bigger tent than just feminist geopolitics – is indispensable to geographical thinking. Recent non-human feminist geopolitics of ‘earthliness’ offer an original theoretical departure from what has come before, though truncate political possibilities by refusing to engage the individuated subjects of ‘conventional’ feminist geopolitics. Feminist geopolitics and its consonant concepts remain relevant to addressing the fast violence of war, displacement, detention and the attendant waiting, or slow violence, that these power relations imply. Feminist geopolitics can and has been enriched by critical work on subaltern geopolitics and post-secular geographies and is shown to be vital to understanding human displacement for those living in the postcolonies of the global South. A case study of private refugee sponsorship to Canada is critically analyzed as one pathway out of protracted displacement. While resettlement is valorized by states and their civil societies as a laudable ‘solution’ offering permanent protection, a feminist geopolitical analysis exposes the Canadian Government’s racialized preferences and prejudice against Sub-Saharan African asylum seekers, masked as geography. The research presented exposes some of the Orientalist assumptions that frame and figure private refugee sponsorship. Taking this Orientalist critique and these additional literatures into the fold of feminist geopolitics, ‘feminist political geography’ offers a larger umbrella under which to collaborate, innovate, and intervene in political struggles that interrupt salient geopolitics and state discourse across world regions and inhibit violence wherever possible.     

The political geographies of D/decolonization: Variegation and decolonial challenges of /in geography

Anglophone and North Atlantic geography is enmeshed institutionally, epistemically and racially in colonial modern privilege, highlighting the urgent task of addressing its modes of theorization, interpretation, and research. Decolonizing analysis builds from postcolonial, critical, feminist and racism critiques, and problematizes accounts of knowledge, subjectivity and power. In pursuit of decolonizing knowledge production and addressing global inequalities, this paper enjoins political geography to more systematically engage with decolonial analysis, conceptualization and theory. Political geography has much to contribute to interdisciplinary decolonial scholarship through contextualized, grounded, multiscalar and granular analysis of socio-spatial relations. The paper examines the common ground and potential tensions between Anglophone political geographies and decolonial theory (῾decoloniality’), then examines the case of Ecuador's politics of plurinationalism to illustrate a decolonizing political geographical analysis. The case highlights how the variegated political geographies of decolonization arising within and against coloniality require from political geography a decolonial turn, which would entail divesting core political geography concepts of western norms, including plural epistemologies of space and power in analysis, and recalibrating knowledge production processes.     

The construction of Israeli Citizenship Law: Intertwining political philosophies

Because of the significance attached to it, the Knesset passed the 1950 Law of Return in an unprecedentedly short time, but it took two more years to pass the Citizenship Law. The official protocols regarding the legislation of Israel’s Citizenship Law illuminate the main concerns of the drafters. The goal of the emerging national citizenship regime was not just to promote Jewish immigration but to establish a modern state that prohibited dual citizenship, accepted naturalizations, prevented statelessness, and granted equal citizenship to women. These policies are accumulations of countless opinions, values, interests, and ideas, each with different conceptions of citizenship and nationhood.     

Consumption,exclusion and emotion: The social geographies of shopping

In recent years, a productive dialogue has developed between retail geographers and those social geographers concerned with the spatiality of consumption. This has resulted in a series of accounts of shopping that emphasize notions of consumer creativity. Nonetheless, this paper argues that many of these have struggled to reconcile the meaning of shopping with an understanding of the material parameters within which consumers operate. Recognizing that this tendency has distracted from the socio-spatial inequalities evident in retailing, the paper examines how shopping rituals are embedded in social relations that discourage particular shoppers from visiting certain retail locations. Drawing on extensive and intensive data derived in Coventry (UK), the paper questions the extent to which this geography of exclusion is the product of constraint, arguing that shopping is shaped by a more complex spatiality of inclusion and (self-) exclusion. Accordingly, the paper makes the case for a social geography of shopping that pays careful attention to the emotionally laden transactions played out in particular settings.     

Currents,visions and voyages: historical geographies of the sea

This paper offers a prospectus for a version of historical geography that puts the seas and oceans at the centre of its concerns. This is pursued in three ways. First, via a discussion of the epistemological and historiographic perspectives that might be taken on geographies of the sea, which argues that the view from the ocean can develop geographies of spaces beyond the local and the national, and can attend to the relationships between the human and natural worlds. Second, through a consideration of the imaginative, aesthetic and sensuous geographies of the sea that contends that maritime worlds open up new experiential dimensions and new forms of representation. Finally, in a survey of the material and social worlds of the oceans that suggests that new life can thereby be breathed into current concerns with global political economy, material geographies, the relationship between knowledge and located practice, and the intersections of social and spatial difference. The paper also provides an introduction to a special issue on the historical geography of the sea.     

The United States and counterinsurgency: 'political first, political last, political always'

According to the status of forces agreement signed by Iraq and the United States in November 2008, US troops are to be withdrawn entirely from Iraq by the end of 2011. A few days later it was also revealed that the British force in Iraq, numbering about 4,100 troops, will be reduced to a contingent of just a few hundred military advisors by summer 2009. The counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan, on the other hand, is to be intensified in the form of a ‘surge’ in military and political effort. Counterinsurgency operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq have long been at the centre of the security policy debate in the United States and elsewhere; a debate which seems unlikely to be resolved in the near future. But what exactly is counterinsurgency? This article offers some reflections on the practice and the politics of an especially complex form of military engagement. All military activity should be understood through the prism of politics, and counterinsurgency particularly so.