Agricultural Settlement and Ecological Crisis in the Ecuadorian Amazon Frontier

This article discusses several structural factors in the policy environment of Ecuador thought to determine the process of occupation by agricultural colonists of the country's segment of Amazonia and the emerging land settlement patterns in the region. These factors are fundamentally concerned with (a) national sovereignty interests over remote, peripheral territories characterized by low population density and ill-defined land ownership, (b) the reduction of demographic and social pressures in other regions of the country, and (c) the extension of the agricultural frontier. For economic and geopolitical reasons, the Ecuadorian state is likely to maintain a moderate and rather ineffectual set of incentives supporfted by the current legislation to allow the occupation of the Amazon region. Consequently, as migrants continue to flow into the easily degradable areas of the Amazon, and without increased population carrying capacity outrside the Amazon, some conversion of the rainforest environment of eastern Ecuador to other uses is certain to continue. A more detailed microlevel understanding of the interrelationship among factors influencing land-use decisions by settler farmers is needed to find policy-entry points.     

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.     

The Mythical Shapeshifting of Capital and Petrification of Labour: Deepening Conflict on the Agrofuel Frontier

In the great civilisations of the past, shapeshifting promised a restoration of order in turbulent times in return for the deference of loyal subjects. It was a strategy of the powerful to maintain advantage and could also be used to bind opponents to an undesired form. This study finds its resonance in the contemporary shapeshifting that is the supposed transition from the fossil fuel economy. With reference to the fusion of oil, grain and sugar companies in Brazil's ethanol sector, it explores how amidst economic, environmental and political insecurity these “old villains” of the carbon economy have fused and emerged as the “new heroes” of the green economy. Accounts of dissenting rural subjects, however, unveil the mythical nature of avowed social gains from this shapeshifting. Amidst rural conflict and a successive weakening of regulation, it becomes evident how their petrification, in a metaphorical and increasingly literal sense is required.     

Accommodation and Conflict: The Incorporation of Miao Territory and Construction of Cultural Difference during the High Qing Era1

Past studies of southwest Guizhou during the Qing dynasty tend to focus on the policy of “abolishment of the native chieftainships and extension of direct bureaucratic control” (gaitu guiliu) pursued under the Yongzheng emperor, and also to emphasize the correlation between state expansion and Miao revolts as a political process of institution building. Based on personal memoirs and ethnographic accounts of the Qing dynasty, this study focuses on the Qing incorporation of Miao territory (Miaojiang) in southeast Guizhou, where there were not even native chieftainships but only unorganized, or “raw,” Miao indigenes; it also examines the incorporation as an interactive process of cultural understanding and construction among the Yongzheng emperor, Governor-General Ortai, a group of local officials, represented by Zhang Guangsi and Fang Xian, and local Miao people, who had already interacted with Han migrants and started to seek the protection of the central government. The paper calls attention to the contribution of lower level Qing officials made in the decision-making process, the formation of knowledge by the Chinese about the long-ignored Miao territory, and the significance of mutual understanding of cultures. It argues that the tragic confrontation between the Miao people and the Qing state building was not necessarily inevitable, but contingent on the officials’ perception of the minority people’s culture and the handling of the relationship between the state and local indigenes.     

Islam,Territory, and Contested Space in Post-Soviet Russia

A noted American specialist on nationalism and identity politics in the former USSR reviews the political, institutional, and territorial complexities identified with the Muslim minority in the Russian Federation. Coverage includes the size and distribution of Muslim communities, the government's approach to the diverse adherents of Islam (including Wahhabis), fragmentation of Islamic institutions, and federal policies before and after the October 2004 terrorist attack on the school in Beslan, North Ossetia. Considerable attention is devoted to differences between Islamo-internationalism and Islamo-nationalism in Chechnya, as well as similarities and differences among approaches to Muslim affairs in Russia and other parts of Europe. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: O15, O18, Z13. 1 table, 53 references.     

Precarious Territory: Property Law,Housing, and the Socio-Spatial Order

Most of us access shelter over land over which other people have legally sanctioned dominant interests and powers, creating systemic relations of security and vulnerability that I term precarious property. We all live inside the territory of property, but do so under different terms. Rather than thinking of the territory of property as an exclusive space of insiders and outsiders, I think of it as a relational technology that organises forms of conditional spatial access. Territorialised expressions of law play a crucial role in organising such relations through a “property space” that frames property’s participants, their interactions, their alternatives to transacting, and the meanings of property itself. Thinking territorially about precarious property offers us both analytical and ethico-political insights, I suggest.     

Territory,sovereignty and entitlement: Diplomatic discourses in the United Nations Security Council

This paper builds upon feminist approaches within political science, international relations and geography that study how bodies haunt global politics, by exploring how entitlement to power connects through the scale of the body to that of the state. In a context of rising populism and political bluster, as well as post-#metoo discussions of personal entitlement displayed by well-known political figures, there is a need to take seriously how discourses of statehood within security crises are gendered in specific ways. This paper argues that the concept of entitlement offers potential for geographic enquiry by opening up new perspectives on masculinist framings of territory and state in critical geopolitics and in critical international relations. It considers specifically how diplomatic discourses ground and naturalize claims to territory by showing how states’ entitlement to territory and masculinist forms of personal entitlement are connected. Drawing upon feminist approaches to language, discourse and power, this paper studies diplomatic interventions at the United Nations Security Council in New York in 2014–2017 on the crisis in Ukraine. Methodologically, it analyses diplomatic speeches through the concept of entitlement to show how territorial claims are naturalized through rhetorical devices grounded in hegemonic forms of masculinity. It argues that a clearer understanding of the connections between discourses of personal entitlement and state territorial sovereignty can further our understanding of territory.