Antipode to Terror: Spaces of Performative Politics

Focusing on Pakistan we address the human geography of politics and violence to argue that organized political violence is not only about death and destruction but also, more importantly, about the control of the public sphere, and vitally, the reorganization of space. To make this argument we also extend Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism and the human condition. Our argument is grounded in a review of the activities of Tehrik‐e‐Taliban, Pakistan's (TTP) during their brief control of the Swat valley in Pakistan. We argue that TTP's spectacular violence eliminates “worldliness”, plurality and life, so that spontaneous action is denied and the public sphere is destroyed through the universalization of terror. The practical implication of our argument is that, in significant contrast to state and military actions to date, productive measures to resist violence should protect the performance of politics in an extended public sphere.     

Spaces of nostalgia: the hollowing out of a London market

In this paper we look at the place of memory and nostalgia in peoples' narratives of an old, traditionally white, working-class market in London, which over the last decade has experienced social and economic decline. We argue that in this hollowed out space, abandoned by many of those who can move, has emerged a nostalgia for the halcyon days of the market when people came from far and wide to shop, and when there was a strong sense of community. What these nostalgic discourses mask are the social divisions (particularly racialized divisions) of the time, while in this romanticized vision of the past, the new population of asylum seekers have become an easy trope for the dissatisfactions of the present. Regeneration strategies in an area such as this need to confront the force of these nostalgic discourses in order to tackle the deep social and racial divisions and reverse the socio-economic decline.     

Women's Cotton and the Spaces of Gender Politics in Northern Cote d'Ivoire

This article seeks to contribute to the gender and 'development' literature by showing how gender struggles over women's economic autonomy from cotton growing are played out at multiple geographical scales. The main argument is that 'men' and 'women' do not simply negotiate over cash cropping within the household. Women in particular find it necessary to 'jump' the scale of the household in order to secure productive resources for cash cropping. Drawing upon the notion of 'scalar politics,' this article illuminates the multiple processes and scaled spaces in which women's economic autonomy expands and contracts around the cultivation of cotton. It is inspired by feminist political ecological approaches to examine how the micro-politics of gender interact with meso- and macro-level agroecological and political economic processes affecting women's poverty and empowerment. Based on longitudinal research in northern Côte d'Ivoire, it shows how women of different sociocultural and economic standing negotiate access to productive resources at multiple scales, and how some men seek to restrict these initiatives. As women search for solutions to contradictions in gendered social relations of production, at different geographical scales, they have simultaneously dispersed the site of gender struggles to other locations (the marketplace and women's personal fields). Male household heads now find it necessary to contest women's cotton growing in these gendered spaces in their attempt to control their wives' labor.     

The Spaces of Parking: Mapping the Politics of Mobility in San Francisco

Abstract:  Recently a "mobility turn" has entered critical geographic discourse. This mobility turn recognizes that mobility is at once physical movement and contains social meanings that are manifested in a politics of mobility. In this paper I contribute to this emerging line of inquiry by exploring how the politics of mobility is manifested in localized urban processes. Mobility, as with the broader localized urban process, is political and ideological, and this is particularly true with contemporary debates about automobiles and parking in cities. I explore parking as an example of the broader contestation of urban space, using a case study of San Francisco, California. There are three broad factions in San Francisco's parking debates—progressives that advocate for less parking, neoliberals that advocate that market-based pricing determine the amount of parking, and neoconservatives that advocate for more parking. Throughout the paper, I provide thoughts on the relationship between parking, space, ideology, and the broader urban process.     

Politics and the London 2012 Olympics: the (in)security Games

This article traces the emergence of security at the Olympic Games as a key concern of host governments and of the Olympic movement and analyses the implications of this heightened concern for the delivery of the Games, the local host community and for national security policy. It is argued that the Olympic Games, as a high profile media event, provide an increasingly attractive political opportunity structure for a range of political actors—an attraction that is intensified when the Games are held in a world city such as London. Since the 9/11 attacks in New York there has been a sharp increase in security expenditure for the Olympic Games, arguably significantly out of proportion to the likely risk. The cost of security has risen from approximately $108 million in 1996 (Atlanta) to an estimated $1.99 billion in 2012 (London). It is argued that the period since 2001 has been characterized by hyper‐insecurity and a culture of intense risk aversion based not on probability but on the possibility of attack. Among the consequences of this development is a desensitization of host nations to the increased securitization of their cities. It is also argued that the impact on the local UK host community of Newham will be significant not only as a result of the intense level of policing, but also owing to the redevelopment associated with the Games and the use of the surveillance infrastructure to create a virtual gated community in the post‐Games athletes' village. The article concludes by discussing some of the longer‐term implications of the increased securitization of the Olympic Games, including the normalization of intense surveillance, the further encroachment on civil liberties and the growing tension between the values espoused by the Olympic movement and the reality of a successful delivery of the Games.     

Assembling Justice Spaces: The Scalar Politics of Environmental Justice in North-east England

Abstract:  In contrast to the US environmental justice movement, which has been successful in building a networked environmentalism that recognises—and has impacted upon—national patterns of distributional (in)equalities, campaigns in the UK have rarely developed beyond the local or articulated a coherent programme of action that links to wider socio-spatial justice issues or effects real changes in the regulatory or political environment. Our purpose in this paper is to extend research which explores the spatial politics of mobilisation, by attending to the multi-scalar dynamics embedded in the enactment of environmental justice (EJ) in north-east England. It is an approach that is indebted to recent work on the scalar politics of EJ, and also to the network ideas associated with actor-network theory (ANT)-inspired research on human–nature relations. Our account provides preliminary reflections on the potential for an "assemblage" perspective which draws together people, texts, machines, animals, devices and discourses in relations that collectively constitute—and scale—EJ. To conclude, and building upon this approach, we suggest future research avenues that we believe present a promising agenda for critical engagement with the production, scaling and politics of environmental (in)justice.     

Changing ideologies of Medieval state formation: the growing exploitation of land in Gwynedd c. 1100–c. 1400

This paper focuses on one of the major ideological shifts associated with the territorialization of power experienced within Medieval European society, namely the growing exploitation of land. Using empirical evidence from the kingdom of Gwynedd in Wales, it explores the difficulties faced by Medieval societal rulers in translating their new ideologies of state rule into administrative practice. Their inability to create a consistent administrative structure to match their ideological ambitions meant that there was often a geography inherent in the territorialization of power in the Middle Ages, ranging from a close relationship between ideology and practice near the political core of the state to one of increasing discontinuity between the two near its periphery. The author suggests that the English conquest of Gwynedd in the late thirteenth century—one which was characterized by a far greater infrastructural co-ordination—led, to a large extent, to the dissolution of the spatial variations in the administrative realities of the Gwynedd state.     

Domestic Spaces as Public Places: An Ethnoarchaeological Case Study of Houses, Gender, and Politics in the Ecuadorian Amazon

In an ethnoarchaeological case study, we take a gendered perspective on the house as a locus of political life in Conambo, a village of about 200 Achuar- and Quichua-speaking peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In this small-scale society, women and men engage actively in political practice in independent yet complementary ways, and the domestic context is a place where political life is conducted on a daily basis. In this article, the house is examined as a politicized context at three scales of materiality: the organization of settlement in the community, the spatial relationships in the house, and the scale of painted designs on pottery bowls used in the house. At each scale, we identify material correlates of women's and men's participation. Our goal is to bring attention to potential archaeological correlates of women's political involvement in past societies, to question assumptions about women's political lives and domestic spaces, and to expand the ways in which anthropological archaeology may contribute to understanding cross-cultural variation in women's and men's domains of power.     

Spaces of the political*

In changing geographic locations, metaphorically or otherwise, perceptions change. Drawing inspiration from ancient Peking rather than Leo Strauss’ Athens and Jerusalem changes the compass points of political theory. This is because it moves the centre of gravity away from the tension of reason and revelation toward a city built upon another way of approaching the world, through the channelling and harnessing of vital energy flows, known as qi. Peking is designed, through fengshui, to channel the vital energy know as qi away from intensities and toward productive (harmonious) ends. How have we moderns channeled and harnessed such (political) intensities? This work traces the flow of energy as it takes on modern political forms, expressed through the built environment. Taking the nineteenth-century’s Crystal Palace and a Maoist Museum as contrasting examples, it illustrates the way in which the built environment channels and transforms energy. In terms of the political, it is the dissipation or intensification effect of these machines that becomes the defining characteristic of difference between these two different political worlds. As modern machine-technologies, these two examples also shine a light on the ways ‘modernity’ has encountered and dealt with the telluric.     

State Making and the Politics of the Frontier in Central Benin

Kopytoff's model of the African frontier has opened room for renewed approaches to settlement history, politics, ethnicity and cultural reproduction in pre‐colonial Africa. This interpretative framework applies well to central Benin (Ouessè). Over the long term, mobility has been a structural feature of the regional social history, from pre‐colonial times onwards. Movements of people, resources, norms and values have been crucial in the production and reproduction of the social and political order. The colonial intrusion and its post‐colonial avatars gave way to renewed relations between mobility and locality, in particular in the form of a complex articulation between control over labour force, access to land and natural resources, and out‐ and in‐migrations. This article argues that the political frontier metaphor provides a useful heuristic device to capture the logic of state making, as the changing outcome of organizing practices taking place inside and outside state and non‐state organizations and arenas. Governmentality in post‐colonial central Benin thus results from the complex interplay of mobility, control over resources and state‐led forms of ‘villagization’.     

Technological Features of Roman Terra Sigillata from Gallic and Italian Centres of Production

Technological features of sherds of Roman terra sigillata were studied. The sherds analysed represented products of workshops which were most probably located in Gaul, central Italy, north-west Italy and the plain of the river Po. Equivalent firing temperatures were estimated by colour measurement, X-ray diffraction and thermal expansion measurement; in addition, the chemical and morphological features of the red sintered slips were investigated using scanning electron microscopy coupled with energy dispersive X-ray microanalysis. The combined results suggest that, relative to northern Italian products,terra sigillata from Gaul and central Italy was made by potters who were more successful in modifying slip composition and controlling firing temperature to obtain highly sintered slips. Northern Italian potters seem to have worked their clays less successfully and fired them at temperatures which were too low to overcome the limited presence of fluxes in the slip.     

Feminism and the Spaces of Transformation

Feminist political theory draws on particular spatial imaginations in elaborating a politics of transformation. This paper establishes this in relation to two familiar accounts of feminist transformation – those of Judith Butler and Luce Irigaray. Respectively I read their work as suggesting that transformation of gender relations takes the form of ubiquitous revolution, taking place everywhere, or a distant dream of an (im)possible future – elsewhere. The paper then turns to discuss the work of Julia Kristeva, often dismissed as not feminist and conservative. I read her work politically, within the frame of feminist theory. She offers a different, heterogeneous account of transformation, as both possible in the present and also limited by the existence and need for social and symbolic orders. In exploring the heterogeneous spatial imagination of her work, the paper suggests that the spatialities of abjection are diverse and productive. Abjection is not simply about devising territories and borders. Moreover, dominant spatialities cannot be described as simply masculine. Finally, drawing links with Lefebvre's account of representational spaces, I argue that Kristeva's work can be extended to inform our understanding of how spaces themselves can be transformed.     

Linkage Politics: the Role of the European Community in Greek Politics in 1973

Abstract

The convulsions which began to shake the Greek military regime with the first student protests at the end of 1972 and which reached their climax in 1973 with the uprising at the Polytechnic in November, have been exhaustively analysed and discussed. However, they have always been viewed either through the prism of internal political developments or in the light of events in Cyprus. The international context remains largely unexplored.     

Abandoned Women and Spaces of the Exception

I consider two cases of legal abandonment in Vancouver—of murdered sex workers and live‐in caregivers on temporary work visas—in light of Agamben's claim that the generalized suspension of the law has become a dominant paradigm of government. I bring to Agamben's theory a concern to specify both the gendering and racialisation of these processes, and the many geographies that are integral to legal abandonment and the reduction of categories of people to 'bare life'. The case studies also allow me to explore two limit‐concepts that Agamben offers as a means to re‐envision political community: the refugee who refuses assimilation in the nation‐state, and the human so degraded as to exist beyond conventional humanist ethics of respect, dignity and responsibility.