Political economy,demography and development in Australia's Northern Territory

The Canadian ‘staples thesis’ literature has documented both the risks (in the tradition of Harold Innis) and the opportunities (in the tradition of W. A. Macintosh) inherent in economies that are dependent on the export of minimally processed natural resources. The key risk is that of retarded long‐term growth as a result of a lack of diversification and over‐dependence on foreign capital and markets. This article argues that the demographic consequences of staples approaches to development also make it difficult to achieve diversification. It profiles Australia's Northern Territory as an example of a mining‐dependent (fiscal) economy that demonstrates a particular demographic profile consistent with what might be expected of a resource frontier. The article argues, however, that restrictive demographic characteristics persist (high sex ratios, high population mobility, disadvantaged position of indigenous people and remote dwellers) even though mining has become an insignificant direct employer (less than one percent of the workforce) and the services sector drives the labour market. This persistence can be linked to the Territory and federal government expectations of economic development patterns in the region and the frontier mythology created around the Northern Territory. Addressing the demographic imbalance is a critical step towards realizing ambitions for economic diversification.     

Mapping international flows of electronic waste

In this paper, we map the international trade in electronic waste (e‐waste). We quantify the directions and magnitude of this trade at the global scale and examine the utility of the pollution haven hypothesis for explaining the observed trade patterns. Our results demonstrate four key findings: the international trade in e‐waste is a more complex story than being one about ‘rich’ countries dumping waste in ‘poor’ countries; the trade in e‐waste is highly regionalized, with intra‐regional trade accounting for most of the total trade flows; the pollution haven hypothesis is an important, but partial, explanation of observed trade patterns; and there is a need to conceptualize the trade and traffic of e‐waste as open ended and contingent processes facilitated by situated practices of wasting and valuing that rely on geographic difference and mobility for the exchanges between the domains of waste and value to occur.     

Trans experiences in lesbian and queer space

This article explores how individuals who identify as transgendered and transsexual men experience the internal possibilities, limitations, and resistances found in spaces identified as ‘lesbian’ or as ‘queer’ in the City of Toronto. The article draws on interview data transcribing the experiences of 12 transgender and transsexual individuals in LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer) spaces. These interviews empirically illustrate how fluid and unfixed gendered and sexualized practices can transform spaces and their occupants. Further, this article considers the ways spaces may be ‘queered’ and the implications of these processes on the constitution of LGBTQ spaces. The experiences of transmen in lesbian and queer spaces bring into sharp relief the complex ways that material spaces, even those arising out of resistive impulses, incorporate disciplining expectations and new opportunities. Those who research or utilize these places must be attentive to these processes, if there is to be a serious commitment to the creation of libratory, inclusive spaces.     

Accessibility interrupted: the Shimshal road,Gilgit‐Baltistan,Pakistan

Geographers working in mountainous northern Pakistan note that gains in accessibility following the Karakoram Highway's official opening in 1978 significantly reshaped social organization, economic activity, and land use across the region. These valuable regional‐scale analyses provide few insights regarding the contingent and variable ways new roads are conceived and experienced at the community and household level by the people whose mobility they drastically impact. This article addresses that limitation of regional research by focusing on an individual agricultural community called Shimshal that in 2003 completed a 40‐kilometre link‐road connecting it to the highway. Drawing from qualitative information gathered before and after the Shimshal road's completion, we briefly describe the community's motivation for constructing the road, villagers’ accessibility‐related hopes and concerns as it was being built, and some of the social, cultural, and economic changes that followed the road's completion. The article concludes by summarizing the community's response so far to landslide‐induced destruction of over 20 kilometres of the Karakoram Highway which, since January 2010, has left community members without vehicular access to the rest of Pakistan just seven years after their link‐road's completion.     

Where does all the talent flow? Migration of young graduates and nongraduates,Canada 1996–2001

It has recently been suggested that cities and regions should focus upon attracting talented individuals as a means to develop. Such a suggestion implies two things: first that it is possible to meaningfully alter migration flows by way of local policy, and second that these flows have an effect on local growth (and not the reverse as has generally been admitted). In this paper, we begin to investigate the empirical foundations of such assertions by examining some structural determinants of graduate migration flows by comparing them, in a gravity model context, to flows of nongraduates. Our contention is that, if migration flows are structured by such factors, then policies aimed at modifying flows—and any research purporting to give such policy advice—must first take them into account. We show that migration flows are strongly dependent on basic gravity variables such as size and distance, but that these and other variables (such as income differences, presence of graduates and border effects) do not affect all flows equally. Furthermore, we show that certain factors that are assumed to be local (such as wage levels) in fact only operate at a provincial level. Thus policies implemented locally may have little or no effect if they are manipulating factors that operate at a different scale.     

Sharing the colonial burden: Treaty‐making and reconciliation in Hul’qumi’num territory

This article explores different understandings of reconciliation within the context of modern treaty making in British Columbia, focusing on the role of the BC treaty process in resolving the longstanding dispute between Aboriginal Peoples and the Crown over rights to land. Although the treaty process was created to reconcile competing interests in the land, Crown and Aboriginal negotiators often have contradictory understandings of how this reconciliation is to take place. Drawing on a case study of the Hul’qumi’num Peoples, a group of Coast Salish First Nations, I examine how different understandings and approaches to reconciliation impede progress at the treaty table. I conclude that progress towards treaty and reconciliation in this case will require coming to terms with the Hul’qumi’num territory's colonial history and geography, something that the current treaty process actively avoids, plus the crafting of a treaty agreement that allows for a more equal sharing of the burden that colonialism has created in this place. More particularly, meaningful reconciliation will require a fuller recognition of Aboriginal title and rights across the breadth of the territory and a commitment to meaningful compensation of Hul’qumi’num Peoples for the wrongful taking of their lands.     

Refractions and recombinations of the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’: a personalized reflection on challenges by—and to—feminist urban geographies

This invited essay responds to requests by the Suzanne Mackenzie Memorial Lecture Nominating Committee and by the former Editor of this journal to take stock of and provide intellectual‐historical context for the major preoccupations that characterized feminist urban geography in its early years, by means of a personalized reflection in light of the author's own positioning in those debates and interventions. The thread running through the article is that of the relationship between the ‘economic’ and the ‘social’ in urban geography. The last section briefly considers new challenges that neoliberalism poses for critical feminist urban geographies.     

From nation to population: the racialisation of ‘Métis’ in the Canadian census†

ABSTRACT. Between 1996 and 2001 the ‘Métis population’ of Canada skyrocketed from 204,000 to 292,000, an astonishing and demographically improbable increase of 43 per cent. Most puzzling about this ‘increase’ is not so much the unpersuasive explanations offered by statisticians and others but, more fundamentally, the underlying assumption that such a thing as a ‘Métis population’ exists at all. In contrast, I argue that such an idea constitutes an artifact of Canada's racial/colonial episteme in which ‘the Métis’– formerly an indigenous nation invaded and displaced in the Canadian nation‐state's westward expansion – have been reduced in public and administrative discourse to include any indigenous individual who identifies as Métis: reduced, in other words, to (part of) a race. The paper argues further that the authority of the Canadian census as a privileged forum of contemporary meaning‐making in Canadian society is such that the lack of explicit Census categories to distinguish Métis Nation allegiance further naturalises a racialised construction of Métis at the expense of an indigenously national one.     

Political utopia or Potemkin village? Italian travellers to the Soviet Union in the early Cold War

Situated on the border between the capitalist West and Communist East, and with the largest Communist party in Western Europe, Italy found itself at the centre of global ideological struggles in the early Cold War years. A number of Italian writers and intellectuals who had joined the PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano) during the Resistance had hoped that the party would play a central role in the post-war reconstruction of Italy and were attracted to the Soviet Union as an example of Communism in action. This article centres on accounts of journeys to the USSR by Sibilla Aleramo, Renata Viganò and Italo Calvino. It will argue that although their writings portray a largely positive vision of the USSR, they should not be dismissed as naive, or worse, disingenuous travellers whose willingness to embrace Soviet-style Communism was based on a wholescale rejection of Western society and its values (see P. Hollander’s 1998 [1981] work, Political Pilgrims: Western Intellectuals in Search of the Good Society). Rather, the article shows how their accounts of the USSR shed light on the writers’ relationship with the PCI and argues that the views expressed in the travelogues emerge from the writers’ personal experiences of war and resistance, a fervent desire to position themselves as anti-Fascist intellectuals, and their concerns regarding the direction that Italian politics was taking at a pivotal moment in the nation’s history.     

The influence of betterment discourses on Canadian Aboriginal peoples in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Based on government archival sources, fieldwork and the historical perspectives, experiences and oral histories of Aboriginal peoples, this paper argues that late nineteenth and early twentieth century Indian policy, and more specifically the File Hills farm colony, was deeply influenced by betterment discourses. The presumption of this discourse was that Aboriginal peoples, who clearly were not vanishing as promised, could be transformed into something approaching white settlers by reshaping, controlling, and managing their environments, both private and public, and by altering their genetics and morals. While the betterment discourse and the File Hills colony have each been the focus of research, no one to our knowledge has focused on the importance of betterment thought in the establishment and application of Indian policy and its significance for the File Hills colony.     

Kinds of environments—a framework for reflecting on the possible contours of a better world

One of the significant developments in the interdisciplinary field of judgment and decision making is the classification of environments as a function of (a) their capacity to enable people to learn from experience (kind environments vs. wicked environments) and (b) the consequences of having failed to understand and adapt to them (exacting environments vs. lenient environments). Based on the premise that ‘environment’ is a key geographical concept, I explore the usefulness of appropriating these classifications in geography and argue that they can stimulate normative work on the possible contours of a better world as well as illuminate in novel ways long‐standing geographical concerns with the problematic of fairness.     

Fringe explosions: risk and vulnerability in Canada's new in‐between urban landscape

This article argues that a new landscape of urbanization takes shape in Canadian cities. In‐between the old downtowns and the new suburbs of urban Canada, a hitherto underexposed and under‐researched mix of residential, commercial, industrial, educational, agricultural and ecologically protected areas and land uses has become the home and workplace, and increasingly also the playspace of most people in Canada. The article examines this new landscape through the lens of the specific risks and vulnerabilities experienced by its inhabitants and users. Using a propane gas explosion in Toronto in the summer of 2008 as an example, we demonstrate that the ‘in‐between city’ is a space of great complexity, which has grown haphazardly and in a contradictory fashion, where, in contrast to the archetype of inner city and suburb, no clear spatial imaginary has been guiding urban development. This leads to always uncomfortable and sometimes dangerous proximities between various and competing uses and social practices. This is nowhere as clear as it is in the splintered urban infrastructures that service this landscape or use the in‐between city's space to service other adjacent or distant purposes.     

Globalizing West African oil: US ‘energy security’ and the global economy

This article examines the nature of US oil intervention in West Africa and in particular the ways in which US strategic policy is increasingly being wedded to energy security. It argues that academic debates of a ‘new oil imperialism’ overplays the geostrategic dimensions of US policy, which in turn underplays the forms of globalization promoted by Washington in the postwar world. Specifically, the US has long sought to ‘transnationalize’ economies in the developing world, rather than pursue a more mercantilist form of economic nationalism. This article argues that US oil intervention in Africa conforms to this broader picture, whereby processes of transnationalization and interstate competition are being played out against the backdrop of African oil. The recent turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa will add to these dynamics in interesting and unpredictable ways.     

Russia and China: converging responses to globalization

This article compares the impact of globalization on the political systems and political economy of Russia and China since the beginning of their respective reform periods. Overall, it argues that both should now be viewed within the paradigm of ‘developmental states’. The article first presents some comparative economic statistics on the changes that have taken place. Second, it looks at the converging attitudes of the two regimes towards industrial restructuring and privatization, highlighting the continued role that they both reserve for state direction. This includes an orientation towards national industrial champions. Third, the evolution of policies of both states towards guided democratization are discussed leading to an assessment of the importance of nationalism in their responses to globalization, particularly in the recent doctrine of ‘sovereign democracy’ of Putin's United Russia party. Finally, the article argues that a greater wariness towards western recipes for political and economic development will frame the efforts of both states to construct a more cooperative bilateral relationship.     

Towards a chequebook democracy? Business,parties and the funding of politics in Italy and the United States

This article seeks to establish to what extent Silvio Berlusconi's entry into electoral politics as leader of Forza Italia signals an ‘Americanization’ of Italian politics. It argues that Italian party democracy is moving in an ‘American’ direction in two ways. First, Italian party organizations are declining, leading to a more candidate-centred type of electoral politics. Second, the decline of parties is enhancing the ability of business to use its financial clout to tailor public policy to its own requirements. However, these trends do not have identical effects in Italy and the United States. This article will also show that this process of ‘Americanization’ interacts with the existing political praxis and institutional framework of Italian politics to produce an outcome which differs from both the traditional Western European model and the American model of party democracy. It will be concluded that this outcome seriously undermines representative democracy in Italy.     

Ethnoscaping Canada's boreal forest: liberal whiteness and its disaffiliation from colonial space

This essay examines the construction of Canada's boreal forest from the point of view of critical whiteness studies. Through an evaluation of two texts—a film and a book—produced in conjunction with a 2003–2004 environmental campaign, it argues that the boreal forest is constructed as a white ethnoscape and that, as a result, boreal forest conservation comes to be associated with ‘white’ identity, although by no means exclusively so, and certainly not without significant contradictions. The essay deploys Robyn Wiegman's notion of liberal whiteness to argue that liberal white subjectivity is cultivated in these texts by its self‐conscious distancing, or disaffiliation, from colonial spatial practices. It is argued that this distancing is achieved through the active inclusion of First Nations peoples in the texts such that the boreal forest is constructed as a socio‐natural working landscape. Liberal white disaffiliation is explored through three specific tropes: inclusion, inverted racial historicism and economic partnership.     

Essai de typologie des centres de santé et de services sociaux au Québec

Given the importance of contextual factors—physical, social and institutional environments—for understanding health landscapes, this article examines the situation in the province of Québec and suggests a spatial typology at the scale of the health and social services centres (CSSS). These CSSS provide services for 95 areas which are the finest territorial delineation in terms of health policies since a reform instituted in 2003. While delivery of primary health and social services is defined at this local scale, overall health policy is decided at the provincial scale. The challenge for stakeholders is to supplement their local knowledge with that of the broader context. In this article, we use principal components analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis to identify eight profiles of CSSS. The final results of the cluster analysis demonstrate that two‐thirds of the health and social services centres correspond with two marginally differentiated profiles and the remaining third shows specificities that are highly spatially anchored.     

Transient dwelling: trains as places of identification for the floating population of China

China has experienced massive rural–urban migration, producing the huge so-called ‘floating population’ (liudong renkou). This article attends to what it means to be thus between places by focusing on the embodied and emotional experience of migrant travel. Each year sees the Spring Festival rush (Chun Yun) with the largest annual movement of people as millions of these rural migrant laborers (nongmingong) return to their homes for the holidays. The Spring Festival rush is marked by huge crowds queuing overnight for train tickets, with throngs of migrants carrying woven bags of belongings and gifts on their shoulders, who end up standing in the overcrowded ‘hard-seat’ carriages of trains. By closely reading some of the poems from the emerging genre of ‘Hired laborers literature,’ this article explores migrants' affective and emotional journeys. It argues that this transit experience is one of the key shared sites of common identification for a migrant population whose mode of inhabitation is through circulation and mobility. It also argues that mobility creates shared experiences characterized by specific corporealities, material cultures, and senses of social stratification.     

A conspiracy to murder: explaining the dynamics of Romanian ‘policy’ towards Jews in Transnistria

This article offers a comprehensive interpretation of the Romanian ‘policy’ towards Jews in Transnistria in 1941–44. This region in southwestern Ukraine witnessed both a monstrous number of Jewish victims, usually estimated as no fewer than 350,000 and possibly more, and an unusually high survival rate by the standards of the occupied Soviet territory. The article argues that what is sometimes referred to as ‘inconsistency’ in Romanian policy can be best explained within the framework of the structuralist/functionalist approach to the history of the Holocaust that was first developed on German material. The article argues that Romanian leaders never adopted the policy of complete annihilation of Jews; rather, their aim was to expel them from Romania’s national territory. However, they were not opposed to murdering Jews en masse when they believed it was ‘necessary’ from a military point of view or advisable for any other reason. Given the scarcity of resources in the region and the fear of epidemics, murdering interned Jews in the areas of their greatest concentration appeared to be the way to ‘solve’ a number of problems. At the same time, the absence of a fanatical paramilitary force such as the SS in Nazi Germany and Romanian leaders’ unwillingness to leave a paper trail of their criminal orders complicated the logistics of mass murder. Mass murder required either the ready participation of the gendarmerie and police, which was not always forthcoming, or the mobilization of the ethnic German militia, which was not available everywhere. In the absence of pressure from the authorities to kill, some officers and individual gendarmes, cognizant of the criminal nature of such actions, hesitated or even avoided participation in mass murder.