Peace through the lens of human rights: Mapping spaces of peace in the advocacy of Colombian human rights defenders

What kinds of peace do human rights defenders advocate? This question has become controversial in light of heavy criticisms raised against the scholarly paradigm that peace and human rights are co-constitutive universals. In this article, I explore how Colombian human rights defenders navigate potential tensions, erasures, and vested politics in their peace advocacy during the current peace process with the FARC-EP. I follow the trend in the geographies of peace literature to study the articulation of peace with human rights as situated and constitutive practices. My analysis of published activist statements maps out the discursivity of peace advocacy, that is, how human rights defenders articulate different political demands as interconnected conditions for peace and maintain a common activist space that cuts across the uneven geographies of violence in Colombia. The visualization of my results as discursive networks shows how activist practices open social and discursive spaces that integrate multiple understandings of peace, instead of obliterating differences in a single and homogenized, ‘local’ representation of peace. I further submit that elucidating how human rights defenders address peace beyond the end of guerrilla insurgency, the ambiguous role of the state, societal discrimination, and structural transformations helps us nuancing conceptual debates. We can learn from Colombian activists to move beyond rigid conceptual juxtapositions of human rights as either panacea or liberal fuel for conflict and to pay attention to how concepts are animated in political struggles to end violence.     

In Search of Free Spaces to Breathe: Turkey's United June Movement,Social Uprising,and Spatial Maintainability

This study examines the socio-spatial practices of the United June Movement (UJM), a grassroots movement that drew inspiration from the neighbourhood forums of the Gezi Park protests. We argue that the counter-sites of politicisation and symbolic places engraved on the social movements’ memory formed the socio-spatial base of solidarity networks and the long-term political organising of UJM. Secondly, we suggest that in an authoritarian context, activist organisations nourishing from full-scale protests such as UJM need to form, reshape, and sustain free spaces where they feel protected. For testing these arguments, we designed fieldwork around UJM with an ethnographic approach. We concluded that the desire for social change has the potential of generating alternative visions in a spatiotemporal context, but in the medium term, it can turn into a feeling of self-enclosure or being besieged. Even so, such attempts leave a perpetual legacy, tagged to certain spaces and geographies.     

Networks of engagement: electronic communication and grassroots environmental activism in Kaliningrad

This paper contributes to a discussion on networks as political spaces by examining the work of an environmental activist group in Kaliningrad, Russia. Drawing from geographic work on communication and from literature on organizational structure and communication technology provides a useful means of understanding and conceptualizing computer networks from a social science perspective. The case study of grassroots activism illustrates how computer-based communication may support a unique space of political activity. Electronic mail (e-mail) communication can be a channel through which activists may overcome the constraints of location as an information container in order to create spaces of interaction and action appropriate to their political agenda. This case study is an example where organization members use e-mail communication to connect their activities, information sources and collaborative partners at different scales to create a viable space for environmental activism and information distribution within a shifting political context.     

Making Space: Women's urban and rural activism and the Australian state

Recent discussions of political actions have emphasised the ways that strategic use of spaces, places and various spatial scales helps to constitute activist practice. Advancing their interests involves activists in spatial practices that seek simultaneously to achieve cohesion and identity for their group, and to negotiate the shifting 'opportunity structures' of their context. In this article, the authors use examples of Australian women's activism in urban and rural contexts to show (1) the spatial processes with which activist groups have negotiated their strategic identities, and (2) how activist groups have constructed their politics spatially with reference to the opportunities presented by the Australian state of the early to mid-1990s. The urban activism discussed is that of parents (primarily women) contesting the quality of children's services in an outer suburban Melbourne municipality; the rural activism is that of the national Women in Agriculture movement, seeking increased recognition of the roles of women in agricultural occupations and sectors. The article elaborates on how the groups have mobilised to develop their constituencies within the contexts of the Australian state of the time, using different spaces and sites, finding appropriate languages and bureaucratic targets, and making a space for their concerns politically, symbolically and materially.     

Battles in Seattle Redux: Transnational Resistance to a Neoliberal Trade Agreement

Abstract: This paper examines the possibilities and complexities of transnationalism through an analysis of political protests organized in Seattle against the Korea–US Free Trade Agreement, arguably the most significant bilateral trade negotiations involving the US state today. By studying the political practices of the Korean farmers' movement through participant research in Seattle from 4 to 9 September 2006, and revisiting the analysis of the 1999 “battles of Seattle” in recent work by Hardt and Negri, we argue that the concept “transnationalism” is potentially applicable to activists and subaltern social groups as much as states and elites, although these groups do not transnationalize through the same practices or in the same spaces. Our analysis of the protests aims to clarify the essentially spatial nature of political articulation (in Laclau's sense) that make the transnationalization of social movements possible.     

Pursuing Urban Commons: Politics and Alliances in Community Land Trust Activism in East London

Community land trust (CLT) practices contribute to analyses of the commons in both conceptual and on‐the‐ground ways. As collective action organizations, CLTs emphasize common land stewardship and resist traditional land speculation and development practices through the mitigation or halting of land value inflation. This paper traces the activist efforts of the East London CLT organization, one of Britain's first urban CLTs, in securing common land in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets, and examines their navigation of political decisions and creation of alliances. Although this process has been challenging as a result of neoliberal governance and private development interests, the East London CLT's trajectory demonstrates the frustrations of activism within these contexts but also the small successes in the pursuit and establishment of urban commons.     

"A World where Action is the Sister of Dream": Surrealism and Anti‐capitalism in Contemporary Paris

In discussing the lifestyle and practices of the Paris group of the contemporary surrealist movement, this paper contributes to debates within economic and political geography that seek to develop the imagining of alternatives to neoliberal globalisation through practices of resistance, and spaces of political and policy engagement. The everyday life of the surrealist movement, in combining creativity with progressive choices and radical economic practices that oppose capitalism, while intellectually investigating ideas of revolution, a different society and utopia, suggests a perspective that contributes to the imagining of such alternatives. This paper outlines the deeply embedded nature of surrealist activity in opposing capitalism and illustrates, as one member of the surrealist group suggests, in quoting Baudelaire, surrealism's insistence for a world in which "action is the sister of dream". The paper further contributes to discussion on the role of academics in facilitating spaces of political engagement.     

Delusion street: Commemoration and monumentality in post-Ottoman Iraklio,Crete

The complex memorial practices that have developed along the street named in commemoration of a massacre of the Christians of the city by Muslim irregulars in 1898 demonstrate an ambivalence towards the transition to the post-ottoman nation-state, one aspect of which is the dialectic that develops between absence and presence of material traces of the Ottoman past. A second aspect is the non-linear temporality within which historical events are remembered. Official commemoration practices have shaped plural memories and often conflicting accounts of the events into a single narrative of modernization, to justify the rebuilding of the city according to western precepts. Reactions to this process did not take the shape of political resistance, but emerged as acts of refusal that create telling absences in the archive and ironic statements that form a genealogy of the ambivalence contemporary Irakliots feel towards the official state and its account of progress to modernity.     

Acts of Desertion: Abandonment and Renouncement at the Sonoran Borderzone

What are ‘acts of desertion’, how do they feature in contemporary border struggles, and what might an emphasis on such acts bring to the analysis of the politics of mobility? This article seeks to address these questions in the context of the Sonoran borderzone, which crosses Mexico and the US. It develops an analysis that sheds light on contemporary border struggles in terms that acknowledge both the intensity of security practices as well as the significance of migratory acts, without pre‐fixing the relation between the two. The analysis shows how ‘acts of desertion’ involve differentiated dynamics of abandonment and renouncement, which demand appreciation of the ambiguities of contemporary border struggles. As acts that variously involve a dynamics of refusal, the article argues that acts of desertion challenge the limits of liberal citizenship, without wholly transcending its limitations.     

Disrupting Gentrification: From Barricades and Housing Occupations to an Insurgent Urban Subaltern History in a Southern City

Housing struggles are key to disrupting gentrification capital flows and dispossessions. Based on life histories, key informant interviews, and six years of engaged ethnography with slum activists in the Philippine capital, this paper explicates political geographies of insurgent housing practices, including community barricades and housing occupations, and marks a history of militant subaltern struggles for the right to the city. I contend that these highly-organised insurgent practices disrupt real estate capital pathways and nurture political subjectification where emancipatory spaces and socialities of care can be founded. Moreover, I intervene in the lack of attendance to the co-constitution of barricades and occupations to less visible forms of insurgent housing practices. As these are emplaced to other subaltern times and spaces, political knowledges and subjectivities developed against forced evictions and demolitions enhance anti-gentrification struggles. In tracing this militant urban history, I mark the incremental advance of subaltern housing struggles in a Southern economy highly reliant on real estate capital investments.     

Intervention: Mapping is critical!

This intervention targets the much heralded demise of the map in geography and the recently proposed “rethinking” of maps. It comprises contributions from two political geographers, a military geographer, a political scientist, and two activist cartographers and argues that there is not so much a need to “rethink” maps, but to “re-engage” with the material practices of mapping, and above all to “re-make” maps.     

Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people's everyday politics

This paper examines how high school-aged young people from New Zealand are crafting their everyday political subjectivities within the liminal status and liminal spaces they occupy in society. With a specific focus on schooling and the citizenship education curricula in New Zealand, three vignettes are introduced which examine young people's less reflexive and ‘everyday’ forms of political action in the interstitial liminal space between Public/private, Formal/informal and Macro/micro politics. These vignettes underline how young people's everyday politics were embedded within spatial and relational processes of socialisation with adults within their schools and communities, yet, also showed both agency and resourcefulness with these spaces. Young people's liminal status and occupation of liminal spaces provided them with unique perspectives on social issues (such as bullying, racism, water conservation, and obesity) and enabled them to respond in ways that were ‘different’ to adults' Politics, yet nonetheless showed their political and tactical selves (de Certeau, 1984). A focus on young people's political practices in liminal spaces allows for new possibilities and understandings of the political.     

Asylum and the Post‐Political: Domopolitics,Depoliticisation and Acts of Citizenship

This paper explores the ways in which practices of asylum governance serve to depoliticise those seeking asylum in the UK. In critiquing claims over the “post‐political” nature of contemporary governance, the paper proposes a focus upon situated practices of depoliticisation which displace those seeking asylum through the production of specific sites of accommodation and specific discourses of risk, security and moralised concern. The paper questions the tendency within “post‐political” thought to strip the potential of modes of informal citizenship through arguing that minor acts of resistance are ineffectual and illusory. In response, the paper explores irregular migrant's “acts of citizenship”, and suggests that such prosaic acts can be powerful forms of political interruption through which new ways of seeing asylum are constructed. The paper concludes by suggesting that an incremental politics orientated around such acts of interruption is essential to challenge the material, affective and discursive closures of asylum domopolitics.     

Indigeneity and the refusal of whiteness

Drawing on international literature examining mismatch between racial appearance and racial identity, this paper analyses the subgroup of Indigenous Australians who have been identified, and self-identify, as ‘light-’, ‘fair-’, ‘pale-’ or ‘white-skinned’. We utilise the term ‘race discordance’ to describe the experience of regularly being attributed an identity that is different from how one personally identifies. In contrast to existing terms such as elective race, ethnic fraud and transracialism, race discordance does not seek to explain or judge the validity of identity claims that do not match perceived appearance. When unnoticed or unchallenged, ‘race discordance’ corresponds to ‘passing’. We propose the term ‘race refusal’ to describe instances when a person rejects the race they are ascribed to. In the case of white-skinned Indigenous Australians who are frequently assumed to identify as white, race refusal entails the refusal of whiteness. When light-skinned Indigenous people refuse whiteness, what are they refusing? In conversation with Audra Simpson’s notion of refusal of state recognition as an assertion of continued Indigenous sovereignty, we find that these particular micro-politics of race refusal demand rather than negate state recognition. We argue that identity refusal by pale-skinned Aboriginal people acts to disrupt histories of assimilation, white sociality and everyday racialisation while simultaneously reinforcing Australian recognition regimes.     

State Spaces of Resistance: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Struggle for Land in Laos

Land grabbing has transformed rural environments across the global South, generating resistance or political reactions “from below”. In authoritarian countries like Laos, where resource investments are coercively developed and insulated from political dissent, resistance appears absent at first glance. Yet, it is occurring under the radar, largely outside transnational activist networks. In this article, we examine how resistance can protect access to rural lands in contexts where it is heavily repressed. Resistance here occurs with, rather than against the state by foregrounding the contradictions of land use and ownership within state spaces, such as competing goals of large‐scale industrial plantations versus smallholder agriculture and national forest conservation. Such contradictions are engaged by using historical, place‐based political connections to exploit the scalar frictions of a fragmented state and occupying plantation clearance sites to highlight contested lands in situ. Nonetheless, such strategies remain spatially and socially uneven amongst the Lao peasantry.     

Carceral labour: Offshore work relations,conflicts and local participation in Ghana's oil and gas industry

Local participation is crucial for linking the oil and gas industry to broader economies. Direct employment in the oil and gas industry, albeit often on a limited scale remains critical for the transfer of expertise and know-how in many developing economies. Focusing on the social construction of carcerality – a set of spaces, practices and relationships, the paper examines the carceralities of non-prison places such as offshore oil and gas infrastructures. With emphasis on oil rigs and Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSOs) vessels, the paper highlights the complex labour relations, negotiations and conflicts in offshore working environment and its impacts on local content and participation in Ghana's oil and gas industry. The paper shows that carceral techniques operate to limit the potentiality of career progress. Offshore labour practices and relations show the new kinds of carceral spaces being created through offshore extraction, and sheds light on how these carceral spaces depotentialize the labour force and reinforce global political economic inequalities.     

Performative citizenship and the politics of scale: Local,national and global citizenships in Zimbabwe

This paper explores the interaction between different scales of governance and performative citizenship, understood as acts by citizens that claim new political rights and reshape the political arena. Performance allows citizens to creatively transform the meanings and functions of citizenship during struggles over rights. The paper focuses on a series of examples in Zimbabwe, which highlight the entanglement of different scales of citizenship and the ways that the acts of citizenship both challenge and sustain these relationships. This is examined through a framework that combines theories of performative citizenship with concepts from human geography that examine scales of governance. The argument draws out the implications of these dynamics in relation to conflicts over customary citizenship in rural Zimbabwe, the issue of dual citizenship among white Zimbabweans and the exercise of citizenship rights by non-Zimbabweans. It highlights both the ways in which citizens have harnessed the creative potential of acts of citizenship which address multiple scales, and the constraints that scalar hierarchies put on citizen action. The examples demonstrate that new forms of political rights can be produced across scales, but that opportunities for creative acts of citizenship are unevenly distributed due to these scalar hierarchies, which are produced by postcolonial legacies.     

(Re)imagining the idea of India: Contestations about Hindutva among the Indian American diaspora

This paper explores the motivations and actions of Indian Americans who actively oppose Hindutva, that is, a Hindu nationalist vision for India. Diaspora activists who advocate in favour of progressive values for India tend to be underreported in the media and underanalysed in scholarship. The following study addresses this gap. Based on public records, interviews with activist leaders, and participant-observation, the paper demonstrates how anti-Hindutva diaspora actors identify and leverage political opportunities in order to engage in moral signalling in local, national and global spaces. By shining a light on ongoing counternarratives to Hindutva, this study highlights contestations within Indian-origin communities and challenges monolithic portrayals of diaspora politics.     

Matter,Places, and Persons in Cahokian Depositional Acts

Artifact caching, soil layering, and other intentional depositional practices—archaeologically defined “ritual deposits” of the past—are especially prevalent during the Mississippian period. Employing a perspective of relational ontology, however, we interrogate the validity of a past partitioned into religious, political, and daily spheres. Rather, this perspective emphasizes the multi-experiential and multi-dimensional aspects of social life. Meaning, intentional depositional acts can no longer be usefully described as simply “sacred” or “ritual” practices. Rather, these deposits should be explored as experiences tied to multiple layers of social life, investigating the relationships constructed through such deposits between humans, nonhuman agents, and the landscape.