The Whereabouts of Power: Politics, Government and Space

Abstract In a world where it has become almost commonplace to talk about power as centralised or distributed, concentrated or diffuse, deterritorialized or dispersed even, it is all too easy to miss the diverse geographies of power that put us in place. The binary talk that forces us to choose between a centred or a decentred view of power, or to shuffle between them in an effort to blur clearly demarcated scales, leaves little room to move beyond defined distances and settled proximities in relation to the exercise of power. In this paper, a more spatially‐curious dialogue of power is opened up which foregrounds associational as well as instrumental forms of power which can make a difference to how we act politically.     

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.     

State Power,Civic Participation and the Urban Frontier: The Politics of the Commons in Karachi

Abstract: A martial state's neoliberal policies opened the nation's frontiers to new forms of globalization. This article investigates the political process that undergirded the military and global capital's sequestration of common land in Karachi and the concomitant contestation by a key civil society organization. Using Foucault's conception of sovereignty and government as an assemblage of authority and strategies of rationalization, this paper analyses the role of state and non‐state actors and changing power configurations in a conflict that surrounded the enclosure of a common and its transformation into a securitized zone of consumption in Karachi's Civil Lines. The conflict highlights the nature of the politics of space and citizenship in Pakistan's primary metropolis.     

Hazardous Liaisons: Risk, Power, and Politics in the Liberal State

This article presents a new approach to interpreting and analyzing technological risks and evaluating their impact on policymaking in liberal societies. I argue that risks must be seen first as emergent phenomena that resist reduction for either explanatory or policy purposes to the individual persons, events, or decisions that constitute them. Second, risks are intrinsically political things, involving aspects of power and interest in ways that also make policy decisions difficult. As emergent and political phenomena, then, modern technological risks pose unique policy difficulties for societies steeped in the epistemological and political individualism of classical liberalism.     

Unions,Parties, and the Politics of State Government Legacy Cost

Many American state governments have made extensive promises to pay for employees’ health care and other benefits in retirement. Currently estimated at over $1 trillion in unfunded liabilities, these other postemployment benefits (OPEB) are creating a major fiscal problem for state governments. In this article, we examine the politics of OPEB. We seek to explain the variation in the generosity of OPEB across U.S. states. We argue that party competition theories do not adequately explain the outcomes we observe. Instead, we draw on the emerging Schattschneiderian approach to the politics of public policy to show that public union strength conditions a party's incentives to represent unions’ interests. In states where public sector unions are strong, unions can find their way into either party's coalition. We find that Republicans are more responsive to public union interests than either their ideological brand or prior research would suggest. It is only in states where public employees are weak that Republicans can act unilaterally and enact their preference for less government spending. To test our theories, we carry out an empirical analysis using a newly assembled data set of per capita OPEB liabilities across 49 states.     

Carbon and Cash in Climate Assemblages: The Making of a New Global Citizenship

Climate instruments such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions by Deforestation and Degradation) promise a win–win proposition as villagers in Africa are paid for their efforts to conserve forests and sequester carbon. REDD+ assembles divergent interests at different scales—from bureaucrats to individual villagers. We argue that climate assemblages are shifting the space of the political by regulating practices that previously had local and national provenance. They are producing “state‐like” effects that touch deeply on citizenship. Villagers are drawn into a shifting REDD+ assemblage and subject to new identifications as entrepreneurs and responsible environmental citizens, meant to look after a new global commons. We shift the discussion to deal seriously with questions of a “global” citizenship, not in its utopian sense, but by bringing into light the dark side of global citizenship already in practice in environmental governance. Forests and peoples are in practice made global—we must conceptualize the rights of this “global” citizenship     

Regional Devolution and Regional Economic Success: Myths and Illusions about Power

The proposition that regional devolution in and of itself will lead to economic success has become deeply embedded in beliefs and policy discourses about the determinants of regional prosperity, and in turn has led to political demands for such devolution. In this paper I seek critically to examine such claims, using the case of the north‐east of England as the setting for this examination. The paper begins with some introductory comments on concepts of power, regions, the reorganization of the state and of multi‐level governance, and governmentality, which help in understanding the issues surrounding regional devolution. I then examine the ways in which north‐east England was politically and socially constructed as a particular type of region, with specific problems, in the 1930s — a move that has had lasting significance up until the present day. Moving on some six decades, I then examine contemporary claims about the relationship between regional devolution and regional economic success, which find fertile ground in the north‐east precisely due to its long history of representation as a region with a unified regional interest. I then reflect on the processes of regional planning, regional strategies and regional devolution, and their relationship to regional economic regeneration. A brief conclusion follows, emphasizing that questions remain about the efficacy of the new governmentality and about who would be its main beneficiaries in the region. The extent to which devolution would actually involve transferring power to the region and the capacity of networked forms of power within the region to counter the structural power of capital and shape central state policies remains unclear.     

Playing with Fire: The 4th Duke of Hamilton's Jacobite Politics and the Union

James Hamilton, duke of Hamilton and the Scots jacobites are generally linked in analyses of the final years of the Scots polity. Indeed, Hamilton is often presented as the leader of the jacobite party in the Scottish parliament. Yet both contemporaries and historians have been unsure what to make of his on-again, off-again, conduct with respect to the exiled Stuarts and France. This has fuelled an ongoing debate about Hamilton's erratic and highly enigmatic behaviour during the winter of 1706–7, when the Union was passing the Scottish parliament. Was he genuinely opposing the Union? Was he duped by the court? Or was he, ‘bought and sold for English gold ’? This essay takes a fresh look at the duke and his part in the Union crisis in the light of new and previously underused jacobite sources with a view to better understanding Hamilton's aims, objectives, and influence with this crucial group. Only the jacobites and the Cameronians were potentially willing to take their opposition to the Union to God's Acre. But neither party immediately flew to arms in response to passage of a union they both believed was a betrayal of everything they held dear, and Hamilton was a major factor in their failure to do so. This essay thus takes a close look at the duke's part in preventing a major national uprising against the Union in the winter of 1706–7 and advances a new interpretation of his conduct and significance throughout the Union crisis.     

Mann and Men in a Medieval State: The Geographies of Power in the Middle Ages

The state-making process represented a major institutional change, as societies moved from being organized according to notions of kinship to being ordered around the power exercised by kings over defined territories. The paper focuses on the medieval state-making process, primarily in a Welsh context; building on Michael Mann's notion of power networks, it is suggested that the mapping of the geographies of power within a society may offer a powerful tool for demonstrating the tentative and gradual nature of this process. Such a methodology also stresses the importance of geography in such a major change in human history.     

Licit Narcotics Production in Australia: Legal Geographies Nomospheric and Topological

Licit narcotics production in Australia is based on the cultivation of a poppy crop restricted to Tasmania under local, national, and international regulation. Its legal geographical analysis is advanced by drawing on the thinking about ‘the nomosphere’ and ‘topology’ developed by David Delaney and John Allen, respectively. Australia continues to lead global production of licit narcotics as distinct new entities, relationships, and capacities have been enabled by differentiating between the constituent alkaloids morphine and thebaine with a loophole identified in US legislation of the 80/20 rule. Nomospheric and topological lenses are used to focus on the intensive, emergent qualities of the industry in addition to the traditional topography revealed in its scalar, networked territorialisation. A renewed understanding of the spatial workings and power plays relevant can inform possible transformation around narcotics production.     

清初摄政、辅政体制与皇权政治

清初经历了叔王摄政、异姓大臣辅政的两种特殊的政治体制。入关前,太祖、太宗未定立储制度。皇太极过世,各派势力窥视皇权,戏剧性地达成拥立幼主福临,叔王摄政的体制。摄政王权势过重,威胁皇权,借机治罪多尔衮。康熙冲龄即位,借鉴前制陋规,形成以孝庄文皇后为核心的异姓大臣辅政统系,辅政失控,导致权臣鳌拜专权,再次危及皇权,而智捉鳌拜。摄政王、辅政大臣的争斗,反映了满洲八旗内旗籍矛盾的尖锐。摄政、辅政与皇权之间的冲突,构成了清代政治文化的重要内容,极大地影响着清初政治的价值取向。     

Multi‐Scalar Practices of the Korean State in Global Climate Politics: The Case of the Global Green Growth Institute

The paper examines the significance of state territoriality and the related multi‐scalar practices of the state in the light of the symptoms of post‐politics exemplified in global environmental governance. The focus rests on the South Korean government's Green Growth (GG) strategy and the efforts to export this strategy as a role model to emerging economies worldwide through the establishment of the Global Green Growth Institute. We begin with the question why the Korean government is going global with a political program that is heavily disputed at home. We then study the practices by which the state manages to maintain its territoriality under the conditions of global climate change. Lastly, we discuss how multi‐scalar practices of environmental governance in the GG strategy are applied by state and non‐state actors both in Korea and abroad.     

Africa after the Cold War: New Patterns of Government and Politics

The state-system of Africa is still essentially the one created by the colonial powers and passed on intact at independence. But the political economy of these states — the substance of political life within fixed territorial boundaries — is changing very profoundly as a result of the breakdown of the style of government of recent decades and the decline of economies based on the export of primary commodities. The political economy which is emerging, still within the same territorial boundaries, is best understood by reference to Africa's history over a long period.     

Of scales, networks and assemblages: the League of Nations apparatus and the scalar sovereignty of the Government of India

Whilst greatly valuing recent critiques of the vertical imaginary and reified ontology of scale theory, and of the unfettered flows of network theory, this paper argues against a human geography without scale. Rather, four propositions from the theoretical literature are used to provide a tool-kit to analyse the practical negotiation of scalar politics, namely that: scales should be considered as effects, not frames or structures, of practice; networks must be considered in all their complexity and heterogeneity; networks can be interpreted as assemblages, the more re-territorialising and re-scaling of which can be analysed as apparatuses; and that state apparatuses work to create the impression that scales are ahistorical, hierarchical and possess exclusive relationships. These propositions are used to explore a period of history when the scalar constitution of the world was under intense debate. The interwar era saw the imperial scale clash with that of the international, both as ideological worldviews, and as a series of interacting institutions. The assemblages of internationalism and imperialism were embodied by apparatuses such as the League of Nations and the colonial Government of India respectively. Attempts by the League to encourage the abolition of tolerated brothels in an attempt to reduce the trafficking of women and children led to intense debates between the 1920s and 1930s over what constituted the legitimate domains of the international and the 'domestic'. These explicitly scalar debates were the product of League networks that threatened the scalar sovereignty of the Raj, most directly through the travelling Commission of Enquiry into Traffic in Women and Children in the East in 1931.