Articulated sovereignty: Extending Mozambican state power through the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park

Since its inception in 2001 and subsequent integration into the tri-national Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP), Mozambique's Limpopo National Park (LNP) has been progressively transformed into a functioning wildlife park. Standing behind this transformation has been a profound expansion of Mozambican state power over and through the park. While this reinforces predictions in the early transfrontier conservation literature, it stands in tension with observations that these projects threaten state power. I address this tension by developing the concept of articulated sovereignty, which understands sovereignty as a heterogenous set of powers that are produced through often unequal interactions with other actors, including foreign or extra-territorial actors. In short, sovereignty is articulated through these interactions. I draw from this to show that the same partnerships that seem to threaten sovereignty in some respects in fact shore up the power of the Mozambican state in other respects. I focus in particular on the foreign-assistance-enabled extension of state power through the development of legal and technical capacity, park administration and infrastructure, a ranger force, and the relocation of communities beyond park borders. I additionally draw on articulated sovereignty to show that the state and territory, like sovereignty, are built through various articulations with extra-territorial partners, thus drawing into question the sovereignty-state-territory triad. I close by reflecting on the utility of articulated sovereignty beyond the realm of conservation. In short, articulated sovereignty sheds light on both the sovereignty complexities of transfrontier conservation projects like the LNP/GLTP and how sovereignty actually plays out in the world.     

Enacting a Local Reform in the Age of Reform: A Salary for the Chairman of Middlesex Sessions

This article examines the unsuccessful attempts made from 1833 to 1842 by Middlesex's justices of the peace to obtain a local statute allowing them to pay a salary to their chairman. Instead of securing such an act, they had to settle for a statute enacted by the government, a statute authorising the government to appoint their chairman for judicial proceedings. The article uses the story of Middlesex's attempt to obtain a salary for the chairman to examine: justices' attempts to reform the office of chairman of county Sessions; the limited powers of justices in their county Sessions; and the centralising aspirations of central government. The statute that the government produced in 1844 originated as a public bill. In contrast, the statute that Middlesex had attempted to obtain originated as private bills. The statute enacted by the government contained defects that probably would not have marred a statute enacted under the rules governing private bills. So, this article uses the legislative misadventures of the government's bill to compare the procedures for enactment of public and private bills. The article therefore provides a case study of mid‐19th‐century legislative procedures governing enactment of local legislation, while arguing that, as of the mid 19th century, parliament had not developed procedures appropriate to both representative government and a centralising central government using public bills for local matters.     

Imperial power, gentry power and clan power: Western and Chinese cultural traditions in a comparative perspective

The differences between China and Western countries in human and physical environment has brought about two distinctive models of state. In the Chinese-style state of quasi-consanguinity, in which family and state have a similar structure, imperial power, gentry power, and clan power are the product of common ownership of consanguineous groups. The similarity in the structures of these three kinds of power derives from the fact that they are all restricted by the power of lineage generated from the self-sufficient small farmer economy, and must obey the conventions of ancestors which hold the benefits of the group as supreme. The relationship between these three kinds of power, is definitely not the one that is based on the division of power that is founded on individual private ownership in Western countries, where ‘public power’ and ‘individual private ownership’ are antithetic, but are three aspects of the patriarchal dictatorship that complement each other. Therefore, village rule in China and autonomy in the West are two totally different concepts, and gentry power is also not the ‘authorized power’ from the state. __________ Translated from the Journal of Tianjin Normal University, 2004: 1     

2014,旅行新能量

<正>美国波士顿公园绿道系统有个很美的名字——翡翠项链。它被公认为世界城市史上第一条真正意义上的绿道,像一条串连着波士顿的公园、林地、水景、野生动物栖息地的绿色项链。"绿道",顾名思义就是绿色的田园道路,没有城市道路中汽车尾气的污染,也没有普通乡间小道的崎岖难行。它融绿色、休闲、生态、低碳于一体,是与人为开发的景观相交叉的一种自然走廊。     

State power in blue

In this article I explore how geographers might go about studying the everyday contexts of police power, given specifically the emphasis today in political geography on the practice of state power. Rather than endorse police practice as a relatively accessible and straightforward realm for researchers, I emphasize instead the uneventful and sometimes disappearing aspects of police work which makes it hard to excavate and interrogate, especially for non-police. Reflecting on various fieldwork experiences, I argue that the basic methodological tools that geographers have at their disposal to bring down the ‘blue wall’ of police practices can do the opposite: produce a tentative mode of knowledge which grasps, qualitatively and quantitatively, at the problem of the social and force relations of policing. I conclude that rather than a fix to the cruddiness of police power, accepted qualitative and quantitative methodologies constitute the ‘blue wall’ of police practice.     

Recognition,power and coloniality

Recognition has emerged in recent decades as an almost universally valued moral and political horizon in intercultural contexts. Recognition claims underpin myriad social struggles, and forms and practices of recognition also animate the management of alterities within both formal and informal arenas. Recently, critical Indigenous scholars Audra Simpson and Glen Coulthard have posed a fundamental challenge to this moral and political horizon. Writing particularly in response to North American settler colonialism, they argue that the politics of recognition has functioned, not to ameliorate colonialism’s negative effects, but to reproduce them. We seek here to respond to the important provocation posed by Simpson and Coulthard’s scholarship, and to extend their critiques into new geographic and empirical terrains. Specifically, we draw on the notion of coloniality to establish a comparative frame that can bring both settler and non-settler postcolonial contexts into dialogue. Doing so highlights a multiplicity of forms of recognition relationships, as well as of sites and structures of power beyond the settler state. It also illuminates a complex, unstable middle ground that can exist between recognition and its absence, which provides a productive ground from which to engage with the possibilities of being against, or beyond, recognition.     

Military power and international order

'"Military power … remains an instrument with which no state has yet found it possible completely to dispense". So writes Michael Howard in discussing military power and international order'. In a time when abstracts did not precede articles in International Afairs , this was how the then Editor, N. P. MacDonald, introduced Michael Howard's article, 'Military power and international order', originally published in volume 40: 3, July 1964 and reprinted in this anniversary issue. It has been chosen because, 45 years later, it still retains astonishing freshness and relevance. Now in 2009, states, and especially the new US administration, will need to assess the emphasis they put on military means to achieve their foreign policy ends, while attempting to deal effectively with, for example, the confects in the Middle East and Afghanistan, and the threat of international terrorism. Michael Howard was not concerned at the same time with terrorism, or transnational actors, but there remain enduring lessons in his 1964 article about the role of the military instrument to advance states' interests.     

Anthropology through literature

James P. Spradley and George E. McDonough, eds. Anthropology Through Literature. Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1973. xviii + 412 pp. $5.95 (paper).     

New methods of power generation

Abstract

Future uses of fossil fuels (particularly natural gas), nuclear power, and renewable sources of energy such as hydroelectric and biomass, as well as solar and wind power, are reviewed. Looking further into the future, ocean power sources and possibilities for gravitational energy are identified.