左江流域边境地区边贸发展规划

本文在全面分析研究左江边境区域边贸发展的区位优势、有利条件及现状特点的基础上,根据趋势朝向型规划方法原理规划了边贸近、中、远期发展阶段目标,并提出中、近期实现目标的对策建议。     

论中国与邻国边境地区的经济一体化

本文在论述了区域经济一体化的一般概念、形式和特征的基础上,探讨了中国与邻国边境地区经济一体化的理论依据、可能性、现实性及其现状特征等问题。     

Disjointed knowledges,obfuscated visibility. Border controls at the French-Italian Alpine border

This article deals with border controls at the French-Italian Alpine frontier which have been implemented to govern and contain the migrants in transit. It analyses border controls by focusing on the circulation of knowledge and the economy of visibility which are enacted at that frontier. The article illustrates how the French-Italian Alpine area has become a border-zone for migrants, showing that modes of knowledge and forms of visibility are constitutive of bordering processes. It moves on with a section on the production and circulation of knowledge at the border, introducing the notion of “disjointed knowledges” to account for the asymmetries and fragmentariness at play in border control activities. It argues that we need to start from the partial non-circulation of data and local frictions in order to understand bordering practices. Then, it engages with the obfuscated visibility produced on migrant crossing, drawing attention to how migrants’ presence at the border is alternatively visible and concealed by the authorities.     

Crossing Khorgos: Soft power,security, and suspect loyalties at the Sino-Kazakh boundary

As China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) development projects deepen connections across Eurasia, the Sino-Kazakh border has been rematerialized in a manner that complicates the exercise of Chinese BRI soft power. On the one hand, the border city of Khorgos is being rebuilt as a bridgehead to facilitate trade and development between the countries; new infrastructure and spectacle at Khorgos and beyond works to entice Kazakhs to cross the border in pursuit of economic opportunities. At the same time, recent crackdowns on Muslims in China's Xinjiang Province has led to the detention and harassment of cross-border migrants with differentiated migrant statuses. Chinese security forces' continued anxieties about separatism in its borderlands imperil the developmental horizons the BRI project uses to entice Kazakhs. It also threatens the translocal development that a border conductive to mobility has provided for Kazakhs over the past thirty years. I argue that the BRI in northwest China fuses soft power rhetoric with territorial security practices in a way that is proving to be counter-productive. This is because border hardening can reactivate borders as “difference condensers” that draw from imperial and national legacies to reinscribe the othering of spaces and peoples beyond the border.     

“They will not automatically benefit”: The politics of infrastructure development in Laos's Northern Economic Corridor

At a time when the shortcomings of neoliberal development are well known, China's Belt and Road Initiative offers both an opportunity and a requirement to revisit the question of a more inclusive, equitable approach to infrastructure development. This article examines the case of the Northern Economic Corridor, a highway-centered regional trade corridor constructed through northwestern Laos in the early-mid 2000s that was co-financed by the Asian Development Bank and the governments of China and Thailand, and that has been subsequently included in the BRI as one of a group of regional corridors following the historical trajectories of the Silk Road. By examining the discursive politics of infrastructure's formal geography – and focusing on the practices that manage how publicly funded projects address predictable, negative impacts – this paper engages with emerging research on the BRI, wider scholarship on infrastructure, and the political geography of transnational development cooperation and financing at multiple scales. Specifically, I show how vulnerable populations were excluded from the protections of infrastructure mitigation along an early BRI project, and use this to argue that scholars, community advocates, infrastructure planners, financiers, regulators and others engaged with the BRI and other new infrastructure initiatives should rethink established conventions that demote the attention paid to “indirect” impacts. I highlight the arena of formal-geographic mitigation planning as a key field of engagement in the struggle to make new infrastructure live up to expectations about inclusive and equitable development.     

兰新高铁对西北地区可达性及经济联系的影响

高铁正在深刻改变和影响我国区域空间格局，兰新高铁作为丝绸之路经济带上重要交通线，对西北地区经济发展具有重要推动作用。通过GIS网络分析及成本加权栅格法构建模型，综合选用最短时间距离、加权平均旅行时间及经济联系强度指标，定量分析兰新高铁对西北地区可达性及经济联系的影响。结果发现：兰新高铁引发了非均衡的时空收敛效应，影响和重塑了区域空间结构，沿线城市可达性提升优于非沿线城市，“核心-边缘”格局得到强化；兰新高铁提升了中心城市的辐射能力，加速中心城市的空间扩张和重构，中心城市一日交流圈面积（3h）均有增加，在空间上沿高铁线呈带状分布；兰新高铁增强了城市间经济联系，促进高铁沿线经济带的发展，沿线城市经济联系中心度得到提高，区域经济联系模式“廊道效应”明显。本研究为完善西北地区交通网络及推动丝绸之路经济带建设提供参考。     

Kirkenes: An Industrial Site Reinvented as a Border Town

Abstract

1 1. This is a significantly revised version of an article published in Nyseth and Granås 2007 “Place-reinvention – Dynamics and Governance Perspectives”, Stockholm: Nordregio. This article analyses the transformation of Kirkenes, a small town on the Russian–Norwegian border, from an industrial town to a border town. Kirkenes was established as a harbour for an iron-ore mining venture in what today is the municipality of Sør-Varanger. This industry closed down during the 1990s. The article describes how Kirkenes has been transformed within “bordered” relationships of civic society, business and a combination of high-level and local political activities. Being a border town and a centre in the Barents Region is the hegemonic narrative of today. The manifold transformations have led to a situation where Kirkenes has become “Russianized”, though local actors struggle with how to handle this aspect of local development and the meaning of the place. The article also investigates to what degree the transformations have changed local identity. The focus is on how identities are dealt with, whether they are seen as immanent and essential cultural traits, or as something that tends to be changed and adapted to the situation. Based on the concept of narrative identities, there are reasons to believe that there are strong identities based on both public narratives relating to local history and nature and metanarratives about globalization and cross-border communities.     

Rebuilding the Great Britain Historical GIS,Part 1: Building an Indefinitely Scalable Statistical Database

Abstract

The Great Britain Historical Geographical Information System (GIS) has been rebuilt around a single central table holding all statistics in one column, currently containing 14,541,491 data values. This architecture enables extremely flexible data handling, but requires that the context of each data value be captured entirely as metadata. Statistical reporting areas are defined via an ontology of administrative units, in which hierarchical relationships are compulsory while boundary polygons are optional. What a number measures is recorded via a relational implementation of the Data Documentation Initiative standard, locating each value within an n-dimensional matrix, or nCube, whose dimensions are variables such as age, gender, and occupation. The data library can be extended to additional countries or more statistical topics without adding any database tables.     

Border thinking: Rossport, Shell and the political geographies of a gas pipeline

Rossport is a small, sparsely populated rural area in the west of Ireland. Over the past seven years, some of its residents have been engaged in a struggle against the building of a gas pipeline through their locality by multinational corporations, including Shell and Statoil. Their struggle has garnered opposition and support within Ireland and internationally. This paper takes the story of Rossport as the starting point for a broader discussion of epistemology within political geography. Drawing on the work of Walter Mignolo, in particular his ideas about ‘border thinking’ and the ‘decoloniality of knowledge’, it argues that Rossport offers the possibility for a redeployment of postcolonial thought within political geography.     

“一带一路”重大项目地缘风险研究

“一带一路”机遇和前景无限,但同时遭遇着严峻的地缘风险。重大项目地缘风险是由地缘因素引起的导致重大项目产生不利后果的可能性,具有客观性、主观性、主体间性、不确定性、后果严重性、纯风险性特点。论文基于全球、区域、国家、项目四个尺度,从“地缘”视角深入探讨了重大项目地缘风险影响机理,在多尺度、多主体、多因素的综合研究框架下构建了重大项目地缘风险评估指标体系,以中国面向东南亚、南亚重大项目地缘风险为例进行研究,并对缅甸密松水电项目进行地缘风险微观剖析。