Assembling dams in Ghana: A genealogical inquiry into the fluidity of hydropolitics

The paper offers a geographical interpretation of the evolving technical, political, and economic intricacy of large dams. It incorporates existing hydropolitical scholarship and the notion of the Chinese Water Machine to reframe dams as assemblages built by specific political, financial and technical processes in particular socioenvironmental regions. The paper examines the continuity of hydropolitical relationships through a genealogical inquiry into the formulation and materialisation of Ghana's three dams: the Akosombo and Kpong dams built during the Cold War, backed by Western lenders and engineering companies; and the Bui dam commissioned in the 2010s, with support from China. Based on fieldwork in Ghana and China, as well as documentary evidence, the paper argues that the thinking, planning and building of dams interconnect the host regime and external techno-financial actors with their floating political-economic interests, but in a durable way. Sometimes, even if little concrete is actually poured, the symbolic power of dams endures, transforms, and at certain times and places expands, through events and discourses of national and international interest groups pursuing their own purposes, albeit with the replacement of influential individuals and powerful institutions, and regardless of the involvement of Western, Chinese and/or other actors. Ruptures exist but do not necessarily break the continuity of dam assemblages. The emergence of an opposition assemblage that battles against dams is a more recent complexity.     

Liberal Government and the Practical History of Anthropology

This paper explores the implications of Foucault's perspective of liberal government for approaches to the practical history of anthropology. It also draws on assemblage theory to consider the changing relations between field, museum and university in relation to a range of early twentieth-century anthropological practices. These focus mainly on the development of the Boasian paradigm in the USA during the inter-war years and on the anthropological practices clustered around the Musée de l'Homme in the 1930s. Key steps in the argument focus on the role of what Foucault called “transactional realities” in mediating the practical applications of anthropology in colonial contexts and in “anthropology at home” projects. Special consideration is also given to the increasingly archival properties of anthropological collections in the early twentieth century and the consequences of this for anthropology's relations to practices of governing.     

A climate terrorism assemblage? Exploring the politics of climate change-terrorism-radicalisation relations

Despite a series of claims from Bernie Sanders (2015), Barack Obama (2015), and others arguing that climate change, radicalisation, and terrorism are connected by complex causal relationships, there is very little academic examination of the politics of these claims. Building on DeLanda’s (2006) account of assemblages and social complexity, this paper conceptualises climate change-terrorism-radicalisation relationships as a ‘climate terrorism assemblage’. A ‘climate terrorism assemblage’ is a complex, emergent ‘whole’ formed from a heterogeneous range of interacting geopolitical components (e.g. climatic factors, migration, think tanks and academic publications, and a discourse of ‘climate security’). Specifically, a climate terrorism assemblage is characterised by ‘strategic territorialisations’: context-specific, multi-scalar points at which political claims of causal links between climate change, terrorism, and radicalisation are crystallised. Strategic territorialisations are produced in two, interrelated contexts. First, using the case study of the Syrian Conflict, a climate terrorism assemblage reveals an intricate, contested politics of ‘drawing lines’ which link climate change, terrorism, and radicalisation. Secondly, the paper argues that, at the points at which causal links are constructed between climate change, terrorism and radicalisation, a climate terrorism assemblage territorialises around intersectional subject formations, in particular a young masculine subject vulnerable to potential radicalisation and terrorism. Overall, the paper concludes that a climate terrorism assemblage provides a productive analytic frame to investigate the contested power relations of climate change-radicalisation-terrorism connections.     

Enabling persistent presence? Performing the embodied geopolitics of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle assemblage

Military Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being increasingly used to provide surveillance and attack capabilities within war zones. At the heart of much of the rhetoric about these aircraft is their supposed ability to enable persistent presence across the battlespace. They are also unique in that they actively distance the aircrew from the aircraft. This paper seeks to question whether this claim to persistent presence can be justified and considers the implications of the distancing of pilot from machine in this. In order to achieve this, the paper focuses upon conceptualising UAVs as assemblages, composed of both human and machine elements. It uses firsthand accounts from a Royal Air Force Reaper UAV aircrew as a basis to analyse the ways in which the deployment of these aircraft in Afghanistan is changing the ways that war is experienced by aerial combatants. It does this through the utilisation of a feminist, embodied geopolitics, refiguring it from a concern with victims of war to argue for its use to understand the micro-scale of how the humans within these UAV assemblages experience combat. This paper thus focuses upon the extent to which the Reaper UAV achieves a persistent presence through analysis of its supposed more-than-human loitering and vision abilities, and the limitations associated with the requirement for a human-in-the loop. The paper contends that although UAVs like the Reaper change the geopolitics of combat, the continuing requirement for the human element of the assemblage restricts their ability to provide persistent presence.     

Putting geopolitics in its place: Gibraltar and the emergence of strategic locations

Gibraltar has long been understood as a strategic location. In this paper I examine the historical emergence of this seemingly common-sense fact, turning to the rise of relational geography and assemblage thinking to re-theorise the idea of ‘strategic locations.’ I argue that the ‘unchanging truth’ of geography as asserted by (neo)classical geopolitical authors is always in fact becoming-otherwise, as shifts in the compositional assemblages (e.g., military-technological systems, logistical networks, domestic politics) can ripple through the place in question, very quickly making strategic places un-strategic again, or vice-versa. People and ideas are central to this emergence, as are place-based materialities such as terrain, technologies, and even micro-climates. Empirically I examine first the emergence of Gibraltar within an English/British cartographic and visual apparatus in the 17th century. I then turn to the materiality of the Strait of Gibraltar and the specific agency of the eponymous Rock, as they both interact with various shifts in military technology and the organisation of empire. I conclude with a call for an assemblage approach to place in geopolitics, highlighting the advantages of such an approach.     

‘The Darroch affair’: Assemblage lines,components, and transformations

This article examines the underresearched role of lines and components in recomposing geopolitical assemblages. It does so by focusing on a single body at the middle of an event to show how its lines of assembling conditioned wider transformations. The event in question – the leaking of confidential diplomatic materials in July 2019 as part of the so-called “Darroch Affair” – opened a massive rift between governing and bureaucratic arms of the UK state. Set in the context of ongoing struggles to recode the transatlantic diplomatic assemblage (TADA) by US and UK governments, Sir Kim Darroch, British Ambassador to the US, was at front and centre of the resulting leaks imbroglio. Using assemblage thinking, I offer an alternative conceptualisation of Darroch's body as distributed across the TADA via structurally complex lines of assembling. I argue the historical trajectories of these lines accelerated assemblage recompositions as the excessiveness of events led to Darroch's body occupying more and more possibility spaces across the TADA. The article considers how the linear complexity of Darroch's body arose, and the consequences of the resulting recompositions of the TADA for its nested diplomatic worlds.     

Re-assembling the memorial landscape: the politics of walking tours in Taipei

This article argues that the memorial landscape is a dynamically composed assemblage of heterogeneous elements, and that the guided walking tour is a practical tactic through which discourses and materials might be re-assembled and thus re-signified. Guided walking tours therefore epitomise the relational rethinking of memorial landscapes, or quasi-heritage, in everyday urban life. Based on three case studies in Taipei, Taiwan, we discuss how memorial landscapes featuring the urban underclass and civil resistance might be strategically re-assembled. We explore to what extent the bodily practices, narratives, and reconfiguration of space have produced new memorialised landscapes. We conclude that guided walking tours are a form of social intervention that can reframe our understanding of memorialization or quasi-heritagization, especially in the urban arena where heterogeneous values increasingly compete.     

Moral assemblages of volunteer tourism development in Cusco,Peru

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we develop a conceptual approach from which to examine the moral landscape of volunteer tourism development in Cusco, Peru. Drawing from recent work on assemblage theory in geography and tourism studies, we explore how assemblage thinking can facilitate new understandings of volunteer tourism development. Using assemblage as an analytical framework allows us to understand volunteer tourism as a series of relational, processual, unequal and mobile practices. These practices, we argue, are constituted through a broader aggregation of human and non-human actors that co-construct moral landscapes of place. Thus, reconsidering volunteer tourism as assemblage allows for more inclusive and nuanced understandings of how geopolitical discourses as well as historical, political, economic and cultural conjunctures mediate volunteer tourism development, planning and policy. Finally, this paper calls for further research that integrates assemblage theory and tourism planning and development.     

Concreting the frontier: Modernity and its entanglements in Sikkim,India

Sikkim is a geopolitically sensitive frontier state in India sharing borders with Bhutan, China and Nepal. As distinctions between urban and rural dissolve across the Himalaya, concrete narrates the transformation of these landscapes and the assemblages that hold them together. Using Cloke and Jones’s (2001) notion of ‘dwelling’ we explore Sikkim's concrete manifested in tourism, hydropower and housing to make four arguments. First, concrete is central to the way development is conceived and enacted in Sikkim and offers a critical reading of the ways landscape is imagined, reproduced and politicised. Second, concrete foregrounds the ways peoples' aspirations are materialised in the built environment of a ‘remote’, yet geopolitically significant territory. Third, concrete is an integral component of Sikkim's political culture, part of the assemblage of incongruent elements that undergird the state's dependency. Finally, concrete has further entangled Sikkim within India, producing a loyal border state out of a recently independent polity.