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.     

Geopolitics at the margins? Reconsidering genealogies of critical geopolitics

Critical geopolitics has become one of the most vibrant parts of political geography. However it remains a particularly western way of knowing which has been much less attentive to other traditions of thinking. This paper engages with Pan-Africanism, and specifically the vision of the architect of post-colonial Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to explore this overlooked contribution to critical engagements with geopolitics. Pan-Africanism sought to forge alternative post-colonial worlds to the binary geopolitics of the Cold War and the geopolitical economy of neo-colonialism. The academic division of labour has meant that these ideas have been consigned to African studies rather than being drawn into wider debates around the definitions of key disciplinary concepts. However Nyerere's continental thinking can be seen as a form of geopolitical imagination that challenges dominant neo-realist projections, and which still has much to offer contemporary political geography.     

Zambrano’s poetic reason in the light of Frankfurtian Critical Theory

ABSTRACT

María Zambrano's biggest contribution to intellectual history is, without a doubt, her poetic reason; her unique attempt to overcome the limiting coordinates of the framework of rationality established by the Enlightenment. Having spent forty-five years in exile, the relevance of this Republican thinker has only been acknowledged in recent decades. Since then, the political content of her early work, as well as her engagement with the Republic's cause prior to and during the Spanish Civil War are well known. Nevertheless, although Zambrano still wrote some political books after the Civil War, most notably, Persona y democracia (1958), the political component of her thought after this period has passed largely unnoticed. This article intends to take a wider approach to Zambrano's political engagement by exploring the political significance of her poetic reason. Here I contend, first, that poetic reason, far from being an isolated attempt at developing an alternative rationality, is actually in line with the critique of instrumental reason proposed by the Frankfurt School and, second, that, in fact, there are meaningful parallels between poetic reason and Frankfurtian Critical Theory. Thus, the purpose of this article is to explore such parallels and their significance in revealing the political dimension of Zambrano's thought.     

Feminist geopolitics,everyday death,and the emotional geographies of Dang Thuy Tram

Women's everyday experiences in war remain occluded; moreover, the bodily impacts of war remain hidden, masked by masculinist accounts of warfare that too often glorify heroic male combatants. In this article, we contribute, first, to the ongoing project to understand violence in everyday life and, second, to the understanding, specifically, of women's experiences in warfare. We do so through a reading of the diaries of Dang Thuy Tram, a female Vietnamese doctor who lived and died in the Vietnam War. By drawing on feminist geopolitics, coupled with the insights from emotional geographies – and specifically, those of love – we focus on two main themes: the emotional transformation of death and life, and the care of life amidst pervasive death. We conclude that an emotionally grounded feminist geopolitics is necessary to challenge masculinist accounts that normalize, naturalize, and glorify war.     

Isolation Through Humanitarianism: Subaltern Geopolitics of the Siege on Gaza

Scholars have argued that in attempts to achieve geopolitical goals, siege often results in covert assaults against civilian populations. In the Gazan context, siege subjects are rendered as surplus to the Israeli state, and are therefore isolated and deprived of basic human needs as well as human rights. In 2006, siege was enacted against Gaza, enforced by the Egyptian and Israeli militaries. As a consequence, the population of Gaza is isolated from the exchange of goods, services, people, and ideas. This article begins with an analysis of siege as a violent process and as a subset of occupation practices. Using ethnographic data collected in Gaza between 2009 and 2014, this article mobilizes the methods and approach of subaltern geopolitics to undermine the notion of siege as a humanitarian alternative to war. This study reveals the micro‐scale, graduated nature of siege and its impacts on the civilians living in Gaza.     

The future role of GIS education in creating critical spatial thinkers

Teaching of critical spatial thinking in higher education empowers graduates to effectively engage with spatial data. Geographic information systems (GIS) and science are taught to undergraduates across many disciplines; we evaluate how this contributes to critical spatial thinking. The discipline of GIS covers the whole process of spatial decision-making, but GIS modules often ignore the context setting of spatial problems, and just cover the technical aspects of how to use GIS software. We outline how some existing GIS practicals could be improved to focus on the development of critical spatial thinking skills, competences and abilities that are valuable to graduates.     

Canadian geopolitical culture: Climate change and sustainability

Considering recent formulations of geopolitical culture in combination with concerns that environmental change be included in contemporary geopolitical analysis, this paper examines the implicit geopolitical formulations in recent Canadian federal political discourse both in Stephen Harper's Conservative government and the subsequent Liberal administration. Contrasting earth system science ideas about global transformations with Canadian nationalist rhetoric concerning petroleum production and notions of unlimited resource extraction as parts of national identity sharply highlights the contours of Canadian identity. If sustainability is to be taken seriously, the official nationalist formulation will have to be drastically changed, but as the widespread rejection of the LEAP manifesto suggests, such ideas of a sustainable mode of globalization have yet to substantially influence Canadian political discourse, despite the rhetorical support offered to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau.     

Celebrity humanitarianism and the popular geopolitics of hope along the Thai-Burma border

In June of 2014 Angelina Jolie, actress and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Goodwill Ambassador, visited camps—home to 130,000 Burmese exiles—along the Thai-Burma border to draw international attention to one of the most protracted displacement situations in the world. Her fourth trip to the border since 2002, Jolie's day-long visit was widely commended in popular media. I draw on ethnographic research among Burmese exiles in northern Thailand to argue that the popular geopolitics of hope she engendered is constituted through contradictory impulses of, on one hand, her signification of global capital and the concurrent widespread geoeconomic hope around Burma's deepening integration into global capitalism, and on the other, the far-reaching geopolitics of fear that has materialized around the threat of repatriation resulting from rapid political-economic change in Burma. Thus, this paper builds on recent work in popular geopolitics and geographies of emotion and affect to offer a grounded illustration of the micro-macro linkages between popular culture and everyday geopolitical experience, as well as the often politically nuanced role of celebrities in humanitarian interventions. This paper contributes to ongoing conversations around the relationship between celebrity humanitarians from the global North and the political-economic implications of the affective enrollment of their intended benefactors from the global South.     

OpenStreetMap in Israel and Palestine – ‘Game changer’ or reproducer of contested cartographies?

In Israel and Palestine, map-making practices were always entangled with contradictive spatial identities and imbalanced power resources. Although an Israeli narrative has largely dominated the ‘cartographic battlefield’, the latest chapter of this story has not been written yet: collaborative forms of web 2.0 cartographies have restructured power relations in mapping practices and challenged traditional monopolies on map and spatial data production. Thus, we can expect web 2.0 cartographies to be a ‘game changer’ for cartography in Palestine and Israel. In this paper, I review this assumption with the popular example of OpenStreetMap (OSM). Following a mixed methods approach, I comparatively analyze the genesis of OSM in Israel and Palestine. Although nationalist motives do not play a significant role on either side, it turns out that the project is dominated by Israeli and international mappers, whereas Palestinians have hardly contributed to OSM. As a result, social fragmentations and imbalances between Israel and Palestine are largely reproduced through OSM data. Discussing the low involvement of Palestinians, I argue that OSM's ground truth paradigm might be a watershed for participation. Presumably, the project's data are less meaningful in some local contexts than in others. Moreover, the seemingly apolitical approach to map only ‘facts on the ground’ reaffirms present spatio-social order and thus the power relations behind it. Within a Palestinian narrative, however, many aspects of the factual material space might appear not as neutral physical objects but as results of suppression, in which case, any ‘accurate’ spatial representation, such as OSM, becomes objectionable.     

Commentary: Philip Hirsch's “The shifting regional geopolitics of Mekong dams”

Understanding the complex shifting geopolitics of the Mekong at a time when many networked arrangements and economic flows are disrupting earlier forms of regulation must involve a multidimensional view of geopolitical practices across time and engagement with their representations. This commentary on Hirsch (2016) underscores the importance of the local struggles and people whose voice is often silenced. For a multidimensional view, it is particularly important to include voices that too easily become omissions.