Violence sits in places? Cultural practice, neoliberal rationalism, and virulent imaginative geographies

Through imaginative geographies that erase the interconnectedness of the places where violence occurs, the notion that violence is ‘irrational’ marks particular cultures as ‘Other’. Neoliberalism exploits such imaginative geographies in constructing itself as the sole providence of nonviolence and the lone bearer of reason. Proceeding as a ‘civilizing’ project, neoliberalism positions the market as salvationary to ostensibly ‘irrational’ and ‘violent’ peoples. This theology of neoliberalism produces a discourse that binds violence in place. But while violence sits in places in terms of the way in which we perceive its manifestation as a localized and embodied experience, this very idea is challenged when place is reconsidered as a relational assemblage. What this re-theorization does is open up the supposed fixity, separation, and immutability of place to instead recognize it as always co-constituted by, mediated through, and integrated within the wider experiences of space. Such a radical rethinking of place fundamentally transforms the way we understand violence. No longer confined to its material expression as an isolated and localized event, violence can more appropriately be understood as an unfolding process, derived from the broader geographical phenomena and temporal patterns of the social world.     

The age of the manager is over? Shale gas fracking and the challenge to the post-political regime for English planning

Planning systems developed through the period of ‘normative’, ‘third way’ neoliberalism were critiqued as being ‘post-political’. Planning systems were developed that bypassed political conflicts through technocratic and consensus-seeking approaches following a so-called ‘end of history’ in which left/right ideological conflicts were deemed settled. Following the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2007/8 though, scholars have begun to question whether this is a suitable critique of planning, and state institutions more generally, as political and economic conditions shift. This paper examines a case of an exemplar post-political planning system: England. The paper identifies three key logics of a ‘post-political regime’ for planning: techno-managerialism, consensus and participation. Through an analysis of texts and interviews of contested planning decisions made over shale gas fracking sites, this paper shows a ‘post-political regime’ for planning facing a crisis of legitimacy as it is challenged by an anti-fracking movement and reactionary interventions from central government. The paper provides an institutional level analysis of the crisis of post-political planning, which has lost legitimacy amidst the slow collapse of normative neoliberalism.     

Experimental territoriality: Assembling the Kaesong Industrial Complex in North Korea

This paper examines the interactions of sovereignty and political economy that shape North Korea's Kaesong Industrial Complex (KIC)—an economic zone jointly operated by North and South Korea. Drawing on contemporary literatures concerning sovereignty, territoriality, and sites of political economic experimentation in East Asia, we argue that the KIC represents an experimental form of territoriality: one that is particularly volatile due to its unique geopolitical location where interaction among the various actors that compose it periodically shuts down or threatens to suspend the project. This volatility cannot be reduced to the structure of the North Korean regime alone, however. Rather, it must be situated within the continuation of a framework of enmity on the Korean peninsula as well as the ethical and political conundrums raised by the largely capitalist nature of the KIC as a form of inter-Korean economic cooperation.     

A battle worth winning: The service of culture to the Communist Party of Vietnam in the contemporary era

The Communist Party of Vietnam’s (CPV) market reform policies—introduced in the late 1980s and carrying on today—have opened the country to foreign investment, deregulated state-owned enterprises, decollectivized agricultural cooperatives, and encouraged foreign direct investment. However, what the Party has not wanted reformed, and has fought strongly on behalf of, is culture. Using primary source official CPV cultural policy documentation and secondary sources highlighting contemporary meanings of Vietnamese and foreign cultures, this paper evaluates the Party’s use of culture as a resource in the direction and regulation of the nation’s market economy with a socialist orientation. While culture is expedient for all governments, I argue that the CPV’s intent is unique in that it uses culture as an instrument to maintain its ownership, rather than simply to legitimize its regulatory ability, over the national political economy. This paper aims to show how culture is part and parcel of post-socialist governance’s political-economic framework and contributes to debates surrounding the reach and impact of neoliberalism in formerly command economies.     

The ‘Cultural Turn’ in Australian Regional Economic Development Discourse: Neoliberalising Creativity?

Regional economic policy‐makers are increasingly interested in the contribution of creativity to the economic performance of regions and, more generally, in its power to transform the images and identities of places. This has constituted a ‘cultural turn’, of sorts, away from an emphasis on macro‐scale projects and employment schemes, towards an interest in the creative industries, entrepreneurial culture and innovation. This paper discusses how recent discourses of the role of ‘creativity’ in regions have drawn upon, and contributed to, particular forms of neoliberalisation. Its focus is the recent application of a statistical measure — Richard Florida's (2002) ‘creativity index’— to quantify spatial variations in creativity between Australia's regions. Our critique is not of the creativity index per se, but of its role in subsuming creativity within a neoliberal regional economic development discourse. In this discourse, creativity is linked to the primacy of global markets, and is a factor in place competition, attracting footloose capital and ‘creative class’ migrants to struggling regions. Creativity is positioned as a central determinant of regional ‘success’ and forms a remedy for those places, and subjects, that currently ‘lack’ innovation. Our paper critiques these interpretations, and concludes by suggesting that neoliberal discourses ignore the varied ways in which ‘alternative creativities’ might underpin other articulations of the future of Australia's regions.     

The geographical and ethical origins of neoliberalism: The Walter Lippmann Colloquium and the foundations of a new geopolitical order

Observers tend to overlook the early neoliberalism that derived from the “Lippmann Colloquium” organised in Paris in 1938. Analysis of the discourse produced and books published at this founding moment shows that neoliberalism was then presented as a geopolitical doctrine aimed at redressing the spatial fragmentation of the world into States. The means to achieve this, according to this first neoliberalism, was by implementing what, in 1978, M. Foucault called “governmentality”: a multiscalar political system based on the submission of territories to the transnational discipline of a multilateral free division of labour. This thinking was very similar to the convictions of a number of political leaders who, from the 1940s onwards, were involved in creating a new international order uniting Western Europe and the United States, the foundations of which had many similarities with the principles of the first neoliberalism.