An empirical test of the relative frequency of bipolar reduction in Beds VI,V, and III at Mumba Rockshelter,Tanzania: implications for the East African Middle to Late Stone Age transition

Mumba Rockshelter, Tanzania, is the only East African site spanning a continuous record of more than 100,000 years, including the Middle Stone Age (MSA) to Late Stone Age (LSA) Transition. Rather than examine the presence or absence of traditional markers of “behavioral modernity”, we have endeavored here to respond to the calls of Shea (2011) and Basell (2008) by examining the proportional similarity of a trait present throughout the MSA–LSA sequence at Mumba Rockshelter: the bipolar technique of lithic reduction. We use a quantified, experimentally derived proxy to track the relative amount of bipolar percussion among Mumba's Beds VI, V, and III, namely, waste shatter. Our examination of Mehlman's previously unanalyzed collections from Mumba demonstrates that in terms of bipolar production Bed V is statistically indistinguishable from the Late Stone Age (LSA) Bed III, but significantly different from the Middle Stone Age (MSA) Bed VI. Given that Bed V dates to 56.9 ± 4.8 − 49.1 ± 4.3 ka cal BP, this result is consistent with other evidence that the origins of the LSA in East Africa began well before 40 kya, and that Mumba Bed V represents one of the earliest manifestations of the LSA in East Africa. We conclude with a discussion of factors that may have influenced the increased dependence of bipolar production at the site.     

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.     

Messianic time,settler colonial technology and the elision of Palestinian presence in Jerusalem's historic basin

Advancing the settler colonial paradigm through a temporal perspective on territoriality, this article argues that the Jewish messianic idea is a distinctive feature of Israeli settler colonialism and an important element of Zionist territorial production. Specifically, the article contends that messianic time constitutes a specific settler colonial technology of domination which finds place-based expression in the ‘historic basin’ of occupied East Jerusalem. This is illustrated through two sites: the City of David archaeological park in the Palestinian village of Silwan and the Temple Mount/Haram al-Shariff, current home of the Dome of the Rock and prophesised location of the Third Jewish Temple. Both are at the frontier of settlement in the historic basin and the messianic conception of a mythical past and redemptive future aids claims to territorial exclusivity by ‘disappearing’ Palestinians in the present. The article concludes by reflecting on the value of an analytical focus on time for settler colonial scholarship on Israel-Palestine and in political geography more broadly.     

The impact of precarious security conditions on renewable electrification: The case of the West Bank

Recent energy-related writing has highlighted the spatiality of renewable energy and its possible affinity to geopolitics. Yet, energy geography and geopolitics literature lack reference to security and how it may shape the energy landscape. This study unpacks the elusive concepts of security and territoriality and operationalizes them into measurable variables. Using statistical and qualitative methods, including an original dataset based on planning and building protocols, this study tests the interplay between security conditions and territoriality on renewable energy adoption. It examines the case study of the contested Area C territory in the West Bank, within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The findings show that precarious security conditions discourage renewable energy diffusion, particularly when security is linked to territorial conflict. As land-intensive infrastructures, renewable energy systems challenge territorial claims. This study demonstrates how space acts as an intermediate variable connecting security concerns with the diffusion of renewable technology. Security interests use spatial planning as a key mechanism to negatively influence on renewable energy diffusion in contested territory, such as Area C, where power asymmetry heavily leans to the advantage of one party. These findings contradict the argument that renewable energy is a catalyst for peace building. They show how renewable energy projects create inequalities and are often held hostage by the territorial dispute between Israel and the Palestinians.     

Islands,extraction and violence: Mining and the politics of scale in Island Melanesia

Set against the backdrop of past, contemporary and possible future mining-related violence on islands in the western Pacific, this article explores how scholarship on the politics of scale, as well as strands of the burgeoning island studies literature, might sharpen our understanding of the political economic and violent effects of extractive resource enclaves in Island Melanesia. Drawing upon field research in Bougainville and Solomon Islands, I argue that just as Melanesian islands were produced as a scale of struggle in the context of the introduction of capitalist social relations under colonialism, so too have they emerged as a critical, albeit problematic, scale of struggle in contemporary contestations around extractive resource capitalism under the current round of globalisation and accumulation by dispossession. I suggest that this politics of scale lens enriches our understanding of how “islandness” can be an important variable in social and political economic processes. When the politics of scale is imbricated with the well-established idea of the island as the paradigmatic setting for territorialising projects, including the nation-state and sub-national jurisdictions, islandness emerges as a potentially powerful variable in the political economic struggles that attend extractive resource enclaves. I also highlight, in the cases considered here, how islands can become containers for internal socio-spatial contradictions that can be animated by extractive enclaves and can contribute to the island scale becoming violent and “ungovernable”. The article advances recent efforts to bring the island studies literature into closer conversation with political and economic geography.     

State power and protected areas: Dynamics and contradictions of forest conservation in Madhya Pradesh, India

The traditionally coercive and state-controlled governance of protected areas for nature conservation in developing countries has in many cases undergone change in the context of widespread decentralization and liberalization. This article examines an emerging “mixed” (coercive, community- and market-oriented) conservation approach in managed-resource protected areas and its effects on state power through a case study on forest protection in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. The findings suggest that imperfect decentralization and partial liberalization resulted in changed forms, rather than uniform loss, of state power. A forest co-management program paradoxically strengthened local capacity and influence of the Forest Department, which generally maintained its territorial and knowledge-based control over forests and timber management. Furthermore, deregulation and reregulation enabled the state to withdraw from uneconomic activities but also implied reduced place-based control of non-timber forest products. Generally, the new policies and programs contributed to the separation of livelihoods and forests in Madhya Pradesh. The article concludes that regulatory, community- and market-based initiatives would need to be better coordinated to lead to more effective nature conservation and positive livelihood outcomes.     

Territory and the governmentalisation of social reproduction: parliamentary enclosure and spatial rationalities in the transition from feudalism to capitalism

Recent applications of Foucauldian categories in geography, spatial history and the history of town planning have opened up interesting new perspectives, with respect to both the evolution of spatial knowledge and the genealogy of territorial techniques and their relation to larger socio-political projects, that would be enriched if combined with other discursive traditions. This article proposes to conceptualise English parliamentary enclosure–a favourite episode for Marxist historiography, frequently read in a strictly materialist fashion–as a precedent of a new form of sociospatial governmentality, a political technology that inaugurates a strategic manipulation of territory for social change on the threshold between feudal and capitalist spatial rationalities. I analyse the sociospatial dimensions of parliamentary enclosure’s technical and legal innovations and compare them to the forms of communal self-regulation of land use customs and everyday regionalisations that preceded it. Through a systematic, replicable mechanism of reterritorialisation, enclosure acts normalised spatial regulations, blurred regional differences in the social organisation of agriculture and erased the modes of autonomous social reproduction linked to common land. Their exercise of dispossession of material resources, social capital and community representations is interpreted therefore as an inaugural logic that would pervade the emergent spatial rationality later known as planning.     

Tristan da Cunha

This paper explores the ambiguities of Englishness/ Britishness from a political geography perspective. An Anglo‐British identity is described in which English territoriality is shown to be both more and less than the geographical area of England. Upper England comprises the south‐east corner of the country only — the Home Counties’ — which is identified as the Crown Heartland of a particularly conservative nationalism. Greater England is the British face of English identity which as hegemon, empire and currently through the City of London used and uses Upper England as a base for extra‐territorial projects. Finally the implications of this unusual nationalism are reviewed in terms of a possible break‐up of England.     

“Living together separately”: Thoughts on the relationship between political science and political geography

In their provocatively titled book, Living Together Separately, Michael Romann and Alex Weingrod argue that the shared terrain of Jerusalem obscures deep divisions in the physical and social lives of its Arab and Jewish ethnic communities (Romann & Weingrod, 1991). Multiple divisions exist not only among peoples sharing a common space; they are also found among communities of scholars sharing common intellectual interests. This has certainly been the case of Political Science and Political Geography during much of the twentieth century. Members of both disciplinary communities seek insights into the role of politics and political structures in human society, yet until recently they have pursued their work within orbits that only rarely intersected. They attended different conferences and symposia, they employed different methodological tools, and they did not draw heavily on each others published work.Recent theoretical and empirical developments have begun to erode the barriers separating Political Science and Political Geography, and a discussion of the relationship between the disciplines is thus both timely and welcome. Professor Elazar is an appropriate person to place at the center of this discussion, for his work as a political scientist is unusual sensitivity to geography. Professor Elazar's comments about research orientations and career constraints provide an interesting point of departure for such a discussion, but to understand the nature and depth of the divide between the disciplines it is important to consider the core intellectual constructs and practices that have characterized Political Science and Political Geography during the twentieth century. These have fostered theoretical orientations and research approaches that are sufficiently different from one another to create significant barriers to interdisciplinary contact.     

Modeling life expectancy and surplus production of dynamic pre-contact territories in leeward Kohala, Hawai‘i

Hawaiian territoriality evolved in response to the ecodynamics of changing populations set within shifting socio-political structures. Modeling agricultural surplus production and life expectancy of various prehistoric and protohistoric territorial configurations in the leeward Kohala dryland field system identifies the costs and benefits associated with dynamic territorial units. The results of the modeling indicate that if people lived autonomous lives within their territories the 18-km long landscape containing the field system would have been optimally divided into 14 territories. The archaeological and ethnohistorical data suggest that at European contact the area was divided into 32 generally smaller territorial units. This configuration, while lowering average life expectancy and increasing levels of spatial variability in surplus production, maximized average yearly surplus and reduced its temporal variability. Dividing the field system into 32 units provided opportunities for elite managers to monitor production and control the redistribution of resources. The modeling and archaeological data suggest selection occurred differentially among social units, with certain segments of society having enhanced fitness in terms of agricultural resources at the expense of others, while maximizing the potential for surplus generation and possible redistribution.