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.     

Playing with Fire: The 4th Duke of Hamilton's Jacobite Politics and the Union

James Hamilton, duke of Hamilton and the Scots jacobites are generally linked in analyses of the final years of the Scots polity. Indeed, Hamilton is often presented as the leader of the jacobite party in the Scottish parliament. Yet both contemporaries and historians have been unsure what to make of his on-again, off-again, conduct with respect to the exiled Stuarts and France. This has fuelled an ongoing debate about Hamilton's erratic and highly enigmatic behaviour during the winter of 1706–7, when the Union was passing the Scottish parliament. Was he genuinely opposing the Union? Was he duped by the court? Or was he, ‘bought and sold for English gold ’? This essay takes a fresh look at the duke and his part in the Union crisis in the light of new and previously underused jacobite sources with a view to better understanding Hamilton's aims, objectives, and influence with this crucial group. Only the jacobites and the Cameronians were potentially willing to take their opposition to the Union to God's Acre. But neither party immediately flew to arms in response to passage of a union they both believed was a betrayal of everything they held dear, and Hamilton was a major factor in their failure to do so. This essay thus takes a close look at the duke's part in preventing a major national uprising against the Union in the winter of 1706–7 and advances a new interpretation of his conduct and significance throughout the Union crisis.     

On Abolition Ecologies and Making “Freedom as a Place”

This introduction calls for political ecology to systematically engage with the ways that white supremacy shapes human relationships with land through entangled processes of settler colonialism, empire and racial capitalism. To develop the analytic of abolition ecology, we begin with the articulation of W.E.B. Du Bois’ abolition democracy together with Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s spatially attuned analytic of abolition geography. Rather than define communities by the violence they suffer, abolition ecologies call for attention to radical place‐making and the land, air and water based environments within which places are made. To that end, we suggest that an abolition ecology demands attention to the ways that coalitional land‐based politics dismantle oppressive institutions and to the promise of abolition, which Gilmore describes as making “freedom as a place”.     

Colonising geology: Volcanic politics and geopower

This paper discusses the experiences of Christian Montserratian residents through the 1995-present eruptions of the Soufrière Hills Volcano, highlighting that while the earthly powers of the volcano are fundamentally nonhuman, they are known and understood in a diversity of ways by different actors – and they interfere in politics and the production of knowledge. Montserrat, as a UK Overseas Territory, is a non-sovereign territory with a strong Christian identity that has been enhanced by its geological experience. At the same time, the UK has used the eruption to hold greater legislative control over the island. A final group of stakeholders in the eruption is the volcanologists, mainly from the UK until 2010, whose terminology and knowledge-world has had significant impact on the island, but has also been significantly extended by it. The paper ultimately uses this example to suggest that while there are useful and important insights from the “ontological turn” (incorporating vitalism, materialism, speculative realism) in thinking about the “lively earth”, the enactment of volcanic risk management at the governmental level also constitutes a knowledge-practice that must be approached critically to avoid the pitfalls of modernist science and ensure meaningful political change.     

Limits to climate action - Narratives of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage

In recent years, bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been awarded a key role in climate mitigation scenarios explored by integrated assessment models and referenced in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Because a majority of scenarios limiting global warming to 2 °C or 1,5 °C include vast deployment of BECCS, a critical discussion has emerged among experts about the moral implications of thus introducing an unproven technology into the policy realm.In this paper, we analyse this discussion as it has played out between 2013 and 2019, with a focus on how expert narratives are constructed in the mass media about the possibilities for decarbonisation within the current political-economic order. We find there are almost no narratives that support massive deployment of BECCS, and that all narratives presuppose limits to decarbonisation imposed by the current political-economic system. The perception of such limits lead some to argue, through deterministic and apolitical narratives, for the necessity of negative emissions technologies, while others argue instead that “degrowth” is the only solution. Thus, there is a distinct lack of positive narratives about how capitalism can bring about decarbonisation.     

Outside the Wage: Seeing Politics and Possibilities with Critical Comparisons

Emerging debates on the contemporary reconfigurations of work question previous understandings of the relationships among and between waged, unwaged, and reproductive labour, situated processes of value formation and/or enclosure, and the constitution and limits of contemporary capitalism. Taking Cindi Katz's notion of countertopographies and Gillian Hart's notion of relational comparison as inspirations, this Symposium draws attention to new and existing conceptual frames and modes of analysis to situate contemporary permutations of work within the shifting dynamics of uneven development in specific state, local, and institutional contexts. This Introduction summarises the interrelated and overlapping contributions that papers in this Symposium offer methodologically, analytically, and politically. The open-ended aspiration that emerges from these contributions is that close attention to heterogeneous formations of work outside the wage might help to multiply forms of vigilance and critical praxis necessary to resist the co-optation and enclosure of people's creative energies, and move toward realising the latent liberatory potentials that several of the contributions suggest.     

Police and Politics in Aesthetics-Based Urban Governance: Redevelopment and Grassroots Struggles in Enninglu,Guangzhou, China

Rancière's theorisation of police, politics, and aesthetics offers an illustrative framework to understand urban (re)developments. While extant works have examined separately the art of governing through aesthetics and the political subjectivities of those having no part in the frame of visibility and intelligibility, this study argues that hegemonic aesthetic regime and bottom-up aesthetic practices can be mutually constitutive and reside in relationships of co-existence and mutual negotiation. Drawing on over a decade's investigation in Enninglu, a neighbourhood district in Guangzhou that underwent several rounds of political struggles related to redevelopment and conservation, we reveal how local residents negotiated aesthetic norms enacted by the state. Particular attention is paid to the interactions between the aesthetic regime imposed by the state and grassroots people reclaiming their own aesthetic sensibilities, culminating in a contingent, inconclusive, and “impure” space of politics. Both political subjectivities and aesthetic norms are redefined ongoingly in this process.     

The executive lawmaking agenda: Political parties,prime ministers,and policy change in Australia

In Westminster systems, governments enjoy a privileged position in the lawmaking process that they can use to deliver on their campaign promises and achieve their policy goals. What policy areas do governments seek to affect through lawmaking? How stable is the executive lawmaking agenda? How responsive is that agenda to changes triggered by elections or by transitions in prime minister? This study uses a dataset of 3982 Australian bills introduced between 2000 and 2017 to answer these questions. While it finds considerable stability in the policy content of executive lawmaking agendas, the analysis also indicates that Australia's executive lawmaking agenda is more responsive to changes in prime minister than to changes in the party in power. As the first application of the comparative policy agendas approaches to government bills in Australia, this article offers new insights into executive lawmaking priorities during an especially turbulent period in Australian politics.     

The prehistory of Cyprus: Problems and prospects

The archaeological record of prehistoric Cyprus is rich, diverse, well-published, and frequently enigmatic. Regarded by many as a bridge between western Asia and the Aegean, Cyprus and its past are frequently seen from scholarly perspectives prevalent in one of those two cultural areas. Its material culture, however, differs radically from that of either area. Apart from the early colonization episodes on the island (perhaps three during the pre-Neolithic and Neolithic), evidence of foreign contact remains limited until the Bronze Age (post-2500 B. C.). This study seeks to present the prehistory of Cyprus from an indigenous perspective, and to examine a series of archaeological problems that foreground Cyprus within its eastern Mediterranean context. The study begins with an overview of time, place, and the nature of fieldwork on the island, continues with a presentation and discussion of several significant issues in Cypriot prehistory (e.g., insularity, colonization, subsistence, regionalism, interaction, social complexity, economic diversity), and concludes with a brief discussion of prospects for the archaeology of Cyprus up to and beyond 2000.     

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.