Book Reviews

Books reviewed:
M. Steiner (ed.), Clusters and Regional Specialisation. On Geography,Technology, and Networks
Denis J.B. Shaw, Russia in the Modern World. A New Geography
Ron Martin, Money and the Space Economy     

Geographies of Policing: Domestic Violence,Mandatory Arrest,and Police Liability

For most of United States history, the police did not intervene in domestic violence. To redress for this history, police departments began implementing mandatory arrest policies in the 1980s. These policies require police to arrest in cases of domestic violence when injuries are present, regardless of victim consent. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research conducted in central Pennsylvania, including participant observation in a domestic violence unit of a police department and interviews with police officers, this paper examines how mandatory arrest policies extend the spatial reach of the state into private space and intimate relationships. Specifically, I argue that the policing of domestic violence positions police officers as neoliberal subjects responsible for mediating abusive relationships on behalf of the state. This paper contributes to geographic research on policing in the private sphere, while also offering a detailed accounting of the mechanics of police practice.     

Frontiers’ violence: The interplay of state of exception,frontier habitus,and organized violence

As global capitalism is expanding to the most remote areas of the world, the notion of “frontier”, where competing social orders are contesting each other, is gaining traction in academic analyses. Contemporary frontiers are associated with resource exploitation in marginalized spaces and processes of socioecological transformation, which are characterized as particularly violent. This article offers a conceptual contribution to the frontier debate by putting violence in the center of a frontier concept. Building on a sociology of violence, this approach assumes that every social order comes with some form of organized violence. We argue that the frontier is characterized by a tidal passage: Existing orders and their institutions, which socially embed and constrain a particular use of violence, are challenged by an expansive order which comes along with new formations of violence, leading to a reorganization of violence. Thus the frontier describes a momentum in which the interplay of social order and organized violence becomes highly disputed. Representatives of the expansive order refuse to recognize existing orders and favour a state of exception, in which law is set aside to impose the new order.     

Dams,Diversions, and Development: Slow Resistance and Authoritarian Rule in the Salween River Basin

We engage geography's longstanding debate on what “counts” as resistance by introducing slow resistance to account for temporal-political strategies against unjust developments, particularly under authoritarian conditions. We draw on over a decade of fieldwork in the Salween River Basin where dams and diversions have been proposed since 1979, including the most recent iteration, the Yuam River water diversion project in Northwest Thailand. We find that resistance by impacted communities and civil society encompasses slow, strategic, and considered actions over time and generations. Such resistance is necessarily protracted to contest developments (re)proposed over decades. By foregrounding the strategic use of time and temporality, we highlight often overlooked actions and strategies of resistance by a diverse range of actors, showing how resistance movements are incremental and interconnected over time, even when “under the radar”. These strategies are key to contesting and (re)shaping the conditions of development in the Basin.     

Whose Streets? Roadway Protests and Weaponised Automobility

The article examines the role of automobility in US-based anti-racism demonstrations and counter-demonstrations. We contrast the spatial strategies of highway occupations by racial justice activists, with so-called “weaponised car” attacks by the American far right. Analysing online memes and anti-protest legislation, the article explores under-acknowledged links between “automobile supremacy”—the structure of motorists' privilege as embedded in law, the built environment and the popular imaginary—and the patterns of racial stratification often termed “white supremacy”. We document three ways in which automobility has been enlisted as means of violence against protestors and against wider Black communities in the US: through the use of vehicles, right-of-way conventions, and roadways as weapons. The article demonstrates how the imperative to make way for the motorist has long provided cover for racial injustice.     

Cogs in the Machine: The Experiences of Female Munitions Workers and Members of the Australian Women’s Land Army in South Australia, 1940–45

Mobilisation on the Australian ‘home front’ during the Second World War enabled some women to move temporarily into employment usually reserved for men, and to earn significantly higher wages than they were accustomed to, but the benefits of this have been often overstated. Focusing on South Australian women in the city and rural areas who took up the new working opportunities — in munitions factories and the Australian Women’s Land Army in particular — this article demonstrates that relatively few women were entitled to higher wages, such wages were lower and paid later in South Australia than in other states, and that working conditions were unattractive and often dangerous. At the war’s end, the social imperative to marry and raise children, coupled with demands that they give up their place for male workers, then saw many women return to domesticity or less-rewarded and lower status ‘female occupations’.     

Punishing wars of aggression: conceptualising Nazi State criminality and the US policy behind shaping the crime against peace, 1943-1945

This paper refocuses attention on what has been seen as one of the most important limbs of the Nuremberg Charter – the crime against peace, or aggressive war. It looks at the legal and political dimensions that motivated such a characterisation by figures behind the debate, and the various, at times uncertain steps, in bringing forth the designation based on breaches of the Kellogg–Briand Pact within the milieu of other traditional offences. Particular attention is given to the philosophical underpinnings of the crime against peace regarding individual German guilt, notably members of the Nazi leadership, with an examination of influences that proved critical in creating a punishable crime at international law. This paper argues that, despite being of continuing interest to civic groups, such an offence continues to trouble legislators and lawyers, rooted as it is in the focus on war as itself criminal.     

Gabrielle Lévy and the Roussy-Lévy syndrome

In 1934, Gabrielle Lévy died at the age of 48. She became well known for an article she published on a hereditary polyneuropathy in cooperation with Gustav Roussy, resulting in the eponym Roussy-Lévy syndrome. Not much is known about this extraordinary neurologist/neuropathologist. Her family declared that she died from the disease she was studying. She was a pupil of Pierre Marie, with whom she worked at the Salpêtrière in Paris and wrote on war neurology. In cooperation with Marie, she published a number of articles on postencephalitic syndromes, which also became the subject of her 1922 thesis. Three years later, she became associate physician at the Paul-Brousse Hospital in Paris, where the study of brain tumors became one of the subjects of her scientific work. Remarkably, Lévy was first author in a few of her many articles, although Roussy confirmed that she often initiated the study and even wrote the main part. In this article her career is considered in the context of the struggle of women physicians to improve their position during the early-twentieth century. She probably died from a brain tumor or a postencephalitic syndrome.     

Beauty,Bath and Beyond: Framing Bathsheba as a Royal Fantasy in 2 Sam 11,1-5

This paper investigates the function of beauty in David and Bathsheba’s encounter in 2 Sam 11,1-5. It argues that the female bather’s pleasant appearance, rather than simply kindling king David’s desire, focalizes the woman as sexually available (and vulnerable) and wraps the whole episode in a royal fantasy of shared intimacy. The focus on Bathsheba’s beautiful body—her wash, her motion towards the king, her self-sanctification and her pregnancy—frames the episode in a very erotic way, suggesting adultery. It conceals the sexual violence committed by the king who sends, takes and sleeps with the woman. David’s violent entitlement to Bathsheba reveals the beauty politics at play in his royal House.     

Moving stories: precarious work and multiple migrations

According to the United Nations over 3% of the global population or 232 million people currently live outside their country of birth. Their significance as a growing proportion of the labour force in many European countries is widely known. It is also evident that women – many of them young – are increasingly represented among economic migrants and asylum seekers. However, the longer term contribution of women, as migrants and as workers, is less well recorded. Here, I explore the connections between migration and employment, through the lens of oral histories undertaken with women who moved to the UK. Their life stories illustrate the growing diversity among female migrants as well as the changing nature of women’s employment. My key focus is, however, not on the work these women migrants undertook in the UK, but on precarious forms of waged work engaged in during the migration journey itself. I also reflect on oral history as a method and the problems of writing difference for feminist scholars working with and on women migrants.