Showing papers by "John Agnew published in 2003"

Agnew, J.A. 1987: Place and Politics: the geographical mediation of state and society

Abstract: Fifteen years have now passed since the publication of John Agnew’s landmark book, Place and politics, in 1987. The world and its political geography are far different places today than was the case when the book was written (Ó Tuathail and Shelley, 2003). What does Place and politics have to say to those of us who live on the other side of what Peter Taylor has called the ‘long 1989’? To address this question, recall Agnew’s purpose in writing Place and politics. Pointing out that previous efforts to explain aggregate political behaviour ‘are sought in categories and concepts that relate all social cleavages to the level of the state’, Agnew stated that ‘The central premise is that territorial states are made out of places’ (p. 1). He went on to point out that ‘the social bases of response and resistance to [state] institutions are best viewed in terms of the histories of places’ (p. 1). Agnew’s premise that ‘territorial states are made out of places’ is no less true today than it was when the book was written 15 years ago, but the events of the late 1980s, the 1990s and the early twenty-first century have resulted in a fundamental reconceptualization of what ‘place’ is. How have the definition and meaning of place, and the relationship of place to the territorial state, changed over the past 15 years? The end of the cold war resulted in fundamental changes in the world political map. New states arose and others disappeared. Conflicts in many parts of the world in the 1990s revolved around tension between territorially defined states and place-based national and ethnic groups. The end of the cold war also contributed to dramatic increases in international trade and globalization. The volume of multilocational production, distribution and corporate activity rose substantially. Movement of people, goods, services and ideas across boundaries became easier, and volumes of cross-border spatial interaction increased dramatically. The 1990s also witnessed the explosive growth of the internet, which greatly facilitated global communication and affected relationships between people, places and territorial states. Accordingly, boundaries between states have come to be conceptualized less literally and with more fluidity; the presence of a border affects local and regional conditions on both sides in varying ways (Bean and Shelley, 2004). These developments force us to reconsider what a place is. For Agnew, place is a setting for interaction, but this setting must be located: in his words, ‘place is not just locale, as setting for activity or social interaction, but also location. The reproduction and transformation of social relations must take place somewhere’ (p. 27, italics in original). For Agnew, there are three elements of place: locale, or place as setting for Progress in Human Geography 27,5 (2003) pp. 605–614

The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question

Abstract: Nelson Moe. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. xv and 349 pp., plates, notes, biblio., and index. $50.00 cloth (ISBN 0-520-22652-6). Giovanni Verga, often described as the greatest...