Veit Bachmann

Bio: Veit Bachmann is an academic researcher from Goethe University Frankfurt. The author has contributed to research in topics: European union & Geopolitics. The author has an hindex of 11, co-authored 37 publications receiving 348 citations. Previous affiliations of Veit Bachmann include University of Plymouth & University of Bonn.

Mapping the political geographies of Europeanization National discourses, external perceptions and the question of popular culture

Abstract: Political geographers have significantly contributed to understandings of the spatialities of Europeanization. We review some of this work, while also highlighting research themes where further political-geographic research would be insightful. We note the importance of work that captures both the diverse expressions and meanings attributed to Europe, European integration and ‘European power’ in different places within and beyond the EU, and the variegated manifestations of ‘Europeanizing’ processes across these different spaces. We also suggest that political-geographic research can add crucial input to reconceptualizing European integration as well as Europeanization as it now unfolds in a time of ‘crisis’.

Zivilmacht Europa: a critical geopolitics of the European Union as a global power

Abstract: The EU's global role is the focus of much media, political and scholarly commentary. This paper explores how ideas associated with the term ‘civilian power’ became an enduring geopolitical conception for an integrated Europe as a significant global actor. It traces their evolution from the early 1970s, whereby in 1972 Francois Duchene (Anglo-Swiss scholar, journalist and advisor to Jean Monnet) introduced a vision of the European Community as a civilian power, just before the first enlargement of the Community and at a moment of geopolitical and geoeconomic turbulence associated with a sense of faltering American hegemony. Narratives about civilian power have subsequently been reworked and revitalised in the context of further European Union enlargement and challenges from American neo-conservatism. In these contexts, this paper critically scrutinises the range of meanings associated with civilian power and their relations to other claims and visions of what it means to be a great power.

African regional integration and European involvement: external agents in the East African Community

Abstract: The EU's role as a model for regional integration is widely discussed in scholarship and policy circles. The promotion of regional integration is central to the EU's external relations and is frequently expected by the EU's partners. This paper examines European involvement with the East African Community (EAC). It questions the promotion and adoption of the European model and critically examines how the discourse of regionalisation relates to motivations and dynamics. On the European part, the promotion of regional integration is part of the EU's notion of a geopolitical mission based on the objective of aligning internal and external policy agendas. African elites, on the other hand, frequently view ‘integration’ as a way of mobilising resources and asserting state sovereignty.

Participating and observing: positionality and fieldwork relations during Kenya's post-election crisis

Abstract: Changes in the research environment during the conduct of ethnographic-style fieldwork often have a profound impact on the role of the researcher, her/his approach to the process of data acquisition as well as on the relations with the researched and the research environment. This paper deals with those implications in the context of a research project on EU development policy during the Kenyan post-election crisis in early 2008. It highlights how they can pose considerable challenges but also open up new spaces and modes of inquiry. In so doing, this paper addresses issues of researcher positionality and illustrates how such unexpected changes often require (re)negotiating the balance between multiple roles in the ‘field’. I discuss how the Kenyan crisis impacted on the embodiment of the two roles as researcher and practitioner and on researcher/researched relations. Furthermore, the paper shows how the practitioner role largely mediated the effects of the Kenyan crisis on the conduct of fieldwork and thus enriched the research methodologically, thematically and spatially. At the same time, this raised a number of ethical issues. Finally, the paper concludes by highlighting how the spatiality of fieldwork, and the social constellations embedded in it, have significant impacts on such challenges and opportunities arising from unexpected changes in the research environment.

The Production of Space

Abstract: ‘The Production of Space’, in: Frans Jacobi, Imagine, Space Poetry, Copenhagen, 1996, unpaginated.

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Globalizing regional development: aglobal production networks perspective

Abstract: Recent literature concerning regional development has placed significant emphasis on local institutional structures and their capacity to ‘hold down’ the global. Conversely, work on inter-firm networks – such as the global commodity chain approach – has highlighted the significance of the organizational structures of global firms’ production systems and their relation to industrial upgrading. In this paper, drawing upon a global production networks perspective, we conceptualize the connections between ‘globalizing’ processes, as embodied in the production networks of transnational corporations, and regional development in specific territorial formations. We delimit the ‘strategic coupling’ of the global production networks of firms and regional economies which ultimately drives regional development through the processes of value creation, enhancement and capture. In doing so, we stress the multi-scalarity of the forces and processes underlying regional development, and thus do not privilege one particular geographical scale. By way of illustration, we introduce an example drawn from recent research into global production networks in East Asia and Europe. The example profiles the investments of car manufacturer BMW in Eastern Bavaria, Germany and Rayong, Thailand, and considers their implications for regional development.