Showing papers in "International Political Sociology in 2015"

The Humanitarian Politics of European Border Policing: Frontex and Border Police in Evros,

Abstract: This paper explores humanitarianism in the practice of Frontex-assisted Greek border police in Evros and of Frontex at their headquarters in Warsaw. Building on the increase in humanitarian justifications for border policing practices as well as the charges of a lack of humanity, the paper analyzes the relations between humanitarian responses and border policing where humanitarianism is used for framing and giving meaning to institutional and operational practices. In offering an interpretive view of border policing undertaken by people in their working lives across sites and scales, it builds on the critical literature addressing the multifaceted nature of border control in Europe today. At the same time, it speaks to wider debates about the double-sided nature of humanitarian governance concerned with care and control. It argues that while humanitarian motivations have implications for operations in the field and help to frame “good practice” at the policy level, humanitarianism should not be seen as additional or paradoxical to wider border policing operations within forms of governance developed to address the problems of population. Conflict arises in the paradox of protection between the subject of humanitarianism and policing, the population, and the object of border control, the territorially bounded state or regional unit.

Making Things Known: Epistemic Practices, the United Nations, and the Translation of Piracy

Abstract: How are international phenomena rendered knowable? By which means and practical devices is international knowledge generated? In this article, I draw on the case of contemporary maritime piracy to introduce a research framework that allows these questions to be addressed. Arguing that the practices of international knowledge generation are poorly understood, I show how concepts from science and technology studies provide the tools to study these practices empirically. Relying on the practice theory of Karin Knorr Cetina, I introduce the concepts of epistemic infrastructures, epistemic practice, and laboratories and demonstrate how they facilitate interesting insights on knowledge generation. I investigate three “archetypes” of epistemic practices in detail and show how these generate knowledge about piracy for the United Nations. The three archetypes are the quantification practices of the International Maritime Organization, the interpretation work of a monitoring group and the network of a special adviser. The article introduces an innovative agenda for studying knowledge generation in international relations by focusing on the practical epistemic infrastructures, which maintain knowledge about international phenomena.

“Resiliency Humanitarianism”: Responsibilizing Refugees through Humanitarian Emergency Governance in the Camp

Abstract: Scholarly interest in the camp has grown over recent years, inspired in part by Giorgio Agamben's (1995; Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life ) work. Scholarship in this area has built on Agamben's view of the camp as an abject space of exception and bare life but also, in reaction to this view, has theorized the camp as a political and social space which constitutes refugees and displaced persons as political subjects, active in demanding rights and social justice. Building on existing scholarship, this article draws attention to another important trend in the camp which has emerged alongside the growing activism of refugee populations, dissatisfied with their lack of rights and abject conditions. This is the trend of engaging refugees to become self-governing in the management of the camp, to think of the camp in terms of community development, with camp life providing the experiences through which refugees are to refashion themselves as resilient, entrepreneurial subjects. Our analysis examines this trend through the issue of humanitarian emergency governance of refugees and IDPs and within the context of reforms undertaken by the United Nations—specifically, through what we term “resiliency humanitarianism.” We use this term to suggest a particular rationale of care, camp coordination, and management which emerges within neoliberal government and which focuses on assisting refugees and IDPs to adapt to, and survive, crisis with the aim of responsibilizing them.

Enclosing Critique: The Limits of Ontological Security

Abstract: The concept of ontological security has received increased attention in the security studies literature over the past ten years. This article develops a critical perspective toward ontological security and its mobilization by IR scholars, arguing that substantive ethical and political resources are produced by resisting the terms of ontological security/insecurity. It argues that the aspiration to ontological security, to contiguous and stable narratives of selfhood, can (violently) obscure the ways in which such narratives are themselves implicated in power relations. Furthermore, it argues that attempts to order political life into an ontological/security episteme disciplines or marginalizes modes of subjectivity which resist the closure of ontological security-seeking strategies. The article engages queer figurations of subjectivity as mobilized by Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Jack Halberstam, as well as examples from anti-militarist social movements, to demonstrate traditions which refuse and resist the framework of ontological security. It does this both in order to highlight particular practices and strategies that are written out by an epistemology oriented around ontological security/insecurity, and to show how a resistance to such ordering can enliven political action in various ways.

Everyday Resilience as Resistance: Palestinian Women Practicing Sumud

Abstract: This article contributes a different approach to discussions of resilience and resistance by arguing that within the current literature, there is too little attention to how communities may engage in their own resilience building without outside intervention or interference. Further, this article will argue that the literature which poses resilience as fundamentally different from resistance overlooks the ways in which resilience can be seen as a tactic of resistance through the lens of infrapolitics. The article uses the Palestinian example of sumud to illustrate these two points. Sumud is a tactic of resistance to the Israeli occupation that relies upon adaptation to the difficulties of life under occupation, staying in the territories despite hardship, and asserting Palestinian culture and identity in response to Zionist claims which posit Israelis as the sole legitimate inhabitants of the land. Sumud represents a “resilient resistance”—a tactic of resistance that relies on qualities of resilience such as getting by and adapting to shock. Thinking about sumud as a form of resilient resistance challenges the resilience literature to engage with a greater variety of forms of resilience.

The Necropolitics of Drones

Abstract: The rapid increase in the use and capabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or “drones,” has led to debates on their place in US strategy, particularly their use in assassination missions, or so-called targeted killings. However, this debate has tended to focus narrowly on two questions: first, whether the US use of UAVs to assassinate its enemies, including US citizens, is legal, and second, whether drones should be given the autonomy to decide when to kill humans. This paper uses the concept of “necro-politics”—the arrogation of the sovereign's right both to command death and to assign grievable meaning to the dead—as it emerges in the work of Achille Mbembe to criticize the assumptions of these questions. It is argued that debates over endowing drones with the autonomy to kill humans assume that the current human operators of drones work outside of the context of racial distinction and colonial encounter in which they already make decisions to kill. The paper supports this argument with reference to the text of a US investigation into a strike which killed civilians in Uruzgan province, Afghanistan.

“Today, I Want to Speak Out the Truth”: Victim Agency, Responsibility, and Transitional Justice

Abstract: In this article, I am concerned with the political agency available to victims of wartime violence, and the subsequent insights it generates for thinking about complicity and responsibility. The article first considers the problematic ways in which victims are cast in the discipline of transitional justice, drawing on interdisciplinary studies of gender, agency, and wartime violence. I conceptualize the political as relational and situated within a web of human relationships that make life meaningful. Political agency includes acts, gestures, and words that negotiate the value of human life within various relationships. To illustrate, I turn to the life story of Sara, a young woman who grew up in the context of prolonged conflict in northern Uganda. I conclude with thinking about how Sara's acts of political agency move us beyond static categories of victims in transitional justice, and conceive of responsibility as diffuse and socially held.

Ubuntu: Toward an Emancipatory Cosmopolitanism?

Abstract: This paper seeks to contribute to the growing body of critical scholarship that extends cosmopolitanism beyond its Kantian conceptions in International Relations (IR). It examines the promise of the ubuntu philosophy which is popular in South Africa and asks whether it can lead to what Pieterse (Development and Change, 37, 2006, 1247) calls “emancipatory cosmopolitanism.” Using Wiredu's (1996) “sympathetic impartiality,” the paper explores insights from this indigenous ubuntu philosophy to critique dominant conceptions of cosmopolitan thought in IR.

Ethnography, Commitment, and Critique: Departing from Activist Scholarship

Abstract: This article addresses the vexed question of relations between critique and political struggle. As emphasis upon the “impact” of research increases, possibilities of integrating research into practices of resistance have been highlighted. Such approaches lend themselves to ethnographic methods, with scholars engaged in these ways offering nuanced reflections on possibilities of “bridging gaps” between research and solidarity. Here, however, I draw on over a decade of “activist” ethnography to highlight risks of conceptual enclosure associated with this move. The politics of struggle are quickly erased through available categories and problematics, which are readily absorbed into existing constellations of power. By contrast, the gaps between solidarity and writing provide spaces for emergence of a critical attitude—along lines sketched by Foucault. Nevertheless, to “apply” Foucault to this sort of ethnography carries a risk of betrayal. Foucault's critical ethos can be neither starting point nor end of engagement with actually existing struggles. Inspired by the philosophical tradition in which Foucault's work was rooted, I advocate a practice that gives weight to ontologies emerging from struggle as conjectures perpetually in question. This implies not closing gaps but a persistent back-and-forth between critique and commitment—risking ourselves as subjects at both ends.

Drones, Targeted Killings, and the Limitations of International Law

Abstract: The debate about drones has largely taken place on a legal terrain with various politicians, lawyers, and activists all seeking to establish whether or not targeted killings are legal under the existing framework of international law. In particular, they have raised concerns about the geographical and temporal scope of the “war on terror,” the legal status of those being targeted and whether or not these strikes can be considered discriminate, proportionate, and necessary. The aim of this article is not to settle these legal questions once and for all but to think about the limitations of framing the use of drones as a legal issue rather than an ethical, moral, or political concern. I will argue that the emphasis on international law distracts attention away from the horrors of war by masking the pain and suffering that is caused in favor of technical debates about the application of particular legal codes. Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Adriana Cavarero, and Elaine Scarry, I will argue that we need to turn our attention back to the embodied experiences of those affected.

Revisiting Bordering Practices: Irregular Migration, Borders, and Citizenship in Malaysia

Abstract: Through a detailed case study of immigration policies in Malaysia, this article examines processes of bordering in a country where physical borders do not seem to play a pivotal role. It describes how, in Malaysia, immigration policies neither focus on border control nor pose strict limits on immigrants' entry but rather seek to curtail immigrants' presence once in the country. The analysis of this “securitization from within” allows us to make three interconnected arguments. First, no border control does not mean no immigration control. Second, confines or internal borders play a decisive role in the construction and preservation of a cheap, flexible labor force. However, despite the disproportionate power of the Malaysian executive, these confines are systematically challenged by immigrants' everyday practices either by resorting to illegality or by reentering the country after deportation. Thus, when the contours of legality are very narrow, illegality does not necessarily mean a more subordinated form of existence but rather a way to resist state control. Third, both foreigners and citizens can be deprived of their most basic rights. In this regard, the conventional wisdom that citizenship draws a clearly defined line of exclusion/inclusion proves to be wrong in the case of Malaysia.

Violence and Political Myth: Radicalizing Believers in the Pages of Inspire Magazine

Abstract: Violent Jihadist movements have increasingly produced online English language magazines in order to encourage young Muslims into terrorism. This article argues that sociological approaches to the study of these magazines should engage with theories of political myth, understood as the collective “work” on dramatic and figurative narratives which provide significance to the political conditions of social groups. The utility of this approach is demonstrated through an analysis of al-Qaeda's online magazine, Inspire. Targeted toward an alienated young Western Muslim readership, Inspire stylistically mimics Western magazines by using satirical representations of politicians and making references to popular culture. The authors seek to convince their readership that they are part of a violent conflict with Western “crusaders” and treacherous false Muslims. Through a rhetorical strategy of “legitimization via proximization,” perceived injustices committed by the purported enemies of Islam throughout the world are seen as direct attacks on the reader and all Muslims. The reader must sacrifice his/her livelihood in order to become a “hero” and defend the Umma against its enemies. The article concludes that the mobilizing potential of the work on myth in these magazines necessitates further research.

Humor at the Airport? Visualization, Exposure, and Laughter in the "War on Terror"

Abstract: With the emergence of aviation as a target for terrorism and serious crime in the 1970s, the affective dimension of airport security changed drastically and is now carefully engineered as a zone of earnest and solemn protocol. Against a backdrop of bombings and hijackings, airport security today enacts a “no bullshit” approach to the “war on terror.” Humor has essentially been banned from screening operations. From signs reading “No bomb jokes, please,” to drastic consequences in the case of non-compliance, security appears as something that is not to be fooled around with. Against this background, this paper builds on ethnographic fieldwork at Hamburg airport during the German trial run with body scanners in 2011. During the time of observation, we found a surprising amount of reciprocal laughter and joking. We argue that this can be conceptualized as an attempt to break open a space for laughter, momentarily abandoning protocol in order to deal with issues of visualization, exposure, and shame which arise from the new focus on the fleshly anatomical body.

(In)visible Ghosts in the Machine and the Powers that Bind: The Relational Securitization of Anonymous

Abstract: This paper analyzes the formation and subsequent securitization of the digital protest movement Anonymous, highlighting the emergence of social antagonists from communication itself. In contrast to existing approaches that implicitly or explicitly conceptualize Othering (and securitization) as unidirectional process between (active) sender and (passive) receiver, an approach that is based on communication gives the “threat” a voice of its own. The concept proposed in this paper focuses on “designations” as communicating rules and attributes with regard to a government object. It delineates how designations give rise to the visibility of political entities and agency in the first place. Applying this framework, we can better understand the movement's path from a bunch of anonymous individuals to the collectivity “Anonymous,” posing a threat to certain bases of the state's ontological existence, its prerogative to secrecy, and challenging its claim to unrestrained surveillance. At the same time, the state's bases are implicated and reproduced in the way this conflict is constructed. The conflict not only (re)produces and makes visible “the state” as a social entity, but also changes or at least challenges the self-same entity's agency and legitimacy. Such a relational approach allows insights into conflict formation as dynamic social process.

Urban Atmospheres: Feeling Like a City?

Abstract: What might thinking about atmospheres add to our understandings of politics? How might this provocation open up other characters, venues, objects, and purposes in the study of politics (Magnusson 2011:1)? In The Politics of Urbanism (2011), Warren Magnusson invites us to challenge our accounts of politics by seeing like a city In doing so, he claims that we are more likely to be able to see a multiplicity of political authorities and political spaces, which in turn complicate a sovereign and statist account of politics (Magnusson 2011:4) But what happens when we shift or expand the emphasis from acts of seeing to acts of feeling , to follow the ways in which bodies are affected by senses, chemicals, rhythms, and sounds—aligning some people with others and against other others (Ahmed 2004)? The concept of atmospheres encourages us to think about the ways in which moods, ambiance, and feelings play an important role in political life A political moment or movement is often experienced as a “structure of feeling” (Williams 1977) or “moody force field” (Amin and Thrift 2013:161) before it can be explained as (and reduced to) a rational, conscious decision (Anderson 2009) I will point to three ways in which thinking about atmospheres challenges and expands our studies of politics by drawing on a literary text—specifically, a novel by Hanif Kureishi called The Black Album (1995) Literary texts intervene in this question of what counts as politics by questioning the “carving up of space and time, the visible and invisible, speech and noise” (Shapiro 2010; Ranciere 2011:4) Working with a novel thus …

When borders lie within: ethnic marriages and illegality on the Sino - Vietnamese border

Abstract: This article examines the changing geopolitical realities which have redefined the nature of sovereign governance on the Sino-Vietnamese border. The binary forms of classification in a rigidly and clearly delimited Sino-Vietnamese borderland replace the ambiguous space of “zomia,” with its fluid and overlapping identifications. This dynamic context sets the conditions for local communities and their long-standing tradition of ethnic marriages straddling the borders of China and its neighboring states. In order to understand how, and why, the status of previously accepted forms of undocumented ethnic marriage has recently changed from “common” ( shishi ) to “illegal” ( feifa ) in two ethnic Yao villages, I look at various factors. These include how state discourses on marriage migration in Asia, biopolitical concerns about population security in China, and regional iterations of the global anti-human trafficking campaign, come into play in forceful ways to shape the geopolitical regime of the Sino-Vietnamese borderland and redefine the terms of legitimate practices, thus reconfiguring ethnic marriages as illegal.

Katechontic Sovereignty: Security Politics and the Overcoming of Time

Abstract: At its core, security is obsessed with the survival of the sovereign order. Security tends to see the sovereign's existence as threatened by agents whose purpose is to challenge the life of the sovereign. In this article, I mobilize a theological language about the relationship between sovereignty and security to grasp the place that the question of life versus death, the fact of sovereign violence, and the problem of temporality occupy in past and present modalities of security. The notion of sovereign restraint, captured by the theological concept of katechon, is introduced to suggest that the politics of security is dependent upon a fundamentally violent, uncompromising, and often terrorizing objective: to keep at bay forces of temporal finitude seen as disorder or chaos. Forces of temporal finitude that refuse to abide by the belief in the sovereign's infinity can be described as the eschaton or as agents of eschatological time. Katechontic sovereignty, the sovereign practice intent on holding off finite ends (and on casting away agents of eschatological “terror”), is generative of security operations that involve decisions over life and death, matters of biopolitics versus necropolitics, and encounters between the ontological vulnerability of the sovereign and “terrorizing” agents.

Africa and the Theoretical Peace in IR

Abstract: This article responds to the debate on “The End of IR Theory?” that appeared in a recent volume of the European Journal of International Relations. It argues that the pronouncements about “theoretical peace” carry the subtext of “epistemic violence,” foreclosing the debate and the possibility of theoretic interventions emerging from the non-West—in this case, Africa. Elucidating how IR theory (IRT) has remained a parochial enterprise by the deliberate silencing of Africa, the article then finds pathways by which Africa can contribute to IRT. Using the metaphor of storytelling, it lists eight different ways in which Africa can tell new stories in IR.

Militarism in Environmental Disguise: The Greenwashing of an Overseas Military Base

Abstract: What is the relationship between militarized landscapes, especially overseas military bases, and the natural environment? Scholars have noticed that militarized spaces—permanent bases, demilitarized zones, live fire ranges, training areas, historical battlefields and so forth—are often accompanied by de facto nature reserves. Thus, the unparalleled seclusion that militarization imposes upon delineated geographic spaces can create safe havens for plants and animals that would otherwise suffer from human encroachment. Others retort that military activities cause severe damage to the natural environment. In this article, I problematize attempts to evaluate the environmental impact of militarized spaces in a way that divorces the natural environment from the broader web of social and political relations to which military activities belong. In particular, I argue that environmental issues often serve as “greenwash” to distract attention—lay, scholarly, and official—from the negative aspects of militarism, including instances of environmental degradation, the mistreatment of human subjects, and the perpetuation of colonial forms of government. To illustrate and buttress my argument, I present a detailed case study of the US military base on Diego Garcia in the British Indian Ocean Territory.

Hot spots/cold spots: Infrastructural politics in the Urban age

Abstract: Tracing the political stakes of contemporary global urbanization requires a shift in focus from cities to infrastructure. Focusing on the dynamics of infrastructural urbanism gives a clearer understanding of the ontology and politics of the global urban than analyses focused on the city (for example, Magnusson 2011). This reorientation reveals a political dynamic of (dis)connection at the heart of global urbanization. This dynamic is exemplified by the hot and cold spots of global urbanization where infrastructural connectivity is at stake. Brenner and Schmid (2014:744) note that current understandings of the “urban age” conceptualize “urbanization primarily or exclusively with reference to the concentration of population within cities or urban settlements.” This is perhaps best exemplified by those who see the politics of the global urban in terms of the relocation of the locus of political authority from the state to the city (for example, Sassen 2010). Such accounts of the politics of the urban age are often focused on the growth of centers of population density and the questions of governance raised by the attendant intensification of flows of money, people, and goods. However, infrastructures de-center the city, leading to polycentric urban agglomerations. A focus on infrastructures thus leads us to think about the urban beyond the constraints of the city. Infrastructure is “the connective tissue that knits people, places, social institutions and the natural environment into coherent urban relations” (Graham and Marvin 2001:43). Infrastructure articulates heterogeneous subjects and spaces together, creating polycentric, plural agglomerations often imagined as grid-like networks composed of lines of transmission intersecting at …

Security and Surveillance in Virtual Worlds: Who Is Watching the Warlocks and Why?†

Abstract: Virtual worlds, persistent online spaces of social interaction and emergent gameplay, have hitherto been neglected in International Studies. Documents disclosed by Edward Snowden in December 2013 suggest that intelligence agencies, including the US National Security Agency and the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), have been less reticent in exploring and exploiting these environments for signals and human intelligence. This article introduces virtual worlds as sociological sites in the matrix of international politics and explores how the intelligence community (IC) has conducted operations in these environments, principally for counterterrorism purposes. Reconstructing the activities of the IC shows how virtual worlds have been drawn into the ambit of state surveillance practices, particularly as a means to generate intelligence from virtual-world behaviors that correlate with, and predict, “real-world” behaviors indicative of terrorism and other subversive activities. These intelligence activities portend a general colonization by the state of previously unregulated interstices of the sociotechnical Internet and their analysis contributes to our understanding of the relationship between government and the Internet in the early twenty-first century.

Slum Tours as Politics: Global Urbanism and Representations of Poverty

Abstract: In this comment piece on global urbanism, I draw together the politics of representation and the politics of poverty by considering how representations of slums have multiple and varied effects, both entrenching and contesting dominant ideas of urbanism The Third World megacity has become the icon of underdevelopment, the shorthand for the dysfunction and its alchemic energy, and the recognizable frame through which cities in the global south are recognized and their differences are located and mapped (Rao 2006; Roy 2011a) I will interrogate what this image does to how we understand poverty in the global south by using slum tours as my object of analysis Engaging the growing popularity of slum tours globally, I question whether it is possible to construct a new politics of solidarity or whether these tours simply engage in what has been called an “aestheticization of poverty” (Roy 2003) In urban studies, debates around global urbanism have raised the problematic division between cities in the developing and developed worlds First World cities often set the agenda for urban studies and theory, while those in the global south continue to be viewed as megacities, analyzed through the lens of developmentalism as sites of poverty and underdevelopment and as peripheral to the global economy (Robinson 2002) There are many ways in which this dichotomy is produced and reproduced, representation being one of them Roy (2003:289), drawing on Spivak, argues that to talk about cities, development, and urban …

Ambiguous Subjectivity, Irregular Citizenship: From Inside/Outside to Being-Caught In-between

Abstract: This paper reflects on the recent development of new and innovative ways of thinking about political subjectivity in international politics as flexible and contingent, by specifically considering ambiguity (in-between-ness) as an important, yet under-theorized, aspect of how political subjectivity is experienced in this way. It does so by focusing on the question of irregular citizenship, where people get caught between citizenship and migration. Focusing on the constant question mark around citizenship and around the alternative of being a migrant in the everyday life of certain people in the US and in Europe, this paper unpacks how ambiguity is constitutive of political identity and belonging. It argues that Julia Kristeva?s notion of ?foreigness? offers a useful way of understanding such experiences of Being which escape both citizenship and migration: by showing how such experiences escape through embodiment in stylistic emotions (for example, music, friendship, family ties).

The Biopolitics of Statistics and Census in Palestine

Abstract: This article addresses the importance of statistics for governing populations in the context of Palestine. On the basis of Michel Foucault's understanding of governmentality, I argue that social statistics represent crucial biopolitical technologies of governmentality. While statistical knowledge as a modern phenomenon originated in Western Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the case of Palestine clearly shows the importance of modern statistics beyond the OECD world. In a first step, I will elaborate on the emergence of social statistics as modern phenomena for governing populations. In this regard, the “discovery of the population” represents a fundamental prerequisite for the “birth of modern statistics” and the systematic utilization of statistical data for governing purposes. On this basis, I will argue social statistics are of crucial importance for governing the daily lives of the Palestinian population. Moreover, I will present the emergence of Palestinian statistics as a global phenomenon. It will become evident that social statistics and inferred demographic politics are essential for the sustainment of societal order in Palestine. This is particularly so regarding related inclusionary and exclusionary dynamics—namely Palestinian nation-building on the one hand and the Palestinian–Israeli demographic contestation on the other.

Blurring the Pipeline: Energizing an Account of the Urban

Abstract: This paper explores an energy development proposal that faces vibrant political resistance today. The proposal is Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline, one of several schemes to transport bitumen from the vast tar sands in Alberta, Canada, to tidewater. Although the Gateway proposal has attracted less international attention than projects such as Keystone XL, which would connect Alberta to the Gulf of Mexico, this proposal is equally controversial and of critical concern for international political sociology not least because it is generating conflict between Canada and various First Nations that claim international status. In many respects the controversy illustrates the difference between “seeing like a state” (Scott 1998), as Enbridge and its supporters do, and seeing otherwise, as certain First Nations and other opponents do. Whether this seeing otherwise amounts to “seeing like a city” in Magnusson's (2011) sense is the issue explored here. The proposed pipeline would cut across “wilderness” rather than farmland, and it would terminate in a small place (Kitimat BC) that most people would call a town, rather than a city. The First Nations territories at stake are lightly populated for the most part, and they seem like the opposite of urban. So, how could “seeing like a city” be relevant in this case? I want to argue that it is deeply relevant, but for reasons that may not be apparent at first. From Enbridge's perspective, the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline would run from one province of Canada (Alberta) to another (British Columbia). However, this line would actually cut across the unceded territories of many First Nations, traveling 1,777 km from the inland boreal forest through two mountain ranges to the Pacific coast, where diluted bitumen would be loaded into tankers and shipped to offshore markets. Enbridge claims that its project is “rational and respectful” and it represents …

Begin Again, Return Again: The Transition Narratives and Political Continuities of Global Urbanization

Abstract: Modern urbanization has been commonly understood as a localized transition of rural to urban populations within the space of a state. This transition narrative works in conjunction with other boundaries of modern progress, such as nature/culture, or savage/civilized. Contemporary analyses of the complex processes of global urban restructuring argue that these boundaries of modernity are increasingly irrelevant. Much of this work characterizes the emergent global urban condition as a political transformation that threatens to make irrelevant modern state sovereignty and the international system of states. Yet these claims of transformations in urbanization and in politics repeat the linear transition narratives of modern politics. An analysis of urbanization in my small Canadian city offers an example of how sovereignty is continually reinscribed through such transition narratives. Understanding this pattern of progress and return as the characteristic dynamic of aporetic boundary practices opens an innovative methodological approach to analyzing the continuities and discontinuities of contemporary politics. Politically oriented urban studies tend to focus on sites that evoke global urbanization as a challenge to state authority, such as megacities, transnational movements, and slums, and on locations in the Global South that challenge the colonial violence of Western sovereign politics (Roy 2009; Robinson 2013). Kelowna, BC, where I live, is the sort of place that escapes this critical attention: just another small, prosperous, predominantly white city, comfortably located within a stable Western state. Dominant accounts of Kelowna's urbanization repeat the modern narrative of a transition from rural community to mid-sized city, yet Kelowna increasingly operates within contemporary neoliberal models of “place-making” as a global competitive strategy. This is not to say that contemporary urbanization has transformed Kelowna …

Bringing Politics Back In

Abstract: Although the social sciences circle about the political, and scholars in the humanities keep gesturing at it, the thing itself remains obscure. It is the silent center of endless academic debate, always already known, yet never quite revealed. A common move is to redescribe it in other terms, such as the ones from military strategy that inform “realist” IR theory, or the moral and legal principles that underpin cosmopolitan ideals. To think of the political in sociological, economic, cultural, geographic, historical, or even scientific terms involves a similarly alienating move, which obscures the original object of study and hides the alienating procedure. If we want to understand politics, we have to address it directly, but that is hard to do when we have largely deprived ourselves of the means of thinking politically. How can we think about this thing that is so central, that pulls us in and envelops us, and yet has this mysterious character that repels understanding? Is politics, like the Kantian noumenon , unknowable in principle? Or, is that apparent unknowability a false problem? Are we bound, as Kant might have imagined, to think politically in a particular way if we are to operate in the world? The conventional view is that we are bound, because politics is a response to the problem of government. That leads us directly to the state. Although we should certainly go there, we should not linger too long. The state gives us an appealing but misleading conception of politics. It is more helpful …