Showing papers in "Territory, Politics, Governance in 2013"

Explaining (with) Neoliberalism

Abstract: The paper takes the form of a reflection on the explanatory status of neoliberalism, before and since the global crisis of 2008. Prior to the crisis, political-economic conceptions of neoliberalism as a hegemonic grid and as a relatively robust regime of state-facilitated market rule were being received with growing skepticism by some poststructural critics, while some ethnographers found the accompanying conceptual tools rather too blunt for their methodological purposes. The fact, however, that the global crisis—far from marking an inauspicious end to the regime of market rule—seems to have brought about something like a redoubling of its intensity and reach has prompted a reconsideration, in some quarters, of the explanatory and political status of neoliberalism. This, in turn, has opened up some new avenues of dialog between structural and poststructural treatments of neoliberalism, and between ethnographic and political-economic approaches, while at the same time highlighting a series of cont...

When Territory Deborders Territoriality

Abstract: The focus is on the misalignment between territory and the legal construct encasing the sovereign authority of the state over its territory—territoriality. The aim is to make visible that territory cannot be reduced to either national territory or state territory, and thereby to give the category territory a measure of conceptual autonomy from the nation-state. Beyond an intellectual project, this analysis seeks to enable a conceptual mobilizing of the category territory, here understood as a complex capability with embedded logics of power/empowerment and of claim making, some worthy and some more akin to power-grabs. Extracto La atencion se centra en el desfase entre el territorio y la construccion legal que encierra la autoridad territorial soberana del Estado, es decir, la territorialidad. La finalidad es hacer ver que el territorio no puede reducirse a un territorio nacional o territorio estatal, y de este modo otorgar a la categoria de territorio una medida de autonomia conceptual del estado-nacion....

How Should We Do the History of Territory

Abstract: This article approaches the question of territory, and its relation to politics and governance, from a historical perspective. The approach here is to interrogate the claims made by Foucault concerning territory in his work on governmentality. Foucault sees territory as crucial to the Middle Ages through to Machiavelli, but as displaced as the object of government by the emerging concept of population. In distinction, this piece argues that territory is not crucial to medieval determinations of rule, but actually emerges around the same time as Foucault's notion of population, making use of similar techniques of rule. The historical examples relate to the broader book The Birth of Territory. While what he says about territory directly is misleading, Foucault is, however, extremely helpful in thinking about these questions more generally, especially in terms of his historical approach. Thinking more deeply about the history of the emergence of the concept and practice of territory is helpful in understandi...

Territory, Politics, Governance

Abstract: Welcome to the first issue of this new journal from the Regional Studies Association. The intersection between the three words in the journal's name defines the central purpose of the journal: to p...

Territory, Scale, and Why Capitalism Matters

Abstract: A number of recent contributions have been critical of those theorizations of scale and territory that emerged in the last two decades. They have argued, variably, that a de-centered world of flows and networks, whether a recent phenomenon or something that is in the nature of space relations, trumps the assumptions of verticality, centricity and fixity that are, in their view, central to those theorizations. They define their view of space as relational in contrast to what they believe to be the non-relational view embedded in concepts of scale and territory. These critiques have been met, in turn, by a number of ripostes which argue, essentially, that there is no contradiction between relational views of space and the concepts of scale and territory. In both the critiques and the rebuttals, though, there is a curious refusal to seriously engage with concrete social relations; relations that make scale and territory and pace the rebuttals, necessary features of spatial organization rather than contingent...

Autocracy-Sustaining Versus Democratic Federalism: Explaining the Divergent Trajectories of Territorial Politics in Russia and Western Europe

Abstract: This article provides a comparative assessment of territorial politics in Russia and Western Europe. The consolidation or deepening of regional autonomy in Western Europe contrasts with the transformation of Russia from a segmented and highly centrifugal state into a centralized authoritarian state in the course of just two decades. The consolidation of territorial politics in Western Europe is linked to the presence of endogenous safeguards that are built into their territorial constitutional designs and most importantly to the dynamics that emanate from multi-level party competition in the context of a liberal and multi-level democracy. In contrast, in Russia, neither endogenous safeguards nor multi-level party democracy play an important role in explaining the dynamics of Russian federalism, but who controls key state resources instead. We argue that under Putin power dependencies between the Russian center and the regions are strongest where regional democracy is at its weakest, thus producing ‘autocr...

Resisting Federal–Local Immigration Enforcement Partnerships: Redefining ‘Secure Communities’ and Public Safety

Abstract: Constructing undocumented immigrants as a security threat has allowed the US government to justify extraordinary measures that have pushed immigration enforcement increasingly inward from the border to states, counties, municipalities, and sheriff and police departments. The Secure Communities program, which integrates federal criminal and immigration databases to identify and deport undocumented immigrants, represents only the latest attempt. Most of the academic literature on local immigration enforcement has elaborated on the diffuse, ubiquitous and often paralyzing nature of the biopolitical power of the state vis-a-vis undocumented immigrants. In contrast, in this article, we focus on the contestations that challenge and go beyond repressive state power. We conceive of these not simply as a reaction to state techniques of power, but as productive and affirmative power that promotes alternative imaginaries and institutional change. As the Obama administration has sought to roll out the program to ever...

Land for Peace in Nagorny Karabakh? Political Geographies and Public Attitudes Inside a Contested De Facto State

Abstract: Discussions of the territorial conflict over Nagorny Karabakh often fail to convey the multiple political geographies at play in the dispute. This paper outlines six distinct political geographies—territorial regimes and geographical imaginations—that are important in understanding Armenian perspectives on the conflict only (Azerbaijani perspectives are the subject of ongoing research). It presents the results of a 2011 social survey in Nagorny Karabakh that measures the extent of support these contending spatial visions have among local Armenian residents of the area. The survey finds widespread support for the territorial maximalist conceptions. These results underscore an important chasm between international diplomatic conceptions of Nagorny Karabakh and the everyday spatial attitudes and perceptions of residents in these disputed territories.

Exiles and Arms: The Territorial Practices of State Making and War Diffusion in Post–Cold War Africa

Abstract: The end of the Cold War resulted in a wave of political change among post-colonial states in Africa. Following these political transformations was nearly two decades of war in central Africa (the so-called Africa's World War). Building on a notion of effective sovereignty regimes, or the relationships between central state authority and state territoriality, this paper examines the territorial strategies and practices associated with the transitions to multiparty politics that enabled the space/time spread of war in the region. The attempts of existing regimes to create polities capable of returning them to power through elections gave rise to territorial practices focused on supporting exile and refugee groups that actively undermined the sovereignty of neighboring states. These territorial practices, with their roots in the democratization of single-party states, directly contributed to nearly two decades of war and human suffering in the region, while ending the wars required altogether new ter...

When Sector Meets Territory: The Case of European Union Wine Policy

Abstract: Studies of sectorial government seldom theorize its relationship to territory, i.e. to constructed, institutionalized but nevertheless contingent political spaces. This is particularly problematic in research on European integration—a process largely driven by the progressive institutionalization of sectors and its considerable reterritorializing effects. This article seeks to relaunch debate on sector-territory relations by proposing a constructivist and institutionalist approach to the ‘political work’ of sectorial and extra-sectorial actors. Territory impacts upon this work by being simultaneously a jurisdiction, a constituency for political representation and a stock of symbolic resources. This three-pronged definition is then applied to explain a recent reform of the European Union's wine policy that was 20 years in the making. Contrary to material determinist or organizational readings of this change, its causes are to be found in how actors strove to reinstitutionalize the European wine sec...

The Global Diffusion of Public Policy: Power Structures and Democratic Accountability

Abstract: The global diffusion of public policies is never just the conduct of rational agents looking for the best solutions that ‘work’, but is always embedded in political and institutional interests. Dominant models of policy diffusion tend to ignore the role of oligarchic wealth in policy diffusion. Oligarchic diffusion's defining feature is lack of democratic accountability. Mayor Michael Bloomberg's appropriation of the Mexican conditional cash transfer model for ending poverty undermined the political accountability of urban policy-making in New York City. Some of the prevailing diffusion models elide the historically specific political and institutional interests driving the diffusion of the neoliberal policy solutions now in global circulation. Oligarchic diffusion is a dominant mechanism implicit in the other typologies. Fortunately, elite-driven policy diffusion models are not the only game in town. More democratic modes of global policy diffusion exist and show promise of better things to come.

Manipulating Territories: British Political Parties and New Parliamentary Constituencies

Abstract: In 2011 the UK Parliament introduced a new set of rules and timetable for the redistribution of Parliamentary constituencies, which also included a new procedure for public consultation on the Boundary Commissions' proposals. The first redistribution under this new regime began in 2011, and an extensive series of Public Hearings and submission of written representations took place in late 2011 and early 2012. During the consultation, the political parties—as under the previous regimes—sought changes to the proposals that would better serve their electoral interests. This paper evaluates the extent to which their counter-proposals were able to achieve that end, given the reduced degrees of freedom provided by the new rules and other geographical constraints. At best, each party might have been able to change the number of seats it might win by about 10–12, out of 600.

Shifting the Territory of Politics

Abstract: I write this editorial introduction while in Hong Kong for a conference on ‘Asian urbanism’. There is perhaps no more interesting place on the map from which to consider the analytics of territory,...