Political parties with conventional memberships and hierarchical structures are under challenge a... more Political parties with conventional memberships and hierarchical structures are under challenge across electoral democracies from movements and candidates that claim they are "going to the people" directly for their support. Italy has been a laboratory for this populism even as the term itself is used more widely. The basic question of what the people are to whom populism refers has not received much, if any, empirical examination. After surveying usage of the term populism, three facets behind the rise of Italian populism since 1990 are examined using a geographic perspective. First, the geography of voter turnout and rising abstention is considered to be emblematic of dissatisfaction with existing parties and the expanding pool of nonvoters available for mobilization by populist movements and candidates. Second, the role of the leader as an alternative focal point to the party is shown to be central to such populist movements. Silvio Berlusconi is the primary actor in this account, although other similar figures are identified. Third and finally, the rise of the Internet-based 5 Star Movement and the promise of going to the people without any institutional or geographical mediation is assessed. The Movement's dual identity as having strong roots in some places as a civic organization and a remarkably uneven geography as a protest movement shows how much even it cannot engage with a singular people. When examined closely, the promise of politics without mediation made by populist movements proves beyond realization.
The word populism is increasingly capacious. At one time it referred specifically to political mo... more The word populism is increasingly capacious. At one time it referred specifically to political movements geared towards diminishing the political influence of economic elites and pushing for redistribution of incomes to "the people" at large. This was the meaning populism had in US politics at the turn of the twentieth century. This version was entirely left-wing in the sense of verging or overlapping with socialism, at least of the parliamentary or electoral varieties. This type of populism still has political mileage; witness the success of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 US Democratic Party presidential primaries and caucuses and of Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. Increasingly, however, particularly in Europe and North America, populism can be rightwing and overtly nationalist rather than leftist and weakly nationalist. It is fervently disruptive, looking to totalistic change in the status quo. The compromises and pork-barrel exchanges that typically make politics work across socially and geographically heterogeneous countries are decried as deceptive and corrupt. Dark conspiracies are posited in which the rhetorical vacuum of "There's something going on" can be filled in by listeners with whatever threat or fear of challenge or difference (immigrants, Jews, Moslems, the European Union, Chinese economic competition and so on) they choose. Oppositional demagoguery rather than much in the way of constructive policy proposals that could actually be followed once government were achieved tends to be the leitmotif of much contemporary populism, including the often central claim to be "overcoming" the historic distinction between left and right. Likewise, sense of loss more than potential for the future tends to be the overwhelming refrain; "taking back the country" rather than discussing what that might actually involve. The campaign in Britain to leave the European Union in 2016 had all of these features. Populism was its leitmotif.
Dos historias sobre la crisis de la Eurozona han dominado los relatos académicos y populares en l... more Dos historias sobre la crisis de la Eurozona han dominado los relatos académicos y populares en los últimos cinco años: 1) virtuosos países del norte de Europa frente a los derrochadores del sur, y 2) una mera extensión de la crisis bancaria de los años 2008-9 en el mercado de bonos de la Eurozona. Este artículo propone que la crisis económica es realmente una crisis geopolítica, que refleja la discordancia entre el modelo normativo de la Eurozona basado en la ideología alemana y la realidad de la heterogeneidad económica de la Eurozona.
El reciente colapso de la economía mundial nos recuerda cómo el mundo se ha convertido en rehén d... more El reciente colapso de la economía mundial nos recuerda cómo el mundo se ha convertido en rehén de una serie de agentes cuyas actividades raramente han formado parte de los debates sobre geopolítica mundial. Uno de los aspectos más controvertidos ha sido el papel de las Tres Grandes agencias de calificación crediticia, que utilizan su influencia en términos de posesión de información como medio para ejercer autoridad, no solo en términos de poder coercitivo en la economía mundial, sino también sobre la deuda soberana estatal. Ya no podemos pretender desde un punto de vista empírico que los Estados monopolizan la autoridad soberana sin asociar e involucrar a otros actores públicos y privados de varios tipos. La apropiación de tierras ya no constituye el centro de las relaciones geopolíticas, sino que está siendo reemplazada por el control sobre productos y flujos financieros.
El reciente colapso de la economía mundial nos recuerda cómo el mundo se ha convertido en rehén d... more El reciente colapso de la economía mundial nos recuerda cómo el mundo se ha convertido en rehén de una serie de agentes cuyas actividades raramente han formado parte de los debates sobre geopolítica mundial. Uno de los aspectos más controvertidos ha sido el papel de las Tres Grandes agencias de calificación crediticia, que utilizan su influencia en términos de posesión de información como medio para ejercer autoridad, no solo en términos de poder coercitivo en la economía mundial, sino también sobre la deuda soberana estatal. Ya no podemos pretender desde un punto de vista empírico que los Estados monopolizan la autoridad soberana sin asociar e involucrar a otros actores públicos y privados de varios tipos. La apropiación de tierras ya no constituye el centro de las relaciones geopolíticas, sino que está siendo reemplazada por el control sobre productos y flujos financieros.
John Agnew is one of the most prominent figures in political geography. He has contributed widely... more John Agnew is one of the most prominent figures in political geography. He has contributed widely to debates about the political economy of the state, the nature of the international, and theories of geopolitics. Within international political economy, John Agnew has worked on theories of development, geographies of the world economy, and regions of the United States in the world economy. He has longstanding research interests in the changing regional and urban geographies of Italy and in the relationship between human geography and sociology. The first of John Agnew's Hettner Lectures 2000 explores the origins and logic of precise national boundary delimitation in Europe. It is argued that from 1600 onwards national boundaries were necessary to define who was to be Europe's dominant agent on a world scale, and that the process of delineating rigid national boundaries still shapes current debates on Europeanness and the characteristics of statehood. In his second lecture, John Agnew provides a discussion of the philosophical perspectives on which the two main positions on the 'nature' of the international in contemporary political geography rely. He suggests an historical approach to geopolitics that endeavours to explicitly recognise the joint effects of geographical representations and the spatial distribution of material conditions on political practices
the growth came from massive development of Ireland as a tax-dodging haven for multinationals; th... more the growth came from massive development of Ireland as a tax-dodging haven for multinationals; the famous 12% corporation tax is but one of the many sophisticated devices used to keep foreign firms in Dublin and provide jobs to law and business graduates if to no-one else. Luxembourg is not the only small state with friendly 'tax rulings'. The authors doubt whether this is a sufficient base from which to grow a national economy. The concluding chapters are more directly political. Assessing the alternatives to FF, they rightly show that neither Labour nor Fine Gael (FG) has anything different to offer; FG won in 2011 because it was not FF. Its policies in coalition with Labour have been thoroughly austerian. The authors also dismiss any claim by Sinn Fein to offer a radical alternative. Although the party has added a radical socioeconomic discourse to its nationalist core, its real project remains similar to that of FFdevelopment of an indigenous capitalism with close ties to the state. Its record in Northern Irish governments is convincingly adduced as proof of its ultimate compatibility with market orthodoxy. The authors are reduced to hoping for the emergence of a strong social movement with its own political expression to counter the austerian orthodoxy-an Irish Syriza. Unfortunately their optimism about the emergence of such a force is the weakest part of the book, though you have to be an optimist in order to remain a Trotskyite. There is no real sign of an Irish Syriza, and we have yet to find out how the Greek original will deal with its electoral victory. For a guess, there will be much posturing, and the eventual outcome of the poker-game will be some debt relief/postponement in return for some more 'reforms'; the troika and Athens will play out a score-draw, where no one loses face, but nothing structural will change. Tsipras might claim to embody hope, but as Nietzsche remarked, hope is the worst sin. Meanwhile in Ireland, the grip of neo-liberal orthodoxy remains as tight as anywhere else. Reading this valuable and depressing book makes one realise how tight that grip is.
of tourism impacts and studies, and compared to the first edition of the book from 2000 they incl... more of tourism impacts and studies, and compared to the first edition of the book from 2000 they include several new interesting aspects. Especially, discussions related to tourism and poverty and tourism and global climate change are important and timely. The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), for example, has identifi ed both poverty reduction and climate change as major challenges to the tourism industry. Indeed tourism is seen as a powerful globalscale tool for poverty alleviation. However, in the current academic literature the industry’s contribution to poverty reduction is also debated and questioned (see Hall, 2007). One of the recent buzzwords in tourism studies is pro-poor tourism (PPT) which is defi ned in the book as ‘a tourism that generates net benefi ts for the poor’ (p. 138). These benefi ts may go beyond economic and include social, environmental and cultural issues. In this respect, PPT may not differ much from the other existing key words, such as ecotourism and sustainable tourism. However, according to Holden, PPT as tourism development and management approach should involve a strong emphasis on (1) poverty reduction in (2) developing countries while ecotourism, for example, can be linked also to various other kinds of goals and settings. Although Holden seems to give support to the idea of PPT and other related approaches, he also recognizes the potential danger of overemphasis of tourism as a means of poverty reduction. According to him, tourism alone should not be viewed as the last resort in rural poverty alleviation and local development strategies in developing countries. Problems of tourism with its environmental connections are well demonstrated in the book. The basic challenges arise from the nature of tourism itself and the scale of analysis. From a consumer side, tourism and especially mass tourism – which forms the majority of tourist fl ows – is a hedonistic pleasure activity in which environmental responsibility beyond an individual’s consumption and relaxation needs, etc, may be diffi cult to combine. From a destination perspective, the spaces of tourism are developed in order to satisfy the needs of non-local interests (ie, tourists and investors) which may differ and even confl ict with the needs and values of local people. In order to have tourism, the former is often emphasized over the latter. However, the relation of increasingly global tourism industry and local environs is not necessarily a zero sum game. This is emphasized in the chapter introducing the idea of sustainability in tourism. Sustainability is one of the key ideas in tourism geographies and tourism studies in general. It is also one of the most contested concepts among scholars. As Holden accurately argues, the present challenge with sustainable tourism is to see it as more than just a destination scale management issue, which leads to wider ethical considerations and discussion over the following chapter’s theme of climate change. All together, the book provides a good overview to the relationship between tourism and environment by exploring the ongoing complexity of this kaleidoscopic relation. The text is solid and highly readable and thus easy to recommend as an introductory text for tourism-environment courses on the undergraduate level.
Some accounts focus on the role of governmental systems in the management of the 2020-22 Coronavi... more Some accounts focus on the role of governmental systems in the management of the 2020-22 Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic. But studies with such an emphasis have typically taken second place to interpretations of outcomes in terms of cases and deaths based on cultural and demographic differences. In theory, federal systems would seem to have certain advantages in managing pandemics given the presumed ability to co-manage national challenges at the federal level (testing, vaccines, resources, etc.) with local differences in demography and behaviour at the state level. This paper argues that, in the case of the United States, its federal system was central to its failure in managing the pandemic. But rather than an indictment of federalism broadly construed, this was the result of a vision of federalism put into practice since the 1980s reflecting a strict division of powers between the states and the federal government. Rather than partners or collaborators with the federal government, the states became competitors with one another and with the federal government. This was the recipe for failure more than was federalism as such.
With the disappearance of the two largest political parties and the emergence of several new ones... more With the disappearance of the two largest political parties and the emergence of several new ones over the last decade, a new electoral map of Italy has emerged. We explore how these ongoing changes to party politics in Italy were manifest spatially between 1987 and 1996. In particular, the geographical aspects of party replacement are examined in central and northern Italy. First, the parties that have succeeded the Italian Communist Party (PCI) are examined in Tuscany, where the Italian left has historically enjoyed high levels of electoral support. Second, we look at how the regionalist Northern League has replaced the Christian Democratic Party (DC) in the Veneto. Exploratory spatial data analyses (ESDA), and in parti-cular, local indicators of spatial autocorrelation (LISA), indicate that the processes and patterns of replacement are more complex than the simple substitution of one party with another in both of these regions, and illustrate the need to frame geographically elec...
Political parties with conventional memberships and hierarchical structures are under challenge a... more Political parties with conventional memberships and hierarchical structures are under challenge across electoral democracies from movements and candidates that claim they are "going to the people" directly for their support. Italy has been a laboratory for this populism even as the term itself is used more widely. The basic question of what the people are to whom populism refers has not received much, if any, empirical examination. After surveying usage of the term populism, three facets behind the rise of Italian populism since 1990 are examined using a geographic perspective. First, the geography of voter turnout and rising abstention is considered to be emblematic of dissatisfaction with existing parties and the expanding pool of nonvoters available for mobilization by populist movements and candidates. Second, the role of the leader as an alternative focal point to the party is shown to be central to such populist movements. Silvio Berlusconi is the primary actor in this account, although other similar figures are identified. Third and finally, the rise of the Internet-based 5 Star Movement and the promise of going to the people without any institutional or geographical mediation is assessed. The Movement's dual identity as having strong roots in some places as a civic organization and a remarkably uneven geography as a protest movement shows how much even it cannot engage with a singular people. When examined closely, the promise of politics without mediation made by populist movements proves beyond realization.
The word populism is increasingly capacious. At one time it referred specifically to political mo... more The word populism is increasingly capacious. At one time it referred specifically to political movements geared towards diminishing the political influence of economic elites and pushing for redistribution of incomes to "the people" at large. This was the meaning populism had in US politics at the turn of the twentieth century. This version was entirely left-wing in the sense of verging or overlapping with socialism, at least of the parliamentary or electoral varieties. This type of populism still has political mileage; witness the success of Bernie Sanders in the 2016 US Democratic Party presidential primaries and caucuses and of Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. Increasingly, however, particularly in Europe and North America, populism can be rightwing and overtly nationalist rather than leftist and weakly nationalist. It is fervently disruptive, looking to totalistic change in the status quo. The compromises and pork-barrel exchanges that typically make politics work across socially and geographically heterogeneous countries are decried as deceptive and corrupt. Dark conspiracies are posited in which the rhetorical vacuum of "There's something going on" can be filled in by listeners with whatever threat or fear of challenge or difference (immigrants, Jews, Moslems, the European Union, Chinese economic competition and so on) they choose. Oppositional demagoguery rather than much in the way of constructive policy proposals that could actually be followed once government were achieved tends to be the leitmotif of much contemporary populism, including the often central claim to be "overcoming" the historic distinction between left and right. Likewise, sense of loss more than potential for the future tends to be the overwhelming refrain; "taking back the country" rather than discussing what that might actually involve. The campaign in Britain to leave the European Union in 2016 had all of these features. Populism was its leitmotif.
Dos historias sobre la crisis de la Eurozona han dominado los relatos académicos y populares en l... more Dos historias sobre la crisis de la Eurozona han dominado los relatos académicos y populares en los últimos cinco años: 1) virtuosos países del norte de Europa frente a los derrochadores del sur, y 2) una mera extensión de la crisis bancaria de los años 2008-9 en el mercado de bonos de la Eurozona. Este artículo propone que la crisis económica es realmente una crisis geopolítica, que refleja la discordancia entre el modelo normativo de la Eurozona basado en la ideología alemana y la realidad de la heterogeneidad económica de la Eurozona.
El reciente colapso de la economía mundial nos recuerda cómo el mundo se ha convertido en rehén d... more El reciente colapso de la economía mundial nos recuerda cómo el mundo se ha convertido en rehén de una serie de agentes cuyas actividades raramente han formado parte de los debates sobre geopolítica mundial. Uno de los aspectos más controvertidos ha sido el papel de las Tres Grandes agencias de calificación crediticia, que utilizan su influencia en términos de posesión de información como medio para ejercer autoridad, no solo en términos de poder coercitivo en la economía mundial, sino también sobre la deuda soberana estatal. Ya no podemos pretender desde un punto de vista empírico que los Estados monopolizan la autoridad soberana sin asociar e involucrar a otros actores públicos y privados de varios tipos. La apropiación de tierras ya no constituye el centro de las relaciones geopolíticas, sino que está siendo reemplazada por el control sobre productos y flujos financieros.
El reciente colapso de la economía mundial nos recuerda cómo el mundo se ha convertido en rehén d... more El reciente colapso de la economía mundial nos recuerda cómo el mundo se ha convertido en rehén de una serie de agentes cuyas actividades raramente han formado parte de los debates sobre geopolítica mundial. Uno de los aspectos más controvertidos ha sido el papel de las Tres Grandes agencias de calificación crediticia, que utilizan su influencia en términos de posesión de información como medio para ejercer autoridad, no solo en términos de poder coercitivo en la economía mundial, sino también sobre la deuda soberana estatal. Ya no podemos pretender desde un punto de vista empírico que los Estados monopolizan la autoridad soberana sin asociar e involucrar a otros actores públicos y privados de varios tipos. La apropiación de tierras ya no constituye el centro de las relaciones geopolíticas, sino que está siendo reemplazada por el control sobre productos y flujos financieros.
John Agnew is one of the most prominent figures in political geography. He has contributed widely... more John Agnew is one of the most prominent figures in political geography. He has contributed widely to debates about the political economy of the state, the nature of the international, and theories of geopolitics. Within international political economy, John Agnew has worked on theories of development, geographies of the world economy, and regions of the United States in the world economy. He has longstanding research interests in the changing regional and urban geographies of Italy and in the relationship between human geography and sociology. The first of John Agnew's Hettner Lectures 2000 explores the origins and logic of precise national boundary delimitation in Europe. It is argued that from 1600 onwards national boundaries were necessary to define who was to be Europe's dominant agent on a world scale, and that the process of delineating rigid national boundaries still shapes current debates on Europeanness and the characteristics of statehood. In his second lecture, John Agnew provides a discussion of the philosophical perspectives on which the two main positions on the 'nature' of the international in contemporary political geography rely. He suggests an historical approach to geopolitics that endeavours to explicitly recognise the joint effects of geographical representations and the spatial distribution of material conditions on political practices
the growth came from massive development of Ireland as a tax-dodging haven for multinationals; th... more the growth came from massive development of Ireland as a tax-dodging haven for multinationals; the famous 12% corporation tax is but one of the many sophisticated devices used to keep foreign firms in Dublin and provide jobs to law and business graduates if to no-one else. Luxembourg is not the only small state with friendly 'tax rulings'. The authors doubt whether this is a sufficient base from which to grow a national economy. The concluding chapters are more directly political. Assessing the alternatives to FF, they rightly show that neither Labour nor Fine Gael (FG) has anything different to offer; FG won in 2011 because it was not FF. Its policies in coalition with Labour have been thoroughly austerian. The authors also dismiss any claim by Sinn Fein to offer a radical alternative. Although the party has added a radical socioeconomic discourse to its nationalist core, its real project remains similar to that of FFdevelopment of an indigenous capitalism with close ties to the state. Its record in Northern Irish governments is convincingly adduced as proof of its ultimate compatibility with market orthodoxy. The authors are reduced to hoping for the emergence of a strong social movement with its own political expression to counter the austerian orthodoxy-an Irish Syriza. Unfortunately their optimism about the emergence of such a force is the weakest part of the book, though you have to be an optimist in order to remain a Trotskyite. There is no real sign of an Irish Syriza, and we have yet to find out how the Greek original will deal with its electoral victory. For a guess, there will be much posturing, and the eventual outcome of the poker-game will be some debt relief/postponement in return for some more 'reforms'; the troika and Athens will play out a score-draw, where no one loses face, but nothing structural will change. Tsipras might claim to embody hope, but as Nietzsche remarked, hope is the worst sin. Meanwhile in Ireland, the grip of neo-liberal orthodoxy remains as tight as anywhere else. Reading this valuable and depressing book makes one realise how tight that grip is.
of tourism impacts and studies, and compared to the first edition of the book from 2000 they incl... more of tourism impacts and studies, and compared to the first edition of the book from 2000 they include several new interesting aspects. Especially, discussions related to tourism and poverty and tourism and global climate change are important and timely. The United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), for example, has identifi ed both poverty reduction and climate change as major challenges to the tourism industry. Indeed tourism is seen as a powerful globalscale tool for poverty alleviation. However, in the current academic literature the industry’s contribution to poverty reduction is also debated and questioned (see Hall, 2007). One of the recent buzzwords in tourism studies is pro-poor tourism (PPT) which is defi ned in the book as ‘a tourism that generates net benefi ts for the poor’ (p. 138). These benefi ts may go beyond economic and include social, environmental and cultural issues. In this respect, PPT may not differ much from the other existing key words, such as ecotourism and sustainable tourism. However, according to Holden, PPT as tourism development and management approach should involve a strong emphasis on (1) poverty reduction in (2) developing countries while ecotourism, for example, can be linked also to various other kinds of goals and settings. Although Holden seems to give support to the idea of PPT and other related approaches, he also recognizes the potential danger of overemphasis of tourism as a means of poverty reduction. According to him, tourism alone should not be viewed as the last resort in rural poverty alleviation and local development strategies in developing countries. Problems of tourism with its environmental connections are well demonstrated in the book. The basic challenges arise from the nature of tourism itself and the scale of analysis. From a consumer side, tourism and especially mass tourism – which forms the majority of tourist fl ows – is a hedonistic pleasure activity in which environmental responsibility beyond an individual’s consumption and relaxation needs, etc, may be diffi cult to combine. From a destination perspective, the spaces of tourism are developed in order to satisfy the needs of non-local interests (ie, tourists and investors) which may differ and even confl ict with the needs and values of local people. In order to have tourism, the former is often emphasized over the latter. However, the relation of increasingly global tourism industry and local environs is not necessarily a zero sum game. This is emphasized in the chapter introducing the idea of sustainability in tourism. Sustainability is one of the key ideas in tourism geographies and tourism studies in general. It is also one of the most contested concepts among scholars. As Holden accurately argues, the present challenge with sustainable tourism is to see it as more than just a destination scale management issue, which leads to wider ethical considerations and discussion over the following chapter’s theme of climate change. All together, the book provides a good overview to the relationship between tourism and environment by exploring the ongoing complexity of this kaleidoscopic relation. The text is solid and highly readable and thus easy to recommend as an introductory text for tourism-environment courses on the undergraduate level.
Some accounts focus on the role of governmental systems in the management of the 2020-22 Coronavi... more Some accounts focus on the role of governmental systems in the management of the 2020-22 Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic. But studies with such an emphasis have typically taken second place to interpretations of outcomes in terms of cases and deaths based on cultural and demographic differences. In theory, federal systems would seem to have certain advantages in managing pandemics given the presumed ability to co-manage national challenges at the federal level (testing, vaccines, resources, etc.) with local differences in demography and behaviour at the state level. This paper argues that, in the case of the United States, its federal system was central to its failure in managing the pandemic. But rather than an indictment of federalism broadly construed, this was the result of a vision of federalism put into practice since the 1980s reflecting a strict division of powers between the states and the federal government. Rather than partners or collaborators with the federal government, the states became competitors with one another and with the federal government. This was the recipe for failure more than was federalism as such.
With the disappearance of the two largest political parties and the emergence of several new ones... more With the disappearance of the two largest political parties and the emergence of several new ones over the last decade, a new electoral map of Italy has emerged. We explore how these ongoing changes to party politics in Italy were manifest spatially between 1987 and 1996. In particular, the geographical aspects of party replacement are examined in central and northern Italy. First, the parties that have succeeded the Italian Communist Party (PCI) are examined in Tuscany, where the Italian left has historically enjoyed high levels of electoral support. Second, we look at how the regionalist Northern League has replaced the Christian Democratic Party (DC) in the Veneto. Exploratory spatial data analyses (ESDA), and in parti-cular, local indicators of spatial autocorrelation (LISA), indicate that the processes and patterns of replacement are more complex than the simple substitution of one party with another in both of these regions, and illustrate the need to frame geographically elec...
US presidential elections are peculiar contests based on mediation by an Electoral College in whi... more US presidential elections are peculiar contests based on mediation by an Electoral College in which votes are aggregated on a state-by-state basis. In 2020, as in 2016, the outcome was decided by a set of states where the two candidates were equally competitive: Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Two geographical stories tend to dominate accounts of what happened in 2020. The first story is based on red (Republican) versus blue (Democratic) states, and the second story relies upon rural versus urban biases in support for the two parties. After showing how and where Donald Trump outperformed the expectations of pre-election polls, we consider these two geographical stories both generally, and more specifically, in relation to the crucial swing states. Through an examination of the successes of Joe Biden in Arizona and Georgia, two states long thought of as “red”, and the role of the suburbs and local particularities in producing this result, we conclude that the polarization of t...
The territorial state has long been seen in the academic fields of international relations and po... more The territorial state has long been seen in the academic fields of international relations and political theory as not simply the primary but as the singular actor of modern world politics. In a 1994 article I outlined the ways in which this had become an intellectual “trap.” Three interlocking geographical assumptions reinforce one another in conventional theories: sovereignty as territorial, the domestic-foreign opposition, and the state-society match. The obsession with territory as the exclusive spatial modus operandi of world politics ignores the significance of other spatial modalities such as networks/flows and place making for understanding its organization. In practice some practitioners in such branches of international relations as international political economy (IPE) have long regarded the territorial assumption as limiting but have never adequately replaced it with a richer geographical analysis. Putting geography into international relations must necessarily address t...
The roles of territory and borders in the genesis of conflicts have come under increased scrutiny... more The roles of territory and borders in the genesis of conflicts have come under increased scrutiny in international relations and political geography over the past ten years. In this paper I want to focus on three intellectual trends that indicate a rapprochement between scholars in both fields over the “way forward” beyond a number of the previously more stereotyped positions concerning the persisting relevance of territory and borders to world politics. One of these is an increased resistance to and articulation of alternatives to a simple state-centrism. A second is an emphasis on the persistence/revival of geographical imaginations at work in world politics even as particular historic examples of these associated, for example, with specific geopolitical configurations (such as those of the 1 Ph.D. Geography, Ohio State University. 2 Department of Geography. Tabula Rasa. Bogotá Colombia, No.5: 85-98, julio-diciembre 2006 ISSN 1794-2489
The US federal government has been widely criticized for its response to the Coronavirus/Covid-19... more The US federal government has been widely criticized for its response to the Coronavirus/Covid-19 pandemic. Much of the poor response and outcome has been ascribed to President Trump's personal failure. Yet more importantly this failure has been of the US governmental system. More specifically, the role of the federal government in fashioning nationwide policies across a range of areas, including public health, has been crippled by an anti-federalist ideology and the institutional inertia it has created. Ordinarily, one would think that the federal government would be empowered by a selfdefined "nationalist" or right-wing populist in the White House. But rather than command and coordination across tiers of government, the states have been left to cope as best they can without much of anything in terms of coherent and consistent national/ federal leadership. The recent efflorescence of anti-federalist ideology has roots going back to the 1980s. The pandemic has exposed the distortion of the once well-established polyphonic practices of historic US federalism by a now institutionalized dualist vision of federalism that has sadly become the leitmotif of failed US governance in the pandemic.
Geopolitics is 25 years old. In this Forum former editors reflect on the journey the journal has ... more Geopolitics is 25 years old. In this Forum former editors reflect on the journey the journal has taken in those 25 years and the wider discipline (or disciplines) in which the journal sits. Alongside a recounting of how the journal came into existence and its name change to just 'Geopolitics', the editors reflect on the resurgence and increasingly interdisciplinary nature of geopolitics as a field of study which the journal played a role in and all meticulously chronicled in its pages (or bytes); the meanings and importance of the "geo" in geopolitics; the dynamics and politics of international publishing, the academic publishing industry, metrics, citation and the move online; as well as the continued Anglophone nature of political geography within a supposedly internationalising academy. This is coupled with suggestions for future avenues of research, including a plea to consider physical geography more concretely.
Geopolítica(s). Revista de estudios sobre espacio y poder, 2020
President Donald Trump has been the public face of the blundering managerial response of the US f... more President Donald Trump has been the public face of the blundering managerial response of the US federal government to the Coronavirus/COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, beyond Trump’s personal failure lies a failure of the US governmental system. More specifically, the role of the federal government in fashioning nationwide policies across a range of areas, including public health, that one think would be empowered by a self-defined “nationalist” or right-wing populist in the White House, has been crippled by an anti-federalist ideology and the institutional inertia it has created. These have roots going back to the 1980s and the distortion of historic US federalism that these have entailed.
The geography of governance has never been as stable as we have pretended, with the coloured bloc... more The geography of governance has never been as stable as we have pretended, with the coloured blocs of territory on our maps telling us everything we need to know about the realities on the ground. In Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), Mark Twain alerted us to the fact that the colours on the mapin this case designating the US states of Illinois and Indianawere not much of a guide to the location of the protagonists in their hot-air balloon over the American Midwest. This is not simply to recognize that the map is not the territory but also to question the adequacy of the claimed functions associated with the particular territories for understanding their governance. It has long been established that the official version of US federalismwith a strict division of powers between the tiers of governmentis in fact a poor guide to the reality of shared and parallel jurisdictions exercised in relation to functions from criminal investigations to immigration management and public education. The pattern is even more variegated in that the governments of some states, Mississippi, for example, do much less in terms of even exercising their own powers never mind challenging federal authority compared with states such as California and Massachusetts (Agnew, 2011). Spatial uncertaintythe unpredictability of finding exactly the same disposition of governmental powers across a given territoryin this case about the relative powers of governments under a federal system, is not new. In the United States, events have produced a host of legislative and regulatory measures that have made governance infinitely more dynamic and uncertain than a simple recitation of constitutional niceties about the role of state and federal tiers might lead you to expect. These events include the Civil War, Supreme Court decisions in the late 19th century that encouraged a national market, two World Wars, the New Deal of the 1930s, the War on Poverty of the late 1960s, and the attack on the federal government from the far right since the 1980s and 1990s. The problem repeats at other geographical scales of governance, from the interstate to the supranational and the international, with various institutions having and deploying powers in complex and overlapping ways that defy the straightforward correlation of discrete powers with specific scales of governance (Agnew, 2018; Jessop, 2016). If anything, the trend has increased exponentially in recent years, even if there are now signs of 'push back' from nationalists and separatists who wish to return to a status quo ante of singular territories without overlapping powers that is often more imagined than real. That said, however, recent years have seen a proliferation of new challenges to what might once have appeared to be fairly stable geographies of governance that are likely to defy a simple 'back to the future' impulse. The papers in this issue raise a number of these from a wide range of different geographical settings. Schou and Hjelholt (2019, in this issue) engage with the literature on the political economy of state rescaling to show how citizen-service centres in Denmark have been fundamentally changed in their spatial reach and operations by the adoption of data-driven
Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2017
Political parties with conventional memberships and hierarchical structures are under challenge a... more Political parties with conventional memberships and hierarchical structures are under challenge across electoral democracies from movements and candidates that claim they are "going to the people" directly for their support. Italy has been a laboratory for this populism even as the term itself is used more widely. The basic question of what the people are to whom populism refers has not received much, if any, empirical examination. After surveying usage of the term populism, three facets behind the rise of Italian populism since 1990 are examined using a geographic perspective. First, the geography of voter turnout and rising abstention is considered to be emblematic of dissatisfaction with existing parties and the expanding pool of nonvoters available for mobilization by populist movements and candidates. Second, the role of the leader as an alternative focal point to the party is shown to be central to such populist movements. Silvio Berlusconi is the primary actor in this account, although other similar figures are identified. Third and finally, the rise of the Internet-based 5 Star Movement and the promise of going to the people without any institutional or geographical mediation is assessed. The Movement's dual identity as having strong roots in some places as a civic organization and a remarkably uneven geography as a protest movement shows how much even it cannot engage with a singular people. When examined closely, the promise of politics without mediation made by populist movements proves beyond realization.
This informative and well-written book carefully scrutinizes both the complex history of politica... more This informative and well-written book carefully scrutinizes both the complex history of political geography and the contemporary challenges the field faces in a globalizing world. Offering current and versatile examples, the authors usefully problematize how politics, identities, and power relations are informed by geography and how geography is in turn informed by politics. This will be a major text for both students and researchers of political geography.
— Anssi Paasi, University of Oulu, Finland
This engaging book uses the revealing history of Political Geography to explore a broader canvas of geopolitics and politically framed geographic knowledge from the imperialist age through the Cold War to the present. Illustrated with fascinating vignettes and everyday examples, this is an ideal text with which to think through the vertiginous dilemmas of our time. If Political Geography had an app, this would be it.
— Gerard Toal, Virginia Tech
Margins are central rather then peripheral to defining political identities. Italian national ide... more Margins are central rather then peripheral to defining political identities. Italian national identity, though often seen as a fragile construct, is by no means unique in this regard. National identities must be constantly in question in order to thrive. Three geopolitical moments or forces are identified as having contributed at different times and in distinctive ways to the spatial construction of Italian identity: the border question, the immigrant/emigrant experience, and the North-South regional division.
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Articles by John Agnew
Papers by John Agnew
— Anssi Paasi, University of Oulu, Finland
This engaging book uses the revealing history of Political Geography to explore a broader canvas of geopolitics and politically framed geographic knowledge from the imperialist age through the Cold War to the present. Illustrated with fascinating vignettes and everyday examples, this is an ideal text with which to think through the vertiginous dilemmas of our time. If Political Geography had an app, this would be it.
— Gerard Toal, Virginia Tech