The political construction of scale

Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, 2006

Political geography and geopolitics were built on the same basic postulate as political sciences and the theory of international relations: the nation-state was the relevant scale for all types of analysis. This postulate was a reasonable one at the time of the Treaties of Westphalia. This type of polity triumphed on the international scene at the time when Hobbes wrote the Leviathan. The basis of the social contract implicit in the perspective was simple: in order to achieve personal security, everybody gave up the parcel of freedom (and the associated use of violence) he was naturally endowed with, and delegated it to the Leviathan , the State. The only field where competition between human beings was legitimate at the most elementary level was that of economy. The evolution of the international scene does not only result from the evolution of weaponry or communication and transport technologies. For many persons today, renouncing any parcel of their individual freedom appears as a mutilation of their egos. There was a general agreement in the past on the scale where the analysis of political action had to be developed: it has disappeared. For a growing part of modern societies, inter-individual or local competition may take a political form and rely on the use of violence at all the levels, including the microscale. It means that political geography and geopolitics have increasingly to allow for the variety of scales of political action and the changing relations between the competition for power, wealth and status which are present in every society.

2008

In the past two decades human geographers have intensely theorized scale, and extended claims that it is a foundational element of geographic theory. Yet attendant with this move has been a growing concern that scale has become an unwieldy concept laden with multiple, contradictory and problematic meanings. I share that concern, and argue that a similar debate about the usefulness of `identity' as a conceptual category in social science offers instructive insights. Paralleling recent critiques of identity categories such as nation and race, I view the conceptual confusion surrounding scale — and scale politics — as, in part, the consequence of failing to make a clear distinction between scale as a category of practice and category of analysis. In adopting scale as a category of analysis geographers tend to reify it as a fundamental ontological entity, thereby treating a social category employed in the practice of sociospatial politics as a central theoretical tool. I argue that this analytical manoeuvre is neither helpful nor necessary, and outline its consequences in analyses of the politics of scale. Finally, I sketch the altered contours of a research programme for the politics of scale if we take this injunction seriously — both in terms of how we theorize scale as a category of practice and what becomes the focus of scale politics research.

Review of International Political Economy, 2009

Fruitful new avenues of theorization and research have been opened by recent writings on the production of geographical scale. However, this outpouring of research on scale production and on rescaling processes has been accompanied by a notable analytical blunting of the concept of geographical scale as it has been blended unreflexively into other core geographical concepts such as place, locality, territory and space. This essay explores this methodological danger: first, through a critical reading of Sallie Marston's (2000) recent article in this journal on 'The social construction of scale'; second, through a critical examination of the influential notion of a politics 'of ' scale. A concluding section suggests that our theoretical grasp of geographical scale could be significantly advanced if scaling processes are distinguished more precisely from other major dimensions of sociospatial structuration under capitalism. Eleven methodological hypotheses for confronting this task are then proposed.

Political Geography, 1998

First, let me say that I appreciate the careful reading that the discussants have evidently given to my paper. I am also grateful for the opportunity to clarify, even expand on, some of the arguments that I was trying to make. For the discussants do raise some issues of significance. I found two in particular which I want to address in these brief comments: questions of representation, which are to the fore in the comments of Michael Peter Smith, and questions of power that are more in evidence in Dennis Judd's comments. Katherine Jones bridges the two and, of course, shows that they cannot and should not be separated from one another. Michael Peter Smith's concerns are with the way in which I represent scale. According to him my major problem is an obfuscation of the meaning of 'the global. If I read him correctly, he wants to interpret global and globalization in an absolute sense. He argues that in my paper the global scale "is conhated with scales like the regional and the national". He is concerned at the way I use the term " 'more global' to designate extralocal scales and processes". And if we are to characterize agents as local or global then the term 'global' should properly be reserved for (e.g.) 'global manaufacturing corporations like Toyota' and 'transnational grassroots movement(s)'. Parenthetically I should point out that I had anticipated this criticism though not quite in the form in which it came. I had in fact thought that I would be found guilty of having an overly malleable view of the term 'local' rather than global. But the same arguments apply. This is a quite crucial issue. I want to argue in response that in certain circumstances it is useful to talk about the local and the global in a relational rather than absolute sense. How otherwise do we express the point that politics always involves a more global outside and a more local inside, with the space of dependence as the space that has the outside and inside? Moreover, and reverting back to an absolute concept of scale, spaces of dependence exist at all manner of geographical scales: neighborhood, local in the conventional sense, metro, regional, national, subcontinental, and, yes, again in the conventional, absolutist sense, global. In my view both these concepts of the local and the global, one absolute and the other relative, have their purposes. In certain circumstances an absolutist conception is appropriate: a useful and obvious way of dividing up the world, and as applicable to the term 'local' as to the term 'global' for whose alleged misuse Michael Peter takes me to task. So to talk about localities in an absolute sense as in the British project of localities research

2019

This dissertation considers how geographic scale shapes the theory and practice of politics. It develops a dynamic, relational approach to scale that finds folds and overlaps between micro- and macro-processes. The project asks how subjects negotiate non-concentric political domains: bodies, localities, cities, nations, the globe, and the planet. In contrast to hierarchically nested models of belonging, it emphasizes transnational, transversal, and eccentric forms of ethical and political interconnectedness. Attending to the elaborate interactions between the embodied, local, urban, global, and planetary complicates state-centric images of politics as well as those that present a flattened, reductive approach to globalization. By tracking an undercurrent in political theory through readings of Machiavelli, Michel Foucault, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, David Harvey, and Manuel De Landa, the project renders explicit a theory of scale that has remained at the margins of work on each o...

The University Bookman, 2022

A review article of Ferenc Hörcher, "The Political Philosophy of the European City".

Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2005

The concept of scale in human geography has been profoundly transformed over the past 20 years. And yet, despite the insights that both empirical and theoretical research on scale have generated, there is today no consensus on what is meant by the term or how it should be operationalized. In this paper we critique the dominant – hierarchical– conception of scale, arguing it presents a number of problems that cannot be overcome simply by adding on to or integrating with network theorizing. We thereby propose to eliminate scale as a concept in human geography. In its place we offer a different ontology, one that so flattens scale as to render the concept unnecessary.We conclude by addressing some of the political implications of a human geography without scale.