Political Geography

The last few years have seen a resurgence of interest in the concept of place in anthropology, geography, and political ecology. "Place" -or, more accurately, the defense of constructions of place -has also become an important object of struggle in the strategies of social movements. This paper is situated at the intersection of conversations in the disciplines about globalization and place, on the one hand, and conversation in social movements about place and political strategy, on the other. By arguing against a certain globalocentrism in the disciplines that tends to effect an erasure of place, the paper suggests ways in which the defense of place by social movements might be constituted as a rallying point for both theory construction and political action. The paper proposes that place-based struggles might be seen as multi-scale, network-oriented subaltern strategies of localization. The argument is illustrated with the case of the social movement of black communities of the Pacific rainforest region of Colombia.

Úvod do studia politiky Miroslav Novák et al. Tato učebnice je určena zejména vysokoškolským studentům sociálních a humanitních věd bakalářského a magisterského stupně. Jde o práci kolektivní a svým pojetím i rozsahem v českém prostředí ojedinělou. Je rozdělena do čtyř částí. V první části je politika vykládána očima nejrůznějších disciplín-od politologie přes filosofii, psychologii, antropologii, právo, geografii a ekonomii až po his-torii. Obsahem druhé části jsou úvody do vybraných subdisciplín politické vědy, jako je komparativní politologie, teorie mezinárod-ních vztahů a správní věda. Ve třetí části jsou zpracovány úvody do kvantitativních a kvalitativních metod v politické vědě, včetně tzv. kvalitativní srovnávací analýzy. Čtvrtá část pak pojednává o někte-rých velkých tématech politiky, jako jsou stranické a volební systémy, národy a nacionalismus nebo demokracie a nedemokratické režimy. Učebnice tvoří vnitřně propojený celek, i když se názory, pojetí nebo hodnocení autorů jednotlivých kapitol od sebe mohou poněkud lišit.-Kdy vznikla politická věda?-Jaké další disciplíny se zabývají politikou?-Jaký je vztah mezi politickou vědou a politickou sociologií?-Proč se v češtině více ujal výraz "politologie" než "politická věda"?-Co je politika? Jaký je vztah mezi politikou a mocí?-Je řadový občan v politice kompetentní?-Jak nám analýza stranického systému pomáhá pochopit mo-derní politické režimy?-Co je předmětem komparativní politologie? Jaké metody pou-žívá?-V čem spočívá rozdíl mezi komparativní politologií a teorií mezi-národních vztahů?-Čím se vyznačuje dobrá veřejná správa? Rozsáhlý autorský tým pod vedením Miroslava Nováka tvoří čeští odborníci nejrůznějších generací z mnoha akademických pracovišť. vydání druhé, rozšířené a doplněné o 2 nové kapitoly.  Doporučená cena 749 Kč

This article examines attempts to negotiate a perceived residual dominance of settler populations in South Africa and Zimbabwe by means of developmental and cultural policies deemed necessary to restore sovereignty to Africans. Indigenisation has become a preferred strategy for reconstructing post-colonial states in Africa: indigenisation of the economy as part of a Third Chimurenga in Zimbabwe and Black Economic Empowerment in the sociocultural context of Ubuntu in South Africa. These are issues arising from the regional legacy of contested and uneven transitions to majority rule. Identifying how governments frame the "settler problem", and politicise space in doing so, is crucial for understanding post-colonial politics. Indigenisation in Zimbabwe allows the government to maintain a network of patronage and official rhetoric, and is highly divisive and exclusivist although couched in terms of reclaiming African values and sovereignty. Revival of Ubuntu as a cultural value system in South Africa facilitates a more positive approach to indigenisation, although Black Economic Empowerment displays elitist tendencies and cultural transformation remains controversial and elusive. The perceived need to anchor policy in socially acceptable (i.e., ostensibly indigenous/traditional) contexts has become a prominent feature of post-colonial politics and is indicative of an indigenous turn in Southern African politics.

There are more types of borders today than ever before in history. Borders of all kinds define every aspect of social life in the twenty-first century. From the biometric data that divides the smallest aspects of our bodies to the aerial drones that patrol the immense expanse of our domestic and international airspace, we are defined by borders. They can no longer simply be understood as the geographical divisions between nation-states. Today, their form and function has become too complex, too hybrid. What we need now is a theory of the border that can make sense of this hybridity across multiple domains of social life.

Rather than viewing borders as the result or outcome of pre-established social entities like states, Thomas Nail reinterprets social history from the perspective of the continual and constitutive movement of the borders that organize and divide society in the first place. Societies and states are the products of bordering, Nail argues, not the other way around. Applying his original movement-oriented theoretical framework "kinopolitics" to several major historical border regimes (fences, walls, cells, and checkpoints), Theory of the Border pioneers a new methodology of "critical limology," that provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary border politics.

Political geography traditionally focused on state, but there has been a broadening of what counts as ‘doing politics’ that includes the work of social movements. Much of this work though uses analytical categories other than social movement, and these are reviewed and included here. Geographers have brought space into thinking about social movements, analyzing how various spatialities shape and are shaped by movements, the spatialities of solidarity, and the geographies of emotion used and generated by movements. Many do this work as academic-activists and collaborate with movements. Across different methods, approaches, and languages, geographers have contributed to building the power of movements to make a better world.

Este libro plantea una síntesis de uno de los temas metodológicos que más desarrollo ha conocido en la Arqueología de los últimos treinta años. Desde que en la década de los 1960 la disciplina arqueológica superase definitivamente el esquema que mantenía al artefacto como objetivo epistemológico principal y a la excavación como único vehículo capaz de alcanzarlo, las teorías, métodos y técnicas de reconocimiento y análisis territorial se han expandido de una forma acelerada. Ello ha creado un ámbito de estudio y práctica profesional de la Arqueología, del cual, a pesar de su pujanza y de la diversidad y complejidad de procedimientos técnicos y nociones teóricas que aparecen implicadas, todavía no se había realizado una verdadera síntesis en lengua española. Este manual ofrece a los jóvenes estudiantes y practicantes de la Arqueología actual un tratamiento riguroso, pero accesible, de los principios aplicados tanto en la detección y caracterización de sitios arqueológicos en el territorio actual (prospección de superficie, prospección geofísica, empleo de imágenes captadas por plataformas aéreas y espaciales, cartografía arqueológica), como en la interpretación de las pautas de aprovechamiento, organización y percepción del territorio que se dieron entre las sociedades del Pasado.

This paper sheds light on the role of evolutionary ideas in
the making of Turkish nationalism during the Kemalist era
(1923–1938). By so doing, it aims to challenge some of the
dominant historiographical viewpoints as to the nature of
Turkish nationalism. One is related to the Kemalist elites'
predisposition towards the so-called “scientism” seen as
one of the bases for nationalism. We intend to turn upside–
down the relation between the Kemalists' use of science
and Turkish nationalism. Second, we problematize the “culturalist”
origins of Turkish nationalism arguing that the
seemingly “culturalist” reflections of the time were, indeed,
materialist formulations based on the science of the times.
We discuss in this respect the Kemalist elites' use of evolutionary
ideas. By synthesizing the ways in which these elites
employed evolutionary ideas in the fields of history, language,
geography, anthropology, biology, eugenics, and
pedagogy, we aim to understand the specific nature of
Turkish nationalism before 1945. This secular nationalism
conceived culture as having materialist bases and differed
fundamentally from the culturalist varieties of Turkish
nationalism coloured by Islam in the post-1945 era. Furthermore,
the paper empirically enriches the complex and
entangled story of evolutionary ideas in the early Turkish
Republic.

This special issue on political geographies of citizenship originates from the Norwegian Research Network in Political Geography (based at the University of Oslo), which includes geographers working within a broad array of research topics, approaches and contexts. Thematically, it reflects the increased interests in spatiality in citizenship studies and the parallel attention paid to citizenship within political geography. The present special issue explores the notion of citizenship as a potential convergence point for geographical research in migration, development, democratization, social movement and labour studies concerned with questions about power, agency and spatiality in state–society relations. Our proposition is that citizenship may provide an integral framework for common concerns among human geographers regarding cultural, juridical, social and political inclusion – in other words, cultural identity and recognition, legal status and protection, social rights and redistribution, and political participation and representation. This general agenda is discussed in more detail in Stokke’s  article in this special issue. We thus limit this guest editorial to a brief review of the core arguments and how they are addressed in the thematic articles in this issue.

The paper focuses on Billig's (Billig, M. (1995). Banal nationalism. London: Sage) notion of banal nationalism. While Billig's work is to be commended for demonstrating the way in which nationalism is an endemic political ideology in all states – and not merely an extreme or hot political ideology that is based upon “blood and belonging” (Ignatieff, M. (1993). Blood and belonging: Journeys into the new nationalism. London: BBC Books) – we suggest that his work tends, perhaps unwittingly, to reinforce an unwarranted separation of the banal and hot processes that reproduce nationalism. Some empirical work has implicitly and explicitly begun to question the distinction between banal and hotter forms of nationalism. We argue that one way in which such an agenda can be furthered is through a promotion of the idea of everyday nationalism, which combines banal and hot elements in more complex and contingent ways. We elaborate on the benefits of adopting such an approach through an ...

Answering calls for increased sensitivity to context in studies of electoral conflicts in local gay rights issues, we offer an exploratory case study of an unsuccessful electoral initiative to repeal a Tacoma, Washington, gay rights ordinance. Using a mixed-methods approach, we explore the role of elections in contemporary cultural politics, especially the ways in which race, class, and sexuality are co-constructed in part through the discourses and practices of elections. We perform a qualitative analysis of the popular rhetorics and understandings deployed during the campaign and a quantitative analysis of the election's sociodemographics. Results suggest that while there is a distinct social geography in Tacoma that was highly correlated with voting on the repeal effort, the contest was played out almost entirely at the citywide scale. It was enjoined as a debate over what kind of place Tacomans wished their city to be as it moves into the future, not as a struggle between contending place-based interests or values. The implication of these results is that the nuances of place at particular scales, including highly contingent constructions of sexuality, race and class, may now be more important than ever in these sorts of cultural conflicts.

The New Urban Politics (or NUP) of local economic development has become one of the dominant themes in urban political economy in the last twenty years. But despite the volume of research this has generated, basic problems remain in the theories that underlie this academic and political work. This paper begins with a discussion of the understandings of the central concepts of locality and autonomy in the NUP. These understandings of locality and autonomy are then criticized for failing to recognize the relational and processual character of both of these constructs. Local autonomy is then retheorized as the capacity to control the production of place. In particular, the paper focuses on groups constructing institutions and relationships of local ownership. These organizations, it is argued, have combined the goals of local autonomy and local economic development, and in so doing have produced new localities in the places in which they are organizing.

Geographic scale, referring to the nested hierarchy of bounded spaces of differing size, such as the local, regional, national and global, is a familiar and taken-for-granted concept for political geographers and political analysts. In much contemporary analysis of political organization and action, geographic scale is treated simply as different levels of analysis (from local to global) in which the investigation of political processes is set. Recently this

Статья посвящена изучению представлений испанских колонистов конца XVI в. о политической организации майя-юкатеков позднего постклассического периода. Автор, рассматривая “Историко-географические сообщения из Юкатана”, уделяет внимание восприятию европейцами двух ее аспектов: 1) территориально-административного устройства и 2) политической иерархии. В статье выявлены, где это возможно, закономерности в соотнесении майяских понятий и терминов с испанскими. Обращается внимание на исчезновение или сохранение в обиходе доиспанской политической терминологии. Рассматривается изменение значений терминов в условиях колониального общества.
T he article examines the notions of late sixteenth-century European colonists about the political organization of the Maya in the pre-Hispanic period. The author draws on Relaciones histórico-geográficas de la gobernación de Yucatán, an important source for the study of the issue, to explore the ways in which the Europeans viewed both the territorial and administrative organization and the political hierarchies among the Maya. He discusses the regularities and inconsistencies that may be observed in the use of Maya and Spanish terms. A significant aspect to consider is the disappearance or preservation of elements from the pre-Hispanic political terminologies. The author traces the changes in the meaning of such elements in the context of the colonial society.

Simon Springer (Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Canada) contributes this short essay about his visit to Moscow and Domitrov. He organized a session titled “For Kropotkin” with Anthony Ince for the IGU Moscow Regional Conference and made a trip to the Kropotkin museum in Dmitrov.

... Permissions & Reprints. Disproportionality and bias in US Presidential Elections: How geography helped Bush defeat Gore but couldn't help Kerry beat Bush star, open. ... Analysis of the bias at those two elections shows that Bush was favoured at the first but not at the second. ...

In the last decades, the relationship between food and nature has experienced two intertwined processes: the de-naturalization of agri-food industry, that apparently has ‘freed’ food from natural processes and the ri-naturalization, linked to the quality turn, that recently transformed agrifood systems and food consumption. This article focuses on the relationships between food and nature, basing on the analysis of the processes that are recently taking place in Valposchiavo (Switzerland), where local agri-food chains sustainability is the core of local development and territorial marketing strategies. The analysis uses the theoretical and methodological framework of food political ecology,
which helps to unveil and critically analyse the complexity and the political dimension of such processes.

A thorough analysis of capital punishment from a political-geographical perspective is lacking in the discipline of geography. This is despite the fact that capital punishment overlaps with numerous geographic approaches, concepts, and areas of study. This study serves as a call to geographers to begin considering capital punishment's wide interaction and interrelation with developed areas of knowledge in the discipline. Specifically, political geographers stand to contribute in novel ways to wider discussions about capital punishment by analyzing executions relative to contemporary work in geography on violent, legal, and carceral spaces. I first introduce the need for geography's engagement with this pressing issue. Then, I clarify several terms needed to understand this violent practice. A third section highlights several pathways of development in the critical geographies of capital punishment. It is organized around four broad themes-critically mapping capital punishment, bodies in motion, politics of access, and executing the "other"-connecting capital punishment to developing concepts, literatures, and sub-disciplines in geography. The final two sections outline an epistemological approach to the geographies of capital punishment and how legal and carceral geographies might contribute.

Discutimos as articulações federativas verticais e horizontais em contextos metropolitanos, partindo da problemática do "lugar" da metrópole frente ao sistema federativo brasileiro. Se, por um lado, municípios que integram regiões metropolitanas se articulam verticalmente com governos estaduais e Federal; por outro lado, estes mesmos municípios se desarticulam horizontalmente. O resultado seria a fragmentação e desintegração da metrópole. Advogamos a necessidade de uma solidariedade institucional a partir das dinâmicas internas à metrópole, ao tempo em que propomos repensar outra configuração federativa para enfrentamento dos problemas metropolitanos.

International diplomacy has been one of a number of practices which have performatively constituted "Bosnia" as a particular place with specific people, so that it could be rendered as a problem requiring a particular solution. Even when, as in the case of the Dayton accords, negotiators claim they have desired the reintegration of Bosnia, their reliance on a powerful set of assumptions about identity, territoriality and politics-a particular political anthropology-has meant the ethnic partition of a complex and heterogeneous society is the common product of the international community's efforts. Paying attention to the role of cartography, this paper explores the apartheid-like logic of international diplomacy's political anthropology, the way this logic overrode non-nationalist options and legitimised exclusivist projects during the war, and considers the conundrum this bequeaths Bosnia in the post-Dayton period as a number of significant local forces seek to overcome division. This article is accompanied by a web-site which presents the relevant maps from the periods of international diplomacy discussed here, along with a further commentary. Referred to in the article as Campbell (1999), this web-site can be accessed at http:// www.newcastle.ac.uk/~npol/maps/bosnia

Israel has endured a shortage of water since the middle of the 1960s. This paper discusses the factors responsible for that. It draws attention to four dominant factors that restrain the Israeli authorities from making major changes in the country's water policy. The second part of the paper suggests how to deal with the water shortage problem in Israel. In the light of some preliminary assumptions, the paper suggests the gradual transformation of the agricultural land in central Israel and elsewhere into national parks and areas for active recreation.

I would like to begin by thanking Susan Smith for engaging us, through her writing, in such important debates and for calling upon a critical reflection of such commonly used and non-questioned concepts such as 'the' market. In an earlier version of this commentary-presented at the 2004 AAG-I began with a personal anecdote, which I would like to rescue, since it bares some resemblance to the ''small'' stories that Smith refers to in her paper. As a result of changing US immigration policies-during the time I was conducting my dissertation fieldwork in Mexico City-I was denied entrance to the United States, and was thus unable to participate in the last Annual Conference. In a context where globalization has become such a recurrent theme and in many cases a discursive tool within state politics, how can one explain that a Latin American student, like myself, who has lived in the US for almost four years, suddenly becomes a threat to national security? Globalization? For whom? How 'free' and unbounded are we, really? This is yet another ''small story'' and I make reference to it because, as Susan Smith has argued in her paper State, markets and an ethic of care, it is through the ''small stories'' that one can begin to unravel and challenge homogenizing discourses embedded within concepts such as globalization, 'the' market, and 'the' state. I therefore would like to begin my discussion by focusing on what I believe to be two key issues that Susan Smith makes reference to in her paper.

In this article I make three inter-related arguments.  First, I argue that contemporary critical political theory should re-assert the city as a privileged site of political action.  Second, I suggest that in the process of such a re-assertion, the dominant “open” conception of the city, characteristic of much critical urban studies, should be reworked in order to be properly “political”; that is, framed within an agonistic, Left-Schmittian model of politics.  Finally, I claim that one way to “politicize” the city in this manner is to think of it as a site of “common property” (as expressed in the work of Nicholas Blomley).

Post-apartheid South Africa has brought about internationally acclaimed legislation that promotes social equity and environmental sustainability. This paper presents findings of research conducted in the Municipality of Stellenbosch on the effectiveness of the participatory planning model, the Integrated Development Plan (IDP). While post-apartheid accomplishments are noteworthy, power dynamics and fiscal insecurity continue to shape outcomes. Innovative coalitions have emerged, instilling hope that true participation is possible after trust between all stakeholders mends historical tensions.

At the annual conference of the Association of American Geographers held in Los Angeles in 2002 we organized two panel discussions around the theme of 'Political Geography in Question'. The framework that we gave the panelists read as follows:

The terms realms, shatterbelts, and gateways conjure up images of places of finance, trade, and war, dominated by hegemonic powers. This is the vision offered by Dr. Cohen's paper, one that is intended to shape the decisions of geopolitical actors at the formal and popular geopolitical levels. The title of my response reflects what I see as unknown territory, the creation of maps and text incorporating the consequences of US political and economic policy, other views of these efforts, and how we might improve it. Unfortunately, Dr. Cohen's paper does little to explore this realm while updating his own schema for guiding US foreign policy.

... The tyranny of the majority: Fundamental fairness in representative democracy. Post a Comment. CONTRIBUTORS: ... SUBJECT(S): Proportional representation; Representative government and representation; Afro-Americans; Minorities; Voting; Suffrage; United States. ...

Abstract: This work has to do with spatial interactions and twin cities at the border between Brazil and Argentina. The focus is on the twin cities of São Borja-Santo Tomé and Itaqui-Alvear that are located in the historical territory of the Jesuit Missions. Due to the geographical position, the cities near the border have special qualities since they are in contact with two different systems. The interactions between the pairs of cities suffer influence from different flows. At the moment, the border’s function is changing. The older function of defense is turning into a newer one of communication place where products pass daily. In this sense, the formation of a regional commercial block (MERCOSUL) had a major role. The subject in question has turned into a matter of the federal government which, through the Ministry of National Integration, attempts to promote a planned integration between Brazil and its neighbors through the twin cities.
Keywords: Spatial interactions; border; twin cities.

A number of people have claimed that the ongoing financial crisis has revealed the problems with neoliberal thought and neoliberal policies in the 'Atlantic Heartland'. However, if we look at the history of the 'Heartland' economies then it becomes evident that they were never neoliberal in the first place - that is, the economic policies and discourses in these countries did not follow neoliberal prescriptions. /We Have Never Been Neoliberal/ explores this divergence between neoliberal theory and 'neoliberal' practice by focusing on the underlying contradictions in monetarism, private monopolies, and financialization. The book finishes by proposing a 'manifesto for a doomed youth' in which it argues that younger generations should refuse to pay interest on anything in order to avoid the trap of debt-driven living.

The Italian region of Campania and its capital Naples have epitomized waste management failure in Europe since 2008 when international media covered extensively the waste crisis occurring there. In response to the crisis, the Italian national government took an authoritarian turn in waste policies and criminalized citizens' grievances and mobilizations against waste-facility siting in Campania. The state authorities' intervention gained popular consent and obscured the multifaceted and unjust geographies of waste management in the region. It was a serious blow for the waste-related justice movement in Campania. However, just when waste management seemed under control the movement re-emerged stronger and more effective than it had been prior to the 2008 crisis. Activists created a new counter narrative and liberated themselves from the constraints imposed by the repressive measures of the national government. They built a new frame around the unhealthy space, whose expansion, they maintained, was caused by the waste-related contamination. Yet the strength of the movement and its transformation following 2008 can only be fully understood when the structural property and the components of the EJ activists' networks are also considered. We apply a Social Network Analysis to show how an effective environmental justice movement requires a cohesive and robust network as well as a comprehensive narrative. The waste-related movement in Campania went from being an archipelago of isolated clusters of organizations with a plural but fragmented claims (before 2008), to a tightly interconnected network supporting a unified political platform (after 2008). We link together the reframing of the movement around health issues with the reconfiguration of activist networks. We use the Campania case to show how environmental justice movements might overcome repression and criminalization and progress toward social justice and ecologically sound transformations.