Geoforum最新文献

This article examines territorial disputes in the Palajunoj Valley of Quetzaltenango, Guatemala’s second largest city located in the western highlands. Drawing on our field research, we explore how dominant territory-making practices and indigenous-led resistance play out over an emerging municipal territorial ordering plan that gets interwoven with disputes over large-scale mining, waste disposal, and municipal authority amid wider urban–rural marginalization and tensions. We innovatively combine the notions of territory, territorial ordering governmentality, and the echelons (or levels) of rights framework to unpack the different layers on which dominant actor alliances’ territorialization strategies and the responses of territorial defense movements emerge. Departing from an understanding that the disputes in the valley are not only about resources, but also entwine struggles over rules, authority, and discourses, we make a twofold argument. First, we argue that the ruling-group’s existing territory-making practices and new territorial ordering techniques coincide across the echelons, building on and reinforcing stark power imbalances. Second, we argue that indigenous-led, territory-based resistance movements engage in diverse strategies of contestation to articulate shared concerns around externally-imposed territorial interventions across echelons, but are challenged by micropolitical fragmentation, threats and instances of violence, and fragile multi-scalar support networks. Our analysis suggests that future territorial defense depends on the strengthening of multi-scalar and multi-actor alliances that – while acknowledging difference and tensions within and among resisting actors − devise their strategies along the four interconnected echelons and articulate their concerns in converging yet plural resistance strategies.

Set in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and UK austerity, this paper explores maps of giving and mobilised resources alongside interview narratives to examine the various energies that support and/or hinder giving. Conceptualising giving as a form of mobility, we find that individual acts of giving have the potential to generate momentum and positive feedback loops – given the right circumstances – to create highly energised mobilities of giving. We also find, however, that mobilities of giving are affected by wider contexts of austerity and perceptions of state non-giving. Indeed, our interviews suggest that state non-giving may act as an important (though not insurmountable) counterweight to individual giving. Overall, we argue that some level or at least perception of governmental generosity is needed to maintain individual giving, but that, in practice, state and civil society are often working in opposite directions.

This article explores how Venezuelan migrants in Peru negotiate sometimes-contradictory notions of identity, solidarity and modernity. Building from decolonial scholarship, it argues for the importance of situated racialized accounts of migrants’ experiences. I found that a common identity as Latin Americans facilitated migration, with an emphasis on solidarity and ‘brotherhood’. Yet, Venezuelans’ narratives also reinforced hierarchical notions of development that position whiter populations as more advanced than indigenous populations. Their stories reveal a constant negotiation between discourses of shared identity and hierarchical understandings of development and modernity that are constantly perpetuated under the coloniality of power. My findings reiterate a need to not only consider multiple intersecting components of migrant identities but also the ways in which identities shift and take on different meanings in different spatial contexts. Based on 18 migrant narratives, the article addresses a lacuna of analyses examining how migrants themselves re-theorize race and development. By centering coloniality and racialization in migration, I challenge linear narratives of migration from less developed to more developed countries and show how some migrants grapple with vulnerability while also reinforcing uneven power dynamics of racialized othering.

Although the circuits of capital model emphasizes the part played by the overaccumulation of capital at the core of capitalistic development, scientific research has seldom used this framework for analysing rural dynamics. After proposing a theoretical approach involving circuits of capital, rural areas and the socio-ecological fix, we draw on different historical sources, semi-directive interviews and press articles to understand how circuits of capital largely altered the socio-ecosystem of France’s upper Saône valley until the mid-nineteenth century before being directed instead towards other more urban areas. The marginalizing of this rural space by the third circuit of capital tended to reduce the socio-ecological transformations expected of capitalistic development in the twentieth century. Political actors at all levels then played a decisive role in the circulation of capital and the shaping of the river and its floodplain. Inclusion in the fourth circuit of capital is an objective for some political actors today who are developing strategies for branding and marketing the local area. If it develops successfully, this fourth circuit of capital will make a sizeable impact on the urbanization of this rural area, setting it on a new trajectory in terms of transformations of the river. It seems that each generation of circuit of capital involves greater socio-ecological impacts than the previous one, forming a palimpsest of capitalistic development.

This paper interrogates the role of digital platforms in advancing territorial stigma. Drawing from research that has discerned the channels with which territorial stigma has been produced and mediated through — commonly referred to as ‘modes’ — I argue digital platforms are a mode in their own right. Digital platforms are on par with, and may have already surpassed, pre-platform media modes (e.g., newspapers, television) in terms of their use for forming preconceptions of cities in lieu of lived experience. Accordingly, this study investigates discussions on the social networking platform Reddit, about moving to the mid-sized city of London, Ontario in Canada. I use a hybrid thematic analysis to identify (de)stigmatizing content within a topic-based forum (a subreddit). The results show that the platform mediated its users’ reproduction of territorial stigmas stemming from pre-platform modes, rather than having generated entirely novel stigmas. Moreover, many users enacted or reworked established territorial destigmatization strategies to contest, counter, or cope with London’s territorial stigma. This paper contributes to territorial stigma research by examining a lesser-known mid-sized city, which in turn expands the current understanding of stigmatization in Canada hitherto limited to its materialization in large cities. By demonstrating Reddit’s modal potentiality, the paper provides the necessary empirical basis for future studies interested in examining other digital platforms through the theoretical framework of territorial stigma. Furthermore, it encourages future conceptualizations of the media mode of territorial stigma production to include digital platforms alongside traditional and mass media.

This discussion forum brings together some of the leading voices in the debate on climate change and security to reflect on the possibilities and limits of critical research in the face of global ecological crises. If we – as critical geography, IR, and security scholars – take the ongoing ecological crisis seriously, how must our questions, concepts, and methodologies change? How, if at all, can security be provided in a climate-changed world, for and by whom? How to come to terms with the unequal landscape of climate insecurity? What is left of security, and what comes instead: mere survival, resilience, or navigating through disasters?

Seeking answers to these questions, the authors of these short forum pieces discuss and rethink core concepts and themes of human geography and neighboring disciplines. The reflection pieces trouble the racist imaginaries that often underpin existing policy debates on climate change, scarcity, and insecurity. They discuss the implications of climate security for the liberal international order, North-South relations as well as the relationship between humans and the non-human world. They reflect on the complicity of our research – both critical and problem-solving – in the violent transformation of the planet and the repression of the racialized “others” of colonial modernity. And they explore the emancipatory potential of alternative security discourses that center on the complex web of beings, practices, and relations endangered by the unfolding climate crisis.

Decentralisation and the flexible combination of infrastructures and technologies are advocated to expand access to safe sanitation amid rapid urbanization, worsening water scarcity, resource depletion, and climate change. Yet, narrowly technical approaches such as the citywide inclusive sanitation approach tend to underestimate social and political bargaining and the role of structural power in shaping access to basic urban services. Building on international political economy, this article develops the territorial political economy framework to explore specific sanitation systems’ distribution of structural power in security, production, and finance. Utilizing this framework, the study constructs a typology of five sanitation bargains, derived from theoretical insights, expert interviews, scientific case studies, and key policy documents. Each bargain represents an ideal typical combination of technology, organisation, and finance, with the corresponding spatial and social distribution of costs, benefits, risks, and opportunities. Together, this enables a political economy analysis of sanitation systems in cities that is sensitive to both multiscalar negotiations and distributional outcomes associated with sanitation provision in the city. When expanding sanitation services to so-far unserved areas in the cities, the paper shows how the limitations of the citywide inclusive sanitation approach in its current form can be overcome. It enables to explicitly consider the implications of embedded structural power on households when assessing and selecting technological options and organizational models for providing access to safe sanitation inclusively across the city.

Much of the discussion under the label of “climate security” focuses on potential conflicts and disruptions in peripheral locations in the global south putatively triggered by climate change. If, however the analysis starts with climate, and the earth system as the point of departure for analysis, then things look very different. The speed and scale of climate disruptions is accelerating. Earth system science suggests that urgent action is needed to deal with climate change; waiting too long may make the issue impossible to address. Framing matters in terms of a planetary condition and focusing on climate rather than national security as the starting point for analysis suggests very different policy priorities. Reframing climate security to grapple with the planetary condition requires policies that first, facilitate adaptation, second work to make sustainable habitats for humanity and third, work to drastically constrain the use of fossil fuels urgently. Here, proposals for fossil fuel non-proliferation treaties and similar measures analogous with earlier arms control agreements. This provides the security sector with a much-needed direct engagement with the causes of climate change and its resultant disruptions while simultaneously reframing climate as a matter of planetary rather than national security. Tackling climate change is a matter of urgency, and failure to so effectively in the short run my derail needed efforts later, simply because the resources to do so are no longer available.

In 2016, the Kuwait Mitribah weather station recorded a scorching 53.9 degrees Celsius, among the highest temperatures ever recorded on earth. Today, temperatures in Kuwait frequently exceed 50 degrees Celsius during the summer, accompanied by a host of extreme weather events such as severe droughts, dust storms, and floods. These climate challenges threaten and transform Kuwait’s social and ecological landscape. To address these pressing issues, this paper adopts an urban climate justice framework, emphasizing the right to the city, recognition justice, and advocating for a climate-just city. Through this lens, we examine how climate change disproportionately affects Kuwait’s structurally vulnerable populations, particularly the majority non-citizen groups: the Bidoon (stateless) and low-wage migrant workers. This paper highlights the necessity of including marginalized groups in climate change discussions along with climate adaptation and mitigation policies. By examining the everyday urban lives of Kuwait’s non-citizen residents – including their struggles with access to civil and political rights; poor housing and labor conditions; and inequitable access to basic urban services, such as water, electricity and transport − this paper demonstrates how these factors significantly increase their vulnerability to the detrimental impacts of climate change. In highlighting the vulnerabilities of low-income non-citizens and advocating a shift to a climate-just city approach, this analysis aims to guide decision-makers in Kuwait and beyond. The impact of climate change, we contend, offers an opportunity to re-open debate about the fundamental rights and concepts of citizenship, belonging, community and justice.

It has become commonplace, almost a cliché, to begin an analysis of the relationship between climate change and security with the acknowledgement that this relationship looks very different depending on whose security is under consideration. In the academic literature on this relationship we have seen a steady shift away from an exclusive focus on the protection of existing institutions from the indirect effects of climate change, and towards a focus on the biosphere or the natural world itself. Such an orientation asks whether and how the natural world, and the ecosystems that compose it, are threatened by the immediate and direct effects of climate change. While this shift seems logical in response to the geological reality of the Anthropocene epoch and the unambiguous arrival of climate change, crucial questions remain about the prospects for pursuing ‘ecological security’ in practice: what would this look like, who would be agents of ecological security, and is increasing academic and think tank engagement with the concept matched in policy and practical developments? This paper analyses the institutional and practical prospects for this approach to the climate-security relationship, drawing on policy documents and interviews with policy makers in a range of states. It finds grounds for (cautious) optimism in increasing engagement with ecological security, including at the nation-state level, evident in growing recognition of the need for states to address the direct threat posed by climate change to the most vulnerable.