Political Geography最新文献

This article documents the struggle of pro-choice nongovernmental organizations, Women on Web, Women on Waves, and Aid Access, to provide reproductive healthcare information and procedures, including medical abortion, to people around the world seeking to exercise their human rights to physical health and autonomy irrespective of state legal structures. These organizations seek to affirm and share factual reproductive health knowledge and care approved by the World Health Organization including safe and approved medical abortions. Women on Waves and Women on Web use international waters and the Internet as common spaces to exercise freedom over bodily autonomy. Specifically, Women on Web and Aid Access use the Internet as a digital imaginary extension of physical international spaces. The authors argue that a transparent and open Internet, as an imagined common, is essential to countering ongoing processes of privatization of international spaces and restrictions on reproductive health rights. Under this framework, the status of abortion care websites to remain accessible and avoid censorship is a bellwether for both net neutrality and feminist geopolitics. The struggle for an open Internet has broad implications for reproductive health, bodily autonomy, and the free exchange of ideas.

Recent studies have applied the explanatory framework of state rescaling to interrogate China's emergent city-regional governance. Much of the extant literature has concentrated on either the centrally driven city regionalism from above or local efforts on cross-boundary cooperation from below. Rather than simply abstracting the multi-dimensional and multi-scalar dynamics in the rescaling process around one singular state project, this paper moves forward to explore the co-existence and co-functioning of variegated rescaling processes contributing to regional governance by deploying assemblage as a heuristic approach. This paper examines an inter-jurisdictional development zone – Beijing-Tianjin Zhongguancun Tech Town in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region to provide a relational and processual understanding of scalar politics on the ground. Our analysis demonstrates how discrete and fragmented spaces and actors are assembled within a specific entity through various rescaling processes. The interplay of local, regional and national actors with different motivations gives rise to a new inter-scalar and inter-jurisdictional regulatory regime for regional industrial integration with relative coherence. This emergent governance regime is sustained and embedded in both topological and territorial political relations. This article furthers the understanding of China's city regional governance by analysing a situated assemblage. It provides an applicable perspective for investigating other trans-local projects and city regionalism.

Place-based identities could potentially shape how the public evaluates political information, especially when cleavages between rural and non-rural become more central to politics. Rural voters may particularly respond distinctly to knowledge about the United States political system, which through several political institutions, notably the federal Senate, gives rural areas a share of votes exceeding their share of the population. Observational survey responses from the 2020 American National Election Study show that although most respondents feel that government institutions give less political influence to rural areas, knowledge about American politics reduces that feeling. The relationship between this knowledge and beliefs about rural political influence, however, occurs only in those with suburban and, especially, urban identities; rural and small-town identifiers seemingly shrug off their knowledge in assessing rural political influence.

Illinois passed the Energy Transition Act (i.e., the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act or CEJA) in 2021, which established clean energy mandates with an emphasis on social equity. We examine CEJA and related policies to understand the politics of Illinois' energy transition. While CEJA has been praised as an approach to a just transition, critics argue that it exacerbated Illinois' rural-urban dichotomy by distributing benefits to urban areas defined as ‘environmental justice communities’ and tangible costs, in the form of clean energy infrastructure, to rural communities. We demonstrate that, leading up to and in response, 1) local governments deployed measures to oppose renewable energy development and 2) the state, in turn, scaled authority for energy governance upward to inhibit opposition. By framing reduced participation as necessary for just climate action, Illinois undermined procedural forms of justice viewed as critical to a just transition and reinforced energy as a partisan political issue. This case illustrates how a narrow definition of justice can contribute to distributive conflict in the energy transition and identifies a need for more inclusive strategies to manage such conflict.

This paper provides a critical, interdisciplinary analysis of the current global landscape of climate action and response with the aim of determining its overall trajectory toward either justice and equity on the one hand, or exploitation and segregation on the other. It finds that tendencies toward the latter are far more pronounced. This paper summarizes those findings and presents arguments for three categories of climate action that are producing and/or exacerbating inequity, injustice, and segregation. They are: securitization (of resources, infrastructure, borders, and land), financialization (of exploitative mitigation and adaptation measures), and (im)mobilization (of migrants and the climate-vulnerable alongside the increased mobility of elite populations). An examination of the political rhetoric and public discourse associated with these trends follows, revealing widespread dehumanization and ‘othering’ used to condone a system that justifies protection for some populations and the expendability of others. Together, this analysis provides a framework for exposing and critiquing our current trajectory toward an outcome that is best described as climate apartheid.

The special issue Abject Lives brings together five articles that attend to questioning the processes that render nonhumans as “abject others” (Kristeva, 1982), devoid of value and amenable to elimination and killing. By doing so, it centres animals and other nonhumans that rarely become subject to positive valuations or human sympathy, such as slurry, wolves, geese and other species that are classified as ‘invasive’ or as a ‘health threat’. Drawing on empirical case studies from Australia and Germany, each of the articles demonstrates how processes of abjection intersect with practices of state-making, governing and power; practices that extend towards nonhumans and that often work towards their violent erasure. In the introduction to the special issue, we review how the articles build from and contribute to a growing interest in more-than-human approaches within the subdiscipline of political geography.

This study offers a novel account of the geographical variation in the association of educational attainment with electoral behaviour. It estimates multilevel random-coefficient models using survey data from the British Election Study Internet Panel and data on constituency characteristics to explore the extent to which, and reasons why, the voting behaviours of individuals with identical qualifications varied across different types of parliamentary constituencies in British general elections from 2015 to 2019. We find the geography of this educational cleavage has not been evenly distributed in recent years. While the individual-level association of educational attainment and vote choice indeed varied geographically at the 2015, 2017 and 2019 general elections, there is only limited evidence to suggest that similarly educated individuals voted differently in constituencies with low and high densities of persons with high levels of education. Rather, our findings suggest that constituency left behind-ness (broadly defined) is the most important factor in explaining the spatial heterogeneity of education-based voting in recent British general elections.

In June 2023, thousands of non-Jewish residents of the Jawlan (in Arabic) or Golan (in Hebrew) protested for several days against the construction of a new wind farm near the picturesque village of Majdal Shams (Arabic for Tower of the Sun) on the southeastern border between Syria and Israel. This event and its fallouts were arguably the culmination of 56 years of Israeli frontier making projects in the region. Drawing on in-depth interviews as well as field observations, this article traces Israel's ecological frontier. Specifically, the article chronicles five strategies of nature related frontier making deployed by the Israeli settler state in the Jawlan-Golan in the last six decades: terra nullius, animal nullius, naturalization, militarization, and renewable energy. I refer to such settler colonial investments in various modes of natural and environmental management, when these occur in contentious political regions and near borders, as “frontier ecologies.” The power of frontier ecologies lies precisely in that they seem to exist naturally—namely, beyond the realm of humans and their wars. Ultimately, the nexus of colonialism and nature conservation highlights the ways in which violence travels in between vulnerable human and nonhuman communities. Documenting the Jawlani resistance to colonialism, and to climate colonialism in particular, this article also calls for a more collaborative practices of nature conservation that would unsettle the colonial legacies of frontier ecologies.