Political Geography最新文献

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.

This paper brings the narratives of the environmental activist groups Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and Fridays for Future into conversation with Critical Anthropocene Theory and Indigenous environmentalism to interrogate pathways for and limits of environmental political action under planetary conditions marked by nonhuman shaping power. Critical Anthropocene Theory, the paper argues, can problematise the simplistic positivism and managerialism of the new ‘extinction activism’. However, the conversation with Indigenous environmental practices, which flexibly manage tensions within human-nonhuman relations and centre radical social impact, reveals the political limitations of both extinction activism and critical Anthropocene thinking. The paper distinguishes the logic of fast change within existing socio-political parameters, which drives extinction activism, from Critical Anthropocene Theory's focus on ontological change as a precondition for a non-exploitative environmental politics, which deprioritises activist practice. Different from both, the paper argues that Indigenous environmental activism is marked by a yet different pragmatic approach, where both modern and non-modern political means are mobilised towards radical change. Indigenous environmentalism is marked by the dynamic co-evolution of cosmology and politics and moves flexibly between modern/nonmodern boundaries, highlighting new pathways for political action in the relational Anthropocene.

The notion of ‘just transition’ (JT) is an attempt to align climate and energy objectives with the material concerns of industrial workers, frontline communities, and marginalised groups. Despite the potential for fusing social and environmental justice, there is growing concern that the concept is being mobilised in practice as a form of ‘climate delayism’: a problem more ambiguous than open forms of denialism as it draws in multiple and conflictual agents, practices, and discourses. Using an historical materialist framework, attentive to both energy-capital and capital-labour relations, we show how JT is vulnerable to forces and relations of climate delay across both fossil capital and climate capital hegemonic projects. We review this through an engagement with the climate obstructionism literature and the theory of labour environmentalism: the political engagement of trade unionists and workers with environmental issues. As tensions within the labour movement surface amidst the unsettling of the carbon capital hegemony, we assess the degree to which (organised) labour—as an internally differentiated, contradictory movement—is participating in climate breakdown through a ‘praxis of delay’. Trade unions and industrial workers are often implicated in resisting or undermining transitions, but this is related significantly to their structural power relations vis a vis the fossil hegemony. Notably, JT negotiations are themselves structurally embedded within the carbon capital economy. The general preferences of trade unions for social over environmental justice might be prevalent but are neither universal nor inevitable; JT is open and contested political terrain, and labour-environmental struggles remain imperative for building just energy futures.

I examine the relationship between interstate river conflicts and intrastate violence such as riots, demonstrations, and civil wars in multiple regions from 1900 to 2001. I argue that interstate disagreements over cross-border river basins create instabilities in water resources, which can increase the risks for intrastate conflict by creating unequal access to water resources across ethnic groups, displacing populations, and reducing water supplies for downstream states. I find that countries that experience more frequent and salient interstate conflicts over shared river basins face significantly higher risks for multiple forms of intrastate conflict, especially if the interstate conflicts involve water quantity rights in river basins. Consistent with the pathways described in the theory, water conflicts between countries increase intrastate conflict risks more for downstream than upstream states, for countries with ethnic dominance, and for countries experiencing large numbers of refugees and internally displaced people. These results help us understand cases like the Syrian civil war where water conflicts in the Tigris-Euphrates basin combined with drought and forced migration fueled grievances against the government.

A peace agreement represents a chance for the state to renew its social contract with the conflict-affected population. Conflict may reoccur if their expectations of a peace dividend are disappointed. However, in the existing literature there is a lack of focus on post-war public services and the challenges to re-establishing effective state governance, especially in areas with significant rebel presence. Much of the literature still assumes that conflict zones are ripe for better governance and the post-war impact of rebel governance remains largely unanalysed. Drawing on original survey data, interviews and focus groups, this mixed-methods article analyses the impact of the 2016 Colombian peace agreement on health services in areas with high conflict intensity and sustained rebel presence. In the most conflict-affected areas, it finds an increase in demand for health services but no improvement in the perceived quality of this care. In fact, in municipalities hosting FARC reintegration camps, which were specially targeted for improved healthcare, we find a decline in both demand and perceived quality. Three key obstacles are identified: 1) favourable views of wartime healthcare services provided by the FARC; 2) difficulties establishing state presence locally; 3) high expectations and mistrust of government provisions. This demonstrates the lasting impact of wartime rebel governance, and the challenges it poses to post-war state legitimacy, and adds to our knowledge of the underlying mechanisms of uneven state capacity. It thereby makes an important and original contribution to our understanding of peacebuilding obstacles and to the growing literature on rebel governance.

A specter is haunting the American heartland — the specter of global China. As US-China geopolitical tensions rise, China-related investments in US land have become ground zero for anti-China populist expressions. This article analyzes the role of Chinese land investment in the reconfiguration of local, inter-regional, and national politics. It examines geopolitical imaginaries of Chinese investment through a case study of Fufeng USA's agricultural land purchase in Grand Forks, North Dakota. The specter of a Chinese-owned corporation in the Upper Midwest ignited fears of economic statecraft and espionage among residents, interregional coalitions, and national politicians alike. In this context, the circulation of anti-China red scare discourses served to unify politically disparate actors across networked scales. The article intervenes by analyzing an anti-China red scare within an agricultural region and extending global China conceptual frameworks to Global North contexts through regional and scalar analyses. This red scare articulates as a land-based formation wherein anti-China discourse circulates in response to fears over the loss of agricultural space and sovereignty to foreign powers, in effect disciplining transnational capital. The analysis, furthermore, illuminates the undersized role of Chinese investment in US agriculture, thereby demystifying perceptions of threat embodied in geopolitical imaginaries of Chinese investment.

This article advances the concept of neoliberal infrastructures as the ghostly carriers of neoliberalism by drawing together two distinct research trajectories: the political critique of neoliberalism and the poetics of infrastructure. The framework of the argument is Kundera's famous dilemma in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Should we approach life with heaviness or lightness? While lightness may be tempting, the only way for us to be ‘real’ is to confront the ‘heaviness’ of things. The article argues that Kundera's construct unwittingly underpins recent critiques that, by confronting the ‘heaviness’ of neoliberalism (its crises, exploitation, and violence), frame it as a ‘monster’. The risk of this characterization, I contend, is to portray neoliberalism as an almost autonomous force, thus neglecting our involvement in its reproduction. Reversing Kundera's logic, I suggest that for us to be ‘real’ we also need to confront neoliberalism's lightness (its seduction, fascination, and enchantment) and thus understand it as a haunting presence, not merely as an oppressive monster. To advance this view, I discuss the notion of hauntology in the context of Mercato Mayfair, a deconsecrated London church turned glamorous community market. Building on the poetic dimension of the infrastructural turn and reflecting on how neoliberalism has established itself through processes of urban restructuring and spatial transformation, Mercato Mayfair is explored as a neoliberal infrastructure. Neoliberal infrastructures are theorized as lived spaces encompassing people, materials, symbols, histories, affects, and desires in which we enable and give life to the unbearable and ghostly lightness of neoliberalism.