Political Geography最新文献

Studies on environmental governance have mainly focused on the relationship between local state, market, and community. However, how an environmental agenda is achieved by multi-scalar state actors and how these multi-scalar interventions reshape urban spatial politics have been understudied. This research investigates the protection of Erhai Lake in Dali, a third-tier city in Western China. Erhai Lake protection is a high-profile initiative proposed by the top leader. However, it is not only conducted through a top-down target-setting authoritarian system but has also invoked market and state interventions from various scales. Based on this case, we first reflect on statecraft in governing environmental sustainability in China, which manifested in mobilizing hybrid instruments to achieve the environmental goal. Second, environmental practices at the local scale do not municipalize environmental resources. Instead, the provincial-level state stands out in influencing local regulations and deploying state-owned enterprises to achieve environmental and economic ends. These actions peripheralize local city authorities in economic development, social management, and environmental assets management, undermining the entrepreneurial stance of the city government. This research contributes to understanding the co-evolution of urban spatial politics and environmental practices.

Since the announcement of Kenya's Vision 2030, infrastructure provision has been cast as a central part of Kenya's development strategy. A key component of this vision is the upgrading of the Port of Mombasa, the largest and busiest port in East Africa, to international logistics standards. Analyzing the implementation of the Mombasa Port Development Program (MPDP), this article argues that it reveals a transformation of the politics of ‘gatekeeping’ - understood as the political contests around the spatial and institutional sites that mediate the circulation of resources between domestic and international political-economic spheres. The controversies surrounding the management of the MPDP reveal how gatekeeping has undergone a process of decentralization, that results in arenas of gatekeeper competition multiplying at the intersection of new institutional and spatial sites of political contestation. The article demonstrates how gatekeeping now increasingly encompasses complex interactions between peripheral city-level actors and international state and non-state actors. Spatially, it emphasizes how gatekeeping contests crystallize around Mombasa's logistics sector, due to the port city's position as a crucial gateway linking the hinterland to global trade networks. This, I argue, is transforming Mombasa into a gatekeeper city understood as an urban space of transboundary logistical entanglements, where a variety of spatial practices encounter, and reconfigure the modalities of gatekeeping.

Over the last twenty years, a remarkable surge in small donor contributing has been observed throughout the United States. Little is known, however, about the geographic origin of these small donors. In this research, we ask whether the impressive emergence of small donors is observed in the same places the large donations spring from, or whether these donors occupy a distinct, more dispersed, geography. If the new donors are emerging from locations where donations are traditionally scarce, then perhaps this extraordinary development is more politically significant. We find that small donor fundraising has had a centrifugal impact on the campaign playing field, bringing fundraising into closer congruence with other grassroots outreach efforts. The democratization of campaign finance is well underway with observers now engaged in a vigorous debate about the consequences.

This paper explores some ways that far-right worldviews are digitally encoded and strategically-assembled in and through built environments. The paper argues that an understanding of far-right spatiality will be limited without a more inter-scalar, relational and material framing of the various components of far-right world-building. Assemblage ontologies, seen through comparative cases, therefore hold value in making sense of the far-right today.

Explorations of how digital media and the far-right are entangled with and co-producing built environments, are thus vital. As ideologies and philosophies (e.g., nationalism or conspiracism) travel across networked medias, complex hybridizations become infrastructurally-fixed-in-place. These affixations produce, and are produced by, geographical communities (e.g., urban developments). Far-right material infrastructures thereby extend from, and into, the digital, mediated by both human and nonhuman processes (such as generative AI), thus becoming co-constitutive elements of place, via land ownership, buildings, aesthetics, social encounters and practices, urban planning processes, and electoral politics; e.g., the assembled spatialities of everyday life.

The paper juxtaposes two international cases, drawn from ethnography and critical discourse/visual analyses. The first is the territorialisation of circulating notions of American hyper-patriotic nationalism in the suburban South via urban developments and recreational spaces. The second case explores how far-right representations of conspiracism and debates around urban traditionalism versus modernity, are contested online and offline in Dresden, Saxony. Both cases point to the powerful entanglements of far-right ideology, digital media, and place. Conceptually, the paper juxtaposes phenomenological notions of far-right space/place with ideas of ‘strategic assemblage’ and online/offline ‘code space’, as ontological lenses to interrogate the relationships between far-right online worlds and the material configurations of physical infrastructures and materials which have troubling implications for everyday environments and democratic life.

This paper explores what it means to hope under, within, and through everyday modes of affective hostile governance. Taking the empirical landscape of everyday digital life within the UK's asylum system, this paper outlines how smartphone practices are entangled with an everyday politics of hope. Holding the tension between hostility and hope, I centre an array of taken-for-granted everyday digital practices that have become central to hope production, circulation, and maintenance within periods of waiting for asylum seekers: from online gaming and lock screen photo choices to the creation of WhatsApp group chats. In the context of banal digital practices, I argue that what hope enables — defined as alternative attachments to life otherwise (materially, spatial-temporally, imaginatively) — is a form of agency that cannot simply be dismissed as cruel or futile within the broader context of systems that harm, injure, and erode. Instead, I highlight how the ability of hope to emerge alongside hostility in the UK's asylum system challenges us to reconceptualise everyday forms of digitally-mediated agency and power.

What explains diaspora support for populist presidential candidates? Existing findings suggest most diaspora voters are less likely to support populist candidates. However, there are notable exceptions among Latin American diasporas. We posit educated diasporas will be less likely to support populist candidates and political socialization in destination countries with successful populists will increase support for populist candidates in origin-country elections. We use origin-country candidate-level election data from 13 Latin American diasporas residing in the United States to test these claims. Our data covers 172 candidates from 45 first-round presidential elections. We connect this voting data to time-variant demographic data from the American Community Survey (ACS) for US respondents born in our thirteen Latin American countries of interest. Our results complicate existing findings as only some diasporas have less support for populist candidates than domestic voters, while others have relatively more support. We find weak origin-country state capacity, manifested by non-reporting of consulate-level election results, explains this variation. Diasporas from weaker states leave earlier in life and are more politically socialized in the destination country, yet likely vote for populists out of a desire to restore order in their country of birth.

Indigenous life in India is defined by development. Indigenous peoples in India are categorized as Scheduled Tribes, a constitutional category defined by a presumed backwardness, remoteness, and need for improvement. Indigenous life and community well-being is tracked via development measures and initiatives where development is seen as both a requirement for and vehicle of peace and stability. In this article, we propose Naga pedagogies of love as Indigenous modes of accounting for relations and narrating community wellbeing. We consider Naga storytelling about rice as an embodied Indigenous pedagogy of love that enacts Indigenous futurity in the here and now. Building on theorizations of Indigenous epistemologies, we demonstrate how dominant modes of development and scaling-up are unable to account for Indigenous ways of knowing and being. Instead, we explore forms of reciprocity and sociality that are embedded in Indigenous community and allow us to claim past and future as Indigenous features that are outside the economic domain of expansion.