Political Geography最新文献

In the past two decades, the 'diaspora turn' in research and policy has led to the development of several typologies of diaspora policies around the world. This study explores and extends Francesco Ragazzi's established 2014 global typology of diaspora policies. We use in-depth qualitative analysis of Czech diaspora policies to assess the internal validity of the typology and identify new dimensions that are central to our understanding of diaspora politics. We then replicate Ragazzi's quantitative analysis with the inclusion of new data on the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia and Poland, assessing the typology's external validity. We find a new cluster of diaspora policy types, characterized by a “cautiously proactive” mix of diaspora policy mechanisms based on relatively generous cultural and citizenship policies, variably accentuated symbolic policies and limited social and economic policies. We suggest that this mix has been structured by the tension between the countries' commitment to a (neo) liberal emigration regime and the continued importance of ethno-cultural conceptions of nationhood. In addition, we identify three new variables that should be included in future typologies: 1) the volume and distribution of funding for diaspora policy; 2) the symbolic recognition of diaspora in the legal system; 3) policy differentiation among different kinds of diaspora. Our mixed-method approach illustrates the importance of using nuanced qualitative data to provide a meaningful depiction of policy.

In this paper, I draw on feminist narrative analysis to reconsider the exceptional character of agriculture under the law and its embodied consequences for contemporary agricultural guestworkers in Georgia, USA. Through engaged participant observation alongside farmworker advocates and archival research of legal texts, I consider the interplay between the law and everyday narratives in (re)constructing the racialized agricultural labor system. I interrogate a century of immigration laws, labor laws, and foreign labor schemes and examine how systems of selective inclusion play out on the ground. My analysis is informed by a theoretical framework that asserts that the US racial capitalist state developed in tandem with conceptions linking territory, whiteness, and the virtues of agriculture. Merging literatures on racial capitalism and the racial state, political geographies of immigration, and agricultural exceptionalism, this paper advances an understanding of the importance of interrogating the farm labor system to illuminate key mechanisms of exclusion characteristic of the US racial capitalist state. I argue that the state's construction of “disposable” farmworkers exposes the extent to which the racial capitalist state acts to discipline labor and uphold racialized hierarchies of “American” identity.

Recent literature on the geography and political economy of humanitarian migration governance has highlighted the diverse circuits of economic value being forged through ‘refugee crises’ across the world. However, there is a noticeable gap in the examination of what kind of labour relations sustain these new economic circuits. Additionally, there is limited analysis of how humanitarian labour practices intersect with existing geographies of labour precarity in regions where refugee aid operations are conducted. This article aims to address these gaps by exploring the dominant labour relations within the changing landscape of private and public service providers in Greece following the 2015–16 European ‘refugee crisis.’ The article argues that the growth of the refugee aid sector in Greece both capitalised on and exacerbated ongoing processes of labour market deregulation and public sector contraction. The burgeoning aid sector operated as a surrogate welfare state, relying on devalued local labour to address the basic social reproduction needs of global ‘surplus populations’. Extending discussions on the political economy of migration industries beyond profit-making to account for their role in transforming the welfare state and labour relations in spaces of accentuated capitalist crisis, the article demonstrates how the emergency temporalities of aid funding, the rise of public sector managerialism, and employment protection liberalisation impact migrant-facing services, effectively serving as both anti-labour and anti-immigration policy. Furthermore, it illustrates how politically induced migrant ruination is used as a lever to intensify and moralise humanitarian labour in a feedback loop detrimental to both working-class locals and migrants.

The harsh beauty of the Antarctic continent has always fascinated explorers, scientists, policymakers, and global audiences alike. From the 18th century onwards, national expeditions competed to discover and claim Terra Australis Incognita, the fantastical Great Southern Land believed to be located in the southern Asia-Pacific. This article investigates the worldmaking potential of Antarctica as an uncanny borderscape where humans confront the familiar yet otherworldly ice. I argue this encounter produces a double-sided imaginary of Antarctica as a geography of exception – both as a utopian world elevated above the everyday politics that dominates international relations elsewhere and as a dystopian world where monsters and madness lurk just beneath the icy surface. This double-sided imaginary enabled diplomatic agreement at the 1959 Washington Conference that froze competing sovereignty claims and preserved Antarctica as a frozen laboratory for collaborative science. At the same time, it inspires fears of a potentially thawed Antarctica as a place of horror where alien forces threaten to overwhelm human rationality. Drawing on primary accounts of exploration, archival material, and science and speculative fiction, my intertextual analysis demonstrates how this imaginary was created, represented, and reproduced to create utopian and dystopian visions of our collective planetary future.

Urban-rural polarisation in political attitudes is widely argued to have become a distinctive feature of many Western democracies. Yet, have urban-rural gaps grown over time, as is often suggested? And, if so, do trends in this regard differ across countries? We address these questions leveraging individual-level data from over 300,000 respondents from the European Social Survey over the period 2002-2020 in 25 countries. Overall, we do find evidence of moderate divergence in outlooks between more urban and more rural publics, examining in particular trust towards the EU and views on migration. We also find that there is divergence in terms of feelings of trust in relation to the political system and levels of satisfaction with democracy since the early 2010s, most likely because of the financial and sovereign debt crises. But these gaps have significantly reduced more recently. Furthermore, trends are heterogenous across countries. Overall, this paper demonstrates that value polarisation along the urban density divide should not be over emphasised as divergence between urban and rural Europe is more moderate than in the US, and very issue-based and country-specific.

This paper explores the implications of the Anthropocene and its associated planetary awareness on the concept and exercise of sovereignty, particularly through the lens of the Svalbard Treaty. The Arctic archipelago of Svalbard is not only a space undergoing rapid environmental change today, but its treaty-based governance arrangements are based on an early-twentieth century spatial imaginary of fishery, coal, and resource extraction. By examining Norway's governance shift from resource extraction to environmental stewardship on Svalbard, this paper reflects on transformations of the practice of sovereignty in response to global environmental challenges. Through interviews with local stakeholders, the research highlights the contentious nature of these shifts, revealing how increased environmental regulations, while necessary, may paradoxically entrench existing power structures and complicate the presence of non-Norwegian entities. This case study of the Svalbard Treaty serves as a normative microcosm for broader issues of sovereignty, treaty obligations, and international governance as they may evolve due to planetary change, pointing to the urgent need to rethink these evolving dynamics. The paper underscores the pressing and complex challenges facing the international system in the Anthropocene, suggesting that while Svalbard's geopolitical stability may be maintained and Norwegian sovereignty remains uncontested, the instability of global environmental realities is already leading to changes to the ways in which sovereignty is exercised in the present.