Political Geography最新文献

Nature conservation strategies are affected by, as well as instruments of, geopolitics and interterritorial relations. This paper provides a conceptual framework that facilitates a systems-based analysis of the relationship between nature conservation and geopolitics. We compare and connect two prominent academic literatures relevant to this relationship: the peace parks and conservation geopolitics literatures. Whereas peace parks refer to an academic knowledge field, a social movement, and a territorialized conservation reality on the ground, conservation geopolitics refers to an academic discourse within critical geopolitics. We analyzed both academic literatures on four aspects: (i) the approach to nature conservation; (ii) the approach to interterritorial relations; (iii) the framing of the relationship between nature conservation and geopolitics; (iv) the actors involved. The former literature predominantly emphasizes cross-border integration, community development and nature conservation benefits. The latter predominantly highlights the more exclusionary, conflictive, and normative aspects of the relationship. The comparison highlights that the relationship between nature conservation and geopolitics can be best understood as a complex. Relational approaches, such as systems approaches, can uncover the intricacies of the nature conservation-geopolitics complex. We have laid the groundwork for such a systems approach by identifying four system components domains: the diversity of involved actors, the institutional framework, multiscale and historical dynamics, and the spatial-territorial context. A systems approach to the nature conservation-geopolitics complex provides a guiding framework for the examination of contemporary issues like the diverging agencies of various actors, trade-offs, and ethical dilemmas between nature conservation and geopolitical concerns.

Protest campaigns have proven an effective form of contention to challenge authoritarian rule yet can at times escalate into armed conflict. This article aims to explain how a protest movement can escalate to an uprising by examining the case of Myanmar, where the 2021 military coup prompted the emergence of a diverse movement of strike groups, civil society, ousted Burman-majority parliamentarians, and ethnic minority resistance organizations. Based on original interviews with movement members, the article traces how repression triggered escalation and spurred increased cooperation among movement actors that resulted in an armed uprising. Building primarily on social movements and contentious politics studies, this article argues effective campaign framing was critical in maintaining movement unity and legitimizing violence as a form of resistance. Mobilization of resources in social networks and coalition networks was key to organizing armed resistance. The article contributes novel insights by showing that a diverse movement can strengthen cooperation to mount armed resistance, instead of fragment during escalation as studies have often found. The article also deepens our understanding of how movements with links to established armed actors may escalate, as it details how cooperation between mainstream protestors and armed actors can transform a movement into armed resistance.

The intensification of corporate acquisition of land in particularly the Global South has generated widespread resistance from rural communities who are being forced off their land with little or no compensation. Yet, while community protests have received ample scholarly attention, the strategies that companies adopt to deal with land conflicts are rarely studied. In contrast with studies that misleadingly describe these strategies in terms of ‘corporate social responsibility’, we adopt a contentious politics perspective. On the basis of a detailed documentation of the trajectories and outcomes of 150 conflicts between palm oil companies and rural communities in Indonesia, we show that palm oil companies are contentious actors, in the sense that companies engage in conscious and strategic efforts to make and realize their claims, and for this purpose mobilize a particular contentious repertoire, involving the co-optation of local leaders, the cultivation of connections with local authorities, the suppression of community protests, and the criminalization of protest leaders. We employ our dataset to explore how common these strategies are, finding that companies that have adopted RSPO's code of conduct are not less likely to employ them. We argue that corporate contentious politics is a response to the informalized nature of Indonesia's state institutions, and call for more comparative research on this understudied dimension of land conflicts.

Climate change puts an inequitable and heavy burden on people who are forced to adapt to unjust socioenvironmental conditions created by the legacy of ongoing climate coloniality and historical settler and imperial colonialism. However, universalizing climate adaptation discourses fail to conceptualize these historical processes by framing climate change as external to complex social and human systems. A plural reconceptualization of adaptation instead asks us to question what it means to adapt to environmental changes not just under the guise of global climate change, but as embedded in coloniality and settler colonialism in place. Critically engaging with different epistemologies of adaptation and grappling with what it means to do this work in the context of settler colonial realities asks scholars to co-produce knowledges of adaptation that embody place-based histories and human-environmental relations that are too often erased, elided, or appropriated in mainstream Eurocentric adaptation science. In this paper, we draw on an environmental oral history with the Chief of the Lenape Indian Tribe of Delaware to understand how the possibility of indigenous futurity and climate adaptation unfolds towards confronting climate coloniality and efforts to unsettle settler colonialism on stolen lands. Addressing climate coloniality on settler colonial territories suggests that as part of discussing climate change adaptation, scholars should make way for repatriating indigenous knowledges of adaptation and climate change to repair colonial wounds.

While political geographers have researched state restructuring extensively over the past forty years, few have explored the role of cybernetics in this process. Conversely, although a wide spectrum of scholars outside of geography have shed light on aspects of cybernetic governance, they have yet to incorporate insights from political geography. In both cases, the political geography of cybernetic state power remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, the article explores the nexus of cybernetics and state restructuring in the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a Cold War US defense research agency, circa 1958 to 1969. It analyzes Congressional testimonies by ARPA-sponsored scientists and engineers alongside their academic publications and other papers to grasp how they conceived of and actively sought to transform state-space. The article makes two arguments. First, while geographers treat state restructuring as a function of neoliberalization or War on Terror securitization, the process was set in motion near the start of the Cold War. It was then that ARPA's appeal to cybernetics to resolve geopolitical conflicts cemented the logical, organizational, and technical foundations for neoliberal and War on Terror state mutations. Second, the main thrust of ARPA responses to Cold War crises involved restructuring state-power in the mode of a cybernetic feedback control system. These efforts bring into relief a distinct object of analysis, the state control system (SCS), which offers geographers fresh perspectives on state restructuring and opens new pathways for interdisciplinary research.

Under what conditions do disastrous storms and floods provoke anti-government protests in autocracies? While grievances, as they often occur after disastrous weather events, are necessary preconditions for protests, they are by no means sufficient. This is particularly true in undemocratic states, where protesters typically fear repressive sanctions. Therefore, this essay hypothesizes that disastrous storms and floods primarily result in anti-government mobilization in autocracies when they occur in the homelands of marginalized ethnic groups. In such scenarios, the immediate hardships caused by the disaster come on top of underlying more structural grievances. Moreover, groups with shared ethnic identities are more likely to mobilize for collective action. This argument is tested using quantitative cross-national protest-event data from the Mass Mobilization in Autocracies Database (MMAD). The results of numerous regression analyses on a sample pre-processed with Coarsened Exact Matching to address potential concerns of endogeneity yield robust support for the outlined hypothesis.

A divide between people in rural areas and in cities contributes to the current wave of populist backlash and the realignment of party systems across Western democracies. Does place-based resentment also exist and influence vote choice in an egalitarian welfare state, and if so, what is its basis? Building on the literature of place resentment and social identities, we examine place-based resentment in the Norwegian context. Employing original survey data, we measure rural-urban resentment by comparing the difference in an individual's in-group and out-group sentiment. We find that rural voters are more resentful of urbanites. Despite extensive redistributive public policies, a sense of unfair resource distribution spurs greater rural resentment than a cultural grievance. In response to current debates in the American and West European scholarship, our findings illustrate that rural resentment can develop in contexts where rural voters are not economically marginalized. Rural resentment also explains voting for the center-left agrarian party. Our work demonstrates the importance of place-based social identities in explaining rural political backlash in advanced democracies. Moreover, rural backlash does not always strengthen the populist right.

Why do sewage and manual cleaning workers, who mostly belong to Dalit communities, die prematurely? In answering this question, I argue that the mutually reinforcing relationship between law and infrastructure enables their premature deaths. The gaps in law and those in urban sanitation infrastructure in India, combined with deeply entrenched Caste ethos, and the commodification of cleanliness, create conditions where the deaths of sewage workers are a regular occurrence. I situate deaths of sewage workers within the Clean India Campaign, a government program for clean public infrastructure and managing fecal matter to posit that the relentless pursuit of cleanliness results in its commodification, which in turn exacerbates the exploitation of the sewage cleaning workers.

Using a theoretical lens drawn from Black studies and Dalit-Bahujan scholarship, I demonstrate that the temporality of law and infrastructure makes the cleaning workers invisible to the planners and implementers of the Clean India Campaign. Under such conditions, the cleaning workers gain recognition from law only when they die. Their appalling working conditions and the near absence of workplace protections hardly get any attention. It is only when they die that the law recognizes their personhood. I draw attention to how law and infrastructure influence each other and contribute to Black Studies and Dalit Studies by framing caste as racializing assemblages—contextualizing the temporal geographies of premature death and the role of infrastructures as an assemblage.

In Spring 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the globe, diplomats embraced the digital as a means of continuing to practise statecraft. Drawing on online observations of the (resumed) 43rd, 44th and 45th sessions of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) in 2020, and 23 interviews with representatives who participated in these sessions, this paper addresses two lacuna in the existing literature: the under-theorisation of the role of the spatial in studies of digital diplomacy; and the lack of attention paid to diplomacy in digital geographies scholarship. We explore how diplomacy, an inherently spatial practice, is being ‘recast’ by the digital via a shift both in the form of diplomatic interactions, and in the human and non-human actors involved in doing diplomacy. In doing so, we take as our starting point Leszczynski's theory of the mediation of socio-spatial-digital relations. We consider two features of digital diplomacy which scholarship on digital mediation opens up for examination. First, how digitalisation – specifically the use of ‘real-time’ online audio-visual communication devices – has altered the geographies of diplomatic inclusion and exclusion at the HRC, simultaneously fostering interactions between diverse diplomatic actors whilst also exacerbating pre-existing spatial exclusions. Second, the shifting geographies of diplomatic encounters, including how digital technologies have reconfigured opportunities for intimacy. The paper concludes by calling for dialogue between scholars of digital diplomacy and of digital geographies.

Evidence on the electoral participation at the municipal level usually points to a detrimental effect of an enlarged size (due to amalgamation) at the following municipal elections. Differently from most previous studies, our results show an overall positive effect of amalgamation on municipal turnout. In a quasi-experimental Difference-in-difference design following Callaway and Sant’Anna (2020) applied to the Italian case, we find that the cross- and within municipal heterogeneity emerges as a crucial lens for explaining such evidence. In particular, turnout after merger is affected by the level of dissent in the referenda held before the mergers: municipalities with higher dissent towards amalgamation show higher turnout at the following municipal election. This suggests possible electoral mobilization effects in controversial amalgamations. Moreover, final municipal size per se does not explain turnout after amalgamation and larger units do not necessarily vote less than smaller ones, thus rivaling the traditional claim that a larger size should depress municipal turnout.