Political Geography最新文献

In this article, we present data from the first dedicated census of commemorative antimafia street names in Italian cities, investigating streets named after innocent victims of the mafia as “lieux de memoire”. We introduce the concept of social amnesia surrounding the mafia to cast light on the impact of mafia violence on socio-spatial relationships and potential societal responses to this trauma. The practice of naming streets to commemorate the antimafia movement is a strategy for countering social amnesia. Antimafia street names are forms of urban resistance and civic education, and as such may be defined as a “common good”. Nonetheless, antimafia street naming can also be a primarily formal or acritical memory practice or – potentially – an expedient for legitimizing illegal relations. This kind of ambiguity is inherent in mafia studies and attests to the ongoing urban conflict between the mafia and the antimafia movement.

This paper explores water justice struggles in the understudied region of Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan through a focus on two water justice movements, one civil society campaign, and a related event. While most of the relevant literature in geography and cognate fields has thoroughly dissected inter-State hydropolitical quarrels, discussed water justice from a legal perspective, and analysed water conflicts, less attention has been paid to bottom-up movements, to their visions and actions within a materially and socially challenging environment, and to their engagement with the state. Relying on published material as well as primary research, we show how Iraqi water activists seek to strike a balance between engaging institutions and moving beyond them, across ethno-religious divides and advocacy registers, in their quest to re-signify and re-common waterscapes. We argue that it is not despite all odds, but rather because of all odds, that Iraqi activists showcase such a developed awareness of their role and transformative potential along the rugged path of democratisation.

In this paper we develop a relational understanding of populism informed by urban political ecology. We argue that an urban political ecology of populism is necessary for a popular-democratic denunciation of the environmental claims of the far right. This article thereby aims to further develop a critique of liberal environmentalism and right-wing populism. We do so by first staging a dialogue between literatures in urban political ecology and Gramscian inflected readings of populism. Both have sought to interpret how spatial – and ecological – claim making becomes central to struggles over hegemony. The second half of the paper analyses these tensions in the Dutch farmers movement, which has become one of the most important political forces in the Netherlands since 2019. Abstracting “the local”, “the rural” or “the farm” out of the broader processes of urbanisation is central to struggles over the representation of farmers. Right-wing movements thus seek to further a broader disillusionment with formal politics, while effectively deploying spatial and ecological abstractions that pit the “rural” against the “urban”. We conclude by instead emphasising the crucial connections between populism and ecology, and call for a popular-democratic political ecology.

Informal construction has been rife in Albanian cities since the fall of communism in 1990. This study investigates the fluctuations in the housing legalization process in conjunction with national and local elections in Albania from 2008 to 2021. Government revenues from legalization fees are used as a proxy for the pace of the legalization process. The key finding is that the legalization of informal buildings intensifies prior to an election and drops afterwards, suggesting that the process is politically driven. This phenomenon is termed Election-Driven Legalization of Informality (EDLI) and is part and parcel of the shadow economy in urban Albania. In combination with another phenomenon known as Election-Driven Informality (EDI), EDLI produces a vicious circle. First, informal construction is enabled or tolerated before an election to curry favor with voters; that is EDI at work. Then, EDLI comes into play: before the next election, the informal buildings are legalized in a rush, again for the purpose of garnering voter support. These practices, which are perpetrated by both sides of the political spectrum, are both unethical and unsustainable.

Why do some countries make the costly decision to relocate their capital city? Existing research offers four general explanations for this momentous action: administrative functionality, economic development, environmental degradation, and national integration. We offer a less sanguine, political explanation: capital relocations offer autocratic leaders a way to mitigate different security threats, including coups, popular protests, and foreign interventions. Using original data on capital relocations in 202 polities after 1789, we test several implications of our argument, at different levels of analysis. First, we show that autocracies are much more likely to relocate their capitals than democracies. Second, using different indicators of internal and external threats, we find that autocracies more likely relocate their capitals when breakdown is looming. Third, running subnational analyses, we find evidence that capitals are relocated to smaller cities and areas less susceptible to urban development.

Data infrastructures are expanding rapidly across African societies, renewing the promise of modernisation, and providing a massive data resource to the dominant tech powers of the world. Google's private undersea cable, named Equiano, landed in west Africa with the intention of igniting data services, smart environments, investment opportunities and jobs. Non-governmental and multilateral agencies are busy supporting African governments in building regulatory frameworks that aim to ‘ready’ countries for the 4th industrial revolution. Young Africans labour in remodelled shipping containers to annotate data and train algorithms. While future promises pan out in wide-angled, utopian visions, this paper sets out an approach to understand African contexts as sites of heterogeneous experience of data infrastructures that are historically and politically contingent. The paper explores the spatial politics of extraction, surveillance, and exploitation in three examples of the Equiano pipeline, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Readiness Index, and the AI annotative labour force. We challenge the homogenising discourses of global tech companies and transnational governance institutions in accounting for the geographical histories of colonialism and its afterlives in African societies. We further call for empirical studies that examine the granular multiplicities of data, providing nuanced understandings of AI in and from Africa.

The history of protected areas in South Africa is inextricably linked to the forced removals of rural Black South Africans by the colonial and apartheid governments based on racially discriminatory laws. To redress historical injustices, the South African National Land Reform Programme enabled land claimants to reclaim land rights to their ancestral lands, which may include modern-day protected areas. The collective ownership of communal land has led to the formation of Communal Property Institutions as legal landholding entities for land reform beneficiaries – and the emergence of Communally-Owned Protected Areas (COPAs). This article explores the management and governance intricacies of 12 legally declared COPAs from KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Engaging theorisation of ethnic territories, we argue that they represent arguably the strongest example of the extreme flexibility of, and contradictory tensions within, resurgent collectivisation. This is because COPAs accommodate both processes of enclosure and dispossession of access rights and restitution of collective ownership rights and associated benefits through the territorialisation of conservation space. Furthermore, we will argue they are governmentalised in such a way as to represent an ‘ethnic-spatial fix’, not in the sense that it applied to anchor ethnicity in various territories through colonial indirect rule, but in the postcolonial period to fix and (re)territorialise conservation and ecotourism land use through ethnicity.

China's Belt and Road Initiative is the most visible manifestation of the country's wider internationalisation efforts in which infrastructure connectivity projects are central. Existing spatialised narratives of these projects have usefully focused on long-standing geopolitical binaries and bilateral state relations, as well as newer spatial ontologies of corridors, zones and networks. Yet they tend to underplay central-local state relations in the countries receiving Chinese infrastructure investment and so this paper examines these intra-state dynamics through three case studies of Chinese-backed transport projects in Germany, Italy and Hungary. Using Jessop, Brenner and Jones' ‘TPSN’ approach we argue that the promise of these infrastructure projects was virtuous insertion of places into global production networks, but in practice we see the central state over-riding local political actors. In Germany and Italy this is in the name of ‘de-risking’ Chinese investments whereby the re-centralisation of state power is a response to a perceived ‘China threat’. In Hungary, the centralised regime uses major infrastructure for legitimatory purposes and uses the growing connectivity to China as an Eastwards balance to its strained relations with Western Europe. We conclude by arguing that greater attentiveness to spatiality and power are needed in future studies of ‘de-risking’.

This article explores the puzzle of victims of political violence in Kenya committing to return to contested spaces of their prior victimhood and displacement. It considers how political violence has been brought to bear on understandings of property rights and belonging among Kikuyu victims of political violence in the Burnt Forest area of Uasin Gishu County in Kenya. It is reported that the iteration between the collapse of the multiparty Kenyan state commitment to protect Kikuyu land rights in their state settled areas and the partisan character of neo-customary tenure that restricts the admission of co-ethnic outsiders, induced Kikuyu spontaneous resistance to their spatial political confinement motivating their formulation of an organic discourse of belonging. The article introduces the ‘sons of village’ concept as a bottom-up framework for understanding the informal mechanisms for claiming property rights and belonging in contested spaces in Africa. By challenging notions of belonging rooted in contested histories and emphasizing credible links to land and space, this concept embodies inclusive citizenship with the potential to foster conciliatory relations between previously hostile groups in post-conflict scenarios. The 'sons of village' identification, therefore, offers a promising avenue for fostering positive peace in regions afflicted by chronic violence in Africa and beyond.

In this article, we aim to understand the processes behind the recent jihadist uprising against the state in Mali. We use the analytical lens of ‘moral economy’ to see the values and ethics at stake among individuals who decided to join the jihadist rebellion. We combine this lens with a political ecology approach returning to the field's roots at the interface with peasant studies with a focus on moral economy and land dispossession. Widespread processes of dispossession in central and northern Mali have created a moral economic anger against rent-seeking elites that provided the foundation of the jihadist uprising. To detonate this anger, two jihadist leaders, Iyad Ag Ghaly and Hamadoun Koufa, have played key roles in mobilizing popular support emerging from local grievances, while drawing on social justice-based Islamic discourse and capitalizing on external support. The Tuareg and Fulani moral economic grievances have different origins, although for both groups a defence of pastoralism is at the core. When the uprising became ‘jihadist’ from 2012, and when the Fulani started to join, it became also attractive to the subordinate classes who saw the rebellion as an opportunity for social liberation. Frequent references to the Macina Empire of the 19th century as the golden period of Fulani pastoral power has also played a key role in the emergence of a narrative about pastoral resistance to a Bambara-dominated state.