Antipode最新文献

This article examines the intersection of Asia's blockchain industry and special economic zones (SEZs). SEZs have been promoted to localise blockchain technology by disparate actors from cyberlibertarian figures to Asian blockchain firms, national policymakers, and local politicians. This convergence raises questions about what activities are imagined for Asian blockchain zones and what mutations of sovereignty, markets, and democracy they involve? To answer, this article surveys how zones have been imagined for blockchain and examines the case of Korea's Busan Blockchain Regulation-Free Zone (BBRFZ). We discuss competing imaginaries that shape the project, from the laissez-faire fantasy of Busan as a cryptocurrency hub to more “developmentalist” ideas for the zone. We argue that despite its invocation of freedom, the BBRFZ is animated by an anxious regulatory dynamic: one that seeks to promote blockchain as a means for regional development but remains conflicted due to the risks that cyberlibertarian logics of exception might bring.

Following from Neil Gray's notion of “spatial composition”, in this article I argue that “tenant composition” names a view of the organic composition of workers through the prism of housing and “tenant recomposition”, the process by which divergent subjects recompose through the self-identification and recoding of existing subject-positions codified by housing agreements. I first introduce “tenant composition” as a methodology. Next, I sketch two case studies with this method: one of the largest rent strikes in New York City history that took place at Co-op City in the Bronx from 1975 to 1976, and the undertaking of “auto reduction” (the collective price-setting of consumer goods and services) in Italy during the same period. I argue that because rent is structurally related to the wage-form, thinking about class struggle from the perspective of tenancy evinces modalities for interrupting the reproduction of neoliberal urban subjectivity, acting to abolish the relations that produce those categories in the first place.

Capitalism is constituted through specific social forms that ground accumulation and mediate class struggle. This essay tracks capital's legal form through the labyrinthine uptake of trucking liberalisation amidst the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). It argues that juridical contestation over NAFTA—known as the US–Mexico Trucking Dispute—both expresses and conceals class struggle between labour and capital on the one hand, and different fractions of capital on the other. The legal form of NAFTA binds workers into a condition of negative mobility or rather the non-identity of capitalist motion and social organisation for use. At the same time, the legal form is inverted into the “neutral” realm of technical regulation through NAFTA's trucking liberalisation clause. Through a critique of reification, and an empirical unfolding of wage and labour conditions evidence, the essay explicates how living labour is thrown into the social retort of circulation.

In the context of anthropogenic climate change, it has become increasingly imperative to examine the socio-ecological consequences of human-made environmental degradation as a form of violence. I advance the term “geoviolence” to refer to human actions that increase suffering through the generation, exacerbation, or instrumentalisation of adverse geophysical conditions. Focusing on labour migration dynamics, this article illustrates how geoviolence is exercised by human actors, particularly states. Based on multisited ethnographic research in Morocco and Spain with agricultural workers and their families, I analyse connections between anthropogenic climate change, migration regimes, and intimacy. I argue that the effects of water scarcity, coupled with restrictive migration policies, exacerbate the familial hardships of Moroccan agricultural labourers, thus engendering experiences of geoviolence.

In an era defined by capitalist realism, our collective ability to imagine futures beyond neoliberal frameworks has been profoundly constrained, giving rise to “cancelled futures”. This imaginative paralysis is particularly evident in urban planning, where gentrification has homogenised urban spaces and created displacement. Looking at Montréal, this paper examines how the crises of capitalist realism and urban commodification have reshaped cities, limiting the possibilities for equitable and inclusive futures. I first demonstrate how capitalist realism perpetuates cancelled futures and facilitates the forces of gentrification. I explore how these dynamics have contributed to the transformation of Montréal's urban landscape, prioritising market-driven development. Second, I turn to memory to argue that the persistence of unrealised pasts can serve as a counterforce to this imaginative stasis. It investigates how memory activism and haunting are mobilised in Montréal to contest the erasures caused by gentrification, allowing residents to reclaim suppressed possibilities.

This essay seeks to complicate Hong Kong's seemingly common-sensical geographical identity as an East Asian—specifically, Chinese—metropolis through a contrapuntal mapping of its historical connections with Southeast Asia. It takes seriously the role that this supposedly hinterland region played in catalysing urban transformations in the colony-turned-SAR. Building on work that theorises Hong Kong as a “non-sovereign” site for the everyday workings of US empire, I explore how the colony's relationship with Southeast Asia was reshaped by the central role that it played in securing the transcolonial logistics of the Vietnam War. Through a close reading of the archival record, I show how the US military-industrial complex used Hong Kong as an offshore hub for supporting the logistics of soldiering life. In addition to hosting US soldiers on rest and recuperation (R&R) leave, Hong Kong helped secure the financial logistics of counterinsurgency. These logistical entanglements remained important in the afterwar moment, when Hong Kong experienced a mass arrival of refugees from Vietnam. Saddled with the logistical burden of caring for these refugees, colonial officials gradually leveraged this “surplus population” to address labour shortages around the city. When read together, these contrapuntal mappings of logistical power clarify how Hong Kong's relationship with Southeast Asia has always been shaped by asymmetrical infrastructures of outsourced industrial production, racialised indenture, and economic unfreedom.

We propose that a critical examination of infrastructure sabotage should consider its material and immaterial dimension, and its constructive and destructive effects. Combining these two antagonisms, we suggest a matrix of four quadrants that describes (1) deconstructive material effects, (2) constructive material effects, (3) destructive immaterial effects, and (4) constructive immaterial effects of infrastructure sabotage. Through the case study of the Game Galana Dam—a project intended to promote agricultural development in a semi-arid area of Kenya—we explore how marginalised communities perceive such infrastructures as threats to their futures. Through sabotage, they do not only mean to destroy the dam, but also to benefit from it materially. Furthermore, the sabotage is intended to highlight the injustices to which they feel exposed, and demonstrate their power. The sabotage-matrix suggested here helps to reveal otherwise hidden dimensions of infrastructure sabotage, contributing to broader debates about resistance to infrastructure in human geography.

This paper re-examines the British workhouse within the framework of racial capitalism and the Atlantic world. Traditionally understood as a domestic mechanism for managing poverty and labour in an era of industrial capitalism, we argue the workhouse was deeply intertwined with global systems of racial exploitation and accumulation from the 17^th to the 19^th centuries. Tracing the workhouse's connections to Britain's colonial plantations, the transatlantic slave trade, and the circulation of finance, goods, ideas, and people in the Atlantic world, the paper challenges understandings of the workhouse's purely domestic function. Instead, the workhouse and plantation are understood as constitutively interlinked—forming a “workhouse–plantation nexus” which operated as a key component in shifting articulations of racial capitalism. Understanding this nexus reconfigures understandings of welfare histories that continue to shape racialised welfare systems and racial capitalism more broadly and is crucial for reparative justice.

As the world continues to grapple with severe climate change impacts over the past decade, states and international organisations are committing to ambitious policies/projects to build “resilience” while scaling up development efforts. At a critical juncture where questions of political power and knowledge production become salient, this paper examines why certain well-intentioned resilience interventions fail and (re)produce unintended consequences. Drawing from ethnography in Bongo in the Upper East Region of Northern Ghana, I argue that despite neoliberal framings of “bottom-up” participation, resilience praxis appropriates neo-colonial subjectivities and power inequivalence that engender counter-modernist spaces for onto-epistemic struggles, community resistance, and development failure. Beyond including farmers in decision-making in a tokenistic manner, I call for decolonial consciousness to critique historicities of power and recognise non-modern ideologies: as an alternative ontology to deconstruct coloniality in critical adaptation governance. I conclude that resilience praxis must move beyond tokenistic participation and embrace a plurality/pluriversality of worlds to co-produce contextually grounded and “just” climate solutions in the Anthropocene.

This article offers a conjunctural analysis of revanchism in San Francisco across scale. Over the past decade, conservative politicians, media, oligarchs, and organisations have emphasised immigration, homelessness, bureaucratic inefficiency, the opioid epidemic, diversity initiatives, and criminal justice reform to frame San Francisco as a weak and lawless city. This coalition's vengeful rhetoric and retaliatory action seek to create a new “common sense” about spatial governance, justifying a more authoritarian approach to both city and nation. Different scales are entwined as the discourse of urban decline is used as a national appeal, while nationalist rhetoric serves to promote urban reform. We argue this articulation of actors, forces, and ideas across scale represents an emergent historical bloc of revanchist populism. Moreover, our case study furthers the theory of urban revanchism by revealing the discursive deployment of the “failed” city in a broader hegemonic struggle.