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Geographies of Authoritarian Politics
Abstract
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... The turn toward practice-focused approaches in human geography -whether drawn from Foucault's practice-based methods (e.g., Koch 2014Koch , 2018, nonrepresentational theory (e.g., Anderson & Harrison 2010), or Pierre Bourdieu's social theory (e.g., Hillier & Rooksby 2005) -has begun to have a significant impact in political geography. For example, in calling for a critical geographical perspective on authoritarianism, Koch (2022aKoch ( , 2022bKoch ( , 2024 challenges territorially trapped approaches to authoritarian power by instead using a practice-based method to spatialize authoritarianism. Indeed, a growing number of political geographers are beginning to attend to the authoritarian power dynamics that are at play in ostensibly democratic and nondemocratic states alike, and in state and nonstate spaces alike (Tansel 2017;Doshi & Ranganathan 2019;Kantel 2019;Kopack 2019;Conduit 2020;Regilme 2021;Tynen 2021;Hammond 2022;Luger 2022;Fung & Lamb 2023;Murrey 2023). ...
Power shapes political geographies in profound ways, but for much of the history of political geography as a subdiscipline it has remained an unexamined concept. Since the early 2000s, however, power has become an increasingly important focus of theorization. This chapter introduces the main conceptual discussions about power that have been important in the development of the subfield. In particular it examines the shift from thinking about power as a substance or a resource to more nuanced relational analyses of power as capacity (“power to”) and control (“power over”). It also highlights some of the main ways in which political geographers have approached the concept in the past several decades, including research informed by notable theorists like Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, and Giorgio Agamben, as well as related efforts to think about the spatial aspects of power with concepts like discipline, biopolitics, the camp, and authoritarian space–time.
This article explore the history of geography in the Ivy League – eight of the oldest and most prestigious academic institutions in the United States. Each of these influential universities provided instruction in geography and most established undergraduate or graduate programs at one time or another. Although most Ivy League universities have geographers on their faculties or retain some aspects of the field in the guise of programs such as Urban Planning or Development Studies, Dartmouth College is the only one with a Department of Geography. The discipline has long struggled to establish itself as theoretically grounded and therefore worthy of membership in these universities. Geography’s fate in the Ivies, however, has also hinged on the activities of individual professors, the disposition of key administrators, trends within the discipline, and events outside the field itself.
Singapore has undergone a tourism turn, an outgrowth of a wider policy effort to re-image the City State as a cultural, entertainment and shopping destination. Yet, the emergence of Singapore as a tourist city has generated protest and resistance, as elite spaces such as the Botanic Gardens – Singapore’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site - are prioritized over less formal spaces of history and nature. Consumption-driven urban spaces have replaced most of Singapore’s sites of cultural heritage. This chapter introduces the concept of ‘guerilla tourism’ as one method through which a loose network of grassroots groups have come together to re-claim the cultural, natural, and historic commons through the ‘Save Bukit Brown’ movement, an activist effort to stop the destruction of a treasured space of Singapore, the largest Chinese cemetery outside of China. ‘Save Bukit Brown’ is conceptualised as an example of de Certeau’s ‘going off the pathway’, where alternative (tourism) narratives are performed through the act of transgressing boundaries and walking. Bukit Brown Cemetery itself is portrayed as a Foucaultian ‘un-governable’ space within the context of Singapore’s top-down, authoritarian structure. Therefore, this chapter adds to the global discussion of the ways that alternative tourism is questioning, contesting and re-shaping the hegemony of consumption-led urban development in the tourist city.
The “Serbian Adolf” figures as one of many parallels between the Nazi aggression of World War II and the more recent wars in Bosnia (1992–1995). Though many recognized and drew attention to the atrocities committed against Bosnian civilians, the stories and images of deportation, mass murder, and concentration camps failed to stir an effective response from the international community of states, which had, fifty years before, promised to defend civilians from such abuses. This occurred despite clear signals that the Serb leadership meant not only to run an expansionist campaign to divide Bosnia with Croatia but also to destroy the Bosnian Muslim population. Instead, there were arguments about whether or not the Serb campaign in Bosnia was genocide, and if it was not genocide, whether it required intervention by other governments, especially by the Western powers. This is to say that although the experiences of World War II produced institutions to limit the excesses of war, especially as it affects civilians, this experience does not seem to have significantly changed the narrow political calculus of most states. In fact, the ideals enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations or the international law that applies to the conduct of modern warfare, such as the Geneva Conventions, are often viewed as outside or antithetical to the “reality” of international politics. It is more productive for the purposes of explanation to recognize that principled institutions, such as the UN or international law, are as much a part of world politics as are the interstate norms of sovereignty or national security. Yet while the institutions that are designed to promote collective security and provide relief from the vagaries of the international state system have gained in the postwar world, they are still beset with the contradictions of those same vagaries, namely, that states must both submit to and enforce the principles that would constrain them. The failure to intervene in Bosnia, at least on behalf of the civilian population if not also for the state of Bosnia itself, is a case in which governments that should have championed principles of international law found it more convenient to demur, despite an international awareness of the war’s excesses.
State sovereignty is an inherently social construct. The modern state system is not based on some timeless principle of sovereignty, but on the production of a normative conception which links authority, territory, population (society, nation), and recognition in a unique way, and in a particular place (the state). Attempting to realize this ideal entails a great deal of hard work on the part of statespersons, diplomats, and intellectuals. The ideal of state sovereignty is a product of the actions of powerful agents and the resistances to those actions by those located at the margins of power. The unique contribution of this book is to describe, theorize, and illustrate the practices which have socially constructed, reproduced, reconstructed, and deconstructed various sovereign ideals and resistances to them. The contributors analyse how all the components of state sovereignty - not only recognition, but also territory, population, and authority - are socially constructed and combined in specific historical contexts.
Theorizing the State Geographically: Sovereignty, Subjectivity, Territoriality.” In The SAGE Handbook of Political Geography
- Merje Kuus
- John Agnew