The politics of identity: Ethnicity, minority and nationalism in Soviet Estonia

Identity has become one of the core concepts of political geography. This reflects the wide recognition of a post-structural conception of society and space, as well as the acknowledgement of the political character of identity. The present article focuses on the politics of identity, and discusses the politicized forms of identity as related to the Soviet state building policies and the Estonian spaces of resistance. It will be argued that neither identity nor the political demand in Soviet Estonia can be viewed in isolation from their historical and social contexts. Both Soviet state politics and the Estonian spaces of resistance reflected the prevailing conceptions of past and the contemporary political realities. This article examines those preconceptions of the political and territorial development in Soviet Estonia, and also illustrates the interdependent character of state politics and non-state activism. The first part of the article concentrates on the Soviet state building practices – the use of power, symbols, education – and the second part examines the various forms of non-state activism of Estonians.     

Domesticating neo-liberalism: Everyday lives and the geographies of post-socialist transformations

This paper examines the ways in which neo-liberalism is both constructed and made ‘more tolerable’ through everyday practices and livelihoods in post-socialist cities. It argues that existing conceptualisations of neo-liberalism centre too fully on the role of powerful global forces and institutions in constructing marketisation processes, and consequently neglect the ways in which everyday lives are embroiled in the formation of neo-liberal worlds. Through an exploration of the experience of neo-liberalism in the Slovak Republic and drawing upon research with households in one large housing estate in Bratislava, the paper examines the ways in which everyday lives construct neo-liberal possibilities in the attempt to make them ‘more tolerable’. In particular, the paper explores the postponement of the future by some members of the middle-aged generation failing to reap the benefits of economic reform, the role of economic practices ‘outside’ of market-based capitalist relations in constructing engagements with the formal market, and the role of domestic food production in sustaining household networks and social reproduction for some of the most marginal households in the context of low-wage employment and state benefit reductions.     

uTshani BuyaKhuluma––The Grass Speaks: the political space and capacity of the South African Homeless People’s Federation

The point of departure for this article is the contemporary tendency towards localisation of politics in the context of neo-liberal globalisation. Mediated through institutional reforms, political discourses and localised struggles, this localisation of politics produce new and transformed local political spaces. The purpose of the article is to examine the capacity of popular movements to use and transform such political spaces within the South African housing sector. This analysis is done through a combination of conceptual examination of political space and actor capacity and a concrete case study of the political strategies and capacities of The South African Homeless People’s Federation. The article argues that the Federation has utilised political relations at different scales to mobilise resources such as land and subsidies for housing for its members. It has also influenced the formulation of housing policies through its discourses and practical experiences with people-driven housing processes. In consequence the Federation’s ability to function as a civil/political movement has granted them a certain capacity to participate in the complicated process of turning de jure rights to adequate shelter into de facto rights for the urban poor as citizens of a democratic South Africa.     

Towards a critical political geography of African development

In this paper we aim to rethink the political geography of African development at the beginning of the 21st century. Central to our thesis are two intertwining legacies, paralleling Edward Said’s Orientalism. The first is the construction of Africa in the western imagination and the second is an enduring trusteeship towards the continent. The core movement we seek to critique and move beyond is the complicity between racialised knowledges about Africa and a series of political interventions that seek to ‘help’ Africans to develop. The paper begins by examining the legacy of colonialism in the policies towards and representations of Africa. Although selective and schematic we argue that what unites these power–knowledge constructions is a sense of trusteeship towards the continent. The next step is to look at ways of decolonising our knowledges as a means to effect more appropriate political engagement with Africa. For this we touch on a range of theoretical positions, but look most closely at the corpus of post-colonial theory for ways of doing this. While not uncritical of post-colonialism we find it potentially useful for destabilising western authority and in addressing questions of popular agency and cultural constructions of exclusion. From here we attempt a reformulation which addresses the role of the state, the politics of place and space, and the ways in which ‘we’––professional geographers––might go about our work.     

A risky business: Mining, rent and the neoliberalization of “risk”

Natural resource investment in the mining sector is often mediated through conflicts over rent distribution between corporate capital and landowner states. Recent rounds of neoliberal policy promoted by the World Bank have highlighted the need for landowner states to offer incentives in order to attract “high risk” capital investment. In Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, countries have been pushed to offer attractive fiscal terms to capital, thereby lowering the proportion traditionally called rent. This paper examines how the concept of “risk” has been mobilized to legitimate such skewed distributional arrangements. While certain conceptions of social and ecological “risk” have been prevalent in political and social theoretic discourse on mining, such focus elides the overwhelming contemporary power of our notion of “neoliberal risk” – or the financial/market risks – in actually setting the distributional terms of mineral investment. We illustrate our argument by examining the nexus of World Bank mining policy promotion and Tanzanian policy in the late 1990s meant to attract foreign direct investment in gold production. In closing, we suggest that just as “risk” is used to legitimate attractive fiscal terms for investment, recent events highlight how skewed distribution of benefits may set into motion risks that corporate capital had not bargained for.     

Power and the hierarchy of knowledge: A review of a decade of the World Bank’s relationship with South Africa

This article presents a case study of the World Bank’s relationship with South Africa to argue that the Bank uses its knowledge brokering role as a device to facilitate the development of a lending relationship with countries that may initially be reluctant to enter into this kind of engagement. This article reviews the World Bank’s 10-year effort to develop a lending relationship with South Africa. The Bank inserted itself into the country in the early 1990s at the outset of its democratic transformation. Throughout the decade, South Africa acceded to the Bank’s policy interventions through technical assistance rather than through a concerted lending programme. In doing so, South Africa internalized the Bank’s market-driven political economy framework underlying its technical assistance programme. The country’s application of the Bank’s knowledge has had questionable outcomes for its development agenda. While the Bank’s ‘expert’ interventions may have offered valuable technical insights, it neglected the politics of distribution that are embedded in a more localized knowledge formation process. The result has led to the instrumentalization of local governance and undermined the engagement of civil society actors in the construction of a democratic state at the local level.     

The etiquette of state-building and modernisation in dependent states: performing stateness and the normalisation of separate development in South Africa

The paper reflects upon the continuing allure of state-building and modernisation in peripheral, `new' states and regions. The central argument is to suggest that our understanding of the conflicts surrounding `nation-building' can be improved upon by looking at one of the most powerful symbols of the neo-colonial, economic and institutional dependency and territorial artificiality of the `nation-state'- the South African Bantustan. As enforced state-hood projects, their `newness' and illegality in the eyes of the international community suggest that the Bantustans provide a particularly striking evocation of both the limits of state-building and, above all, the significance of recognition for `newer' states. Efforts to overturn the illegal status and non-recognition of one `independent' Bantustan, namely Bophuthatswana, therefore, illustrate what are widely held to be the modern attributes and evolutionary etiquette (`growth', `building', `development') that need to be `performed' in order to legitimise or normalise a state internationally. To be given a `voice' internationally, states are seemingly required to enact state-hood and sovereignty through a range of normalising rituals associated with state-building. In this case- study, strategies promoting neo-liberal development policies and also clandestine diplomatic and economic manoeuvres were believed by the regime to deliver international recognition. Directed at locating Bophuthatswana within its place in the world, these strenuous efforts also show how crude territorial `divide and rule' tactics alone were not responsible for underpinning the apartheid project. Rather, spaces were provided for discourses and practices of state-led `national' development in the Bantustan periphery. Thought to deliver normality for the renegade Bophuthatswana state, these international and local policies exacerbated and induced further a range of crises at the heart of the Bantustan strategy and apartheid modernisation more generally. These debilitating, and in Bophuthatswana's case, disastrous, tensions between the internal and external realms of state-building point to a more general need to rethink alternatives both to neo-liberalism as well as the rituals associated with state- building.     

Entrepreneurial Regionalist Planning in a Rescaled Spain: The Cases of Bilbao and València

European politics and planning have recently been characterized by a shift to economic entrepreneurialism at sub-national scales, and the planned redevelopment of the city-region in pursuit of global competitiveness, which scholars have interpreted in light of political-economic “rescaling” or regionalization and the emergence of a “new regionalism.” Analyzing rescaling largely in terms of shifting economic and institutional structures, however, many accounts underestimate the complexity and enduring power of so-called ‘old’ regionalist politics of culture and identity as backdrop to urban redevelopment planning. In this paper we address how the urban planning process mediates between the seemingly dichotomous tendencies of regionalized entrepreneurialism and cultural regionalism. Using case studies of two Spanish autonomous regions and their major urban centers – the Basque Country or Euskadi (Bilbao) and the Comunitat Valenciana (València) – we review the historical geography of planning in the European region in order to explore how cultural regionalism collides with economic rescaling and entrepreneurialism, in and through the planned landscape. We propose that such emerging and hybrid politics and planning be understood as a form of entrepreneurial regionalism, a culturally inflected form of economic competitiveness characteristic of but not unique to the Spanish region. This specific notion of entrepreneurial regionalism may illuminate how planners mediate global and local imperatives within political discourse and landscapes that materialize them, and allow us to better reconceptualize the relationship between economic globalization, state restructuring, and cultural politics in a new Europe of the Regions.     

Entrepreneurial Regionalist Planning in a Rescaled Spain: The Cases of Bilbao and València

European politics and planning have recently been characterized by a shift to economic entrepreneurialism at sub-national scales, and the planned redevelopment of the city-region in pursuit of global competitiveness, which scholars have interpreted in light of political-economic “rescaling” or regionalization and the emergence of a “new regionalism.” Analyzing rescaling largely in terms of shifting economic and institutional structures, however, many accounts underestimate the complexity and enduring power of so-called ‘old’ regionalist politics of culture and identity as backdrop to urban redevelopment planning. In this paper we address how the urban planning process mediates between the seemingly dichotomous tendencies of regionalized entrepreneurialism and cultural regionalism. Using case studies of two Spanish autonomous regions and their major urban centers – the Basque Country or Euskadi (Bilbao) and the Comunitat Valenciana (València) – we review the historical geography of planning in the European region in order to explore how cultural regionalism collides with economic rescaling and entrepreneurialism, in and through the planned landscape. We propose that such emerging and hybrid politics and planning be understood as a form of entrepreneurial regionalism, a culturally inflected form of economic competitiveness characteristic of but not unique to the Spanish region. This specific notion of entrepreneurial regionalism may illuminate how planners mediate global and local imperatives within political discourse and landscapes that materialize them, and allow us to better reconceptualize the relationship between economic globalization, state restructuring, and cultural politics in a new Europe of the Regions.     

Embedding the reforms in New Zealand schooling: After neo-liberalism?

Two decades of reforms to the state in New Zealand have altered policy, its making and the ways in which it is realised in micro settings. This paper uses the example of schooling to examine the rationality of these reforms, their spatial logic and what they mean for our understanding of the national state. It examines the development and practices of the Education Review Office (ERO), the body established under the reforms to evaluate and audit the performance of schools in the new national education `system'. The paper interprets neo-liberalism as a governmentality, and argues that the development of new managerial technologies of remote control such as contract and audit constitute a spatial model of control. The paper suggests that this model encourages, and relies for its efficacy upon, the cultivation of neo-liberal subjectivities. It argues that although the political projects working through the reforms have shifted, the altered rationality of the state and the models of control erected to secure it define an enduring and neo-liberalising social transformation. The shift to the `Third Way' in New Zealand's political and social economy is underpinned by neo-liberalising processes, which continue to reorganise social and economic spaces. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Political geography in the time of cyberspaces: New agendas?

This review paper aims to offer a contribution to debates over theory and subject for political geography. Following a brief review of histories of political geography, the main (though not exclusive) focus is on the way that political geography may confront ‘globalization’ and the multiplicity of flows that constitute ‘cyberspaces’. Notwithstanding the consequences of the resulting transformations, the paper argues that a number of traditional subjects of political geography should remain central to the field. In particular, it is argued that a degree of state-centric focus continues to be a valuable critical project. However, such a focus needs to be supplemented by a stress on the dialectical relationships between the state, territory, culture and economy. The approach taken to this in World Systems-Theory is critiqued and some alternatives are explored. In these explorations the paper also argues for an increased engagement and cross-fertilization between political, economic, social and cultural geographies, and with critical work in political science and international relations.     

Neo-liberalism, markets and class structures on the Nepali lowlands: The political economy of agrarian change

In recent years, neo-liberalism has manifested itself in peripheral social formations on an ideological basis through strategies of poverty alleviation. This process is epitomized by Nepal’s donor led agrarian strategy, which constructs farmers as ‘rational entrepreneurs’ responsible for their own welfare. In the process it seeks to encourage smallholders to shift from subsistence to market oriented production. However, over 10 years since the current agrarian strategy was released, there is little evidence of commercialisation and the integration of rural populations into global or domestic markets, while subsistence production remains dominant. To understand this failure, one must examine both the contradictions inherent in neo-liberal ideologies and the rural political economy of Nepal. While the emphasis on self-help through market access can be understood to be an ideological process constitutive of the overdetermined nature of capitalist expansion, contradictions are evident in such ideologies when they are mobilised in regions dominated by non-capitalist economic systems. The depoliticizing assumptions inherent in such ideologies can serve the interests of capitalist expansion through glossing over the associated forms of class exploitation. However, a case study from Nepal’s eastern lowlands demonstrates how they also divert attention from complex non-capitalist modes of surplus appropriation in both the relations of production and circulation. Such forms of exploitation have not only obstructed the process of classical agrarian transition long envisaged in Marxian theory, but have also blocked the emergence of the particular form of rural commodity production envisaged in Nepal’s neo-liberal agrarian strategy itself.     

Cultural policy in Singapore: negotiating economic and socio-cultural agendas

In this paper, I examine the role of cultural policy in a newly industrialised economy, which is at the same time a state with a short history and only nascent beginnings in nation-building and efforts to construct a distinctive cultural identity. Using Singapore as the site of analyses, develop an understanding of the intersection between the economic and socio-cultural agendas behind cultural development policies. I illustrate the hegemony of the economic, supported by the ideology and language of pragmatism and globalisation. At the same time, I explore the reception of and attempts to negotiate (and at times, contest) state policies by “cultural practitioners” – artists, dancers, playwrights, actors, directors and so forth, illustrating the disjuncture between state policies and practitioners' ideals. This may be cast as a conflict between social and cultural development priorities as envisaged by the practitioners as opposed to economic development priorities as embodied in the state’s cultural economic policies.     

Neo-liberal ruptures: Local political entities and neighbourhood networks in El Alto, Bolivia

In October 2003, hundreds of thousands of Bolivians took to the streets demanding the resignation of President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada. After 20 years of neo-liberal policies - and the failures to improve the living conditions of the majority - the proposal to export natural gas via Chile was taken by the population as yet another step to sustain an unjust political order. Facing a direct challenge by the population the Sánchez de Lozada administration responded with indiscriminate military force. The result was 63 dead and over 300 wounded, which deepened and extended the social rage and eventually forced the resignation of the President. The neo-liberal project - promoted and defended by Sánchez de Lozada - collapsed. The city of El Alto was the epicentre of the challenges to the legitimacy of this political order. This article focuses on the role of local political entities and neighbourhood networks from El Alto in articulating political spaces that challenged the legitimacy of the institutional infrastructure and led to the October 2003 ruptures in the neo-liberal project. Furthermore, I make the case that the particular histories and memories (of “relocalized” miners and indigenous/peasants) that converged in and defined this city were pivotal in the organization of a “political subsoil” that surged to the surface during the October 2003 events.     

Development for a postneoliberal era? Sumak kawsay,living well and the limits to decolonisation in Ecuador

Latin American development is being rapidly transformed, with popularly elected governments embarking on reversals of neoliberalism informed by autochthonous notions of human wellbeing. Through a detailed examination of the origins and application of one development model, this article examines the constraints on and limits to postneoliberal development in terms of state-civil society relations and as a form of postcolonial governmentality. Interpreting Ecuadorian sumak kawsay (living well in English) in relation to embedded political cultures, specific opportunity structures, and the dynamic between contentious and electoral politics highlights the extent of room for manoeuvre in rethinking development. As a form of governmentality and pastoral power, Ecuadorian ‘postneoliberalism’ incorporates a constitutional commitment to social rights, collective citizens and the rights of nature. The paper also reveals the difficulty of making a definitive break from neoliberalism, which remains pervasive in practice, conceptualisations and state formations. Moreover, although various forms of anti-colonial ‘border thinking’ were proposed by social movement’s contentious politics, the paper argues that sumak kawsay works to sustain postcolonial conditions of development.     

Scaling struggles over land and law: Autonomy,investment, and interlegality in Myanmar’s borderlands

This article explores the relevance of spatial global legal pluralism—an emerging field at the interstices of geography, anthropology, and socio-legal studies—for research on the global land rush, and the study of land law and investment in particular. I argue that a focus on the spatial dimensions of law—coupled with attention to the interlegality, scalar politics, and spatio-temporalities of semi-autonomous law—offers important insights into the dynamic forces, actors, and stakes in the global land rush. In Myanmar, the prospects for peace—however tenuous—have led to an acceleration of land law development including the creation of ‘semi-autonomous land law’ by ethnic armed groups and activists in its borderlands. I discuss the ways in which such policies not only anticipate peace but seek to shape its political-economy over multiple spatio-temporalities. By recognizing both international human rights law and customary law, such ‘non-state’ laws bring these two scales into an intermediary legal jurisdiction, contributing to the sedimentation of Kawthoolei and Kachinland as political scales in their own right.     

Putting principles of linguistic rights into practice: Geographical perspectives on a contemporary European problem

The political salience of demands from minority and regional groups for greater language rights increases across Europe. To draw more geographical attention to a particular aspect of these developments, this article identifies the main generic problems of converting demands for ‘linguistic rights’ into applied language policies. It does this by first outlining how the historic process of nation-state building in Europe reduced linguistic diversity, but has not eliminated language demands emanating from regional minorities. It then analyses how the concept of ‘linguistic rights’, as a part of human rights in general, has been developing within the United Nations and bodies including the Council of Europe and the European Union. Having outlined the political-legal frameworks within which minority language rights are pursued, the article then discusses the major difficulties of putting them into practice in particular places and spaces. They can be summarised as: the weakness of relevant international agreements; the dominance of state sovereignty in determining language policies; the limited public support for minority language rights; the difficulties of defining minority languages and delimiting the geographical spaces they occupy; the challenges posed by the growing geographical mobility of populations; and the problem of balancing collective and individual rights. Two fundamental issues linking these different problems are identified. First, there are problems of definition: what constitutes a ‘minority’ or ‘regional’ language and within what geographical space(s) is such a language spoken? This spatial dimension underlies a second fundamental problem, namely that of resolving conflicts between individual personality rights and collective territorial rights in increasing hybrid geolinguistic situations created by the growing geographical mobility of populations. Sociolinguists study these issues, but usually treat these essential spatial dimensions in a superficial fashion. Thus, there is an opportunity for geographers to develop more sophisticated geolinguistic analyses as a contribution to this interdisciplinary field.     

(Re)politicizing empowerment: Lessons from the South African wine industry

Despite being a poorly defined and vague concept, empowerment is currently of political and theoretical significance and nowhere more so than in South Africa, where it seen as central to post-apartheid transformation. This paper explores the ways in which empowerment has been understood, defined and deployed by post-apartheid governments in the context of a gradual shift from nation-building to neo-liberal governance. It examines the impact of legislation and government policy through a critical examination of empowerment initiatives in the wine industry. Drawing on research conducted in the Western Cape in 2004, the paper analyses how empowerment is interpreted and appropriated both within legislation and specifically within the wine industry. It explores what the wine industry reveals about the disempowering work of neo-liberalism, even as it is couched in the discourses of empowerment. Findings suggest that equating empowerment with economic empowerment threatens to reinforce structures of domination, rather than transforming them, while leaving power relations largely untouched. The case study reveals that until more radical understandings of power and empowerment are acknowledged and incorporated into government policies the failure to address broader issues of social and economic transformation will persist and policies aimed at the empowerment of marginalised individuals and communities will continue to have apparently pre-determined and depoliticised outcomes.     

A 23,000-yr pollen record from Lake Euramoo, Wet Tropics of NE Queensland, Australia

A new extended pollen and charcoal record is presented from Lake Euramoo, Wet Tropics World Heritage rainforest of northeast Queensland, Australia. The 8.4-m sediment core taken from the center of Lake Euramoo incorporates a complete record of vegetation change and fire history spanning the period from 23,000 cal yr B.P. to present. The pollen record is divided into five significant zones; 23,000–16,800 cal yr B.P., dry sclerophyll woodland; 16,800–8600 cal yr B.P., wet sclerophyll woodland with marginal rainforest in protected pockets; 8600–5000 cal yr B.P., warm temperate rainforest; 5000–70 cal yr B.P., dry subtropical rainforest; 70 cal yr B.P.–AD 1999, degraded dry subtropical rainforest with increasing influence of invasive species and fire.The process of rainforest development appears to be at least partly controlled by orbital forcing (precession), though more local environmental variables and human activity are also significant factors. This new record provides the opportunity to explore the relationship between fire, drought and rainforest dynamics in a significant World Heritage rainforest region.