The political economy and geopolitical context of India's economic crisis, 1990–91

The Indian economy suffered a balance of payment crisis in 1991, which provided the context for the rolling out of neoliberal policies, also referred to as the New Economic Policy in India. This paper examines the national and global causes and context of India's economic crisis and adoption of neoliberal policies. While grounding my analysis in historical‐geographical materialism, I argue that India's economic crisis was a product of certain contingent conditions. I draw attention to India's pre‐neoliberal economic regime and analyse how the earlier‐established relationship between revenue generation and expenditure ran into trouble; what changes occurred in the organization and management of revenues and capital; nature of interventions of the state in the circulation of capital; changes in the physical aspects of circulation of commodities, together with foreign trade and the formation of the ‘world market’; and the rise of the United States as the only global superpower. I conclude that India's economic crisis of 1990–91, and the neoliberal policies that followed, are products of contingent historical and geographical conditions. A teleological approach towards examining global capitalism and production of economic crisis often neglect such contingencies and provide a set of causalities that may, at best, be classified as incomplete.     

城市政治生态学视角下的空间转型与中国环境治理创新——基于深圳城—水关系动态演变的分析

城市空间是探讨城镇化特征、动力机制和效应的重要载体,但生态空间作为传统城市—自然二分对立认识论下被人类控制和支配的对象,却较少成为城镇化研究的主体。论文以深圳为例,从城市政治生态学视角展现了过去40余年深圳城—水关系的阶段性演化及其背后的权力结构关系变迁。研究认为,水是权力不可分割的一部分,具有多元复杂的本体特征,它与城市发展并非二元对立,而是相互建构。在深圳城镇化的不同阶段,国家、资本、自然展现出差异化的动态关系,塑造了水的商品化、去商品化、再商品化过程,使之成为经济发展所需开发利用的自然资源、支撑城市可持续运作的生态保障、提升城市长期竞争力的新动力。深圳城—水关系的演变揭示了中国环境治理从路径依赖到路径创新的过程。尽管改革开放初期为了确保经济发展,以水为代表的城市生态空间出现了同质化和退化,但在后续发展过程中,国家权力未必在资本和市场的扩张中出现“空心化”;相反,国家权力的主动介入修复甚至扭转了单一市场逻辑下的生态退化和社会不平等。这些新型的国家—资本—自然关系和社会经济实践,不仅呈现了人类寻找公平、正义、可持续城市建设的中国方案,而且为城市—自然辩证关系的理论深化提供了中国经验。     

Cartographic Methods for Determining the Qibla

Abstract

Islam is an important topic in human and regional geography instruction, and major textbooks include maps showing Islam's core and rapid expansion diffusion, along with the number of pilgrims to Mecca from different countries. Determining the qibla, the sacred direction for daily prayer, and the distance to Mecca are additional topics that link human geography, Islamic mathematical geography, and modern geographic information science. Recently discovered Persian instruments used a retro-azimuthal map projection devised by medieval Muslim mathematicians to compute the qibla and distance to Mecca from anywhere within the seventeenth century realm of Islam. Modern global maps that allow the qibla and distance to Mecca to be determined from all populated areas on earth are added to the Persian instruments.     

“Teaching Against Culture” in Geography of Islam

This article explores various ways of how to challenge the “otherness” of Islam and Muslims when teaching geography of Islam. It suggests a critical project of “teaching against culture,” which challenges essentializing notions of Islam as a monolith, and rather demonstrates the complexity of Muslim geographies and “lived” Islam. Furthermore, it implies examining the various identity categories and binaries such as secular–religious and West–East that come about in the classroom itself in the secular academic context of an urban state university. As such, the article engages in questions of significance to a wider set of courses on social and cultural geographies, geography of religion, and postcolonial geographies     

Creating and sustaining Islamic financial centers: Bahrain in the wake of financial and political crises

Although primarily concentrated in countries with Muslim majorities, Islamic finance has become a global industry representing both a decentering of the global financial architecture and the emergence of an urban network that resides beyond the confines of traditional world city literature. While geographers have identified the “Mecca’s” of the Islamic finance industry – one of which is Bahrain – there remains a need to identify the factors necessary to create and sustain centers of Islamic finance. This paper examines these factors through a firm-level survey of foreign and local Islamic financial institutions in Bahrain, in conjunction with key informant interviews with representatives of these firms. We find that while Bahrain’s entrenched institutional advantages have preserved its role as a center in the Islamic financial landscape, ongoing political instability and the increasing attractiveness of new and emerging centers are threatening this role. As the country navigates the current social and political unrest, questions are raised as to what it takes to be an Islamic financial center.     

Muslim geographies and the politics of purification in Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami

In this paper, we argue that the politics of aid in Sri Lanka 'after' the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami accentuated what we call the 'politics of purification'– the fragmented ethnic politics of territoriality – in Sri Lanka's east. The politics of purification entail geographical imaginations of a nation as 'the same people living in the same place'. We illustrate this with a case study on Muslim geographies in Kalmunai Divisional Secretariat division, on the coast of Ampara District, southeast Sri Lanka, where the politics of relocating Muslim families from the buffer zone created the conditions for the geographical imaginations of the politics of purification to play out. At the same time, our study indicates the antinomies of purification and the political fragmentation of Muslim geographies.     

中国大城市穆斯林女性移民的宗教空间实践

采用动态、辩证的观点对宗教空间进行了重新审视,通过女性穆斯林在广州先贤清真寺的空间实践,说明宗教空间不仅是被宗教经典和历史定义的神圣空间,也是穆斯林群体经由自身丰富的实践活动所不断进行意义再生产的日常生活空间。广州先贤清真寺的女性穆斯林移民群体在全球化的多元氛围中突破了原先家长制的宗教教育体制,转而从公共宗教生活中认知宗教,形成更加包容、进步的宗教观念,增加了自身的族群认同。另一方面,基于女性宗教空间开展的日常生活实践,则不仅为女性穆斯林群体融入新的城市生活提供了丰富的社会资本,更让一部分女性穆斯林成为全球贸易中的参与者。这些都有助于城市中女性穆斯林群体社会地位的提升。     

Urbanizing the nation-state? Notes on the geopolitical growth of cities and city-regions

This article suggests that the developments during the past few decades indicate a qualitative shift in the city/state relation, and conceptualizes this shift as the geopolitical growth of cities and city-regions. Originally a state-orchestrated process, today this is manifested in the attempts of major cities and city-regions, in particular, to demand a stronger national and international political role even as claims are made for urban separatism. This process is connected to a geopolitical reasoning of the heightened role of cities in inter-state competition during the age of post-Fordist capitalism. Furthermore, the geopolitical growth of cities and city-regions is partly constituted in academic theories and expert knowledges that combine certain type of urbanism, economic growth, and political success, and which in so doing destabilize state-centered geopolitical imaginations.     

西方"马克思主义"地理学--人文地理学的一个重要流派

本文全面地概述了西方“马克思主义”地理学的形成过程、理论脉络和研究方法以及新的进展,并着重介绍了西方“马克思主义”地理学的三个核心内容,即政治经济学分析、空间理论和社会－自然关系理论,最后对西方“马克思主义”地理学进行了简要的评论。     

Context and contingency: the coffee crisis for conventional small-scale coffee farmers in Brazil

Brazil is the largest economy in Latin America and the world's leading producer and exporter of coffee. Smallholders are the predominant producers of Brazilian coffee and have been significantly impacted by post-ISI (import substitution industrialisation) neoliberal reforms that swept the nation's agricultural sector beginning in the 1980s. These reforms stimulated increased coffee production while simultaneously diminishing state interventions, including agricultural subsidies, farmer credits, research and development programmes, extension services, and rural development initiatives. These changes were closely followed by major restructuring of the global coffee market and the elimination of international coffee export quotas. Our research joins a growing body of recent literature exploring how changes related to market liberalisation and globalisation affect localities and regions where producers supply coffee for conventional markets. Through a case study, we describe the impacts of neoliberal globalisation on the lives, livelihoods, and environment of small-scale coffee producers in Minas Gerais, Brazil. We explore how neoliberal reform, reflected in the specific historical, geographical, and environmental context of Brazilian coffee production, has resulted in the increased marginalisation of small-scale farmers, the degradation of soils, and overall rural decline.     

国家统一的地理学解释——以东西德统一为例

国家的统一问题一直是关乎区域稳定发展、民族复兴乃至世界和平的大事,然而在地理学领域系统讨论该命题的研究尚不多见。事实上,地理学拥有比政治学和法学更为综合的理论分析体系,尤其是随着政治地理学的快速崛起,从地理学视角解析国家统一的发生机理和影响机制已经日渐成熟。本文从国家主权学说、地缘政治学、后殖民主义、新帝国主义等理论出发,试图构建“国家统一地理学”的分析框架,将国家统一分解为地缘政治重构、经济一体化和文化认同重建3个不同的阶段;并通过东西德国统一的案例分析,深入诠释了德国统一过程中政治版图和地缘格局变化,德国统一后漫长的经济一体化和原西德资本主义的野蛮扩张,以及由于长时间受到不同文化帝国主义渗透带来的民族身份认同分歧问题。德国案例很好地展示了从地理学视角探讨国家统一问题的优越性,同时德国的案例分析可为其他国家的统一问题提供参考与借鉴。     

Navigating an inconvenient difference in antagonistic contexts: Doing fieldwork in Aceh,Indonesia

This article discusses the challenges of doing fieldwork in an antagonistic context. Such an antagonistic context can emerge when a non‐Muslim researcher conducts fieldwork in a Muslim country that experiences humanitarian intervention and reconstruction efforts after natural disasters or the end of conflict. This particular setting can create a conflation of Islamic and Western (liberal) values while a political settlement is about to be consolidated. The case discussed in this article is located in the province of Aceh in Indonesia, where a political settlement of a conflict which lasted more than 25 years converged with a massive influx of foreign aid for disaster mitigation vis‐à‐vis the desire to apply Islamic Law (shari'a). The combined effects of reconstruction efforts and political and armed conflict, forged a problematic co‐presence of Western and non‐Western values, which affected the relations between the (Western) researcher and (non‐Western) researched by creating tension or even hostility between the two. The article argues that methodological dilemmas stemming from such a setting require a relational approach drawing on empathy, sameness and the personal, thereby taking into account emotions when conducting fieldwork. For this particular case I suggest an approach based on teamwork crossing cultures and gender among the research team members. To deal with constraints in such a setting, the article proposes to contextualize any potential difference between the researcher and researched, and to explore various relational elements drawing on psychoanalytical approaches and/or cross‐cultural positioning through and in teamwork.     

Academic publishing as 'creative' industry, and recent discourses of 'creative economies': some critical reflections

This paper continues recent discussions on the (geo)politics of the production of academic knowledges, in relation to the recent rise of narratives of 'the creative economy'. Creativity and the 'creative industries' are increasingly common components of urban economic development discourse, especially following the release of a set of key books – most notably Charles Landry's The Creative City (2000), and Richard Florida's The Rise of the Creative Class (2002) – that have become popular among economic development planners and cultural policy makers. This paper focuses on the traffic of these books, and their authors, beyond the Anglo-American core. It also briefly discusses policy discourses interpreted from these texts. It is principally, though, a critique of the ways in which academic knowledges circulate, stemming from theorization of academics as creative producers, and of knowledge production as part of the creative economy. The article seeks to critique the means by which particular northern economic knowledges become normative, framed as universal and 'global', and are distributed and absorbed via intellectual 'scenes' and an academic 'celebrity' circuit.     

Political economies of corruption beyond liberalism: An interpretative view of Zimbabwe

This paper models the political economy of corruption in the 'space beyond' the corruption discourse, using a case study of Zimbabwe. While a critical body of writers have examined the relationship between global neoliberal governance and the anti-corruption agenda within aid-recipient states, there is less critical work about the political economy of corruption in pariah and failing states. This paper asks how far political corruption can be identified and understood in spaces beyond the neoliberal paradigm, when instead of existing as a normative aberration, it is a central moment of instrumental state power.     

ZARA跨国品牌升级 ——空间发展史视角

全球化使品牌与地方之间的联系日益密切。西方国家的快时尚品牌实行全球同价、全球同款和标准化的经营模式,被认为具有消极的品牌形象,然而却在异源文化背景的中国实现品牌升级。以ZARA为例,从时间和空间2个维度出发,描述其品牌空间发展史,分析品牌源地、空间发展、店铺选址等参与快时尚品牌的文化生产过程。结论如下：1）快时尚品牌与全球时尚城市建立积极联系,将全球时尚城市想象写入品牌发展史中,品牌空间发展史比品牌源地对品牌形象的影响更大;2）ZARA与全球时尚城市互动成功塑造全球时尚品牌形象,“全球”品牌头衔对于中国本土向往全球化的消费者来说具有很强的吸引力,对于其跨国升级有积极影响;3）ZARA在中国大陆的品牌空间发展依然延续“下沉式”模式,利用上海、北京、深圳、广州等地在全国时尚产业中的引领地位影响二级城市消费者的品牌选择,实现其跨国品牌升级;4）专卖店选址于高端消费街区,在跨国过程中重新定位于中高端消费群体,使得ZARA实现跨国品牌升级。     

Negotiating partnerships, understanding power: doing action research on Chilean Fairtrade wine value chains

Sales in Fairtrade wine have been growing rapidly worldwide, and the UK is the most important market. This paper reports on an action research project undertaken with different economic actors along the value chain of a Chilean Fairtrade wine. The aim of the interdisciplinary project was to explore how the internet and tracking and tracing technologies could be used to render value chains more transparent for consumers and producers. An internet interface combined with a barcode-based data retrieval system could allow actors in the value chain to call up economic, social and environmental information about a product. Early findings from the action research process show that while supermarkets are the lead firms in the Fairtrade wine chain in terms of economic power, the producers and the Fairtrade certification body wield 'moral power' over other actors in the value chain. Fairtrade producers and the Fairtrade certification body relate to each other in cycles of mutual recognition, thus underpinning each others' legitimacy and moral power. The paper argues that action research, in particular the positionality of the researcher team as a collaboration partner, can lead to a better understanding of the nature of linkages and power relations between the economic actors in value chains.     

Refugees in the IT Sector: Young Syrians’ Economic Subjectivities and Familial Lives in Jordan

This article explores refugee economic subjectivity in the context of restrictive asylum policies and disrupted transnational family lives. Drawing on fieldwork with young Syrian refugees pursuing IT training in Jordan, I focus on the “coding boot camp,” an emerging educational format in the field of refugee professional training. I thus explore how Syrian youths approach humanitarian policies in which, in the absence of full social and economic rights for refugees, the question of livelihoods is addressed through the paradigms of self‐reliance, creativity, and innovation. Reframing the refugee from a “protected” to a “productive” subject, and offering individual solutions to a structural economic impasse, these policies produce tensions between individual responsibilities and more‐than‐individual relations and identifications—with families, religious identities, and national communities—that remain unresolved. The findings contribute to geographical scholarship on economic subjectivity, familial relations, and the migrant and refugee condition, while shedding light on some of the effects of the encounter between technology‐centred, neoliberal approaches to humanitarianism and restrictive migration regimes in responses to the Syrian displacement.     

Technologies of austerity urbanism: the “smart city” agenda in Italy (2011–2013)

In the heyday of the late 2000s financial crisis, austerity urbanism became a dominant practice of state financial restructuring—an intensification in the encroachment of the neoliberal project into the agendas of local governments. In the specific case of Italy, which faced political and economic distress between 2011 and 2013, “smart city” policies became one of the foundational political technologies for the implementation of austerity measures. In this paper, I analyse how the smart city provided a lexicon for urban austerity through a series of different sites and vehicles of policymaking, from practitioners to companies and other institutions. I argue that smart city discourses and practices functioned as a political technology that was effective in justifying cost containment measures and supporting the shift to pro-innovation public expenditures. Yet, at the same time, the smart city techno-utopian vocabulary created spaces where other meanings and, potentially, alternative political outcomes were made possible by diverse alignments of knowledge and expertise.