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An active role for political geography in our current conjuncture

2018; Wiley; Volume: 12; Issue: 11 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/gec3.12410

1749-8198

Nicholas Jon Crane, Kevin Grove,

Climate Change, Adaptation, Migration

Recent electoral victories of right-wing populist, ethno-nationalist, and authoritarian candidates or platforms provide Anglophone commentators with evidence of fundamental challenges to liberal international order, norms of multicultural ‘tolerance,’ and neoliberal modes of regulation. The apparent demise of liberal order is not only found in European and North American contexts (the victories of Brexit in the UK, Trump in the US, Orbán in Hungary, Kaczyński in Poland, inter alia), but also in contexts beyond or on the edges of the West (Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdogan in Turkey, and so forth). Of course, liberal norms are also under attack outside of formal electoral politics as well: commentators may note an uptick in hate crime, the organization of unabashedly white supremacist rallies in the US and Europe, complicity with authoritarian government policy in higher education, extra−/legal enforcement of compulsory displays of patriotism, or – infrequently in accounts that read these turns as symptomatic of something larger – the more “ordinary scenes and situations” of everyday life (Anderson & Wilson, 2017, p. 292). Almost always, however, these examples are interpreted like the electoral victories, as being, in essence, signs of a break from liberalism. The “break from liberalism” reading converges around a conception of the various authoritarian, right-wing populist, and illiberal turns as being so many “political earthquakes” (Kiely & Saull, 2017, p. 821) that can easily be distinguished from neoliberalism just as the latter might be distinguished from a Fordism that came before. But a corresponding inattention to how our conjuncture has in fact emerged upon a terrain defined in part by ubiquitous rituals of neo/liberal politicking will likely function as an obstacle for any efforts to elaborate and enact strategic challenges to these regimes. Political geographers and scholars in cognate fields of study accordingly have an important role to play in mapping the social relations and historical processes that have come together to form our current conjuncture, and from out of which practical solutions to concrete problems might reasonably be sought. The work of some political geographers now helps us recognize the political implications of narratives that assert a departure from liberalism or that cast illiberalism as something “out there” that has disruptively come home to the US or to the West more generally. Natalie Koch (2017), for example, identifies a “widespread script about authoritarianism coming to America,” which “functions as a geopolitical identity narrative” and treats, in this case, the US as an exemplar of liberal norms that are only now under attack (p. 145). Alan Ingram (2017) similarly questions whether we are indeed in the midst of a rupture, or if we should instead conceive of this moment as an intensification of tensions that have long threatened to, in his terms, deterritorialize familiar geopolitical assemblages. A recent collection of essays in ACME likewise characterizes this apparent break as a crystallization of longer-running tendencies (A Collective of Anarchist Geographers, 2017). Together, these political geographical analyses suggest that we might characterize this recent intensification of tensions as the materialization of autoimmune possibilities that liberal democracy has always carried (Esposito, 2011) and which, in this particular conjuncture, are coming to “endanger the very framework within which [liberal democracy] can function” (Arditi, 2008, p. 52). These analyses reveal what Benjamin Arditi (2008, pp. 50–52) would term populism “as a spectre of democracy.” As political geographers, we can therefore correct popular stories of a break from liberalism. We suggest that it is urgent that we pursue such a correction because popular narratives of rupture ignore important continuities that must be acknowledged both in our scholarly analyses and also in any elaboration of political-strategic positions and projects. We must acknowledge, for example, how the rollout of economic liberalization in the name of “development” the world over has frequently been facilitated by authoritarian acts of dispossession (Blomley, 2003; Correia, 2013); how the naturalization of market logic in media (e.g., competition for readers and clicks in social media platforms) has allowed and indeed incentivized the promotion of illiberal positions in media ecologies that, in the name of liberalism, guarantee access to the so-called “marketplace” of ideas (Ehrkamp, 2010; Sultana, 2018, p. 235); how decades of market fundamentalist “color-blind” policies and discourses, often promoted in the name of individual liberty, have ensured the endurance of racial injustice by insulating from critique agencies that could otherwise be held responsible for its correction (Hardy, Milligan, & Heynen, 2017; Ranganathan, 2016); or how, in the authoritarian turn of Turkey, for example, Erdogan's megalomaniacal extensions of emergency rule have exploited long-running exclusionary processes immanent to liberal nation building and state formation in Europe (Bilgin, 2012). But if now, out of intensifying tensions, illiberal populisms are overtaking the liberal forms of politicking they have long haunted (see also Losurdo, 2014), this may also be an opportunity for political geographers to realize what Milton Santos and his colleagues in the Brazilian Territorial Studies Group identified as an “active role” for our work (Bernardes et al., 2017; see also Davies, 2018). Locating ourselves in the movements of a changing world, we may indeed map the processes that come together in our current conjuncture and at the same time lend momentum to the constitution of a collective will that can challenge so much of what is objectionable about these regimes the world over. With an eye to the worldliness of our practice of doing political geography, it seems to be an appropriate time to revisit our work in the Political Geography section of Geography Compass. Under the leadership of Mike Bradshaw, and on the heels of marking the tenth anniversary of the journal last year, the Editorial Board for the Political Geography section of Geography Compass is in a position to identify timely new directions for our sub-discipline. As the outgoing and incoming editors of the Political Geography section, we accordingly offer this editorial essay as way to anticipate work to come in the Political Geography section and also to frame the articles in a virtual special issue it complements. We believe that, together, the articles collected in the virtual special issue exemplify the “active role” for political geography we propose here. They also reflect well on the work featured in this section of the journal during the past decade. Of course, these articles do not exhaust our authors' and editors' excellent contributions to the section since 2007. Indeed, arguments could be made for the inclusion of many other articles commissioned under the leadership of past editors Simon Dalby, Jo Sharp, Fiona McConnell, and Kevin Grove. But, in these articles, we identify and affirm a productive recognition of tensions within liberal politicking, as well as within scholarship that defines its problematic on the assumption of those norms. As we write this essay in mid-2018, we accordingly make these articles available for download and re-present them alongside the editorial essay in the hope that they might perform the work of an intervention. Here we follow the cultural theorist and public intellectual Stuart Hall, who promoted and performed interventions in conjunctures wherein domination by a ruling-class alliance was, in his terms, routinely naturalized through reference to a “consensus” (Hall, Critcher, Jefferson, Clarke, & Roberts, 2013, p. 213). Hall documented how, in such conjunctures, possible debate was often tacitly policed so that “domination not only seems to be universal (what everybody wants) and legitimate (not won by coercive force),” but also natural, so that “its basis in exploitation actually disappears from view” (Hall et al., 2013, p. 213). For Hall, scholarly interventions were supposed to elicit a pause for reflection and thereupon reorient practices through which we might otherwise reproduce the consensus (see also Hall & Massey, 2010). It is with this understanding of conjunctural analysis that we offer this editorial essay and have collected past articles for a virtual special issue. The articles we have collected intervene in our current conjuncture in at least two senses. On the one hand, they challenge commonsense ideas that undergird our tendencies either to engage in rituals of neo/liberal politicking or to promote a return to norms that, in Arditi's terms (2008, pp. 50–52), were “haunted” by the illiberalism that popular commentators are now apparently inclined to interpret as symptoms of a break. On the other hand, these articles elicit a moment of critical consideration for how we might explain such tendencies in our scholarly production. These articles were timely when they were published and remain timely today. For example, in a recent article by Forest (2018) and in an article written several years ago by Page and Dittmer (2015), we see arguments for heterodox thinking in electoral geography that would revisit its object (elections and the spatiality of voting behavior) in the context of wider geographies of representation and affect that are the condition for it. We see similar gestures of staging conversations across literatures and making one's object differently actionable in the collected articles on the spatiality of confinement (Martin & Mitchelson, 2009), gendered spaces of militarization (Dowler, 2012), peace and antiviolence (Loyd, 2012), urban geopolitics (Fregonese, 2012), and fear (Pain, 2010). Among the other collected articles, we include authors in the Political Geography section who have shaped our understanding of practices in and conditions for resistance to geographies of “crisis” (Nolan & Featherstone, 2015; Routledge, 2009), and who have promoted modes of geographical analysis and cartographic production that maintain other worlds as possible (Baldwin, 2014; Moore & Perdue, 2014). As Inwood (2018) suggests in the last of the articles we collected for the virtual special issue, our capacity to untether geographical practice from the reproduction of domination in our current conjuncture is contingent upon attuning ourselves to past and enduring landscapes of injustice (e.g., of white supremacy) within which geographers embody a potential to act. Across these articles, a brief survey of publishing in the Political Geography section of Geography Compass suggests that the journal can serve as an outlet for collective efforts to rethink the givens of political life and lend momentum to modes of political engagement adequate to our contemporary challenges. A look back at the first decade of political geography in Geography Compass suggests, for us, the active role that this section can continue to play in making sense of and orienting engagement with our changing world. We should end by noting that, as a venue for academic publishing that both popularizes debates at the “cutting edge” and also facilitates the rethinking of “‘traditional’ themes such as borders, the state, migration, and electoral systems” (McConnell, 2013, p. 450), the Political Geography section of Geography Compass is particularly well suited to playing this role. In the short term, this agenda will shape articles on the traffic between postcolonial theory and political geography, on anti-fascism, on Black political geographies, on climate change skepticism, and on relationships between domestic and international technologies of policing. The Editorial Board is, as ever, indebted to a wide network of authors, reviewers, and readers, and we are hopeful that this statement of an editorial direction serves to invite still wider participation in shaping an outlet for political-geographical scholarship that is opened to the world and engaged, both in mapping the processes that come together in our current conjuncture and also thoughtfully reconfiguring the ground on which we enact politics. Nicholas Crane received his PhD in Geography from the Ohio State University in 2014 and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Wyoming, where he teaches courses in human geography. Crane's ongoing projects focus on social movements and political organizing in Mexico and the United States. He is the section editor for political geography in Geography Compass. Kevin Grove received his PhD in Geography from the Ohio State University in 2011, and is currently Associate Professor of Geography in the Department of Global & Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. His research focuses on the politics of disaster resilience in the Caribbean, Miami and New York City, as well as the genealogy of resilience and designerly thinking. He has published on these topics in a recent book, Resilience (Routledge, 2018) and in a range of peer-reviewed journals, including Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Antipode, Security Dialog, Geoforum and the Annals of the American Association of Geographers.