Progressive Geographies

Handbook on the Geographies of Power – edited by John Agnew and Mat Coleman, Edward Elgar, 2018. A very expensive but interesting looking collection.

The so-called spatial turn in the social sciences means that many researchers have become much more interested in what can be called the spatialities of power, or the ways in which power as a medium for achieving goals is related to where it takes place. Most famous authors on the subject, such as Machiavelli and Hobbes, saw power as entirely equivalent to domination exercised by some over others. Though this meaning is hardly redundant, understandings of power have become more multidimensional and nuanced as a result of the spatial turn. Much recent writing in human geography, for example, has rigorously extended use of the term power beyond its typical understanding as a resource that pools up in some hands and some places to a medium of agency that has different effects depending on how it is deployed across space and how actors cooperate, or not, to give it effect. To address this objective, the book is organized thematically into four sections that cover the main areas in which much of the contemporary work on geographies of power is concentrated: bodies, economy, environment and energy, and war.

Contents:
Part I Introduction

1. Introduction to the Handbook on the Geographies of Power
Mat Coleman and John Agnew

Part II Bodies
Mat Coleman

2. When Ethnography Meets Space
Ishan Ashutosh

3. Sex and Sexuality: Exploring the Geographies of Prostitution
Phil Hubbard

4. Spatial Technologies of Racialized Knowing: On Visuality, Measurement, and the Law
Robin Wright, Eric Goldfischer, Aaron Mallory and Kate Derickson

5. “This Wack(Yhut) Idea!!!”: The Plantation Bloc and Political Economy of Prison Expansion in Louisiana
Jenna M. Loyd

6. Human, All too Human, Geographies
Claire Rasmussen and Michael Brown

Part III Economy
John Agnew

7. Reflections on the Power in and the Power of Financial Markets
Adam D. Dixon

8. Corporate–state relations in the age of Trumpism: analytical problems with the neoliberal synthesis and some potential ways forward
Joshua Barkan

9. Reproduction, Justice and Spatialities of Power
Kendra Strauss

10. Abstract and Concrete Labor in the Age of Informality
Vinay Gidwani

11. The Circulation of Financial Elites
John Allen

Part IV Energy And Environment
Mat Coleman

12. The Anthropocene and Geographies of Geopower
Kathryn Yusoff

13. The Power of Water
Philip Steinberg

14. Animated Place: Invisible Industrial Technologies and the Shaping of Eating Bodies
Nicholas Bauch

15. Microontologies and the Politics of Emergent Life
Nigel Clark and Myra Hird

16. Destituent Power and Common Use: Reading Agamben in the Anthropocene
Bruce Braun and Stephanie Wakefield

Part V Warfare
John Agnew

17. Human Shields and the Political Geography of International Humanitarian Law
Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini

18. Matrix Governance and Imperialism
Pádraig Carmody

19. Governing Banishment: Settler Colonialism, Territory, and Life in an Economy of Death
Lisa Bhungalia

20. Military Contracting and the Labor of Force Projection
Adam Moore

21. Autonomy, Human Vulnerability and the Volumetric Composition of US Border Policing
Geoff Boyce

22. Maps, Complexity, and the Uncertainty of Power
Luca Muscarà

23. To Help or Not to Help? Humanitarian Spaces, Power, and Government
Jennifer Hyndman

24. Power’s Outsides
Mat Coleman and John Agnew

Index

Global Politics: A New Introduction, 3rd edition, edited by Jenny Edkins and Maja Zehfuss – forthcoming in December 2018.

The 3^rd edition of Global Politics: A New Introduction continues to provide a completely original way of teaching and learning about world politics. The book engages directly with the issues in global politics that students are most interested in, helping them to understand the key questions and theories and also to develop a critical and inquiring perspective.

Completely revised and updated throughout, the 3rd edition includes a host of new illustrative examples which focus on the most pressing issues in in global politics, offering new material on topics such as Migration, Brexit, the rise and impact of ISIS, Race and Racism and Drone warfare.

Global Politics:

• Examines the most significant issues in global politics – from war, peacebuilding, terrorism, security, violence, nationalism, political violence, human rights and authority to poverty, development, postcolonialism, gender, inequality, ethnicity, environmental politics, nationalism, the internet, democratization, colonialism and the financial crisis.
• Offers chapters written to a common structure which is ideal for teaching and learning and features a key question, an illustrative example, general responses and broader issues
• Integrates theory and practice throughout the text, by presenting theoretical ideas and concepts in conjunction with a global range of historical and contemporary case studies

Drawing on theoretical perspectives from a broad range of disciplines including international relations, political theory, postcolonial studies, sociology, geography, peace studies and development this innovative textbook is essential reading for all students of global politics and international relations.

Like the previous editions, I have a  chapter in this, entitled ‘Why is the world divided territorially?’

Elaine Stratford, Home, Nature, and the Feminine Ideal: Geographies of the Interior and of Empire – Rowman International, January 2019.

Take three things: the home, nature, and the feminine ideal—a notional and perfected femininity. Constitute them as inexorably and universally connected. Enrol them in diverse strategies and tactics that create varied anatomo-politics of the body and biopolitics of the population. Enlist those three things as the “handmaidens” of the government of individuals and groups, places and spaces, and comings and goings. Focus some effort on the periodical press, and on producing and disseminating narratives, discourses, and practices that relate specifically to health and well-being. Deploy those texts and shape those contexts in ways that affect flesh and bone, psychology and social conduct, and the spatial organization and relational dynamics of dwellings and streets, settlements and regions, and states and empires. Stretch these activities over the Anglophone world—from the epicentres of the United Kingdom and the United States to Australia or Canada, New Zealand or India—and extend their reach over the whole of the long nineteenth century. Such are the subjects of this work, in which Elaine Stratford draws from governmentality, the geohumanities, and geocriticism to converse with an extensive archive that profoundly shaped our engagements with home, nature, and the feminine ideal, deeply influenced our collective capacity to flourish, and powerfully constituted diverse geographies of the interior and of empire that still affect us.

Ian Klinke, Cryptic Concrete: : A Subterranean Journey Into Cold War Germany – RGS-IBG book series, April 2018

Cryptic Concrete explores bunkered sites in Cold War Germany in order to understand the inner workings of the Cold War state.

• A scholarly work that suggests a reassessment of the history of geo- and bio-politics
• Attempts to understand the material architecture that was designed to protect and take life in nuclear war
• Zooms in on two types of structures – the nuclear bunker and the atomic missile silo
• Analyzes a broad range of sources through the lens of critical theory and argues for an appreciation of the two subterranean structures’ complementary nature

Chapter 1 available to download from the publisher; a bit more information on the RGS website.

James A. Tyner, The Politics of Lists: Bureaucracy and Genocide under the Khmer Rouge – West Virginia University Press, September 2018

Scholars from a number of disciplines have, especially since the advent of the war on terror, developed critical perspectives on a cluster of related topics in contemporary life: militarization, surveillance, policing, biopolitics (the relation between state power and physical bodies), and the like. James A. Tyner, a geographer who has contributed to this literature with several highly regarded books, here turns to the bureaucratic roots of genocide, building on insight from Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, and others to better understand the Khmer Rouge and its implications for the broader study of life, death, and power.

The Politics of Lists analyzes thousands of newly available Cambodian documents both as sources of information and as objects worthy of study in and of themselves. How, Tyner asks, is recordkeeping implicated in the creation of political authority? What is the relationship between violence and bureaucracy? How can documents, as an anonymous technology capable of conveying great force, be understood in relation to newer technologies like drones? What does data create, and what does it destroy? Through a theoretically informed, empirically grounded study of the Khmer Rouge security apparatus, Tyner shows that lists and telegrams have often proved as deadly as bullet and bombs.

Richard Devetak, Critical International Theory: An Intellectual History – OUP, August 2018

Whether inspired by the Frankfurt School or Antonio Gramsci, the impact of critical theory on the study of international relations has grown considerably since its advent in the early 1980s. This book offers the first intellectual history of critical international theory.

Richard Devetak approaches this history by locating its emergence in the rising prestige of theory and the theoretical persona. As theory’s prestige rose in the discipline of international relations it opened the way for normative and metatheoretical reconsiderations of the discipline and the world. The book traces the lines of intellectual inheritance through the Frankfurt School to the Enlightenment, German idealism, and historical materialism, to reveal the construction of a particular kind of intellectual persona: the critical international theorist who has mastered reflexive, dialectical forms of social philosophy. . In addition to the extensive treatment of critical theory’s reception and development in international relations, the book recovers a rival form of theory that originates outside the usual inheritance of critical international theory in Renaissance humanism and the civil Enlightenment. This historical mode of theorising was intended to combat metaphysical encroachments on politics and international relations and to prioritise the mundane demands of civil government over the self-reflective demands of dialectical social philosophies. By proposing contextualist intellectual history as a form of critical theory, Critical International Theory defends a mode of historical critique that refuses the normative temptations to project present conceptions onto an alien past, and to abstract from the offices of civil government.

Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson, Genealogies of Terrorism: Revolution, State Violence, Empire, Columbia University Press, July 2018.

What is terrorism? What ought we to do about it? And why is it wrong? We think we have clear answers to these questions. But acts of violence, like U.S. drone strikes that indiscriminately kill civilians, and mass shootings that become terrorist attacks when suspects are identified as Muslim, suggest that definitions of terrorism are always contested. In Genealogies of Terrorism, Verena Erlenbusch rejects attempts to define what terrorism is in favor of a historico-philosophical investigation into the conditions under which uses of this contested term become meaningful. The result is a powerful critique of the power relations that shape how we understand and theorize political violence.

Tracing discourses and practices of terrorism from the French Revolution to late imperial Russia, colonized Algeria, and the post-9/11 United States, Erlenbusch examines what we do when we name something terrorism. She offers an important corrective to attempts to develop universal definitions that assure semantic consistency and provide normative certainty, showing that terrorism means many different things and serves a wide range of political purposes. In the tradition of Michel Foucault’s genealogies, Erlenbusch excavates the history of conceptual and practical uses of terrorism and maps the historically contingent political and material conditions that shape their emergence. She analyzes the power relations that make different modes of understanding terrorism possible and reveals their complicity in justifying the exercise of sovereign power in the name of defending the nation, class, or humanity against the terrorist enemy. Offering an engaged critique of terrorism and the mechanisms of social and political exclusion that it enables, Genealogies of Terrorism is an empirically grounded and philosophically rigorous critical history with important political implications.

1. The Trouble with Terrorism
2. The Emergence of Terrorism
3. State Terrorism Revisited
4. Terrorism and Colonialism
5. Reimagining Terrorism at the End of History
6. Towards a Critical Theory of Terrorism: Genealogy and Normativity

Inspired by Wittgenstein and Foucault, and contemporary debates about concepts, in this remarkable book Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson undertakes a significant examination of terrorism. Rather than assuming its meaning and looking for that in her sources, she instead allows a multifaceted understanding to emerge from a historical study of texts and practices. A powerful and urgent intervention for our troubled times. Stuart Elden, University of Warwick

This book is political philosophy at its best. It offers an instructive model of mobilizing philosophical genealogy for a critique of a highly-charged idea. It complicates the seeming obviousness with which the concept of ‘terrorism’ is today purveyed. Through meticulous historical and philosophical analysis, this book shows how the concept of terrorism came to be an explosive, dangerous, and contested political idea. Colin Koopman, University of Oregon

Verena Erlenbusch-Anderson’s careful genealogy of ‘terrorism’—tracking the term’s multiple and overdetermined meanings since its first appearance as a political concept in the late eighteenth century—powerfully shows us how we all too frequently ask the wrong questions about terrorism. This critical book offers a necessary corrective to how we think about terrorism, and it reshapes the grounds upon which we should have any meaningful debate about terrorism in the present moment. Andrew Dilts, Loyola Marymount University