Progressive Geographies

A supplemental essay at the Society and Space open site – original journal article open access for a limited time.

Ali Riza Taskale, Post-Politics in Context, now out with Routledge (in another obscenely priced hardback, unfortunately).

As disciplines, Politics and International Relations remain dominated by ideas drawn from traditions of liberal internationalism and political realism in which political imagination is preoccupied with command and order, rather than with disruption and emancipation. Yet, they have failed to offer adequate answers to why political action is foreclosed in contemporary times.

Proposed through a historically informed engagement with seminal thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault, and examples from films and contemporary events, Ali Riza Taskale presents an original and much needed new perspective to interpret politics in our contemporary societies. He argues that post-politics is a counterrevolutionary logic which aims to create a society without conflict, struggle and radical systemic change.

Post-Politics in Context serves as seminal intervention upon the debate over the depoliticised conditions of contemporary neoliberal society as well as functioning as an introduction to the core theoretical frameworks of alternative tradition of social and political thought in a manner that is lacking in current debates about Politics and International Relations.

Rob Kitchin, ‘Geographers matter! Doreen Massey (1944-2016)‘ in Social and Cultural Geography (open access). I’ve added this to the list of obituaries and tributes on this site.

Robert Latham, The Politics of Evasion: A Post-Globalization Dialogue Along the Edge of the State – published in Routledge’s Interventions series. Looks interesting, though disappointing it is another example of Routledge’s crazy pricing – £90 for 176 pages!

Burgeoning national security programs; thickening borders; Wikileaks and Anonymous; immigrant rights rallies; Occupy movements; student protests; neoliberal austerity; global financial crises – these developments underscore that the fable of a hope-filled post-cold war globalization has faded away. In its place looms the prospect of states and corporations transforming a permanent war on terror into a permanent war on society. How, at the critical juncture of a post-globalization era, will policymakers and power-holders in leading states and corporations of the Global North choose to pursue power and control? What possibilities and limits do activists and communities face for progressive political action to counter this power inside and outside the state?

This book is a sustained dialogue between author and political theorist, Robert Latham and Mr. V, a policy analyst from a state in the Global North. Mr. V is sympathetic to the pursuit of justice, rights and freedom by activists and movements but also mindful of the challenges of states in pursuing security and order in the current social and political moment. He seeks a return to the progressive, welfare-oriented state associated with the twentieth century. The dialogue offers an in-depth consideration of whether this is possible and how a progressive politics might require a different approach to social organization, power and collective life.