Progressive Geographies

Another new commentary on the Society and Space open site – this time on the relation India has to the situation in Israel and Palestine.

A thoughtful piece at the Society and Space open site on the situation in Palestine from Nadim Khoury. When I was visiting Al Quds in 2013, Nadim was one of the people I was working with – a very interesting perspective that emphasises chronology and narrative as much as occupation, disruption and destruction of space.

There is a memorial event for urbanist and planner Peter Hall at the Royal Geographical Society in London on October 22nd. The event is free but pre-registration is essential.

As previously posted, there is an obituary in The Guardian and one at Building Design.

This is interesting – analysis of the words in the title of US Geography dissertations since 1888 to track changing interests in the discipline. (Some dumb comments though, including a gratuitous swipe at a journal I know well…) Thanks to Kris Olds for the link.

Call for papers on an interesting theme. See also the Society and Space virtual theme issue on Geopolitical Economy edited by Deb Cowen and me back in 2013.

Geopolitical Economy: States, Economies and the Capitalist World Order

Research in Political Economy, Volume 30 (2015)Edited by Radhika Desai
Submission deadline: 1 October 2014; Proposal Acceptances: 15 October 2014; Final papers due: 1 December 2014
This issue advances geopolitical economy as a new approach to understanding the evolution of the capitalist world order and its 21st century form of multipolarity.  Neither can be explained by recently dominant approaches such as ‘U.S. hegemony’ or ‘globalization’: they treat the world economy as a seamless whole in which either no state matters or only one does. Today’s ‘BRICs’ and ‘emerging economies’ are only the latest instances of state-led or combined development. Such development has a long history of repeatedly challenging the unevenness of capitalism and the international division of labour it created. It is this dialectic of uneven and combined development, not markets or imperialism, that spread productive capacity around the world. It also ensured that the ‘hegemony’ of the UK would end and that of the US would never be realised, despite repeated attempts.
In geopolitical economy the role of states in developing and regulating economies is central. States’ mutual interactions – conflicting cooperative and collusive – and the international order they create are understood in terms of the character of national economies, their contradictions, and the international possibilities and imperatives they generate. Geopolitical economy as an approach to the world order is clearly anticipated in classical political economy up to and including Marx and Engels, though this becomes clearest if we take a fresh look at it untainted by neoclassical economics and associated discourses of neoliberalism, globalization and hegemony. Further intellectual resources for geopolitical economy include the classical theories of imperialism, the theory of uneven and combined development as well as 20th century critics of neoclassical economics such as Keynes, Kalecki, Polanyi, Minsky and the developmental state tradition going back to List and Serra and forward to Amsden and Wade.
Papers that investigate any aspect of the world order, its theories or its historiography – whether contemporary or historical – in a way that relates to geopolitical economy as described above, or poses important objections to it, are welcome for consideration.
A non-exhaustive list of potential themes would include:
The international relations of early capitalism
Capitalism, imperialism and imperialist competition
Capitalism and the state
Combined development, capitalist and non-capitalist
Wars in Uneven and Combined development
International economic governance
International relations and international political economy theories in light of geopolitical economy
Development theory, the demand for a NIEO and the ‘rise of the rest’
The BRICs and emerging economies as combined development
Challenges to states’ economic roles: sources, strength, implications for geopolitical economy

Proposals should be sent to Radhika.Desai@umanitoba.ca by 1 October 2014: http://emeraldgrouppublishing.com/products/books/call_for_papers.htm?id=5364#sthash.GNQSui02.dpuf
Published in http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/distributed/call-for-papers-for-special-issue-of-research-in-political-economy

Interview with Walaa Alqaisiya and Lisa Bhungalia by Mat Coleman and Mary Thomas at the Society and Space open site.