Deborah Cowen

A Geography of Logistics: Market Authority and the Security of Supply Chains

In recent years, U.S. military and civilian agencies have been rethinking security in the context of globalized production and trade. No longer lodged in a conflict between territorial borders and global flows, national security is increasingly a project of securing supranational systems. The maritime border has been a critical site for experimentation, and a spate of new policy is blurring “inside” and “outside” national space, reconfiguring border security, and reorganizing citizenship and labor rights. These programs seek to govern integrated economic space while they resurrect borders and sanction new forms of containment. Forces that disrupt commodity flows are cast as security threats with labor actions a key target of policy. Direct connections result between market rule created to secure logistic space and the broader project of neoliberalism. Even as neoliberalism is credited with expanding capitalist markets and market logics, it is logistics that have put the cold calculation of cost at the center of the production of space. Since World War II, logistics experts have conceptualized economy anew by spatializing cost–benefit analysis and applying systems analysis to distribution networks. The “revolution in logistics” has changed how space is conceived and represented, and transformed the practical management of supply chains. Historically a military technology of war and colonialism abroad, today logistics lead rather than support the strategies of firms and the security of nations across transnational space. These shifts have implications for the geopolitics of borders and security but also for social and political forms premised on the territory and ontology of national space.

Suburban citizenship? The rise of targeting and the eclipse of social rights in Toronto

The decline of ‘universal’, welfarist forms of social citizenship and the rise of selective or targeted social policy is generally considered to be a recent phenomenon, and a constituent element of neo-liberal citizenship and state forms (Brodie 1997), or ‘advanced liberal’ technologies of government (Rose 2000). This paper documents how targeted policies were in fact being defined at the height of Keynesian welfarism, in the newly consolidating post-war suburbs of Toronto. I suggest an alternative account of the genesis of these practices, which sees the spatiality of the post-war metropolis as key. The analysis considers how the mutual consolidation of these social and material spaces, and of hegemonic suburban political practices enabled the articulation of a suburban style of citizenship, which was both intensely familial and entrepreneurial in form. Through a case study in recreation policy in the Toronto region, this paper demonstrates how selective, targeted and residual approaches to service delivery evolved in suburban municipalities in the immediate post-war period, and were only generalized across the city more recently through the restructuring of a municipal amalgamation. It documents how these approaches have relied on radically different assumptions about citizenship that were dependent on the articulation of suburban life, literally built around the private family in private space. Thus this paper also documents ways in which these approaches to social policy, increasingly dominant across a range of policy areas and at a variety of spatial scales, construct gendered and racialized identities and problematize non-nuclear family forms.

From the American Lebensraum to the American Living Room: Class, Sexuality, and the Scaled Production of ‘Domestic’ Intimacy

In this paper I interrogate the powerful brand of intimate nationalism that has permeated American political discourse since the initiation of the ‘war on terror’. I consider how a strategic collapse of scales in articulations of ‘domestic’ life simultaneously defines public cum national and private cum familial belonging, with material force. This scaled production of domestic intimacy entails a concurrent restructuring of the spatiality of social reproduction and of norms of desirous identification. My analysis draws on the combined insights of scalar theory and sexuality studies, and argues that in order to benefit from both fields of inquiry we need to return to and rethink class. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, I posit class as embodied social-group relations of production, consumption, reproduction, and desire in order to highlight the scaled and strategic hinging of normative sexualities to modes of social reproduction. This approach questions how people become invested in, and desirous of, norms of sociality that constitute militarist imperial capitalism. It suggests that identification with, and desire for, this nation at this moment is fundamentally dependent on actual configurations of private, intimate life. A consideration of these shifting normative desires and geographies of domestic life, as manifest across a range of cultural, political, and economic terrains and at a variety of spatial scales, provides insight into why people continue to consume and be consumed by the American empire.

Introduction: Turbulent Circulation: Building a Critical Engagement with Logistics

Since the mid-20th century, logistics has evolved into a wide-ranging science of circulation involved in planning and managing flows of innumerable kinds. In this introductory essay, we take stock of the ascendancy and proliferation of logistics, proposing a critical engagement with the field. We argue that logistics is not limited to the management of supply chains, military or corporate. Rather, it is better understood as a calculative logic and spatial practice of circulation that is at the fore of the reorganization of capitalism and war. Viewed from this perspective, the rise of logistics has transformed not only the physical movement of materials but also the very rationality by which space is organized. It has remade economic and military space according to a universalizing logic of abstract flow, exacerbating existing patterns of uneven geographical development. Drawing on the articles that make up this themed issue, we propose that a critical approach to logistics is characterized by three core commitments: (1) a rejection of the field’s self-depiction as an apolitical science of management, along with a commitment to highlighting the relations of power and acts of violence that underpin it; (2) an interest in exposing the flaws, irrationalities, and vulnerabilities of logistical regimes; and (3) an orientation toward contestation and struggle within logistical networks.

Recently completed doctorates in social and cultural geography

Is war the antithesis of peace and the soldier the opposite of the citizen? For three hundred years scholars have contributed to this kind of understanding of politics, war, and populations. Starting with the work of Clausewitz, scholars have traditionally constituted war as a space of exception that exceeds the political and is exterior to the national polity. More recently, scholars including Arendt, Foucault, Hardt and Negri and Agamben have proposed a different relationship between politics and war. They suggest that war has actually constituted and shaped our politics and our peace. Despite this important intervention, the military remains marginal in academic and public conceptions of citizenship, while the soldier is understood to be a peripheral and exceptional player. Based on extensive archival research in previously restricted military files that cover a five-decade span, my research demonstrates that modern formsof citizenshiphave their origins in times of war and in the image of the warring workercitizen. The military is not an institution that operates under democratic or political rights— defining features of modern western citizenship—and yet paradoxically, it was through the mass sacrifice of the population in military service to the nation duringWW2 that post-war citizenship was assembled. Welfare was a reward for the serving citizen, and a means to harness the labor and allegiance of a divided population for the nation. By collectivizing risk, expanding education, and nationalizing political struggle and culture, the welfare state reshaped the geographies of work and identities of citizens such that today the military histories and geographies of citizenship are hidden in plain view. Long missing in action in academic and public accounts of social change, the soldier plays a central role in this account of the puzzle of social citizenship.