John Agnew

The territorial trap: The geographical assumptions of international relations theory

Abstract Even when political rule is territorial, territoriality does not necessarily entail the practices of total mutual exclusion which dominant understandings of the modern territorial state attribute to it. However, when the territoriality of the state is debated by international relations theorists the discussion is overwhelmingly in terms of the persistence or obsolescence of the territorial state as an unchanging entity rather than in terms of its significance and meaning in different historical‐geographical circumstances. Contemporary events call this approach into question. The end of the Cold War, the increased velocity and volatility of the world economy, and the emergence of political movements outside the framework of territorial states, suggest the need to consider the territoriality of states in historical context. Conventional thinking relies on three geographical assumptions ‐ states as fixed units of sovereign space, the domestic/foreign polarity, and states as ‘containers’ of societies...

Geopolitics and discourse: Practical geopolitical reasoning in American foreign policy

Abstract This paper argues for the re-conceptualization of geopolitics using the concept of discourse. Geopolitics is defined as a discursive practice by which intellectuals of statecraft ‘spatialize’ international politics and represent it as a ‘world’ characterized by particular types of places, peoples and dramas. Four theses explicating this re-conceptualization are outlined including the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘practical’ geopolitics. These arguments are illustrated by a general discussion of practical geopolitical reasoning in US foreign policy which includes an analysis of George Kennans ‘Long Telegram’ and ‘Mr X’ article representations of the USSR. The irony of such practical geopolitical representations of place is that they necessitate the abrogation of genuine geographical knowledge about the diversity and complexity of places as social entities. Geopolitical reasoning, it is concluded, ironically works by being anti-geographical.

Sovereignty Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics

Abstract I propose a concept of effective sovereignty to argue that states participate in sovereignty regimes that exhibit distinctive combinations of central state authority and political territoriality. Two basic conclusions, drawing from recent research in political geography and other fields, are that sovereignty is neither inherently territorial nor is it exclusively organized on a state-by-state basis. This matters because so much political energy has been invested in organizing politics in general and democracy in particular in relation to states. Typically, writing about sovereignty regards sovereignty as providing a norm that legitimizes central state authority. Unfortunately, little or no attention is given as to why this should always entail a territorial definition of political authority and to why states are thereby its sole proprietors. The dominant approach continues to privilege the state as the singular font of authority even when a states sovereignty may be decried as hypocrisy and seen as divisible or issue-specific rather than “real” or absolute. I put forward a model of sovereignty alternative to the dominant one by identifying four “sovereignty regimes” that result from distinctive combinations of central state authority (legitimate despotic power) on the one hand, and degree of political territoriality (the administration of infrastructural power) on the other. By “regime” I mean a system of rule, not merely some sort of international protocol or agreement between putatively equal states. I then examine the general trajectory of the combination of sovereignty regimes from the early nineteenth century to the present. The contemporary geography of currencies (specifically exchange-rate arrangements) serves to empirically illustrate the general argument about sovereignty regimes. Finally, a brief conclusion suggests that the dominant Westphalian model of state sovereignty in political geography and international relations theory, deficient as it has long been for understanding the realities of world politics, is even more inadequate today, not only for its ignoring the hierarchy of states and sources of authority other than states, but also because of its mistaken emphasis on the geographical expression of authority (particularly under the ambiguous sign of “sovereignty”) as invariably and inevitably territorial.

Mapping politics: how context counts in electoral geography

Abstract Electoral geography, indeed political geography in general, has been largely concerned with mapping distributions which are then ‘explained’ by non-spatial factors. To the extent that spatial context itself has counted, it has been largely in terms of locality or neighborhood effects which are presumed to work against ‘larger’ or ‘wider’ social processes. This paper takes issue with conventional mapping and locality-effect accounts of context on the ground that each involves a radical ontological separation of space and society that cannot be sustained. A concept of context-as-place is elaborated which abandons the identification of context with a single (local) geographical scale and provides a way of bridging the gap between abstract sociological and concrete geographical analysis. The potential of the concept is explored in a series of analyses of Italian electoral geography over the period 1947–1994.

The dramaturgy of horizons: geographical scale in the ‘Reconstruction of Italy’ by the new Italian political parties, 1992–1995

Abstract The four major political parties in contemporary (1994–1995) Italy—Forza Italia, the Northern League, the Democratic Party of the Left, and the National Alliance—are brand new in name and ideology. Each of these parties has been constructing in its rhetoric and organization differing conceptions of the geographical scales—international, national, regional, local—in terms of how they understand ‘Italy’. The collapse of the old system of parties during 1992–1994 created an opening for a reorganization of parties more in line with recent trends towards a fragmented Italian political economy and society. The Italian case illustrates a more general point, that political parties must organize themselves and their ideologies through the ways they divide, order and organize space. There is an intrinsically geographical basis to the drama of organized politics even when all parties structure space in the same ways. This is only more obvious at times of dramatic political change when there are competing conceptions of how to organize potential constituencies and interests. Geography, therefore, is not ‘external’ to the operations of political parties, a Euclidean surface or stage upon which the drama of politics is played out. The drama of party politics is scripted in terms of the geographical horizons—national or otherwise—parties set for themselves.

From the political economy of regions to regional political economy

Two intellectual trends in the 1980s and early 1990s reversed much of the emphasis on the political economy of regions within countries that had become popular among geographers and others in the 1970s and early 1980s. One was the rise of a neoliberalism which saw regional differences in economic performance and affluence as either temporary disequilibria or the result of government interference in market allocation of resources. A new conventional wisdom arose: just wait long enough and everything will iron out. The other was the emergence of perspectives on globalization, particularly among sociologists, which saw regions and localities, at least in the ‘developed’ world, as fading away in social importance as social and cultural practices standardized a round global norms. Remaining regional diff e rences were put down to either historical inertia or composition effects reflecting differences in population characteristics and other nongeographical variables. There is now something of a swing away from these positions towards a renewed emphasis on mapping and explaining the continuation of old and the emergence of new regional diff e rences. Rather than disappearing, regional economic and political differences seem, if anything, to be strengthening under contemporary circumstances. This time around, however, the political economy of regions has different ingredients in which the regions are central rather than merely derivative of nonspatial processes. In particular, the focus has shifted from administrative to city-regions, from central government regional policies to regional competition, and from taken-for-granted permanent regional definitions to historicized units whose boundaries and politicaleconomic significance change historically. There is also greater theoretical diversity than characterized the previous round of political-economic theorizing about regions. More specifically, institutionalist, cultural and representational approaches compete with more conventional rational-economic ones. Most importantly, however, regions Progress in Human Geography 24,1 (2000) pp. 101–110

Borders on the mind: re-framing border thinking

From one viewpoint, interstate borders are simple ‘artefacts on the ground’. Borders exist for a variety of practical reasons and can be classified according to the purposes they serve and how they serve them. They enable a whole host of important political, social, and economic activities. From a very different perspective, borders are artefacts of dominant discursive processes that have led to the fencing off of chunks of territory and people from one another. Such processes can change and as they do, borders live on as residual phenomena that may still capture our imagination but no longer serve any essential purpose. Yet, what if, although still necessary for all sorts of reasons, borders are also inherently problematic? We need to change the way in which we think about borders to openly acknowledge their equivocal character. In other words, we need to see a border not as that which is either fixed or that as such must be overcome, but as an evolving construction that has both practical merits and demerits that must be constantly reweighed. Thinking about borders should be opened up to consider territorial spaces as ‘dwelling’ rather than national spaces and to see political responsibility for pursuit of a ‘decent life’ as extending beyond the borders of any particular state. Borders matter, then, both because they have real effects and because they trap thinking about and acting in the world in territorial terms.

HOW MANY EUROPES? THE EUROPEAN UNION, EASTWARD ENLARGEMENT AND UNEVEN DEVELOPMENT

Eastward enlargement of the European Union (EU) is rarely discussed in terms of the organizational and ideological condition of the existing Union. In this paper the debate over eastern enlargement is related directly to a shift within the EU from a dual focus on global economic competitiveness and the compensation of lagging regions to an increasingly singular focus on European competitiveness. Seen in this light, the goal of a single Europe with relatively similar levels of development everywhere is being replaced by an emerging threefold division of the continent into a ‘core’ Europe (itself increasingly differentiated across policy areas), a ‘peripheral’ Europe of potential eastern members perpetually on the road to full membership, and an ‘external’ Europe excluded from membership but open to use by businesses from the core. This geographical taxonomy rests on the growing reliance of the EU on a neo-liberal economic ideology that sees uneven development within Europe as helping the global competitiveness of the EU as a whole, using the model of the United States as its inspiration.

Baghdad Nights: Evaluating the US Military ‘Surge’ Using Nighttime Light Signatures

Baghdad Nights: Evaluating the US Military ‘Surge’ Using Nighttime Light Signatures John Agnew Thomas W. Gillespie Jorge Gonzalez Brian Min CCPR-064-08 December 2008 Latest Revised: December 2008 California Center for Population Research On-Line Working Paper Series

Regions on the mind does not equal regions of the mind

Since 1989 we have lived through a period of regional ‘extinction’. The great Second World of the Soviet Union and its allies has disappeared from global political and intellectual radar because the sociopolitical order which that region represented has disappeared. At the same time, the Other Worlds this Second One held in place, the First World and the Third World, must necessarily lose their raison d’être. As in any classification scheme based on totalizing the differences between units, once the one the others were defined against disappears the old regional labels and what they stand for no longer make much sense. This example speaks volumes to the controversies that flair up episodically among geographers and others about the meanings we invest in regions and the schemes of global division (or metageography) they represent. It draws attention to the degree to which we can believe that regions are ‘real’ in the sense of marking off distinctive bits of the earth’s surface or the product of political and social conventions that appear and disappear as human history takes its course. This opposition has once again arisen to prominence in disputes over the character of region and place (Entrikin, 1996; Lewis and Wigen, 1997; Sack, 1997). The Three Worlds scheme has also been one of the most popular ways in the USA of teaching world regional geography. Yet, what if it always had an entirely mythic basis as compared to other more ‘stable’ and ‘essential’ divisions of the world (Lewis and Wigen, 1997)? Finally, what if the geographical scale of regionalization represented by the Three Worlds has long since failed to capture the emerging geography of the world in the late twentieth century? From this point of view, one emerging ‘reality’ is of a world of mesoscale regions challenging the division of the world into a set of mutually exclusive state territories (see, e.g., Scott, 1998) and another is a world whose shape is increasingly complex and difficult to define according to a single measure or a limited set of criteria (see, e.g., Schwarz and Dienst, 1996). Of course, such representations do not go unchallenged nor do they supersede attempts at Progress in Human Geography 23,1 (1999) pp. 91–96