Mat Coleman

The naming of ‘terrorism’ and evil ‘outlaws’: geopolitical place-making after 11 September

In the aftermath of 11 September, techniques of spatial surveillance and processes of rebordering indicate a moment of American (re)territorialization. This said, it seems important to move beyond a simple notion of geography-as-territoriality to focus on place and the politics of identity. In the context of events following from the mid-September 2001 ‘attacks’, I suggest that critical geopoliticians focus on the US foreign policy naming of ‘terrorism’ as an iconographic place-making activity. However, perhaps the more poignant question is one concerning the post-11 September invocation of evil. I suggest here that scrutiny of the placemaking naming of evil makes evident the potentially unjust and inhumane constitution of state responses to ‘terrorism’, declared as an outlaw to justice and humanity. This is particularly relevant given the US bombing campaign in Afghanistan, the alleged poor treatment of Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners at Camp X-Ray in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and the recent detainment of suspected residents in the US. I conclude with a brief thought concerning the need to contextualize the events of 11 September in a larger frame of US global geopolitical relations and histories.

Thinking about the World Bank’s “accordion” geography of financial globalization

Abstract Two “flagship” World Bank reports, entitled The Long March—A Reform Agenda for Latin America and the Caribbean In The Next Decade (1997) and the World Development Report, 1999–2000 (2000), are the subject of this paper. Both publications attempt to come to terms with the policy and practice of structural adjustment in the context of a new geography of global finance. This paper argues that the geographical imagination employed in both World Bank reports is the product of a dominant statist geographical imagination that struggles to explain contemporary developments in the geography of money. The paper starts with a brief discussion of the Mexican peso and debt crisis, and the World Bank’s practice of structural adjustment. Through an interrogation of both World Bank papers, thought is then given to the purchase of territorialized state-based mappings of the global economy. The paper wraps up with a brief conclusion concerning the explanatory salience of scale. Internationally mobile capital is here to stay. Growing trade links, new communication technologies, and increasingly sophisticated financial products are making national borders more porous to financial flows. The challenge facing policymakers in developing countries is how to navigate through this financially integrating world ( World Development Report 1999-2000, 2000: 85 ). [W]hereas the horizons of the world of money and finance are global and deterritorialized, the political imagination seems wedded to territorialism and the borders of the nation state ( Leyshon &Thrift, 1997: 290 ).

Topologies of practice

Allen’s (2011) provocative argument on the difference between topographic and topologic ontologies in human geography offers human geographers an important opportunity to re-engage with other similarly spirited arguments about the limitations of the topographic. For example, debate over Marston et al.’s (2005) argument for a ‘site ontology’ has tended to sidestep the question of topological space and has instead dwelled on whether or not their representation of human geography research on scale is accurate. However, if Allen’s research gives human geographers another opportunity to take up the question of sociospatial practice as contingent, site-specific, and self-structuring, it also poses at least two problems. On the one hand, Allen characterizes the topographic and topologic according to a too neat calendar of sociospatial relations. On the other hand, Allen overlooks a long-standing appreciation for the topologic in human geography by drawing a strong distinction between past and newer intellectual approaches to power and space.

Geopolitics as a Social Movement: The Causal Primacy of Ideas

In Nationalism – Five Roads to Modernity (1992), Greenfeld argues that social reality is predominantly a cultural and ‘symbolic reality, created by the subjective meanings and perceptions of social actors’. In this Weberian reading, social reality concerns the invention of meaning and actors’ ideas, beliefs, and motivations. With respect to the phenomenon of nationalism, for example, Greenfeld suggests that ideas introduced and retooled by disenfranchised elite clusters – who possess a specialised knowledge – shape emergent concepts about communities of origin, purpose and opinion. Such an approach approximates the focus on ‘imagined communities’ and on the ‘invented traditions’ of proto-nationalist identification found in other studies of nationalism, and finds fault with primordialist explanations of nationhood focused on the hereditary and the ethnic. This explanation of social reality in terms of the ‘causal primacy of ideas’ echoes throughout Gertjan Dijkink’s interesting and provocative essay on geopolitics. As with Greenfeld’s discussion of the birth of new national identity matrices, Dijkink typifies geopolitics as an act of conceptual naming and reframing – or knowledge production – by politically and academically disenfranchised elite groups who seek alternative truths as well as political office and/or academic recognition, against increasingly problematic mainstream conceptualisations of space articulated by dominant thinkers in principal state institutions and offices. Here, geopolitics – as a functional practice of the marginalised and knowledgeable, and as a new cultural coding – is bent on the instatement (literally, bringing into the halls of statecraft) of a new elite knowledge class. For Dijkink, then, geopolitics – or stories about political arrangements in the international space of the state system – is best grasped as an intellectual social movement. Membership follows, first, some period of crisis, disorder or danger and, second, a decisive awakening or revaluation – a satori, in which an existing frame of international spatial order is discarded in favour of a new lens, idea, or interpretation. The resultant reassignment of

Missing in Action: Practice, Paralegality, and the Nature of Immigration Enforcement

Abstract U.S. immigration control is typically understood in terms of enforcement practices undertaken by federal officers guided by legislation and court decisions. While legislation and court opinions are important components of the immigration control apparatus, they do not adequately account for immigration control ‘on the ground.’ To explore this problem, we advance the concept of paralegality, the practices and operations that constitute a dynamic system of actions and relationships that are not simply linear applications of legislation or judicial decisions but may in fact extend or counter these texts. We illustrate the importance of paralegality by reconstructing the evolution of the §287(g) and Secure Communities programs, both of which have shape-shifted dramatically since their inception. Our account of immigration control highlights the problem practice poses for law, proposes a theoretical alternative to textual-law-centric research on immigration and law enforcement, and contributes to scholarship on everyday citizenship.