Matthew Sparke

Introduction: Professional Geography and the Corporatization ofthe University: Experiences, Evaluations, and Engagements

While the recent “cultural turn” in geography has sometimes led to a neglect of political economy, the capitalist economy in all its creative and destructive dynamism has not neglected professional geographers. Instead, as both producers and consumers of academic knowledge and as teachers, students, researchers, and readers, we have been witness to, or at very least blind participants in, a sweeping set of economically driven changes steadily transforming academic institutions around the world from the 1980s onwards. In the last decade we busily debated how postmodernism might relate to both postFordist economic reorganization and postfoundationalist thinking, moved on to address situated knowledges and the politics of location, and have become fascinated more recently with bodies and their diverse cultural geographies. However, we have tended not to address as directly as we might the ways in which our own bodies as academics situated in universities are being fed, counted, and variously decorated, maintained, and exhausted in institutions altered at the very foundation by the same flexible accumulation dynamics that earlier excited such analytical enthusiasm. To be sure, the “we” assumed in these opening sentences is problematically homogenizing, and one of the purposes of this special issue of Antipode 32:3, 2000, pp. 222–229 ISSN 0066-4812

Geopolitical Fears, Geoeconomic Hopes, and the Responsibilities of Geography

Abstract Geographers have a responsibility to examine persistently, collaboratively, and critically the geographical grounds of hope and fear. We can help debunk false hopes and groundless fears, and in so doing we can also advance more sensible hopes based on more embodied and accountable experiences of fear. The case of the Iraq war shows how the groundless geopolitical fears about Iraqs weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda connections were combined with equally groundless geoeconomic hopes about making the middle of the Middle East into a bastion of peace and freedom through free-market reforms. These geopolitical and geoeconomic discourses were imagined as part of a foreign policy of accumulation by dispossession. Other, more grounded accounts of the real fears created by dispossession can lead instead to more realistically hopeful geographies of repossession.

American Empire and Globalisation: Postcolonial Speculations on Neocolonial Enframing

In this paper, I examine the ways in which widely reproduced discourses and theories about globalisation elide American dominance. Drawing on arguments about enframing made by Timothy Mitchell in his postcolonial analysis of Egypts colonisation, I suggest that one significant cause of this elision relates to a commonplace imagined geography of globalisation that enframes economic interdependency as constitutive of a smooth, decentred and somehow levelled global space of flows. I argue that this imagined geography is structured into dominant political-economic forms of practice and governance, and that in this way it both enables and elides American dominance. Notwithstanding this force in the world, and notwithstanding the tendency of many commentators on globalisation to ignore American dominance, recent events have made such elisions more difficult. I therefore suggest that we need to do more to theorise how American dominance is interwoven with economic globalisation.

From geopolitics to geoeconomics: Transnational state effects in the borderlands

This article reads Ohmaes arguments about ‘the end of the nation‐state’ against the arguments of Luttwak about the centrality of ‘geoeconomics’ in the new world order. By exploring the limits of both their arguments, the article develops a much more critical account of geoeconomics, suggesting that it can be used by scholars of boundaries and geopolitics to come to terms with the development of cross‐border regionalism and associated transnational state effects (i.e. transnational governance imperatives) in the context of free trade. Geoeconomics is thus argued to describe the localised changes in governance imperatives implicated in a series of economically‐driven and quite quotidian challenges to national borders on the ground in both North America and Europe. The article outlines how an examination of localised strategies to create cross‐border regions in the context of globalised economic interdependencies offers a research window onto processes currently challenging the nation‐state from the ground ...

H1N1, globalization and the epidemiology of inequality

This paper examines the lessons learned from the 2009 H1N1 pandemic in relation to wider work on globalization and the epidemiology of inequality. The media attention and economic resources diverted to the threats posed by H1N1 were significant inequalities themselves when contrasted with weaker responses to more lethal threats posed by other diseases associated with global inequality. However, the multiple inequalities revealed by H1N1 itself in 2009 still provide important insights into the future of global health in the context of market-led globalization. These lessons relate to at least four main forms of inequality: (1) inequalities in blame for the outbreak in the media; (2) inequalities in risk management; (3) inequalities in access to medicines; and (4) inequalities encoded in the actual emergence of new flu viruses.

Chunnel Visions: Unpacking the Anticipatory Geographies of an Anglo-European Borderland

Abstract This study examines the overlapping ways in which a cross‐channel “Transmanche” region has been envisioned, mapped, promoted, and thereby made part of the fast developing European political and business discourse surrounding border regions. Originally conceived along the lines of connections opened up by the Channel Tunnel, the region links the English county of Kent, the French region of Nord‐Pas de Calais, and more recently, through a larger partnership that created a so‐called “Euroregion,” the whole of Belgium. This study unpacks three distinct future‐oriented modes of visioning the cross‐channel region: the infrastructural, predicated on the tunnel itself and the ties of new rail and road networks; the Eurocratic, predicated on EU funding and protocols; and the entrepreneurial, predicated on the business of promoting the region for economic development. By overlapping and drawing upon one another, these future‐predicting and future‐normalizing “Chunnel visions” have a material force and thus important practical consequences. Among them is the eclipse of other potentially more democratic and environmentally sustainable visions of the region.

Unpacking Economism and Remapping the Terrain of Global Health

We are in transition from what seemed a relatively stable, state defined and structured world of international health to a diffuse political space of global health. We need to analyse to what extent the political ecosystem that inhabits this space transfers power and to whom. We need to map the epistemic communities and the multitude of networks and their spheres of influence (Ilona Kickbusch, 2003).

Writing on Patriarchal Missiles: The Chauvinism of the ‘Gulf War’ and the Limits of Critique

The limits of critique are politically significant. Such politics become examinable through deconstruction as a form of interested closure. To do this, however, it is first necessary to distinguish the Derridean deconstruction of writing from the purely literalist interpretations it is commonly but mistakenly given. The example subsequently used as an illustration of limited critique is a conference paper on the ‘Gulf War’ previously presented by the author in 1991. This paper drew on feminist psychoanalytic theories in order to critique the geopolitical effects of masculinist nationalism made manifest in the war. It is reprinted here and then reexamined in terms of its problematic production of truth through writing. This reexamination is pursued at three levels: by considering the conference papers instrumentalisation of feminist theories and the questions this entails about male academics and feminism; by examining the dangers of normalisation inherent to the normative frameworks of psychoanalytic criticism; and by indicating some of the specific differences that were concealed as this form of criticism was brought to bear in an explanation of the chauvinism of the war. Although deconstruction is shown to offer a way of monitoring how critique risks erasing the heterogeneous through an inevitable essentialism, it is also argued that it is vital to come to terms with the political definition of such risks.

Not a State, But More than a State of Mind: Cascading Cascadias and the Geoeconomics of Cross-Border Regionalism

Cascadia is a concept cross-border region, an idealised transnational space on the Pacific coast of North America, bridging the 49th parallel and linking the Canadian province of British Columbia and the US states of Washington and Oregon, This clear-cut geographical description is best seen as cartographic still shot of a much more dynamic process of regional invention, a process which at its most grandiose extends to the whole of the Pacific Northwest Economic Region, including Alaska, Alberta, Montana and Idaho. Cascadia is thus, as its boosters claim, in ‘active evolution’. Rather than being territorially fixed, static and statelike, Cascadia appears to its promoters first and foremost as a moving ‘state of mind’. However, as a vision, an idea, a discourse, a dream image, a space-myth and a state of mind, to list only a few of the terms applied to Cascadia, this CBR project is actively sustained by Canadian and US think tanks, visionaries and policymakers. As well as being noted in many academic articles (for example, Swanson 1994; Courchene 1995; Edgington 1995; Alper 1996; Blatter 1996) and attracting the attention of mainstream policy-oriented think tanks like the Carnegie Endowment for international Peace (Papademetriou and Meyers, 2000), it continues to surface in popular media outlets ranging from BC Business (Buchanan 1992) to The Economist (1994) through Atlantic Monthly (Kaplan 1998) and the Seattle Times (Agnew 1998) to the Christian Science Monitor (Porterfieid 1999).

Negotiating national action: Free trade, constitutional debate and the gendered geopolitics of Canada

Abstract This paper concerns the ways in which a Canadian feminist organization, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC), has negotiated and contested the boundaries dividing a masculinist public sphere from the personal lives of women in contemporary Canada. NAC has highlighted the material effects on women of the metaphorical but masculinist boundaries to national public life in the modern state. In its struggle against free trade, NAC demonstrated how a feminist organization could overcome such boundaries and intervene to shape a national public debate by highlighting how trade liberalization and neoliberal restructuring would affect the personal lives of Canadian women. Likewise, with its interventions into the constitutional debates, NAC has shown how attention to womens experience and oppression can serve to displace the ‘big-picture’ politics of nation-framing. These interventions have served to thematize the gendering of geopolitics in a particularly practical way, a way that displaces a solely representational and identitarian understanding of academic critical geopolitics. Furthermore, they indicate how, in contrast to the pretended purity of an academic poetics of metaphorical space, negotiations of the metaphorical/material spaces of the modern nation by feminist activists involve difficult on-going negotiations with structures and spaces of exclusionary violence.