Simon Reid-Henry

Vital Geographies: Life, Luck, and the Human Condition

Life has been problematized anew by recent social change and scientific innovation. There are important and little studied geographical dimensions to any such understanding of “the politics of life itself,” however. A geographical perspective involves, first, highlighting the spatial aspects of both states and capital, two rather neglected dimensions of vital politics. Elaborating the geographical constitution of vital politics entails further describing the related powers of knowledges and practices. Reflecting on the geographical dimensions of longevity and health leads directly to a recognition of the ethical implications of the geographical luck of birth and residence. Taking up this ethical challenge requires specifying at least six components of geographical justice: culpability, fairness, care, state failure, human rights, and solidarity with environmental and social justice.

Under the Microscope: Fieldwork Practice and Cuba's Biotechnology Industry: A Reflexive Affair?

Through a re-reading of my Ph.D. fieldwork on Cubas biotechnology industry, I empirically pull apart the relationship between fieldwork practice and knowledge production as experienced in my research. I argue that reflexivity is an insufficiently critiqued concept and, as a result, that its widespread influence in contemporary fieldwork practice works to obscure the influence of “others”, not just on the “doing” of research but on the conceptual development of the methodology itself. I make this argument by focusing on the various strategies I employed to actualise my research methodology, the problems I met with and the subsequent pull of my research in new directions. I cover such issues as gaining access, working in multiple locales across antagonistic polities, what happens when fieldwork goes wrong and the notion of “empirical drift”. I use these issues to examine how I was actively constructing both my field and my research methodology at the same time and through others. I try to show how the fact that fieldwork can be simultaneously a lived experience, a socially constructed performance and an episteme accounts for much of its distinctive qualities as a milieu in which existing knowledge is put to the test, or added to. I argue that these same qualities allow it to be a deeply intertextual process, or a joint work between the researcher and the field. This, I suggest, warrants greater recognition.

The Territorial Trap Fifteen Years On

Each of the contributions to this special symposium stem from a series of presentations given at the New Thinking on Territory, Sovereignty and Power symposium, held in March 2009 at Queen Mary, University of London. The aim of the seminar was to explore recent work on the history and geography of territory, from the history of the concept itself, to work on the relationship between sovereignty and territory, and explorations into the operation of violence, justice and identity in relation to territory. It was not the intention of Miles Ogborn and myself, as organisers of the event, to ask participants to reflect specifically upon the work of John Agnew, or the idea of the territorial trap first put forward by Agnew in 1994. Nor, it ought to be said, did all, or even most of the actual papers presented make specific mention of Agnew’s ideas. But our conversations consistently returned to the idea of the territorial trap, and for good reason. The territorial trap offers a critique of geopolitical thinking which remains relevant today as it draws attention to the continued need to think very carefully about the ways in which the claims of state sovereignty and national security are mobilised in our geopolitical present. It was decided therefore that rather than compile the contributing papers into the usual special issue format, we would ask each of the presenters to return to their own research and to reflect upon some of the ways in which their work has taken up, re-worked, or challenged Agnew’s original territorial trap thesis. It seemed to us that while the history of recent geopolitical events suggests that the territorial trap continues to catch out a range of influential geopolitical thinkers and practitioners, a good number of scholars have nonetheless developed novel ways of thinking around it,

An Incorporating Geopolitics: Frontex and the Geopolitical Rationalities of the European Border

This paper develops a critique of the emergence of the new European Border Agency, Frontex, specifically its operations along Europes maritime borders with North Africa. Rather than account for Frontex in terms of securitising and neoliberalising processes, as has become common, I focus instead on the underlying geopolitical rationalities that guide Frontex operations. These reflections then set up the further argument of the paper: that what Frontex itself sheds light upon is a novel geopolitics of the border, what can be thought of as an ‘incorporating geopolitics’. Through investigation of the policies and practices of Frontex, such an incorporating geopolitics can be shown to be replacing the much-discussed paradox of contemporary border regimes – that between trade freedoms and security restrictions – with a more fundamental contradiction: that the more border controls address more than just borders, the more they may themselves undermine the societies they purport to protect.

The “humanitarianization” of urban violence

This paper describes how international humanitarian organizations (IHOs) are adapting their operations to working in the urban environment. When levels of armed violence in urban areas are sufficient to trigger international humanitarian law, organizations such as the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) may argue that they have an important contribution to make by offering a set of skills and experience gleaned in conflict and non-governed settings. This paper reflects on this humanitarian turn to the city and uses it to problematize certain assumptions within the existing understanding of “urban violence” and the nature of humanitarianism itself. What does it mean to “humanitarianize” urban violence? What is the value-added that humanitarians might bring? And in what ways might such engagements be changing the nature of the problem itself? Drawing upon a wide range of literature that sets the local structures of violence in light of wider national and international processes, we analyze the “humanitarianization” of urban violence as a cross-scalar governmental assemblage that is likely to play an increasingly important role in cities in the global South in the future.

Scientific innovation and non-Western regional economies: Cuban biotechnology’s ‘experimental milieu’

A good deal of research within the cultural turn in economic geography has sought to understand the relationship between economic activity and regional culture. This work encompasses an increasingly heterodox set of approaches to regional economic activity, from innovation studies to processes of embedding to accounts of regional learning and clustering, and an increasingly broad set of empirical cases through which these issues are regularly discussed. Only recently has the literature had much to say about the relationship between scientific knowledge and regional culture, however, or about the empirical experience of non-Western regional economic activity and forms of innovation within this. This paper seeks to further develop these two recent strands by bringing them together. Firstly it transposes the study of high-technology regional cultures to a developing world and socialist country context. I examine, as a case study, Cubas Science Pole, a biomedical growth pole on the outskirts of Havana comprising some forty-two interlinked institutions and 14 000 scientists. I show how a space for biotechnology was created and maintained outside of the capitalist milieu with which the industry has come to be associated in the West. More specifically, I reveal how the formal demands made by the Cuban state of this biotechnology endeavour paradoxically encouraged the development of a suite of informal and innovative scientific practices. To account for how this very different approach nevertheless resulted in a similar ‘regional culture’ of innovation to that found in high-technology regions in the West, I suggest we need to consider not just the structural components of regional cultures (labour mobility, attitudes to risk, etc) but also the forms of rationality that underpin such factors themselves. In order to do this I turn to some of the insights of the science-studies literature as to the epistemological foundations of processes of innovation and knowledge production, to argue that regional cultures of innovation are never just economic spaces, they are also epistemic spaces.

Genealogies of liberal violence: human rights, state violence, and the police

This paper presents a genealogical analysis of the relationship between liberal state violence and the contemporary liberal will-to-care by way of an exploration of what is sometimes referred to as ‘humanitarian war’. I explore the historical convergence of contemporary human rights norms with military intervention in the post-Cold War context. I suggest that, far from representing a limit upon state violence in the present, human rights in fact move us closer to the ‘emancipation’ of state violence as an instrument of liberal police power. Further I take up the question of the law as it structures and shapes this emergent form of state violence more directly. Focusing on the doctrine of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P), I suggest that the form of power that is made possible by military humanitarian interventions, and in doctrines such as R2P in particular, is an international variant of what Michel Foucault termed the power of the ‘police’. I suggest that thinking about this power as a form of distributional authority may be helpful in holding to account both liberal interventionism and its underlying will-to-order in favour of an international politics of care.

From Welfare World to Global Poverty

Gunnar Myrdal was one of the earliest and most vocal advocates of the need for international redistribution, or what he termed “welfare world”. As Myrdal himself pointed out the western welfare state was itself often a barrier to such redistribution internationally. Myrdal eventually came to see the western, and specifically swedish welfare state as a model for more generous flows of international aid, but this on primarily humanitarian grounds. The political lessons of the social democratic model which lay behind this evocation of international ethics thus fell away in order to make room for a more politically-realistic argument in the liberal (American) world Myrdal liked above all to address himself to. In so doing Myrdal, to some extent despite himself, came to represent the wider shift in international development ethics under way from the 1970s: away from questions of structural reform and economic redistribution and towards the minimalist yet universal guarantees of a basic minimum of subsistence, from welfare world to global poverty in other words.

Book review: The politics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. By Nikolas Rose. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2006.

525 forms of publicness that others may not share. This underlines that when talking about public space, geographers are always and inevitably working with a specific notion of what the public city is – one that may or may not resonate with the concerns of others who are engaged in struggles for the city. Iveson’s book hence moves the debate on public space forward in a significant manner and will certainly be of interest to all geographers and urbanists for whom the life of the street holds fascination. Even those who find debates on public space somewhat arid should enjoy this book’s lively range of examples. Drawn from across Australia, the case studies that Iveson presents are carefully nuanced and engage critically with ongoing debates in social and cultural geography about the making of gender, racial, age and sexual identities. Issues of aboriginal rights, youth countercultural expression, sexual citizenship and the gendering of space are flagged up by the varied case study chapters, meaning that there are multiple points of entry for those for whom public space per se is not a prime concern. This given, Iveson clearly demonstrates why issues of publicness should be of concern to all geographers, and he suggests that there is too much at stake to accept existing normative assumptions about the decline of the public sphere. Provocative and passionate, the fact that the book is laced with humour will also surely endear it to a student audience. For such reasons, Publics and the city is highly recommended both as a primer on public space as well as a state of the art intervention in debates on the ‘struggle for space’.