Susan M. Roberts

The New Political Economy of Geographical Intelligence

A troubling new political economy of geographical intelligence has emerged in the United States over the last two decades. The contours of this new political economy are difficult to identify due to official policies keeping much relevant information secret. The U.S. intelligence community increasingly relies on private corporations, working as contractors, to undertake intelligence work, including geographical intelligence (formally known as GEOINT). In this article we first describe the geography intelligence “contracting nexus” consisting of tens of thousands of companies (including those in the geographical information systems and mapping sector), universities and nonprofits receiving Department of Defense and intelligence agency funding. Second, we discuss the “knowledge nexus” to conceptualize how geographical knowledge figures in current U.S. intelligence efforts, themselves part of the U.S. war on terror and counterinsurgency (COIN). To analyze the contracting nexus we compiled and examined extensive data on military and intelligence contracts, especially those contracts awarded by the countrys premier geographical intelligence agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), for satellite data. To analyze the knowledge nexus we examined recent changes in the type of geographical knowledges enrolled in and produced by the U.S. intelligence community. We note a shift from an emphasis on areal and cultural expertise to a focus on calculative predictive spatial analysis in geographical intelligence. Due to a lack of public oversight and accountability, the new political economy of geographical intelligence is not easy to research, yet there are reasons to be troubled by it and the violent surveillant state it supports.

Development Capital: USAID and the Rise of Development Contractors

Development assistance from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is conceptualized as flowing through an assemblage that includes heterogeneous subjects and objects and that has coevolved with USAIDs contracting regime. Key assemblage elements are contractors (firms, nongovernmental organizations, individuals), contracts, and procurements, and key flows include capital, knowledge, and people. The focus of this article is the rise over the past forty years of a lucrative development contracting industry in the United States, through a relational examination of USAID contractors and other key elements in the assemblage. This article traces the contemporary U.S. development assistance contracting assemblage and its geographies. This entails identifying and mapping the assemblages component elements, its networks and flows, with the overall aim being to take steps toward building a critical geographical understanding of development capital.

Confidence Men: Offshore Finance and Citizenship

On Saturday 2 August 1997 the Irish Times carried a story with the headline ‘Cayman Mourns Loss of a Model Citizen’. Two days later the Irish Times ran another story: ‘Masonic Theme at Furze Funeral’. Both stories were accounts of the funeral preparations and ceremony for an expatriate Englishman named John Furze who had died in a Miami hospital four days after a heart operation (Keena, 1997a, 1997b). The funeral was held in George Town, capital of the Cayman Islands — a collection of three small Caribbean islands, which are a British dependency. The funeral was a big one: there were 24 honorary pall-bearers, eulogies from Caymanian politicians and business leaders, and a police escort for the cortege. John Furze was 55 years old when he died, a recently retired banker who had lived the last 30 years of his life in the Cayman Islands. He had visited Ireland only occasionally. Why did the Irish Times run two stories, both in the ‘Home’ (rather than ‘Foreign’) section, on this funeral held on a small island so far away?

Feminist inclusions in economic geography: What difference does difference make?

This special section of Environment and Planning A is the outcome of a panel we organized at the Fourth Global Conference on Economic Geography (GCEG) held in Oxford, UK in August 2015. The panel was intended to reflect on the role and influence of feminist work in economic geography; a sub-discipline distinguished by its heterogeneous theoretical and methodological approaches. In particular, it sought to encourage reflection on the extent to which economic geography as a sub-discipline has responded to feminist interventions that have drawn attention to the cultural construction of difference in ways that pose a challenge to its more generalized categories and frameworks of analysis (for example, regional development, labour, the firm, the state). Taking as our starting point, Linda McDowell’s (1991) article ‘Life without Father and Ford: The New Gender Order of Post-Fordism’, which was published a quarter of a century ago (and revisited 10 years later, see McDowell, 2001), we asked to what extent and in what ways feminism (here referred to in the singular, but clearly ‘feminisms’ in practice) has changed the way economic geography is done? To what degree has the sub-discipline benefitted from the attention paid over the past 25 years to reproductive and domestic labour, the gender order and the interactions of categories of difference such as gender, class and race in our research enquiries? In presenting a case for the importance of gender in understanding an emerging postFordist economy, McDowell’s (1991) article was tremendously significant in pushing scholars of economic geography to examine the interconnections between the sphere of production and the sphere of social reproduction (a category of analysis which includes the family, the community and the welfare state). It highlighted the gendering of skills

Managerialism in motion: Lessons from Oaxaca

Non-governmental organisations operate as nodes in networks of ‘managerialism’ – bundles of often Northern, corporate-inspired knowledge and practices that promote ‘good governance’ under neoliberalism. Managerialism is double-sided: it can guard against corruption and help ensure accountability, but it can also be culturally disjunctive, reinforcing North–South power imbalances while diffusing the political potential of NGOs. In this paper we present a framework for studying managerialisms global circulation and discuss a series of empirical findings from a multi-year study of NGOs in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. We conclude by commenting on managerialisms influence on NGOs during the social upheavals of 2006, highlighting its differential and contingent impact on social and political change in Oaxaca.

What do we want our words and our concepts to do

In this commentary on John Agnew’s article, the overarching issue is identified as the relationship between us (humans), our words, and our world. The commentary considers the specific question ‘what do we want our concepts to do?’ Drawing from recent work in political economy and geography—much of it undertaken by feminist scholars—the effects of words and ideas on our world are stressed and the emphasis is placed on considering words’ work in creating future worlds. The argument is made that we assess our keywords based on how they assist us in imagining what might become, rather than what really is.

Why write textbooks

the time and hardship, is the personal satisfaction of having plumbed a subject to the depths and having made a serious contribution to the process of knowledge-making (even if one is ultimately proved wrong). The labour process matters, not merely in the usefulness of the commodity, but in the value we put on it – a value that goes beyond exchange, ‘measurables’ and money. This is true, by the way, for any significant product, whether a beautiful piece of furniture, an elegantly designed iPhone, or simply a good meal cooked at home for friends. I have to add that the book-as-object matters to the writer, as well. Alienation is not just a negative process of ‘objectification’ of labour; in fact, objectification is part of the point. That beautiful object in hand, when one gets the first copy off the presses, is a reward in itself, a symbol of the achievement. But more than that, the book as object can circulate to colleagues, friends and strangers, carrying the contribution with it. It can create new connections, new opportunities for the author, as well as for readers, in its travels; and it can outlast the author to keep on being productive for others. What makes this less alienated than factory work is that the author’s name is on a book (though the reality of the publisher’s control can show up in many tawdry ways). Finally, the book qua object is satisfying to readers, as well. This is not just about the ego and fame of the author who, after all, loses control of the text as it circulates. While the ‘object’ may be as minimal as the electronic scribbles on an e-reader, books still get read in huge numbers today, and that practice is not going away even as the digital young have shorter attention spans and lose the habit of reading. How many times do you hear a friend or colleague say that she just loves the ‘feel’ of the book in her hand or the possibility of passing a good book along to someone else? Books are here to stay, even as the world of scholarship, publishing, writing and reading swirls into new constellations. Go read or write a good one, and you will see why.

Reviews: Scholar's Choice, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other Real-And-Imagined Places, Young and Homeless in Hollywood: Mapping the Social Imaginary

My favorite book at the moment is Bill Maurcr\s brilliant Recharting the Caribbean (1997)—and not just because it contributes to Caribbean studies. Maurcr works poststructuralist identity theory through rich empirical material and delivers a model for research on space/politicaleconomy/identity. I have found Paul Gilroys The Black Atlantic (1993) repays reading and rereading. Gilroys arguments about racializcd identities at the heart of modernity and its geographies make a whole lot of sense to me. Liisa Malkkis study of politics and identity Purity and Exile (1995), based on ethnographic fieldwork, can be read as an exciting example of how political geography could be rethought and practised—although this was not anthropologist Malkkis aim in undertaking her research. A not insignificant accounting of globalization may be found in Nancy Schcper-Hughes and Carolyn Sargents disturbing collection Small Wars: The Cultural Politics of Childhood (1998). The book contains a range of essays each addressing particular aspects of what is happening to children in todays world. Arundhati Roys The God of Small Things (1997) is a powerful novel set in South India. I was gripped by it.