Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category
In the United States during the spring and summer of 2005, long-simmering debates over “intelligent design” came to a boiling point. Long a favorite of the Christian Right, which had never reconciled itself to some of the causal and temporal implications of modern biology and geology, intelligent design represents a revamped creationism, the antievolution belief that the world is too complicated to have been created in any way other than by the actions of a divine intelligent being. With court challenges looming, which if successful would potentially mandate that Kansas and Pennsylvania school districts teach supernatural doctrine in science classes; with President George W. Bush declaring in August 2005 that intelligent design ought to be taught; and with scientists mobilizing against such unwarranted political and religious intrusion into the science curriculum, this and the socalled avian u looked like the hot-button issues of the fall political season.
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The orthodox wisdom of the last century holds that empire is a deeply conservative project of economic expansion, power and control bound up with a social civilisational mission. Certainly, the recrudescence of US imperial ambition in the early years of the twenty-first century is widely associated with the rise of neoconservatism, whereas the ubiquitous postcolonial sentiment of recent decades since the middle of last century is seen as a symptom of progressive liberalism standing against empire. But as Uday Mehta2 has reminded us in his review of nineteenth-century British imperial thought, empire is equally if not predominantly an economic and civilisational project of liberal capitalism, and so it is no accident that the present imperial phase is associated with neoliberalism as much as neoconservatism. Thus, in pursuit of inspiration, lineage, and historical support, George Bush attempted to vindicate his warring in Iraq and Afghanistan by harking back again and again to the great liberal icon, Woodrow Wilson. How, therefore, are we to explain this anomaly of an apparently conservative project of empire performed in terms of the best liberal tradition?
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When Tony Blair was re-elected in 2001, he promised to continue the moral crusade of ‘‘New Labour’’ as a force for political and moral regeneration in Britain and the world. Workers, women, immigrants, Asian and Caribbean Britons, many in the middle class, all caught the wave. The nightmare of Margaret Thatcher’s neo-liberal revolution of the 1980s was still visceral in many people’s minds, and a sweeping majority still thought Blair the best of a motley crew. It was becoming increasingly clear, however, to a wide swath of people including disaffected members of his own party and eventually cabinet, that Blair was not the answer to Thatcher but was in many ways continuing her neo-liberal policies. Not only did he not roll back Thatcher’s travesties but he sought to complete various ambitions of the Thatcher government in a way that neither the Iron Lady nor her successor John Major could ever have hoped for. Blair’s second term in office consummated many of these goals, further shambolizing a Thatcherized National Health Care system and initiating university privatisation with student fees.
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This paper uses several events in New York in the late 1990s to launch two central arguments about the changing relationship between neoliberal urbanism and so–called globalization. First, much as the neoliberal state becomes a consummate agent of—rather than a regulator of—the market, the new revanchist urbanism that replaces liberal urban policy in cities of the advanced capitalist world increasingly expresses the impulses of capitalist production rather than social reproduction. As globalization bespeaks a rescaling of the global, the scale of the urban is recast. The true global cities may be the rapidly growing metropolitan economies of Asia, Latin America, and (to a lesser extent) Africa, as much as the command centers of Europe, North America and Japan. Second, the process of gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint, and local anomaly in the housing markets of some command–center cities, is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy that takes over from liberal urban policy. No longer isolated or restricted to Europe, North America, or Oceania, the impulse behind gentrification is now generalized; its incidence is global, and it is densely connected into the circuits of global capital and cultural circulation. What connects these two arguments is the shift from an urban scale defined according to the conditions of social reproduction to one in which the investment of productive capital holds definitive precedence.
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A commodity, according to the classical political economists, comprises and combines a use value and an exchange value. Value, they recognized, was the product of human labour; for Marx it was measured by socially necessary labour time. Capital, he argued, was ‘value in motion’, and capital accumulation was the process by which capitalist societies multiplied social value through the exploitation of labour. Capitalism has always employed labour power to invest value in use values harvested from nature, and so what could it mean to suggest, as the title of this paper does, that nature has become an accumulation strategy? It is increasingly evident, I want to argue, that in the past three decades, a new dimension of the capitalist production of nature has considerably transformed the social relationship with the natural world.
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We are all now familiar with the story of the rise of neoliberalism – Friedrich von Hayek and the Mont Pe´le`rin Society, Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, Pinochet’s Chile – as simultaneously testing ground and template for a whole new phase of capitalism. In intellectual historical terms, neoliberalism marked a return to a Smithean economy based on private property, competition and selfinterest, and to a Lockean politics vaunting the expression of self-interest as the best-for-all pinnacle of bourgeois democracy. But it may be Russia nearly two decades later that marks the most emblematic expression of this ruthless killand-grab politics.
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This paper makes two central arguments. First, the popular language of geopolitics needs to be understood as historically emerging from and helping create a “geopolitical social”, which both crosses and crafts traditional borders of internal and external to the national state. Second, we suggest that geoeconomic social forms are gradually supplanting this geopolitical social. After establishing the geopolitical social associated with traditional geopolitics, from Ratzel to Bismarck, we examine the erosion of geopolitical calculation and the rise of the geoeconomic.We trace emerging geoeconomic social forms in three domains: the reframing of territorial security to accommodate supranational flows; the recasting of social forms of security through the market; and the reframing of the state as geoeconomic agent. Neither an exercise in “critical geopolitics” nor an endorsement of Luttwakian style geoeconomics, this paper assumes no straightforward historical succession from geopolitical to geoeconomic logics, but argues that geoeconomics is nonetheless crucial to the spatial reconfiguration of contemporary political geography.
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