The Dictionary of Human Geography (142 page)

Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
4.19Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
participatory democracy
A system of gov ernment in which those being governed partici pate directly in decision making and/or policy formation. It is contrasted with representative democracy, in which those being governed elect representatives to an assembly that takes decisions on behalf of the voters. Participatory democracy is usually thought to have origin ated in ancient Athens, where decisions were made by an assembly comprising all citizens. Although full participatory democracy is diffi cult to implement for large populations, popu lar participation in decision making remains an aspiration for many social movements. However, community participation in govern ance has also been criticized for its association with neo liberal policies (Herbert, 2005). (See also radical democracy.) jpa (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Barber (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
partition
In recent times, the idea of partition (connected to the interaction between compet ing diverse notions of statehood and nation hood) has attracted fresh attention as the inevitable, though not ideal, solution to pro tracted ethnic conflicts. Before the First World War, partition was a tool of the empires, divid ing territories between themselves or using them to strengthen their rule. After the war, partition took place either in the devolution of authority granting independence to nations or as a solution to ethnic conflicts perceived to be irreconcilable. Even then, the ?solutions' proved to be volatile and precarious since the territories they created were not culturally homogeneous, as the partition of Palestine through the creation of the state of Israel or the successive partitions of India and Pakistan (with East Pakistan eventually becoming Ban gladesh) have shown. In the ?short partitions', such as Vietnam and Germany, the nationalist journey might succeed without much difficulty, whereas in the ?long partitions', (marked by a long history of the politics of otherness and its persistence) the nation often fails the state. The project of harmonizing the nation with the state becomes nearly impossible. (NEW PARAGRAPH) According to a critical geopolitical perspec tive, ?partition' is not the end (product) of a geopolitical conflict or rivalry but, rather, a means of resolving or managing that conflict, accepted by various parties either as a matter of choice, or due to persuasion or pressure. In other words, partition is to be seen not as an inevitable consequence of actual or imagined predestined differences but, rather, as a consciously developed and deliberately deployed spatial strategy of eliminating real or imagined differences a method preferred over other methods, including ?mutuality/ consociation/power sharing?. (NEW PARAGRAPH) A comparison of partitions around the world, from British India to Yugoslavia, from Canada to Ireland, from Nigeria to Rwanda, from the Soviet Union to Palestine, appears to suggest that territory is, in fact, a crucial factor in the process of disrupting and reshaping states and loyalties. It is further revealed that the process of partition cannot be reduced to a state separation event (as in the cases of India and Pakistan, Serbia and Croatia, Ireland and Britain or potentially Canada and Quebec). This process also has to deal with additional regional sub partitions, family divisions and religious contrasts. Partitioning British India, for instance, has generated a subsequent partition of Punjab and Bengal. Similarly, the partition of Yugoslavia has implied the sub partition of Istria, Krajinas and Sandzak, and of Yugoslav populations and minorities. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Historically, there are very few examples of partition where violence could be avoided. Wherever and whenever partitions have been implemented, a large scale destruction of the sociocultural landscape has invariably fol lowed. In the vast majority of cases, violence becomes a determinant for reconfiguring pol itical societies, where territory (or geopolitics), sources of loyalty and collective/individual psychology are forced to reshape and modify. To a certain extent, the stronger the pre existing ties, the greater is the deployment of violence to construct new sources of identifi cations by redrawing maps. Among several icons of ?partitioned times? on the Indian sub continent are millions of refugees who con tinue to live with bitter memories of loot, plunder, rape and murder, and in whom such memories live. sch (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Pandey (2001). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
pastoralism
Social and economic systems of peoples who both practice and strongly iden tify with livestock husbandry (most commonly of camels, cattle, goats and sheep). Identities of ethnicities, castes or lineages to livestock husbandry have typically formed historically during periods of occupational specialization. Mobile forms of pastoralism require funda mentally different demands on knowledge, social connections and labour than sedentary productive pursuits. Therefore, more mobile forms of pastoralism have been most associ ated with the occupational specialization tied to identity formation. For this reason, com mon uses of the term ?pastoralism? often sug gest systems of herding specialists relying on more mobile forms of animal husbandry. However, pastoralism encompasses systems of variable reliance on livestock production and on livestock mobility. (NEW PARAGRAPH) From a cultural ecology perspective, pastoralism is an effective adaptation to eco systems that are marginal for crop agriculture due to soil, topography or climate constraints. Thus, while historically not necessarily the case, contemporary pastoralism is increasingly found largely within marginal areas, due to agricultural encroachment in productive areas. More mobile forms of pastoralism are seen as ideally suited for environments with significant spatio temporal heterogeneity of vegetative productivity. Two axes of mobility within pastoral systems are human and live stock mobility. Nomadic pastoralism (see nomadism) involves the movement of pastoral families and their livestock, which does not allow the establishment of a permanent human dwelling. There are many other mobile pastoral systems, such as transhumance, in which the whole production unit (family, clan etc.) does not move with the animals. Studies have found that the mobility of pastoralists is highly variable (over time and between pro duction units), making categorizations of pas toral peoples based on their mobility and that of their livestock extremely hazardous. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Despite widely held romantic visions of isol ated, individualistic pastoralists relying solely on their animals to meet subsistence needs, most pastoralist societies have historically aligned themselves to broader military/political authority for security and have relied variably (depending in part on livestock ownership) on farming and/or trade to procure grain and cash. This engagement with broader political and economic systems has become more evi dent since the mid twentieth century in many parts of the world. More mobile pastoral live lihoods have generally not only not had the support of nation states, but have, in certain contexts, been actively attacked and disman tled by states that see pastoral mobility as working against their development and polit ical aims (see migrancy). Resource disposses sion along with the economic vulnerability of livestock producers to market and climate fluc tuations has led to increased impoverishment of pastoral peoples. While many pastoralists maintain identities tied to animal husbandry, (NEW PARAGRAPH) their livelihoods often depend more on other economic pursuits. mt (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Galaty and Johnson (1990); Ingold (1980); Niamir Fuller (1999). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
patenting
Patents are a category of inteL lectuM property rights designed to provide inventors with legal rights for a fixed period (usually 20 years) to prevent others from using, selling or importing their innovations. An appli cation for a patent must satisfy a national and/ or international patent office that the invention described in the application is new, useful and that its creation involved an inventive step either beyond the present state of the art or unobvious to a skilled practitioner. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Over time, more and more things (e.g. certain biological materials) have become patentable as business interests (and especially recently the life science firms involved in producing medi cines) have successfully argued that patents are essential for their ability to make a return on the high R&D investment required to discover, pro duce and get regulatory approval for new prod ucts. Such an extension is reflected in the TRIPS (Trade Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) agreement administered by the World Trade Organization (WTO) and is hugely controversial. nb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Coombe (1998); Parry (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
patriarchy
A system of social structures and practices through which men dominate, oppress and exploit women. A distinction is made between classic or paternal patriarchy, a form of household organization in which the father dominates other members of an extended kin network (including younger men) and controls the economic production of the household, and fraternal patriarchy, in which men dominate women within civil soci ety; the latter provided a key focus for feminist theorizing and organizing during the 1960s and 1970s. By the 1980s, the utility of the concept was in doubt; critics saw it as ahistor ical and insensitive to cross cultural variation. Efforts to theorize patriarchy in relation to capitalism seemed to collapse into function aLism, or leave the relations between the two systems unresolved. And if patriarchy operates autonomously from capitalist relations, as pos ited by dual systems theory, did this not leave the patriarchal relations of capitalism under theorized? In geography, efforts were made by (NEW PARAGRAPH) Foord and Gregson (1986) to resolve these dilemmas through realism: Walby (1989) criticized their model for neglecting paid work, the state and male violence (for other critical reactions, see gender and Women and Geography Study Group, 1997), and posited a dual systems theory of patriarchy at three levels of abstraction system, structure and practice. Patriarchy, according to Walby, is composed of six structures: the patriarchal mode of production, male violence, patri archal relations in paid work, the state, sexu ality and cultural institutions. But in Acker's view (1989), the moment of theorizing patri archy in this way had passed: the object of feminism had moved from patriarchy as a sys tem to gender relations (and now heteronor mativity and sexual difference: see gender). Interest had also moved away from delineating the cause(s) of patriarchal relations to under standing the diversity of effects. (NEW PARAGRAPH) As early as 1980, Barrett suggested that patriarchy is better conceived as an adjective than as a noun. The term is still used as a noun, but typically in the plural: Grewal and Kaplan (1994, pp. 17 18) urge the need ?to address the concerns of women around the world in the historicized particularity of their relationships to multiple patriarchies as well as to international economic hegemonies', but their concern is to compare ?multiple, overlap ping, and discrete oppressions' and not to construct ?a theory of hegemonic oppression under the unified sign of gender' (i.e. under the sign of patriarchy). Post colonial theory has alerted feminists to the ways in which accusations of patriarchal relations among immigrant groups or in countries in the global South can be used to discriminatory, colonial or imperialist ends. The Bush administration's justification of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 as in part a defence and liberation of Afghan women is one example. Young (2003a) asks Western feminists to consider how they ?laid the ground work' for the suc cess of this appeal through their own cam paigns against the Taliban and the ?stance of protector' that they sometimes adopt ?in rela tion to . . . women of the world who [Western women] construct as more dependent or sub ordinate' (p. 3) and more oppressed by patri archal relations. gp (NEW PARAGRAPH) Pax Americana Also known as ?Pox Americana', this synonym for american empire makes parallels with the ancient Roman Empire to either critically unpack (e.g. Johnson, 2003a; Foster and McChesney, (NEW PARAGRAPH) or uncritically expound (e.g. Steel, 1967) the argument that US global domin ance makes the world safe for long distance trade, communication and democracy. Most recently, it has been put forward by the National Intelligence Council (NIC; the US government's ?strategic intelligence' planning body) as one of four extraordinary scenarios for what the world map of geopoLitics will look like in the year 2020 (National Intelligence Council, 2005). ?Mapping the global future' with a keen attention to what the strategic planners view as the long term ?mega trend' of gLobaLization, the NIC envi sions Pax Americana as a benign extension of contemporary US military dominance along side a faltering but still extant American ability to dominate the institutions of global govern ance. The NIC contrasts this vision of 2020 with three others: Davos World, which is also imagined as a relatively utopian scenario, albeit with US economic authority increas ingly overshadowed by rising Asian influence; The New Caliphate, a very different and dis tinctively dystopian vision of a world rendered unstable by what is depicted (using the imaginative geographies of orientalism) as tradition bound Muslim resistance to global ization and American influence; and, finally, the unremittingly bleak dystopia of a so called Cycle of Fear, in which weapons of mass destruction circulate through globalized terror networks (see terrorism), in turn envisioned as spurring an authoritarian governmental backlash of which most fearfully of all for the NIC?s futurists ?globalization may be the real victim? (NIC, 2005, p. 104). (NEW PARAGRAPH) While Pax Americana is imagined as a fairly unexceptional continuation of the current global order (relative to the three other 2020 scenarios), it is useful to consider what the alternative scenarios tell us about what has to be repressed by the NIC to continue with its exceptionalist imagining of America as a uniquely freedom loving and anti imperial nation state. Cycle of Fear, for example, imagines authoritarianism and the future vic timization of globalization, but all the while it obscures the already existing victims of the CIA's own programmes of torture in Black Sites and other spaces of exception (see excep tion, spaces of). The New Caliphate likewise dissembles the huge role of the US intelligence agencies in helping to start, arm and even train many of the key leaders of the more violent and territorially ambitious jihadist movements in Central Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. And Davos World meanwhile betrays the still deeper contradictions that at once underlie and undermine the exceptionalist American idea that the spread of freedom and the spread of free enterprise are one and the same thing. If the rapid development of cadre capitaLism in China has not made this completely clear for the NIC, then the fiasco in Iraq that has continued unabated since the publication of the 2020 report most certainly must. Here, in what was announced by many war promoters as the inaugural battle for a new and more peaceful American century, the brutality, death and destruction of a terribly unpeaceful Pax Americana has been writ large on the landscape. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Even if Pax means peace, the more import ant aspect of the reference to Pax Romana has always been to the violence of the ancient empire and the punitive approach that the Roman army took to subduing and incorpor ating the periphery into a unipolar world dom inated by Rome. In 1963, President Kennedy acknowledged as much when he said that the world peace that the US sought was ?not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war? (quoted in Foster and McChesney, 2004). However, by the new mil lennium this return to the Roman model was exactly what the administration of President Bush was openly advocating as the rationale of the Iraq war. Given the hubris of some of the advocates of this neo conservative foreign policy, it is not surprising that their identities often remain anonymous, but the following is reporter Ron Suskind?s (2004) account of one Bush aide?s comments: (NEW PARAGRAPH) The aide said that guys like me were ?in what we call the reality based community', which he defined as people who ?believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality'. I nodded and mur mured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ?That?s not the way the world really works anymore?, he continued. ?We?re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that real ity judiciously, as you will we?ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do' (NEW PARAGRAPH) This sort of attitude clearly put the US intelligence agencies in a difficult situation in which they had to help invent realities that helped justify the policy of attacking Iraq (Rich, 2006). The subsequent turn to scenario (NEW PARAGRAPH) building at the NIC seems to be of a piece with this story telling cum war mongering geopol itical inventiveness, albeit announced instead as a peace loving geo economic homage to globalization. Elsewhere, though, the turn away from reality in the name of Pax Americana has been widely criticized. With the possible exception of fans of non representa tional theory, geographers have stayed put as denizens of a reality based community that acknowledges both the limits and possibilities of situated knowledge. Thus rather than map a futuristic scenario of Pax Americana for 2020, leaders in the field have instead charted the violent destruction and dispossession that con stitutes Pox Americana on the ground in the colonial present (Harvey, 2004b; Johnston, 2005d; Gregory and Pred, 2007; see also Retort, 2005). And rather than counterpose globalization and fear as opposites, critical geographers have also explored the globaliza tion of fear that has followed from the unremit ting American pursuit of an informal and, as such, exceptionalist empire that is founded on ideas about peace and justice for all, but which is always also foundering in human geographies from slave plantations to export processing zones to Guantanamo where exceptions are made in the name of the exceptionalist vision (Miller, 2006; Mitchell and Rosati, 2006; Sparke, 2005, 2007; Wright, 1999b). A brand name for this tortured concoction of capital and coercion is only fitting: Pax Americana¸ certain restrictions may apply. ms (NEW PARAGRAPH)

Other books

A Good House by Bonnie Burnard
River: A Bad Boy Romance by Fate, Kendra
Past Imperfect by Alison G. Bailey
The Risqué Resolution by Eaton, Jillian
Frosted by Allison Brennan, Laura Griffin
Lessons in Indiscretion by Karen Erickson
Everyone We've Been by Sarah Everett