The Dictionary of Human Geography (191 page)

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Authors: Michael Watts

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sovereignty
A claim to final and ultimate authority over a political community. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) codified modern politics as a system of states: states have sov ereignty over the land and people in their ter ritories. The term implies that no external political entity has the authority to enact laws or exercise authority within a sovereign terri tory (Taylor, 1994c, 1995b). In reality, such a condition of sovereignty has never existed and has been particularly challenged by contem porary processes of gLobaLization. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Sovereignty of states in an inter state system is the result of two interrelated processes. First, internal sovereignty means that external powers are excluded from exercising authority within a state?s territory, and that the state has authority over the whole of its territory. A distinction must be made between legal and effective sovereignty. A state may claim sovereignty over the whole of its territory but face strong opposition and resistance to its rule in particular regions to the extent that the state apparatus is ineffective and ignored. Second, external sovereignty means mutual recognition from other states in the system, ultimately requiring endorsement by, and membership of, the United Nations. For example, Israel?s induction into the United Nations in 1947, despite protest from Arab countries, established the new state in the inter state system. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The sub discipline of poLiticaL geography was initially focused upon issues of sover eignty, especially the precise location of the borders that delimit states and their sover eignty, as well as the functional internal geog raphy that facilitated the effective exercise of sovereignty. In addition, the fact that state sovereignty did not produce peace, as int ended and expected, but has generated con fLicts has also provided topics for political geographers: inter state conflicts, imperiaLism and secession, for example. Furthermore, sovereignty over the sea and inner and outer space have emerged as important topics. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The most intriguing discussions of sover eignty have emerged in light of gLobaLiza tion, and the extreme argument, made by some, that we are facing the end of state sovereignty as it emerged in modern times (Ohmae, 1995). Before discussing globaliza tion and sovereignty two points must be made. Sovereignty as per its definition has never existed; there have always been interdictions of external authority and challenges to internal sovereignty. Second, globalization is not an external force acting upon states, but a collec tion of economic, political, and cultural pro cesses that are partially created and enacted by states. The undermining of state sovereignty by globalization is partly a result of the states themselves. This has led to the definition of ?quasi states?, those that have limited effective sovereignty, often an outcome of post colonial relationships (Jackson, 1990). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The inter state, or even trans state, charac ter of globalization has weakened the ability of states to manage their own economic affairs. Currency values and interest rates within par ticular countries are partially set by the decisions made by international markets rather than through domestic policy, for example. In other words, external influence is felt within sovereign territory. The outcome is a geography of ?graduated sovereignty', in which state sovereignty is spatially differenti ated within a sovereign territory (Park, 2005). For example, special economic zones of reduced taxes and tariffs are established within countries that reduce the fiscal authority of the state in order to promote trade and investment (cf. enterprise zone). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Although states have ceded sovereignty over economic processes, others, reacting to public pressure, have focused upon social sov ereignty (Rudolph, 2005), defined as the states' ability to define and control access to a political community. Political citizenship has been understood as a feature of territorial sovereignty; citizenship was attached to a par ticular territorially defined community, and citizens gained rights and received duties from the sovereign state. However, processes of globalization have led to increased calls for non territorial forms of citizenship, in effect granting sovereignty to institutions that tran scend states (Russell, 2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Sovereignty is in a state of flux, as society becomes increasingly organized around networks rather than territories (Castells, 1996b). Consideration of graduated sover eignty is coupled to overlapping forms of sov ereignty, akin to pre modern times, whereby a territory may be subject to a number of sover eign claims. Some of these claims may be stronger and more appealing than others as the ability to exercise authority may decline with distance from a political centre (Lake, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . Currently, we live in a hybrid political geography of varying forms of sovereignty within territorial and network spaces. cf (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Holsti (2004); Sidaway (2002). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
space
The production of geographical knowledge has always involved claims to know ?space' in particular ways. Historically, special importance has been attached to the power to fix the locations of events, places, people and phenomena on the surface of the (NEW PARAGRAPH) Earth and to represent these on maps. The extension of these capacities involved a series of instrumental, mathematical and graphical advances, but these innovations were also pol itical technologies that were implicated in the production of particular constellations of power (Pickles, 2004; Short, 2004). As such, they carried within them particular concep tions of space that were always more than purely technical constructions (see also car tography, history of). This recognition of an intricate connection between power, knowledge and geography has transformed the ways in which contemporary human geography has conceptualized space. A suite of theories and concepts has been assembled to address what Allen (2003) describes as both ?spatial vocabularies of power' (which trace the mobilizations and effects of power over space) and ?lost geographies of power' (which show how power is produced and performed through space). These elaborations have significant repercussions for concepts such as place, region and territory, but in what follows attention is directed towards the more general, plenary concepts of space within which these more particular concepts may be convened. (NEW PARAGRAPH) These are matters of considerable import ance. Many writers have argued that the nine teenth century was the epoch of time, the twentieth century the epoch of space, and that as ?the modern? yielded to ?the postmodern? so there has been a marked ?spatial turn' across the spectrum of the humanities and social sciences that describes much more than the play of spatial metaphors (e.g. Smith and Katz, 1993; Soja, 1989). But others have insisted on the imminent ?end of geography', ?the irrelevance of space' and the ?death of distance' in ostensibly the same late, liquid or postmodern world (e.g. Bauman, 2000a). It is not difficult to reconcile these competing clai ms: everything depends on how ?space' is con ceptualized (cf. modernity; postmodernity). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Hartshorne's once influential enquiry into The nature of geography (1939) occupies a strange position within the history of the discipline. His view of geography was Kantian Geography was concerned with the organization of phenomena in space (see areal differentiation; Kantianism) and (NEW PARAGRAPH) yet Hartshorne provided no systematic discus sion of the concept on which his prospectus depended. Even his subsequent account of geography as one of the ?spatial sciences' (with astronomy and geophysics) failed to elucidate the conceptual basis of his claim. What preoccupied Hartshorne (1958) was the recovery of a line of descent from Kant through Humboldt to Hettner, and yet the ways in which these writers conceptualized space was never allowed to become a problem. Hartshorne simply took it for granted that space (like time) was a universal of human existence, an external coordinate, an empty grid of mutually exclusive points, ?an unchan ging box? within which objects exist and events occur: all of which is to say that he privileged the concept of absolute space (Smith, 1984, pp. 67 8). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Many of Hartshorne?s postwar critics fas tened on the way in which he had taken a specific concept of space and elevated it to the single, supposedly universal concept of space. Although Schaefer objected to the exceptionaLism of Hartshorne?s views, he nonetheless agreed that ?spatial relations are the ones that matter in geography and no others?. The difference was that spatial rela tions were now to be defined between objects and events (not between the fixed points of an external coordinate system) and thereby made relative to the objects and events that consti tuted a spatial system or spatial structure. This substituted a concept of relative space whose elucidation required a more complex geom etry, and for this reason spatiaL anaLysis the preferred research methodoLogy of many of Hartshorne?s critics involved a process of abstraction in which ?physical space [was] superseded by mathematical space? (Smith, (NEW PARAGRAPH) pp. 68 73). This intellectual project promised to turn geography into a formal spatiaL science, predicated on a key claim: ?That there is more order than appears at first sight is not discovered till that order is looked for? (Haggett, 1965, p. 2). This was used to demarcate a new research frontier a ?new geography? whose explorer scientists believed that there was an intrinsically and essentially spatial order to the world: that spa tial science made it possible to disclose (to make visible) the spatiality of the natural and the social in ways that were literally overlooked by the other sciences. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Yet many human geographers became increasingly uncomfortable at what they saw as both spatiaL fetishism (treating social rela tions as purely spatial relations) and spatiaL separatism (divorcing human geography from the humanities and social sciences). The cri tique of spatial science was many stranded, but many of the original objections revolved around Olsson?s (1974) insight that the state ments of spatial science revealed more about (NEW PARAGRAPH) the language that its protagonists were talking in than the world that they were talking about. The most general outcome was a movement towards a process oriented human geography that explored the process domains of poLit icaL economy and sociaL theory, and then traced the marks made by these processes and practices on the surface of the Earth. At the time, several influential writers insisted that concepts of space could not be adjudicated by appeals to the phiLosophy of science, but had to be articulated through the conduct of social practices: ?The question ??what is (NEW PARAGRAPH) space??? is therefore replaced by the question ??How is it that different human practices cre ate and make use of distinctive conceptualiza tions of space??? ? (Harvey, 1973, p. 14). This introduced a relational concept in which space is ?folded into? social relations through prac tical activities. This allowed not only for the socialization of spatial analysis but also, cru cially, for the spatialization of social analysis: like simultaneous equations, each was incom plete without the other (Gregory and Urry, 1985; Soja, 1989). The international journal Society and Space was founded in 1983 to fos ter the interdisciplinary conversations that were emerging in this new discursive arena. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Many of the first attempts to re theorize ?society and space? were indebted to Harvey?s re readings of Marx. Harvey argued that Marx?s critique of political economy implied a latent spatial structure that he never made explicit: capitalism as a system of commodity production also depends on the production of a space economy, and its spasmodic crises in turn require a precarious ?spatial fix? (Harvey, 1999 [1982]). Others preferred to explore the writings of later Marxist scholars, notably Henri Lefebvre and his suggestive yet enig matic account of the production of space (Lefebvre, 1991b). Harvey had always ack nowledged his interest in Lefebvre, and subse quently integrated his own work with some of Lefebvre?s key propositions and, en route, dia grammed the implications of absolute, relative and relational spaces for a revitalized histor icaL materiaLism (Harvey, 2006a; see also Gregory, 1994, pp. 348 416). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Later contributions pursued the spatial implications of other thinkers with varying degrees of success (Crang and Thrift, 2000). Two diagnostics have repeatedly emerged. The first is an unwavering concern with ontoLogy: with grasping the significance of space not for the constitution and conduct of capitalism alone, but for being in the world. Pickles (1985) was one of the first human geographers to provide a rigorous account of the implications of existentiaLism and phe nomenoLogy for understanding human spati aLity, and these themes have re emerged in later thematizations of space (e.g. Strohmayer, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . The second is a persistent interest in concepts of space that are markedly less orderly than those of spatial science and its successor projects, sometimes through read ings of outlaw Marxists such as Walter Benja min (Latham, 1999; Dubow, 2004) and sometimes through post structuraLism: the most influential figures here have been Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault (Crampton and Elden, 2007) and Jacques Lacan. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Taken together, contemporary theorizations of space in human geography (and beyond) share the following features: (NEW PARAGRAPH) The integration of time and space. Conven tional social science privileged the first term (so that time was seen as change, movement and history) while marginal izing the second (so that space was seen as the site of stasis and stability). Human geography has abandoned the project of an autonomous science of the spatial, rejected conceptions of space as the fixed and frozen ground on which events take place or processes leave their marks, and is now exploring the mobile, proces sual fields of ?time space? (May and Thrift, 2001; see time geography; time space compression; time space expansion). (NEW PARAGRAPH) The co production of time and space. Time and space are not neutral, canonical grids that exist ?on the outside?, enfram ing and containing life on Earth, but are instead folded into the ongoing flows and forms of the world in which we find our selves. Thus Thrift (1996; see also 2008) introduces the idea of spatial formations to figure a sensuous ontoLogy of prac tices and encounters between diverse, distributed bodies and things. This is a thoroughly materiaList account, but it operates through an analytics of the sur face rather than the ?depth models? of mainstream Marxism, and it refuses the oppositions between ?cuLture? and ?nature? on which historicaL materiaL ism is predicated. Time space emerges as a process of continual construction ?through the agency of things encounter ing each other in more or less organized circulations? (Thrift, 2003, p. 96). Simi larly but differently, Rose (1999b) draws on feminist theory, and particularly the work of Judith Butler, to insist that space is not a pre existent void or ?a terrain to be spanned or constructed?: it is instead ?a doing?, a performance. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The unruliness of time space. Both spatial science and conventional social theory made too much of pattern and systema ticity, labouring to solve what they called ?the problem of order?, without recogniz ing the multiple ways in which life on Earth evades and exceeds those orders. The sense of partial ordering and incom pletion is focal to many contemporary theorizations. To be sure, space is not infinitely plastic: ?certain forms of space tend to recur, their repetition a sign of the power that saturates the spatial? (Rose, 1999). And yet, while modalities of power often work to condense particu lar spatialities as ?natural? outcomes through architectures of surveillance and regulation, Massey (2005) insists that space is not a coherent system of discriminations and interconnections, a grid of ?proper places?. She argues that space necessarily entails plurality and multiplicity. Hence spatial formations in volve (and invite) ?happenstance juxta positions? and ?accidental separations?, so that time space becomes a turbulent field of constellations and configurations: a world of structures and solidarities, dis ruptions and dislocations that provides for the emergence of genuine novelty. ?Emergence? is not necessarily progres sive or emancipatory, of course, and the argument may also be put in reverse: contemporary spaces of exception (see exception, spaces of) trade on paradox ical orderings of space whose very ambi guity is used to foreclose possibilities for political action. Either way, however, far from space being ?the dead?, as one of Foucault?s astringent critics once claimed, it is now theorized as being fully involved in the modulations of ten sion and transformation. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The porousness of time space. Constella tions of power and knowledge are typic ally elaborated through a spatial system of inclusions and exclusions, most gener ally through the demarcation of a ?space of the Same? from which ?the Other? is supposedly excluded (cf. imaginative geographies). A common critical re sponse to these measures is to call these b/ordering processes to account to denaturalize them by disclosing their constructedness and to break open (lit erally to de limit) the ?space of the Same'. This involves recognizing the presence of the Other within the space of the Same: the ways in which the geo graphical knowledges brought ?home' by European explorers relied on, appropriated and so smuggle in indigen ous knowledges, for example, or the ways in which the racialized, gendered and ?pure? spaces of colonialism were rou tinely disrupted and transgressed (cf. hy bridity; transculturation). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Thinking about time space in these ways invites critical readings of the ways in which landscape, maps and other conceptual devices function as representations as orderings of space, redescribing their natur alization as the product of political technolo gies and cultural practices, and calling into question the discipline's claims to know the world by rendering it as a transparent space (cf. situated knowledge). But they also require other ways of grasping time space, and there are signs of experiments with the performing, plastic and media arts to subvert our taken for granted methods of representa tion, and to open new political spaces for observant participation in the making of human geographies. dg (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Harvey (2006a); Thrift (2006). (NEW PARAGRAPH)

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