Search

Wind power production is expanding globally and with this comes social resistance. In this article, we study controversies concerning the expansion of wind power in Sweden between 2009 and 2022. To this end, we study national press coverage and local press coverage from Sweden's 290 municipalities. Despite previous studies showing that Swedish people are generally in favour of expanding wind power, our results show that this policy is controversial and often is met with significant local resistance. We identify a clash between two environmental concerns: developing national policies to mitigate the effects of climate change and local opinions calling for the preservation of natural landscapes, which are often coupled with concerns about whether expansion of wind power leads to positive climate effects. We analyse national and local discourses through a multi-level governance perspective, a view that argues Sweden's market-oriented and decentralized wind power planning regime feeds the controversy. In conclusion, the dispersal of power throughout the planning system facilitates scaling up of local resistance to an energy policy issue of national concern, creating significant uncertainty about the expansion of wind power in Sweden. • Material on the debate on wind power resistance in the case of Sweden is analysed focusing on national and local actors. • A national opinion in support for wind power development is challenged by local resistance towards the same energy source. • The controversy threatens climate objectives as well as the electrification of Swedish industry and transportation sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of rapid urbanisation, understanding how marginalised groups shape and are shaped by planning has never been more urgent. Here, we focus on the political capability of marginalised groups, centring analysis on the control (or lack of control) that they have over their livelihoods and environment. Focused on the politics of participatory planning that surround the Kirtipur and Baan Mankong Housing Projects in Nepal and Thailand, we develop a post-foundational approach to explore how the political capabilities of informal settlers and their representatives are bound up in the realisation of conflict. Crucially, our analysis reveals the discourses, alliances, and expertise – referred to as knowledge infrastructures – that are mobilised by constituted and constituent forms of power to construct and contest urban development. Building upon this framework, we demonstrate how technocratic knowledge infrastructures support hegemonic encroachment discourses that, in turn, condition the emergence of insurgent knowledge infrastructures. In doing so, we show that the political capabilities of informal settlers are fundamentally tied to how these insurgent knowledge infrastructures support participatory planning processes conducive to political subjectivisation. Ultimately, we reveal how participatory planning generates struggles for equality and rights that shape the urban as an arena of conflictual coproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spanish far-right party Vox has undergone, together with other similar forces in Europe, an "ecological turn". To analyze this case, the article starts from the premise of the need to understand better the far-right parties' discursive mechanisms and their engagement with environmental issues. Theoretically, we criticize the ideological and ontological approaches to the current wave of national populism; instead, we argue that the dominant form of authoritarian national populism is more usefully analyzed in terms of embodied narratives, metaphorical imagination, mythmaking, and affective intensification. Empirically, using discourse analysis (Laclau, 2005) and drawing on the affective turn in political ecology, first, we argue that Vox's eco-narrative is interpretable as a combination of national populism and biopolitical imaginary pitting a "culture of death" against the "culture of life". Vox's key rhetorical mechanisms, we intimate, are hyperbolical metaphorization and rhetorical inversion, have an intensifying effect at two interconnected levels: fear and indignation concerning the degeneration of Spain, pride and hope regarding Vox's and its male hero's promise of salvation and the Reconquista of the Spanish way of life. Second, by looking into key policy areas (energy and water), we argue that Vox has systematically chosen the former in conflicts between capitalist interests and environmental issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of borders has experienced a renaissance in various disciplines, but the concept of vernacular security in the field of borders and the politics that surround them has been neglected. This article uses a people approach and examines the perceptions and understandings of the UK civil society and 'their' state border. Using the example of the UK is particularly interesting because governments have invested high efforts into constructing a more stringent, efficient and secure UK border for decades. As consequence, the concept of border has gained a raised public profile in the UK, which questions security perceptions by members of the UK civil society and what the UK border means to them. Drawing on a variety of empirical data and employing critical discourse analysis, this article will show an ambiguous and paradoxical picture of the UK border instead of its usually assumed monolithic symbolism of security and protection. The article shows that there is a mismatch present in border politics: security is aimed at however insecurity is generated. This mismatch and confusion among members of the UK civil society have further political and societal consequences. Borders and bordering effectively insecuritize people by which, as the article argues, the concept of vernacular security moves to the forefront of new theorizations of the relationship between borders, security and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2018 the Australian government has displayed anxiety about its apparently declining influence in the Pacific Islands region due to the growing presence of China, a power with potentially inimical interests. The government has long been anxious about threats to its physical security that may arise from the Pacific Islands region. But reports in April 2018 that China was in talks to build a military base in Vanuatu were a wake-up call that its ability to influence the actions of Pacific Island countries (PICs) was limited. In response to its anxiety, the government has engaged in 'worldmaking' by seeking physical and ontological security through a discursive and practical 'geopolitical project'. This project has tried to enclose PICs through a 'domestication strategy' that has aimed at normalising Australia's presence in the Pacific Islands region. Yet despite these efforts at worldmaking through enclosure, the government has simultaneously made a parallel world that excludes Pacific peoples from Australia. To unpack this apparent contradiction, this article draws on ontological security scholarship and uses discourse analysis techniques to analyse the government's discursive efforts at enclosure by framing the Pacific as its 'family' and 'home', and practical efforts at enclosure through two schemes within which bordering practices are evident: labour mobility and scholarships. Drawing on criticisms of the exclusionary consequences of those schemes, this article then analyses how the government's migration rules seek to exclude Pacific peoples from Australia. Based on this analysis, it argues that the contradiction between the two worlds made by the government's foreign and security discourse and policy represent its longstanding ambivalence about its proximity to, and relationship with, PICs and Pacific peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act marked a watershed moment for the politics of asylum in the UK, setting the discursive groundwork for the now infamous 'hostile environment'. This article is the first to compare the discursive framings of this formative act by the Home Office and UK government with those of the then newly devolved Welsh political institutions. While exploring the dominant visions of asylum as fear, unease and hostility marking the act, this paper highlights contrasting national narratives and imaginaries of welcome and hospitality in Welsh institutions. Drawing on a discourse analysis of archived policy documents, newspapers and interview material, the paper argues that these emerging hospitable imaginaries constituted a form of Welsh national identity formation against a less hospitable 'Other'- the UK sovereign state. This article contributes to the critical migration literature by questioning if the notion of hospitality involves more than the ambivalent framing of non-citizens as guests and others, or if instead it is more intended to differentiate from sovereign responses to asylum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asks what militarisation looks like when encountered in university settings, using the example of the UK university armed service units. It identifies a specific definition of militarisation, which is then used as a framework to explore the USUs. The USUs have been subject to critique as emblematic of militarisation, and thus problematic. The paper looks at practices where militarisation can be identified as evident on university campuses, such as in disciplinary engagements with military institutions and activities, as well as flows of funding and knowledge. We show how the military-university nexus problematizes the idea of separate and distinctive military and civilian spheres which pervades much of the discourse around military involvement at universities, and highlight the generative and creative capabilities of militarisation as co-constituted within the military-university nexus. The paper then examines in detail how the process of militarisation works in practice through the USUs. This confirms the importance of individual agency to a conceptualisation of militarisation. In conclusion, we argue for the continued utility of process-focussed understandings of militarisation which emphasise how such processes are generative of social relations. We emphasise the necessity of capturing the nuance and complexity through which processes work not least around the engagements of people as active agents with such processes. We also note the potential significance of scale to future conceptualisations of militarisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the global economic recession provides an instructive point to reconsider recent theorisations of post-politics for two reasons. First, theories of the post-political can help us to understand the current neoliberal impasse, and second, current transformations provide us with an empirical basis to test the limits of these explanatory frameworks. While the resurgence of neoliberal policies, evidenced through the state-sponsored rescue of the financial sector and the introduction of harsh austerity measures in many countries, appear to confirm post-politics, various protest movements have testified to a concurrent re-politicisation of the economy. Furthermore, crises constitute periods of disruption to the discursive and symbolic order, which open a space for hegemonic struggle, however fleeting. We focus our analysis on Ireland's 'ghost estates' - residential developments left abandoned or unfinished after the property crash - and their treatment within mainstream print media. We argue that in the context of crash, the 'ghost estate' functioned as an 'empty signifier' through which hegemonic struggles over how to narrate, and thus re-inscribe, the event of the crisis were staged. We explore the double role played by 'ghost estates': firstly, as an opening for politics, and secondly, as a vehicle used to discursively contain the crisis through a neoliberal narrative of 'excess'. We argue that our analysis offers an instructive example of how post-politicisation occurs as a process that is always contingent, contextual, and partial, and reliant on the cooption and coproduction of existing cultural signifiers with emergent narrations of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper advances the concept of disruption, drawing upon Butler's (1993) work on performativity, her engagement with Goffman's (1974) frame analysis and recent work on performativity within critical geopolitics. It argues this approach provides a useful tool with which to elucidate gaps in the iterative processes of geopolitical discourse production that offer opportunities for momentary distortions to these dominant articulations of power. It analyses the utility of this approach through discussion of three artworks by the acclaimed British artist Fiona Banner. In June 2010 she unveiled her prestigious Duveens commission project at Tate Britain. The work, entitled 'Harrier and Jaguar', was the most ambitious of a series of engagements with military aircraft which have spanned over a decade of creative work. Banner's work has become synonymous with challenging dominant discourses on power and war especially through textual representations of war films and innovative uses of military aircraft. Beginning with her book project, 'All the world's fighter planes' (2004) and moving through her Duveens project to the military aircraft-related work 'Tornado' (2010), this paper argues that Banner's work illustrates the utility of the concept of disruption; going beyond simply raising questions about our engagements with military aircraft, to actively disrupting our encounters with and understandings of these objects and thus popular representations of air power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Global climate change has been increasingly defined as a security threat by a range of political actors and analysts. Yet as the range of voices articulating the need to conceive and approach climate change as a security issue has expanded, so too has the range of ways in which this link has been conceptualized. This article systematically maps different approaches to the relationship between climate change and security as climate security discourses, divided here between national, human, international and ecological security discourses. In exploring the contours of each, the articles asks how the referent object of security is conceptualised (whose security is at stake?); who are conceived as key agents of security (who is responsible for/able to respond to the threat?); how is the nature of the threat defined; and what responses are suggested for dealing with that threat? Systematically mapping these alternative discourses potentially provides a useful taxonomy of the climate change–security relationship in practice. But more importantly, it serves to illustrate how particular responses to climate change (and the actors articulating them) are enabled or constrained by the ways in which the relationship between security and climate change is understood. The article concludes by suggesting that the most powerful discourses of climate security are unlikely to inform a progressive or effective response to global climate change. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper extends the reach of ‘popular geopolitics’ by exploring the geopolitical frame that American popular/news magazines use to portray a major religion in the United States: the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the most prominent body known as Mormonism). It asserts that magazines often represent this type of Mormonism as a geopolitical entity, and sometimes even as a geopolitical threat. Prior to the early twentieth century, these portrayals were hegemonic, given the national government's distrust of Mormonism. But echoes of an earlier and more virulent geopolitical discourse have persisted, long after the federal government made its peace with Mormonism. This paper defines and analyzes twentieth-century magazines' geopolitical discourse on Mormonism, particularly in relation to Mormon spatiality. In doing so, it puts forward concepts of geopolitical optic and logic in order to more effectively distinguish between variations in geopolitical language. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article seeks to develop a discursive-argumentative perspective on practical geopolitical reasoning, using the United States’ policy dialogue towards the Bosnian war in the early summer of 1992 as an illustration. Foreign policy statements, press briefings and public policy actions by the President, Secretary of State and their staff are used to document this policy dialogue. Sources include The Public Papers of the President: George H. W. Bush, journalistic reports from leading newspapers and transcripts of State Department press briefings, most of which are accessible in the data archives of Lexis-Nexis. Memoirs, where they exist, are drawn upon to provide insight into the backstage of foreign policy making. The perspective outlined here draws upon the work of the argumentative approach in public policy, some social constructivist perspectives in IR, and a selection of the literature on rhetoric and meaning in social psychology. The article outlines a heuristic theory of how practical geopolitical reasoning works and can be studied in a critical geopolitical fashion. The emphasis is on geopolitical reasoning not state interaction so there is no consideration of the ‘grammar’ of strategic interaction and communication between the U.S., its allies and the various Balkan warring parties. The goal is to illustrate an important feature of the United States’ Bosnian policy discourse, namely its consistent internal tensions and conflicts. This is perhaps best expressed as the argument that the Bush administration, and succeeding administrations, never really had a unitary foreign policy toward Bosnia but rather had a foreign policy argumentative space. The theoretical approach outlined in the article develops a synchronic map of this policy space and documents empirically how it operated. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Since 1992, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the global governing apparatus of climate planning, has privileged the sovereignty of territorial states. Contemporary political geographical scholarship has since called into question the coherency of the state as a unitary entity and as the sole legitimate arbiter of international politics. This article extends these contributions to planetary climate change adaptation. Through discourse analysis and the multi-scalar institutional and political history of climate planning, this article examines how normative discursive parameters enact prevailing political dynamics that script material futures. Drawing on recent climate planning reports of Palestine and Israel, this article investigates how state discourses operate within an asymmetric geopolitical context where issues of territoriality, sovereignty, and statecraft remain fractured and contested. Climate planning in Israel/Palestine exposes two key institutional constraints of climate governance. First, technical-managerial principles prescribe ahistorical adaptation measures that inadequately address inherently political constraints. Second, the elision of political-economic and historical-cultural contingencies in favor of a universalizing geophysical representation of climate change elides the systemic production of differentiated vulnerability. Consequential of an anachronistic politics of recognition within the UNFCCC, the conditions of climate governance may ultimately embolden the asymmetric status quo. I conclude by highlighting the spatial manifestations (both material and symbolic) of Israeli sovereign violence and the chronic indeterminacy of Palestinian territoriality produced by discursive climate futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents a study of the geopolitical reasoning of the Georgian Orthodox Church (GOC) and its leader Patriarch Ilia II regarding the question of Georgia's territorial integrity. Does the GOC's territorial discourse complement or challenge Georgia's territorial nationalism? The empirical analysis of the geopolitical discourses of Patriarch Ilia II in the early 1990s and in the wake of the 2008 August (Russia-Georgia) War shows a complicated relationship between spiritual and secular geopolitical discourses on Georgia's territorial integrity. Ilia's spiritual geopolitics is neither dissident nor entirely complementary. The Patriarch's definition of Georgia's territorial integrity eschews the broadly accepted formulation of "Russian occupation" within Georgia and in its place, insufficient faith and religiosity within the Georgian society take a more prominent place in the explanation of the problem's origins. Ilia II defines the religion and the GOC as the unifying factor, spiritually, territorially, and politically, of the rival parties and alienated peoples and territories. The church's canonical territoriality, rather than the state's sovereign territoriality, plays the key object of concern in the Patriarch's geopolitical discourse. However, Ilia II frames this narrow institutional interest of the church as the basis for the nation's territorial unification. By advocating more narrowly for the GOC's canonical jurisdiction across the entire disputed territories, rather than actively embracing secular anti-Russian geopolitical narratives, the church simultaneously stands outside of the territorial conflict, taking a seemingly neutral position, and reinforces the territorial claim of the Georgian state. By distinguishing and problematizing the role of GOC's canonical territoriality in the question of Georgia's sovereign territoriality, the paper concludes that the GOC is a territorial power in its own right, not merely a spiritual wing of the state of Georgia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on Foucaultian work on problematization, this paper explores the urban resilience paradigm which emerged in the wake of 2012's Hurricane Sandy, which dramatically disrupted New York City. Using discourse and media analysis, examination of government commissions and proposals, and site observation at panels and conferences, it argues that, rather than an ahistorical "thing," urban resilience was the name given to techniques resulting from a three-part process of problematization drawn together by media and government in the storm's aftermath. This process, I argue, was itself political, and included the identification of new problems to govern in the form of environmental and technical risks; the critique of modern urban governance techniques based on a city/nature separation and ideas of mastery and control as impediments to responding to these problems; and finally the overcoming of impediments via creative recalibration of government by redefining the social and ecological as interconnected infrastructure. The recalibrations produced within this three-part problematization, I show, were promoted by city government and local institutions as "urban resilience," which was presented as the unquestionable answer to Sandy's problems as they had been posed. I conclude by discussing what this problem-based case study helps us see about urban resilience, but also how it advances our understanding of the growing interest in problematization within geography, as well as implications it suggests for thinking the political in the Anthropocene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anticipatory geographies are state-driven initiatives promoting economic hope through the language of rejuvenation, prosperity and connectivity. As a discursive process, anticipatory geographies reconfigure spaces and identities. These narratives have proliferated in an age of intensified connectivity as states aim to imprint their political and economic visions. Oceania has become a site of multiple anticipatory geographies external and internal to the region with the presence of China as an enabling factor. In 2006, Fiji reintroduced a Look North policy to globalize economic connectivity placing Fijian agency at the centre, and in 2015, Beijing included Oceania into China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework. This work examines the processes when two anticipatory geographies meet. Adapting critical geopolitics, the research presents the findings of a critical discourse analysis of Chinese and Fijian texts referencing Look North and BRI. The work reveals the entanglement of anticipatory geographies in Fiji has generated a co-produced discourse of prosperity displaying continuity from Look North to the BRI. Although there is a shift toward defining the Sino-Fijian relationship through BRI, it does not signal an overwrite of an indigenous policy framework. I argue Look North has been 're-placed' into the BRI to co-produce a narrative that permits the ongoing articulation of Fijian interests. With the Belt and Road becoming the defining framework for China's relations with countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the Americas, this work suggests Fiji's handling of BRI's impact on its domestic spaces and policies is an indicator of how other states will reposition their promises of economic hope to civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While tense and contested forms of nationalism tend to dominate public discourses of national belonging in Europe, there is a need to explore in more depth the ways in which nationhood and ethnic and religious diversity continuously intertwine to re-create plural expressions of national identity. This article will do this by exploring the subtle, intermittent moments when people who identify with a religious minority mobilise their national identities. By analysing the family visits of second-generation Welsh Muslims to parental homelands, it will highlight how they use their attachments to Wales as a tool for situating a sense of national place-belongingness. When thinking about these mobilities, the participants negotiate what a sense of place means to them, revealing moments when belonging to Wales matters within their biographical narratives. By highlighting these relationships, this article analyses a bottom-up approach to understanding how ethnic and religious minorities experience the nation and argues that diversity and nationalism should not be treated as mutually exclusive entities. Rather, it argues for the need to develop more plural and flexible interpretations of nationalism, which highlight how diverse populations 'do' their national identities in ways which matters to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]