Search

By situating drones in a lineage of colonial technologies of pacification, the critical literature on militarized drones suggests a revised concept of peripheries and global space. This paper engages this literature to argue for a conception of peripheries as spaces of colonial state power at multiple scales. It does so by arguing for a distinction between proliferation to the global periphery and the proliferation of peripheries at multiple scales and across scattered sites. The paper also draws on Gramsci and Fanon to elaborate an internationalist anticolonial position on the defense of territorial sovereignty of states in the global periphery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we outline the case for feminist geolegality, a project that integrates legal geography and feminist geopolitics. The approach captures the myriad ways that law intermeshes with intimate corollaries of geopolitics and geoeconomics. It includes yet surpasses scholarship on international lawfare and military conflict to examine intimate wars that law mediates in the more mundane battlefields of everyday life. The body and home act as heuristic sites to review existing work and future trajectories of feminist geolegality. Its significance is marked further by the era of Trumpism, the gendered spatial and temporal legal implications of which are explored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Developing the concept of kinaesthetics, this article undertakes a critical re-description of amateur sports and fitness to explore the topographies, materials, innovation, and socialities that make up urban environments. Extending work on affect and urban materiality within geography and elsewhere, we argue that amateur sport and fitness animates many cities in ways that are frequently overlooked. The paper aims to 1) broaden understandings of amateur sport and fitness practices; 2) reframe perspectives on the kinds of environments cities are; 3) develop a prospective politics of provision involving the design and maintenance of a social infrastructure of amateur sport and fitness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops ideas from poststructuralism, actor-network theory, non-representational theory and complexity theory to begin to produce a topological consideration of cities in global networks. In other words, the paper argues that fluids and flows, actant networks, performances and practices fold the spaces and times of cities in ways that question the privileging of geometrical space (near and far) and linear time (now and then) in explanations of global and world cities. To reach a conceptualization of world city topologies, the paper is in four parts. First, space is set free and rethought as everywhere and folded into everything. Second, time is rethought as non-linear, multiple and folded into everything. Third, these new conceptualizations of space and time are mobilized to challenge the spatialities and temporalities produced through the political-economy approach of a writer such as Saskia Sassen. Finally, my rethinking of space and time in globalization is worked through to portray global and world cities as 'Bodies without Organs'. This spatial formation is seen to be one that connects and disconnects through networks and folds. Overall, my rethinking of space, time, globalization and cities produces a spatiotemporal pattern or topology that defies familiar geographical borders and temporal frames to point to the spaced and timed quality of relations that stretch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper unpacks the contested inter-connections between neoliberal work and welfare regimes, asylum and immigration controls, and the exploitation of migrant workers. The concept of precarity is explored as a way of understanding intensifying and insecure post-Fordist work in late capitalism. Migrants are centrally implicated in highly precarious work experiences at the bottom end of labour markets in Global North countries, including becoming trapped in forced labour. Building on existing research on the working experiences of migrants in the Global North, the main part of the article considers three questions. First, what is precarity and how does the concept relate to working lives? Second, how might we understand the causes of extreme forms of migrant labour exploitation in precarious lifeworlds? Third, how can we adequately theorize these particular experiences using the conceptual tools of forced labour, slavery, unfreedom and precarity? We use the concept of ‘hyper-precarity’ alongside notions of a ‘continuum of unfreedom’ as a way of furthering human geographical inquiry into the intersections between various terrains of social action and conceptual debate concerning migrants’ precarious working experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper notes a growing, diverse and yet somewhat partial and disparate interest among geographers in the illicit. Within this there has been little substantive interest in organized criminality despite it constituting a range of activities comparable in their significance to other aspects of the illicit that have attracted extensive attention from geographers. This paper argues that the development of a geographical perspective on organized crime is timely and seeks to map out connections with both the extant literatures of organized crime and those of human geography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How can the modalities and whereabouts of power – and specifically the spatiotemporal contingencies and reach of power relations – be more effectively studied? This paper shows how issues of validity and reflexivity restrict existing empirical work’s ability to advance understandings of power, and demonstrates how such issues can be overcome through the refined use of methods and analytical techniques that tease out the double contingencies of the social relations that underlie power. Refinements are shown to be possible by learning, in particular, from approaches to analysing power elsewhere in the social sciences, and particularly from management studies and linguistics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper builds on previous geographical and social science work at the boundaries of climate change by (re)asserting the significance of the territoriality of the national state in global climate negotiations. Using the post-political consensus as a theoretical framework and drawing upon examples from climate change negotiations like Kyoto and Copenhagen, it argues that it is too premature to fetishize the consensus of, and collectivism between, national states in global climate politics. As geographers, ‘territoriality’, both as a material and discursive device, is fundamental in, and constitutive of, how we interpret and understand climate change and the politics thereof. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A resurgence of interest in the region as a scale of economic organization has been apparent within economic geography over the past decade or so. In view of the apparent shift towards a 'knowledge-driven economy', the capacity of regions to support processes of learning and innovation has been identified as a key source of competitive advantage. This paper provides a critical appraisal of recent work on innovation, learning and regional development, situating this within its intellectual context. We argue that, while the focus on knowledge and learning is highly relevant, much of the literature fails to adequately ground its arguments in empirical enquiry and also tends to underemphasize the importance of wider extra-local networks and structures. In conclusion, we offer some directions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore a theoretical framework that can assist in understanding the extent to which the increased integration of macro-regional economies (such as the European and North American) and the global economy is leading to divergence and/or convergence in the pattern of economic activity and the distribution of value-added and wealth. In particular, the paper focuses on the extent to which changing divisions of labour, the production, appropriation and allocation of value, and economic organization underpin these processes of convergence/divergence. We focus on developing an understanding of the changing divisions of labour across space in increasingly integrated macro-regional economies such as Europe and North America, and the (unequal) flows of value between places that underpin mosaics of territorial inequality. We argue that the production and flows of value associated with different forms of economic activities and commodity production and exchange in different localities provides a framework for understanding changing geographical divisions of labour. We also argue that a critical engagement with the range of work associated with analysing 'commodity chains' and 'commodity networks' provides a way into thinking about the (dis)organization of economic activity and value creation, appropriation and distribution. In particular, we argue that the focus on the commodity, while initially helpful, is misplaced because commodities embody and carry with them relations of value. Consequently, our attention should be focused on the organization of the production, appropriation and realization of value flows and the various forces that structure these processes, such as state governance, labour organization, corporate practices and so on, that are fundamental to understanding the (re)configuration of economic activity in macro-regional economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper interrogates the enduring yet changing role of world cities as centers of capitalist ‘command and control’ amidst deepening uneven development. By incorporating financialization processes in Friedmann’s (1986) world city hypothesis, we hypothesize that the world city archipelago remains an obligatory passage point for the relatively assured realization of capital. The advanced producer services complex appropriates superprofits as producers of co-constitutive knowledge on operational and financial firm restructuring, the creation of new circuits of value, and capital switching. Geographically, beyond the international financial center shortlist, the wider world city archipelago inserts finance capital (logics) in contemporary economies and societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Friedman's 2005 book The world is flat was meant as a wake-up call to those in the United States who direct its corporate boardrooms and govern its political/economic state, a warning that globalization has brought about a level economic 'playing field' in which the United States might be losing the game. As rhetoric, the title certainly works well to raise fears about North America's future economic role. It also works in concretizing a popular view of globalization, a view that obscures its uneven, discordant, and decidedly unflat processes and practices. In this paper I help deconstruct this view by fleshing out the everyday ways through which United States expanded economically in its early (1890-1927) global empire. Based on archival work in Argentina, Russia, Scotland, and the United States, I provide a historical look at encounters between North American business men and women and their foreign customers, students, and workers. Focusing on the diverse practices and personal encounters that were critical to the early global efforts of select United States-based corporations, I expose the uneven, contested, and messy ways in which economic expansion works. By analyzing early global encounters when the economic dominance of the United States was just becoming apparent, I am able to highlight the sheer complexity and truly relational nature of United States' expansion in the early twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent emergence of global justice networks (GJNs) to counter neoliberal globalization has been an important political and geographical phenomenon. Much has been written about the emergence of a new global civil society, centred upon a new 'network' ontology. In engaging with these debates in this paper, our purpose is to develop a more critical spatial perspective. We argue that issues of space and place are critical in understanding the operation of GJNs and their potential to contribute to an alternative global politics. Spatially, the global linkages of GJNs can be seen as creating cultural and spatial configurations that connect places with each other in opposition to neoliberalism. However, the individual movements that comprise networks, while not necessarily place-restricted, remain heavily territorialized in their struggles. Additionally, networks evolve unevenly over space. Some groups and actors within them are able to develop extensive translocal connections and associations whereas others remain relatively more localized. Potential conflicts arise from such complex geographies, which only become evident through analysing the operation and evolution of different networks. This leads us to focus not solely on the transnational character of networks but also upon how the global is enacted through the localized practices of movements within them, in considering the potential for GJNs to form more sustainable political alternatives to neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

David Harvey's adaptation and redeployment of Marx's notion of 'primitive accumulation' – under the heading of 'accumulation by dispossession' – has reignited interest in the concept among geographers. This adaptation of the concept of primitive accumulation to different contexts than those Marx analyzed raises a variety of theoretical and practical issues. In this paper, I review recent uses and transformations of the notion of primitive accumulation that focus on its persistence within the Global North, addressing especially the political implications that attend different readings of primitive accumulation in the era of neoliberal globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among scholars of globalization and neoliberalism, there has been a marked turn away from the national as a relevant scale in today's world, with researchers arguing that the national is being 'rescaled' to local, regional and global scales. This paper argues that we need to move beyond this rescaling argument to recognize that the national still is relevant in contemporary political economy. Seeing the national not as a discrete scale but as a dimension of political economic practice is an alternative analytical approach that treats the national as constitutively implicated in other scaled activities. Distinctions between one scale and another are not so clear. This approach enhances our understanding of contemporary patterns and processes because, instead of focusing on one set of scales or another, analysis can reveal relations among multiple scales. This approach also moves us beyond the historical periodization posited in the rescaling literature. Instead of providing descriptions of contemporary change in which the dominant national is giving way to a messier configuration of global and local scales, the idea of scales-as-dimensions offers a way of analysing scalar relations more generally. This can then be used in both contemporary and historical analysis. The rescaling argument treats the national largely as residual, which serves to draw our attention away from complex scalar practices without offering a truly different way of thinking about scalar relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scale has emerged as a major issue in both ecology and geography in recent decades. Little effort has been made to compare these parallel debates, however, or to seek an integrated conception of scale across the two disciplines. This paper argues that such an integration is possible, even between ecology and human geography — the subfield of geography seemingly most removed from ecological concerns and methods. In both disciplines, globalization has lent practical urgency to problems of scale, revealing deeper theoretical issues. Geographers have helped impel ecologists to take space and scale seriously, and the epistemological insight that scale is produced (rather than given a priori) should be applied to ecological as well as social phenomena. Ecologists' conceptual distinctions and methodological guidelines regarding scale, meanwhile, can help resolve 'the scale question' in critical human geography. Scale is both a methodological issue inherent to observation (its epistemological moment) and an objective characteristic of complex interactions within and among social and natural processes (its ontological moment). These processes and interactions — rather than scale per se — should be the object of research, with particular attention to nonlinearities or thresholds of change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The principal focus in this paper is a sympathetic critique of the institutional turn in economic geography and its analysis of convergence in contemporary capitalism. While insightful, this perspective does not fully capture the dynamic and contradictions of capitalist development and has tended to neglect the role of labor-capital relations in how systems of work organization develop. Following Jessop (1999; 2001), I argue that macroeconomic competition driven by the law of value disrupts institutions and acts as a 'disembedding' force for convergence within capitalism. In the workplace these tendencies are mediated by labor's ability to resist capital through what Burawoy (1985) terms the production politics of workplace regimes. I then illustrate these general points via an analysis of lean production in the automobile industry. Lean production is associated with strong convergence tendencies, because TNC reorganization facilitates the increased comparability of work quality and intensity across space. However, drawing upon the research of Lewchuck et al. (2001) and others on lean production and workers in Canada, the UK and Germany, I argue that, while national regimes are declining relative to firm-specific ones, workplace regimes continue to be an active force for divergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropologists and geographers are increasingly turning to one another for tools to analyze the present global political-economic conjuncture. Yet to date there has been no adequate accounting of the comparative advantages each field brings to studies of globalization – Anthropology with its emphasis on the role of culture in anchoring (or resisting) globalizing processes within particular societies and Geography with its more comparative emphasis on the politics of place and scale. This paper is intended to contribute to interdisciplinary exchange through such an accounting and argues for a constructive synthesis geared toward understanding how 'local' cultural systems articulate with political-economic currents operating at wider spatial scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the developments in population geography from the Southern Hemisphere. It discusses some research into geographical dimensions of population vulnerability, as well as a consideration of recent work on international migration and development. Moreover, population geographers have been major contributors to the body of research which is reshaping policy relating to migration and bringing sending and receiving nations together for the first time by the opening of the promise of developing policies, resulting in advantageous outcomes for the communities left by migrants and those they enter.

The emerging peace geographies subfield has made significant contributions to peace research by showing how peace is a contested spatial process and political discourse. This article integrates peace geographies with the until now ignored trans-rational 'many peaces' framework's exploration of an even wider range of peace imaginaries. Yet some forms exacerbate rather than provide alternatives to intersectional violences pervasive in today's world. I argue for a normative framework to evaluate the 'plurality of the peaces' illuminated by these subfields, proposing 'radical trans-relational peace' - ecological dignity and solidarity through trans-community networks - as a geographically and politically situated conception to analyze the 'many peaces'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within economic geography there has been a growing body of work that straddles the disciplinary boundaries of management studies and international business (IB) scholarship. Whilst this growing cross-disciplinary proximity may be related to increasing numbers of economic geographers being located in business and management schools, this report argues that it also corresponds to a growing fruitful and productive cross-disciplinary interest from both management studies and international business. It contends that there is growing epistemological and theoretical common ground between both these disciplines and economic geography which reflects a shift towards spatial thinking being increasingly evident in the empirical and conceptual concerns of management and IB scholars. The report reviews two major elements to this intersection within the recent economic geographical literature – what might loosely be termed the ‘new management geography’ and a broad range of work that brings together the thinking of economic geographers and IB scholarship concerned within firm internationalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The construction of ‘fictive place’ is ever more common in capitalist production and exchange. It could be argued that the adoption of Geographical Indications (GIs) is a form of resistance to the homogenizing effects of globalization. In some ways fictive place-making can be seen as a means of adding value to land; however, we argue that fictive place has become a factor of production in its own right. We investigate this through a discussion of fictitious capital and the rise of GIs. We draw evidence from the wine sector and suggest that other networks are increasingly constituted of similar processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographies of health have neglected relevant consideration of health human resources. Five developments in the sub-discipline are examined to demonstrate how health labour has been neglected. Three research themes, circulation, regulation and distribution, are then presented to indicate the value of a greater focus on health workers for the geography of health, and we suggest that deeper analytical engagement with labour and feminist geographies can support this. Each theme points to the increasingly global organization of health care and the need for health geographers to seriously examine the role of health workers during a period of health transformation, globalization, and privatization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expectations and contradictions in the rural, played out through small-scale farming, the pervasive nature of globalization, discourses of food security, new productivism and escalation in global land grabs have been shown in previous reports to impact greatly on sustainable rural futures. The analysis continues here by exploring another often contradictory pathway, that of sustainable intensification. The bioeconomy and its nascent popularity in rural policy discourse is discussed before questions are posed about the ‘logic’ of sustainable intensification, its increasingly dominant positioning as a guiding principle, and its conceivable use as a rural policy instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this report, I use the organizing device of the A–Z to present a critical review of recent work under the banner of global production networks (GPN). The report positions GPN analysis in its broader intellectual context, profiles its distinctive contributions, and details a range of challenges that remain to effective economic-geographical theorizations of globalization dynamics and their impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the possibility that US rural amenity destinations are affected by ‘linked migration’ streams similar to ones connecting the fate of high-wage professionals and low-wage immigrants in global cities. To date, the possibility of such a linkage has not been considered in the vast literature on migration and social transformation in rural America, a literature that has treated the arrival of these two groups (high-wage professionals and low-wage immigrants) in rural spaces as separate processes. We explore the possibility that these two groups, in a particular set of US rural amenity communities, are structurally linked. We focus on the theoretical implications of documenting such linkages, arguing that the presence of linked migration dynamics in rural areas would transform scholarly debates on: (1) Latino immigrants in the rural USA; (2) amenity migration and rural gentrification, not only in the USA but in a range of postindustrial economies; and (3) theories of globalization and mobility, as well as the place of the rural in globalization dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Working with the assumption that the social and the material are mutually embedded, this article suggests that actors in the business world tend to separate social from material concerns despite the entanglement of these two dimensions. This disconnection - a binary logic applied in the context of blurry realities - creates problems, the resolution of which requires change in production logic. The predicament of firms is the apparent inability of actors to develop a production logic that recognizes the entwinement of the material and the social; rather than changing from a unidimensional to a multidimensional logic, strategies continuously oscillate between one unidimensional logic (emphasizing social or material concerns) and another (emphasizing the opposite), thus perpetuating the predicament. The oscillation occurs in both the old and new economies, but is compressed in the new economy. Recognizing this oscillation in the new and old economies requires dehomogenizing each to uncover problems that prompt change. Recognizing the transformation of production logics within the old and new economies requires awareness of, and retreat from, binary logic in academic analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article critically engages with the 'varieties of capitalism' school, which since its origins in the early 1990s has been consolidated into one of the most influential strands in comparative and heterodox political economy. While the 'varieties' approach can be credited with the development of several of the most evocative stylized facts in heterodox political economy, having served as a potent foil against the orthodox globalization thesis, its alternative vision of a bipolar global economy comprising two competing capitalisms is found to be wanting. The approach is limited by its methodological nationalism, a tendency towards static analysis and latent institutional functionalism, and by an inability to adequately balance national specifi city and path-dependency on the one hand with common underlying tendencies in capitalist restructuring on the other. Nevertheless, the varieties approach has spawned an influential account of the spatiality of advanced capitalism from which economic geography can certainly learn, and to which it has much to contribute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographic perspectives on civil aviation have traditionally been situated within the conceptual landscapes and languages of a transport geography in which quantitative methodologies have been to the fore. While such perspectives have shed light on the increasingly complex morphology of global air routes, this article argues such approaches tend to downplay crucial questions concerning the social production and consumption of airspace. Drawing on ideas from the newly-emergent 'mobilities' paradigm, we use this article to flag up some alternative geographies of air travel, arguing that socially- and culturally-inflected perspectives can usefully reveal the iniquitous imprints of global air travel at a variety of spatial scales. We hence conclude that there is much to be gained by adopting such perspectives, and argue that work on the social dimensions of air travel is vital in a discipline where air transport is routinely described as an enabler of globalization, yet is often treated as an abstract, and oddly disembodied, space of flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies Massey's (2005) call for a relational understanding of space that can challenge aspatial readings of globalization to the study of globalization in a rural context. Critiquing existing rural research for tending towards studies of global commodity chains and overarching processes of globalization, it argues for more place-based studies of globalization as experienced in rural localities. The concept of the ‘global countryside’ is introduced as a hypothetical space that represents the ultimate outcome of globalizing processes, yet it is noted that the characteristics of the 'global countryside' find only partial articulation in particular rural spaces. Understanding this differentiated geography of rural globalization, it is argued, requires a closer understanding of how globalization remakes rural places, for which Massey's thesis provides a guide. The article thus examines the reconstitution of rural places under globalization, highlighting the interaction of local and global actors, and of human and non-human actants, to produce new hybrid forms and relations. As such, it is argued, the politics of globalization cannot be reduced to domination or subordination, but are instead a politics of negotiation and configuration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the relationship between globalization and governance in the U.S. The author specifically explores the political geographies of control and neoliberalism that form the relationship. Neoliberalism has become an increasingly umbrella term for the diverse ideologies, policies and practices associated with liberalizing global markets. In geography, there has been widespread attention paid to the spaces of neoliberalism, the scales of neoliberalism, the urban regimes of neoliberalism, the natures of neoliberalism and the governmentalities of neoliberalism. The work that has mapped the political geography of neoliberalization at and across a whole variety of scales is highlighted.

The study of borders has undergone a renaissance during the past decade. This is reflected in an impressive list of conferences, workshops and scholarly publications. This renaissance has been partly due to the emergence of a counternarrative to the borderless and deterritorialized world discourse which has accompanied much of globalization theory. The study of borders has moved beyond the limited confines of the political geography discourse, crossing its own disciplinary boundaries, to include sociologists, political scientists, historians, international lawyers and scholars of international relations. But this meeting of disciplines has not yet been successful in creating a common language or glossary of terms which is relevant to all scholars of borders. Central to the contemporary study of borders are notions such as 'borders are institutions', the process of 'bordering' as a dynamic in its own right, and the border terminologies which focus on the binary distinctions between the 'us' and 'them', the 'included' and the 'excluded'. Borders should be studied not only from a top-down perspective, but also from the bottom up, with a focus on the individual border narratives and experiences, reflecting the ways in which borders impact upon the daily life practices of people living in and around the borderland and transboundary transition zones. In positing an agenda for the next generation of border-related research, borders should be seen for their potential to constitute bridges and points of contact, as much as they have traditionally constituted barriers to movement and communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article we argue that the retail transnational corporation (TNC) is an entity that merits urgent theoretical and empirical investigation from economic geographers. Using recent theoretical developments that conceptualize TNCs as the complex nexus of intrafirm, interfirm and extrafirm relational networks, we explore the special characteristics of retail TNCs that distinguish them from their manufacturing counterparts, still the predominant focus of interest in the literature on economic globalization. In particular, using Hess's (2004) notion of three different kinds of embeddedness (societal, network, territorial), we explain how it is the necessarily high territorial embeddedness in markets and cultures of consumption, planning and property systems, and logistical and supply chain operations that defines the distinctive theoretical and organization challenge of the retail TNC. In turn, we argue that this high level of embeddedness frequently implies a very different experience of host-market regulation than is found in other sectors. Additionally, we use Dicken's (2000) distinction between 'placing firms' and 'firming places' to explore how territorial embeddedness of the retail TNC is influenced by its societal embeddedness (home country institutional origins), and how network embeddedness is critical to an understanding of how places/host economies are inserted, reciprocally, into the organizational spaces of the retail TNCs. In particular, we argue that intrafirm management of innovation and knowledge dynamics across highly dispersed store and sourcing operations poses particular problems and possibilities for retail TNCs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the new research on gender globalization and development and the extent to which 'critical development geography' that represents a unitary subdisciplinary project. Indication on the focus of political culture on civil society and social capital discussions; Geneology of social capital in the development field; Accumulation of considerable social capital that occur within locally based national-ethnic populations.

Discusses whether political geographies of terrorism should compete with technological fixes and geo-surveillance for a place within the discipline. Role played by political geography in investigating globalization as a particular scalar expression of neoliberalization; Influence of interaction of spatial analysis and political processes on political geography.

Abstract: The aim of this article is to research the extent to which ‘international journals’ of human geography are really international. The analysis is based on the affiliation data (work centre) of the authors of articles and of members of editorial boards of a group of international journals; the results so obtained are related to the impact factors of these journals. The indicators used show that human geography journals in general have still not attained a high degree of internationalization. This may be interpreted as a sign of fragmentation within the discipline: human geographers do not constitute a proper international scientific community or, rather, a global community that makes use of certain common media of expression (international journals) but are fragmented into national or regional (linguistic) communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As theoretical and empirical research on ‘globalization’ balloons, the concept of globalization has become subject to more critical scrutiny from the perspectives of both advocates and sceptics. While most would agree that it ‘represents a serious challenge to the state-centrist assumptions of most previous social science’ (Sklair, 1998a: 1; 1998b), critics range from those who doubt its newness, inevitability or epoch-making qualities; those who point to the lack of specificity in theories of the global and the inadequacies of mere polemical eloquence in more popular pronouncements; those who argue that the globalization literature neglects issues of social regulation by the nation-state; to those who take the view that globalization is not simply a ‘natural’ term for a set of material processes shaping the contours of geographical space but a discourse (or even a myth) drawn upon to legitimize particular political and economic agendas (Hall, 1991; Robertson, 1992; Massey, 1994; Hirst and Thompson, 1996; McMichael, 1996; Allen and Thompson, 1997; Amin, 1997; Kelly, 1997; Thrift, 1994; 1997; Chua, 1998a; Larner, 1998; Robertson and Khondker, 1998; Tickell, 1998). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the impact of globalization on world politics and society. Attribution of debates on political globalization; Opinions on international politics and human rights abuses; Publications and reference materials on geological politics.