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The image of Scottish National Party (SNP) leader Alex Salmond unfurling the Scottish Saltire behind the bemused UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, moments after Andy Murray won the Wimbledon tennis tournament in July 2013, has come to epitomize the nature of debate around the implications of the Independence Referendum outside of Scotland. Mainstream coverage has rendered “IndyRef” as something of a pantomime politics performed by Salmond and Cameron. The debate has been reduced to a competition between Salmond's idealistic political nationalism and the economic “realities” presented by Cameron, rendered as a chant: “We can afford independence, we will be one of the world's wealthiest countries” versus the response, “Oh no you can't”! In Scotland, on the other hand, debates around the implications of the referendum have gone beyond romanticized notions of tartan, Braveheart and freedom (although these do still exist, of course). Although the political parties themselves have perhaps been rather conservative, debates beyond their official efforts have been much more imaginative, with discussion around the nature of the state, citizenship, and Scotland's role on the international stage, among other issues.

Critical geopolitics has become one of the most vibrant parts of political geography. However it remains a particularly western way of knowing which has been much less attentive to other traditions of thinking. This paper engages with Pan-Africanism, and specifically the vision of the architect of post-colonial Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to explore this overlooked contribution to critical engagements with geopolitics. Pan-Africanism sought to forge alternative post-colonial worlds to the binary geopolitics of the Cold War and the geopolitical economy of neo-colonialism. The academic division of labour has meant that these ideas have been consigned to African studies rather than being drawn into wider debates around the definitions of key disciplinary concepts. However Nyerere's continental thinking can be seen as a form of geopolitical imagination that challenges dominant neo-realist projections, and which still has much to offer contemporary political geography.

In this article we wish to explore the political possibilities of video games. Numerous scholars now take seriously the place of popular culture in the remaking of our geographies, but video games still lag behind. For us, this tendency reflects a general response to them as imaginary spaces that are separate from everyday life and ‘real’ politics. It is this disconnect between abstraction and lived experience that we complicate by defining play as an event of what Brian Massumi calls lived abstraction. We wish to short-circuit the barriers that prevent the aesthetic resonating with the political and argue that through their enactment, video games can animate fantastical futures that require the player to make, and reflect upon, profound ethical decisions that can be antagonistic to prevailing political imaginations. We refer to this as social irrealism to demonstrate that reality can be understood through the impossible and the imagined.

When Henry Lyons was appointed as the first lecturer in Geography at the University of Glasgow in 1909, he had just returned from several years as the Director General of the Survey of Egypt. One hundred years later witnessed the publication of a book drawing together a collaborative project in Egypt involving members of the Department. This paper reflects upon this interest in Egypt by geographers at the University of Glasgow, and, in so doing, critically examines the changing nature of scientific knowledge and practice over the intervening century.

In this paper we will critically consider the different ways in which history and belonging have been treated in artworks situated in the Citadel development in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland. We will focus upon one artwork, Constellation by Stephen Hurrel, as an alternative to the more conventional landscapes of heritage which are adjacent, in order to examine the relationship between personal history and place history and argue the primacy of participatory process in the creation of place and of any artwork therein. Through his artwork, Hurrel has attempted to adopt a material process through which place can be created performatively but, in part due to its nonrepresentational form, it proves problematic, aesthetically and longitudinally, in wholly engaging the community. We will suggest that, through variants of ‘new genre public art’ such as this, personal and place histories can be actively recreated through the redevelopment of contemporary urban landscapes, but we will also highlight the complexities and indeterminacies involved in the relationship between artwork, people, and place.

There has recently been much said about the end of public space. In contemporary cities, the public sphere is increasingly been seen as comprised of dead public spaces, privatised shopping malls and gated communities, eroding the essence of city life. However, in this paper it is argued that this particular vision of contemporary public space is skewed by the concentration of research in city centres, and in particular in the recapitalised, flagship spaces associated with urban restructuring. The paper questions the extent that the inclusivity and accessibility of local public spaces is under threat and whether democratic practices unfold to threaten such local public spaces, drawing on the recent experience of two inner-city neighbourhoods in Glasgow.

This article discusses the role of public art in the built form of western cities. Increasingly public art is being seen as an unquestionably good thing in urban regeneration discourse, in particular for its ability to (re)create urban communities. In part, this reflects the influence of `new genre public art' approaches which privilege art as process over art as product. However, this reading of new genre public art works can overlook the wider networks through which presence is facilitated, the very materiality of the artistic things produced, and how they are subsequently incorporated into everyday life. These agendas for the critical appreciation of public art will be developed through the example of the Five Spaces public art project in Glasgow, Scotland.

In this article, it is shown how cultural policy, and in particular public art, intersects with the processes of urban restructuring and how it is a contributor, but also antidote, to the conflict that typically surrounds the restructuring of urban space. The particular focus of the paper is on investigating how public art can be inclusionary/exclusionary as part of the wider project of urban regeneration. The first part of the paper examines examples in which public art intervention has attempted to generate inclusion. Subsequently, attention focuses more on examples in which the public art has been perceived as an aspect of cultural domination and has thus provoked resistance. Throughout, it is argued that the processes through which artworks become installed into the urban fabric are critical to the successful development of inclusion.

El final de la guerra fría parecía prometer el final de una praxis geopolítica basada sobre la exclusión de la diferencia. Los teóricos hablaron de fluidez, hibridación y de un mundo en el que progresivamente disminuían las fronteras. Sin embargo, las consecuencias del 11 de septiembre mostraron claramente la persistencia de imágenes de un mundo peligroso donde el mantenimiento de las fronteras es vital para la seguridad. Mientras que este artículo se centrará inicialmente en la crítica de textos y de escritos de la geopolítica de la «guerra contra el terror» en el espíritu de una «geopolítica crítica», proseguirá hacia el planteamiento de una geopolítica feminista que ponga cuerpos y prácticas cotidianas en el centro de la geopolítica.

As a result of the failure of formal top-down development, there has recently been increased interest in the possibilities of drawing upon the indigenous knowledges of those in the communities involved, in an attempt to produce more effective development strategies. The concept of indigenous knowledge calls for the inclusion of local voices and priorities, and promises empowerment through ownership of the process. However, there has been little critical examination of the ways in which indigenous knowledges have been included in the development process. Drawing upon postcolonial theory, this article suggests that indigenous knowledges are often drawn into development by both theorists and development institutions in a very limited way, failing to engage with other ways of perceiving development, and thus missing the possibility of devising more challenging alternatives.

This paper offers a contribution to the recent emergence in geography of studies of travel writers and the production of other representations of the non-Western world. I consider a rather different text to those normally studied in that the book, Empire of Signs by Barthes, purports not to represent any real place. A number of writers, influenced by Said's pathbreaking work Orientalism, have considered whether Barthes perpetuates Orientalist images. Rather than structure my argument around the binary of Orientalist/not-Orientalist I will consider the ways that Barthes subverts the structure of Orientalism from within. Barthes counterfeits travel: playing with the concept of ‘wonder’ which halted the representational language of more conventional travellers. Through the construction of his own ‘hyper-Orientalist’ account, Barthes produces a poststructural ethics which I argue offers some important reflections on the politics of representation both of travel writing and of academic critiques of it.

This paper is a continuation of one published in 1993. In the earlier piece, I joined the call for a ‘critical geopolitics’. Here I want to both illustrate and develop the programmatic calls of critical geopolitics with the use of an empirical example. Critical geopolitics has demanded the siting of any geopolitical praxis—a refusal to accept the abstract logic of geopolitics but instead embody it in historically and culturally specific interests. In line with this, I contextualize the production of a geopolitical discourse by studying both the text produced and the institutional location within which it was generated. The example used is the popular American magazine the Reader's Digest and its changing perception of the Soviet Union and communism between 1930 and 1945.

Subaltern geopolitics is a concept we use in this special issue to look past the binary vision of geopolitical reasoning and much critical engagement with it and to go beyond the endlessly critical nature of some critical geopolitics, to offer alternative ways of imagining and doing geopolitics. Engaging with postcolonial, feminist and anti-geopolitical interventions, the papers included here present subaltern imaginaries that offer creative alternatives to mainstream geopolitical scripts. The concept of subaltern makes direct reference to postcolonial notions of power relations, suggesting a position that is not completely other, resistant or alternative to dominant power, but instead one that occupies an ambiguous position of marginality.

The recent emergence of a new ‘critical geopolitics’ has opened up traditional geopolitical texts for thorough interpretation. Yet there is little work which contextualizes traditional, elite geopolitical texts within the institutions of their social reproduction. The media are the prime example of a site of representation at which elite texts are interpreted in the terms of popular culture and assessed in these terms. It is also through socialization at these sites that elites form their interpretative structures. This paper will make the case for the importance of studying popular conceptions of geopolitics in America through an examination of the popular magazine The Reader's Digest from 1980–1990.

I reflect on the methodological challenges of undertaking oral history research that attempts to address issues of security and violence that occurred in the past. When such issues become entangled with individual (and group) senses of identity and autobiography, there are challenges to do with nostalgia, forgetting and non-disclosure. I draw on current research into post-colonial identities in Tanzania.

I would like to thank Merje Kuus and Garth Myers for suchthoughtful and generous responses to my paper. Their comments,inverydifferentways,bothdrawouttheimplicitchallengerunningthrough my paper, which is the attempt to overcome the domi-nance of western ways of thinking in political geography withoutsliding towards a kind of relativism where everything is of equalimportance (see also Agnew, 2007).Kuus suggests that I see marginality and subalterity as equiva-lent, leading to her argument that marginalityis not a trait but a relationship to power. Our efforts to grasp itsoperation, whether in Denmark, Tanzania or the US, cannot be astraightforwardmatteroflabellingsomeplacesassubalternandothers as hegemonic.Kuus argues that potentially all countries are subaltern in thecurrent system; they just don’t know it yet. Recent debates aroundthe difficulties of states ensuring that multinational corporationspay tax is illustrative of this point: it has recently been discoveredthat tax avoidance by one UK-based companycost Zambia fourteentimes the amount it received in aid from Britain (Boffey, 2013). Butit has also been argued that the tax owed by companies like Star-bucks, Google and Vodaphone to the UK government would elim-inate the need for austerity cuts (Milne, 2012). Argued like thisthen, each state is in a subaltern position relative to systemic po-wer; each matters equally.However, I do not want to entirely equate marginality andsubalterity e they are broadly comparable, as Kuus notes, but notquite the same. While I do want to see both primarily as being in arelationship to power, there is no doubt that, at times, certainplaces are labelled as subaltern, that this representation has con-sequences, but also that it is a location with a certain strategicpolitical agency. Nyerere played up the subalterity of Tanzania,insisting on the importance of unity with other people placedoutside of hegemonic power. And, this is where Tanzania is notjustanother example of a marginal state. Nyerere had a vision thatmade it more significant than the country’s position in otherranked measures might suggest. Post-colonial Tanzania was tryingto do something different, setting a new path not just forTanzanians but to challenge a system where certain states wouldcome todominance. Nyerere’s vision of going beyond societies thatwere defined by religion, colour and ethnicity led to the countrybecoming a beacon of hope for many. But this was a leadership ofmoral authority, not one based around conventional geopolitical oreconomic power.Thus, as I noted in my paper, post-colonial Tanzania sought topush a different world order. Nyerere did not seek to compete withhegemonic powerof any kind, as he explained in an interviewwiththe Kenyan paper, the Daily Nation, in 1968:The big Communist states are as likely to indulge in attempts toinfiltrate societies as the big capitalist states. The major differ-ence which I see at the moment is that the eastern powers arenot yet used to controlling Africans . They don’t assume theyhave the right to ‘give us advice’ in the same wayas some of thelargewesternpowers do.The real truthis thatcapitalismis bynature expansionist. Communism is on the other hand evan-gelical . and Africa has some experience of the things that canfollow evangelism. (quoted in Pratt, 1976: 250).Nyerere sought to create linkages with a variety of lower-orderpowers; politically through pan-Africanism and non-alignment butalso in terms of economic assistance, by going to those Europeanpowers (Norway, Sweden, Denmark.), which, he believed, werenot used to assuming dominance (from this Tanzanianperspective,Denmark did matter). Thus, I do think the Tanzanian case is of in-terest in and of itself. It is not just one marginal state amongstmany, because of what it stood for, and what it attempted to dowithin and beyond its own boundaries.Nyerere’ssubalterngeopoliticswasprojectedthroughanumberof scales. Myers has suggested (in his response to my paper and,more forcefully, in Myers and Muhajir 2013) that the true subalterngeopolitics in Tanzania are expressed in Swahili. Indeed, Nyerereused Swahili to narrate the Tanganyikan, then Tanzanian, nation,and perhaps one day hoped for this to be a language that wouldunite East Africa and beyond. The concepts that Myers explains,alongside the more familiar ujamaa, umoja and uhuru (family-ness,unity and freedom), capture Nyerere’s conceptualisation of adistinctively African form of self-reliant socialism in a way thatthese English translations do not. However, while it is clear that, asMyers explained so convincingly, Nyerere was an exceptionalSwahili orator, this was a performance made in particular spaces,when he was promoting a vision of a country united beyond the

The crisis of representation highlighted by recent postmodern works in the social sciences has exposed the ethnocentric nature of (re)presentations of the world. Although it is recognised that the self-reflexivity which this project introduces has undoubtedly opened up the possibilities for more culturally sensitive work, its rejection of any notion of hierarchy could be read as precluding the deployment of political projects beyond this opening. It is the authors' contention that this need not necessarily be the case, that the postmodern challenge can be met without having to discard a political standpoint. This move is important because the power structures inherent in colonial discourses largely remain in place. Instances are explored where conflicting representations can be brought into collision so that the naturalized assumptions of hegemonic representation can be challenged. This meeting of discourses can facilitate the undermining of certain cultural assumptions in the representative schema which have, until now, remained unquestioned.

Using Žižek's theorisation of power, we analyse the UK Conservative Party's Green Paper on international development, ‘One World Conservatism’ (OWC). We argue that by placing the West's giving of development aid as something beyond politics, on the moral high-ground of self-evident certainty, it acts to deflect attention from critical engagement with the nature of globalisation, power and aid itself, hiding both economic and epistemological violences behind the apparently benevolent act of giving. An analysis of the nature of the green paper demonstrates the ways in which it draws in UK citizens as active subjects complicit with this vision of the world.

Summary The recent ‘culture turn’ in geography has generated a good deal of interest in the structure of scientific knowledge and modes of writing, but there has less attention to the construction of other forms of knowledge and writing. While humanistic and regional geographers have referred to literature on the whole without comment on genre, mode of production or range of consumption, more recent critical geographers have regarded literature as a material artefact which fulfils a role designated by its position in various social and economic processes. This paper critiques both positions as offering a limited vision of the relationship between geography and literature and attempts to offer an engagement with literary fiction which analyses the content and form of the text, but also leaves room for its distinctive voice.

The use of indigenous knowledge has been seen in some quarters to offer real possibilities of success in development practice. However, results have been uneven, perhaps because of the way in which indigenous knowledge has been conceptualised. Drawing on empirical research among two related Bedouin communities in Egypt, the paper suggests that indigenous knowledge is provisional and dynamic and therefore rather less static than implied in much of the literature; it should be seen as utilitarian and grounded, both economically and socio-culturally; and indigenous knowledge as a term may be unhelpful and misleading and would be better expressed as local knowledges. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

A major dilemma in Gender and Development (GAD) work is why it is that sometimes women may feel better off colluding with gendered structures that ensure their continued subordination rather than seeking approaches that will allow them to break free of this. Kandiyoti (1988 Gender and Society 2 274-90) has identified this apparent collusion as 'patriarchal bargains', which offer women greater advantages than they perceive can be achieved by challenging the prevailing order. Such women are therefore reluctant to engage in empowering activities that may challenge their gendered bargain. This paper explains this dilemma in the context of GAD work undertaken with Bedouin women in Southern Egypt.

The language of participation and empowerment has become a convention in urban redevelopment practice. While on first glance there is little to disagree with, a critical literature has emerged around the notion that participation has become a new ‘tyranny’ that, despite its claims, is little more than tokenism. However, it is the contention of this paper that the impacts of participation in community-based urban regeneration projects are complex, usually contested and often contradictory. While an uncritical vocabulary of ‘participation’ has proliferated in both cultural and regeneration policy, the actual practice on the ground reveals significant difficulties which have implications for policy goals of community participation and empowerment, and for the community itself. Rather than seeing it as a problem, or something to be removed as soon as possible from the process, contestation and conflict should be recognised as appropriate reflections of community.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the ways in which changing gender roles in a Bedouin community in Upper Egypt, brought about by settlement over the last 20 years on the shores of Lake Nasser, have impacted on the accumulation and development of indigenous environmental knowledges by Bedouin women. The research was carried out among four groups of Ababda Bedouin in the Eastern Desert of Egypt and involved in-depth monthly conversations carried out over a period of 12 months. The main conclusions of the study are that the women of the study area have had to develop new knowledges which, in some cases, are now different from those held by men because of the different economic circumstances in which many find themselves; that these knowledges are fluid, dynamic and ever-changing with their own internal dynamism; and that socially constructed notions of gender are vital in the development process, notions that are sensitive to both men's and women's interests and their interrelationships.

This paper represents an exploration of the relationships between geographical and fictional literatures. In general, geographers have not made sufficient use of literary sources in their work. In this paper the author goes beyond using literary quotations to provide a ‘feel’ or impression of a region or place, to regard specific texts as containing a ‘voice’ which can speak to the geographies created by academics. This means that geographers can regard fictional literature as offering an alternative account of the processes that they are seeking to describe and explain. After a brief introduction to the current relationship between geography and literature, it is discussed how fiction is used as a source in other disciplines. Finally, the suggested approach to literature is applied to the work of Salman Rushdie, especially to his controversial novel The Satanic Verses.