‘power’ and politics in human geography

Abstract

Power is an all-pervasive concept in contemporary human geography. In particular, following widespread concern with the limiting effects of a focus on the state, power would probably, space or place aside, be many political geographers' candidate for their key concept, if they had to name one. Yet, as Allen (2003) points out, while it is ubiquitously invoked in human geography, the concept does not often receive the degree of examination and elaboration that we might expect. Concern about the effects of unequal power relationships motivate much research and debate, yet at the same time theories of power tend not to take centre-stage. Where they do, it is often in the course of the discussion of particular theorists such as Foucault or Latour, or in the context of reviewing debates in urban politics. Where, as in a textbook, some explanation of the concept seems desirable for student readers, the resulting definition or discussion is not always carried forward in an explicit way in the remainder of the text. There are at least two important exceptions (Pile and Keith, 1997; Sharp et al., 2000a). These focused forays into questioning and debating power and space have, however, remained important isolated examples rather than feeding into or informing in an explicit way the majority of invocations of the concept in the discipline. Part of the explanation for this may be that 'power' is such a ubiquitous term outside the academy, as well as within, that it is easily deployed unglossed in a variety of contexts in ways that make perfect sense to the reader at the time and in those particular contexts. Other potentially difficult terms, such as 'justice', 'democracy', 'the state', 'ideology' and so on, are often similarly used with apparent clarity without the need for theoretical elaboration at every point. Moreover, it is possible that 'power', like, at times, some of these other words, is easily digested in most of the contexts where it is used because it is not, after all, really the centre of attention1 In some circumstances it has the role of telling us that some set of, (e.g. economic or cultural), processes or relations being examined have political consequences, an important function in terms of any project of constructing a critical economic or cultural geography. In others the term serves to place a general emphasis on the necessarily political nature of the critical human geographic project in general, as in comments to the effect that space is 'thoroughly imbued with', 'saturated with' or 'constituted in and through' power relationships. It is important in these ways in emphasizing political (as opposed to merely scholarly or theoretical) commitments, or in the construction of human geography as an ongoing, but varied, set of political projects. But because it is not analytically central in many of the contexts where it is thus invoked, other concepts are often performing most of the political 'work'. Moreover, as Allen (2003) attests, foregrounding power, defining it, mediating between very different theorizations and commonsense understandings of the word, let alone linking it effectively with other concepts in the context of theory building and research, opens up some very difficult questions indeed. So, given that we commonly seem to get along nicely without opening these up, a preliminary question to raise may be whether we need to actually talk about power in a conceptually explicit way at all, or whether we should treat it, as it sometimes is, as a useful supplementary term that points to wider political implications or consequences. The collection edited by Herod and Wright (2002) raises this question fairly starkly. Entitled Geographies of Power: Placing Scale, it comprises a series of chapters concerning scale, space, place and globalization in which there are many important arguments and insights. Despite the title, however, none of the chapters foregrounds 'power' as a central object of analysis. Only Kathy Gibson-Graham discusses theories of power at any length (pp. 50-51), but in the context of an article concerned largely with discourses of place, space and scale, on the one hand, and their links to a discourse about social life as homogeneously capitalist, on the other. Kevin Cox mentions state power (pp. 89, 104) and state authority (p. 104), in the context of a critique of regulation theory, but