Spatialities of Hunger: Post-National Spaces, Assemblages and Fragmenting Liabilities

Abstract

This contribution addresses the casual structure and spatialities of food insecurity. Drawing from scholarly debates on periphery, I illustrate the limited explanatory range of state-centered periphery-approaches in order to comprehend the recent constellations of conflict and hunger. I argue that increasingly dynamic and post-national spaces of food insecurity emerge. Due to complex power geometries, these spaces are driven by realigning and territorially-stretched arrangements of action (e.g. global producer-consumer relations), by technologically enhanced new temporal configurations (e.g. speculation and high frequency trade in food), by the performances of metrics (e.g. models of food price and value-constructions shaping food security), and by the reflexive effects of knowledge production. In order to comprehend these dynamics, concepts capable of capturing new assemblages are required.