Analytical Entry Research Articles

Beyond the hype: Digital transformations in global land, housing, and property

This theme issue investigates how 21st-century digital innovations are changing the nature and value of land, housing, and property. Contributors bring together an array of cases to understand how digitization is remaking land and housing on a global scale and, in turn, how existing property relations structure digital transformations in particular geographies. In this introduction to the theme issue, we outline how hype can be used as an analytical entry point to characterize the collection’s contribution, demonstrating how hype elides unequal relations of land and labor while stoking speculation in immovable property, even as it creates new markets for less tangible assets—whether rental data or virtual plots—that usher in new global connections and familiar market dynamics.

Dismantling the anti-politics machine in aid: political mētis and its limits

ABSTRACT In a recent article in NPE, Rajesh Venugopal (2022. Can the anti-politics machine be dismantled? New political economy, 1–15) concluded that the anti-politics machine was still in operation. He argued that development planners held a cognitive divide between the realm of political dynamics – an unknowable terra incognita – and the realm of operational technical knowledge. This article revisits and expands that argument. It takes a particular kind of adaptive project as an analytical entry point, arguing that their focus on political practice reimagines the ontology of politics as a kind of expert mētis which is situated, relational and emergent. Such projects hold out hope that the anti-politics machine can be dismantled by displacing the cognitive frames of the development planner from the centre stage and emphasising political practice during implementation. However, shifting attention to implementation reveals other elements of the anti-politics machine’s operation. Drawing on interviews with policy advocates, the article shows that the anti-politics machine does not simply work through the cognition of the planner: it also acts through bureaucratic resistance to political practice during project implementation, produced through operational, accountability and financing processes that shackle practice, particularly in spaces with heterogeneous interests and values.

The territorialisation of industry in times of transition: ecosystems, infrastructures and hubs in the green hydrogen sector

ABSTRACT Current evolutions of the relationships between industry and the state associate explicit objectives of industrial transformations for ecological reasons, a growing interest in sovereignty-driven interventions in industry, and the linkage of industrial development to social concerns. This paper examines these evolutions by analysing the territorial inscription of industry, its practical manifestation and its consequences. We speak of styles of territorialisation of industry to characterise the articulation of three components: the construction of an industrial sector, the design and use of policy instruments, and the material consequences of spatial interventions. Using the example of the nascent green hydrogen sector in France, we contrast three styles of territorialisation, which we label ‘ecosystems’, ‘planned infrastructures’, and ‘hubs’. Each of them encompasses visions of the relationships between public and private actors, faces tensions and frictions, and has inevitable exclusion effects. We contend that the study of styles of territorialisation is a productive analytical entry point for understanding the politics of transition.

Curated Power: The Performative Politics of (Industry) Events

Abstract Since the turn of the millennium, there has been an increased interest in the social performance of power in international political sociology. At the same time, recent years have seen the growing popularity of event ethnographic research approaches. In this article, we develop the concept of “curated power” as a tool to explore the performative enactment of power at and through conferences and events. A focus on curated power, we argue, can orient scholars of performative power toward conferences and events as an analytical entry point, and orient event ethnographic approaches toward the performance of classed, gendered, and racialized hierarchies as a central research concern. To develop these points, and to illustrate the analytical purchase of the concept, we provide a concrete example of its application by analyzing the performative enactment of social hierarchies at industry events in two alternative financial subsectors: FinTech and Islamic finance. In both sectors, we show that curated power can provide a situated and nuanced understanding of why and how corporate efforts to change finance for the better—whether on the basis of religious principles or advanced technological capabilities—often remain complicit in perpetuating classed, gendered, and racialized hierarchies.

State, capitalism and infrastructure-led development: A multi-scalar analysis of the Belgrade-Budapest railway construction

The 2008 financial crisis allowed for the rising power of China to expand deeper into more (semi-)peripheral regions: in the past decade, the role of China and Chinese SOEs has increased markedly in Eastern Europe. This has been in step with China's geopolitical and geoeconomic expansion, hallmarked by the Belt and Road Initiative; the reconstruction of the Belgrade-Budapest railway line constitutes one of its flagship projects in Europe. This paper aims to explore the complexities of the current reconfiguration of state-capital nexus through an empirical analysis of this particular development project; in doing so, we hope to contribute to the scholarly debate about the heuristic use of ‘new’ state capitalism in three specific ways. First, instead of conceptualizing the state as a territorially confined power container, we propose to scrutinize the state-capital nexus from a multi-scalar and relational perspective. Second, we claim that the study of funding, financing and governing of large-scale infrastructural investments is a fruitful analytical entry point to theorize the changing relations between ‘state’ and ‘capital’. Finally, we argue that from the perspective of contemporary shifts in global power structures, the emergence of state capitalist modalities in the Eastern peripheries of Europe should be understood as a ‘co-production’ of the geopolitical rivalry and elite capture of domains of infrastructure. In terms of methodology, in order to show how state-capital relations are produced, enacted and redrawn, the study builds on the analysis of media sources, policy documents, company networks, semi-structured interviews, and non-participant observations.

Zoonotic urbanisation: multispecies urbanism and the rescaling of urban epidemiology

A focus on zoonotic urbanisation challenges existing conceptions of global urbanism. In this article I consider how a modified urban political ecology framework might help to illuminate emerging landscapes of epidemiological risk. I show how a multi-scalar perspective on urban epidemiology, including the impact of colonialism, global capitalism, and changing relations with non-human others, unsettles existing analytical approaches. I contrast resilience-oriented public health paradigms, focused on the malleability of nature, with a historically grounded set of insights into global environmental change. I suggest that the conceptual field of zoonotic urbanisation provides an analytical entry point for understanding an emergent ‘triple crisis’ spanning climate change, biodiversity loss, and global health threats.

Propostas (in)convenientes: transpassando a opacidade do discurso sobre a educação financeira na escola

This paper seeks to present an interpretative gesture on the intersections and direc-tions of private discourse, conveyed by Cooperative Credit System (Sicredi), and public discourse, conveyed by the Ministry of Education, about financial education at school, explaining the effects of meaning produced in/by the proposals in both segments (private and public). To this end, we re-sorted to the theoretical and analytical device of Discourse Analysis, henceforth AD, of the French line, through which we proposed two analytical entries: first, an image present in an intervention of the Sicredi aimed at teachers and, secondly, images related to posts on the Instagram page of the Ministry of Education of Brazil (@mineducação).

Playing a tyrant – rethinking an autocrat in Asya Voloshina's Antigona: Redukciia

Written by Russian playwright Asya Voloshina, the 2013 Antigona : Redukciia is, as the author herself refers to it, 'a political satire with elements of poetry and reduction', which recasts Sophocles' title character, Antigone, from an existentialist tragic figure to a political rebel, whose actions of protest become inevitably and ironically performative in the highly mediatised culture of social media influencers and performative post-truth. A radical juxtaposition between the individual and the state, Voloshina's play exhibits deep internal connections with Bertolt Brecht's Die Antigone des Sophokles (1948), which serves as its contextual and analytical entry point. Like Brecht, I argue, Voloshina interprets the tragic conflict of Sophocles' Antigone as highly pragmatic. In her acknowledgement of Antigone's new reality – which simultaneously reminds of George Orwell's 1984 and Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games – Voloshina challenges the premise of the 20th century political tragedy. Her Antigone stands to combat the state-based machine of manipulation with her personal truth. She 'is motivated neither by religion nor by kinship'; for her Creon's law is 'simply a pretext to protest against her country turning into a totalitarian state' (SYSKA 2022: 4); and so eventually she is cancelled out from the history and from the myth. I conclude that Brecht's and Voloshina's plays connect the two centuries together, diagnose their respective dark times, and demonstrate that the cultures of populism produce corrupt moral standards, compromise personal dignity, and cultivate post-truth, all channeled through the role of an autocratic, if not tyrannic, state leader.

Incorporation of urban differences in Tokyo, Mexico City, and Los Angeles

Reinvestment and intensification are common processes in many urban areas across the world. These transformations are often analyzed with concepts such as ‘urban regeneration’, ‘urban renaissance’, or ‘gentrification’. However, in analyzing Shimokitazawa (Tokyo), Centro Histórico (Mexico City), and Downtown Los Angeles, we realized that these concepts do not fully grasp the qualitative changes of everyday life and the contradictory character of the urbanization processes we observed. They do not take into consideration the far-reaching effects of these processes, and particularly do not address the underlying key question: how is urban value produced? Therefore, we have chosen a different analytical entry point to these transformations, by focusing on the production, reproduction, and incorporation of the intrinsic qualities of the urban. We found Lefebvre’s concept of ‘urban differences’ and Williams’ concept of ‘incorporation’ particularly useful for analyzing our empirical results. In this contribution, we compare the ‘incorporation of urban differences’ in the three case study areas and offer this concept for further discussions and applications.

Entry Guidance Based on Analytical Trajectory Solutions

Analytical entry guidance is designed to control the atmospheric gliding of a hypersonic glider. The guidance uses only approximate analytical solutions for a 3-D hypersonic gliding trajectory to fast plan reference trajectory onboard and thus has an extremely high computational efficiency. To reduce the amount of calculation, the adopted analytical solutions are improved first such that their coefficients depend only on generalized flight states. As the coupling of longitudinal and lateral dynamical equations is fully considered, the analytical solutions are of high accuracy but complicated, which consist of zeroth-and first-order solutions. To resolve the resulting difficulty of trajectory planning, an efficient scheme is proposed. In the first guidance cycle of steady glide, the scheme uses only the zeroth-order solutions to plan a trajectory rapidly. In the subsequent guidance cycles, the scheme first uses some profiles obtained from the previously planned trajectory to specify part of the coefficients of the zeroth-and first-order solutions in order to offset the impact of the equations coupling and then utilizes the complete solutions to update the trajectory by proposing a method based on a virtual endpoint of glide and virtual terminal crossrange, which can achieve a very small terminal heading error. The superiority of the guidance is demonstrated by conducting Monte-Carlo simulations.

Politics of internationalisation and the migration-higher education nexus

ABSTRACT Taking the migration-higher education nexus as an analytical entry point, we address the question: How can we account for different internationalisation outcomes? We focus on three actors involved in the global race to internationalise higher education activities: higher education institutions (HEIs), states, and migrants. We argue that the migration-higher education nexus enables us to begin describing and explaining differences in internationalisation outcomes (i.e. greater, limited, or none) by focussing our empirical attention on the interaction between HEI internationalisation strategies, state policies, and migrant agency to move/stay. We delineate various configurations of these interactions and how they determine internationalisation outcomes.

Reproductive Justice: Impulse für intersektionale Bevölkerungsgeographien

Abstract. Black women are three to four times more likely to die during childbirth than white women. Research in population geography and demography highlight factors such as educational background or access to health services as social determinants of fertility, to better understand these reproductive inequalities. Notwithstanding these determinants are key causes for reproductive outcomes, the question of how these determinants are embedded in global power relations remains mainly unresolved. As a feminist science intervention, this article develops two impetuses for a power-sensitive, intersectional knowledge production in the field of population geographies. Therefore, the article cursorily refers to current activist protests in the name of reproductive justice, a concept developed by black feminists in the US. It argues that a multi-scalar analysis of reproductive relations helps to shift the focus from the demographic question „who is born?“ to „how are life chances unevenly distributed?“. Reproductive justice suggests that smaller scales such as the body or the womb constitute helpful analytical entry points to disentangle the powerful webs, within which reproductive outcomes are embedded. Finally, the article outlines a future research design towards geographies of reproductive justice.

The Circulation of Evaluative Information

Given ongoing changes in the social structuration of evaluation, the circulation of evaluative information is becoming an increasingly important factor in the production of constitutive effects of evaluation. There is power in the circulation of evaluative information, and therefore also power in attempts to regulate or curb it. Based on one case exemplifying massive circulation of evaluative information (Google Scholar), and one with very limited circulation (workplace assessments), we show how infrastructure, interests and institutional rules are useful analytical entry points into studies of circulation. The paper proposes a new theoretical and empirical attention to circulation of evaluative information as a fragile and contested phenomenon.

The Making of Everyman’s Capitalism in Sweden: Micro-Infrastructures, Unlearning, and Moral Boundary Work

This article analyzes the so-called turn to the market in Sweden, with an emphasis on aspects that are typically absent from large-scale narratives. How did the changes known as neoliberalization and financialization enter everyday life and mundane financial practices? And which analytical tools can historians use to meaningfully connect the experience of changes on the micro level to those on the macro level? Zooming in on the the year 1979 and focusing on two empirical cases—the popularization of stock saving and the domestication of consumer credit—allows us to elaborate and apply a set of analytical entry points about (1) mundane micro-infrastructures, (2) financial knowledge as learning and unlearning, and (3) moral boundary work. This framework offers a way of exploring when and in what ways new financial practices were experienced and eventually embraced by those who had previously been skeptical or even hostile. It also reveals the role played by actors and institutions not typically seen as agents of marketization.

Working for Protection? Precarious Legal Inclusion of Afghan Nationals in Germany and Switzerland

AbstractThis paper engages with the violent conditions deriving from neoliberal trends in European migration and asylum governance. We explore how continuous precarity, in conjunction with an integration imperative, affects the lives of recently arrived Afghan refugees in Germany and Switzerland. Drawing on critical engagements with the politics of integration and theories of violence, we argue that, in both European countries, Afghans are increasingly forced to earn their right to remain on the basis of labour‐market performance instead of obtaining humanitarian protection. Based on qualitative interview data, we show that persons with a precarious legal status are urged to fulfil neoliberal integration requirements to avoid being deported to their country of citizenship. Employing the “continuum of violence” as an analytical entry point, we specify how the interplay and consequences of structural and cultural violence manifest in the way those affected navigate precarious living conditions and uncertain futures in receiving countries.

A matter of time: Explicating temporality in science and technology studies and Bergen’s car-free zone development

In their article on ‘sociotechnical matters’, Hess and Sovacool (2020) draw on extant STS scholarship to unpack ‘the black box’ of sociotechnical contributions to social science studies of energy. Notably absent in their synthesis is explicit attention to temporality and to the impact of temporal dimensions on the politics of material change. We argue that temporality is a key analytical entry point to unpack how energy infrastructure changes. Using the case of transitions to low-carbon mobility in urban transport in Bergen, Norway, we highlight how attention to temporality enables us to not only understand and explain, but also engage with and influence, changes in sociotechnical matters. Empirically, we deconstruct the ongoing development of car-free zones in Bergen's suburban spaces, and show how the temporal organisation of events is a key constraint in the project. Car-free zone planning occurs within a continuously evolving context, with trade-offs between requisite time to build sufficient knowledge, fast-approaching project deadlines, and the timing of parallel synergistic processes. An analytical appreciation of the significance of time in setting and swaying the politics of material change is, we argue, instrumental to both unpacking the black box of sociotechnical matters and to informing and impacting change.

Revisiting the local turn in peacebuilding – through the emerging urban approach

In this article, we revisit the ‘local turn’ debate in the peacebuilding literature, and explore its most recent and promising approach to ‘the local’, focussing on post-war cities and on urban dimensions of peacebuilding. There is still substantive contestation and frustration in the peacebuilding research field with regards to the conceptual fuzziness of ‘the local’, and with the continual failures of international interventions to actually take into account local perspectives, promote local agency and establish local ownership. In this article, we explore to what extent recent urban approaches to peacebuilding can help alleviate some of the conceptual problems that has persisted in the literature. We reflect on and raise questions about what a focus on cities and urban perspectives is contributing to the study of local peacebuilding more specifically. We suggest three facets of analytical added value: (1) an increased understanding of how the particularities of urban and rural space affects peacebuilding locally and potentially beyond; (2) how cities and urban space are interrelated with traditional territoriality; and (3) the methodological benefits of the city/urban as (local) analytical entry point. We also discuss potential pitfalls and limitations of urban approaches to peacebuilding, and identify prospective pathways for further research.

Struggling against land loss: Environmental (in)justice and the geography of emerging rights

Due to anthropogenic climate change and the ongoing integration of agriculture into the world market economy, access to arable and habitable land has become an urgent issue within current transnational debates on environmental (in)justice. In particular, the emerging calls for ‘food sovereignty’ (FS) and ‘migrate with dignity’ (MWD) show how most vulnerable groups from the Global South, i.e. small-scale farmers and inhabitants of small Pacific islands, respond to deteriorating environments by claiming universal and emancipatory rights ‘from below’. These contestations show that the struggle over land is tied not only to the potential loss of physical resources but also to the struggle over cultural and political sovereignty, as well as to the emergence of post-national forms of citizenship. In drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Bolivia and Kiribati, where these claims – FS in the former case, MWD in the latter – are currently being negotiated and fought over, this contribution aims to sketch a ‘geography of emerging rights' to make transnational politico-legal responses to environmental injustice visible and understandable. Conceptually, it draws on the assumption that, by now, environmental justice research has paid too little attention to the sphere of 'the legal', and that conversely, legal geography research has been reluctant to analyze dimensions of law and social order within deteriorating environments. This contribution thus discusses analytical entry points from legal geography, legal anthropology, and political theory in order to bring these disciplines into dialogue with empirically grounded research on movements struggling for land and sovereignty.

Ayahuasca and Arabidopsis: The Philosopher Plant and the Scientist’s Specimen

ABSTRACT Moving among the laboratory, the Brazilian Amazon, and herbaria, this article cultivates a theoretical grafting of phytocommunicable strategies that stem from human interactions with ayahuasca and Arabidopsis, two plants that appear – at least geographically – worlds apart. Ayahuasca, a psychedelic Amazonian vine, represents the ‘Philosopher Plant’, guiding imbibers to greater self-knowledge and facilitating embodiment across species divides. It also links Amazonian indigenous claims to land and political sovereignty through cultural patrimony. Arabidopsis, also known as the ‘Botanical Drosophila’ and ‘rat-plant’ for its role as an experimental organism, is a ‘scientist’s specimen’ in laboratory research. These two plants demonstrate different ways that humans think, interact and communicate with or about plants, shaping and shaped by different conceptions of ‘the human’ in relation to other organisms. I take a ‘rhizomatic’ approach to provide multiple modes of analytical entry to phytocommunicable models, arguing for a cross-pollination of ideas in fertilising futures of human-plant collaborative survival.

Machinery of Male Violence: Embodied Properties and Chronic Crisis amongst Partners in Vietnam

This article takes the notion of crisis as a helpful analytical entry point to unfold the tem- poralities and modalities of the machinery of violence as manifested in men’s abuse of their female partners in Vietnam. Based on ethnographic research I conducted over the years, the article argues that some types of crises might be episodic, and thus a bracketing of daily life, while others, such as intimate partner violence, might settle as a crisis of chronicity; as a condition of prolonged difficulties and pain that surreptitiously becomes a new ‘normal’. The machinery of violence, the article shows, refers to processes of symbolic and material transformations of a targeted woman, shaped in accordance with a perpetra- tor’s essentialist imaginations about her embodied properties (e.g., gender, sexuality, age, ethnicity, and bodyableness). Such violence is invigorated by a patrilineal organization of society and a systemic permissiveness to male-to-female abuse. A battered woman is con- fined to an interregnum; a space in which the laws of protection do not apply and male violence is perpetrated with impunity. Yet, men’s violence against their female partners also is combatted and resisted in Vietnamese society.