What kind of critical geography for what kind of politics

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View Full Size. The focus then passed back to Korea and after 2 short presentations Park, Sang-Hun Lee there was a very informative discussion of the complicated issue of the reunification of Korea.

The final session picked up the theme of the politics of critical geography and of a tempered optimism. The rest of his talk explored ways of pulling together a critical geography that is simultaneously broad, ambitious and able to conceive of radically different political futures.

In addition to our nightly pilgrimage to the bars in the village outside the campus gates, the evenings were filled by absorbing cultural presentations. The poet Bud Osborn read a long, intense poem he prepared for the conference, touching on the destitution of life for many himself included on the streets of Downtown Eastside Vancouver.

He connected with Korean themes and Korean poetry, and was backed up by a student rock band with which he had become acquainted. On another warm evening, we were treated to traditional Korean dance under the stars, a tremendous performance.

The conference officially concluded with field trips to the US military base on the outskirts of Taegu and to a huge industrial complex in the city. There were many differences of opinion and politics at Taegu but the sense of a broadly unified purpose was overwhelming. All of the attendees seemed to come away with an exhilarating sense that the ICG has already achieved some modest successes and established itself as a venue where the discussion starts from a sophisticated mix of political assumptions.

The combination of wide international involvement and a critical politics is powerful and hopeful. The debates were invigorating but we were collectively more optimistic than many of us have felt in recent years — more optimistic that fundamental political change can be made to happen. You are commenting using your WordPress.

You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. However, by adopting an Inuit perspective of territory that rejects nation-state delineation of the global space, critical geographers can offer alternative definitions of territory and provide more accurate representations. The Inuit represent only a small segment of the total population of residents within an individual state — for example, only 0.

But, when thinking about how Arctic sea ice loss due to climate change affects the total numbers of Inuit across each of the five nation states by defining territory as consisting of cultural commonality rather than state boundaries, a much spatially larger picture emerges Huntington The loss of ice endangers the economic and cultural livelihoods of the Inuit, as it affects hunting activities and puts coastal villages at risk of erosion and flooding.

When viewed from this perspective, the security risk to the wellbeing of people right across such a large area of the globe appears much more prominent than that afforded by most other IR theories. When scholars adopt traditional spatial definitions, they over-simplify the global space and, as we can see in this example, oversimplify the geographic extent of threats to human security.

Furthermore, when scholars define space as existing solely of independent states, it limits the examination of the impacts of environmental disaster to simple comparisons between two or more nations, such as between Canada and United States.

This undermines differences in the severity of impacts of natural disasters within particular regions of the world. Moreover, this traditional method of analysis also overlooks how the human security threats posed by environmental disasters are not evenly spread within individual state territories. For example, it downplays the fact that the Inuit living in Alaska are at risk of far greater disruption from the effects of melting sea ice than people living in other areas of the United States.

It also downplays how coastal communities within Alaska are at a greater risk from the devastation caused by flooding and erosion than communities located within the interior of the state. Inuit understandings of territorial space can also provide scholars with an alternative tool to make assessments of international political action taken to mitigate the impacts of global environmental change.

Critical geographers contend that traditional analyses of patterns of international political activity are prone to focus on actions taken by formal institutions, like the United Nations, that use a nation-state means of political representation — but stress that this places limits on our appreciation of the wider forms of political action that have been taken to mitigate climate change.

For example, the majority of the scholarly analyses of the International Panel on Climate Change IPCC in Copenhagen in Denmark in described how opinions of state representatives regarding action on climate change and emission on greenhouse gases fell into three camps that consisted of: 1 North America and Europe, whose past industrial activities contributed to most of the problems of climate change, 2 industrialising countries such as the BRICS nations, which tended to see no alternative to carbon emissions as a means to fuel economic growth, and 3 poorer countries, which were more likely to disagree to changes on the basis that development and poverty alleviation represented more pressing goals Meena However, this mode of analysis is based on divisions of territory defined by tiers of industrial development and ignores differences in influential capacities across and within nations grouped within each tier — for example, between Brazil and China, or between large segments of the South African population.

Over-simplistic ways of thinking about the international political space lead to a lack of consideration for alternative forms of political action, particularly action that takes place outside formal international political institutions including that taken by indigenous organisations, whose spheres of representation and governance transcend nation state boundaries.

For example, the Inuit are members of the Arctic Council, which is an international governmental organisation that addresses issues faced by Arctic governments and indigenous people. The Inuit take prominent decision-making roles in the Council rather than having their participation restricted to mere observer status — as at the United Nations climate summits. The decisions the Inuit take are based upon their sense of commonality that transcends state boundaries.

Because of their influence in the Arctic Council they have been able to achieve success in fostering a culture of collective governance on environmental management by seeking discussion and resolution of a matter of common concern to all Inuit. However, despite the success of Inuit representation in the Arctic Council, the vast majority of indigenous governmental bodies continue to fall outside the formal political representational structure in larger international climate change negotiations.

It is on this basis that the state system of representation within the United Nations climate summits can be argued to further marginalise indigenous groups like the Inuit.

As representation is afforded on the basis of state territory rather than Inuit conceptions of territory it reinforces the decision- making power of the former colonial governments, enabling them to exercise greater control over international affairs, which hinders Inuit self-determination efforts.

The power of the Inuit to shape international political decision-making risks becoming further marginalised if IR scholarship does not critically question nation-state ideas about territory and representation. By bringing alternative conceptualisations of territory to the foreground, critical geography opens up a space for recognising and exploring alternative modes of representation that reduce inequality between indigenous people and state governments.

The environment is the ultimate source of human sustenance; people have created places to realize that potential; and a spatial structure—nodes, routes, surfaces and bounded territories—has been erected within which human interactions are organised.

Resolution of all but the smallest scale of those conflicts requires a body that is independent of the actors involved and can ensure that agreements are reached and then implemented.

Such a body is the state, a territorially bounded apparatus that, through the operation of territoriality strategies, can ensure conflict resolution among its citizenry and thereby resolve environmental problems. Tackling them requires inter-state co-operation, at a global scale, but the absence of a super-national body with the power to require actions by individual states is a major constraint to problem resolution. The Geography of Diplomacy. The fields of geography and diplomacy have traditionally been closely intertwined.

Diplomacy is conventionally the conduct of statecraft in the nonviolent manifestations of external relations by a specific institution. These nonviolent manifestations can be variously merged with the use of armed force.

The political order of the system of states—statecraft emanates from its separate entities—is deeply permeated by geography, notably by the application of territorial control. The art of diplomacy is inextricably linked to spatial perceptions, aims at place-based assets, and plays out in a given geographical context. As the system of states has evolved by incremental increase, functional cooperation, fragmentations and mergers, and internal centralization and decentralization of separate states, the diplomatic institution has had to adapt.

As more and more non-state parties commit themselves to transboundary relations or find themselves so implicated, diplomatic practice becomes more widely required, the core of the diplomatic institution still settled in the apparatus of states. This article is consecutively concerned with different aspects of the overlap of geography and diplomacy. In the introduction the ways in which academic geographers have over time shed light on this common ground is briefly reviewed.

The next section provides an inventory of the mappings of the diplomatic web to get a sense of its general cartography, followed by descriptions of the diplomatic niche, the places where diplomacy is practiced. In the diplomatic worldview and the geographic frame, the geographic notions that are relevant to the diplomatic institution are followed according to reasoning and travel practice. Finally, shifts in the practice, contents, and functions of diplomacy are dealt with over time, based on the major geographical forces that affect the system of states in and beyond which diplomacy operates.

The Geography of Resource Wars. The other set of perspectives originates from political science and development economics studies, and is based on the assumption that the significance of resources in wars is largely rooted in questions of resource scarcity, abundance, or dependence. The Geography of World Cities. World cities are a product of the globalization of economic activity that has characterized post-World War II capitalism, and exhibit characteristics previously found in primate cities but with influence extending far beyond the range of the metropolitan state.

The potential for both human development advantage and disadvantage is historically unprecedented in these new and highly interconnected urban amalgams. In general, human settlement systems are usually understood to include the systemic regularized ways in which settlements hamlets, villages, towns, cities are linked with one another by trade and other kinds of human interaction.

The resulting models served to illustrate the importance of the interactions between specific geographic location, population concentrations, and economic activity. But given the development of world cities, there is the relationship between the size of settlements and political power in intergroup relations to consider.

The spatial aspect of population density is, after all, one of the most fundamental variables for understanding the constraints and possibilities of human social organization. Geography, Territory, and Conflict. Traditional, structural theories of international relations may have eschewed the importance of geography and territory to understanding international conflict, but the past 50 years of quantitative scholarship have returned geography and territory to the fore of the discipline.

The importance of geography and territory to the study of international conflict first emerged in the discipline of political geography and the early foundations of peace science. Subsequent empirical analyses demonstrated a robust connection between geography, particularly disputed territory, and all phases of inter-state conflict.

Explanations for this robust relationship emerged concurrent to the empirical findings. The theoretical arguments are eclectic and focus on territoriality as human instinct, the tangible and intangible value of territory, and whether conflict over territory conforms well to implications from the bargaining framework.

Though traditionally the domain of inter-state conflict scholars, civil conflict scholarship has greatly informed this research program on geography, territory, and conflict by expanding and enriching its theoretical arguments and empirical implications. Global and Regional Cooperation on Migration. The problem of international migration is that global cooperation is somewhat rare. If international cooperation is to develop, then it will depend on states; but effective cooperation would also impose real constraints on states.

Moreover, as states and their borders give meaning to international migration, it follows that the development, consolidation, and transformation of the state system is a key factor determining the possibilities for the global and regional governance of migration to develop.

Existing forms of regional integration and their migration provisions as well as regional consultation processes RCPs can serve as a mechanism for intraregional communication, the sharing of knowledge, and for the dissemination of policy ideas and practices. It is the only international organization with the power and capacity to make and implement laws through its own institutional system that must be implemented by member states.

The EU moreover has a highly developed system of internal free movement for nationals of its own states and has developed a border-free travel area for participating states.