The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political GeographyEdited by John Agnew, Virginie Mamadouh, Anna Secor and Joanne Sharp. Wiley Blackwell. 2015
The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography aims to account for the intellectual and worldly developments that have taken place in and around political geography in the last 10 years. Bringing together established names in the field as well as new scholars, it highlights provocative theoretical and conceptual debates on political geography from a range of global perspectives. It discusses the latest developments and places increased emphasis on modes of thinking, contested key concepts, and on geopolitics, climate change and terrorism and Explores the influence of the practice-based methods in geography and concepts including postcolonialism, feminist geographies, the notion of the Anthropocene, and new understandings of the role of non-human actors in networks of power
The volume offers an accessible introduction to political geography for those in allied fields including political science, international relations, and sociology.
The thirty-six chapters by 40+ authors based are grouped into four sections 1) Key Concepts in Political Geography 2) Theorizing Political Geography 3) Doing politics 4) Material political geographies, plus a closing section on Dong political geography with a chapter on academic capitalism and the geopolitics of knowledge by Anssi Paasi.
(Virginie Mamadouh)
Borderities and the politics of contemporary mobile borders.
Edited by Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary and Frédéric Goraut. Palgrave. 2015
This book looks at contemporary transformations affecting border spaces, by using the concept of the ‘mobile border’ to examine the growing dissociation between border functions and border locations. The book bears witness to the claim that de/rebordering and de/reterritorialization processes are not equivalent. It questions them through the analysis of ‘borderities,’ a concept built upon a close reading of the writings of Michel Foucault and derived from ‘governmentality.’ ‘Borderity,’ any technology of spatial or socio-spatial division, could be defined as the governmentality of territorial limits. Although initially defined as a technology of power, borderity may also appear as a differentiated social and political quality that individualized regimes of crossing reveal. The contributors examine the production of mobile borders (section 1: technologies), their embodiment (section 2: biopolitics) and their complex interpretation (section 3: ‘dispositifs’). By looking at how political subjects can be disabled and enabled, the proposed ‘borderities’ approach illuminates the question of how borders can be the site of both power and counter-power.
With contributions of Saskia Sassen, Michael Strauss, Sylvain Guyot, Jouni Häkli, Gabriel Popescu, Nicolas Lambert, Olivier Clochard, Chiara Brambilla, Thomas Hendriks, Adriana Dorfman, Olivier Walther, Denis Retaillé, Sarah Mekdjian, Luiza Bialasiewicz, Paolo Cuttitta, and Ariane Littman.
(Anne-Laure Amilhat Szary)
Borderscaping: Imaginations and Practices of Border Making
Edited by Chiara Brambilla, Jussi Laine, James W. Scott & Gianluca Bocchi, Ashgate, 2015
Using the borderscapes concept, this book offers an approach to border studies that expresses the multilevel complexity of borders, from the geopolitical to social practice and cultural production at and across the border. Accordingly, it encourages a productive understanding of the processual, de-territorialized and dispersed nature of borders and their ensuring regimes in the era of globalization and transnational flows as well as showcasing border research as an interdisciplinary field with its own academic standing.
Contemporary bordering processes and practices are examined through the borderscapes lens to uncover important connections between borders as a ‘challenge’ to national (and EU) policies and borders as potential elements of political innovation through conceptual (re-)framings of social, political, economic and cultural spaces. The authors offer a nuanced and critical re-reading and understanding of the border not as an entity to be taken for granted, but as a place of investigation and as a resource in terms of the construction of novel (geo)political imaginations, social and spatial imaginaries and cultural images. In so doing, they suggest that rethinking borders means deconstructing the interweaving between political practices of inclusion-exclusion and the images created to support and communicate them on the cultural level by Western territorialist modernity. The result is a book that proposes a wandering through a constellation of bordering policies, discourses, practices and images to open new possibilities for thinking, mapping, acting and living borders under contemporary globalization. (Source: http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781472451460)
(Jussi Laine)
Diplomatic Cultures and International Politics: Translations, Spaces and Alternatives
Edited by Jason Dittmer, Fiona McConnell, Routledge, 2016
This volume offers an inter-disciplinary and critical analysis of the role of culture in diplomatic practice. If diplomacy is understood as the practice of conducting negotiations between representatives of distinct communities or causes, then questions of culture and the spaces of cultural exchange are at its core. But what of the culture of diplomacy itself? When and how did this culture emerge, and what alternative cultures of diplomacy run parallel to it, both historically and today? How do particular spaces and places inform and shape the articulation of diplomatic culture(s)? This volume addresses these questions by bringing together a collection of theoretically rich and empirically detailed contributions from leading scholars in history, international relations, geography, and literary theory. Chapters attend to cross-cutting issues of the translation of diplomatic cultures, the role of space in diplomatic exchange and the diversity of diplomatic cultures beyond the formal state system. Drawing on a range of methodological approaches the contributors discuss empirical cases ranging from indigenous diplomacies of the Inuit Circumpolar Council, to the European External Action Service, the 1955 Bandung Conference, the spatial imaginaries of mid twentieth-century Balkan writer diplomats, celebrity and missionary diplomacy, and paradiplomatic narratives of The Hague. The volume demonstrates that, when approached from multiple disciplinary perspectives and understood as expansive and plural, diplomatic cultures offer an important lens onto issues as diverse as global governance, sovereignty regimes and geographical imaginations.
(Fiona McConnell)
A. Cattaruzza, Atlas des Guerres et des Conflits: un Tour du Monde Géopolitique, Autrement, 2014, 96 pages, ISBN: 978-2-7467-3558-3
anna.casaglia@unimib.it
