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doi: 10.1068/d160509pmid: N/A
In this paper I examine the process through which different claims to ‘development’ and ‘sustainability’ were made during a recent public inquiry into an application for a coastal superquarry at Lingerbay, Isle of Harris. On the one hand, a modernist discourse of sustainable development was claimed by a corporation which attempted to frame the debate in terms of jobs versus environment, exploiting rhetorically a difference between islander and incomer. Sustainable development here became the front for an extension of corporate interest and private property. On the other hand, members of the local community drew on historically resilient symbols of collective identity, crofting, the Gaidhealtacht, and observance of the Sabbath, to claim an alternative discourse of sustainability.
doi: 10.1068/d160533pmid: N/A
Democracy is associated with particular kinds of spatialities. In this paper I address two aspects of the spatiality of democracy through an assessment of transitional arrangements for local government in South African cities. Political identities, as well as spatial arrangements, involved in democratic politics are associated with instability, uncertainty, and ongoing contestation. In democracies, the contestation both of identities and of spaces is institutionalised and this implies the generalisation of particular spatialities. Drawing on a spatially informed interpretation of the work of Ernest Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, I argue that the transitional phase in the emergence of democracy in South Africa has involved the growth of a democratic culture—even in situations where substantial compromises have been made to keep recalcitrant white interests on board. I question the assertion of a nonracial politics which seeks to erase the possibility of ethnically based political identities and argue that the failure of the left to hegemonise their perspective of a nonracial political project and a nonracial postapartheid city may have ironically assisted in extending the possibilities for democracy. A key conclusion is that democracies are associated with different spatialities which facilitate contestation and representation. A politics of space, given the radical undecidability of spatial boundaries, is supportive of the extension of democracy.
doi: 10.1068/d160549pmid: N/A
Although mindful of the context of debates about a global tendency towards the formation of regional communities [of which the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), and the European Union (EU) are examples] the author focuses on the nature of regional integration in Southern Africa. In turn, however, the example of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is used to reflect on a number of broader theoretical issues concerning discourses and processes of regional integration. The author notes how, in the early 1980s, the forerunner to the SADC was born (in part) out of a struggle against the apartheid regime in South Africa. Today, the organisation includes the ‘new’ (postapartheid) South Africa and has accordingly shifted its avowed rationale away from an alliance against apartheid towards a scheme for regional integration, ‘development’, and reconstruction. Moving beyond these claims and drawing on interviews, journalistic sources, and official documentation the author seeks to understand the SADC's role as a diplomatic entity—and as operating within the same logics of power as the postcolonial African state.
doi: 10.1068/d160577pmid: N/A
In this paper I consider the ways in which discourses of development enframe postcolonial Africa. The dissemination of development is discussed in three principal ways. First, constructions of national identities and of the nation-state and their dissemination through development discourse is considered. Second, the textual dissemination of meaning through the process of writing development is explored with specific reference to Hegel's writings on the principle of development. Third, the dissemination of historical and geographical worlds through discourses of development is considered with the continued durability of the idea of three worlds as the key focal point of discussion. I formulate an antidevelopment incite which attempts to disrupt the enframing of postcolonial Africa through ‘Western’ discourses of development. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the worlds of development have proven so persistent, and of the implications for a more radical ‘post-colonial’ development geography.
doi: 10.1068/d160599pmid: N/A
In this paper I develop a genealogy of globalisation in New Zealand informed by the neo-Foucauldian literature on governmentality. My claim is that globalisation involves a shift-in the object of economic governance away from the national economy and towards the circuits of global capital. This shift is associated with a change in spatial imaginaries. Through an analysis of three key arenas—social policy, foreign direct investment, and immigration—I show that policies and programmes, designed to fulfil these new political ambitions, aim to articulate individuals, sectors, and regions into the economic flows and networks of the Pacific Rim. In this regard, globalisation can be usefully understood as a political strategy that promotes a new understanding of the means and ends of economic governance.
doi: 10.1068/d160615pmid: N/A
In this paper we explore the nature and degree to which Australian imaginings of self in Asia have altered since the 1960s. We do this in two ways. First, an analysis of Christopher Koch's two novels, The Year of Living Dangerously and Highways to a War, is used to establish the parameters of change in Australian imaginings of themselves in Asia. This analysis of literary texts, we argue, can be used to develop an analytical framework for considering Australian aid policies to Asia as cultural texts, and the extent to which such policies can be seen to be part of a redefinition of Australian settler society towards a postcolonial understanding of the ‘white self’. In the second part of the paper we offer a preliminary analysis of how Australian overseas-aid policies have begun to acknowledge the fact of Australia's geopolitical location. We argue that these cultural texts reveal a repositioning of Australian identity which remains caught within a terrain of whiteness.
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