Environment and Planning D

Roy, Ananya

doi: 10.1177/0263775819830969pmid: N/A

The city as sanctuary is an ancient concept. As a modern practice in North America and Europe, it has entailed refuge for subjects rendered illegal and placeless by the state, be it asylum-seekers or undocumented immigrants. Sanctuary thus reveals the terms of protection through which liberal democracies recognize and include racial others. In the age of Trumpism, sanctuary jurisdictions have become a key terrain of struggle in the United States, connoting resistance to white nationalism and the defiance of federal immigration policy. However, the concept of sanctuary requires scrutiny. In this paper, I demonstrate that the current meaning of sanctuary in the United States has limited scope, relying on, rather than limiting, police power. Seeking to disrupt such forms of liberal inclusion, I turn to a more expansive ethico-political inquiry concerned with hospitality. Such inquiry demands engagement with colonial and imperial histories. At stake is a rethinking of liberal and cosmopolitan traditions of Western humanism, those that seek to provide sanctuary from the place of Europe or the free city. Once conceptualized as the threshold of empire, these territories are no longer sanctuary for the illegal and placeless but instead expressions of state violence and thus grounds for abolition.

Schouten, Peer; Stepputat, Finn; Bachmann, Jan

doi: 10.1177/0263775819851940pmid: N/A

Stepputat, Finn; Hagmann, Tobias

doi: 10.1177/0263775819847485pmid: N/A

This article explores the co-production of political order and circulation in what today is known as Berbera corridor, a trade and transport corridor that connects landlocked Ethiopia and Berbera Port in the breakaway Republic of Somaliland. We analyse the ‘politics of circulation’ that are set in motion by the articulation of different projects of making goods circulate and capturing revenue from circulation. Such politics involve a plurality of rationalities, the emergence of technologies that seek to balance circulation and security, and substantial elements of anticipation. Our empirical analysis focuses on three overarching projects of circulation: Somaliland’s foundational state-building-based-on-circulation project of the 1990s; shifting Ethiopian customs regimes and strategies to discipline and capture cross-border trading and livestock exports in the 2000s; and the transnational state-of-the-art corridor project of the 2010s. The article depicts Berbera corridor as a state-building frontier as well as a frontier of global logistical networks and rationalities, where new agents of circulation rearrange relations between former ones and cut across international as well as public/private boundaries.

Chalfin, Brenda

doi: 10.1177/0263775818800720pmid: N/A

This paper places an empirical focus on logistics to link three strands of inquiry: Ghana’s deep-water oil economy, the built environment of Ghana’s oil-city of Takoradi, and the character of governance at their confluence. Moving beyond the land and sea, off-shore/on-shore dichotomy, logistics provides a means of instantiating and interpreting the regulatory terrain of off-shore extraction within a historically constituted urban landscape. Highlighting an array of urban locations—from military installations, pre-colonial ports, and imperial-era trading outposts, to oil service centers, and training academies—the complex cohabitations of on and off-shore, pre- and post-colonial, city and sea comes into view through a logistics-centered optic. The result is a distinctive brand of “terraqueous urbanism” where elite, state, and transnational strategies of maritime governance and extraction-based accumulation become embedded in urban space.

Grappi, Giorgio; Neilson, Brett

doi: 10.1177/0263775818814535pmid: N/A

Examining the conduits of production and circulation that link the extraction of copper in Chile to its storage and use in China, this article explores the political dimensions of the logistical techniques and technologies that enable these processes. We approach copper as a material element that due to its capacity to conduct electricity provides conditions of possibility for contemporary digital capitalism. At the same time, we consider the elements that constitute logistics as a political force by asking how logistics operates in parallel, partnership, and rivalry to forms of state and international order themselves in uncertain transformation. Empirically, the article stems from research conducted in Chile, specifically in the port of Valparaíso, the Andina mine run by the country’s state owned copper mining company CODELCO, and the copper smelter run by the same company on the coast at Ventanas. On this basis, we ask how the production and circulation of copper has mutated with shifting logistical arrangements that respond to the geopolitical position of China, the financialization of trade in base metals, the rise of business models based in data extraction, and workers’ struggles in times of labor precarization.

Stenmanns, Julian

doi: 10.1177/0263775819834013pmid: N/A

Seaports at global margins rarely feature in contemporary discussions of the logistics industry. This paper brings together recent geographical writing on logistics with discussions of margins as paradoxical sites of inclusive exclusion. Building on fieldwork on the docks of Freetown, Sierra Leone – a port that experts in logistics problematize as a ‘contaminated’ place within the global shipping community – this contribution shows that seaports at global margins are in fact at the centre of key projects of global circulation. While logistics embodies universal aspirations to connectivity, it is profoundly dependent on the uneven terrains of global capitalism. To make this case, this contribution traces the interventions of a global terminal operator and the US Coast Guard to reposition a port at the margins and discusses their effects on logistical and political orders. In doing so, this paper offers a critical perspective on the power geometries of the global logistics industry. Logistics in this view is not only a political technology that creates seamless interconnectivity and transforms heterogeneous places with diverse socialities, political configurations and technological infrastructures into zones of global circulation. The implementation of logistics is also an intrinsically controversial, precarious and contested project.

Haugen, Heidi Østbø

doi: 10.1177/0263775818822834pmid: N/A

A sizable body of popular and academic literature explores how containers have reconstituted the spaces through which they travel. However, the space within containers remains largely unexamined. This article leverages the concepts of “earmarking” and “pressure” to analyze the space within containers as socially produced rather than arithmetically defined. The analysis draws upon an ethnographic study of container freight from China to Africa. Earmarking describes the practice of attaching segments of shipment space to specific sets of social relations, which in turn defines appropriate usage of the space and bestows it with economic value. African traders earmark space in containers shipped from China as a way to manage their capital in volatile economic environments. Logistics agents apply physical pressure to goods as they are loaded in containers in South China. The practice—made possible by the material characteristics of the container—disrupts the relationship between the container’s measurements and the shipment volumes sold, and generates asymmetries across modes of calculating space. Application of pressure renders the relation between containers and goods unstable and shipments vulnerable during customs inspections. Opening the container space for analysis reveals how China’s successful logistics integration with Africa relies heavily on political tolerance for disorder and localized solutions.

Uribe, Simón

doi: 10.1177/0263775818788358pmid: N/A

The Amazon is currently experiencing a rapid growth in the building of transport infrastructures. While national governments have portrayed infrastructure development as greatly enhancing economic and geographical integration, critical approaches largely describe such development as a destructive process of resource extraction and dispossession. While these views differ radically in relation to the ends and effects of current and future infrastructure projects, they both conceive infrastructure as reflective of an inexorable process of state and capitalist expansion region-wide. Less attention has been paid, however, to the ways in which this very process is conditioned, and sometimes hindered, by a wide array of normative, social and political (dis) orders. In this paper, I draw attention to the ever conflicting and contingent nature of infrastructure building through an ethnographic account of the land conflicts present in an ongoing road project in the Colombian region of Putumayo. Specifically, I look at the tensions and disputes arising from the project’s attempts to make a target space and population legible in order to make them governable. By showing how such attempts have consistently failed and led the project into various states of suspension and uncertainty, the paper sheds light on the deep embedding of infrastructure in everyday dynamics of state-making and unmaking.

Shell, Jacob

doi: 10.1177/0263775818805491pmid: N/A

This article explores and analyzes a form of subversive logistics: the use of trained Asian elephants in the mobilization of cargo and people. This unusual means of conveyance, whose zone of persistence is mainly in the forested uplands of Burma (Myanmar) and parts of northeast India, most comes into its own during logistical operations which occur without the use of fixed-route roads. Empirically, the article presents fieldwork conducted in Burma and northeast India between 2013 and 2017, as well as related archival research, including research about other transport animals like sled dogs and camels. The (perhaps surprising) role played by elephants during flood relief operations in recent times receives special attention here, as does the theme of elephant-based transportation during modern armed conflicts, such as the ongoing Kachin conflict in northern Burma and in the Burma theater of World War II. The article aims to help theorize the connection between mobility and political subversion, highlighting how landscapes which do not lend themselves to permanent transport infrastructure—and thus the presence of the state—are simultaneously places of potential resistance. A related aim is to contribute to our understanding of the elephant–human relationship itself, demonstrating how elephants and humans have worked together to produce constantly shifting systems of mobility.

Schouten, Peer

doi: 10.1177/0263775819830400pmid: N/A

A frequent sight along many roads, roadblocks form a banal yet persistent element across the margins of contemporary global logistical landscapes. How, this article asks, can we come to terms with roadblocks as a logistical form of power? Based on an ongoing mapping of roadblocks in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, it sketches a political geography of “roadblock politics”: a spatial pattern of control concentrated around trade routes, where the capacity to disrupt logistical aspirations is translated into other forms of power, financial and political. While today’s roadblocks are tied up with the ongoing conflict in both countries, the article shows, roadblock politics has a much deeper history. Before colonization, African rulers manufactured powerful polities out of control over points of passage along long-distance trade routes crisscrossing the continent. The article traces how since precolonial times control over long-distance trade routes was turned into a source of political power, how these routes were forcefully appropriated through colonial occupation, how after the crumbling of the colonial order new connections were engineered between political power and the circulation of goods in Central Africa, and how control over these flows ultimately became a key stake in ongoing civil wars in the region.