This innovative book is an excellent introduction to contemporary political geography. Its threefold [604901]

‘This innovative book is an excellent introduction to contemporary political geography. Its threefold
structure provides valuable routes into material covering both current theoretical debates and illuminatingcase studies. It is up-to-date in every sense and enables students to appreciate the discipline’s approaches
through accessible exemplars.’
Ron Johnston, University of Bristol
‘This book is much more than a basic introduction to political geography. It provides a critical, versatile
alternative to traditional state-centric narratives in political geography and will be a valuable resource
not only for political geographers but also for students in such fields as political science and sociology.’
Anssi Paasi, University of Oulu
Questions of the interaction between politics and geography permeate much of contemporary life. In this
broad-based introduction to contemporary political geography, the authors examine the relationship betweenpolitics and geography at a variety of levels and in a number of different contexts. By pushing back the boundaries
of what is conventionally understood to constitute political geography, the book emphasises the relationships
between power, politics and policy, space, place and territory in different geographical contexts.
An Introduction to Political Geography explores how power interacts with space, how place influences political
identities and how policy creates and remoulds territory. In outlining the full breadth of contemporary politicalgeography, covering a rich and diverse range of topics, it addresses not only traditional concerns such as state
formation, geopolitics, electoral geography and nationalism but also newer themes, including the geographies
of regulation and governance, public policy, the politics of place consumption, landscapes of power, identitypolitics and geographies of resistance.
This accessible text successfully combines discussion of cutting-edge conceptual debates with international
case studies, numerous illustrations and explanatory boxes. An Introduction to Political Geography will be essential
reading for political geographers as well as a valuable resource for students of related fields with an interest in
politics and geography.
Martin Jones is Reader in Human Geography, Rhys Jones is Lecturer in Human Geography and Michael
Woods is Senior Lecturer in Human Geography in the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at the University
of Wales Aberystwyth. They all teach on the Master’s degree, Space, Place and Politics.AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL
GEOGRAPHY

Martin Jones, Rhys Jones and Michael WoodsAN INTRODUCTION TO
POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY
Space, place and politics

First published 2004
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
© 2004 Martin Jones, Rhys Jones and Michael Woods
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Jones, Martin
An introduction to political geography: space, place and politics / Martin Jones,
Rhys Jones, Michael Woods.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Political geography. I. Jones, Rhys. II. Woods, Michael. III. Title.
JC319.J66 2004
320.1 ′2–dc22
2003021646
ISBN 0–415–25076–5 (hbk)
ISBN 0–415–25077–3 (pbk)This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.
ISBN 0-203-62697-4 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-63084-X (Adobe eReader Format)

Contents
Acknowledgements vi
1 Power, space and ‘political geography’ 1
PART 1 STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 19
2 States and territories 20
3 The state in global perspective 384 The state’s changing forms and functions 57
PART 2POLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 81
5 The political geographies of the nation 826 Politics, power and place 997 Contesting place 115
PART 3 PEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 135
8 Democracy, participation and citizenship 1369 Public policy and political geography 158
Postscript 169
Glossary 172
References 176
Index 195

Acknowledgements
Like many projects, this book has had a long gestation period. Between us, it is the result of nearly twenty
years’ curiosity with the broad field of political geography. The book is developed from a number of undergraduateand postgraduate courses that we have taught at the University of Wales Aberystwyth since 1995 and wewould like to thank our many students for their perseverance and enthusiasm.
An Introduction to Political Geography would not have been completed without the assistance of a number of
individuals. We owe a huge debt to Andrew Mould, who commissioned the book way back in 2000. Andrew
has been an enthusiastic editor, mixing a number of well needed on-the-account meals and drinks – progressmeetings in disguise – with emails asking ‘exactly when are you going to deliver’. The answer is now (at last).We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers, whose comments have proved valuable in reworking themanuscript.
We would like to thank Ian Gulley and Anthony Smith at the University of Wales Aberystwyth for redrawing
some of the figures and maps that appear in the book. The authors and publishers would like to thank the
following for granting permission to reproduce images: Plate 3.1, photograph by Gillian Jones; Figure 4.1,Geoforum , Elsevier; Figure 4.3, Ivan Turok; Table 4.2, Geoforum , Elsevier; Plate 5.1, photograph by David Henry;
Figure 6.1, University of North Carolina Press; Figure 7.1, Cambridge University Press; Plate 8.1, photographby Paul Routledge; and Figure 8.4, Brookings Institution. Every effort has been made to contact copyright
holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any
copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in futureeditions.
We would also like to acknowledge our various teachers, tutors, supervisors, mentors and colleagues for putting
us on the right path over the years, and thanks also go to our friends and family for support during this project.
Martin Jones (msj@aber.ac.uk), home page http://users.aber.ac.uk/msj/
Rhys Jones (raj@aber.ac.uk), home page http://users.aber.ac.uk/raj/
Mike Woods (m.woods@aber.ac.uk), home page http://users.aber.ac.uk/zzp/woodshome.htm

Sydney, September 2000
It is the night of Monday 25 September 2000, in the
closing week of the Olympic Games in Sydney,
Australia. In front of a record crowd the Australian
athlete Cathy Freeman sprints clear to win gold in thewomen’s 400 metre final. It is Australia’s first Olympicgold medal in athletics since 1988, and the hundredthmedal won by an Australian since the start of themodern Olympics in 1896. Momentarily exhausted,
Freeman sits cross-legged on the track, hands over
her eyes and mouth. Then, collecting a flag from the trackside, she sets off on a barefoot lap of honour,draped in her dual-sided flag – on one face the ‘southerncross’ standard of Australia, on the other the red, black
and gold Aboriginal flag.
Cathy Freeman’s moment of Olympic history is
saturated with political geography. Most explicitly,there is the demonstration of Australian patriotism,reflecting the way in which sports events often providea focal point for the articulation of national identity.
Yet, with Freeman, a black Aboriginal woman and
Aboriginal rights campaigner, the event assumed adeeper, more complex, symbolism. Freeman had beenreprimanded on a previous occasion when she hadcelebrated with the Aboriginal flag. This time, however,
there were no objections as she waved her dual
Australian and Aboriginal ensign. In doing so Freemanserved not just to reaffirm Australian national identitybut contributed to its reinvention, turning the Olympicstadium into the stage for a seminal performance in thepolitics of race and identity in Australia.
Freeman’s celebrations refocused attention on
the brutal oppression of the Aboriginal people duringthe British colonisation of ‘Australia’ as part of an
imperial geopolitical strategy. Moreover, the subjuga-tion of the Aboriginal people depended on the appli-
cation of political geographic knowledge about the
exercise of power through the control of space. Colonialauthorities imposed new administrative territorieswithout regard for any existing geographical under-standings of the land, obliterated Aboriginal place
names and tribal homelands, and exiled Aboriginal
communities to spatially controlled ‘reservations’.
Freeman was not the first to use the Olympic Games
to make a political statement. The tradition includesthe ‘black power’ salutes given by African-Americanathletes at the 1968 games in Mexico City, and the
boycotts of the Moscow and Los Angeles games as
part of geopolitical posturing in the 1980s. Today thevery process of bidding to host the Olympics is a geo-political exercise, with competitors lobbying to buildalliances of voting nations with negotiations that often
spill over into issues of international diplomacy.
For the host city the prize is a symbolic step towards
recognition as a ‘global city’. The price, however, is areworking of the city’s own internal political geog-raphy. At Sydney, as at all the games, the stadium,
athletes’ village and the associated infrastructure of the
event formed a ‘landscape of power’ which symbolisedthe powerfulness of the coalition of politicians, businessleaders and sports administrators that had brought thegames to Sydney, and the powerlessness of those whofound themselves displaced by the development. The
preparations for the games revealed much about the
balance of power in contemporary urban politics asnetworks of key actors were assembled, funds divertedfrom health and education programmes, and newPower, space and ‘political
geography’1

public order legislation introduced. At the same time,
the Olympics became a site of resistance by Aboriginal
rights and anti-globalisation protesters who defied newlaws prohibiting demonstrations, claiming space andtransgressing the spatial order of the ‘Olympic city’ asthey did so.
These diverse stories from the Sydney Olympics
illustrate the breadth and diversity of contemporarypolitical geography. Some are about nation building,others about cultural politics, yet others about urbandevelopment or about governance – but they are all
of interest to political geographers. In this book
we provide an introduction to contemporary politicalgeography that captures a sense of the dynamism and diversity of the sub-discipline at the start of thetwenty-first century. As such, this book is by naturewide-ranging, covering topics from the medieval
state to the regulation of the capitalist economy, and
from community participation in planning in Berlinto conflicts over the use of the Confederate flag in South Carolina. What unites these seemingly dis-parate examples is that they all involve the interaction
of ‘politics’ – defined in its broadest sense – and
‘geography’, represented by place, territory or spatialvariation. It is this intersection of ‘politics’ and‘geography’ that forms the central concern of this bookand that is the basis of our understanding of ‘politicalgeography’.
Defining political geography
Political geographers have taken a number of different
approaches to defining the field of political geography.
To some, political geography has been about the studyof political territorial units, borders and adminis-trative subdivisions (Alexander 1963; Goblet 1955).For others, political geography is the study of politicalprocesses, differing from political science only in
the emphasis given to geographical influences and
outcomes and in the application of spatial analysistechniques (Burnett and Taylor 1981; Kasperson andMinghi 1969). Both these definitions reflected theinfluence of wider theoretical approaches within geog-
raphy as a whole – regional geography and spatialscience respectively – at particular moments in the
historical evolution of political geography and have
generally been superseded as the discipline has movedon. Still current, however, is a third approach whichholds that political geography should be defined interms of its key concepts, which the proponents of this
approach generally identify as territory and the state
(e.g. Cox 2002). This approach shares with the earliertwo approaches the desire to identify the ‘essence’ of political geography such that a definitive classifi-cation can be made of what is and what isn’t ‘political
geography’. Yet political geography as it is actually
researched and taught is much messier than theseessentialist definitions suggest. Think, for example,about the word ‘politics’. Essentialist definitions ofpolitical geography have tended to conceive of politicsin very formal terms, as being about the state, elections
and international relations. But ‘politics’ also occurs
in all kinds of other, less formal, everyday situations,many of which have a strong geographical dimen-sion – issues about the use of public space by youngpeople for skateboarding, for example, or about the
symbolic significance of a landscape threatened with
development. While essentialist definitions of politicalgeography would exclude most of these topics, theyhave become an increasingly important focus ofgeographical research.
As such, a fourth approach has been taken by writers
who have sought to define political geography in
a much more open and inclusive manner. John Agnew,for example, defines political geography as simply ‘the study of how politics is informed by geography’(2002a: 1; see also Agnew et al. 2003), while Joe Painter
(1995) describes political geography as a ‘discourse’, or
a body of knowledge that produces particular under-standings about the world, characterised by internaldebate, the evolutionary adoption of new ideas, anddynamic boundaries. As indicated above, the way inwhich political geography is conceived of in this book
fits broadly within this last approach.
We define political geography as a cluster of work
within the social sciences that engages with themultiple intersections of ‘politics’ and ‘geography’,where these two terms are imagined as triangular con-
figurations (Figure 1.1). On one side is the triangle POWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 2

of power, politics and policy. Here power is the
commodity that sustains the other two – as Bob Jessopputs it, ‘if money makes the economic world go round,power is the medium of politics’ (Jessop 1990a: 322)
(see Box 1.1). Politics is the whole set of processes that
are involved in achieving, exercising and resistingpower – from the functions of the state to elections towarfare to office gossip. Policy is the intended outcome,the things that power allows one to achieve and thatpolitics is about being in a position to do.The interaction of these three entities is the concern
of political science. Political geography is about
the interaction of these entities and a second triangleof space, place and territory. In this triangle, space (orspatial patterns or spatial relations) is the core com-modity of geography. Place is a particular point in
space, while territory represents a more formal attempt
to define and delimit a portion of space, inscribed witha particular identity and characteristics. Politicalgeography recognises that these six entities – power,politics and policy, space, place and territory – are
intrinsically linked, but a piece of political geo-
graphical research does not need to explicitly addressthem all. Spatial variations in policy implementationare a concern of political geography, as is the influenceof territorial identity on voting behaviour, to pick two random examples. Political geography, therefore,
embraces an innumerable multitude of interactions,
some of which may have a cultural dimension whichmakes them also of interest to cultural geographers,some of which may have an economic dimension alsoof interest to economic geographers, some of which
occurred in the past and are also studied by historicalPOWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 3
Figure 1.1 Political geography as the interaction of
‘politics’ and ‘geography’
BOX 1.1 POWER
Put simply, power is the ability to get things done, yet there are many different theories about what precisely
power is and how it works. In broad terms there are two main approaches to conceptualising power. The firstdefines power as a property that can be possessed, building on an intellectual tradition that stems from ThomasHobbes and Max Weber. Some writers in this tradition suggest that power is relational and involves consciousdecision making, as Robert Dahl describes: ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something
that B would not otherwise do’ (Lukes 1974: 11–12). Others have argued that power can be possessed without
being exercised, or that the exercise of power does not need conscious decision making but that ensuringthat certain courses of action are never even considered is also an exercise of power. The second approachcontends that power is not something that can be possessed, as Bruno Latour remarks: ‘When you simplyhave power – in potentia – nothing happens and you are powerless; when you exert power – in actu – others
are performing the action and not you. . . . History is full of people who, because they believed social scientists
and deemed power to be something you can possess and capitalise, gave orders no one obeyed!’ (Latour
1986: 264–5). Instead, power is conceived of as a ‘capacity to act’ which exists only when it is exercisedand which requires the pooling together of the resources of a number of different entities.
Key readings : Clegg (1989) and Lukes (1986).

geographers. To employ a metaphor that we will
explain in Chapter 2, political geography has frontier
zones, not borders.
In this book we explore these various themes and
topics by drawing on and discussing contemporaryresearch in political geography. Nearly all the case
studies and examples that we refer to are taken from
books and journal articles published in the last twentyyears, including many published since 2000 which may be regarded as at the ‘cutting edge’ of politicalgeography research. However, current and recent
work in political geography of this kind does not exist
in a historical vacuum. It builds on the foundations of earlier research and writing, advancing an argu-ment through critique and debate and through theexploration of new empirical studies that allow newideas to be proposed. Knowing something about this
genealogy of political geography helps us to understand
the nature, approach and key concerns of contemporarypolitical geography. To provide this background, the remainder of this chapter outlines a brief history of political geography, from the emergence of the
sub-discipline in the nineteenth century to current
debates about its future direction.
A brief history of political
geography
The history of political geography as an academic sub-
discipline can be roughly divided into three eras: an era of ascendancy from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War; an era of marginalisation
from the 1940s to the 1970s; and an era of revival
from the late 1970s onwards. However, the trajectoryof political geographic writing and thinking can be traced back long before even the earliest of these dates. Aristotle, writing some 2,300 years ago in ancientGreece, produced a study of the state in which he
adopted an environmental deterministic approach
to considering the requirements for boundaries, thecapital city, and the ratio between territory size andpopulation; while the Greco-Roman geographer Straboexamined how the Roman Empire was able to over-
come the difficulties caused by its great size to functioneffectively. Interest in the factors shaping the form
of political territories was revived in the European
‘Age of Enlightenment’ from the sixteenth century tothe eighteenth, as writers combined their new enthu-siasm for science and philosophy with the practicalconcerns generated by a period of political reform
and instability. Most notable was Sir William Petty,
an English scientist and economist who in 1672 pub-lished The Political Anatomy of Ireland in which he
explored the territorial and demographic bases of thepower of the British state in Ireland. Petty developed
these ideas further in his second book, Essays in Political
Arithmetick , begun in 1671 and published posthu-
mously, which outlined theories on, among otherthings, a state’s sphere of influence, the role of capitalcities, and the importance of distance in limiting the reach of human activity. In this way Petty fore-
shadowed the concerns of many later political geog-
raphers, but, like other geographical writing of the timeand the classical texts of Strabo and Aristotle, his bookswere popular works of individual scholarship by poly-maths which did not stand as part of a coherent field
of ‘political geography’. To find the real beginnings
of ‘political geography’ as an academic discipline weneed to look to nineteenth-century Germany.
The era of ascendancy
The significance of Germany as the cradle of political
geography lies in its relatively recent formation.Modern Germany had come into being as a unified stateonly in 1871 and under ambitious Prussian leader-ship sought in the closing decades of the nineteenth
century to establish itself as a ‘great power’ on a par
with Britain, France, Austria-Hungary and Russia.However, Germany was constrained by its largelylandlocked, Central European location which restrictedits potential for territorial expansion. In these circum-stances, ideas about the relationship between territory
and state power became key concerns for Germany’s
new intellectual class and, in particular, for FriedrichRatzel, sometimes referred to as ‘the father of politicalgeography’.
Much of Ratzel’s work was driven by a desire
to justify intellectually the territorial expansion ofPOWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 4

Germany, and in writings such as Politische Geographie
he embarked on a ‘scientific’ study of the state (see
Bassin 1987). Ratzel drew on earlier political geo-graphical work, notably that of Carl Ritter, but his innovation was to borrow concepts from the evolutionary theories of Darwin and his followers. In
particular, Ratzel was influenced by a variation on
Social Darwinism known as neo-Lamarckism, whichheld that evolution occurred through species beingdirectly modified by their environments rather than bychance. Translating these ideas to the political sphere,
Ratzel argued that the state could be conceived of as a
‘living organism’ and that like every living organismthe state ‘required a specific amount of territory fromwhich to draw sustenance. [Ratzel] labelled thisterritory the respective Lebensraum or living space of the
particular organism’ (Bassin 1987: 477).
Extending the metaphor, Ratzel contended that
states followed the same laws of development asbiological units and that when a state’s Lebensraum
became insufficient – for example, because of popu-lation growth – the state needed to annex new territory
to establish new, larger, Lebensraum . As such he posited
seven laws for the spatial growth of states, which held that a state must expand by annexing smallerterritories, that in expanding a state strives to gainpolitically valuable positions, and that territorialexpansion is contagious, spreading from state to
state and intensifying, such that escalation towards
warfare becomes inevitable. In this way Ratzel not onlyprovided an ‘intellectual justification’ for Germanexpansionism, but suggested that it was an entirelynatural and necessary process. Ratzel himself argued
that the only way Germany could acquire additional
Lebensraum was through colonial expansion in Africa
– a policy he actively promoted – but his theories were seen by some more militant nationalists asjustifying the more aggressive and more dangerousstrategy of expanding German territory in the crowded
space of continental Europe itself.
Ratzel’s ideas were developed further by Rudolf
Kjellen, a Swedish conservative whose own politicalmotives were fired by opposition to Norwegian inde-pendence. Kjellen’s intellectual project was to develop
a classification of states based on the Linnaean system.By adapting Ratzel’s theories, he attempted to identify
the ‘world powers’ and predicted a future dominated
by large continental imperialist states. Although hereceived some support in Germany, Kjellen’s workwould probably have been long forgotten had he notin an 1899 article coined the term geopolitisk which
– translated into German as Geopolitik and by 1924
into English as geopolitics – came to describe that part
of political geography that is essentially concerned with the external relations, strategy and politics of thestate, and which seeks to employ such knowledge to
political ends (see Chapter 3).
While Ratzel and Kjellen were wrestling with the
dynamics of state power and territoriality, a secondstrand of political geography was being developed in Britain by Sir Halford Mackinder. Like Ratzel,Mackinder is regarded as a founding father of modern
Geography, having popularised the subject in a series
of public lectures in the 1880s and 1890s leading tohis appointment as Oxford University’s first Professorof Geography. Also like Ratzel, Mackinder saw thebenefits of proving the political usefulness of his infant
discipline. As O’Tuathail (1996: 25) has commented,
to an ambitious intellectual like Mackinder, the
governmentalizing of geographical discourse so that it addressed the imperialist dilemmas faced by Britain in a post-scramble world order was a
splendid way of demonstrating the relevance of his
‘new geography’ to the ruling elites of the state.
However, unlike Ratzel, Mackinder was primarily
concerned with issues of global strategy and the balance
of power between states – topics that better suited
the interests of British foreign policy. He was not thefirst to consider such matters. In the United States a retired naval officer, Alfred Mahan, had estab-lished himself as a newspaper pundit by arguing thatglobal military power was dependent on sea power, and
expounding on the geographical factors that enabled
the development of a state as a sea power. Mackinder,though, disagreed with Mahan’s thesis, suggestingthat, as the age of exploration came to end, so thebalance of power was shifting. In 1904 Mackinder
published a paper entitled ‘The geographical pivot ofPOWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 5

history’ in the Geographical Journal , in which he divided
history into three eras – a pre-Columbian era in which
land power had been all-important, a Columbian erain which sea power had become predominant and an emergent post-Columbian era. In this new era,Mackinder argued, the end of the imperialist scramble
had demoted the importance of sea power while new
technologies which enabled long distances on land tobe more easily overcome – such as the railways – wouldhelp to swing the balance of power back to continentalstates. Applying this hypothesis, Mackinder ordered
the world map into three political regions – an ‘outer
crescent’ across the Americas, Africa and the oceans; an ‘inner crescent’ across Europe and southern Asia; andthe ‘pivot area’ located at the heart of the Eurasian landmass. Whoever controlled the pivot area, Mackinderargued, would be a major world power.
The First World War put the theories produced by
the new political geography to the test, and Mackinderclearly felt that his ideas were vindicated. Writing in his 1919 book Democratic Ideals and Reality , h e
dismissed Ratzel’s models as misguided and outdated:
Last century, under the spell of the Darwinian
theory, men came to think that those forms oforganisation should survive which adapted them-selves best to their natural environment. To-daywe realise, as we emerge from our fiery trial, that
human victory consists in our rising superior to
such mere fatalism.
(Mackinder 1919: 3)
In Democratic Ideals and Reality Mackinder expanded
on his thesis of the shift from sea power to land power
and recast his map of the world’s seats of power to suit the new post-war order. He renamed the ‘pivotarea’ the ‘heartland’, but left it centred on the Eurasianland mass, which he labelled the ‘world island’.Significantly, he proposed that control of Eastern
Europe was crucial to control of the heartland – and
hence to global dominance (see Chapter 3). To main-tain peace, therefore, Mackinder argued, WesternEurope had to form a counterweight to Russia, whichoccupied the heartland, and the key priority of the
West’s strategy had to be to prevent Germany andRussia forming an alliance that would dominate
Eastern Europe.
Mackinder’s ideas had a strong influence on the
Versailles peace conference in 1919, in which heparticipated as a British delegate. Arguably, his legacycan be seen in the creation of ‘buffer states’ in Eastern
Europe, separating Germany and Russia, more or less
on the model that he proposes in Democratic Ideals and
Reality . However, his continuing influence extended
further than the map of Europe, informing US strategyin the Cold War, with the rhetoric and presumptions
of Mackinder’s heartland thesis surviving into the
1980s (see O’Tuathail 1992). Yet Mackinder was also criticised for oversimplifying history, underesti-mating the potential of air power and marginalisingthe significance of North America – a mistake whichO’Tuathail (1992) describes as Mackinder’s ‘greatest
blunder’. From this critique a modified approach was
developed by writers such as Spykman (1942, 1944),which emphasised the strategic importance of the‘rimland’ (or Mackinder’s ‘inner crescent’) and which,by becoming closely related to US foreign policy,
shifted the academic home of such theorising away
from mainstream geography to international relationsand strategic studies.
Ironically, Mackinder’s thesis was also consumed
with interest in the country that suffered most fromits practical application at Versailles – Germany. For
German nationalists, enraged by the way in which
Germany had had its territory reduced and its militarydismantled after the First World War, the geopoliticalideas of Ratzel and Mackinder offered a blueprint for revival (Paterson 1987). Most prominent in this
movement was Karl Haushofer, a former military
officer and geographer who became an early memberof the Nazi party. Haushofer sought to build publicsupport for a new expansionist policy by popularisinginterest in geopolitics. In 1924 he founded theZeitschrift für Geopolitik (Journal of Geopolitics) and the
following year was involved in establishing the German
Academy, aimed at ‘nourishing all spiritual expressionsof Germandom’, of which he later became president.Haushofer’s ‘pseudo-science’ of Geopolitik took from
Ratzel the concept of Lebensraum and twisted it, arguing
that densely populated Germany needed to annex addi-POWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 6

tional territory from more sparsely populated countries
like Poland and Czechoslovakia. From Mackinder
it took the idea that control of Eastern Europe and theheartland would lead to global dominance, arguing forthe construction of a continental bloc comprisingGermany, Russia and Japan which would control the
heartland and form a counterweight to the British
Empire (see O’Tuathail 1996).
Geopolitik provided the intellectual justification
for Nazi Germany’s annexation of Czechoslovakia andPoland, for the Hitler–Stalin pact and, later, for
Germany’s ill-fated invasion of the Soviet Union.
However, the extent of Haushofer’s influence on theNazi leadership is questionable (see Heske 1987). Moresignificant was the contribution of Geopolitik in shaping
public opinion, most effectively achieved through the promotion of a new form of cartography in which
highly subjective maps were used to emphasise the
mismatch between Germany’s post-1919 borders and its ‘cultural sphere’, to justify the annexation of territory and to suggest that it was vulnerable toaggression by its Slavic neighbours (see Herb 1997 for
examples). The misadventures of Geopolitik inextricably
associated political geography with the brutality andracism of the Nazi regime and led to its discreditingas a serious academic pursuit.
The era of marginalisation
The excesses of German Geopolitik cast a pall over all
political geography. Writing in 1954, the leadingAmerican geographer Richard Hartshorne mourn-fully remarked of political geography that ‘in perhaps
no other branch of geography has the attempt to
teach others gone so far ahead of the pursuit of learn-ing by the teachers’ (Hartshorne 1954: 178). In anattempt to ‘depoliticise’ political geography and to putit on what he regarded as a more scientific footing,Hartshorne (1950) promoted a ‘functional approach’
to political geography. He argued that political geog-
raphy should be concerned not with shaping politicalstrategy, but rather with describing and analysing the internal dynamics and external functions of thestate. Included in the former were the centrifugal forces
that placed pressures on the cohesion of states (such as communication problems and ethnic differences),
the centripetal forces which held states together
(such as the state idea and the concept of a ‘nation’),and the internal organisational mechanisms throughwhich a state governed its territory. The external func-tions, meanwhile, included the territorial, economic,
diplomatic and strategic relations of a state with other
states.
The functional approach led political geographers
to become concerned with questions such as the dis-tribution of different ethnic populations in a state, the
match between a state’s boundaries and physical
geographical features, and the structure of a state’s localgovernment areas, as well as with mapping patterns of communication networks within states and of traderoutes between states. (Some examples of this type ofwork include Cole 1959; East and Moodie 1956;
Moodie 1949; Soja 1968; Weigert 1949.) However,
while the functional approach was popularised after the Second World War, it was pioneered in Britain and North America between the wars and arguably canbe traced back to the work of Isaiah Bowman in the
early 1920s.
Like Mackinder Bowman had been a participant in
the Versailles talks, but unlike Mackinder he regardedthe new world map that emerged as extremely un-stable. His pessimism stemmed from concern not with strategic models, but with social and economic
factors such as access to natural resources and the
distribution of population, which he considered to bethe real sources of political instability. Bowman set outthese concerns in The New World (1921), in which he
identified the ‘major problems’ facing the new world
order as national debts and reparations, control over
the production and distribution of raw materials,population movement and the distribution of land, the status of mandates and colonies, trade barriers and control over communications and transit links, the limitation of armaments, the status of minority
populations and disputed boundaries between states.
Bowman changed the scale at which political geog-raphy was focused and set the foundations for a new,arguably more scientific and more objective, form of analysis. This new style of political geography was
more explicitly outlined by East (1937) in a paperPOWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 7

which Johnston (1981) identifies as laying down the
principles of the functional approach later championed
by Harteshorne. East argued that ‘the proper functionof political geography is the study of the geograph-ical results of political differentiation’ and ‘that thevisible landscape is modified by the results of state
and inter-state activities is a matter of common
observation and experience’ (East 1937: 263). As such,East continued,
political geography is distinguishable from other
branches of geography only in its subject matter and
specific objectives. . . . Whereas the regional geog-
rapher has for his objective the discovery anddescription of the distinct components of a physicaland human landscap e…t h e p o litical geographer
analyses geographically the human and physical
texture of political territories.
(East 1937: 267)
Political geography as practised in the immediate
post-Second World War period therefore had little by
way of a distinct identity separate from mainstream
regional geography, and became largely fixated on the territorial state as its object of analysis. Moreover,fear of the sub-discipline’s past made political geog-raphers wary of modelling and theorising, such thatresearch remained essentially descriptive and empiri-
cally driven. The consequences of this self-restraint
were twofold. First, political geography largely missedout on theoretical developments taking place elsewherein geography, notably the ‘quantitative revolution’ of the late 1960s. Second, (and relatedly), political
geography became marginalised within geography and
began to disappear as a university subject. Berry (1969:450) famously described it as ‘that moribund back-water’ and by the mid-1970s Muir (1976) found thatpolitical geography was taught in only half of Britain’suniversity geography departments, with over two-
thirds of heads of geography departments considering
that the development of political geography literaturewas unsatisfactory compared with other branches ofgeography.
However, Muir’s article, which was provocatively
entitled ‘Political geography – dead duck or phoenix?’,found grounds for optimism. He noted that over half
of respondents to his survey had felt that political
geography was ‘an underdeveloped branch of geog-raphy that should increase in importance’ (Muir 1976:
196), and pointed to theoretical innovations that werebeginning to take place on the fringes of the sub-
discipline. He concluded, ‘the contemporary climate
of geographical opinion augers well for the future ofpolitical geography, and a promising trickle of pro-gressive contributions suggests stimulating times tocome’ (p. 200).
The era of revival
The revival of political geography that Muir detected
in the 1970s was driven by two parallel processes –the reintroduction of theory into political geography
and a ‘political turn’ in geography more broadly.
Significantly, neither resulted from developments in the established mainstream of political geography, but rather reflected innovation at the fringes of politi-cal geography, producing research clusters which
eventually came to eclipse the old-style ‘functional
approach’. One illustration of this is the rise ofquantitative electoral geography from the late 1960sonwards. Although the quantitative revolution tendedto pass political geographers by, some quantitativegeographers realised that the spatially structured
nature of elections, combined with the large amount
of easily available electoral data, made them an idealfocus for the application of quantitative geographicalanalysis. Elections had not traditionally been a concernof mainstream political geographers, and the new
electoral geographers did not therefore have to chal-
lenge any orthodoxies as they employed quantitativetechniques to develop models and test hypothesesacross their tripartite interests of geographies of voting,geographical influences on voting and geographicalanalyses of electoral districts (Busteed 1975; McPhail
1971; Taylor and Johnston 1979). The lure of technical
and theoretical innovation made electoral geographythe fashionable ‘cutting edge’ of political geography inthe 1970s, such that by 1981 Muir was moved tocomment that its output had become ‘disproportionate
in relation to the general needs of political geography’POWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 8

(Muir 1981: 204). (We discuss electoral geography in
fuller detail in Chapter 8.)
The growth of electoral geography was the most
prominent aspect of the belated introduction of a sys-tems approach to political geography, drawing on thebroader development of systems theory in geography
as part of a focus on processes, not places (Cohen and
Rosenthal 1971; Dikshit 1977). Electoral geographersviewed the electoral process as a system – comprisedof various interacting parts, following certain rules andhaving particular spatial outcomes – but they also
realised that other parts of the political world could
also be conceived of and analysed as systems, includingthe state, local government, policy making and publicspending (see Johnston 1979). Significantly, the mech-anical principles underlying systems theory meant that adopting the approach rendered complex political
entities suitable for mathematical analysis and mod-
elling. However, the extent to which a full-bodiedsystems analysis was adopted in political geographyvaried. At the most basic level, ‘systematic politicalgeography’ implied no more than reordering the way
in which political geography was taught and researched
to start from themes or concepts rather than regions(see de Bilj 1967). While this allowed generalisationin a way that the regionally focused approach did not, it did not necessarily lead to in-depth theorising.Yet even the most conscientious attempts to produce
models and theories through quantitative analysis
were constrained by their positivist epistemology –that is, the belief that the world might be understoodthrough the construction and testing of laws based onempirical observation. As critics pointed out, posi-
tivism is problematic because it creates a false sense of
objectivity, filters out social and ethical questions,oversimplifies the relation between observed events and theoretical languages, and fails to engage with the part played by both human agency and social,economic and political structures in shaping the human
world (see Cloke et al. 1991; Gregory 2000b). Thus,
because of these epistemological shortcomings, posi-tivist political geography continued to be strangelyapolitical ( Johnston 1980). Moreover, the ‘time lag’that afflicted the introduction of concepts into political
geography meant that positivism was being cham-pioned in political geography at a time when these
criticisms were already widely accepted elsewhere
(Walsh 1979).
Ironically, the challenge to positivism was led by
theoretical approaches that were intrinsically political,not least the development of Marxist political economy
within geography (see Box 4.1 for more on models of
political economy). In Social Justice and the City (1973),
for example, David Harvey proposed a new analysis of urban systems as embedded in capitalism whichdescribed an urban geography saturated by class,
corporate and state power and forged through political
conflict. However, the infusion of these ideas intopolitical geography was slow. Despite the calls of com-mentators such as Walsh that ‘what political geographyneeds most urgently . . . is a comprehensive analysis of the state as a political-economic entity’ (Walsh
1979: 92), political-economic research within poli-
tical geography remained the exception, not the rule,and the task of studying urban conflicts, the geographyof the state and the political–geographic expressions of capitalism was taken up primarily by urban and
economic geographers, political scientists and soci-
ologists. It was not until the 1980s that mainstreampolitical geography really started to take the political-economy approach seriously, with the blossoming of work on the state, localities and urban politics (seeJohnston 1989). The development of the political
economy approach in political geography and its con-
tinuing in current research concern with state strategy,governance and the policy process is discussed inChapter 4, while political economic approaches to localpolitics are among those discussed in Chapter 6.
One of the relatively few attempts to link the
traditional concerns of political geography with theo-retical insight from Marxist political economy wasPeter Taylor’s introduction of world systems analysis.The world systems approach had been developed by a political sociologist, Immanuel Wallerstein, who
was himself influenced by the materialist school of
historical analysis associated with Fernand Braudel andKarl Polányi and by neo-Marxist development studies(see Wallerstein 1979, 1991). As Box 1.2 details,Wallerstein rejected the idea that societal change could
be studied on a country-by-country basis and arguedPOWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 9

instead that change at any scale can be understood only
in the context of a ‘world system’. The modern world
system, Wallerstein argues, is global in scope, but herecognises that it is only the latest of a series of his-torical systems and proposes that it is the changeswithin and between historical systems that are the key
to understanding contemporary society, economy and
politics. For Taylor, the world systems approach wasparticularly attractive to political geography not onlybecause spatial pattern was core to its analysis (Taylor1988) but also because it offered the potential to
develop a comprehensive, unifying theory of political
geography that could include traditional areas likegeopolitics and electoral geography and accommodatepolitical-economic analysis of the state, urban politicsand so on. However, despite its superficial attractive-ness, world systems analysis is open to a number of
criticisms (Box 1.2), and although it has formed the
framework of Taylor’s series of textbooks (see Taylor1985 and Taylor and Flint 2000 as the first and mostrecent editions), the world systems approach has notbeen widely adopted by political geographers.Far more influential have been two conceptual
developments which served to further politicise the
outlook of human geography as a whole. The first ofthese was the so-called ‘cultural turn’ of the late 1980sand 1990s which promoted a new understanding ofculture as the product of discourses through which
people signify their identity and experiences and which
are constantly contested and renegotiated (see Jackson1989; Mitchell 2000). Consequently, issues of powerand resistance were positioned as central to the analysisof cultural geographies, generating significant clusters
of research on questions of identity and place, including
national identity and citizenship; conflict and con-testation between cultural discourses; geographies ofresistance; the role of landscape in conveying andchallenging power; and ‘micro-geographies’ of politics,including investigation of the body as a site of oppres-
sion and resistance (see for example Pile and Keith
1997; Sharp et al. 2000). These themes are discussed
further in Chapters 5, 7 and 8.
Moreover, the ‘new cultural geography’ drew on the
conceptual writings of post-structuralist thinkers suchPOWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 10
BOX 1.2PETER TAYLOR, IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN AND WORLD
SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
World systems analysis forms the basis of the best-known attempt to construct a comprehensive theoretical
framework for political geography, undertaken by Peter Taylor. It was initially developed by Immanuel
Wallerstein as a critique of analyses of social change that focused on one country and considered only ashort-term perspective. In contrast, two of the fundamental principles of world systems analysis are that socialchange at any scale can be understood only in the context of a wider world system, and that change needsto be approached through a long-term historical perspective. (The latter principle is derived from economic
historians such as Fernand Braudel and Karl Polányi.)
Wallerstein holds that a single modern world system is now globally dominant, but that it has been preceded
by numerous historical systems. These systems can be categorised as one of three types of ‘entity’, characterisedby their mode of production. In the most basic, the mini-system, production is based on hunting, gathering orrudimentary agriculture where there is limited specialisation of tasks and exchange is reciprocal betweenproducers. In the second type, the world empire, agricultural production creates a surplus that can support
the expansion of non-agricultural production and the establishment of a military-bureaucratic elite. The third
type, the world economy, is based on the capitalist mode of production where the aim of production is tocreate profit. From the sixteenth century onwards, Wallerstein argues, the European ‘world economy’ systemexpanded to subjugate all other systems and monopolise the globe. Transformation from one system to another

as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, and postcolonial theorists such
as Homi Bhabha, for whom the relation of power and space was a key concern (see Box 1.3). A numberof different strands of post-structuralist thought havebeen introduced into political geography, includingideas about difference in research on the cultural
politics of identity and the use of Derrida’s method ofdeconstruction in critical geopolitics (see below).
However, it is the work of Michel Foucault that
has arguably had the greatest influence in politicalgeography, in particular through the development and application of two key concepts. The first of theseis ‘discourse’, which Foucault redefined as referring tothe ensemble of social practices through which the
world is made meaningful but which are also dynamicPOWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 11
can occur as a result of either internal or external factors, but changes can also occur within systems (termed
‘continuities’) – for example, in cycles of economic growth and stagnation. In the modern world economy
these cycles are mapped by the Kondratieff waves which describe fifty-year cycles of growth and stagnationin the global economy since 1780/90.
Wallerstein further described the modern world economy as being defined by three basic elements. First,
there is a single world market, which is capitalist, and in which competition results in uneven economicdevelopment across the world. Second, there is a multiple state system. The existence of different states is
seen as a necessary condition for economic competition, but it also results in political competition between
states, creating a variety of ‘balances of power’ over time. Third, the world economy always operates in athree-tier format. As Taylor and Flint (2000) explain: ‘in any situation of inequality three tiers of interactionare more stable than two tiers of confrontation. Those at the top will always manoeuvre for the ‘creation’ ofa three-tier structure, whereas those at the bottom will emphasize the two tiers of ‘them and us’. The continuing
existence of the world-economy is therefore due in part to the success of the ruling groups in sustaining three-
tier patterns throughout various fields of conflict’ (p. 12). Examples cited by Taylor and Flint include ‘centre’parties in democratic political systems and the ‘middle class’, but also, crucially, a geographical ordering ofthe world into ‘core’, ‘periphery’ and ‘semi-periphery’. For Wallerstein, core areas are associated with complexproduction regimes, and the periphery with more rudimentary structures. But there is also a ‘semi-periphery’in which elements of both core and peripheral processes can be found, and which forms a dynamic zone
where opportunities for political and economic change exist.
By drawing on these different components of world systems theory, Taylor identified a ‘space–time matrix’
for political geography, structured by Kondratieff cycle and spatial position (core, periphery or semi-periphery),which formed a context for the analysis of all types of political interaction from the global scale down to thehousehold scale, hence providing a unifying framework for political geography.
However, the world systems approach can be criticised on a number of grounds. First, it is economically
reductionist – it sees the driving processes of change as purely economic; it positions political action assecondary; and it reduces sexism and racism to reflections of the economy. Second, it is totalising in that itincorporates everything under one big umbrella and fails to acknowledge fully the heterogeneity of politicalor cultural relations. Third, it is functionalist, not recognising that what causes something to exist may havenothing to do with the effects it produces. For example, the factors behind the creation of a nation-state may
not be related to subsequent nationalist actions.
Key readings : For more on world systems analysis see Taylor and Flint (2000), especially chapter 1, and
Wallerstein (1991). For more on the critique of world systems analysis see Painter (1995) and Giddens
(1985).

and contested (Box 1.4). In books such as The Order of
Things (1973 [1966]) and The Archaeology of Knowledge
(1974 [1969]) Foucault examined the articulation ofdiscursive practices and thus established precedents asto how discourses might be analysed. These ideas havebeen fundamental to the development of geographical
work on cultural politics and of critical geopolitics,
as well as to the development of discourse analysis asa methodological approach which is now widely usedacross political geography. The second key concept is‘governmentality’, by which Foucault refers to the
means by which government renders society govern-
able. Governmentality is essentially about the use of particular ‘apparatuses of knowledge’ and has beenemployed in recent years in work on the state andcitizenship (see Chapter 8).A significant aspect of both discourse analysis and
governmentality is the potential they allow for explora-
tion of the incorporation of space itself as a tool in theexercise of power. Much of Foucault’s writing wasconcerned with power, but he rejected conventionalnotions of power as a property that is possessed,
focusing instead on how power is exercised and how
it circulates through society. Foucault stated that ‘spaceis fundamental in any exercise of power’ (Rabinow1984: 252), and this principle underlies much of hiswork on disciplinary power. His best known illus-
tration of this is his discussion of Jeremy Bentham’s
panopticon (Foucault 1977: ch. 3). The panopticon wasa proposal for an ideal prison, the spatial arrangementof which would effectively force prisoners to disciplinethemselves. The panopticon would be built in a circularPOWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 12
BOX 1.3 POST-STRUCTURALISM
Post-structuralism refers to the theories advanced by a loose collection of philosophical writing produced in
the late twentieth century, most notably in France. Labelled ‘post-structuralism’ because of the way it built onearlier structuralist theories, the approach is particularly identified with the work of Jacques Derrida, MichelFoucault, Gilles Deleuze, Julia Kristeva and Jean Baudrillard. The core ideas of post-structuralism are therejection of the notion of an essential ‘truth’ and the consequential examination of the notion of ‘difference’.
Building on the work of structuralist thinkers like Saussure (1983), post-structuralists hold that language does
not reflect meaning, but rather that meaning is produced within language and that the relation between thesignifier (a sound or written image) and the signified (the meaning) is never fixed. Moreover, post-structuralistsreject the idea of the rational subject, arguing that subjectivity (the sense of who we are) is constructedthrough discourses (see Box 1.4) that are open to change and contestation, and that there is no external ‘reality’
outside discourse. The ‘claims to truth’ that are advanced by science, religion and other discourses are
considered by post-structuralists to be enforced by particular power relations.
Post-structuralism is also associated with the development of particular methodologies to explore these
concerns. Derrida, for example, promoted the method of the deconstruction of ‘texts’ (that need not necessarilybe written texts) as a means of destabilising truth claims (Norris 1982), while Foucault traced the genealogiesof discourses to uncover their contingency (see Foucault 1966, 1969, 1979). These approaches have been
adopted by a number of political geographers, notably in the field of critical geopolitics, while other political
geographers have been attracted to the ideas of difference and of power and space that are prominent inmuch post-structuralist writing (see, for example, Deleuze and Guattari 1988; Foucault 1979, 1980, 1984).
Key readings : For an overview of the work of key post-structuralist writers see Lechte (1994). For a concise
introduction to post-structuralist thought see Belsey (2002).

arrangement with all the cells facing a central observa-
tion tower. The circle meant that prisoners could notsee or communicate with each other, but also by meansof backlighting from a small external window itallowed prisoners to be constantly visible via a large
internal window from the observation tower, whose
own windows had blinds to prevent prisoners see-ing in. The prisoners could not know whether theywere being watched at any particular time, but had topresume that they were under constant surveillance and
therefore act within the rules. As Foucault describes,
the major effect of the Panopticon [is] to induce
in the inmate a state of conscious and permanentvisibility that assures the automatic functioning ofpower. So to arrange things that the surveillance is
permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous
in its action; that the perfection of power shouldtend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; thatthis architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation inde-
pendent of the person who exercises it.
(Foucault 1979: 201)
Although Bentham’s panopticon was never actually
built, the principle of control through visible yetunverifiable surveillance, assisted by spatial ordering,
has been replicated in many areas of social and politicalactivity. More broadly, the ideas about space and powerthat Foucault explored through his study of the pan-opticon have been translated into political geography
through work on the ordering and control of space,
for example, by Herbert (1996, 1997) on policingstrategies in Los Angeles and by Ogborn (1992) onthe exercise of state power in nineteenth-centuryEngland.
The influence of ideas from post-structuralist and
postcolonial writers meant that the ‘cultural turn’ notonly identified new avenues of geographical enquiry,but also introduced new conceptual and methodolog-ical approaches, including the use of discourse analysisto ‘deconstruct’ the meaning of texts, maps, policy
documents and landscapes. However, as with Marxist
political economy two decades earlier, the uptake ofthese innovations in established political geographywas patchy. It was more commonly cultural geog-raphers who took up the challenge of the new research
questions posed by the cultural turn than people who
described themselves as ‘political geographers’.
Surprisingly, perhaps, the area of political geogra-
phy where the new conceptual and methodologicalapproaches had most impact was the neglected field POWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 13
BOX 1.4 DISCOURSE
There are many different definitions of precisely what ‘discourse’ is, and the term is often used quite loosely
in geographical literature. Put simply, however, discourses structure the way we see things. They are collections
of ideas, beliefs and understandings that inform the way in which we act. Often we are influenced by particulardiscourses promoted through the media, through education, or through what we call ‘common sense’. DerekGregory, writing in The Dictionary of Human Geography (2000), identifies three important aspects of discourse.
1 Discourses are not independent, abstract, ideas but are materially embedded in everyday life. They inform
what we do and are reproduced through our actions.
2 Discourses produce our ‘taken for granted’ world. They naturalise a particular view of the world and position
ourselves and others in it.
3 Discourses always produce partial, situated, knowledge, reflecting our own circumstances. They are
characterised by relations of power and knowledge and are always open to contestation and negotiation.
Key readings : Barnes and Duncan (1992) and Gregory (2000a).

of geopolitics. Drawing on Foucault’s notions about
discourse, as well as on critical political theory, geog-
raphers, including most notably Simon Dalby andGearóid O’Tuathail, began to develop the new approachof critical geopolitics . By treating geopolitical knowledge
as a discourse, critical geopolitics has sought to ques-
tion, deconstruct and challenge geopolitical assump-
tions. This has involved, for example, examining theuse of geographical metaphors such as ‘heartland’ and‘containment’ in framing strategies, and, significantly,exploring the popular geopolitical knowledges that
are constructed through cultural media such as film,
literature, news reports and cartoons. We discuss criticalgeopolitics in more detail in Chapter 3.
The second recent influence on political geography
has come from the development of feminist geog-raphy and from feminist theory more broadly. To date,
few attempts have been made to think through an
explicitly ‘feminist political geography’ (see England2003; Hyndman 2001; Kofman and Peake 1990), but,engagements with feminism have highlighted themasculinist nature of traditional political geography
and have begun to suggest ways in which political
geography might be done differently. The conventionalconcerns of political geography have tended to focuson institutions such as the state, government andpolitical parties which are dominated by men and tendto reproduce a male view of the political world (Drake
and Horton 1983). Less attention has been paid to
the institutions through which the patriarchal powerof gender relations is exercised (such as the family) orto the spaces in which women’s political activity hasconventionally been focused – local education, health
and childcare systems, the household and the voluntary
sector. The integration of feminist perspectives intopolitical geography has been associated with the devel-opment of work on the politics of ‘public’ and ‘private’space, and on place/space tensions (England 2003;Taylor 1994a, 2000). England (2003: 611) proposes
‘a feminist political geography that takes formula-
tions of the politics of “public” and “private”, power,space, and scale seriously’, which she illustrates througha discussion of the political significance of scale forforeign domestic workers in Canada. Notably, the
empirical research that England cites was not initiallydesigned as a political geography project (England
and Stiell 1997; Stiell and England 1997), yet, as she
suggests, there is much political geography that isimplicit in previous work by feminist geographers.
Moreover, feminist theory and activism in general
have challenged traditional notions of the ‘political’
that underpinned many essentialist definitions of
political geography by proclaiming that ‘the personalis political’. Combined with the influence of post-structuralism and cultural studies, this message hashelped to change perceptions about the scope of poli-
tical geography, extending the boundaries of the
field far beyond those envisaged by many traditionaldefinitions that focus on the state, or territory, or theanalysis of political regions.
The future of political geography
Political geography is clearly a much more expansive
creature today than it was twenty or thirty years ago.However, the danger of this transformation is that
‘political geography’ may become devalued by its
very ubiquity – if everything is ‘political’ then it couldfollow that all geography is ‘political geography’. Thislogic was followed by Clarke and Doel (1994), whoemployed post-structuralist theory and a Derridianwriting style to imagine a ‘transpolitical geography’
which spilled over the limits of political geography’s
normal concerns and interests. The disturbing conse-quences of this proposal are posed in the accompanyingcommentary by Chris Philo:
does this mean that swathes of work on the
geographies of empires, states, nations, territoriesand boundaries (from Mackinder’s geopolitics to Taylor’s ‘world systems’) now become solely ofhistorical interest, given that such work operateswith the objects specified in a passing domain of
politics? And does it also mean that much conven-
tional research on administrative, electoral andlocational conflict geographies might have to bewaved goodbye as well? Clarke and Doel appear toanswer in the affirmative.
(Philo 1994: 529)POWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 14

At the same time, the status of political geography
has been challenged in more grounded terms by the
fact that much of what might be considered as politicalgeographical research is not being undertaken by ‘poli-tical geographers’ (Cox 2003; Flint 2003). Research on cultural politics and geography is performed by
cultural geographers; on citizenship and the geog-
raphies of policy delivery by social geographers; ongovernance, regulation and state theory by economicand urban geographers – as well as sociologists andpolitical scientists; on state formation and national
identity by historical geographers; and on geopolitics
by students of international relations.
These concerns have informed a debate about
the future direction of political geography as a sub-discipline which was articulated in a panel discussionat the conference of the Association of American
Geographers in Los Angeles in 2002 and a themed
issue of the journal Political Geography in 2003. The
perceived problem was expressed by Flint (2003), who pointed to the ‘paradox’ that while political geog-raphy (at least in the United States) was in good
institutional health, it appeared to lack coherence and
face uncertainty about its direction. Flint identified the uncertainty with the dilemma of whether politicalgeography should concentrate on politics with a big‘P’ or a little ‘p’:
Identity politics, the environment, post-colonialism,
and feminist perspectives are all relatively ‘new’politics, placed on the agenda by the politicalupheavals of the 1960s . . . and can be classified
as politics with a small ‘p’. They stand in contrast
to the old politics of the state and its geopolitical
relations, statemanship or politics with a large ‘P’.
(Flint 2003: 618)
Flint argued that knowledge of both Politics and
politics is required to understand the contemporary
world, and that coherence could be maintained for
‘political geography’ by focusing on ‘the way thatdifferent spatial structures are the product of politicsand the terrain that mediates those actions’ (p. 619),and by showing the relevance of spatiality to all types
of power. Yet he also noted that much work on the‘new’, small ‘p’ political geography is undertaken
by individuals who are not ‘card-carrying’ political
geographers, thus raising concerns about disciplinaryboundaries that were echoed by Cox (2003). Otherparticipants in the debate saw less cause for alarm. JohnAgnew, for example, emphasised the historic fluidity
of political geography and commended its diversity
with a geographical analogy:
Much of what is of interest to me in contemporary
political geography is exciting precisely because
there is more limited agreement than was once the
case in political geography and is the case today insome other fields (such as economic geography). Byanalogy, political geography is like Canada or Italy,a complex entity in imminent danger of collapsingunder the weight of its internal differences. But for
this very reason each is more interesting to the
political geographer than, say, Luxembourg.
(Agnew 2003: 603)
Broadly speaking, the debate produced three possible
pathways for the future. The first is concentration , in
which political geography would refocus on traditionalkey concepts such as the state (Low 2003) or territory(Cox 2003), reverting to an essentialist definition ofthe sub-discipline and establishing firm boundariesthat distinguish it from cultural geography, economic
geography and other predatory neighbours. The second
is expansion , celebrating the dynamism and diversity
of political geographical research and proactively seek-ing new objects of study as part of a ‘post-disciplinarypolitical geography’ (Painter 2003). Kofman (2003),
for example, argued that ‘there isn’t necessarily a
contradiction between a heightened interest in politicalquestions in human geography and the existence ofsomething called political geography’ (p. 621), whileMarston (2003) noted that ‘the migration of thepolitical to other areas of the discipline seem to me to
be compelling evidence that we have failed to attend
to a large portion of what is legitimately and centrallythe purview of political geography’ (p. 635). The thirdpathway is engagement , forging new intellectual connec-
tions with allied subjects such as peace and conflict
studies (Flint 2003), socio-legal studies (Kofman 2003),POWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 15

political ecology (Robbins 2003), feminist geography
(England 2003) and political theory (Painter 2003),
as well as with political geographies produced fromoutside the insular environment of Anglo-Americangeography (Mamadouh 2003; Robinson 2003).
We have already indicated that we are sympathetic
to definitions of political geography that emphasise
diversity, and hence to the pathways of expansion and engagement. This is reflected in the breadth oftopics covered in this book. However, the key pointto note here is the continuing dynamism of political
geography. What we present is a snapshot of politi-
cal geography at a particular moment in time, and even by the time you read these words new researchwill have been published, new debates started, newideas proposed and new areas of study emerging. It isin this sense that this book presents an introduction
to political geography, providing a foundation from
which the student of political geography can engagewith the cutting edge of the sub-discipline throughjournals and research monographs.
The structure of the book
This book is organised into three parts, each of which
starts from a different perspective. Part 1, ‘State,territory and regulation’, starts with the state, which
as we have noted above has conventionally been con-
sidered a key focus of political geography. The firstchapter in Part 1, ‘States and territories’, examines thedevelopment of the territorial state and the signifi-cance of territory to the operation of the modern state.
The next chapter, ‘The state in global perspective’,
discusses the external relations of the state and the partthat geography plays in them, including geopolitics.By drawing on a regulation approach to politicaleconomy, the final chapter in Part 1, ‘The state’schanging forms and functions’, focuses on the forms
and functions of the contemporary state and the
strategies adopted by the state in the regulation ofeconomy and society
Part 2, ‘Politics, power and place’, starts with place,
a core geographical concept. The first chapter, ‘The
political geographies of the nation’, considers theconcept of a ‘nation’ and the ways in which national
identity is linked with specific places and territories.
The second chapter, ‘Politics, power and place’, stepsdown a scale to think about place as locality. It exploreshow place is important to politics and discusses thestructuring of power within place-based communities.
The final chapter in Part 2, ‘Contesting place’,
examines how places become sites of political conflict,including conflicts about the meaning of symboliclandscapes and the construction of community.
Part 3, ‘People, policy and geography’, starts with
people, but does so from two different directions. The
first chapter in Part 3, ‘Democracy, participation andcitizenship’, examines the ways in which people engagewith the political process as citizens and how thisengagement both is shaped by geographical factors andcreates new geographies. The second chapter, ‘Public
policy and political geography’, focuses on policy, the
means by which the state engages with people in aplace. This chapter discusses debates about the extentto which human geographers should engage directlywith the policy process and raises issues that political
geography students could consider in their own
work.
A book such as this cannot hope to give any more
than a flavour of the rich variety of topics that form part of contemporary political geography. As an intro-ductory text, it is hoped, the book will stimulate you
to read further on themes that interest you, and even
to become involved in producing your own ‘politicalgeography’ through undergraduate and postgraduateproject work.
Further reading
Agnew’s Making Political Geography (2002a) provides
a more detailed history of political geography than that outlined here, albeit one which emphasises the
traditional concerns of the sub-discipline more than recent
innovations.
The debate about the future direction of political
geography, discussed towards the end of this chapter, is
published in Political Geography , 22, 6 (2003).POWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 16

Many of the classic texts in political geography can still
be found in university libraries, but it is often moreinformative to read more contemporary commentaries
on these books and articles rather than the originals
themselves. For more on Ratzel’s theories, Bassin’s paper‘Imperialism and the nation state in Friedrich Ratzel’spolitical geography’ in Progress in Human Geography 11
(1987), 473–95, is a good overview. O’Tuathail’s paper‘Putting Mackinder in his place’ in Political Geography 11
(1992), 100–18, is a similarly good source on Halford
Mackinder. Herb, Under the Map of Germany (1997) is an
interesting exploration of the perversion of cartographyby German Geopolitik .Kasperson and Minghi’s edited collection The Structure of
Political Geography (1969) contains reprints of many sig-
nificant contributions from Aristotle onwards. Although
it is long out of print, many university libraries will have
copies. Agnew’s reader Political Geography (1997) has
an illustrative sample of more recent writing from the1970s onwards.
Many of the themes explored by political geographers
since the 1970s will be covered in more detail in later
chapters and guidance to further reading will be giventhen.POWER, SPACE AND ‘POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY’ 17

STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION1PART

Introduction
Rather like the air we breathe, states are organisa-
tions that surround us as individuals, influencing
and, in many ways, offering sustenance to the lives we lead. Similar to the air we breathe, states are alsoorganisations that often lie beyond the limits of ourcritical reflection. We may question the priorities ofpolitical parties; we may also disagree with the policies
implemented by various governments. We do not often
question, however, the character of the organisationthat political parties, while in government, seek togovern. In other words, we rarely think about whatstates actually are, how they are constituted, how
they come into being and how they change over time.
These are some of the questions concerning the formof the state that we will ask, and ultimately seek toanswer, in this chapter.
The first and most fundamental issue we need to deal
with, of course, is what exactly is a state? Fortunately,
a number of eminent social scientists have sought to
answer this question. Max Weber, for instance, arguedthat a state is a ‘human community that (successfully)claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physicalforce within a given territory’ (Gerth and Mills 1970:
78). Michael Mann (1984) has built on this definition
by arguing that any definition of states shouldincorporate a number of different elements:
1 a set of institutions and their related personnel;
2 a degree of centrality, with political decisions
emanating from this centre point;
3 a defined boundary that demarcates the territorial
limits of the state;4 a monopoly of coercive power and law-making
ability.
An extended definition such as this makes us think
about a number of important aspects of the state.Significantly, it encourages us to think about the statein a far more abstract sense. In addition to the vari-
ous paraphernalia associated with states in individual
countries, there are, or at least there should be, certainunderlying constants in states throughout the world,ones that are highlighted in the above definition.Rather than viewing the state in purely personal terms,
therefore – as a supplier of public utilities, or some-
thing that is embodied in a senate or parliament, forinstance – it makes us think of the underlying processesand institutions that (usually) help to constitute statebureaucracies.
So what do geographers, and more specifically
political geographers, have to offer in any study of the
character of states? In other words, what can we gainfrom studying the state from a geographical perspec-tive? We argue that there are three main reasons for doing so. First, geographers can help to illuminate
the fact that states, when considered at a global scale,
vary from region to region. One geographer whosework can be said to demonstrate this is Peter Taylor(see Taylor and Flint 2000). Taylor has deployed theideas of Immanuel Wallerstein (1974, 1979, 1980,1989) regarding the existence of a capitalist world
economy – one in which the northern states of the
First World thrive through their exploitation ofsouthern states and people of the Third World – inorder to structure his understanding of the economicdisparities that exist from one region of the world toStates and territories2

another (see Chapter 1). Crucially, this process of
exploitation leads to significant differences in the
political, economic and social viability of Southernstates on the ‘periphery’. To put it bluntly, they donot have the money to support either their stateinstitutions or their citizens. To states such as these,
the badges of statehood – described by Mann – are ones
to be aspired to, rather than being ones that reflectpolitical reality. This is a theme that we will return tolater in the chapter.
Second, geographers can help to highlight the
unequal effect of particular policies on different areas
within the territory of the state. These may range frompolicies that are explicitly targeted towards certainareas – for instance, policies of urban renewal in Europeand North America – to more general or ‘national’policies. Even though these latter policies may be
directed towards the state’s territory and population
as a whole, they may in turn have different impacts in different areas of the state, owing to pre-existingcultural, social, economic and political geographies.So, for instance, a policy to encourage the use of public
transport amongst the general public through the
raising of taxes on private car ownership may worksuccessfully in urban areas, where opportunities for the use of public transport proliferate, but may fur-ther disadvantage the inhabitants of rural areas, wherelevels of car dependence are far higher. Obviously,
geographers have a key role here in studying, and
attempting to alleviate, these problems. This is a themethat we will discuss in Chapter 8.
Third, and most fundamentally, geographers can
contribute to our understanding of the state because
of the state’s effort to govern a demarcated territory.
Indeed, this is the main justification for studying thestate from a geographical perspective and it is a pointworth emphasising. Broadly speaking, states use the notion of territoriality in two main ways. In thefirst place, territoriality is important in a material
or physical sense (see Brenner et al. 2003). This is a
relatively straightforward idea and relates to the factthat states always try to demarcate the physical limitsof their power. A good illustration of the growingpower of the state over the modern period (since
approximately 1500) has been its efforts to demarcateits physical boundaries in a more precise manner. In
this way, diffuse and ill-defined frontiers became
precisely delineated boundaries (Newman and Paasi1998). One of the best examples of this physical terri-toriality lies in the context of the shifting boundarybetween the US federal state and Mexico (see Prescott
1965: 77–87; Donnan and Wilson 1999: 34–9). For
much of the nineteenth century a conflict existedbetween the two countries regarding their territorialextent. Much of the wrangling revolved around theprecise location of the boundary between the two
states. Critical here were natural features used to
designate the boundary, such as the Rio Grande river.A large amount of the conflict concerned the chang-ing course of the river over time and the implicationsthis had for the territorial extent of the two states. Amore recent set of examples revolve around the geo-
graphical limits of the Chinese Republic. Hong Kong,
for a century an integral part of the British Empire, was reinstated into the Chinese Republic in 1997, and there have been long-term conflicts regarding the independent status of China’s other independent
neighbour, Taiwan (see Box 2.1). Obviously, these
examples clearly illustrate the major importance ofterritory and boundaries in a physical sense.
In the second place, a state’s territory is of key
significance in an ideological context. What we meanby this is that the notion of territoriality is used by
the state as a way of explaining its way of governing
and ruling its population. In a sense, it is possible toargue that states do not govern people as such. Rather,they govern a defined territory and it is by doing sothat they subsequently govern the people living within
it. As Robert Sack (1983, 1986) has argued, this
territorial method of control is in many ways a far easierway of governing than one that emphasises the directcontrol of people. Within this system, anyone livingor working in, or even passing through, a state’sterritory is subject to the laws and policies of that state,
regardless of their social, ethnic or cultural background.
In this context, therefore, a state’s internal and externalboundaries are not only lines drawn on a map, ditchesdug or stones laid on a barren moor. They are this, butthey are also far more: they represent the ideological
basis of state power.STATES AND TERRITORIES 21

Our aim in this chapter is to explore the changing
nature of the state over time. Adopting this historicalapproach enables us to demonstrate the development
of some of the key features of state power. In order to
accomplish this, we will focus first on the process ofstate ‘consolidation’ (Tilly 1990) that occurred fromapproximately the sixteenth century onwards. Thisgradual process led to the formation of the all-powerfulstates of the twentieth century. One useful way of
exploring these changes is to examine the changing
territoriality of the state, something we address lateron. Here we also briefly discuss the arguments thatsuggest that states are being systematically under-mined by the processes of globalisation operating in
the contemporary world. The final theme we discuss
is the process of ‘exporting’ the state from Northernto Southern states. This process has not been unprob-lematic, and we discuss the issues facing Southern statesin detail. Taken together, the themes discussed in thechapter make us appreciate the importance of territory
to the state, as well as the need to explore the temporal
and spatial variations in state forms.The consolidation of the state
In this section we discuss the development of the state
over the past 400 years. We do not argue in this contextthat the state has existed only for this relatively short
period of time. This is patently not the case. Ancient
states existed as far back as 3,000
BCin Mesopotamia,
the region occupied by modern-day Iraq (Mann 1986).We focus our attention here on the state from approxi-mately 1500 onwards, since it is this relatively recentprocess of state formation that directly informs the
political geography of contemporary states.
Charles Tilly (1975, 1990) has argued that funda-
mental changes affected the state from approximately1500 onwards, most clearly in Europe. During thisso-called modern period a series of far-reaching
developments occurred in the nature of states as they
gradually became ‘consolidated’ into their presentforms. By ‘consolidation’ Tilly means the way in whichthe states of this period – mainly in Europe – becameterritorially defined, centralised and possessing amonopoly of coercive power within their boundaries.STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 22
BOX 2.1 STATE AND TERRITORY: CHINA AND TAIWAN
The uneasy relationship between China and Taiwan can be traced back to the period immediately following
the Second World War. In 1949 the Communist Party of China defeated the Nationalist forces of Jiang Kaishekand gained control of the whole of the country, apart from the remote area of Tibet and the islands of Taiwanand Hong Kong. Since that period, the Chinese state has tried to gain control of these enclaves. Chinesesubjugation of Tibet began in 1950 and Hong Kong was ceded from the British Empire to China in 1997.This has left Taiwan as the only remaining blot on the territorial integrity of China and the main focus of the
Chinese state’s enmity. Indeed, Taiwan has been a thorn in China’s side for many reasons. First, Taiwan was
the place of refuge for the Nationalist forces of Jiang Kaishek after the revolution of 1949. Second, Taiwan’sstatus as an independent state has consistently been supported by the United States. The main reason for USinterest in Taiwan was the perceived need to maintain a series of territorial footholds throughout the Asiancontinent. US troops were stationed on the island until 1978 and contributed to the frosty relationship that
existed between the United States and China. With the US withdrawal from Taiwan, China has began to
reaffirm its belief that Taiwan is an island that it can legitimately lay claim to. Much military posturing betweenthe two countries – including missile testing and a series of military manoeuvres by the Chinese armed forces– has helped to reinforce the territorial significance of Taiwan. In this example, the state’s key role in takingand maintaining physical control over a defined territory is clearly illustrated.
Key readings : Calvocoressi (1991) and Shambaugh (1995).

Of course, this process of consolidation, which echoes
some of the themes raised in Mann’s definition of states,
speaks of an earlier period when European states didnot adhere to this organisational formula. The state of the earlier medieval period was a haphazard affairand included a plethora of different individuals and
organisations claiming power over territory and space.
These included kings, lay and ecclesiastical lords,religious organisations and free townspeople (seeAnderson 1996). The process of consolidation thataffected state forms during the modern period entailed
the gradual abandonment of this medieval legacy and
the development of states that possessed clearly definedterritories, and which were capable of exploiting theirland, people and resources in an efficient manner.
We can put some empirical meat on these bare bones
by discussing specific studies that have examined the
consolidation of state power. Miles Ogborn (1998),
for instance, has explored some of the key changes to have affected the English and Welsh state during the seventeenth century. Crucial to the consolidation of state power during this period was its ability to
collect revenue from its people, resources and land.
The main method employed by the leaders of theEnglish and Welsh state was the excise duties – or in other words, the taxes raised – on the consumptionof beer. Furthermore, a series of new mechanisms wereemployed in order to ensure the efficiency and con-
sistency of this process. At one level, this meant that
a number of different officers were paid to survey theprocess of brewing beer. This involved much travelthroughout the country to ensure consistency in theway in which beer was produced and sold. At a more
fundamental level, efforts to raise excise duties on beer
production led to sustained attempts to comprehendthe internal geometry of barrels and casks. Accordingto Ogborn (1998), by ‘mapping’ the internal ‘geog-raphies’ of barrels, the state could ensure that exciseduties were raised in an efficient and consistent manner.
Efficiency was important, of course, since it enabled
the state to raise as much revenue as it possibly could.The consistency and equality of collecting excise dutieswas just as significant, since it helped the state tolegitimise the whole process to its citizens.
This example helps to draw our attention to animportant feature of the consolidation of state power.
States during the modern period were not solely con-
cerned with collecting monetary resources from theirpeople and territory, though this factor was withoutdoubt crucial. Ogborn’s study of the development of excise duties in early modern England and Wales
is significant for another reason, for it emphasises the
key role played by the collection of information andsurveillance in the changing power of the state. In thiscase, the state had to know exactly how much beer was being produced. This general point has been well
made by Anthony Giddens (1985). He has explored
the crucial role of surveillance in the consolidation ofstate power. It is the act of collecting information, ofrecording it within the state bureaucracy, and of usingit in order to govern a population, that is so critical tothe consolidation of state power. Giddens (1985: 179)
argues succinctly: ‘as good a single index as any of the
movement from the absolutist state to the nation-stateis the initiation of the systematic collection of “officialstatistics”.’
Key here is the notion of the infrastructural power
of the state, or in other words, the power of the state
to affect the life of its citizens in a routine manner(Mann 1984). The promotion of surveillance is boththe product of, and the precursor to, the growth of the infrastructural power of the state. States requireinformation about their population, their resources
and their land in order to develop higher levels of
bureaucratic control. In the same vein, the formationof state bureaucracies enables the development of more sophisticated means of monitoring the state’spopulation and territory. This type of state–society
relation is portrayed chillingly in George Orwell’s
famous novel, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949).
As well as collecting information about the state’s
population and territory, another important aspect ofthe growth of state power during this period relates to the production of certain knowledges. Michel
Foucault (1977, 1979) has consistently argued that a
key feature of the growth of state power during themodern period lay in the state’s ability to produceknowledges concerning its population. So, for instance,before the state could impose more restrictive rules and
regulations on the practices of its population, it firstSTATES AND TERRITORIES 23

had to develop a series of knowledges concerning
the difference between acceptable and unacceptable
behaviour. In this way, considerable efforts were madeto define deviance, various forms of sanity and insanityand of morality and immorality. Only by developingthese sets of very specific knowledges could the state
ensure that it was able to classify its population in
the correct manner. In developing these knowledges,and in classifying its population, the state was then ableto take action against it, for instance by buildingprisons, madhouses, workhouses, where criminals, the
insane and the immoral could be taken (see pp. 12–13
above). In focusing on these issues, Foucault seeks todraw our attention to notions of ‘governmentality’ or,in other words, the rationality involved in government(see Box. 2.2). By this, Foucault means the develop-ment of a ‘way or system of thinking about the nature
of the practice of government (who can govern; what
governing is; what or who is governed), capable ofmaking some form of that activity thinkable andpracticable both to its practitioners and to those uponwhom it was practised’ (Gordon 1991: 1). This process
of developing knowledges and rational forms of
government, therefore, further fuelled the growth ofthe infrastructural power of the state. One useful way in which we can think of these
changes to the nature of state power is through refer-
ence to James Scott’s (1998) ideas regarding states’efforts to make the society and territory that theygovern more ‘legible’. States during the modern periodfaced significant problems in their efforts to govern in
an effective manner. At least part of these problems
lay in the complexity of the societies and territoriesthat states sought to govern. For instance, Scott (1998:27–9) notes that methods of measuring varied greatlythroughout Europe during the early modern period
(approximately between 1600 and 1800). Since there
were so many different means of measuring, Scottargues there was considerable potential for geo-graphical variation in the amount of taxes and excisepaid by various communities, so much so that we canrefer to a politics of measurement:
Even when the unit of measurement – say the bushel
– was apparently agreed upon by all, the fun hadjust begun. Virtually everywhere in early modernEurope were endless micropolitics about how
baskets might be adjusted through wear, bulging,
tricks of weaving, moisture, the thickness of ther i m , a n d s o o n…H o w t h e g rain was to be pouredSTATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 24
BOX 2.2 GOVERNMENTALITY
Governmentality is associated with the work of Michel Foucault and is essentially concerned with the problem
of how government renders society governable (Foucault 1991; Rose 1993). ‘Classical governmentality’ henceinvolves both the description and problematisation of society, and the putting in place of techniques andmechanisms to respond to the problems identified. However, Foucault also proposed a second, more historicallyspecific, meaning of governmentality which ‘marks the emergence of a distinctly new form of thinking about
and exercising power in certain societies’ (Dean 1999: 19; see also Foucault 1991). This latter approach
places an emphasis on the political rationalities that inform government, including the identification of theproper spheres of action of different types of authority. Once the legitimate scope of government has beenestablished, the governmentality perspective also highlights the technologies of government, such as censuses,statistical surveys, maps and legal processes, and the apparatus of security, such as health, education and
social welfare systems, that enables state power to be exercised.
Key readings : Dean (1999), Foucault (1991) and Rose (1993).

(from shoulder height, which packed it somewhat,
or from waist height?), how damp it could be,
whether the container could be shaken down, and,finally, if and how it was to be leveled off when full were subjects of long and bitter controversy.
(Scott 1998: 28; see also Kula 1986)
Key to the consolidation of power, according to Scott,
were states’ efforts to make the society and territorythat they governed more ‘legible’. What Scott meansby this is the state’s attempt to simplify the society
that it governed and to make it more ‘understandable’
to the state’s institutions. Instead of the great varietyin methods of measurement, therefore, the state soughtto impose its own standardised means of measuring.Perhaps the best example of this process were the effortsmade by the French state during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries to replace the various local and
regional means of measuring distance with a rationaland standard system of measurement based on the
metre and kilometre. Box 2.3 discusses another instance
of states attempting to make society and territory morelegible in the context of the growth of scientific forestryin Prussia (modern-day Germany). In all these projects,linked with attempts to standardise methods of nam-
ing, measuring, growing and even brewing, we see the
state’s determined efforts to create a more legible, andtherefore more governable and exploitable, populationand territory.
Here, therefore, we see the efforts of the modern state
to consolidate its power over the long term. This is
the process that led to the shift from the so-called punystates of the medieval period, ones which were‘marginal to the lives of most Europeans’, into the all-powerful organisations that are ‘of decisive importancein structuring the world we live in today’ (Mann 1984:
209). The main question that arises is this context is
what motivated these massive changes in the natureSTATES AND TERRITORIES 25
BOX 2.3 MAKING NATURE LEGIBLE: SCIENTIFIC FORESTRY IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY PRUSSIA
A recurring theme with regard to the consolidation of state power has been the attempts made by the state
to exploit its territory and people in a more efficient manner. One particularly critical resource for the stateduring the modern period was its forests. These enabled it to support indigenous industry and also acted asthe material for the construction of buildings and ships. Forests, though, were originally a problematic resource
in that they were very disorderly in the way in which they were organised. In mixed forests, in particular,
valuable timber was interspersed with trash and other varieties of trees and shrubs. For Scott (1998) thisresource was especially ‘illegible’ in nature. Starting in Prussia (northern Germany) during the nineteenthcentury, however, a concerted effort was made to make this resource more legible, and therefore moremanageable, for state foresters. New sampling and mapping techniques were developed that enabled foresters
to quantify the amount of useful timber within a given area of woodland. Building on this, state foresters
began to impose their own rationality on the forests of Prussia, so that they could create new forests, oneswhich were easier to ‘count, manipulate, measure and assess’ (Scott 1998: 15). Here, therefore, we see thebeginnings of the regimented and uniform stands of trees, by today so familiar in many states. What is crucialhere, however, is that this attempt to impose a certain rationality on a complex natural resource was linkedwith the efforts of states to consolidate their power. One key way of achieving this aim was to create a
more rational, simplified, standardised and, as Scott puts it, more legible society and territory for the
state to govern.
Key reading : Scott (1998).

of the state? What was the driving force behind the
consolidation of state power?
Michael Mann has convincingly argued that the
main reason for the consolidation of state power duringthe modern period was the need to conduct wars. Usingempirical evidence from the English state, Mann
(1988) has mapped out the changing patterns of the
state’s finances over the very long term. There has beena general tendency towards ever-increasing economicexploitation of the people and land of the English state. Critically, the main periods of growth corre-
spond almost exactly with wars that the English state
was involved in. Even during the limited periods ofstability and peace that followed each conflict, stateexpenditure remained at a higher level than it had been during the pre-war period. This so-called ‘ratcheteffect’ relates to the need to pay back the loans that
were taken out by the state in order to sustain its
war effort. Mann’s work demonstrates clearly that the main impetus for the growing consolidation ofpower over the long term was the need to promote the state’s ability to wage war against other states, and the
equally crucial need to defend itself against aggressive
neighbours.
An important theme, in this respect, is the close
relationship between the external or international rela-tions of states and their internal or domestic politi-cal geographies. This point was made over fifty years
ago by one of the fathers of political geography,
Richard Hartshorne (1950), but it is an idea that is alsoapparent in Ogborn’s work (see Chapter 3). Ogbornhas argued that it was the English state’s attention to the domestic political and economic geographies of
excise duty collection that enabled it to build external
colonies that extended througout much of the knownworld. The same relationship between the external and internal political geographies of the state can beseen in the context of the interaction between the state’s need to conduct wars and its efforts to tax its
citizens in a more effective way (see Figure 2.1). The
need for tax revenue had two main consequences. Atone level, resistance to taxation could lead to increasedsurveillance of the population and the creation of amore repressive political regime. One could argue, for
instance, that it is this resistance to war-inducedtaxation that – at root – explains the formation of the
police forces that exist in all states, as well as the devel-
opment of ever more detailed systems of law and order.Paradoxically, the need to sustain a war effort couldlead to the political and civic emancipation of thecitizens of a particular state. Painter (1995: 45) has
argued that the state’s need to raise taxes in order to
support its armed forces in many ways explains thecreation of more representative democracies within the state. In other words, state leaders were forced by different factions within the state to pay a price
for the financial support they received during times
of war. As Tilly (1990: 64, original emphasis) has succinctly put it with regard to the English state of thisperiod, ‘Kings of England did not want a Parliament
to assume ever-greater power; they conceded to barons,and then to clergy, gentry, and bourgeois, in the course
of persuading them to raise the money for warfare’.
Warfare between states could, therefore, have both
repressive and emancipatory consequences within
each individual state (see Figure 2.1). The exact natureof these consequences depended in large part on the
balance of power that existed within each state. (See
Rokkan 1980 for a discussion of these varying alliancesand conflicts within European states.) Moreover theseconsequences were socio-economically and geograph-ically uneven in nature, depending on the ability ofeach social, economic, political and cultural faction to
resist state repression and, furthermore, to mobilise the
state machinery for its own ends. (In a general contextsee Jessop 1990a.) We discuss the relationship betweenthe internal and external political geographies of thestate in greater detail in Chapter 3.
The other key point that comes from Mann’s work
on the financing of the English and Welsh state overthe long term relates to the function of the state as an organisation (see Clark and Dear 1984). Contrary to the work of some theorists, who view the state as an organisation solely concerned with furthering
the process of capitalist accumulation, Mann’s work
demonstrates that states – for a considerable period intheir history – have been concerned with fostering andsustaining the means to wage war on their competitors.Admittedly, states broadened their range of functions
to deal with the regulation of capital accumulation andSTATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 26

related welfare issues during the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. This, however, is a theme that wediscuss at greater length in Chapter 4.
In this section, we have discussed the consolidation
of state power and have explored different theoretical
contributions that have sought to explain this change.In the following section we explore some of thesethemes in greater detail by focusing explicitly on thegrowing territorialisation of the state. In addition,
we will explore those processes – most particularly
revolving around the forces of globalisation – that areallegedly undermining the territorial integrity of the
state.
Building and challenging
state territoriality
One of the main consequences – and driving forces –
of the consolidation of the state during the modern
period was the increasing emphasis placed by state
rulers on governing defined territories. As discussed inSTATES AND TERRITORIES 27
Figure 2.1 External and internal political geographies of the state
Source: after Tilly (1975); Mann (1988); Painter (1995)

the introduction to this chapter, territoriality plays a
key role in the material and ideological constitution
of every modern state. In other words, states have togovern territory in order to secure their physical form.Similarly states derive much of their legitimacy fromthe fact that they govern territory and not people. As
Robert Sack (1986) has argued, the territorialisation of
power can often cloud the repressive and exploitativenature of power relationships. This is part of the reasonfor the political success of states as they seek to governgroups of people.
A focus on the territoriality of the state helps us to
answer a number of questions regarding state power.First, it enables us to think about one common aspectof the physicality of state forms, namely the extent to which most states during the modern period wereof a medium size. Here it is useful to turn to the work
of Hendrik Spruyt (1994), who has examined the
changing territoriality of state forms in Europe duringthe modern period. Spruyt’s key argument is that the European state has tended to gravitate towards amedium size and scale. Importantly, this was not, in
any way, predestined to happen. Indeed, three differ-
ent territorial formats were open to state rulers on the eve of the modern period: the city-state, such asFlorence and Genoa; the extensive empires such as theHoly Roman Empire and the Hanseatic League; andthe medium-sized state, such as England and France.
Crucially, according to Spruyt (see also Tilly 1990), the
medium-sized state possessed a distinct advantagecompared with the other two possible territorial for-mats, for the reason that it offered the most appropriatecombination of economic and military power. Both
were needed in order to sustain successful war efforts.
Generally speaking, cities are sites of the productionand consumption of capital. They are, therefore, wellsuited to producing the economic resources needed to sustain a war effort. The economic power of artisansand guilds, however, made it difficult to coerce a large
proportion of the inhabitants of cities into the state’s
armies. As such, city-states were not able to cope with the specific functions required of a state duringthe modern period. Large empires of the early modernperiod, however, were characterised by considerable
coercive capabilities. They were filled with a warriornobility at the head of large populations. Unfortunately,
these extensive empires did not possess the economic
might to support the large-scale military activityneeded of a modern state. In effect, Spruyt argues, asuccessful warring state would require a combinationof these two factors – cities in order to produce capital
and a warrior class leading large armies. Medium-sized
states possessed this balance between cities, as sites ofcapitalist production, and large agricultural hinter-lands, acting as the territorial basis for its warriorleaders.
Spruyt’s work helps to draw our attention, therefore,
to the key role played by a particular form of terri-toriality in promoting and sustaining the power ofgiven states. States were far more likely to be successfulin wars, and were far more likely therefore to surviveas coherent political units, if they were of a particular
size and scale. Of necessity, this point demonstrates the
key role of geography in the constitution of statesduring the modern period.
Another key point made in the introductory section
of this chapter regarding the territoriality of the state
was the crucial role it played in sustaining the
ideological integrity of the state as an organisation.Importantly, this territoriality has not been static inany sense. Alexander Murphy (1996) has explored thesethemes at length and he has suggested that we shoulddistinguish between two interrelated aspects of state
territoriality (see Figure 2.2). First, we need to think
about territoriality as something that governs the rela-tions between states: this, in other words, is the degreeto which states within an international system of stateslive by a series of rules and regulations, responsibilities
and obligations. This aspect of territoriality largely
relates to the international or external activities of statessuch as in the context of war and diplomacy. Second,state territoriality also exists at a far more fundamentallevel in the way it relates to the ‘relationship betweenterritory and power in a sovereign state system;
its central focus is the degree to which the map of
individual states is also a map of effective authority’(Murphy 1996: 87). Murphy refers here to the internalterritoriality of a state, or in other words, the extent to which a state possesses a practical and effective
control over all its territory. As can be noted from the STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 28

schematic representation in Figure 2.2, there have been
variations in the nature of state territoriality over time.Territoriality in an external or international sense
has fluctuated wildly over time, ranging from pre-
dominantly stable or ‘systemic’ periods, when states,on the whole, respected each other’s territorial integrity– for instance during the period after the Peace ofWestphalia in 1648, or after the Treaty of Versaillesin 1919 – to more unstable or ‘anarchic’ periods, or in
other words, times of war and territorial encroachment.
We can think here of the international anarchycharacteristic of the First and Second World Wars.
Focusing our attention on the internal territoriality
of states, the diagram portrays a far more stable pattern.
Generally speaking, states have increased their ability
to promote a more territorialised form of power overtime. This relates back to Mann’s (1984) ideas concern-ing the growing infrastructural power of the state overtime. One of the main ways that states have ensuredthat they can reach out and govern their citizens in an
effective manner during the modern period has beenthrough proclaiming that all people living, and all
the land lying, within the boundaries of the state are
subject to the state’s laws and coercive powers. In effect,the majority of European states for much of the modernperiod have sought to create a homogeneous andisomorphic state territory. The aim for many stateshas been to reach a situation in which distance from
the centre of the state has little bearing on states’ ability
to govern and rule.
The aim of creating a homogeneous state territory
was a difficult one, for the simple reason that it meantchanging age-old traditions and customs in the various
localities of the state. It was often easier to achieve
this goal in new lands, less structured by communitytraditions. It is no surprise, therefore, that some of themore successful attempts to impose a rational terri-toriality on state space have been achieved beyond theSTATES AND TERRITORIES 29
Figure 2.2 Changing ‘international’ and ‘national’ state territorialities
Source: adapted from Murphy (1996: figs 1–2)

STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 30
Figure 2.3 The imposition of
rational territoriality in NorthAmerica
Source: adapted from National
Geographic (1988)

boundaries of Europe. In Figure 2.3, showing an early
map of North America, we see a clear effort to create
what J.C. Scott (1998) has referred to as a ‘legible’society and territory. The map shows the precise par-titioning of lands that took place to the north-west ofthe Ohio river in the late eighteenth century as territory
was subdivided into townships and smaller parcels of
land.
The efforts to create a territorial rationality for state
space often involved a degree of conflict. In this regard,various options were open to state leaders who wanted
to enforce their territorial order on state space. First,
states could try to sponsor a process of centralisationwhereby the political, economic, social and culturalnorms of the centre were imposed on the state’speriphery. Smith (1989) has argued that this was asignificant feature of socialist states during much of
the twentieth century. Socialist states’ position as the
prime directors of economic, political, social andcultural processes within their boundaries left littleroom for other actors – for instance, the forces of capital– to distort its vision of a wholly uniform state terri-
toriality. For instance, the Soviet Union’s monopoly
of power enabled it to ‘shape the spatial structure of society’ in ‘accordance with its own political prefer-ences’, based on notions of communism (Smith 1989:323). This had enormous implications for the notionof territoriality within the Soviet Union, leading
to sustained attempts to dissolve ‘town–country’ and
‘region–region’ differences within the country. In this ‘grand plan’ for the development of the Soviet state,little attention was paid to spatial variations in societyand culture. The key factor that underpinned this
drive was the vision of a homogeneous, and therefore
‘legible’, Soviet communist territory.
Second, the creation of a homogeneous state territory
could occur through negotiation between the centreand the periphery. Ogborn (1992), for instance, hasargued that many of the Acts adopted in Britain during
the nineteenth century as a means of creating a more
homogeneous British territory were developed througha process of negotiation between Parliament in Londonand the various localities. Acts such as the Police Billof 1856 and the development of poor relief were fine-
tuned as a result of political bargaining between centreand periphery. In no sense here was a homogeneous
British territory created through the uncontested
imposition of the norms of the core of the British stateon its periphery. Building on this, we can think of athird mechanism for a state, eager to govern its territoryin a more effective manner, namely that of federal-
ism. In a federal system, some powers are delegated
to various regions within the state whereas others are maintained at a federal scale. As such, it can besaid that federal states represent a somewhat emascu-lated form of territoriality: though some political
and economic rights and responsibilities exist at a
territorialised federal scale – thus forming a relativelyhomogeneous state space – others vary from provinceto province, creating a mosaic form of territoriality (seeBox 2.4).
One final way in which territory helps to give shape
to the power of the state is through the promotion of
state nationalism, which engenders a sense of loyaltyamongst citizens towards the state and its institutions.This is a theme we will discuss at much greater lengthin Chapter 5. It is important to note at this juncture,
however, that nationalism, as an ideology, emphasises
the link between a group of people and a certain terri-tory. As such, territory can be viewed as the conceptthat unites the bureaucratic and impersonal organ-isation of the state and the political and culturalcommunity of the nation (see Taylor and Flint 2000).
It is another important reason for exploring the state
– and the nation – from a geographical perspective.
We have discussed the key importance of terri-
toriality for states during the modern period in thissection. In the contemporary or late modern period,
however, much is being made of the fundamental
organisational changes that are affecting the state’sfunctions. These changes are largely attributed to theforces of globalisation. As political, economic, culturaland social processes gravitate towards a broader, globalscale the independence and autonomy of individual
states throughout the world are allegedly being
undermined. Importantly, these processes possess aterritorial dimension. What we mean by this is thatglobalisation is often portrayed as something which isundermining the territorial integrity of states. If the
states of the modern period can be described as ‘powerSTATES AND TERRITORIES 31

containers’ (Giddens 1985), then there is some scope
to argue that these containers are pitted with holes
and are leaking badly (see Taylor 1995). We discussthe impact of globalisation on the state at greaterlength in Chapter 3. We think it important, however,to briefly address one aspect of the potential impact of
globalisation on the territoriality of the state in this
chapter.
The discussion in this chapter illustrates one
important reason for countering the discourses thatview the state as an organisation that is of irrelevance
within the contemporary world, or one that has lost
its territorial focus. These discourses often portray asimple shift from a state that was wholly territorial andhomogeneous in nature to one which is increasinglybeing challenged by global forces. What these
interpretations conveniently forget is that states have
never been constituted as homogeneous politicalentities. Even though the goal of individual states hasbeen to promote a method of governance that is centredaround a territorial ideal, they have often failed in this
enterprise. Reasons for this failure are not difficult
to countenance. One possible explanation is the lackof infrastructural co-ordination on the part of thecentral state to exactly map social practices within itsboundaries. Linked with this are the attempts by the
citizens of different states to contest the efforts of the
state to regulate their behaviour in a territorial manner(see also Chapters 4 and 8). Even in states that seek topromote a wholly centralised notion of political power,STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 32
BOX 2.4 TERRITORIALITY AND FEDERALISM IN THE UNITED STATES
One of the best examples of a federal state, incorporating a limited territorial homogeneity at a national
scale, is the United States. European expansion into North America between the sixteenth and nineteenth
centuries progressively signalled a radical re-evaluation of the meaning of space compared with indigenous
peoples’ understandings of the land in which they lived. Mirroring Scott’s ideas regarding the state’s need tomake society legible, many charters were granted to Europeans that described their newly acquired land in a precise territorial manner. As Sack (1986: 136) notes, the charter granting land to William Penn in 1681 helped to define his land in a delineated manner. He was granted the land ‘bounded on the East by
the Delaware River, from twelve miles distance Northwards of New Castle Town unto the three and fortieth
degree of Northern Latitude . . .’. At one level, therefore, there were considerable efforts to fashion a terri-torial basis for the new state that was forming in the United States. At a grander political scale, however, there were many debates regarding the exact way in which this new state should be governed. The mainsticking point was the potential size of the new state, and the belief in the difficulty of governing a large statein a democratic manner. After independence in 1776, federalists, such as Madison and Jefferson, saw a federal
state structure as offering the most democratic form of governance. According to these influential individuals,
the smaller (provincial) states were favoured as the primary sites of governance, with the federal state scalelimited to sectors that could not be governed at the scale of the individual state. In practice, this meant that thefederal state’s responsibilities were limited to defence and foreign affairs. As Jefferson argued (Sack 1986:148), ‘it is not by consolidation, or concentration, of powers, but by their distribution, that good government
is effected . . . were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want
bread’. The federal structure adopted in the United States from this period onwards has, of course, profoundimplications for the nature of territoriality within the federal state. Federalism in the United States, owing to thedevolution of considerable powers to various (provincial) states, has led to a limited territorialisation of powerat the federal state scale, and an uneven pattern of territorial governance throughout the federal state.
Key reading : Sack (1986).

there are numerous instances of the ability of citizens
to challenge that power. France offers one example of
this process. In his now famous book, Peasants into
Frenchmen , Eugene Weber (1977) discusses the efforts
of the French state to mould its citizens into onecommunity of people. Though this is linked with the
creation of a coherent French nation, we argue that it
is also symbolic of an effort to forge a common anduniform territoriality for the French state. Importantly,however, this project was not altogether successful.Even during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
people living in the various localities in France were
able to challenge the centralising tendencies of theFrench state, for instance by preserving their own
languages, dialects and customs. Another common way
of challenging the territoriality of the state is throughthe act of smuggling, and this is a theme we discussin Box 2.5.
This discussion shows that we need to question
recent debates concerning the impact of globalisation
on the territoriality of the state. As Yeung (1998) hasdemonstrated, states still play an active role in shap-ing the nature of political geographies within theirboundaries. This means that state territoriality is still
of crucial importance. In addition, state territoriality
has never been unproblematic in nature. This factSTATES AND TERRITORIES 33
BOX 2.5 SMUGGLING AND STATE TERRITORIALITY: THE BORDER
BETWEEN GHANA AND TOGO
The practice of smuggling is intimately bound up with state territoriality. By definition, smuggling depends on
the organisation of the state: without state borders, smuggling would not have a reason to exist, since it is the
act of illicitly transporting or trading goods, services or information across borders that constitutes the criminal
offence of smuggling. In one way, therefore, smuggling helps to reinforce the importance of state boundaries.At another level, of course, smuggling demonstrates how porous state boundaries have always been. It is apractice that challenges the notion of a clearly defined and homogeneous state territoriality. We can see thisprocess at work at the border between Ghana and Togo. During the colonial period, when Ghana and Togo
formed part of the British and French empires respectively, attempts were made by the British to control the
export of contraband from Ghana to its eastern neighbour. These attempts included the construction of customsposts along key routes between the two countries and the implementation of monetary fines for those caughtwith contraband. These efforts were at best half-hearted and there was a general acceptance that some illicittrade between the two countries was inevitable. Indeed, it was welcomed, since it brought a degree of financialand social stability to the border region. Under British control, therefore, it was accepted that the control of
the state of Ghana was only partially constituted along territorial lines. With independence, considerable
efforts were directed towards ‘hardening’ the border between the two countries. Far harsher measures wereadopted in order to discourage smuggling, including introducing the death penalty for those caught smugglinggold, diamonds or timber. This situation did not last long, however, mainly owing to the ever increasinglevels of smuggling between the two states and the evidence of the complicity of state officials. After a revolution
in Ghana in 1982, the state realised that more lenient measures were needed to deal with smuggling, and
it once again became a practice that was unofficially ‘condoned’. In this example we see the uneasy relationshipthat exists between smuggling and the state: at one and the same time, they help to reinforce and challengeeach other. As Donnan and Wilson (1999: 105) so aptly put it, ‘smuggling . . . both recognises and marksthe legal and territorial limits of the state and, at the same time, undermines its power’.
Key reading : Donnan and Wilson (1999).

makes it difficult to speak of globalisation as a process
that is helping to undermine a purely homogeneous
territory of the state, since it is unlikely that thisuniform territorialised state has ever existed.
In this section we have discussed the importance
of territoriality to the state. It is this aspect of the state
that is the main reason for studying the state from a
geographical perspective. In the final section of thechapter, we explore one other significant process thathas happened over approximately the past fifty years.We refer here to the export of the state from its
European, North American and socialist core area to
the rest of the world.
Exporting the state to the world
The historical geography of the expansion of the
state form to Southern countries is also an historicalgeography of the collapse of European empires. As the Spanish and Portuguese empires were broken up,largely during the late eighteenth century, and as the
empires of Britain, France and the other European
countries dissolved during the twentieth century, sowere a large number of new, politically independentstates formed in the three continents of South America,Africa and Asia. (See the newly independent statesformed in Africa in 1960 in Figure 2.4.)
Primarily as a result of the imperial legacy, the
leaders of these independent countries have sought to promote a political formation for their state thatmirrors that of the various European metropolitanstates. So, for instance, these new states have, on the
whole, been organised territorially, and have incor-
porated a number of functions that are predominantin European and North American states (see Chapter4). Vandergeest and Peluso (1995), for instance, haveexamined how state leaders in Thailand have soughtto promote territoriality as a more effective way of
controlling the country’s people and resources. This
project has unfolded in three main contexts: first,through the extension of a territorial form of civiladministration into the rural areas of Thailand; second,through the promotion of survey-based land titles as
the legitimate way to acquire and own land and, third,through the demarcation of certain land as ‘forests’,
which can then be acquired and exploited directly by
the state.
Crucially, many Southern states have faced con-
siderable problems in achieving these goals. We do not argue, here, that Northern states do not face sig-
nificant challenges. We do argue, however, that
the problems facing Southern states are of a differentmagnitude from those experienced in their Northerncounterparts. Significantly, a number of the majorissues facing Southern states revolve around notions
of territoriality. Vandergeest and Peruso (1995) have
shown the difficulties experience by the state inThailand, both in promoting a uniform system ofsurvey-based land titles and in defining large tracts of land as ‘forest’ to be exploited by the state. Majorproblems also arise with regard to Southern states’
attempts to control their more peripheral land. Frontier
regions within these states can often act as regionalpower bases for armed groups. We can think, forinstance, of the mujaheddin rebels in Afghanistan,
whose power base lay in the west of the country, the
area farthest removed from the capital, Kabul. Other
examples include the Tamil guerillas located in thenorthern Jaffna peninsula of Sri Lanka and the southernregions of India. Similarly, the portrayals that appearin the novels by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1998) andLouis de Bernieres (1991, 1992, 1993) of the upper
reaches of the Amazon basin, an area which lies beyond
the immediate control and influence of the states of the region, are illustrative of the territorial challengesfacing many Southern states. Here, life carries onregardless of minimal state interference, and there is a
very strong sense of a ‘peasant’ life and community
that lie beyond effective state control.
Linked with this theme is the extent to which
Southern states possess a monopoly of coercive powerwithin their boundaries (see the introduction to thischapter). This is patently not the case in many Southern
states, which contain armed groups and even armies
that curb the coercive power of the state. This processis most apparent in the case of civil wars. For instance,of the forty-five peacekeeping missions carried out bythe United Nations between 1948 and 1997, only nine
were located outside Southern states (Held et al. 1999:STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 34

STATES AND TERRITORIES 35
CÔTE
D’IVOIRECÔTE
D’IVOIRE
Figure 2.4 The geographies of state formation in Africa: the miraculous year of 1960
Source: adapted from Arnold (1989)

126–9). This clearly illustrates the greater potential for
military instability and civil war in Southern states
compared with ones within the states of the North.This means, in effect, that Southern states cannotmaintain their physical dominance over all theirterritory. For instance, after many years of surviving
formal political opposition, the incumbent President
of Sudan, Mohammad Nimeiry, who had presided over a gradual process of decay and decline within the country, was finally deposed only as a result of direct action in the form of a coup d’état in 1985 (see
Calvocoressi 1991: 538). Once again, the notion of
territoriality – so crucial in definitions of statehood –becomes problematic in Southern states.
In addition, Southern states often face severe prob-
lems in promoting a sense of civic nationalism – or in other words, a form of nationalism that is linked
with the institutions of the state (see Chapter 5) – that
can unite all its citizens. It is important to note at thisstage that even the more stable and long-standingEuropean states have experienced difficulty in sus-taining their own civic nationalism. The growth of
ethnic nationalisms in states such as Spain, France
and the United Kingdom is testimony to this. This is an issue, however, that has far more potential for ethnic discord and violence within Southern states. Oneprocess that highlights some of these problems facingSouthern states has been the substitution of many
African nationalisms by ethnic or ‘tribal’ identities.
The ethnic conflict and genocide in Rwanda betweenthe Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups is a disturbinginstance of this tendency. In all, it is estimated that800,000 Rwandans were massacred during the civil
war in Rwanda, a war that had ‘deep roots in politi-
cally fuelled inter-ethnic distrust and fear’ (Wood2001: 60). The formation of a Rwandan state with little cultural currency, along with the existence of adivisive political system, has hurried the descent intoa political and ethnic abyss. What this example clearly
demonstrates is the unstable foundation that exists for
civic nationalism within Southern states.
These, then, are some of the problematic issues
facing Southern states. Indeed, the extent and depthof these problems have led some political commen-
tators, along with influential organisations, to arguethat ‘southern states …h a v e n o c h o ice but to reduce
their expectations of what, as modern states, they can
do’ (Hawthorn 1995: 141). At one level, such anargument is morally distasteful, since it opens the door to the potential neglect of the predicament facing Southern states by the states and organisations
of the North. We disagree with this position on ethical
grounds. At a more theoretical level, however, thequote raises interesting issues regarding the spatialityand temporality of state forms, and this is a theme wediscuss in the conclusion to this chapter.
Timing and spacing the state
In this chapter we have stressed the changing nature
of the state, over time and over space. States in Europe
back at the beginning of the modern period were
relatively puny organisations, with little ability toaffect the lives of their citizens. With the process ofstate consolidation, this situation gradually changed as states became more sophisticated and powerful in
their degree of infrastructural control. Importantly
for us as geographers, we can link this shift with thegrowing territoriality of the state: governing a territorycame to be viewed as the most efficient way of govern-ing a given population. Contemporary globalisation,amongst other processes, is allegedly challenging the
functions and the territorial integrity of the state
(see Chapter 3). As far as we are concerned, the jury is still out regarding the effect of globalisation on the territoriality of the state. These debates, however,help to reinforce the notion that the state is not a static
organisation, and is always undergoing changes with
regard to its territoriality and, as we shall see in Chapter4, with regard to its functions.
Similar arguments can be made concerning the
spatial variation of state forms. This was true for muchof the modern period and is especially true of the
contemporary state. The main difference, especially
since the end of the Cold War, has existed betweenNorthern and Southern states. Partly as a result of their recently created status as independent states, andpartly as a result of their lack of economic viability,
many Southern states are struggling to maintain theirSTATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 36

territorial integrity. This again draws our attention to
the changing nature of state form from one part of the
world to another. A number of thorny questions arisewith regard to this geographical patterning of stateforms. Is the ‘Northern’ form of the state necessarilythe model for ‘Southern’ societies? Is there a moral
obligation on ‘Northern’ states and societies to interfere
in repressive state forms that exist in ‘Southern states’?Has the unstable state form of ‘Southern’ societies thepotential to undermine the stability of states elsewherein the world? These are not easy questions to answer,
but they deserve our sustained consideration and
action, not only as political geographers, but also asethical and moral citizens of the world.
Further reading
The best starting point for an explanation of the
significance of territoriality to the state is Michael Mann’spaper ‘The autonomous power of the state: its origins,mechanisms and results’, European Journal of Sociology , 25
(1984), 185–213, reprinted in Agnew (ed.) Political
Geography: A Reader (1997), pp. 58–81.A good introduction to the changing nature of the state,
especially in territorial terms, can be found in Anderson,‘The shifting stage of politics: new medieval and post-
modern territorialities’, Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space , 14 (1996), 133–53. This paper discusses
the changing character and importance of territoriality forthe state over the long term and outlines the increasinglytangled territorialities of the state under globalisation.
An examination of the contemporary significance of
territoriality to the state, and the associated impacts of globalisation on state territoriality, can be found in two interrelated papers by Peter Taylor: ‘The state ascontainer: territoriality in the modern world system’,
Progress in Human Geography , 18 (1994b), 151–62, and
‘Beyond containers: internationality, interstateness,interritoriality’, Progress in Human Geography , 19 (1995),
1–15.
Fewer academics have attempted to chart the difficulties
faced by southern states in promoting a territorial formof state power. An interesting study, however, can befound in Vandergeest and Peluso, ‘Territorialization andstate power in Thailand’, Theory and Society , 24 (1995),
385–426.STATES AND TERRITORIES 37

Introduction
In the previous chapter, we discussed various aspects
of the state’s form. We focused on the historical devel-opment of the state and emphasised the significance
of the state’s efforts to control space as territory. In
Chapter 2, therefore, we focused largely on the internal
political geographies of the state. The aim of thischapter is to complement this discussion by focusingon the external relations of the state or, in other words,
to examine the state in global perspective.
To some extent, a discussion of the state in global
perspective may seem somewhat strange. After all,classical definitions of the state – as discussed inChapter 2 – highlight the fact that states are organ-isations that seek to govern people, resources and land
within defined boundaries. The portrayal of states that
appears here is, therefore, relatively inward-looking and parochial. International and global issues wouldseem to matter little to the state, as defined by Weberand Marx. None the less, we began to illustrate in the previous chapter how all states look outwards
beyond their defined boundaries in many ways. For
instance, it was noted how much of the impetus to theconsolidation of state power throughout the modernperiod came from the state’s need to wage wars againstits competitors. In this way, the state’s interference
in international matters could lead to far-reaching
changes to its internal political geographies (see Mann1988). This is not an isolated example of the close linksbetween the internal and external geographies of thestate. At a general level, for instance, it has been arguedthat many of the new means of governing that have
been adopted in Northern states in recent years havebeen ‘borrowed’ from other, apparently successful,
states. In the age of ‘fast policy transfer’, states are onthe constant look-out for new and innovative policiesand practices to adopt within their own territory (Peck
2001). These two brief examples demonstrate clearly
how states should be viewed as crucial actors on theinternational stage. In this way, we can see how the nation-state, existing at a national scale, also has
international pretensions.
Statements such as these represent relatively well
trodden intellectual ground within political geog-raphy. As noted in Chapter 1, Friedrich Ratzel, in many ways the father of the subject area, was keen toemphasise the need for states to actively engage in international relations. It was another key figure
in the development of political geography, Richard
Hartshorne (1950), however, who was to expound mostsystematically the need to focus on the external, as wellas the internal, relations of the state. His classificationof the state’s external relations into the four different
categories of territorial, economic, political and stra-
tegic is outlined in Table 3.1. Importantly, there is,according to Hartshorne, a close relationship betweenthese four different categories, so much so that theyshould not be viewed as existing in isolation from each
other. For instance, Hartshorne (1950: 127) notes how
the interest of the United States in West Africa in the1950s was shaped by a mixture of economic relations– significantly after the Firestone Tyre Company beganrubber production there – and strategic – when WestAfrica was viewed as a convenient site for US airports
during the Second World War.
Hartshorne’s work is an important starting point for
us in this chapter since it helps to illustrate the crucialThe state in global perspective3

significance of international political geographies for
each state. A given state does not exist in isolation andtherefore must engage with other states or institutions
beyond its boundaries. It is, therefore, imperative for
us as political geographers to examine the state inglobal perspective. We do so in two main contexts inthis chapter. First, we discuss the way in which states– at certain times – can extend beyond their bound-
aries to engage with political, economic, cultural and
environmental processes at an international or globalscale. We focus here on two main themes: the linkbetween states and the process of imperialism andcolonialism; and the key role played by states withinglobal geopolitical patterns. Second, we address the
way in which certain global processes can penetrate theboundaries of a given state. The substantive focus here
is on globalisation and its impact on the state’sterritorial form. Although we concede that there are
many commonalities between these three processes, we
focus on them in different sections in this chapter forthe simple reason that they have traditionally beendiscussed in separate spheres of geography. The readerwill, none the less, appreciate the strong connections
between the three topics.
States and empires
One of the most fundamental ways in which states have
sought to extend their power and influence beyondTHE STATE IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE 39
Table 3.1 The external relations of the state
Type of relation Meaning Example
Territorial The degree to which neighbouring states agree The boundary between Finland and the former
on their respective boundaries. It also refers to Soviet Union has long been disputed and speaksthe efforts made by states to regulate movement of uncertain territorial relations between the two across their boundaries countries. On the other hand, the movement of
goods and people between the two states was highly regulated, especially during the Cold War
Economic The economic trade that takes place between The large deposits of the metal manganese, found
different states. This is important politically, in the Transcaucusus, in the former Soviet Union,since the economic resources that a state was an important factor in the United States’possesses affect the degree of its influence on relations with its Cold War enemy. Similarly,international relations. Economic trade between economic trade has acted as the stimulus todifferent states can lead to the development of international alliances such as NAFTA and theinternational alliances European Union
Political The degree to which a given state exerts The empire created by France in Africa, Asia, the
political control or influence over other states. Americas and Australasia during the modernThis can vary from direct political control, as period testifies to formal French domination ofin the form of a colony or empire, to more extensive lands throughout the world. Eveninformal relations of influence and domination though the majority of these lands are now
independent, the French state still exerts informal influence on them
Strategic Most fundamentally, the relationships that a The unification of the various German princiaplities
given state chooses to enter into as a means of in 1871 into one state encouraged the formationsustaining and enhancing its security or power. of a number of new strategic partnershipsThese relationships can change over time between other European states as they sought to
counter the military threat posed by a united
Germany
Source : after Hartshorne (1950)

their immediate boundaries has been in the context
of conquering and maintaining control of overseas
territories. This close relationship between states andempires was a feature of much of the modern period.As was discussed in Chapter 2, from about the sixteenthcentury onwards the nation-state began to assert itself
as the most important political unit on the world map.
At the same time, nation-states also began to attemptto control other lands throughout the world. Thisoccurred in the context of the creation of empires.
The relationship between states and empires is, at
first glance, relatively straightforward. Empires are
said to be constituted as a result of formal and/orinformal relationships of domination between differentstates. For instance, empires, especially in the form that they took from the nineteenth century onwards, havebeen described as ‘an extensive group of states, whether
formed by colonization or conquest, subject to the
authority of a metropolitan or imperial state’ ( Jones1996: 155). Similarly, the political relationship ofimperialism, which is often based on the existence of empires, has been described as follows: ‘The creation
and maintenance of an unequal economic, cultural
and territorial relationship, usually between states andoften in the form of an empire, based on dominationand subordination’ (Clayton 2000: 375). These twodefinitions illustrate the conceptual relationshipbetween states and empires. Empires are formed by
a collection of states and so empires usually exist at a
far grander spatial scale than states. In the same way,processes of state formation take place within particular
states, whereas efforts to create empires are examplesof inter-state activity and international relations.
States become the hub of extended empires through
a mixture of political, economic and cultural/religiousdomination. Political relationships between the metro-politan state and its dependent territories can take on a variety of forms, ranging from a situation in whichthe empire is constituted as a unified political whole
to one that is characterised by far looser forms of
political co-ordination. Moreover, there has histori-cally been very little rhyme or reason to the characterof the political relationships adopted within particularempires. This was largely a result of the piecemeal
manner in which empires were generally formed andthe impact that pre-existing political and economic
relationships in the various conquered territories could
have on later imperial developments. So, for instance,the British Empire of the late nineteenth century con-tained a mixture of Crown colonies, governed directlyby the British Colonial Office, self-governing white-
settled colonies, semi-independent protectorates and
the Indian subcontinent, administered by its own India Office. As Morris (1968: 212) argues, the BritishEmpire of the time was ‘all bits and pieces. There was no system.’ Similarly, the French Union during
the period 1946–58 comprised metropolitan France,
French overseas departments, territories and settle-ments; UN trusteeships; French colonies, whichbecame overseas departments of France; and associatestates or protectorates, such as Vietnam, Laos andCambodia (Calvocoressi 1991: 478). Here, once again,
the political geographies of empire were complex,
containing a mishmash of relationships between themetropolitan state and its dependent territories.
The practical implementation of political control
could range from the more mundane aspects of colonial
administration to instances of physical coercion and
oppression. Effective administrators, for instance, couldimprove the day-to-day running of imperial territoriesby seeking to regulate the social relationships thatexisted between settlers and the indigenous population.Political control could also be evidenced in the context
of military coercion of indigenous populations, some-
thing that was facilitated by the advanced technologiesof the European powers. There is no better testamentof this than the battle of Omdurman in Sudan in 1898when British and Egyptian forces confronted a Dervish
army of 40,000 people and managed, with the aid of
the Maxim machine gun, to kill approximately 11,000of them (Abernethy 2000: 100). Although the idea of political control within the European empires of the modern period could mean many things, it was at its most tangible and unforgiving in the form of
the muzzle of a gun. A more recent example is the
use of, or threat of the use of, a mixture of ‘smart’ andcluster bombs by the US military in extending itsimperial influence into the Middle East.
Economic relationships and trade also played a
significant role in constituting the relationshipSTATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 40

between state and empire. Indeed, some have argued
that it is these economic relationships between different
parts of the world – often organised into empires – thathas been the driving force behind much of worldpolitics during the modern period. Key here are theideas of the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (1974,
1980, 1989) regarding the existence of a capitalist
world economy and Lenin’s writings on the nature ofimperialism (in Lenin 1996). As argued in Chapter 1, much of what sustained the imperial expansion ofthe modern period, according to Wallerstein, was
the need of European states to discover new sources of
cheap labour in different parts of the world. Some havebeen critical of Wallerstein’s ideas, most specificallyhis attempt to explain world politics through solereference to economic processes (see Giddens 1985).Lenin’s work is also crucial, in this respect, and is
central to economic, development and Marxist geog-
raphies of imperialism. Lenin conceived of imperialismas the final stage of capitalism, associated with the rise and crises of finance capital in the late nineteenthcentury. He argued that ‘Imperialism emerged as the
development and direct continuation of the funda-
mental attributes of capitalism in general’ (Lenin 1996:89). In this way, Lenin’s work also emphasises theimportance of economic relationships for the processof empire building.
Once again, economic relationships between the
metropolitan state and its imperial territories could
take on a variety of forms. Abernethy (2000: 57–63),for instance, has noted how economic relationshipswithin empires could be organised either vertically orhorizontally. Vertical economic relationships were part
of the classic mercantile ideology, prevalent from the
sixteenth century to the eighteenth, where tradeoccurred solely between the metropolitan state and itscolonial territories. Raw materials, such as preciousmetals and spices, were extracted from imperial landsand served to increase the financial resources of the
metropolitan state. Semi-finished products, such as
luxury clothing materials and porcelain, also flowedfrom the Americas and Asia to the Europeanmetropolitan centres. Importantly, this was a two-wayflow of trade, as European states exported raw materials
and manufactured goods to their peripheral lands.Abernethy (2000: 58), however, argues that the ‘most
significant trade pattern s…v i o lated the mercantilist
ideal by being lateral, not vertical’, as European statessought to link non-European lands in a global tradingcircuit. The most important of these horizontal pat-terns of trade, especially in the context of early empires,
was the so-called ‘slave trade triangle’ (see R. King
1995: 10–15): ships from ports in Britain and Franceset sail for Africa with manufactured goods; these goods were traded with West African leaders for slaves;the slaves were then taken to the Americas to be sold;
the money raised from this transaction was then used
to buy raw materials and goods produced in theAmericas, which were finally transported back to themetropolitan European states to complete the tradingtriangle (see Figure 3.1). It is international trade, such as this, linking a European core with an African,
Asian and American periphery, that symbolises most
clearly Wallerstein’s (1974) notion of a capitalist worldeconomy organised around the former’s economic andpolitical needs. Clearly, therefore, the economic geog-raphies of trade were crucial to the development and
sustenance of European empires.
European empires of the modern period were also
predicated on cultural geographies of domination.Social and cultural differences are central to theoreticalconceptions of colonialism and imperialism. Watts, for instance, defines colonialism as ‘the establishment
and maintenance of rule . . . by a sovereign power
over a subordinate and alien people’ (in Johnston et al.
2000: 93, our emphasis). Critically, ideas of culturaland social difference could help to justify the wholeproject of imperialism. In this respect, colonists could
be led to believe that their imperial efforts were part
of a process of ‘civilising’ an uncivilised ‘other’ (Said1978, 1993) (see Box 3.1). Moreover, empires helpedto reinforce ideas of difference. This is seen most clearlyin the context of the emphasis placed on categories of race (Stoler 1991). Ideas of white superiority and
discrete racial categories were reproduced in the con-
text of empire as colonised peoples came to be viewedas second-class citizens ( Jackson 1989). Morris (1968:131–2) illustrates well the importance of ideas of racewithin the British Empire – and of social and cultural
difference – in the following quotation:THE STATE IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE 41

The great ideal of Roman citizenship was only half-
heartedly approached by the British. In theory every
subject of the Queen, whatever his colour or skullformation, enjoyed equality of opportunity, and fifty years before Lord Palmerston, springing to the defence of Don Pacifico, a Greek merchant of
Portuguese Jewish origin but British nationality,
had almost plunged Europe into war. There wasnothing to stop an African or an Indian going toBritain and becoming a bishop, a peer of the realmor Prime Minister. In practice, however, it was a
racialist empire—what was Empire, Lord Roseberyhad once rhetorically asked, but the predominance
of race?
Ideas of cultural domination were clearly exhibited in
the context of expansion of European state religionsoutwards into new imperial lands. The close connection
between the religious activity of the Church and the
political practices of states during the modern periodmust be emphasised. Protestantism and Catholicismduring this period should be viewed, first and foremost,as statereligions, intimately linked with the imperial
project. For instance, the vast majority of religiousSTATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 42
Santa DomingoSanto Domingo
Figure 3.1 The Atlantic slave trade triangle
Source: adapted from King (1995: fig. 1.2)

personnel within the Spanish empire of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries were of Spanish birth. More-
over, they were appointed by the Spanish court so
that their actions were controlled by the political armof the state (Abernethy 2000: 231). It is not surprising,therefore, that the Protestant and Catholic religionsof the various imperial European states were often used
as a way of reinforcing ideas of cultural domination
within the empire. Europeans, as members of eitherthe Protestant or the Catholic Church, were in receiptof religious salvation and, therefore, could be easilydistinguished from a ‘savage’ condemned to the fieryhalls of hell. The relationship between state politics
and state religion, however, was rarely a straight-
forward one. Religion could destabilise the rigid socialand cultural boundaries erected between colonisers andthe colonised. Once a member of the Christian faith,indigenous individuals in various colonised lands could
be viewed by the Church as the equals of the European
colonisers. Indeed, Christophers (1998) has shown thisto be the case in nineteenth-century British Columbia,where a resident missionary, John Booth Good, viewedcoloniser and colonised alike as either sinful or saved
individuals. In this way, religion at one and the same
time helped to reinforce ideas of social and cultural
difference and to destabilise them.
This section has discussed the political, economic
and cultural relationships of domination that were so important to the European empires of the modern
period. Although it has been useful to address these
three sets of relationships separately, it should notsurprise the reader that the different spheres of domi-nation were often intimately related. This is clearly the case in the example discussed above, which illus-trated the close linkages between the Spanish state
and Catholicism within the Spanish empire. Similarly,
the United States has used a mixture of military intimi-dation, economic might and cultural dominance as a way of facilitating its recent imperialist pretensions.The connections between different sectors of the French
empire are discussed in Box 3.2.
This discussion has shown the different tactics used
by European states of the modern period in order tofurther their political control of lands throughout theTHE STATE IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE 43
BOX 3.1 EDWARD SAID AND THE NOTION OF ‘OTHERING’
In his now famous book Orientalism (1978) Edward Said attempted to outline the relationship that exists
between empires and ideas of cultural and social difference. Key to this whole process of domination is the
idea of ‘othering’. In describing the allegedly different qualities of peoples encountered on the periphery –which, in the majority of cases, involved emphasising their perceived weaknesses – Europeans could morallyjustify their efforts to civilise and exploit them. This process helped to essentalise racial and ethnic categoriesin both non-European and European lands. What this means is that particular racial or ethnic categories were
perceived as homogeneous groupings of people, with internal differences being underplayed. There are many
instances of this process. Black people, for example, could be described in a gentlemen’s magazine of thelate eighteenth century as follows: ‘The Negro is possessed of passions not only strong but ungovernable; amind dauntless, warlike and unmerciful; a temper extremely irrascible; a diposition indolent, selfish and deceitful;fond of joyous sociality, riotous mirth and extravagant show…a terrible husband, a harsh father and a precariousfriend.’ The significance of such a description, according to Said, is that the alleged negative characteristics
of the black person were seen to represent the direct opposite of the white person’s alleged strengths. For
Said, it is this cultural act of domination that justified many of the worst excesses of European state imperialismof the modern period.
Key readings : Said (1978, 1993).

world. Political control, economic exploitation and the
emphasis on social and cultural difference all combinedto create a situation in which European states hadmanaged to control, at some time, the vast majority
of the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania.
Of course, this formal political control of non-
European lands was not to last. Lands in the Americasgained their independence from the Spanish, Portu-guese and British empires by the early nineteenthcentury. A second round of decolonisation took place
in Australasia, Asia and Africa during the twentieth
century (see Taylor and Flint 2000: 116–19). It hasbeen argued that this has not led to the creation ofcompletely independent non-European states. Indeed,it has been suggested that some dominant states still
exert as much influence over non-European lands and
peoples as they have ever done. In this world of informalinfluence and coercion, it is the geopolitical powerexerted by states over other political actors that isimportant and it is this theme that we discuss in the
following section.States and geopolitics
As discussed in Chapter 1, there has traditionally been
a strong association between geopolitics and political
geography, though it has varied in strength over time(see Box 3.3). What is crucial for the present discussionis the way in which notions of geopolitics demonstrateanother important, yet more informal, way in which
states can reach beyond their boundaries to affect
processes occurring at international and global scales.Our aim in this section is to examine the contours ofthis engagement, at both a conceptual and an empiricallevel.
Geopolitics is concerned with the manifold ways in
which states seek to exert power and influence beyond
as well as within their boundaries. The first questionthat needs to be addressed, therefore, revolves aroundthe methods used to achieve this political domination.Here, it is useful to distinguish between the politico-
geographical knowledges needed to ‘make sense’ of the
world and the actions taken to sustain the politicalposition of a given state within it. We will discuss eachof these issues in turn.STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 44
BOX 3.2SPHERES OF DOMINATION WITHIN THE FRENCH EMPIRE
The French empire of the modern period demonstrates clearly the way in which different forms of domination
coalesced within the imperial project. In the scramble for land in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific
state officials, soldiers, merchants and missionaries combined to extend French control. A cadre of state andmilitary officials provided the political domination so crucial to the empire-building process. The merchant classwas critical to the French empire’s economic domination of its conquered lands and religious orders, such asthe Pères Blancs of the nineteenth century, could provide a much needed cultural focus of domination. One
pattern – evidenced in the expansion of French power from Senegal to the West African interior during the
nineteenth century – was for state officials and the armed forces to exert physical control over new lands, andfor business interests and the Church to advance once the indigenous population had been pacified. Anothermodel saw the united advance of state officials, the armed forces, business interests and religious orders, but,as Abernethy (2000: 235) argues, ‘with a clear understanding of which actors would undertake which tasks’.This method of empire building was evident in the French expansion into Canada. Whatever the method
employed, the key point is the fact that co-operation between different sectors of the metropolitan state was
crucial for a successful process of French empire-building.
Key reading : Abernethy (2000).

The first element refers to conceptions of space,
power and politics that inform the policies adopted
by given states. At a general level, we need to stress theimportance of ideas of realism within the internationalrelations of various states (see Dodds 2000: 37–42).Realism within international relations is based on the
assumption that all states are in active competition,
one with another. As such, any given state should bedistrustful of the activities of other states. Followingon from this, the main aim of any given state is tomaintain and develop its political status in the face of
other states equally concerned with their own self-
interest and status. It is in a political scenario such asthis that the geopolitical considerations of states – in
the form of military security and international political
influence – become important. Despite the appellationof ‘realism’ for this body of theory, many commentatorshave argued that this is far from a ‘real’ interpretationof the character of world politics (see, for instance,
Walker 1993). None the less, realist ideas have
characterised states’ attitudes towards internationalrelations since the nineteenth century.
Within this broad realist framework, none the
less, individual states must develop more specialist
knowledges of other competing or allied states. It
is here that the role of political geography becomesTHE STATE IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE 45
BOX 3.3 THE RISE, THE FALL, THE RISE AND THE POSSIBLE FALL
OF GEOPOLITICS
The notion of geopolitics has helped to shape the nature of political geography over time. The term came to
prominence during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and referred to the way in which ideas
relating to politics and space could be used within national policy. The growing importance of the term
during this period was not an historical accident. In the period subsequent to the ‘scramble for Africa’, therewere few opportunities for additional European territorial expansion and, in such circumstances, internationalpolitics became increasingly focused on ‘the struggle for relative efficiency, strategic position, and militarypower’ (O’Tuathail 1996: 25). It was in this world that political geographers could aid state leaders in theirefforts to increase the political influence exercised by individual states on the global stage. This period
of geopolitical involvement in statecraft reached its apogee in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, where
ideas concerning the need for German territorial expansion were easily incorporated into Nazi ideology(Parker 1998: 1). Of necessity, perhaps, the period subsequent to the fall of that regime witnessed a waningof the star of geopolitics, both within the subject of political geography and, to a lesser extent, within policycircles. The re-emergence of geopolitics as a legitimate frame of enquiry took place during the 1970s,
particularly in the United States and France (Parker 1998: 1). Its use during this period was very much based
on the all-pervading, yet largely unconsummated, conflict between ‘East’ and ‘West’ that characterised theCold War. Here again, it was the need for international political alliances, and the political geographies ofinfluence that underpinned them, that acted as the much needed ‘shot in the arm’ for geopolitical debates.Geographers were to contribute to these. Since the mid-1980s, however, classical geopolitics has, once again,come under fire, in academic circles at least. Rather than supporting international and national political structures
of domination, political geographers, affiliated to the subject area of critical geopolitics, are beginning to
question and undermine these structures and the discourses and ideologies that surround them (see O’Tuathail1996). Depending on one’s perspective, therefore, this has either signalled another downturn in the fortunesof the notion of geopolitics within geography or has re-energised it in exciting and radical new ways.
Key readings : Dodds (2000) and O’Tuathail (1996).

important in helping states to ‘visualise society’. The
locus classicus of a political geographer shaping state
policies is the contribution of Halford Mackinder,Professor of Geography at Oxford University at thebeginning of the twentieth century. As we suggestedin Chapter 1, his now famous ‘heartland thesis’
(Mackinder 1904), in particular, sought to advise the
British state concerning the geographical balance ofpower within Europe and the wider world. Containedwithin this thesis were ideas concerning the shift from the importance of maritime to terrestrial bases
of power and the growing threat from particular
regions – Central Europe for instance – and states,especially Russia (see Figure 3.2). Despite the growingcritical engagement with geopolitics within politicalgeography in recent years (for instance Agnew andCorbridge 1995; Dodds 2000; O’Tuathail 1996), more
conventional forms of geopolitical knowledges are still
produced by key actors within political geography (seeBox 3.4).The application of these geopolitical knowledges
and visions lies within the purview of state leaders. The
strategic objectives of states can be achieved in manyways but we concentrate in this section, for the sake ofbrevity, on the overtly political, economic and culturalaspects of geopolitical engagement. In much the same
way as the previous section, we would want to stress
that these three are closely interrelated, even thoughwe consider them separately here.
Political domination can take on many forms. At
its most basic and uncompromising, it is based on
military relationships between two or more parties.
Much of the rationale behind the proliferation ofnuclear weapons during the Cold War, for instance,was based upon the West and the East’s need to securestrategic military and, therefore, political advantageover their enemies. This became the main justification
for the global political and military face-off between
East and West that characterised the internationalrelations of the Cold War. A more recent example hasSTATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 46
Figure 3.2 The ‘heartland’ map of Halford Mackinder (1904: 426)

been the nuclear stand-off between India and Pakistan
over the disputed province of Kashmir (Dodds 2000:
103–6). Once again, overt displays of the military
might of the two countries have been used as a meansof securing strategic, military and political advantagewithin the region. Political forms of geopoliticaldomination can also occur in more subtle and hidden
ways. A good instance of this is the persistent military
influence of the United States in neighbouring coun-tries in the Caribbean, Central and South America (see Dodds 2000: 57). The most infamous examples of these more covert efforts by the United States to
influence the internal politics of other independent
states have been in Guatemala, Nicaragua and Cuba.
These latter examples also begin to demonstrate the
strong connections between political and economicaspects of geopolitical strategy, where political inter-ference is accompanied by various forms of financial
aid. A key method of securing geopolitical influence
and dominance in recent years has been the financialand technological aid offered by dominant countries toother, needy countries. In many ways, if military mightrepresents the ‘stick’ of international relations, then
financial aid is the ‘carrot’. Numerous examples exist
to demonstrate the role of economic influence in
shaping international geopolitical relations. In theperiod after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, forinstance, there was much debate in the internationalcommunity concerning the best way to secure the
freedom of the latter. Much of the political shenanigans
of the period took place in the corridors of the UnitedNations in New York. The famous journalist JohnPilger (1992) has noted how the United States triedto use its economic muscle as a way of securing the
support of other states for its plan to mount an invasion
of Kuwait and Iraq. In this respect, its main efforts weredirected towards the non-permanent members of theSecurity Council of the United Nations, which, at thattime, included one of the poorest states in the world,Yemen. It is a little-known fact that Yemen voted not
to support an invasion of the Middle East by American-
led UN forces. In the immediate aftermath of the vote,it is alleged by Pilger (1992), the Yemeni ambassadorto the United Nations was informed by his USTHE STATE IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE 47
BOX 3.4 GEOGRAPHY AT WEST POINT MILITARY ACADEMY,
NEW YORK
West Point Military Academy, the institution that has trained army cadets in the United States for over 200
years, is probably the best remaining instance of the interaction between geography, geopolitics and statecraft.Here the emphasis of a geography career is clearly on addressing geopolitical and strategic issues. Thedepartmental Web site, for instance, asserts that the discipline’s focus is on ‘the continued security of the [US]nation …W e believe understanding and appreciating the world around you adds to quality of life Americans
enjoy, which is an important reward of the freedom we serve to protect (http://www.dean.usma.edu/
geo/gene.htm)’. In this respect, the publications of the Academy give a flavour of the way in which geographyas a discipline is viewed. They include a CD-ROM entitled Afghanistan: a Regional Geography and another
electronic publication, Understanding International Environmental Security: a Strategic Military Perspective .
The former is significant in light of the recent United States-led military incursions into Afghanistan whereasthe latter attempts to chart the possible impact of global environmental issues on the national security of the
United States. These publications, along with the general ethos of the Department of Geography at the West
Point Military Academy, illustrate a clear concern with geography’s contribution to geopolitical and strategicissues. In this context, they represent some of the few remaining examples of the influence of conventionalgeopolitics on the subject area of political geography.
Key reading : The department’s home page at http://www.dean.usma.edu/geo/gene.htm.

counterpart that that was the most costly decision he
had ever made. In the following weeks, $70 million of
proposed US aid to Yemen was cancelled, the WorldBank and the International Monetary Fund began toquestion the economic practices of the Yemeni stateand 800,000 Yemeni workers were expelled from Saudi
Arabia.
As Dodds (2000) has argued, occurrences such as
these are part of a broader range of economic strategiesthat help certain Northern states to achieve geopoliticaldominance over Southern countries. The influence
of industrialised countries over institutions such as
the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation has been particularlyimportant. It has helped to generate an additional layer of compliance within international relations. Thebest example of this process is the so-called ‘structural
adjustment programmes’ of the World Bank, which
seek to constrain the range of economic and politicalpolicies that can be pursued by less industrialisedcountries (Dodds 2000: 17; see also Krasner 2001:28–9). The criticism levelled at these programmes is
that they reify a particularly industrialised model of
development on southern states and, as such, representa new form of informal imperialism by northern states.In many ways, these examples illustrate the strongconnections between geopolitics and the broader inter-national political economy (see Agnew and Corbridge
1995).
The third element that helps to constitute geo-
political dominance is the cultural messages that shapeour geographical and political understanding of the world. The field of critical geopolitics in recent
years, in particular, has attempted to draw our atten-
tion to the value-laden messages contained in politicalspeeches (e.g. Agnew 1998: 116) and more popularforms of culture (e.g. Sharp 1993). Indeed, much hasbeen made of the intimate connections between thegeopolitical imaginings forged in both formal and
informal contexts. The most notable example of this
interaction is the alleged influence of the war filmRambo on US foreign policy under the leadership of
Ronald Reagan (Sharp 1999: 186).
The similarities between the role of culture within
geographies of imperialism and geopolitics are strik-ing, in this respect. In the same way as ideas of the
essentialised categories of difference could be used
to justify acts of colonial exploitation within formalempires, so can the propaganda contained withinpolitical and popular accounts of countries, culturesand religions help to create positions of geopolitical
dominance. There is no better example of this process
than the western reaction to the terrorist attacks thattook place on 11 September 2001 (see Box 3.5).
As stressed earlier, political, economic and cultural
aspects of international relations should not be viewed
in isolation. Rather, they coalesce and reinforce one
another to form the geopolitical patterns of power that are familiar to us today. Indeed, much has beenwritten of the ‘new world order’ that has been createdaround the geopolitical might of the United States (see Williams 1993; see, however, Arrighi and Silver
2001). We need to realise, however, that the current
geopolitical ordering of the world represents merely the latest manifestation of global patterns of powerwithin international relations. Agnew and Corbridge(1995: 19–23), for instance, have usefully delineated
three periods of geopolitical order within international
relations (see Table 3.2), ones that have structuredinternational politics for the past 175 years. Their work is important, in this respect, since it demon-strates the changing nature of geopolitical patterns over time. Although relationships of political, economic
and cultural domination may continue for extended
periods of time, they are by no means wholly stable and continuous. It is unsurprising, therefore, that many commentators argue that we have entered afourth, unipolar period within international rela-
tions, subsequent to the final period noted by Agnew
and Corbridge (1995), dominated by the geopoliticalmight of the United States (e.g. Ikenberry 2001).
States, therefore, seek to influence political, eco-
nomic and cultural processes operating beyond theirimmediate boundaries. The one note of caution that
needs to be sounded, however, is that some of the
geopolitical literature can give the impression thatstates are wholly effective and single-minded in theirpursuit of geopolitical goals. One fact that can offersome solace to individuals and organisations criti-
cal of states’ seemingly self-serving interference inSTATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 48

international affairs is that the geopolitical goals of any
given state can be, and often are, contradictory and
self-defeating. This is due, at least in part, to the fact
that any given state is not a unitary phenomenon, but is rather made up of a series of often competinginstitutions ( Jessop 1990a). The upshot of this is thatthe geopolitical priorities of various sectors of any given
state can contradict one another. A good instance
of this geopolitical conflict of interest is discussed inBox 3.6.
Another more recent example of geopolitical
contradictions is the tangled relationship betweenwestern states and Iraq. In supporting Iraq during its
conflict with the neighbouring state of Iran, western
states contributed to the military arsenal available toSaddam Hussein and his armies during their incursioninto Kuwait. Of course, these weapons of mass
destruction, partly supplied by western arms manu-
facturers and governments during the 1980s, are now
causing much geopolitical consternation within theglobal coalition against terrorism. All in all, such anexample demonstrates the potential pitfalls of seek-ing to impose a geopolitical order on an unstable and
changing world.
This section has explored another way in which
states can extend beyond their boundaries in order to shape political geographies at international andglobal scales. The following section – focusing on the relationship between globalisation and the state
– looks at an apparently different process, whereby
international and global processes penetrate theboundaries of the state.THE STATE IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE 49
BOX 3.5 GEOPOLITICAL IMAGES AFTER THE TERRORIST ATTACKS
OF 11 SEPTEMBER 2001 ON NEW YORK
One of the clearest recent examples of the significance of cultural messages for global patterns of geopolitics
came in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States that took place in September 2001. PresidentGeorge W. Bush, for instance, was keen to use images and rhetoric appropriated from the culture of the
American west, referring to the need to ‘smoke out’ terrorists ‘holed up’ in the caves of Afghanistan. Famously,
there was much disagreement about how to conceptualise the terrorist threat to the United States. By describingthe United States as a civilised country of freedom and democracy, commentators in the United States wereseen by many to be describing the states or peoples supporting terrorism as uncivilised. That the terroriststhemselves can be considered uncivilised is not especially controversial but there was a too common assertionthat all Islamic states should be viewed as uncivilised when compared with a civilised West. The most extreme
example of statements like this came from Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Prime Minister, who asserted that ‘the
West is bound to occidentalise and conquer new people’, thus presumably leading to the dissolution of allIslamic states. Berlusconi’s viewpoint was seen to be unhelpful for the formation of a coalition of states unitedagainst the threat of international terrorism, especially since the coalition would be strengthened immeasurablyby the inclusion of moderate Islamic states. As a result, the United States was keen to portray Al-Qaeda as
an organisation supported by one ‘rogue’ state, Afghanistan. Berlusconi, however, was not the only person
to use unhelpful images and phrases during this period. ‘Operation Ultimate Justice’, the original title used todescribe the US-led attack on the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, was objected to by Islamic clericson the grounds that ultimate justice can be dispensed only by Allah. This, once again, had the potential toantagonise Islamic members of the coalition against terrorism and, as a result, the offensive was renamed
‘Operation Enduring Freedom’. These various examples demonstrate the key significance of cultural messages
and images for forging geopolitical visions of the world.
Key readings : Harvey (2003) and Mann (2003).

STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 50
Table 3.2 The changing patterns of geopolitical power, 1815–2002
Locus of power Period Forms of geopolitical dominance
Phase 1 Britain within a wider 1815–75 Britain leads a European territorial expansion into
Europe non-European lands. Britain, partly because of its territorial
expansion but also its sea power, holds a position of military dominance within the European continent. Britain uses this military dominance as a way of promoting particular globaleconomic relationships, such as free trade and comparativeadvantage, that sustain its pre-eminent geopolitical position
Phase 2 The destabilisation of British 1875–1945 National economies become more protectionist and there is far
power, especially as a result of the less emphasis on free trade. There is a struggle for geopoliticalrise of Germany dominance, most clearly in the context of the two world wars of
the twentieth century
Phase 3 The Cold War between 1945–90 The world is divided into two spheres of geopolitical influence –
East and West East and West – based on the conflicting geopolitical might of
the United States and the Soviet Union. The tentacles of these two countries extend well beyond the confines of Europe, the traditional battleground of geopolitical dominance, to incorporate all states in the world
Phase 4 A unipolar world, with 1990–? The Unites States, since the collapse of the communist bloc, tries
the United States as its hub, based to dominate world politics through a mixture of political andon ideas of free trade military influence, the economics of free trade and neoliberalism,
and through the dissemination of numerous cultural messages. In many ways this dominance is similar to Britain’s during Phase 1 ,
though, as Agnew and Corbridge (1995: 20) argue, the United States is far more aggressive in its pursuit of global free trade and international political influence than Britain was, even in its
heyday
Source : after Agnew and Corbridge (1995: 19–23)
BOX 3.6 THE CONTRADICTIONS OF GEOPOLITICS: BRITAIN AND
ARGENTINA, 1945–61
A fine example of the potential that exists for contradictory tensions to develop within geopolitical relationships
is the friction and conflict that existed between the United Kingdom and Argentina in the 1950s and early1960s. There have been strong trading links between the United Kingdom and Argentina for some time –
manufactured goods were exported from Britain and raw materials, like beef, were exported from Argentina
to the United Kingdom. During the 1950s and early 1960s, however, tension rose between the two countries,mainly because of friction concerning the political status of the Falkland Islands and Antarctica. Despite theseproblems, the United Kingdom was keen to continue exporting goods to Argentina. A major conflict of interest

States and globalisation
As discussed briefly in Chapter 2, there has been much
discussion concerning the alleged impact of global-isation on the state. Before examining these variousdebates it is important to define precisely what we
mean by globalisation (see Box 3.7). Key here are the
writings of Peter Dicken (1998, 2003) and Ash Aminand Nigel Thrift (1994, 1997).
There are, broadly defined, three different interpre-
tations of the impact of globalisation on the state. The
first interpretation views globalisation as something
that is undermining the state and its territoriality,leading to new global forms of political organisation.For these so-called ‘boosters’, such as Kenichi Ohmae(1996: 5), ‘traditional nation-states have become un-natural, even impossible business units in a global
economy’. Proponents of this argument suggest that
globalisation is associated with a ‘borderless world’where states are relegated to a minor supporting roleon the global stage of capital accumulation. Importantpolitical figures have supported this position. In the
words of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, ‘what
is called globalisation is changing the nature of thenation-state as power becomes more diffuse and bordersmore porous’ ( The Times , 20 July 1995). For former
US politician Robert Reich ‘modern technologies
have made it difficult for nations to control these flows
…o f knowledge and money’ (1992: 111). This
viewpoint has been popularly characterised by imagesof McDonald’s and Coca-Cola becoming part of the
staple diet of people living in the vast majority of thecountries of the world (see Plate 3.1).
Others have criticised the booster school, rejecting
the argument that globalisation is a new phenomenon
that is transforming contemporary political geog-raphies. ‘Hypercritics’ (Dicken et al., 1997) or ‘sceptics’
(Held et al., 1999) – such as Hirst and Thompson
(1996) – use historical statistics of world flows of
trade, investment and labour in order to underplay
the significance of more recent global patterns of trade.They claim that because levels of economic inter-dependence remain stable, no significant changes have occurred since the nineteenth century and it is,therefore, wrong to suggest that the contemporary
period has witnessed the formation of a particularly
integrated economy. For Hirst and Thompson, global-isation is a ‘myth’, used as a politically convenientrationale for practising neoliberal economic strategies.Furthermore, from this perspective, the nation-state
remains a controller of cross-border activity and it is
misleading to suggest that it has lost all meaning andsignificance within the contemporary world.
In between the ‘booster’ and ‘sceptic’ schools lies the
middle ground occupied by numerous commentators(such as Dicken 1998, 2003; Held et al. 1999; Yeung
1998), who argue that globalisation should be viewed
as a complex set of interrelated processes that are lead-ing to a qualitative reorganisation of the geo-economyand nation-states. The main thrust of these argumentsTHE STATE IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE 51
arose, however, when the Argentine government wanted to acquire Shackleton aircraft from the United
Kingdom. Certain sectors of the UK state, such as the Treasury, were of course, in favour, since it would have
helped the UK balance of payments. The Foreign Office was ambivalent about the transaction. At one level,the sale of Shackleton aircraft would have helped to sustain the good trading relations that existed betweenthe United Kingdom and Argentina. At another level, the sale could have weakened the political and militaryinfluence of the United Kingdom in the south Atlantic and for this reason the Ministry of Defence attempted toveto the sale. This example shows that because the state cannot be considered in the singular, so its geopolitical
posturings cannot be viewed as singular either. This creates the potential for disruptions and contradictions
within the geopolitical relationships espoused by any given state.
Key reading : Dodds (1994).

is that the nation-state is presented as ‘permeable’ to
the processes of globalisation but, none the less, has a‘political complexion’ that enables it to filter variousglobal forces (Dicken 1998). In a similar vein, HenryYeung (1998: 292) challenges the ‘borderless world’discourse on the grounds that it plays down the
‘intricate and multiple relationships between capital,
the state and space’. There is, for Yeung, an enduringimportance of national boundaries because capital isstill embedded in distinct national social and/orinstitutional structures. According to authors such as
these, the nation-state, therefore, remains engaged in
mediating both domestic and transnational political,economic and cultural activity.
It is this third interpretation of the character of the
relationship between the state and globalisation thatwe advocate in this book. States are being transformed
in many ways as a result of the forces of globalisation.
They still, however, play key roles in structuringpolitical, economic, cultural and social geographies
within and beyond their boundaries. This point hasbeen forcefully made by Yeung (1998). Focusing onthe economic impacts of globalisation on contempo-rary states, Yeung has argued that states still retaininstrumental roles in shaping the processes that take
place within their boundaries (see Table 3.3). States,
for instance, create the political, social and culturalconditions which may foster the global economicsuccess of their home industries. The success of theJapanese electronics and car industries in the period
between 1975 and 1990, for example, was in large
part due to the correct political and economic institu-tions put in place by the Japanese state. Key, in thisrespect, was the way in which the Japanese statecovered the costs of innovation within these industriesin order to sustain their economic competitiveness.
Equally important is the fact that some transnational
corporations – seen by some as the antithesis of stateSTATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 52
BOX 3.7 GLOBALISATION
Globalisation, when considered in political, cultural and economic contexts, implies:
1 the increasing importance of financial markets on a global scale;
2 the centrality of knowledge as a factor of production;
3 the internationalisation and ‘transnationalisation’ of technology;4 the rise of transnational corporations;5 the intensification of cultural flows;6 the rise of ‘transnational economic diplomacy’.
(Amin and Thrift 1994, 1997)
When these various factors are considered together, something is certainly ‘happening out there’ in relation
to the scale of political, economic and cultural activity (Dicken 1998). Crucially, we need to distinguish between‘internationalisation’ and ‘globalisation’. The former refers to the extension of political, economic and cultural
activity across national boundaries. This has occurred since the formation of nation-states during the modern
period (see Chapter 2). Globalisation, on the other hand, means ‘not merely the geographical extension of[political, cultural and] economic activity across national boundaries but also the functional integration ofsuch internationally dispersed activities’ (Dicken 1998: 5). The key significance of globalisation, therefore, isthe existence of behaviour, rules and organisations that normalise and regulate political, economic and culturalactivity on a geographical scale greater than that of the nation-state.
Key readings : Amin and Thrift (1994, 1997) and Dicken (1998, 2003).

territorial power – are controlled directly by the state.
The clearest instances of this phenomenon are to be
seen in Europe. The French state, which controlsinternational corporations such as the finance companyCrédit Agricole, the petrochemical company Elf-Aquitaine and car manufacturer Renault, is aparticularly good example.
A further weakness in many contributions to the
debate on the nature of the relationship that existsbetween contemporary states and the processes ofglobalisation is that they tend to position states andglobal processes as two opposing combatants, involved
in a ‘zero-sum game’. What this means is that in the
battle between states and the forces of globalisationthere is an implicit assumption that each representstotally distinct and different categories. Furthermore,so the argument goes, if one becomes more powerfuland important then the other must automatically
decrease in importance by the same amount. As
Yeung’s (1998) work demonstrates, this is clearly notthe case. For instance, some key transnational corpo-rations are owned and run by states. In addition, theUnited Nations – although a body that operates at a global scale – exists as a collection of individual
nation-states. Another good example of the way in
which nation-states can contribute to the forces ofglobalisation lies in the context of the World TradeOrganisation (WTO). Even though this has beenconsidered to be the antithesis of the nation-state, it
is significant that it is an organisation formed by
nation-states and run, ostensibly, for the benefit ofnation-states (see Box 3.8).
Reports of the death of the nation-state are therefore
exaggerated: states demonstrably still play a key roleTHE STATE IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE 53
Plate 3.1 Booster accounts of globalisation: the spread of American foods
Courtesy of Gillian Jones

in structuring the processes that occur within their
boundaries. Moreover, they also help to shape the
character of those global processes that are allegedly
undermining the power of the state.
Of course, this does not mean that states are not
affected by the forces of globalisation. Indeed, there is strong evidence that they are being transformed in
important ways. There are two key points to make
in this respect. First, the impact of globalisation maybe different in different states located in different partsof the world. Much has been written concerning thedifferential impact of the processes of globalisation in
different parts of the world. Dodds (2000), for instance,
has argued that for many Southern states the currentdebates on the impact of globalisation on the state
merely represent the recent concerns of Northern
countries. For the vast majority of Southern countries,
the political, economic and cultural dominance oftransnational and global forces has been a feature of their national politics for tens, if not hundreds, ofyears. Following on from this, we can argue that the
impact of certain aspects of globalisation varies from
state to state, being dependent upon the underlyingpolitical, economic, cultural and environmental geog-raphies of those states. In this regard, it has been notedthat one particular aspect of globalisation – namely
the use of the internet – has not impacted overmuch
on Southern countries, because of the need for certainSTATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 54
Table 3.3 States and economic globalisation
The continuing role of states Recent examples
States continue to act as the ‘guarantor of the rights of The US state during the 1980s actively lobbied Japan on
capital’: in other words, they ensure that capitalist behalf of its semiconductor industries in order to open upaccumulation is carried out according to certain rules the Japanese market for US semiconductor transnationaland regulations corporations
States create the domestic conditions for the success of For much of recent history the Japanese state has covered
their own transnational corporations the costs of new innovations for transnational corporations
in certain sectors of the economy, especially automobiles and electronics
States are often directly involved in global economies Examples include the French state’s ownership of
through their ownership of certain transnational transnational corporations such as Elf-Aquitaine andcorporations Renault, and the many corporations that have strong links
with the government of Singapore
States have a key role in regulating the world economy, China regulates the types of foreign firm that may invest
so that they can influence the types of foreign within its boundaries. This involved confining them toinvestment that take place within their boundaries Special Economic Zones for much of the 1980s
States play an important role in helping to set up States – and state politics – are instrumental in the decisions
international political and economic organisations that made by the World Trade Organisation, and otherhelp to co-ordinate and regulate the global economy organisations such as the G7, the group of most
industrialised countries
States still have an influential role in shaping their own The implementation of particular policies within certain
domestic economies. These domestic economies still states may lead to changes in the nature of the domesticrepresent a large proportion of total economic activity economy. Ronald Reagan’s reduction of taxes as a meansin the world today of increasing consumer demand within the United States
can be seen as an example
Source : after Yeung (1998)

expensive technologies in order to surf the web (see
P. Crang 1999). The fact that languages other thanEnglish are spoken in a large number of states also, of
necessity, means that the impact of English as the
lingua franca of globalisation varies from state to state.
Second, we want to emphasise that the loss or
transformation of state power in one particular contextneed not mean that other aspects of state power are lost
or transformed in the same way, if at all, even within
the same state. Michael Mann (1997) has done muchto emphasise this point. He has argued, for instance,that the integrity and territoriality of Northern statesmay well be weakened as a result of the processes ofeconomic globalisation, particularly within the
European Union. Here, the creation of the euro zone
has challenged the power of many European states tomake decisions concerning their own national interestrates. On the other hand, a focus on the changing role
of identity politics – the way in which people’s politicsare shaped by aspects of their identity, most notably
their national identity (see Chapter 5) – demonstrates
that Northern states are being strengthened, ratherthan weakened, under globalisation. It is this variableimpact of different aspects of globalisation on the state that enables Mann (1997: 472) to argue that ‘these
patterns are too varied to permit us to argue simply
that the nation-state and the nation-state system are strengthening or weakening’ under globalisation.In effect, globalisation impacts on different states indifferent ways. Furthermore, these various impacts arecontext-specific.
The discussion in this section shows clearly that the
impacts of globalisation on the state are complex.Moreover, it is not simply a situation in which forcesTHE STATE IN GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE 55
BOX 3.8 GLOBALISATION, NATION-STATES AND THE WORLD
TRADE ORGANISATION (WTO)
The WTO was formed in 1995 as a way of ensuring the expansion and regulation of free trade throughout
the world. It is based on the earlier General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which also sought to regulatetrade between states. The WTO has been commonly understood as an organisation that represents the antithesis
of the democratically elected governments of nation-states. Viewed as a ‘tool of the rich and powerful’, the
international messenger of transnational corporations and the opponent of progressive health, environmentaland development policies, it has incurred the wrath of anti-globalisation activists. The most significant illustrationof the hatred that has been directed towards the WTO was the often violent demonstrations that took placeduring the WTO summit in Seattle in 1999. One of the main criticisms of the WTO was that it reflected theimperatives of big business and, therefore, represented a wholly undemocratic organisation that had the power
to influence not only international trade but also labour rights and degrees of environmental protection within
particular countries. The irony, in this respect, is that the WTO is an organisation that is ratified by thegovernments of the states which are its members. At its heart, therefore, the WTO is not an organisation thatexists over and above nation-states. Rather, it should be viewed as a global institution that is formed throughthe amalgamation of nation-states. This point does not diminish the environmental, political, social and economic
injustices that have been committed as a result of WTO decisions over its brief history. Furthermore, the undue
influence of certain powerful countries and organisations on WTO decisions is not to be welcomed. Theimportant point we would stress, however, is that nation-states, in this context at least, are intimately involvedin the production of new global political and economic institutions. As such, the processes of globalisationdo not just happen ‘out there’ beyond the reach of the state. The state is actively involved in shaping globalpolitics.
Key reading : de Burca and Scott (2001).

at scales over and above that of the nation-state are
undermining or transforming the political geographies
of the state. As has been demonstrated, states areactively involved in the process whereby these globalforces are forged in the first place. In this respect, ratherthan thinking of the relationship between global
forces and the state as one that reflects a one-way and
top-down process, it should be viewed more as a dialogue between the two. States, since their forma-tion, have been actively involved in shaping thepolitical geographies that exist beyond their borders.
The relationship between states and current processes
of globalisation demonstrates that this urge to influenceextraterritorial political geographies seems set tocontinue.
Further reading
Three main themes are discussed in this chapter and the
literature that addresses them is vast. For a goodintroduction to the link between states and empires, see
Abernethy, The Dynamics of Global Dominance (2000). This
book gives a good account of the various methods usedto enhance state control of overseas land during themodern period as well as providing some interesting casestudies of this process. A fascinating examination of theassociation between the discipline of geography and
imperialism can be found in Godlewska and Smith,Geography and Empire (1994).
Many political geographers have contributed to our
understanding of geopolitics and critical geopolitics. See,for instance, Agnew, Geopolitics (1998), Agnew and
Corbridge, Mastering Space (1995) and Dodds, Geopolitics
in a Changing World (2000). An account of the problems
involved in geopolitical interference can be found in
Dodds, ‘Geopolitics in the Foreign Office: Britishrepresentations of Argentina, 1945–61’, Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers , 19 (1994), 273–90.
Economic geographers have tended to explore the impact
of globalisation on the state, even though the variouscontexts within which globalisation impinges on thenation-state are numerous. Dicken, Global Shift (2003),
offers a comprehensive and brilliant introduction to the
theme of globalisation. For an account of the impact of
globalisation on the state see Yeung, ‘Capital, state andspace: contesting the borderless world’, Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers , 23 (1998), 291–309, and
M. Jones and R. Jones, ‘Nation states, ideological powerand globalisation: can geographers catch the boat?’,
Geoforum (forthcoming).STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 56

Introduction
The previous chapter concluded by discussing the
ways in which the nation-state plays a key, althoughmodified, role under the conditions and challenges ofglobalisation. This chapter continues on this themeby examining the changing institutional forms andfunctions of the capitalist state. It does this by draw-
ing on a régulation approach to political economy and
the state. The term ‘political economy’ is frequentlyused to discuss the interrelationships that exist betweeneconomic, social, and political processes, which areforged through power relations as ‘moving parts’ (see
Peet and Thrift 1989). The régulation approach has a
neo-Marxist take on political economy that stresses the ways in which capitalism is managed through state,economy and society ‘interactions’ (Florida and Jonas1991). Box 4.1 introduces capitalism and summarisesthe differences between Marxism, structural Marxism
and neo-Marxism approaches to political economy.
This chapter, therefore, suggests that state institutionalforms and functions can be explored in relation to theways in which states are embedded or ‘integrated’ intodifferent economic, social and political processes.
The political geographer David Reynolds, writing
during the early 1990s, remarked upon the increasingnumber of geographers drawing on approaches suchas régulation theory to understand ‘the behaviour of
states as economic and geopolitical actors at a variety
of territorial scales’ (Reynolds 1993: 389). This work
was considered important because it was taking poli-tical geography into new territory and giving progressto its intellectual development. We discuss the state’schanging forms and functions from this perspectiveby first focusing on the origins of régulation theory and
analysing its main arguments. Because the régulation
approach is a challenging set of literatures, we then use
case studies of how regulationist authors have applied
this approach in their work and in doing so we drawout the changing institutional forms and functions of the state. The case studies analyse the régulation
approach in relation to: economic and industrial
geography; the geographies of scale within the context
of neoliberalism; state intervention through modes of governance; the dynamics of urban politics andcitizenship; and the purported shift from the welfarestate to the workfare state.
A rough guide to the régulation
approach
The régulation approach emerged from a particular
strand of French thinking during the early 1970s.
Researchers at the Centre for Mathematical EconomicForecasting Studies Applied to Planning (CEPREMAP)in Paris were faced with an interesting set of problemsthat could neither be resolved through conventional
economic planning nor explained using existing theo-
ries of political economy (Jessop 1990b). Between the late 1960s and early 1970s the ‘Fordist’ consensus(after the car manufacturer, Henry Ford) – based oneconomic planning, mass production, structuredinternational financial systems, and full employment
– began to disintegrate. An international division of
labour was emerging based on newly industrialisingcountries, at the same time as widespread industrialunrest and declining productivity in developedThe state’s changing forms
and functions 4

STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 58
BOX 4.1 MODELS IN POLITICAL ECONOMY
What is capitalism?
Societies have moved through four different organising systems: primitive accumulation (bartering economies);
antiquity (based on slavery); feudalism (supported by serfdom) and capitalism. Capitalism refers to a social
and economic system that is divided into two classes: those owning the means of production (land, machineryand factories, etc.) and those selling labour power. Under the capitalist mode of production, labour power isexploited to provide surplus value (or profit) and capitalists compete for this profit through a system thatnecessitates the ‘accumulation of capital’.
Marxism: a critique of political economy
Karl Marx advocated an approach to political economy that he called ‘historical materialism’. This materialistconcept of history captured the shifting relations between the state, the economy and society through struggles
between opposites. This position was initially a critique of the model of political economy used by classical
economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, whose work focused on production and exchange as somewhat isolated relationships. For Marx, a critique of political economy starts with property relationswithin different modes of production and then explores the relations between individuals in this context. VolumeI of Capital took these concerns forward through an analysis of the commodity form, the nature of labour power
as a commodity, the labour process, the working day and alienation under capitalism. Volume II of Capital
discusses the role of finance and money under capitalism. Volume III of Capital , which was completed after
Marx’s death by his colleague Frederick Engels, focuses more on economic reproduction. Further volumeswere planned to examine the state and other aspects of the capitalist mode of production.
Structural Marxism: a critique of classical Marxism
This was dominant in the 1960s and 1970s and had close relations with political practice, especially in France.The leading thinker in structural Marxism, Louis Althusser, challenged what he saw as the technical and economicdeterminism within Karl Marx’s thinking. Althusser introduced non-economic levels of analysis – such as
consciousness and politics – into a Marxist framework and these were critically seen as ‘relatively autonomous’
because they formed an ‘over-determined social structure’. This approach has also been termed‘base–superstructure’ analysis, where historical materialism becomes a way of tracing the connections betweenthe main social elements. More recently social scientists, drawing on the work of US economists StephenResnick and David Wolff, have revisited some of this thinking. Geographers such as J.K. Gibson-Graham use
the term ‘anti-essentialism’ to reject economic determinism of all kinds: they escape capitalism through
developing anti-capitalist spatial analysis and anti-capitalist political strategies.

capitalist economies, and France experienced stagfla-
tion (the coexistence of unemployment and inflation).
Despite attempts to resolve this, state interventionexacerbated national economic instability.
Set within this context and also reacting against
the structural Marxism of the 1970s (see Box 4.1),regulationists offered an analysis of socio-economic
change that tried to understand the importance of
rules, norms and conventions at a number of spatialscales (local, regional, national and supranational) in the mediation of capitalism. Regulationists explorethe regulation of economic life in its broadest sense,
acknowledging that capitalist development does not
possess its own ‘self-limiting mechanisms’ or follow an ‘exclusive economic logic’ (Aglietta 2000). Regula-tionists argue that socially embedded institutions and their networks, expressed as a series of ‘structuralforms’, are crucial to the continued existence of
capitalism, despite contradictions and crisis tendencies.
The initial work of Michel Aglietta captured concernwith the roles played by trade unions, financialinstitutions and, perhaps most important, the state andits changing institutional forms and functions under
capitalism (Aglietta 1978).This thinking has been extended by others through
research on ‘modes of regulation’ (Lipietz 1988),
‘modes of social regulation’ (Peck and Tickell 1992)and ‘social modes of economic regulation’ (Jessop 1994)– terms that capture, among other things, the differentinstitutional forms and functions of the state. ForRobert Boyer (1990), the mode of regulation denotes
five levels of analysis under capitalism: the wage
relation, or wage–labour nexus; forms of competitionand the enterprise form; the nature of money and itsregulation; the state and its forms and functions; and the international regime. When these act in
concert, a period of stable growth known as a ‘regime
of accumulation’ is said to exist. Figure 4.1 depicts thisrelationship and Box 4.2 summarises some key termsin régulation theory.
Aglietta’s research on the US economy between
1840 and 1970 identifies five regimes of accumulation,
each associated with a particular mode of state inter-
vention, complementary economic system and formof state territoriality. Discussing the United States after the Civil War, for instance, Aglietta talks about the importance of a territorial ideology called the
‘frontier principle’, which secured economic growthTHE STATE’S CHANGING FORMS AND FUNCTIONS 59
Neo-Marxism: rebel sons of Althusser
This mode of thinking originated, first, as a return to some of the principles of Marx’s Capital . Authors such
as Ernest Mandel and Paul Baran insisted on the necessity of rates of profit and labour theories of value askeys to studying the depressions of the 1970s. Another brand of neo-Marxism has been associated withdevelopment theory, and found in the work of André Gunder Frank. A third neo-Marxist strand can be locatedin critical theory associated with the Frankfurt school and more closely associated with the systems theoryanalyses of Jürgen Habermas and Claus Offe. A fourth strand challenges base–superstructure analysis and
what is seen as the automatic reproduction of capitalism. Two distinct neo-Marxist groups argue that social
action is situated within, but not reduced to, structural contexts. The social structures of accumulation (SSA)school seeks to explain the role of political and economic institutions in the making of capitalism. This is aNorth American approach found in the work of David Kotz, Michael Reich and colleagues. Another groupof scholars answers this question by developing a régulation approach to growth and crisis, which uncovers
‘mediating mechanisms’ that help to bring about conflict resolutions under capitalism. Key regulationist authors
are Michel Aglietta, Robert Boyer, Bob Jessop and Alain Lipietz.
Key readings : Jessop (1997b), Lipietz (1988) and Peet and Thrift (1989).

based primarily on agricultural production and the cre-
ation of urban commercial centres (see Chapter 2). This
involved the ‘domestication of geographical space’ bythose charged with conquering territory and buildingrailroads in line with a model of capitalism fostered
on mobility and mutual competition (Aglietta 1978).
The régulation approach, then, is not restricted to
Fordist analysis – a common mistake made by critics(see Brenner and Glick 1991). That said, it is morecommon for authors to use the example of Fordism –
whose regime of accumulation can be analysed as a
system supporting a virtuous model of production and consumption, and a mode of regulation consistingof: labour relations fostered on collective bargaining;the nationalisation of monopolistic enterprises; the
creation and maintenance of national money; and the
dominance of the Keynesian welfare state (Jessop1992). Fordism also had a particular spatial pattern,or ‘mode of societalisation’, and links are frequentlymade between mass production and large-scale urban-isation in North America and Western Europe (EsserSTATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 60
Figure 4.1 Regime of accumulation
Source: redrawn from Peck and Tickell (1992: fig. 1),
copyright 1992, with the permission of Elsevier
BOX 4.2THE REGULATIONIST VOCABULARY
Regime of Accumulation (RoA)
This is used to denote a coherent phase of capitalist development. There are connections here with ‘long waves’
of economic growth, which emphasise technological phases of development (Marshall 1987). The regime of
accumulation, however, is not reduced to purely techno-economic concerns: the RoA is forged through the‘structural coupling’ of accumulation and regulation, and this develops through ‘chance discovery’, involvingtrial-and-error experimentation.
Accumulation system
This explores the production–consumption relationship, whereby the individual decisions of capitalists toinvest are met by demand for their ‘products’ through the market place. Convergence between productionand its ongoing transformations and the conditions of final consumption can provide the basis for a RoA.
Mode of regulation
At one level this captures the integration of political and social relations, such as state action and the legislature,social institutions, behavioural norms and habits, and political practices. For the purposes of undertakingresearch, modes of regulation can be unpacked as: the wage relation; forms of competition and the enterprise

and Hirsch 1989). We discuss this further in Box 4.3.
Last, given that the régulation approach is concerned
with analysing the ‘institutional infrastructure around
and through which capitalism proceeds’ (Tickell and
Peck 1995: 363) this infrastructure varies within andbetween nation states, according to the different setsof economic, social and political circumstances.Geography matters and Table 4.1 highlights the key national variants of Fordism. In each case, the
state has a different institutional form and performs
different functions to underpin models of economicdevelopment and also instigate social and culturalchange.
What comes after Fordism?
Debates within the régulation approach have been
preoccupied with what comes after the Fordist regimeof accumulation. At the other end of the spectrum, apost-Fordist camp claims that flexible specialisation or
flexible accumulation is emerging. This draws on
developments taking place in industrial districts acrossNorth America and Western Europe, which have amodel of economic growth built on flexible small firmsand specialised high-technology production (Scott
1988a, b). This is often supported by observations on
localised modes of regulation. Sebastiano Brusco andEnzio Righi, for instance, draw attention to locallybased institutions in Modena (north Italy), which havehelped to forge a consensus around flexible economic
growth (Brusco and Righi 1989). In extreme instances,authors such as Michael Piore and Charles Sabel
selectively deploy regulationist language to push
these localised observations further as one-region-tells-all scenarios. Flexible specialisation is presented as an economically and socially sustainable new regimeof accumulation (see Piore and Sabel 1984). Box 4.3summarises some of the key characteristics of post-
Fordism and compares these with Fordism.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are those
sitting in the after-Fordist camp, which sees the
contemporary stage of capitalism as still-in-crisis andnot representing a new regime of accumulation. No
prediction is made concerning the successor model to
Fordism because régulation theory does not make any
claims about the future (Peck and Tickell 1995). Their research focuses, among other things, on how the state’s forms and functions have been changing in the after-Fordist era (see Jessop 1994; Jones 1999;
Moulaert 1996). These authors criticise post-Fordist
accounts for generalising from a limited number oflocal case studies and overemphasising the successesof this model to create sustainable and equitablegrowth (Amin and Robins 1990; Lovering 1990). By
using case studies, the remainder of the chapter dis-
cusses the changing institutional forms and functionsof the capitalist state to get behind some of theseimportant debates. THE STATE’S CHANGING FORMS AND FUNCTIONS 61
system; money and its regulation; the state and its forms and functions; the international regime. The effectiveness
of these institutional forms and their interrelations varies over time and across space.
Collectively these three terms allow regulationists to analyse the economy in its ‘integral’ sense, i.e. they
are concerned with the social, cultural, and political context in which economic reproduction occurs. The spatialaspects of this are often expressed through:
Mode of societalisation
A term used to discuss the pattern of institutions and social cohesion, or the spatial patterning of regimes ofaccumulation.
Key readings : Jessop (1992) and Tickell and Peck (1992).

STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 62
Table 4.1 Variants of Fordism
Type of Fordist regime Characteristics of coupling Examples
Classic Fordism Mass production and consumption underwritten by social democratic United States
welfare state
Flex-Fordism Decentralised, federalised state. Close co-operation between financial West Germany
and industrial capital, including facilitation of interfirm co-operation
Blocked Fordism Inadequate integration of financial and productive capital at the level United Kingdom
of the nation-state. Archaic and obstructive character of working-class politics
State Fordism State plays a leading role in creation of conditions of mass production, France
including state control of industry. L’état entrepreneur
Permeable Fordism Relatively unprocessed raw materials as real leaders of economy. Canada, Australia
Private collective bargaining but similar macro-economic policy and labour management relations to classic Fordism. ‘Bastard Keynesianism’
Delayed Fordism Cheap labour immediately adjacent to Fordist core. State intervention Spain, Italy
played key role in rapid industrialisation in the 1960s
Peripheral Fordism Local assembly followed by export of Fordist goods. Heavy Mexico, South
indebtedness. Authoritarian structures coupled with movement for Korea, Brazildemocracy, attempts to emulate Fordist accumulation system in absence of corresponding MSR
Primitive Taylorism Taylorist labour processes with almost endless supply of labour. Malaysia,
Bloody exploitation, huge extraction of surplus value. Dictatorial states Bangladesh,
and high social tension Philippines
Source : adapted from Tickell and Peck (1995: table 1)
BOX 4.3 FORDISM AND POST-FORDISM
Fordism and post-Fordism can be analysed under three main headings: the relations of production, the
socio-institutional structure and geographical form.
Fordism
•Relations of production . Mass production, economies of scale, large firms and monopolistic competition,
product and job standardisation.
•The socio-institutional structure . Collective bargaining through trade unions, demand management by the
state, and mass consumption through the welfare state.
•Geographical form . The manufacturing belt of the United States and the zone of industrial development
in Europe stretching from the Midlands of England through North West France, Belgium and Holland, tothe Ruhr of Germany, with many outlying districts.

Régulation approaches to the
state: five examples
Economic and industrial development
The relationship between the state’s institutional forms
and functions and the economy is discussed in research
by Sean DiGovanna (1996). He analyses the roles
played by ‘institutionalised compromises’ in thedevelopment of regions, using the régulation approach
to compare the institutional basis and development ofthree economies (Emilia-Romagna in Italy, Baden-
Württemberg in Germany and Silicon Valley in the
United States). These regions are selected because they broadly correspond to the model of industrialdistricts suggested by ‘flexible specialisation theory’ – where industrial clustering occurs within sectors
associated with electronics, aerospace and high tech-
nology in general (see Krätke 1999). DiGiovanna’sresearch reveals differences in both the institutionalfoundation and the economic trajectory of each region,which result from characteristics within the mode ofsocial regulation.
Box 4.4 summarises DiGiovanna’s (1996) argument
by analysing the three regions as different ‘systems of regulation’. The first institutional form coversregional industrial relations and the structure of thelabour market. DiGiovanna details how employers
and employees relate to each other within the three
regions, especially through skills development andtraining policies. The second institutional form cap-tures market-based relations and forms of competition.
Attention is drawn to the size of firms and sub-contracting networks. Again, relationships are differentin the three regions. Baden-Württemberg is charac-terised by large firms, whereas Emilia-Romagna and
Silicon Valley rely more heavily on small-firm alliances.
The third institutional form deals with consumptionregimes – such as market relations, inter-firm trans-actions, the different spatial structures of the firm, andproduct flows within the regional economy. Striking
differences exists between the three regions.
Last, and perhaps most important, DiGiovanna
(1996) discusses the state as an institutional formcapable of intervening in the economy to provide thenecessary atmosphere for economic development. The state’s forms and functions are very different across
the three regions. In Baden-Württemberg the state
plays an important role in managing the productionsystem and its industrial relations. In Emilia-Romagnathe state’s role is focused more on social reproduc-tion and is more ‘paternalistic’. Silicon Valley is an
interesting example of what is becoming known as the
‘knowledge-based economy’, where highly skilledworkers are the source of innovation and economicsuccess. National government expenditure on researchand development and on defence supports many of theorganisational structures within this ‘modern quick-
silver economy’ (Leadbeater 2000), whereas local-level
government deals more with housing and environmentconcerns. Because California is a leading contributorto global warming, through high levels of car ownershipTHE STATE’S CHANGING FORMS AND FUNCTIONS 63
Post-Fordism
•Relations of production . Niche small batch production, economies of scope, small and high-tech firms,
specialised products and jobs (‘knowledge-based’ workers).
•The socio-institutional structure . Individualised bargaining and decline of trade union activity, supply-side
state intervention and selective consumption through welfare privatisation.
•Geographical form . ‘New industrial spaces’, such as Route 128, Silicon Valley and Orange County
(North America), Baden-Württemberg (Germany), Emilia-Romagna (Italy) and Cambridge (Britain).
Key readings : Scott (1988a, 1988b) and Jessop (1992).

STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 64
BOX 4.4 INSTITUTIONAL FORMS AND THE THREE INDUSTRIAL DISTRICTS
Emilia-Romagna
•Wage–labour nexus . Labour supply is segmented by employer and there is a clear divide between large
firms (the primary sector) and small firms (the secondary sector). The primary sector is unionised and offers
security, whereas the secondary sector is more precarious.
•Forms of competition . Competitive advantage is secured from large numbers of specialist small firms, often
working together on joint marketing and technology acquisition.
•Consumption regime . Many firms are dependent on decisions made outside the region and few products
are consumed in the region.
•Role of the state . Local government is socialist or communist and heavily involved in social reproduction.
There is reluctance to be involved in industrial relations, and the exploitation of labour often goes unchecked.
Baden-Württemberg
•Wage–labour nexus . A corporatist model with high rates of unionisation in large and small firms and the
determination of wages by federal and regional patterns of negotiation. Security occurs by a commitment
to training and skills development.
•Forms of competition . Large firms dominate subcontracting relationships and lead developments in training
and technology acquisition. Small firms are highly competitive and are hesitant to collaborate.
•Consumption regime . Components are produced by smaller firms and consumed by larger firms within the
region. Suppliers often follow firms in Baden-Württemberg to foreign locations.
•Role of the state . The Land regional government is proactive in education, training and networking. The
federal government is also supportive of research and development and technology diffusion. Struggles oftenoccur between these two scales of regulation.
Silicon Valley
•Wage–labour nexus . Based around a bifurcated labour market model, where highly educated scientific
workers operate alongside low-skilled production workers (often women and immigrants). Unionisation ratesare low and violations of health and safety standards are not uncommon.
•Forms of competition . Dynamic strategic alliances exist between relatively small designers and customised
equipment producers. This is augmented by extensive subcontracting between firms and collaboration on
research, development and technical innovations.
•Consumption regime . Products are created largely for large and small manufacturers in worldwide markets.
Many products are aimed for niche markets which are not accessed by large manufacturers.
•Role of the state . Local governments are not key players in Silicon Valley outside dealing with housing and
environment concerns. Instead, economic development is fostered by venture capital institutions, foundingfirms, universities and the more informal networks of social capital.
Key reading : DiGiovanna (1996).

and traffic congestion, environmental regulation is
becoming increasingly important in this region.
Geographies of scale: local modes
of social regulation
An interesting application of régulation theory can be
found in the work of Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell.This examines the state’s changing forms and functionsin relation to economic, political and social processes,by incorporating the geography of scale into régulation
theory (Peck and Tickell 1992, 1995). For these geog-
raphers, spatial scales – such as regions and localities– are fluid and actively produced, as opposed to being fixed and static. Moreover, in the event of beingproduced, spatial scales can constrain some forms ofactivity and enable others to exist (see Smith 2003).
We visit these themes in Chapter 6. By using the
example of England’s south-east region, a key spacewithin Britain’s response to globalisation, Peck andTickell argue that political projects (in this caseMargaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party brand of neo-
liberalism) can mobilise geographical difference. They
offer a regulationist reading of scale and uneven devel-opment by suggesting that modes of social regulationare mixtures of different ‘regulatory systems’, ‘regu-latory forms’ and ‘regulatory mechanisms’ and these all operate at different spatial scales. Table 4.2 details
these concerns, some of which point to the differently
scaled forms and functions of the state.
Peck and Tickell suggest that ‘regional couplings’
occur between accumulation and regulation and thisgives rise to regional or ‘local modes of social regu-
lation’. This allows them to undertake a political
geography of the south-east during the late 1980s, withthis region representing a particular social structurewithin accumulation (Peck and Tickell 1992). Figure4.2 details the south-east standard region, which coversthe Home Counties and London. Peck and Tickell
argue that in order to sustain a regime of accumulation
uneven development needs to be contained and theirresearch highlights the inability of Thatcherism tocontrol growth, such that the south-east ‘bubble’ burstduring the early 1990s. This region’s model of eco-
nomic growth was fuelled by a neoliberal ideology of‘individualism’ and ‘ownership’ (see Box 4.5), which
represented a challenge to the Fordist consensus of mass
production, mass consumption and one-nation socialdemocracy. This manifested itself as the consumercredit and mortgage boom of the late 1980s that, whencombined with wage inflation resulting from skill
shortages and recruitment difficulties, produced an
overheated economy, and rapid and uncontrollableincreases in house prices. Peck and Tickell point outthat these problems occurred partly because ‘appro-priate mechanisms for the regulation and reproduction
of the economy had not been set in place’ (1995: 35).
The region suffered a ‘regulatory deficit’ and this raisesquestions about the sustainability of post-Fordism.
Political geographies of the
local state
The work of Mark Goodwin and Joe Painter has
been important for developing links between therégulation approach, the local state and local politics.
Goodwin’s research has focused on the changing insti-
tutional forms and functions of the local state and
how these can act as both ‘agent and obstacle’ to regula-tion (Goodwin et al. 1993). Goodwin has argued that
local states are products of uneven development: they have historically attempted to ameliorate theworst effects of socio-spatial polarisation by provid-
ing – through housing, education and transport, etc.
– the local means for securing collective consumption(Duncan and Goodwin 1988). Building on this,Goodwin discusses the ways in which regulation, itscodes and its decision-making procedures, occur not in
a national territorial vacuum, but through sub-national
state agencies, which ‘are often the very mediumthrough which regulatory practices are interpreted and delivered’ (Goodwin et al. 1995: 250). Painter and
Goodwin explore the notion of ‘regulation as process’– where the institutional forms and functions of the
state are not only seen as being associated with trying
to secure stability; they are also concerned with man-aging fluidity, flux and change, which are ‘constitutedgeographically’ (Painter and Goodwin 1995). Thisemphasises the ‘ebb and flow’ of regulatory processes
across time and space by using a ‘modified version’ ofTHE STATE’S CHANGING FORMS AND FUNCTIONS 65

régulation theory that can explore the plethora of
new institutions emerging in the local state. New institutions often incorporate business sector elites to undertake the delivery of economic development andhave a specific rather than a multi-functional policy
remit, operating through territories smaller than thoseof local government (Peck 1995). Set within the con-
text of a neoliberalist shift from ‘managerialism’ to‘entrepreneurialism’ (Harvey 1989b), local authorities– key players under the Fordist mode of regulation andunderwriters of many of its consumption norms – now
operate within a system called ‘local governance’. AsSTATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 66
Table 4.2 Regulatory forms and mechanisms at different spatial scales
Regulatory form/ Spatial scale
mechanism
Regional/local Nation-state Supranational
Business relations Local growth coalitions State policies on Trade frameworks
(including forms of competition and monopolycompetition)
Localised inter-firm networks Business representative Transnational joint venturing
bodies and lobbying groups and strategic alliances
Labour relations (including Local labour market Collective bargaining International labour
wage forms) structures and institutions institutions and social conventions
Institutionalisation of State labour market and Regulation of migrant labour
labour process training policy flows
Money and finance Regional housing markets Fiscal structure Supranational financial
systems
Venture capital and credit Management of money Structure of global money
institutions supply markets
State forms Form and structure of local Macro-economic policy Supranational state
state orientation institutions
Local economic policies Degree of centralisation/ International trading blocs
decentralisation in state structures
Civil society (including Local trade union/ Consumption norms Globalisation of cultural
politics and culture) production politics forms
Gendered household Party politics Global political forms
Source : reprinted from Peck and Tickell (1992), copyright 1992, with the permission of Elsevier
Form of
sub-national
uneven
development
Form of
international
uneven
developmentstructures

THE STATE’S CHANGING FORMS AND FUNCTIONS 67
Figure 4.2 The south-east standard region
Source: adapted from Allen et al. (1998: map 2.1)
BOX 4.5 CHARACTERISTICS OF NEOLIBERALISM
Neoliberalism is a political philosophy stressing six central concerns:
1Liberalisation . Promoting the free market.
2Deregulation . Reducing central state intervention and direct control.
3Privatisation . Selling off nationalised and state-controlled parts of the public sector.
4Re-commodification . Packaging remaining parts of the public sector to behave on a commercial basis.
continued

we have detailed in Figure 4.3, governance captures
the broader concern with how the local state is managednot only through elected local government but alsothrough:
central government, a range of non-elected organ-
izations of the state (at both central and local levels)as well as institutional and individual actors fromoutside the formal political arena, such as voluntaryorganizations, private businesses and corporations,
the mass media and, increasingly, supranational
institutions, such as the European Union (EU). The
concept of governance focuses attention on the relationsbetween these various actors .
(Goodwin and Painter 1996: 636,
our emphasis)
Table 4.3 summarises this work on new developments
taking place in local governance, which should not
be read as applying only to Britain. New local ‘sites ofregulation’ are common across many developed capital-
ist economies (see Brenner and Theodore 2002). Local
governance, then, allows political geographers topresent the local state as a system of regulation thatinvolves different actors and regulatory practices: some-times this is based on government and at other times
governance is the norm. It is, therefore, not accurate
to talk about a binary shift from local government tolocal governance. Many have made this mistake (see
the debates in Valler et al. 2000) and have fallen into
the same trap as those offering post-Fordist forms of analysis (see p. 61 above). Governance present does not presuppose government past. Furthermore,
developments need to be related to processes occurring
outside the local state to assess the effectiveness of the
new institutions. Painter and Goodwin use the term‘local regulatory capacity’ to probe on such issues,discuss the impact of these shifts within Sunderland
(in the north-east of England) and claim that there is
little evidence of new institutional state forms and theirfunctions providing the necessary mechanisms forstabilising a new mode of regulation (see Box 4.6).Sunderland has a ‘deficit in local regulatory capacity’
and some state forms and functions are ‘clearly counter-
regulatory’ (Painter and Goodwin 2000). This lastpoint has been explored further by others, who suggestthat the state forms and functions become modified todeal with policy problems created by previous roundsof state intervention (Jones and Ward 2002, forth-
coming). The German state theorist Claus Offe called
this situation the ‘crisis of crisis-management’ (Offe1984) and in some circumstances this raises issues ofpolitical legitimacy that can ultimately threaten thestate’s operation. This is discussed further in our next
case study.STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 68
5Internationalisation . Stimulating globalising market forces.
6Individualisation . Creating the opportunities for entrepreneurial activity within high-income earners.
Elements of this were realised in the ‘new right’ political strategy of Thatcherism , taken as the period of British
political economy from 1979 to 1997 and covering the Conservative Party under the leadership of both
Margaret Thatcher and John Major. According to Ray Hudson and Allan Williams, ‘The Thatcherite projectwas above all else, an attempt radically and irrecoverable to redefine the relationships between the state,economy and society, and to break out of the old social democratic consensus of One Nation politics’ (Hudsonand Williams 1995: 39). These characteristics can also be applied closely to the United States, under especially
the Reagan administration, and public sector restructuring in New Zealand throughout the 1990s.
Key readings : Allen et al. (1998), Hudson and Williams (1995), Jessop et al. (1988), Larner (2000),
Brenner and Theodore (2002) and Brodie (1997).

THE STATE’S CHANGING FORMS AND FUNCTIONS 69
• Co-operative Development
Agencies• Community Business Development Agencies• Enterprise Boards• Innovation Centres• Area Development Teams/Initiatives• Planning
• Estates• Education – colleges• Libraries• Environmental Health• Economic/Business Development Sections• Roads• Public transport• Dept of Agriculture and
Fisheries (DAF)• Dept of the Environment (DOE)• Dept of Transport (DTp)• Dept of Employment (DE)• Dept of Industry (DTI)• Home Office (HO)• Dept of Education and Science• Welsh Office• Scottish Office (SO)• Rural Development
Commission• Tourist Boards• Urban development corporations• English Estates• BOTB• Scottish Enterprise• Highlands and Islands Enterprise• British Technology Group
• TECs and LECs
• Local Enterprise Agencies/Trusts• British Coal Enterprise• British Steel (Industry)• Regional Development (Organisations)
• Community Trusts
• Science Parks• Charitable Trusts, e.g. Prince Youth Business Trust• Action Resource Centres• BP
• Shell• IBM• Marks & Spencer• Banks• Business in the Community• Banks
• Venture capitalists• Property developers• Transport companies• Professional services, e.g. consultants, accountants, solicitors, patent agents• CBI
• Trade associations• NFSE• Forum of Private Business• Business clubs• Chambers of commerce• Employer associationsSponsors Individual
companiesAssociationsAgencies Local authorities,
district and regionalDepartments/
regional officesAgencies
Central
governmentLocal
government
Private/public
organisations
Private
sector
Voluntary
sectorOrganisations
influencing
enterprise and
economic
development
Figure 4.3 Actors involved in promoting local economic development
Source: redrawn from Richardson and Turok (1992: fig. 2.1)

Urban politics, citizenship and
legitimacy
This work on the local state’s changing functions
raises important issues of urban politics, especially in
relation to citizenship. Ade Kearns, for instance, talksabout the consequences of the shift towards multi-agency modes of delivery in the local state for ‘sensesof belonging to a community that lies at the heart of
existential citizenship’ (Kearns 1995: 169). UnderFordism, local government was important in creating
‘certainty’ and ‘clarity’: it was the main regulatorymechanism operating within the local state. With thearrival of non-elected local agencies, often drawingtheir personnel from outside the locality and drivenby service agreements and market ethics, Kearns
highlights the emergence of ‘confused citizenry’ and
somewhat diluted senses of place (1995: 169). ForKearns, fundamental tensions exist in neoliberal localgovernance between service-based and citizen-orientedSTATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 70
Table 4.3 New developments in local governance
Sites of regulation Local governance in Fordism New developments
Financial regime Keynesian Monetarist
Organisational structure of local Centralised service delivery authorities Wide variety of service providers
governance Pre-eminence of formal, elected Multiplicity of agencies of local
local government governance
Management Hierarchical Devolved
Centralised ‘Flat’ hierarchiesBureaucratic Performance-driven
Local labour markets Regulated Deregulated
Segmented by skill Dual labour market
Labour process Technologically undeveloped Technologically dynamic (information
Labour-intensive based)Productivity increases difficult Capital-intensive
Productivity increases possible
Labour relations Collectivised Individualised
National bargaining Local and individual bargainingRegulated ‘Flexible’
Forms of consumption Universal Targeted
Collective rights Individualised contracts
Nature of services provided To meet local needs To meet statutory obligations
Expandable Constrained
Ideology Social democratic NeoliberalKey discourse Technocratic/managerialist Entrepreneurial/enablingPolitical form Corporatist Neocorporatist (labour excluded)Economic goals Promotion of full employment Promotion of private profit
Economic modernisation based on Economic modernisation based ontechnical advance and public low-wage, low-skill, ‘flexible’ economyinvestment
Social goals Progressive redistribution/social justice Privatised consumption/active citizenry
Source : adapted from Goodwin and Painter (1996: table 2)

THE STATE’S CHANGING FORMS AND FUNCTIONS 71
BOX 4.6 ‘LOCAL REGULATORY CAPACITY’ IN SUNDERLAND
Fordism in Sunderland
Sunderland represents the model of ‘blocked Fordism’ as outlined by Tickell and Peck in Table 4.1. This locality
in England’s north-east – one of the five districts that constituted the former metropolitan county of Tyne andWear – was dominated by heavy industry (mainly shipbuilding and coal), had a dominance of male full-time
employment, was regulated by high levels of unionised workers and was underwritten by a welfare state system
that provided a social wage. Fordist local governance also provided large-scale public housing, furthersupporting this model of economic growth. During the era of state modernisation in the 1960s the WashingtonNew Town introduced interventionist planning and considerable central government resources, whichtemporarily absorbed the crisis tendencies of Fordism.
Sunderland and the crisis of Fordism
As with most resource-based regional economies, Sunderland went through a period of intense economicrestructuring during the 1970s. The heavy industry of the past gradually disappeared and was replaced by
an expanding service sector. Washington New Town attracted small-scale manufacturing that offered low-
skill work. By the early 1990s two-fifths of the male population of working age had no direct income from ajob, whereas half of women worked in low-skill and often part-time jobs. Sunderland was very much becomingan industrial wasteland.
Is Sunderland post-Fordist?
During the 1990s Sunderland experienced an entrepreneurial city council with a shift from single-agencyapproaches to partnership-based organisations. This had the potential to provide the institutional basis for asustained period of post-Fordist growth. The Tyne and Wear Development Corporation, Sunderland City
Challenge, Sunderland City Training and Enterprise Council, the City of Sunderland Partnership and Sunderland
Business Link were the key players in economic development and were largely involved in supply-sideinterventions to promote the locality to inward investors and increase the skills of the unemployed in a shrinkinglabour market. These institutions promoted Sunderland as ‘the advanced manufacturing centre of the north’,but without co-ordinated demand-side intervention policies these institutions did not possess the ‘regulatory
capacity’ to intervene in the locality and regulate the contradictions of after-Fordism. The local state is driven
by agendas and funding regimes determined outside the locality. The City of Sunderland Council and the
various partnership organisations also have little impact on wage relations and the norms of collectiveconsumption: they dealt with firefighting the consequences of after-Fordist economic decline, rather than paving
the way for post-Fordist high-tech prosperity.
Key reading : Painter and Goodwin (2000).

strategies (Kearns 1992, 1995). We discuss this further
in Chapter 8.
Using the example of Los Angeles, Purcell’s work
also considers the complex links between the changingforms and functions of the state, citizenship andpolitical legitimacy (see Purcell 2001, 2002). Working
within the régulation approach, Purcell presents a
‘consciously political conception’ of the state to drawattention to bottom-up state–citizen relations that canchallenge the state’s functions. Although the state hasultimate political authority within its given territory
(see Chapter 2), this is derived from the collective
willingness of its citizens to be ruled. The state, then,is involved in a careful balancing act, set around whatPurcell calls ‘mutual expectations’: citizens expect thestate to meet, or at least to perceive that it can meet,its obligations in return for territorial allegiance. Purcell demonstrates this through research in Los
Angeles and Box 4.7 summarises how the state changes
its interventions in response to state–citizen tensions.Los Angeles (LA) contains 3.5 million people and is an incubator for ‘secession movements’ – groupswhich have turned their back on mainstream political
parties and prefer to pursue more unconventional ways
of making themselves heard (Purcell 2001, 2002).Purcell gives examples of such movements in the SanFernando valley, a ‘microcosm of the twentieth-centurysuburban America’ (Purcell 2001: 617), focusing on an
organisation called Valley VOTE (Voters Organized
Together for Empowerment). Also by drawing on theStaples Center project – a previously run-down area of LA that is now the ‘entertainment centre of theworld’ and home to basketball, ice hockey and footballteams – Purcell explores the tensions between theSTATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 72
BOX 4.7 CRISES OF LEGITIMACY IN THE LOS ANGELES LOCAL STATE
VOTE is a coalition of valley business interests and valley home owners’ groups. Both are influential forces: in
some cases home-owner groups have 2,000 members. Although there are conflicting agendas within the
coalition – with home owners wanting controlled growth and development and the business communityadvocating laissez-faire land use policy and low taxes – they agree on key reasons for secession. Both sides
feel that the City of Los Angeles (local government) is too large to be responsive to local needs and has been
‘short-changing’ the valley in terms of providing the necessary level of services for collective consumption.Interesting examples here are struggles over the ownership of water, with the urban population being privileged
over suburban interests in the valley region. After many struggles the City of Los Angeles was forced to launch
an independent charter reform commission, which recommended a rewriting of the charter for public services
to defuse organisations such as VOTE.
In the example of the Staples Center Project a local commercial real estate agent, who at the same time was
an adviser to the mayor, was offering tax breaks and nominal rents deals (worth $70 million and 25 per cent
of the arena’s estimated cost) to attract developers to this area. The rather clandestine processes at work here
were uncovered by a populist councillor, Joel Wachs, who started a group Citizens Against Secret Handouts
(CASH). This argued that the mayor’s office should offer less costly incentives to develop the site. Because his
concerns were not taken seriously within city government, Wachs balloted citizens in a move that wouldrequire a voter referendum, enforced by city law, for any new sports facility. An anti-arena movement quickly
developed and it appeared that Wachs’s efforts would derail the project. The developers avoided this by
renegotiating a deal whereby they would absorb the costs of the project, with minimal costs being picked upby the city government. The ‘city chose to assuage the discontent among its citizens rather than meet the
imperatives of economic development’ (Purcell 2001: 308).
Key readings : Purcell (2001, 2002) and http://www.secession.net/.

‘competition state’ (Cerny 1997), focused on economic
competitiveness strategies such as inward investment
and the maintaining of political legitimacy. The poli-tics of economic development thus relates to defend-ing a form of growth andpreserving state–citizen
relations (Purcell 2002).
Towards workfare states
Since the middle of the twentieth century the
welfare state has dominated the political landscape
of North America and Western Europe. During the
1980s and 1990s, and set firmly within the context of globalisation, advanced nations have been address-ing the problems associated with economic decline and spiralling public expenditure by restructuring the institutional forms and policy functions of the
welfare state. For régulation theorists, welfare state
restructuring entails the displacement of ‘passive’ with‘active’ forms of labour market regulation (see Jessop2002; Peck 2001). Within active labour market regu-lation, the ‘work ethic’ is being used to reconfigure
the universal rights and needs-based entitlements
to welfare that characterised the state’s historical commitment to full employment and social rights for all citizens. The term ‘workfare’ – literally meaningwelfare + work – is becoming increasingly dominantin the political vocabulary as a means of securing a
‘new paternalist’ relationship between the state and
its subjects (Mead 1997). Workfare introduces strictbehavioural requirements and new social respon-sibilities to encourage the unemployed to become moreemployable and job-ready through compulsory par-
ticipation in training and education programmes.
The workplace is also presented as the best means of avoiding poverty through slogans such as ‘I fightpoverty. I work’. Workfare is frequently legitimisedas a reaction to economic globalisation (see Chapter 3)through the need to secure labour market flexibility
as the basis of competitiveness and based on these
changes to the state’s functions, Jessop suggests that we are moving from a Keynesian welfare state to aSchumpeterian workfare state. This also has implica-tions for the state’s institutional form (see Box 4.8).
Workfare began in the buoyant labour markets ofNorth America (such as California), where since the
1960s state governments have been experimenting
with mandatory work and training programmes toreduce the welfare case load. This increased throughoutthe 1970s and the Federal Family Support Act 1988required state governments to provide mandatory
work or training activities for welfare recipients as the
condition of receiving benefits. Based on local successstories – such as Riverside, California (see Box 4.9) –workfare was claimed to be a national success and wastransferred across North America through think-tanks
and political advisors (Peck 2001). Workfare became
intensified under the Personal Responsibility andWork Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which replacedthe 60-year-old Aid to Families with DependentChildren programme (AFDC) with block-grantedwelfare payments to the state level and also introduced
a time-limited unemployment benefit system. Sign-
ing this Act in August 1996, President Bill Clintonfamously argued it was about ‘ending welfare as weknow it’. Critics highlight the long-term impact thatthe strategy will have on the plight of welfare children
and the deepening of America’s economic problems
(Baratz and White 1996).
Welfare state restructuring in North America has
not gone unchallenged at the local level and new spaceshave been opened up for contesting state strategythrough political activism within civil society. Organi-
sations such as Workfairness and Community Voices
Heard in New York have been lobbying since the mid-1990s for regulatory standards to minimise theexploitation of labour and to get workfare workersunionised. Box 4.10 describes these organisations,
Figure 4.4 details a Workfairness anti-workfare leaflet,
and Plate 4.1 is a protest against workfare in New YorkCity during 1999.
These developments are not isolated to North
America. Ivar Lødemel and Heather Trickey (2000)and the OECD (1999) highlight similar trends occur-
ring across Western Europe, but in doing so reveal
subtle differences in the changing institutional formand function of the welfare state. Authors such as GøstaEsping-Andersen (1990) and Evelyne Huber and JohnStephens (2001) attribute geographical differences to
the role of different interest groups that can influenceTHE STATE’S CHANGING FORMS AND FUNCTIONS 73

STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 74
BOX 4.8 FROM KEYNESIAN WELFARE STATES TO SCHUMPETERIAN
WORKFARE STATES
Jessop highlights a new era for the institutional forms and functions of the state that is associated with
the shift from Keynesian welfare to Schumpeterian workfare. In more recent work this is expressed as a movement from Keynesian welfare national states (KWNS) to Schumpeterian workfare postnational regimes (SWPR).
Keynesian welfare states
After the British political economist John Maynard Keynes:
•Function of the state . The KWNS supported full employment through demand management, provided public
infrastructure to support mass production and consumption, and ensured mass consumption through collectivebargaining and the expansion of welfare rights.
•Form of the state . The national scale was used for state intervention in economic and social policy making,
with local as well as central modes of delivery.
Schumpeterian workfare regimes
After the Austrian political economist Joseph Schumpeter:
•Function of the state . The SWPR supports supply-side innovation and competitiveness through promoting
open economies and subordinates social policy to the needs of competitiveness by pushing wages downand promoting low-skill employment.
•Form of the state . The national scale is no longer the dominant scale for state intervention, with the emergence
of devolved local and regional ‘partnerships’ and networks.
Key readings : Jessop (1994, 2002).
BOX 4.9 BORN IN THE USA: WORKFARE IN RIVERSIDE,
CALIFORNIA
The Riverside Greater Avenues for Independence (GAIN) model concentrates on moving welfare recipients
into work as rapidly as possible and with minimum costs. Evaluations have shown it to be successful in drivingcosts down and accelerating the process of labour market re-entry, although there is no evidence that it canlift participants out of poverty. The Riverside model has excited much interest across North America and Western

THE STATE’S CHANGING FORMS AND FUNCTIONS 75
BOX 4.10 RESISTING WORKFARE
Workfairness
Workfairness is a New York-based organisation of workfare workers and their supporters that emerged as a
response to New York’s Work Experience Program (WEP). Workfairness has been campaigning for a better
deal for workfare workers and has challenged the ‘new paternalist’ ideology of blaming the unemployed for
their position in society. ‘People on welfare have been stereotyped, maligned in the media, and made intoscapegoats for the politicians, the rich and powerful to target. The truth is that Workfare mothers get up inthe morning just like any other worker, they see their children are cared for, and they go to work. Workfareworkers work very hard, and they are proud of the work they do. They don’t want to be cheap replacementsfor their friends and neighbors fortunate enough to have union wage jobs. Workfare workers want permanent
jobs at union wages. They want to join unions. They want respect, dignity and equality. These are the things
that WORKFAIRNESS and others are trying to fight and win.’
Community Voices Heard
Community Voices Heard (CVH) is an organisation of low-income people, mostly women on welfare, workingtogether to improve the lives of the poor in New York City. It is run by low-income people on welfare. CVHuses public education, public policy research, community organising, leadership development, politicaleducation and direct action issue organising to campaign around issues such as ‘welfare activism’. In the late1990s CVH lobbied New York City politicians to ensure that welfare reform moved people out of poverty by
creating jobs, job training, education and child care. CVH has also been developing grass-roots leadership
among women on welfare to recognise their power and potential to impact public policies that impact ontheir daily lives.
Key readings : Holmes and Ettinger (1997), http://www.iacenter.org/workfare.htm and
http://www.cvhaction.org/.Europe because of its ‘pure’ workfare appeals. It is a no-frills, high-volume, low-cost way of enforcing workparticipation and work disciplines. Peck (1998) uncovers a ‘new mode of labour discipline’ that seeks toconscript the poor into low-wage, or contingent, work. He discusses the various strategies used by officialsin Riverside and draws attention to the consequences that these have on local labour markets.
Key reading : Peck (1998).

STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 76
Figure 4.4 Workfairness leaflet
Source: reprinted by courtesy of Workfairness, New York

those holding power within the institutions of the
welfare state.
The arrival of the ‘new paternalism’ in the United
Kingdom, for instance, has been more recent. Owing
to trade union pressure, workfare was resisted during
the 1980s and the post-war labour market settlementremained more or less intact until the 1996 Jobseekers’Allowance required a strict ‘agreement’ between the‘job seeker’ and the state as a condition for the receipt
of benefits ( Jones 1996). With the arrival of the New
Labour government in 1997, elements of workfare – presented as ‘welfare-to-work’ – have been clearlyevident in the various ‘New Deal’ programmes. Theserequire participation in a series of ‘options’ in returnfor welfare benefits. Priority is given to immediate
placement in the labour market to embed the workethic at the earliest opportunity (Peck 2001). TheChancellor of the Exchequer famously argued that
‘Rights go hand in hand with responsibilities, and
for young people offered new responsibilities . . . there
will be no third option of simply staying at home on full benefit doing nothing’ (Brown 1998: 1).
In contrast to the neoliberal approaches of the
United States and United Kingdom, research under-
taken on Denmark has suggested that a welfare-through -work strategy is being deployed and this retains
many of the state’s welfarist labour market functions(see Box 4.11). THE STATE’S CHANGING FORMS AND FUNCTIONS 77
Plate 4.1 Anti-workfare protest, New York City, April 1999
Courtesy of Martin Jones

Summary
This chapter has provided an overview of the uses made
by the régulation approach to capture the changing
institutional forms and functions of the capitalist state.
This approach to political economy is an on-goingmethod and should not be read as fully finished orcomplete. As Aglietta puts it, ‘We must speak of anapproach rather than a theory. What has gained
acceptance is not a body of fully refined concepts but a
research programme’ (Aglietta 2000: 388). Therégulation approach doesn’t have all the answers but
it asks some interesting political geography questions.Tickell and Peck have highlighted five important‘missing links’ – more work on modes of social regula-
tion; more research on leading-edge motors of growth;
consideration of how and why economies change; moreattention to spatial scales of analysis; heightenedconsideration of consumption issues (Tickell and Peck1992) – some of which are important concerns for
political geographers. Jessop has also suggested that the
régulation approach needs to be combined with other
approaches, such as state theory and discourse analysis,to get a better handle on political economy ( Jessop1995).Political geography students might wish to consider
a recurrent criticism levelled against this approach topolitical economy, the regulationist defence and apossible extension of régulation theory. It is often stated
that régulation theory tends to insert a divide between
the economy, which is bracketed as a black box and
simultaneously cast as a key protagonist, and the
cultural and political realms (see Graham 1992; Lee1995). In reply, regulationists claim that the economyis constructed, reconstructed and institutionalisedthrough social, cultural and political relations (Bakshi
et al. 1995). For uncovering further the changing
institutional forms and functions of the state, it is alsosuggested that mileage can be gained from develop-ing a ‘regulationist state theory’ which draws on BobJessop’s work on states as mediums and outcomes
of territorially distinct political strategies and policy
projects (Jessop 1997c). We discuss this further inChapter 9 on public policy and political geography. STATE, TERRITORY AND REGULATION 78
BOX 4.11 WELFARE STATE RESTRUCTURING IN DENMARK
Denmark has adopted a ‘welfare- through -work’ model. Owing to the power of the labour movement and the
pressures exerted against the state by gender movements, this retains some key social policy functions. First,
social partnerships have been strengthened in respect of the delivery and implementation of welfare. Second,
financial planning and decision making have been decentralised to regional institutions. Third, the unemployedhave been given the right to counselling, an individual action plan and, more important, access to acomprehensive package of leave schemes, including job training, education and child care. A key aspect ofthis model is a work-sharing scheme called ‘job rotation’, whereby the unemployed are recruited and givendirect job training experience in posts vacated by (predominantly) unskilled workers, who in turn are given
the opportunity to update their training and education. The unemployed receive both work experience at
trade union negotiated rates and additional vocational training. This benefits the firm by providing thesustainable basis for an up-skilled work force, without loss in employment. This initiative is being promoted infourteen different countries through an EU-funded transnational programme.
Key readings : Etherington and Jones (2004) and Torfing (1999).

Further reading
The subjects covered in this chapter are wide-ranging
and there are several avenues of further reading. The
political economy approach is discussed further in Castree,
‘Envisioning capitalism: geography and the renewal ofMarxian political economy’, Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers , 24 (1999a), 137–58; Gibson-Graham,
The End of Capitalism (as we knew it) (1996); Lipietz,
‘Reflections on a tale: the Marxist foundations of the
concepts of accumulation and regulation’, Studies in
Political Economy , 26 (1988), 7–36; Peet and Thrift,
‘Political economy and human geography’ in Peet andThrift (eds), New Models in Geography (1989).
The papers by Tickell and Peck, ‘Accumulation,
regulation and the geographies of post-Fordism: missinglinks in regulationist research’, Progress in Human
Geography , 16 (1992), 190–218; MacLeod ‘Globalising
Parisian thought-waves: recent advances in the study ofsocial regulation, politics, discourse and space’, Progress
in Human Geography 21 (1997), 530–53; Painter and
Goodwin, ‘Local governance and concrete research:investigating the uneven development of regulation’,Economy and Society 24 (1995), 334–56; and Valler et al.,
‘Local governance and local business interests: a critical
review’, Progress in Human Geography , 24 (2000), 409–28,
all provide very good overviews of the development ofrégulation theory and its applications in human geography.
Those wanting to trace the intellectual origins of régulation
theory should consult Boyer, The Regulation School (1990);
Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation (2000); Boyer
and Saillard, Régulation Theory (2002), and two key
papers by Jessop, ‘Twenty years of the (Parisian) regulationapproach: the paradox of success and failure at home and
abroad’, New Political Economy , 2 (1997a), 503–26, and his
survey article ‘The regulation approach’, Journal of Political
Philosophy , 3 (1997b), 287–326.
The debates on Fordism and Post-Fordism are covered in
the excellent book edited by Amin, Post-Fordism: A Reader
(1994); the collection of essays brought together in Storperand Scott, Pathways to Industrialization and Regional
Development (1992); Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity
(1989a), and papers by Moulaert and Swyngedouw,‘Survey 15: a regulationist approach to the geography offlexible production systems’, Environment and Planning D:
Society and Space volume 7 (1989), 327–45; and Michael
Webber, ‘The contemporary transition’, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space , 9 (1991), 165–82. Some
of these debates have been revisited within the context ofneoliberalism in a collection of essays edited by Brennerand Theodore, Spaces of Neoliberalism (2002).
The majority of our case studies cover the broad area
of local and regional economic development, and thosewishing to further explore the comparative nature of thiswork should consult a number of excellent sources:Harvey, ‘From managerialism to entrepreneurialism: the
transformation of urban governance in late capitalism’,
Geografiska Annaler , 71B (1989b), 3–17; Clarke and Gaile,
The Work of Cities (1998); Lauria (ed.), Reconstructing Urban
Regime Theory (1997); Walzer and Jacobs (eds),
Public–Private Partnerships for Local Economic Development
(1998); Leitner, ‘Cities in pursuit of economic growth’,
Political Geography Quarterly , 9 (1990), 146–70; Wood,
‘Making sense of entrepreneurialism’, Scottish Geographical
Magazine , 114 (1998), 120–3; and John, Local Governance
in Western Europe (2001).THE STATE’S CHANGING FORMS AND FUNCTIONS 79

POLITICS, POWER AND PLACE2PART

Introduction
I was walking down this street in Mold, north
Wales [in the UK] – years ago now – with somefriends from my home town in Llanelli in southWales. We were laughing, playing about and talk-
ing to each other in Welsh. A group of locals
came down the street, and after hearing our accents,came up to us quite aggressively . . . obviouslylooking for a fight. They tried to taunt us by callingus ‘Cymry plastic’ or ‘plastic Welsh’. Obviously,
we didn’t fit in with their ideal type of Welsh
person. We weren’t local and we spoke south-Walian Welsh. That was enough for them. Anyway,we ran into the nearest pub and managed to getout of any trouble.
This tale, narrated by Rhys Jones, one of the authors
of this book, helps to illustrate a number of crucialthemes relating to the ideas of place and nation. First,it demonstrates the close relationship that existsbetween place and nation. In this story, certain places
can be seen to represent the Welsh nation more effec-
tively than others: north rather than south Wales, Mold more so than Llanelli. It shows the way in which places help symbolise and anchor nationalidentity. Second, the story shows us the subdivisions
that exist within the allegedly homogeneous entities
of nations. We usually think of nations as coherent‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983) of peoplewho follow the same customs and speak the samelanguage. Indeed, this is one of the main ideologicalfoundations of nationalism: to encourage us to believethat it is possible to draw boundaries around
homogeneous groupings of people. Rhys Jones’s
experience in north Wales would seem to undermine
this notion. Even though he and his friends were bornin the same country, and spoke the same language, asthe other group of men, they were still thought of asbeing somehow different in nature. In this example,
these imagined boundaries between the two groups
were constructed along place-based and linguistic lines.To be born in a different region or a different town, or to speak a different dialect, led to the construction of imaginary boundaries between the two groups ofpeople. Finally, the tale illustrates the close link that
often exists between language and national identity.
The ability or inability to speak a language can oftenbe used as a means of defining who acually belongs to, and who is excluded from, a nation. In this case,the ability to speak a language was not deemed to be
enough of a badge of national identity, since the Welsh
language had to be spoken in a particular way in orderto gain membership of the Welsh nation.
These are all key themes that need to be explored
when discussing the link between place and nation,and we shall focus on each in turn during the course
of this chapter. The first section will introduce the
different kinds of theories that have tried to explain the formation of nations. Following on from this, we then proceed to explore the significance of the key geographical concepts of place, landscape and
territory for the nation. Finally we focus on the con-
testation of nations – focusing on ideas of gender,region and localities – and thereby seek to illustratethe problematic nature of nationalism as ideology.The political geographies of the nation5

Reproducing nations
So what do we mean by a nation? Similar to comments
made regarding the state in Chapter 2, it is often the
case that our membership of a nation – as individuals
and as communities of people – makes it difficult tothink about it in an objective way. This is even moreof an issue since it is nigh-on impossible for anyindividual to escape from the ideological grasp of agiven nation. As Gellner (1983: 6) has noted, it is as
if ‘a man [ sic] must have a nationality as he must have
a nose and two ears’. When nations are commonlyviewed as ‘natural’ phenomena like this, it becomesdifficult to critically analyse their form and function.A further problem arises when attempting to dis-
tinguish between states and nations. In the first part
of this section, our aim is to define what we mean by nations and emphasise the difference between statesand nations.
According to Anthony Smith (1991: 14), a promi-
nent writer on themes of nationalism, a nation should
be viewed as a ‘named human population sharing
an historic territory, common myths and historicalmemories, a mass, public culture, a common economyand common legal rights and duties for all members’.Although definitions of nations display slight varia-
tions in the themes that they emphasise (see below),
on the whole they follow the general principles laiddown by Smith. Smith’s definition draws our attentionto a number of important themes. First, and crucially,all nations possess a geographical referent in theirclaims to a particular territory. It is difficult to imagine
a nation that does not claim access or control over a
certain territory, and it is this feature of nations thatacts as the main justification for studying nations from a geographical perspective. We will argue insubsequent sections that territory is only one geo-
graphical theme that is of importance to nations.
Others, such as place and landscape, are also highlysignificant. Second, Smith’s definition stresses someof the key cultural aspects of nations. Nations possessa common ‘public culture’. They also emphasise com-
mon historical memories that help to engender a sense
of loyalty towards the nation. It is these commoncultural characteristics that enable the members of anation to imagine the existence of this large-scale, yet
close-knit, community of people, even though they will
never meet all other members of the nation (Anderson1983). It is these cultural themes that also help us todistinguish between states and nations. Whereas statesare organisations that seek to control a particular
territory – similar to nations – they do so in a relatively
impersonal manner. States, per se , do not attempt to
stress the cultural commonalities that exist within and between the state’s citizens. Nations, on the otherhand, are communities that emphasise common ties
of custom, history and culture as a means of gaining
control over a certain territory. It is when both theseinstitutions combine, of course, that the powerfulorganisation of the nation-state is formed. Third, Smithemphasises the role that certain legal and economicprocesses play in forging a nation. Once again, this
draws us near to definitions of the state (see Chapter
2) and helps to illustrate once again some of thecommon elements that characterise states and nations.
If nations are common communities of people that
share certain cultural attributes and a particular terri-
tory, then we need to think of nationalism as an ideology
that seeks to promote the existence of nations withinthe world. Furthermore, an important element with-in nationalism is the belief that every nation shouldpossess its own sovereign territory or state. Theideology and political practice of nationalism there-
fore seek the ideal political and territorial scenario
of the nation-state , in which every citizen of the state is
a member of the same nation. Thinking of this ingeographical terms, nation-states represent politicalgeographies in which the boundary of the nation
coincides with the boundary of the state (Gellner 1983:
1). Obviously, in a world characterised by continuousflows of people, the ideal of the nation-state is preciselythat – an ideal that can never be achieved. Indeed, ithas been famously argued by Mikesell (1983) that theonly example of a nation-state in the contemporary
world is Iceland. Unfortunately, the difficulties in
achieving the goal of the nation-state do not stop states,nations and minority groups from trying – sometimespeaceably and sometimes violently – to reach the ideal.Examples such as the attempts to create an independent
Quebec through referendums and the terrorism ofTHE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF THE NATION 83

ETA, the Basque separatist movement in Spain,
demonstrate the salience of such processes within con-
temporary political geography (see Anderson 1995).
We now possess an understanding of what nations
are, along with some of the ideologies that are linkedwith them. The key question that has exercised the
minds of social scientists and historians in the field of
nationalism is ‘How are nations formed and continueto exist?’ To put in another way, ‘How are nationsreproduced?’ Theories that have sought to explain theformation of nations are numerous, and draw on a broad
range of political, economic and cultural viewpoints.
At a general level we can conceive of them in two broadcategories (see Table 5.1).
In the first category are those theories that see
nations as communities of people who have somediscernible roots in the pre-modern period (in other
words, before approximately 1500). These theories
often posit a link between nations and ethnic com-munities of people. Most problematic in this categoryare those so-called primordialist theories of the nationthat argue that nations have always existed, from
time immemorial, as it were. Nations are therefore
not produced, as such, since they are seen to repre-sent essential qualities – linked with race, blood,language, religion or ethnicity – that are inherent incommunities of people. These can appear as quite naiveinterpretations of nations, since they posit that certain
definable and homogeneous communities of people
have always existed in the world. Halvdan Koht (1947:278), for instance, perceived a late twelfth-century
uprising in Italy as an early display of Italian nation-
alism against the Germanic people who were occupyingtheir country. Koht argued that the Italians succeededin rallying their people by proclaiming that theGerman language was similar to the ‘barking of dogs
and the croaking of frogs’. Clearly, here we see an
attempt to view a medieval conflict as an early instanceof nationalism. It is doubtful whether such is the case,since it is unlikely that the communities of people wholived in Italy at the time displayed the characteris-
tics common in modern nations (though see Reynolds
1984). More seriously, these primordialist theories are also potentially dangerous ideas, since they can beused to legitimise reactionary and racist attitudestowards ‘outside’ people and influences that allegedlyundermine the ‘purity’ and ‘integrity’ of the nation.
Many instances of historical and contemporary nation-
alism – especially during times of conflict – havewitnessed exclusionary and essentialist attitudestowards people who do not ‘fit in’ with the norm of the nation. In recent times, we can think of ethnic
cleansing in the former Yugoslavia as a particularly
repugnant example of attempts to rid the nation of ‘impure’ or ‘undesirable’ elements (e.g. Mirkovic1996).
Less problematic are the so-called perennialist
theories promoted by academics such as Anthony
Smith (see especially 1986). In his attempt to chart
the ethnic origins of nations, Smith has argued that1
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Table 5.1 Theorising the reproduction of the nation
Theorising the roots of nations in pre-modernity
•Primordialist theories : the nation is an essential element of the human make-up and has always existed
•Perennialist theories : the nation is a product of modernity but has its roots in earlier pre-modern ethnic communities
Theorising the nation as a product of modernity
•Nationalism as ‘high culture’ : industrial development requires a literate work force and state education systems
‘educate’ citizens regarding nationalist ideals
•The socio-economic development of nationalism : ‘peripheral’ countries mobilise their populations, using nationalism
as a means of competing against the ‘core’
•Nationalism and the state : nations are formed as a result of the creation of state bureaucracies
•Nationalism as ideology : nationalism is created as a means of escaping the isolation and social disruption caused
by processes within modernity
Source : after Smith (1998)

‘nothing comes from the nothing’ (1996: 386): in other
words, it is extremely difficult to create a nation out
of a group of people who do not feel any sort of com-munal feeling towards each other. Rather than seeingnations as totally modern fabrications (see below),Smith argues that the more successful nations have
been based on early ethnic communities of people,
or ethnies . In doing so, Smith tries to emphasise the long
history of nations. The processes and institutions of modernity – industrial development, capitalism and the state – impact on ethnic communities in
various ways. Some ethnic communities are dissolved
as a result of these processes as the language, cultureand customs of a particular ethnie are adopted as the
norm for a number of adjacent ethnic communities.This process possessed distinctive geographical under-tones, since it often involved the imposition of the
language spoken in the core of the nation on its
peripheral regions. We can think, for instance, of the adoption of the language of the Île de France – the area around Paris in France – as the officiallanguage of the French nation, and the subsequent
attempts to dilute and extinguish the other so-called
vernacular languages – Breton, German and Basque – spoken in other parts of the country. Smith’s ideascertainly make us think of the long-term developmentof nations out of earlier ethnic communities and theycan act as a powerful antidote to the more explicitly
modernist theories of the formation of nations.
Modernist theories view nations as communities of
people that have come into being as a result of variousprocesses that happened in the modern period. To agreater or lesser extent, they view the nation as a new
creation, actively produced by means of the processes
and institutions of modernity. These theories tend to focus on the civic quality of nations. Anthony Smith(1998) has classified them into four main categories of theories. We briefly discuss each category in turn.First, some theories emphasise the role played by
industrial development and state education systems
in the formation of national ‘high cultures’. Gellner(1983) argued in his later writings concerning theimportant role of state educational systems in thecreation of a ‘high’ culture necessary for successful
industrial development. In this period there was a needfor individuals who understood the same language.
It was this need to create an impersonal society in
which all individuals spoke the same language, wereeducated by the same state education system, and wereto a large extent, interchangeable one with another,that explained the formation of nations. State education
systems replaced ‘low’ cultures – meaning localised and
traditional customs, languages and cultural norms – with the ‘high’ culture, meaning a ‘standardised,education-based, literate culture’ (Smith 1998: 32).These shared, literate cultures became the bases
for national sentiment. We can consider empirical
evidence for Gellner’s theory in the context of schooltextbooks and the key role played by them in helpingto inculcate children that they belong to a specificnation. A famous example of this process relates to thedifferent histories portrayed in Estonian school
textbooks before and after the country’s independence.
While Estonia was still part of the Soviet Union, theSoviet Union was portrayed favourably, since it hadhelped to liberate Estonia from German rule towardsthe end of the Second World War. After independence,
however, school textbooks portrayed the Soviet Union
in a negative light, seeing it as a repressive politicaland cultural force within Estonian history (Smith1996). This example clearly shows the key role playedby state educational systems in moulding nations.Rather than representing age-old cultures and customs,
as primordialists argue, Gellner argues that nations
are in fact created out of new, state-based cultures,languages and customs. As such, ‘nations are functionalfor modern society’ (Smith 1998: 35) meaning thatthey are indispensable to it.
Second, and to some extent linked with the first set
of theories, are socio-economic models of the formationof nations. Characteristic of these types of theories isthe work of Tom Nairn (1977), who views nations aspolitical and cultural entities that are formed as a resultof socio-economic processes of the world economy.
In a nutshell, Nairn argues that nationalism derives
from the uneven development of capitalism. By this,he means that the success of the capitalist process in certain western states after 1800 depended on theirexploitation of cheap labour and resources on the
periphery. Nairn views nationalism as a means byTHE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF THE NATION 85

which political and cultural leaders in the periphery
seek to mobilise their populations against the imperial-
ism of the core, much in the same way as a sense ofnationalism can be said to help the players in a sportsteam to compete against an opposing team. Effortswere made, therefore, to encourage popular forms of
nationalism in the periphery. Nairn uses the spread
of nationalism in Germany and Italy during the nine-teenth century, as they sought to oppose the capitalistmight of the United Kingdom and France, as an illus-tration of this process. There are weaknesses in Nairn’s
model, for instance his inability to explain the way
in which political and cultural leaders in the peripherysucceeded in promoting nationalisms within thepopulation that they ruled. Similarly, there is firmempirical evidence that the first nationalisms appearedin the core, rather than the periphery. According to
Smith (1998: 53) it appeared in England, Britain,
France and America before Germany, the alleged firststate to promote a sense of nationalism. We can, there-fore, take only so much from Nairn’s model. It offerssome insight into the relationship between capitalism
and nationalism but it displays too many weaknesses
to be considered as a truly useful explanation of theformation of nations and nationalism.
Third, we need to consider political explanations
of the formation of nations and the development ofnationalist ideologies. Here, the development of the
modern bureaucratic state is used as an explanation
for the formation of nations. We can take the ideas ofAnthony Giddens (1985) as an illustrative example of this body of work (though see also Mann 1986; Tilly1975). For Giddens, nations can only exist with regard
to states. What is key here, therefore, is the con-
solidation of the state as a bureaucratic organisationthat extends its administrative control outwards froma core to defined boundaries (see Chapter 2). Thesignificance of this is twofold: it brought a singular and uniform administrative rationality to all citizens
of the state, and it also imposed a fixed boundary on
the national community of the state. In a few rareinstances, this could lead to the creation of a singularnation within the boundaries of the state, but it moreoften led to cultural and national reactions against
bureaucratic control within particular states. Somesupport for Giddens’s ideas appears in the context
of African states. Here, we see clearly the influence of
states on national communities during the post-colonial era. Leaders of these states have tried to forgea national community to match the boundaries of theiradministrative control, but these boundaries have
also acted as the frame of reference for secessionist and
independence movements within these countries. Apainful example of this process is the DemocraticRepublic of Congo, where a number of armed revo-lutionaries, especially in the eastern half of the country,
are challenging the territorial integrity of the state. The
main problem with Giddens’s ideas is their inabilityto deal with more cultural forms of nationalism. Notall nationalist movements seek to create their ownindependent state, and may rather seek to propagateforms of nationalism that seek to improve the moral
and cultural well-being of the nation. In many ways,
the nationalism of the Maori people of Aotearoa/NewZealand fits into this model. Maori are more concernedwith ideas of cultural well-being, socio-economicdevelopment and the protection of the natural environ-
ment than with the need to create an independent
Maori state (see Pawson 1992; Bery and Kearns 1996).As such, political explanations of the nation fail toaccount for the more diffuse form of nationalismexperienced in this context.
Fourth and finally are the ideological interpretations
of Elie Kedourie (1960, 1971), who views nationalism
as a system of beliefs similar to religion. Here, nation-alism is viewed as a system of beliefs that is promotedby groups of intellectuals as a means of making senseof the fundamental changes that affect societies as
a result of the processes of modernity. Indeed, the
nation’s immemorial history plays an important rolein anchoring the life-worlds of individuals who are lostwithin the modern maelstrom. Importantly, Kedouriegrounds the growth of nationalism in two specificperiods and places: an early nineteenth-century Central
Europe that was experiencing large-scale political
and social change and Africa and Asia during the latenineteenth and twentieth centuries. The key impetusto the development of nationalism, in this regard, was the colonial process that operated in particular
countries. Traditional forms of living were destroyed,1
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and local intellectuals were marginalised from colonial
bureaucracies and reacted to this process of marginal-
isation by engaging with ideals of nationalism thatdiffused from western states. For instance, Kedourie(1971: 42–3; see also Anderson 1983: 195) describesthe role of the Greek intellectual, Adamantios Korais,
in helping to enframe Greek history within western
conceptions of nationalism. Having experienced life inrevolutionary France, Korais began to comprehendGreek history as a nationalist history of the Greekpeople. This intellectual enabled Greeks to begin to
view their place in the world as one that was structured
by the new secular religion of nationalism: instead ofexperiencing the anomie and isolation of modernity,
they began to view themselves as members of an endur-ing Greek nation. According to Kedourie, therefore,nationalism should be viewed as a political and cultural
opiate (Smith 1998: 103) that enables individuals
to make sense of the world in which they live.
Here, then, are the theories that have sought to
explain the formation of nations as political com-munities and of nationalism as a political ideology. We
stress that the categories Smith (1998) has imposed
on this broad-ranging literature should not be viewedas definitive in nature. From the discussion above, it is clear that there are many overlaps between thevarious categories. None the less, adopting such asystem of categorisation enables us to appreciate the
variety of theoretical viewpoints concerning nations
and nationalism. Perhaps the key point to note at thisstage is that it is unlikely that any one theory canexplain the formation of nations and nationalisms inall historical and geographical contexts. Some theories
are more applicable at certain times and in certain
places and, as such, it is doubtful whether we will everfind an all-encompassing theory of nationalism. In any case, much academic insight may be gained fromarticulating the contestations and inconsistencies thatexist within this variegated body of literature.
In the following section, we turn to more geo-
graphical themes by discussing the way in which the key geographical concepts of place, landscape and territory help to inform the character of nationsand nationalism.Geographies of the nation
Since approximately the 1980s, geographers have
begun to examine the significance of spatial concepts
for nations and nationalism. The key contribution that
acted as a clarion call for political geographers toexamine nationalism from a spatial perspective was thatpublished by Colin Williams and Anthony Smith in1983. In their paper on the ‘National construction ofsocial space’ they argued that much research needed
to be carried out on the geography of nations and
nationalisms. As a starting point for this project, theyoutlined eight different contexts in which geographicalthemes could inform our understanding of nationalism.These are noted in Table 5.2.
Williams and Smith’s (1983) ideas are an extremely
valuable way of understanding the relationship betweengeography and geographical concepts and nationalism.Indeed, their ideas have been taken up by a number of political geographers who have brought new in-sights into the study of nationalism through their
focus on geographical concepts such as place, land-
scape and territory. It is to their work that we now turn.
Placing the nation
In this section we focus on the importance of certain
places for nations. By referring to place here, we arespecifically concerned with place as locality, in otherwords, places that occur at small scales. Even thoughnationalism refers to an ideology that exists at a
national scale, and draws members of a nation together
as one common community of people, individualnations always draw on specific places as sources ofideological nourishment.
At one level, we can think of generic places that
help to sustain the political ideology of certain nations.
One particularly powerful type of place is the memo-rials to the dead of the nation (see Plate 5.1). Theseare individuals who have paid the ultimate price for their loyalty to their nation. Michael Heffernan
(1995), for instance, has described in detail the dis-
cussions and, indeed, conflict that revolved around the commemoration of those members of the formerTHE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF THE NATION 87

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Table 5.2 Space, territory and nation: eight dimensions
Dimension of national space and territory Recent examples
Habitat
The nature of the environment and the soil helps to Jewish fundamentalists try to recapture the essence of theexplain the location and nature of human communities. Jewish nation by creating new rural settlements in disputedFollowing on from this, the members of the nation come territoriescloser to the ideal of the nation if they live close to the soil, in other words, in rural rather than urban areas
Folk culture
Soil and environment lead to particular customs and Nazism and the emphasis placed within this extremesocial norms, e.g. daily, monthly and annual rhythms nationalist ideology on the virtue of a folk culture of theof life in rural areas. These become prized as peasant Volk
virtues and folk cultures. Efforts are made to avoid the cosmopolitan culture of the cities and recapture the rural roots of the nation
Scale
The size or scale of nations helps to position the nation This was implicit in much of geopolitics in the first half of thein an international league table of nations. We can link twentieth century, and helps to explain the ‘scramble forthis most clearly with the attempts made by nations to Africa’ by European nationsexpand the reach of their territorial control. By doing this, the nation increases its own prestige
Location
We can think here of the uneasy relationship between For instance, the uneasy relationship between India anda nation and other neighbouring nations. This can lead Pakistan has led to more virulent nationalisms in the twoto warfare, which may affect the character of the nation. countries. We can also think of the border community ofAlso the distance between peripheral areas of the nation Kashmir that lies between India and Pakistan and whichand the core can lead to uneasy relationships has been problematic for both nations
Boundary
Crucial here is the idea of finding the ‘natural’ frontiers This idea has been important in the development of the
of the nation and the need to get away from artificially French nation, which has professed an explicit need to
imposed borders defend its natural borders
Autarchy
Land is viewed as a resource deposit for the benefit of A good example of this was the attempt by the Kikuyu toa particular nation. Any struggle for land and wrest land from white control in Kenya. This process isindependence is linked with the struggle for the use of being repeated in Zimbabwenational resources, first in the context of agrarian resources but also in the context of minerals
Homeland
Territory is not a neutral term for the nation. It is the We can think of the importance of the homeland for Jews,national homeland, the historic root of the nation something that sustained them during thousands of years of
exile
Nation building
The process of forming and maintaining nations involves For instance, cities, communications networks, power improvements carried out within the nation’s territory. stations, law and educational systems are all crucial to theIt is this ‘infrastructure of the nation’ that turns a territory construction of a national territory. A fine example of this isinto a national territory the communication node of Grand Central Station in New
York
Source : after Williams and Smith (1983)

British Empire who died during the First World War
(1914–18). After much wrangling a system was
adopted whereby those who had died in the war wereburied in cemeteries along the western front, mainlyin northern France and Belgium, while momumentswere raised along the length and breadth of the United
Kingdom in remembrance of each community’s human
losses. Importantly, both the cemeteries and themonuments represent key symbols of the loyalty ofthousands of individuals to the British nation. TheArlington cemetery in the United States and the Arcde Triomphe in Paris are other clear examples of this
memorialisation of the dead of the nation. Perhaps
most powerful, in this respect, are the tombs of un-known soldiers that exist within most states. BenedictAnderson (1983: 9) has argued that ‘no more arrestingemblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist
than cenotaphs and tombs of Unkown Soldiers’.
Because of the anonymity of the soldier that lies underthe tomb, these tombs can come to represent the moregeneral sacrifices that all individuals (should) makefor their nation.THE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF THE NATION 89
Plate 5.1 The Arc de Triomphe
and its ‘eternal flame’:
remembering a nation’s dead
Courtesy of David Henry

Memorials to the dead of the nation are one powerful
type of place that helps to focus the nationalist senti-
ment of members of the nation, but others also exist.Parliament buildings and monuments (see Plate 5.2),for instance, embody the citizenship of all individualswithin a state, along with their membership of a nation.
Other examples include national museums. These are
seen as illustrations of the nation’s historical devel-opment and are therefore a key method by which thenation can demonstrate its achievements to visitors,whether they are members of the same nation or others.
The role of museums as generic places that play a key
role in symbolising nations is elaborated upon in Box 5.1.As well as certain generic places that are important
to all nations, we also need to consider the specific
places that possess a significant meaning for particularnations. What is important here are the particularitiesof the histories and geographies of a given nation, oneswhich give meaning and value to specific places. In
the remainder of this section, we discuss two brief
examples of places that play a significant role in sym-bolising or inspiring particular nations.
Our first example is the Cathedral of Christ the
Saviour in Moscow. Dmitri Sidorov (2000) has
examined the significance of this particular place for
the Russian nation. Originally designed as a memorialto the great Russian victory against Napoleon’s French1
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Plate 5.2 A statue commemorating Garibaldi, ‘father’ of the Italian nation
Courtesy of Rhys Jones

forces in 1812, it was viewed as a way of memorialising
the ‘unprecedented zeal, loyalty to and love of the
faith and Fatherland’ (quoted in Sidorov 2000: 557).Obviously, therefore, from the very beginning thecathedral was perceived as a means of symbolising thecommitment of the Russian people to their nation.
What is equally crucial, according to Sidorov, is that
the cathedral, since its construction, has reflected and symbolised broader political and national changesthat have occurred in Russian/Soviet society. So, forinstance, the original European design was quashed in the late 1820s because it did not tally with the new
Tsar’s desire for the cathedral to reflect national Russian
architectural forms. Similarly, its demolition in 1931,as a result of the Bolshevik revolution, was carried outas preparation for the use of the location where it stoodas a site for the construction of the secular Palace of
the Soviets. In other words, by replacing the cathedral
with the Palace of the Soviets, this one place in Moscowcould be seen to represent the far broader changesoccurring in Russian/Soviet nationalism as it shiftedfrom one which emphasised a strong religious form of
nationalism to one which was wholly secular in nature.As it turned out, the Palace of the Soviets was never
constructed. After the accession of Mikhail Gorbachev
in 1985, discussions began concerning the constructionof a new cathedral. Sidorov argues that this process,once again, has reflected broader political and nationalcurrents in Russia. Crucially, therefore, this one place
in the centre of Moscow can be viewed as a key symbol
of Russian nationalism. Throughout its period as aconstruction project it has illustrated some of thesignificant changes to have affected Russian society.Moreover, it has been viewed as a place that should helpto symbolise and inspire the Russian/Soviet nation.
Our second example is from the United Kingdom.
National identity in the United Kingdom during the 1990s, as in a number of other countries, has beenchallenged by the processes of globalisation and region-alisation. Importantly, it has been argued by British
politicians that the British nation must respond to
these challenges in a positive manner. Tony Blair, asPrime Minister, for instance, has argued that Britishnational identity should ‘not . . . retreat into the
past or cling to the status quo, but . . . [should] . . .
rediscover from first principles what it is that makesTHE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF THE NATION 91
BOX 5.1 FOLK MUSEUMS AND THE MEMORIES OF THE NATION
National museums are key sites for any nation because they enable a nation to represent itself to its members
and to the world. Particularly important are the folk museums that exist within many countries. Seen as therepositories of the folk culture of the nation, they are viewed as key means of representing the essential
cultural truths about a particular nation (see Williams and Smith 1983). A good example of a folk museum
is the Skansen Open Air Museum, situated in Stockholm, the capital of Sweden (M. Crang 1999). Skansen,the world’s first open-air museum, was opened in 1891 as a way of preserving elements of the Swedish folkculture. Crang has noted how Swedish intellectuals at the time displayed a great deal of interest in the culturalpast of the Swedish folk. These folk (and mostly rural) cultures were perceived as the only links between aSwedish nation and its past, especially since the cultural make-up of the vast majority of the Swedish population
was being transformed as a result of the processes of modernity. Skansen today comprises a number of costumed
workers who ‘inhabit’ the houses and farms drawn from all parts of the country. Importantly for Crang (1999:451) the folk culture preserved in Skansen is set up as ‘a timeless, interior Other within the modern nation’.Skansen, and other folk museums, therefore, illustrate the importance of preserving a folk past for the modernpolitical and cultural communities of the nation. They help to emphasise how contemporary nations are allegedly
connected, through ties of culture, with the earliest incarnations of the nation in the dim and distant past.
Key reading : M. Crang (1999).

us British and to develop that identity in a way in tune
with the modern world’ (Blair 2000: 1–2). Part of this
effort to reconstruct a new form of national identityfor contemporary Britain can be seen in the context of the construction of the Millennium Dome. This was opened in 1999 as a means of ‘illustrating the
importance of past achievements and future challenges
to national identity’ (Taylor and Flint 2000: 222).Viewed as a means of representing the ‘best of Britain’and ‘all that was good about “Cool Britannia”’, theDome has played a key role in the efforts of the con-
temporary British nation to rebrand itself. Importantly,
this central place in the national architecture of Britainwas seen as an important cog in a far grander nationalscheme of projects and constructions that would helpto celebrate a vibrant new British national identity.Admittedly, the Millennium Dome and its associated
paraphernalia were viewed by much of the British
public as a failure. None the less, what it importanthere is that this one place in the heart of London was viewed as one which was of crucial significance tothe development of the whole concept of a new form
of British nationalism.
Place – whether thought of in generic or specific
terms – is, therefore, critical to any understanding of nations and nationalism. Places help to symboliseand sometimes inspire the nation. In many ways, cer-tain places become important elements of the national
imagination. Another geographical concept that plays
a significant role in national imaginations is thelandscape.
Landscapes of the nation
Along with place, the most potent way of imagining
the nation is through reference to particular land-scapes. By landscape we mean not just the physicalenvironment but also the meaning and values that areascribed to it by individuals or communities. Nations
tend to view particular types of landscape as ones that
represent the values or the essence of the nation. In this section we focus on these landscapes at both aconceptual and a more empirical level.
Generally speaking, nations tend to portray rural
landscapes as ones that symbolise the nature of thenation. We can relate this to some of the themes raised
by Colin Willams and Anthony Smith (1983) in their
classification of the various dimensions of state terri-tory. Two, in particular, emphasise the important ofrural landscapes to the nation. By referring to thehabitat of the nation, Williams and Smith draw
our attention to the stress placed by nations on the
belief that members come closer to the nationalist ideal if they live ‘on the soil’. What this means is that indi-viduals are more likely to adhere to nationalistprinciples if they live in rural, rather than urban, areas.
Folk culture is also important to many nations: the
rhythms of life in rural areas lead to the formation ofpeasant lifestyles and these are prized as manifestationsof the true character of the nation. In both of thesecontexts, therefore, rural lifestyles and rural landscapesare to be cherished by the nation.
We see examples of the promotion of these two
elements – folk culture and habitat – in the politics of the Welsh Nationalist Party, Plaid Cymru, in theinter-war period. Pyrs Gruffudd (1994: 69–70) hasdemonstrated how the party argued that Welsh people
would have to ‘return to the land’ if they were to gain
their rightful place as a moral nation. Significantly, part of this political strategy was based on a belief thatthe Welsh nation needed to live in rural areas so thatit could avoid ‘anglicised metropolitan values’. It wasalso based on the belief that it was only in rural areas
that the Welsh gwerin (folk), or in other words the
upholders of true Welsh national and moral values,lived. In many ways, Gruffudd’s research echoes thework carried out on the national imagination of thewest of Ireland within Irish nationalism (see Johnson
1997). Here, once again, for much of the twentieth
century the west of Ireland was perceived as the main bastion of Irish national identity. This nationalimagination drew on linguistic geographies. The west was, by far, the least anglicised and most Gaelic-speaking region of the island. It was also based upon
the religious differences that were thought to exist
between a Catholic west and a Protestant north.Equally important was a romanticised understandingof the rural lifestyles that existed there among the Irish ‘folk’. Though these ideas have been thoroughly
deconstructed by Irish commentators, they represent1
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a set of discourses that are still of great relevance to
popular understandings of Irish nationalism.
As well as helping symbolise the purity of the
nation, certain landscapes can be used as a means ofemphasising the differences that exist between onenation and another. Rob Shields (1991: 182–99), for
instance, has focused on the importance of the Canadian
north for the constitution of Canadian nationalism. In one context, the Canadian north can be viewed in much the same way as Gruffudd and Johnson respec-tively view rural Wales and Ireland. For Shields,
‘the “True North” is a common reference “point” mark-
ing an invisible national community of the initiated’(1991: 198). For instance, the Canadian historian W.H.Morton notes that an understanding of the Canadiannorth is imperative if people are to fully comprehendthe nature of the Canadian identity (quoted in Shields
1991: 182). The rugged northern landscape – divorced
from a southern, urbanised Canada – is seen torepresent the essence of the Canadian nation. Shieldsargues, however, that the Canadian north is more thanmerely a symbol of the purity of the Canadian nation,
for it helps to distinguish the Canadian topography
and nation from that of the United States. For example,much of the nineteenth-century literature thatdescribed the Canadian north as a significant factor inthe formation of the Canadian nation was consumed byaudiences in the United States. In effect, the landscape
of the Canadian north came to be used as a symbol of
the necessary national difference that existed betweenthe Canadian and US nations. The existence of thismassive arctic hinterland in many ways enabled theCanadian nation to identify with other northern
nations and states, such as Norway, rather than with
the United States (Shields 1991: 198). In this example,landscape, as well as being a symbol of the nation, wasa signifier of the differences between neighbouringnations.
In this section we have discussed the importance
of certain landscapes for nations. They help to sym-
bolise the essence of the nation in myth, literature andsong. In the following section we discuss the equallyimportant link between nation and territory.Nation and territory: the homeland
of the people
Nations, as is shown in Anthony Smith’s definition,
must ‘share an historic territory’. Nations are, in effect,rooted in particular territories. Indeed, James Anderson
(1988: 24) has eloquently argued that:
the nation’s unique history is embodied in the
nation’s unique piece of territory – its ‘homeland’,the primeval land of its ancestors, older than any state, the same land which saw its greatest
moments, perhaps its mythical origins. The time
has passed but the space is still there.
In this quote we see part of the significance of territory
for the nation. A nation’s territory helps it to communewith its past and to emphasise the strong links thathave always existed between it and the land in which
it now resides. Similar to place and landscape, therefore,
territory can offer significant ideological succour tonations. A particularly striking example of this processexists in the context of the Jewish nation. During itslong time in exile, and since the formation of the Israeli
state, the territory of Israel has furnished the Jewish
nation with much ideological support (Azaryahu andKellerman 1999; Hooson 1994). Struggles over landbetween Jews and Arabs in contemporary Israel, there-fore, do not merely represent attempts to increase the
amount of land under one’s control in a physical sense.
They also represent ideological struggles for the controlof the symbolic body of the nation.
Territory plays other important roles for a nation.
In the first place, it has been argued that territory isthe conceptual link between the nation and the state
in the form of the nation-state (Taylor and Flint 2000:
233). Of course, the notion of the nation-state is theideal of nationalism, the perfect political scenario in which the boundary of a state matches in an exactmanner the geography of the nation. It is in these
political contexts that both the nation and the state
may feed off each other. The nation helps to legitimisethe whole existence of the state, binding its citizensinto an unswerving loyalty towards it. At one and the same time, the state exists to protect the membersTHE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF THE NATION 93

of the nation, ensuring that their national rights are
promoted at the expense of the rights of the members
of all other nations. In this way, territory can be viewedas the basis for the ideological and organisationalmarriage between the nation and the state.
Of course, boundaries are crucial elements in the
constitution of territories, and this fact draws our
attention to a second important link between nationsand territories. Daniele Conversi (1995) has argued thatthe boundaries between nations are critical elements in the constitution of the nations that exist on either
side of the boundary. For Conversi, nations are defined,
at least in part, through a process of ‘othering’, in whichthe faults of neighbouring nations – whether real orperceived – are emphasised as a means of promotingthe strengths and qualities of the ‘home’ nation. Allnations engage in this act of ‘othering’ to a greater or
lesser degree. The United States, in recent years, has
attempted to contrast itself with the Japanese nation,most clearly with regard to economic and culturalpractices. Nations from the neighbouring countries of Greece and Turkey have also symbolised each other’snations in negative ways. This situation has been
further exacerbated by the conflict between the two
countries over the national status of the island ofCyprus (see Box 5.2).
Of course, in the contemporary world of cultural
globalisation, nations need not define themselves
against other nations, but rather against the perceived
growing importance of a supranational sense of groupidentity. In many ways, this mirrors David Harvey’s(1989a) arguments regarding the tendency for con-temporary groupings to try to preserve their own
individuality and distinctiveness as communities
of people. Michael Billig (1995: 99) has noted, forinstance, how much of contemporary British nation-alism is couched in terms of a need to preserve a distinct British identity in the face of an ever-increasing‘Europeanisation’ of identity within Europe. For
instance, John Major, as leader of the Conservative
Party, announced in 1992 that he would ‘never letBritain’s distinctive identity be lost’. His attempt herewas to defend a proud and valuable national identityagainst what he and many others saw as the detrimental1
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BOX 5.2GREEK AND TURKISH NATIONALISM
The history of the struggle between Greece and Turkey over the island of Cyprus has its roots in two main
processes. First, the domination of the eastern Mediterranean by the Ottoman Empire for much of the modern
period and the related repression of the Greek population. Second, the efforts of the British Empire to control
the eastern Mediterranean as a bulwark against the growing power of Germany and Russia. With the collapseof the Ottoman Empire after 1918, there has been much conflict over the status of the island. In the periodbetween 1918 and 1939 many Greek nationalists on Cyprus and the Greek mainland sought to gainindependence for the island from British rule. The Turkish minority on the island were naturally wary of this
prospect. The relationship between Greece and Turkey deteriorated further in the period subsequent to 1945,
with much of the nationalist angst deriving from conflict over the status of Cyprus. Atrocities were committedon Greeks living in Turkey and numerous riots took place on the island itself. The creation of an independentCyprus in 1960 did not solve the issue and, indeed, four years later all-out war between Greece and Turkeywas only narrowly avoided. Today, it is only a large UN presence that prevents the escalation of hostilitiesbetween Greece and Turkey. During the whole of this period, there has been a steady deterioration in the
relationship between the Greek and Turkish governments and peoples. To a large extent, both nations exist
in opposition to one other.
Key reading : Calvocoressi (1991).

cultural and political influences emanating from
European politicians and bureaucrats.
Here is another example, then, of the key role played
by the nation’s boundaries and territory in helping to shape the nature of the nation. Admittedly, BenedictAnderson (1983) has criticised this interpretation of
nations as being too exclusionary, negative and regres-
sive in nature. For Anderson, the fact that certainindividuals may become naturalised members of othernations demonstrates that the boundaries of nations are not always fixed. In other words, the boundaries
of nations may be viewed as places where national
cultures and languages mix, rather than being placesof exclusion and mutual denigration. Of course, sucharguments resonate with recent debates within humangeography regarding the necessity to view place as opento outside influences, rather than being closed to them
(see Massey 1994). Laudable though these sentiments
are, plainly, nationalist discontent and war are stillgrounded, in many cases, in the defamation and hatredof neighbouring nations.
In the three preceding sections we have discussed
the key role played by the concepts of place, landscape
and territory in ideologies of nationalism. As a resultof this discussion we argue that geography and spatialthemes are at the heart of any understanding of thenation. We further reinforce this claim in the finalsection of the chapter, where we focus on processes that
contest the nation.
Contesting the nation
The impression given in definitions of nationalism,
and also in various nationalist ideologies, is that thenation is a coherent and stable community of people,to which its members demonstrate unswerving loyalty.Within the ideology of nationalism, therefore, thenation is conceived of as a homogeneous group of
people who have been indoctrinated with the nation’s
ideals. The physical boundaries of the nation demarcatethe territorial extent of a group of people totally unifiedin their love of the nation. All members of the nationcontribute to this notion of a unified ‘imagined com-
munity’ of people (Anderson 1983). Of course, in ourmore lucid moments, we know that claims such as these
are unlikely to mirror the reality of social existence,
and that other spatial, scalar and social processes helpto contest the ideology of nationalism. In this section,we want to discuss three ways in which the nation iscontested. We do this through reference to: the way
in which other aspects of identity fracture the nation;
regional movements that operate within the boundariesof particular nations; and the concept of the localproduction of national identity.
At a very basic level all nations are intricately sub-
divided. This arises from the fact that every individual
who exists as a member of a nation is also an individualwho possesses a certain gender, religion, race, sexualityand so on. This means that there is the potential forthem to engage with the nation in slightly differentways, and therefore to contest any unified vision of the
nation contained within nationalist ideology. Some
of these themes come to the fore in the work of SarahRadcliffe (1999) on feelings of national identity with-in a lower-middle-class neighbourhood of Quito, thecapital of Ecuador. She found that women and men
experienced ‘different trajectories of affiliation’ to
the Ecuadorian nation (1999: 217). This meant, forinstance, that women were more likely to express theirsense of national identity through reference to ideas oflove of nation, while men spoke in more neutral termsof a sense of obligation to the nation. Furthermore,
there were significant differences in the way in which
male and female Ecuadorians engaged with the mestizo
racial category. Originally, this was the name of amixed racial group of European and indigenous people,but especially in the post-war era it came to symbolise
‘an engagement in the urban, market-led and mod-
ernizing national society and an avenue for socialadvancement’ (1999: 215). Importantly for Radcliffe,men and women in Ecuador engaged with this mestizo
category in a different way from each other. On thewhole, a lower proportion of women identified with
the mestizo category, and those who did, did so in an
ambivalent manner. Indeed, many women viewedthemselves as white rather than mestizo , and identified
with ‘white’ forms of language use, dress code andliterature. For Radcliffe, therefore, women and men
in Ecuador became entangled in Ecuadorian nationTHE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF THE NATION 95

identity in different ways, as a result of their different
engagements with issues of gender and race. This is one
clear instance of the way in which individual identitycan contest a homogeneous vision of nationalism.
A second way in which nations’ attempts to promote
themselves as unified bodies of people is shown to
be a political and cultural fallacy is in the context of
regional movements. Regional movements – operatingat a spatial scale smaller than the nation-state – seek to increase the political, cultural or economicrecognition afforded to them by a particular state
or nation (see Paasi 1996). In some circumstances,
regional movements may evolve into national move-ments and may seek independent status from thenation-state in which they reside. Regional move-ments’ significance is that they demonstrate thatnations are not coherent and unified communities
of people. Nations’ cultural and political dominance
is sometimes challenged by other communities ofpeople who feel themselves to be somehow differ-ent from the norm that is portrayed by the nation.Indeed, the fact that regional movements exist in a
large number of nation-states in the contemporary
world shows us that the common cultural communityof the nation is in fact a myth: regional movementsare seeking to subdivide and challenge the autonomyof nations in all parts of the world. There are few better
examples of regional movements in the contemporary
world than the Northern League, or the Lega Nord, incontemporary Italy. The significance of this regionalmovement is discussed in Box 5.3.1
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BOX 5.3 THE LEGA NORD IN CONTEMPORARY ITALY
The roots of the Northern League (Lega Nord) lie in the Lombard League and other local political leagues in
northern Italy. The main reason for their creation was the desire to defend the perceived cultural and ethnicdifferences of northern communities from the cultural imperialism of the south of Italy. These various localleagues combined in 1991 to form the Lega Nord. From approximately this period onwards, economicsrather than culture or ethnicity became the main guiding principle of the league. The northern region of Italy,
containing the industrial cities of Milan and Turin, was portrayed as one that was being held back by an
overbearing national government and a parasitic south of Italy. As Agnew (1995: 166) puts it, ‘the messagewas stiamo bene , “we are fine as we are”, without outsiders who undermine what “we” have achieved.
Whether the outsiders were Africans or Sicilians almost seemed a matter of indifference.’ The emphasisduring this period, therefore, was on the creation of a federal system in Italy where the north would be ableto thrive. Until this period the Northern League, with its emphasis on ethno-regionalism and federalism, illustrates
the fundamental schism that existed within the Italian nation. There is a further twist to the story. In the period
1992–4 the Northern League, as a result of a political coalition, entered the Italian government and wasimmediately tranformed from a regional party into a national party with policies designed to shape the futureof the whole Italian nation-state. In other words, the regional movement had become a national party. In thisrare example, a regional movement gained enough political power to be in a position to alter the policies of
the state within which it was contained. It also began to contribute to the reproduction of a slightly different
view of Italian nationalism, one which was based on ideas of regionalism, federalism and privatisation. Thisexample clearly shows the ways in which regional movements can contest the nation. It also illustrates themutability of nations, since their nationalist ideologies can be appropriated, at times, by certain bodies operatingwithin them.
Key readings : Agnew (1995, 2002b), Giordano (2001) and Putnam (1993).

The discussion above about the complex nature of
identity and about regional movements begins to draw
our attention to the role that geographical scale playsin the contestation of the nation. One way in whichwe can combine these two elements is to think aboutthe local production of national identity. Michael
Billig’s (1995) work is especially useful in this context.
He has urged social scientists to consider the banalityof nationalism, or in other words, the way in which it is subtly reinforced on a daily basis as a result ofsmall-scale, mundane and banal processes. National
newspapers, for instance, repetitively use the first
person plural pronoun as a means of referring to thepeople of the nation – ‘us’, ‘we’, ‘our’ and so on. Thefact that these words are used daily, according to Billig,helps to reinforce the idea that a common communityof people exists within a particular country. As such,
the daily and mundane use of words such as these can
be viewed as instrumental processes in the reproduc-tion of nationalisms within a given country. A goodexample of the banality of nationalism – at a nationalscale – is the research that has focused on the symbols
and imagery used on national currencies (see Gilbert
and Helleiner 1999; Unwin and Hewitt 2001). Plate5.3 illustrates another instance of banal nationalism,namely the inclusion of the words ‘Je me souviens’ or‘I remember’ on all car registration plates in Quebec.Presumably these words allude to the historic struggle
for the promotion of a Quebecois nationalism.The significance of Billig’s ideas, therefore, is that
they help to emphasise the mundane and everyday
processes that help to mould individuals as part of thenation. We argue that many of these mundane andbanal processes and happenings take place in local orsmall-scale settings. Research by Fevre et al. (1999) in
Wales, for instance, has demonstrated how such process
of reproduction could take place at small scales. Forexample, for many people in north Wales, it is theprocesses that operate within the local housing market,in which Welsh-speakers cannot afford to compete
with English newcomers, that helps to engender within
them a sense of Welsh nationalism. Similarly, it isindividuals’ experiences in pubs and bars – wherepeople with varying linguistic abilities meet eachother, and where arguments may take place – thatenables them to shape their own interpretation of their
national identity. As individual members of nations,
we can all recall experiences from school, university,on the street or when socialising, that have made usthink about our role and place in our nation in particu-lar ways. For Rhys Jones, for instance, his experiences
on the streets of Mold in north Wales forced him
to re-evaluate his place within the Welsh nation. Weargue that the logical outcome of these local repro-ductions of nationalism is the creation of nationalismsthat vary slightly from place to place (see Edensor1997; Jones and Desforges 2003). If we think place
to be important in the shaping of our identity, then
surely it will mean something slightly different to bea member of the US nation in Birmingham, Alabama,as opposed to Seattle, Washington. Or to be a memberof the Brazilian nation in Rio de Janeiro, as opposed
to a village in Amazonia. If this is the case, then we
argue, once again, that nations are contested fromwithin, for the simple reason that they incorporatenumerous different places, and therefore numerousdifferent types of people with numerous types ofnational identity within their boundaries.
The fact that nations can be reproduced at scales other
than the national raises important issues regarding theimpact of cultural globalisation on nationalism.Thegrowing production, circulation and consumption of cultural messages at a transnational or global scale
does not necessarily mean that nationalisms are beingTHE POLITICAL GEOGRAPHIES OF THE NATION 97
Plate 5.3 The banality of nationalism:
remembering the sacrifices made for Quebec
Courtesy of Rhys Jones

undermined within specific countries. Potentially,
nationalism can be reproduced as a result of processes
operating at any spatial scale, and therefore it wouldbe unwise to predict the end of nationalism as astructuring principle for cultural communities.Nationalism is here to stay, at least for the foreseeable
future, and as long as it still exists it will draw on
geographical concepts of place, landscape and territoryfor its sustenance.
Further reading
The key starting point for geographical studies of the
nation and nationalism is Williams and Smith, ‘The
national construction of social space’, Progress in Human
Geography , 7 (1983), 502–18. This paper, which in many
ways represents the beginnings of geographical studiesof the nation, elaborates on different geographical themesthat are intimately related to nationalism.
Numerous studies have examined the significance of place,
landscape and territory for the nation. For a gooddiscussion and case study of the significance of particularplaces for the nation see Sidorov, ‘National monumental-ization and the politics of scale: the resurrections of theCathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow’, Annals of the
Association of American Geographers , 90 (2000), 548–72.Whelan’s discussion of the politics of monuments in
Dublin, although couched in terms of colonialism, alsoillustrates the importance of monuments for cultural
identity; see ‘The construction and destruction of a
colonial landscape: monuments to British monarchs inDublin before and after independence’, Journal of Historical
Geography , 28 (2002), 508–33.
The significance of particular landscapes for the nation has
also been the source of much debate within geography.A good discussion of these themes can be found in Daniels,Fields of Vision (1993). This book gives an account of the
use of rural images as a way of inspiring members of a
nation, particular during times of tension and conflict, for
instance wars.
More recently a number of authors have started to
demonstrate the way in which nations are contested from
within. A good example can be found in Radcliffe,‘Embodying national identities: mestizo men and whitewomen in Ecuadorian racial-national imaginaries’,Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers , 24 (1999),
213–26. See also Jones and Desforges, ‘Localities and the
reproduction of Welsh nationalism’, Political Geography ,
22 (2003), 271–92, for a discussion of how place-basedidentities can undermine notions of a coherent anduniform community of people within the nation.1
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Introduction
The nation is just one of the many different scales at
which we define our identity and become engaged
in political action. Below the level of the nation there
are regions, states, provinces, counties, cities, towns,municipalities, parishes, neighbourhoods – manydifferent places in which and through which politics
occurs. This chapter examines how place provides acontext for the formation of political identities and
the identification of political interests, how political
activity can be organised and mobilised around place,and how power within place is structured andexercised. In doing so, however, we seek to avoid twocommon traps that have sometimes ensnared political
geographers in the past. First, we must be careful not
to overstate the causal significance of place, but insteadrecognise that every place is constituted through wider
social, economic and political processes. Second, inchoosing to think about ‘place’ at a local scale – thatis, to think about places as localities (see Box 6.1) – we
must also recognise that ‘the local scale’ cannot be taken
as a given entity but is socially constructed and that assuch there is a politics of scale. These two argumentsare discussed in more detail below before the chaptermoves on to look at aspects of place-based communitypolitics and power.
Why place still matters
It is a cliché of the western movie – the horseback
stranger rides in off the dusty plain and enquires, ‘Who
runs this town?’ Today many people, including manyPolitics, power and place6
BOX 6.1 LOCALITY
Despite its popularity within geography and sociology during the 1980s and early 1990s, there is no general
consensus about the definition of the term ‘locality’. For simple geographical delimitation researchers on thelocality studies of this period tended to take local labour markets or travel-to-work areas as a ‘locality’ – but
this really reflected the economic focus of the research. If political processes had been at the forefront, local
political units might just as legitimately have been employed. This uncritical use of pre-defined areas openedthe studies to charges of the unwarranted privileging of space (or ‘spatial fetishism’), and Massey (1991:277) argued that ‘localities are not simply spatial areas you can easily draw a line around. They will be definedin terms of the sets of social relations or processes in question’. More controversial have been attempts to definelocality as a concept – with disagreement about the attribution of causal powers to localities forming the core
of the locality debates discussed below (see Box 6.2).
Key reading : Duncan (1989).

political researchers, would suggest that the correct
answer should be ‘Nobody around here.’ Power, they
would contend, can be attributed only to the state, or the media, or global corporations, or the invisiblehand of capitalism. Place, to them, is unimportant inthinking about politics. This is the attitude of much
political science research, which concerns itself with
social classes and lifestyle groups but tends to conductits analysis at a national scale with little attention paidto the effects of geography or spatial variation.
The marginalisation of place within political
research stems from two separate critiques. The first
is theoretical and has been largely associated withMarxist political economy approaches. Marxist theoryemphasises structure over human agency and bindstogether social, economic and political processes andoutcomes as part of an overarching capitalist system
in which the need to reproduce and accumulate capital
is the primary driving force. As such, the Marxistapproach to urban politics conceptualised the city as ageographical entity produced and reproduced throughcapitalism, not as a neutral vessel in which autonomous
local politics took place (Harvey 1973). Questions
about the organisation, motivation and ‘power’ ofurban elites and managers were sidelined as distractionsfrom the structures through which the interests ofcapital were advanced. Marxist commentators recon-ceptualised the city as a site of capitalist oppression,
where the agents of capital acted to produce favourable
conditions for capital accumulation (see for example,Cockburn’s 1977 thesis on the role of the local state ) but
also as a site of conflict, which is both produced byand helps to sustain capitalism (Cox and Johnston
1982).
Local politics, according to this argument, are
primarily concerned with the resourcing and manage-ment of public services, such as housing, health care,public transport, education and social services, whichare central to the reproduction of labour (Castells 1977,
1978). Conflict over these issues helps to displace class
conflict from the work force to the city and distractspolitical opposition away from the global forces ofcapital that are the real sources of power (Castells 1983;Cockburn 1977). In the further development of this
argument by Castells (1977, 1983), ‘urban’ is definedby reference to these processes of labour reproduction
rather than by any spatial characteristics, such that,
contrary to the theories of Marxist geographers likeHarvey and Cox, ‘space’ and ‘place’ were removed from the analysis of urban politics (Dunleavy 1980).However, this reduction of the urban to the social
relations that define it was criticised, most notably by
Urry (1981), who argued that the arrangement of socialobjects in space (such as the mix of classes in a particulartown) can have an effect on wider social relations.
The second critique is based on empirical obser-
vation of the centralising and homogenising tendencies
of late modernity. Local distinctness and autonomy, itis argued, have been eroded by a number of parallelprocesses. Globalisation has meant that localities areincreasingly subject to the impacts of social, economicand political processes that operate at a higher level
far beyond their control or influence; the greater
mobility of people, advanced communications andcultural homogenisation have eroded local politicalcultures and mean that the same issues tend to framepolitics in all localities; and in countries such as Britain
the autonomy and power of local state institutions
have been clipped by the centralisation of the state.However, beguiling as this argument may seem,research has shown globalisation and its attendantprocesses to be more complicated than this modelwould suggest. The impacts of globalisation are influ-
enced and mediated by local factors, and globalisation
can be accompanied by a simultaneous rescaling ofpower down from the level of the nation state to thelocal arena – labelled ‘glocalisation’ by Swyngedouw(1997) (see also Chapters 3–4).
Following these critiques, the question of how far
the ‘local state’ – that is, the assemblages of state andgovernmental institutions that are organised at a localscale – is autonomous of the central state or how far itis an agent of the central state preoccupied manygeographers and political analysts during the 1980s
with mixed results. As Miller (1994) observed, ‘those
who attributed much autonomy to the local statetended to place more emphasis on the political processof decision-makin g…t h o s e who saw the local state
as a functional arm of the central state focused more
on economic relations’ (Boudreau 2003: 181–2).POLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 100

Included in these analyses were the ‘locality debates’
between British social scientists, which were linked
with a programme of research that explored localresponses to economic restructuring (see Box 6.2). Thelocality debates helped to re-focus attention on placewithin political and economic geography, but they
eventually became too entangled in detail to provide
any real conceptual pointers as to how the politicalgeographies of localities should be researched.
More useful is the reworking of the concept of place
by Doreen Massey in her article ‘A global sense of
place’ (originally published in the magazine Marxism
Today in 1991 and reprinted in Massey 1994). Massey
starts from an account of time–space compression andglobalisation and the ‘increasing uncertainty aboutwhat we mean by “places” and how we relate to them’(Massey 1994: 146). She argues that time–space
compression has a particular ‘power geometry’ in which
some people, some communities, some localities areempowered and enjoy the benefits of globalisationwhile others are disempowered and disadvantaged.This leads her back to the question of place:
How, in the context of all these socially varied
time–space changes do we think about ‘places’? Inan era when, it is argued, ‘local communities’ seemto be increasingly broken up, when you can goabroad and find the same shops, the same music
as at home, or eat your favourite foreign-holiday
food at the restaurant down the road – and wheneveryone has a different experience of all this – howthen do we think about ‘locality’?
(Massey 1994: 151)
The answer, suggests Massey, is to adopt a ‘global
sense of place’ that is constructed not around politicalor administrative boundaries, but through the con-nections that link one place with other places:
In this interpretation, what gives a place its
specificity is not some long internalized history butthe fact that it is constructed out of a particularconstellation of social relations, meeting and weav-ing together at a particular locus. If one moves in
from the satellite towards the globe, holding allthose networks of social relations and movements
and communications in one’s head, then each ‘place’
can be seen as a particular, unique, point of theirintersection. It is, indeed, a meeting place. Instead,then, of thinking of places as areas with bound-aries around, they can be imagined as articulated
moments in networks of social relations and under-
standings, but where a large proportion of thoserelations, experiences and understandings are con-structed on a far larger scale than what we happento define for that moment as the place itself, whether
that be a street, or a region or even a continent.
(Massey 1994: 154)
Place, then, can be thought of as the intersection of
a unique mixture of social, economic and culturalrelations, some of which are local in character, some of
which have a global reach. As such, place does there-
fore matter in political analysis because the distinctiveways in which these intersections are constituted, and the ways in which different actors engage withthe particular combination of relations in a particular
place, have real political effects. However, as the last
quote from Massey indicates, a ‘place’ need not existat a specific scale, but may be anything from a streetto a continent. Hence if we want to think about placesin terms of localities, that is, places that are defined asexisting at a ‘local’ scale, we need to understand not
just what is meant by ‘place’ but also what is meant
by ‘local’.
The political construction of scale
Traditionally, an examination of sub-national politics
in a political geography textbook would include a discussion of the governmental units that existed atthe different geographical scales – local, regional andnational (e.g. Prescott 1972; Glassner 1996). Similarly,
researchers studying local politics would often take the
territory of a local government institution as their unitof analysis (e.g. Cooke 1989; Dahl 1961). In both casesthe existence of a ‘local scale’ is taken as a given and is considered to be unproblematic. Little attention is
paid to questions about how the scale was fixed, howPOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 101

POLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 102
BOX 6.2THE LOCALITY DEBATES
The locality debates are associated with a research initiative in the 1980s that explored local responses to
economic restructuring in Britain. As the programme’s director, Phil Cooke, explained, it sought to addressthe ‘difficult question’ about late twentieth-century life: ‘While people’s lives continue to be mainly circumscribedby the localities in which they live and work, can they exert an influence on the fate of those places given that so much of their destiny is increasingly controlled by global political and economic forces?’ (Cooke
1989: 1).
In fact there are two questions hidden within this conundrum (see Duncan and Savage 1991). First, what
importance can be given to locality in conducting research on political and economic geography ? Duncan
(1989) argued that localities matter because there are locally contingent factors that alter the nature of socialstructures in particular places and consequently influence the direction of social and political action. This
assertion was supported by empirical evidence from the localities research that showed, for example, that in
the north-east of England the strength of organised labour in industries such as shipbuilding and coal mininghad built a left-wing political culture founded on trade unionism, which became undermined as these stapleindustries declined, muting the local political response to change; while in Birmingham the paternalism ofmajor employers bred a more moderate local political culture, but also a tradition of work-based socialassociations such that it proved difficult to organise local responses to unemployment outside the factory
(Cooke 1989). However, other geographers, such as Neil Smith (1987), expressed concern that the locality
studies represented a covert return to empiricism and that locality research distracted from more ‘worthy’ globalissues.
Second, how does locality make a difference ? Answering this question proved more divisive among the
localities researchers. Cooke, for example, held that localities are a form of social agent and that ‘proactive’
localities can have the power to cause socio-economic change (Cooke 1989). However, critics dismissed this
notion as dangerously close to suggesting that geography determines social patterns, and argued insteadthat spatial variations can be incorporated into the analysis of social processes only as is appropriate for theresearch problem concerned. The importance of space may vary depending on the problem being investigated,and pre-defined territories such as the areas of local government institutions could not be uncritically assumed
to be the appropriate spatial framework for research (Duncan 1989; Duncan and Savage 1989, 1991;
Gregson 1987). A third approach adopted an intermediate position, acknowledging that pre-defined territoriescould provide the context for research on localities but rejecting any suggestion that such localities existed as‘social objects’ with a capacity to determine social outcomes (Urry 1987; Warde 1989).
A related debate in the United States asked a similar question about how much agency could be attributed
to localities and local institutions in shaping political and economic outcomes. Work on urban economic
development had highlighted the importance of ‘parochial capital’, such as rentiers who are tied to a particular
locality, in the coalitions or ‘growth machines’ that created favourable conditions for investment and develop-ment (Logan and Molotch 1987). The economic interests of ‘growth machine’ members are hence perceivedto be intrinsically entwined with those of the locality, producing a system in which flows of capital are influencedby competition between localities for investment. Cox and Mair (1988) consequently advanced the concept
of ‘local dependence’ as being central to understanding the local politics of US cities. Locally dependent
firms form business coalitions to stimulate investment which are supported by local governments because theyare themselves locally dependent. Cox and Mair recognised that the resulting developments may sometimes

the boundaries were drawn, how the governmental
responsibilities and political issues appropriate to the
local scale were decided, and how the local engageswith other scales. Yet, as the discussion of ‘place’ abovedemonstrates, localities cannot be understood as neatly bounded administrative territories, and placesare intrinsically multi-scalar, constituted by social
relations that range from the parochial to the global.
All this points to the contingency of scale and to its
social construction (see Box 6.3) through both lay andstate practices. Marston (2000) proposes three centraltenets that underpin this approach. First, as noted
above, scale is not an existing, given entity awaiting
discovery, but rather the differentiation between geo-graphical scales ‘establishes and is established throughthe geographical structures of social interactions’(Smith 1992: 73; see also Delaney and Leitner 1997).Second, the ways in which scale is constructed have
tangible and material consequences. They are not just
rhetorical practices but are inscribed in both every-day life and macro-level social structures. Third, theframings of scale are often contradictory and contestedand are frequently ephemeral (see also McCann 2003).
Indeed, the contestation of scale recognises that the
fixing of scale is in itself a political act practised by both state and non-state actors. The state routinely con-structs scales, as it creates and restructures local govern-ment institutions, as it formulates and implements
policies, and as it decides which issues are appropriately
dealt with at which scale (Brenner 2001). This is partof the state’s spatial strategy that enables it to govern(Jones 1997; see also Chapter 3). But scales of politicalaction are also constructed by non-state actors. Herod(1995, 1997), for example, illustrates the engagement
of trade unions in contesting the scale at which
bargaining with employers is most advantageouslyfixed. Similarly, grass-roots activists contribute to the construction of the local scale through the way inwhich they mobilise discursive representations of theirneighbourhood or community, and through the issues
that they select as the focus of local activism. McCann
(2003), for example, examines how grass-roots Latinoactivists contested the scaling of new neighbour-hood planning areas by the city authority in Austin,Texas, because the territories of the suggested units did
not fit in with their spatial imagination of their com-
munity. Martin (2002) similarly discusses the role ofactivists in defining a neighbourhood public sphere inSt Paul, Minnesota, and the use of gender-essentialisingdiscourses of safety and parenting to position householdand family issues as community concerns. It is in this
sense that we can talk about not just the scales of
politics, but also the politics of scale.
Local politics, therefore, are in part concerned with
the construction of the local scale, and the scale of localpolitics is in part defined by those who participate in
it. But need local politics be tied (and restricted) to any
fixed territorial area when scale is so contingent, andwhen place is constituted by dynamic mixes of widersocial and economic processes? To answer this question,Cox (1998) makes a distinction between the spaces of
dependence of local politics and the spaces of engage-
ment of local politics. Spaces of dependence are ‘definedby those more-or-less localized social relations uponwhich we depend for the realization of essential inter-ests and for which there are no substitutes elsewhere;POLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 103
threaten the interests of local people and could potentially be opposed. Such conflict, they argue, is generally
avoided by business coalitions appealing to the local dependence of communities and re-casting concepts
of local community ‘in a form that better suits their needs’ (p. 317) by eliding community with locality and presenting the interests of the community as being threatened by the competitive advantage of otherlocalities.
Key readings : The findings of the British localities research are summarised in Cooke (1989). For more on
the localities debate in Britain see Duncan and Savage (1991) and other papers in the same issue. Formore on the locality as agent thesis see Cox and Mair (1988, 1991).

they define place-specific conditions for our material
well being and our sense of significance’ (Cox 1998: 2).The space of dependence for local government is itsterritory or jurisdiction, but for other agents the spaceof dependence might be a labour market, or a localeconomy, or some other geographical unit. Hence, for
any particular spatial point, ‘local politics’ will involve
many different institutions, each with its own space ofdependence fixed at different scales.
However, local actors – people, firms, state agencies,
campaign groups, etc. – also have to engage with
other ‘centres of social power’ that exist outside their
space of dependence – local, regional and centralgovernment, transnational corporations, the nationaland international media, and so on. Cox defines theserelationships as the ‘space of engagement’, which hefurther conceives of as a network, unevenly penetrating
different scales and areas (see also Low 1997). Cox
(1998) illustrates the construction of a scale of engage-ment with reference to a land use conflict in southernEngland, described by Murdoch and Marsden (1995).In this, opposition is organised to a proposal for a
gravel extraction pit at a site near Chackmore, Buck-
inghamshire, identified as part of a national strategyand rationalised in terms of national mineral needs.As such, the ‘space of engagement’ was constructed bythe state at the national scale. The opposition grouptherefore could not fight the proposal at the local scale,
but needed to construct its own national-level network
of agents. It did this by commissioning a hydrologicalstudy that showed that the development could lowerthe water table, draining the ornamental ponds in the
renowned parkland at nearby Stowe Park. This enabledthe protest group ‘to build a national-level networkaround an alternative representation of the site: not [so] much important to the national economy as to the national heritage’ (Cox 1998: 8), enrolling elite
national actors whose influence was sufficient to stop
the development.
Places that exist as intersections of diverse social,
economic and cultural processes, fixed at a sociallyconstructed ‘local scale’, hence frame the practices
and concerns of ‘local’ politics. Yet local politics are
not bounded by this apparent spatiality. They areinfluenced by events that may be distant in space andtime. The local politics of localities with large diasporiccommunities, for instance, are often informed by the politics of the homeland. In summer 2003 the
town of Huntington on Long Island, New York, voted
to remove the family crest of the English ruler OliverCromwell (who was born in the town’s near name-sake of Huntingdon, England) from its coat of armsafter lobbying by Irish-American groups motivated
by Cromwell’s brutality in the seventeenth-century
annexation of Ireland (Buncombe 2003). Similarly,global corporate politics have a particular significanceto residents in single-industry towns. Moreover, the pursuit of local politics may on occasion require theconstruction of ‘spaces of engagement’ that enrol actors
outside the locality, including at regional, national
and international scales. Indeed, the ability of localcommunities to participate in multi-scalar spaces ofPOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 104
BOX 6.3 SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION
The concept of social construction suggests that ‘things’ (either material objects or abstract entities) do not
have a preordained, intrinsic, ‘true’ definition or meaning, but that things are ascribed with meaning by and
through social interactions. In other words, the meanings of things are socially constructed. Our knowledgeabout things does not therefore involve the discovery of truth, but rather knowledge is constructed within thesocial context of the enquiry and is informed by the prevailing beliefs, practices and experiences of the time,place and people involved. As such, the meanings that we give to things are always contested, contingentand ephemeral.
Key readings : Braun and Castree (1998), especially the introduction, and Sismondo (1993).

engagement can be empowering and emancipating
and can reflect back to shape local spheres of political
activity. Perreault (2003), for example, describes theprocesses of political organising in the Quichuacommunity of the Mondayacu region of Ecuador. Herethe construction of a local scale of political organ-
isation, including the creation of new local institutions
and territories, is intrinsically connected with theparticipation of community-based indigenous groupswith transnational organisations and agencies in multi-scalar networks that position the local activity
as part of a wider development process. In this way,
Perreault notes, mutli-scalar networks link local andtrans-local processes, producing and consolidatingsocial constructions of place and ‘thickening’ theemerging civil society.
Having positioned local politics, the remainder of
this chapter proceeds to focus on two distinct aspects
of the interaction of politics and place. First it considershow the characteristics of a place (and of the com-munities associated with that place) inform the politicalidentities, interests and perceptions of residents. Second,
it examines how power and leadership are structured
within localities (or communities).
Place, community and
political interests
Places are not the same as communities. A community
is a group of individuals who are bound together by a common characteristic or a common interest and who enjoy a relatively high degree of mutual social
interaction. Communities are defined by shared mean-
ings and enacted through established and routinepractices that occur within particular spaces andstructures including ‘both the material sites filled bycommunal activities, and the symbolic and metaphoricspaces in which people connect “in community” even
while existing in different physical or social locations’
(Liepins 2000: 28). Communities, therefore, are fre-quently identified with a particular place, but need not be. Many communities do not have a geographicalidentity (although all have a geography), but represent
a social group with members in many different places.Moreover, few localities are associated with a single,
homogeneous community. Rather, there are commonly
many different, overlapping, communities in a locality,such that local politics often revolves around conflictsor disputes between different communities.
It is, however, the characteristics of the dominant
community (such as ethnicity, religion, class) as much
as the characteristics of the place (the physical, eco-nomic and administrative structure) that constitute the politics of place (see Box 6.4). This happens in a number of ways. First, communities are a source of
identity for their members and thus may be treated
as a collective that may take political actions en masse .
For example, a sense of collective identity may leadmembers of a community to vote for a co-memberstanding for higher office (the so-called ‘friends andneighbours’ effect, see Chapter 8). Second, com-
munities are filters through which people view the
wider world, judging political issues in terms of theirimpact on the community as a whole and identifyingtheir own personal interests with the interests of thecommunity. Third, as social collectives, communities
have their own internal power structures, leaders and
conflicts. Fourth, because communities rely on ideasof collective identity, they can also become exclusion-ary forces, promoting conformity and suppressingdifference. As such, for example, communities thatdefine themselves at least in part in terms of con-
servative religious identity or masculine culture may
be intolerant of non-heterosexual behaviour ( Joseph2002).
The post-communist transition in Central and
Eastern Europe provides an interesting example of
how the local politics of communities both reflect and
shape individuals’ perceptions of wider change, notleast because these processes occurred in parallel withthe social construction of a new local scale of politicalaction. Fiona Smith (2000) describes the case of a run-down housing estate in Leipzig, East Germany.
Following the downfall of the communist regime,
the strategy for the renewal of the estate was framedby the Western discourses of democracy and the mar-ket. The former was mobilised through communityparticipation in the planning process. As a partici-
patory local civil society did not exist under thePOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 105

communist regime, community activists first had to
construct the neighbourhood as a space of politicalactivity:
Neighbourhood activist groups worked to create
local public spheres, holding events which, in using
a range of local public spaces, such as halls, squares,parks and schools, displayed to the local populationand to wider public the active construction of localagendas.
(Smith 2000: 138)
The latter discourse, that of the free market, structured
the way in which the redevelopment was implementedand managed, and proved more contentious for resi-dents. Accepting the free market meant abandoning
the principle of equal rents and allowing market forcesto dictate property prices, and, consequently, the pace
and type of housing renewal. In the new system, theresponsibility for renewal lay with the property owners,with the state able to facilitate action but not toprescribe or carry out the action itself. Residents used
to the imposition of standardised work programmes
often had difficulty adapting to the new system and expressed disappointment that promises of betterhousing had not been realised. These experiences at the local scale informed the residents’ perceptions andopinions of the larger-scale changes involved in the
transition from communism. Moreover, experiences
of the transition differed between localities:
The problems in this neighbourhood were not found
uniformly across Leipzig. In each neighbourhood
the nature of political contests and local problemsPOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 106
BOX 6.4 CULTURE AND LOCAL POLITICS: POPLAR IN THE 1920s
Poplar was formerly the easternmost borough in the East End of London. Its crowded and largely sub-standard
housing was the product of rapid urbanisation in the late nineteenth century, its population predominantlyemployed in the nearby London docks and in large engineering and drink and food-processing factories. Inthe early 1930s it was identified as the poorest borough in London, with a quarter of the population living in
poverty. Local politics were dominated by a radical left-wing local Labour Party which frequently took a maverick
line, coming into conflict with the national Labour Party and earning Poplar a reputation as a ‘little Moscow’.In one incident in 1921 Poplar refused to pay precepts to London-wide authorities, including the police force,spending the money instead on poor relief within the borough. By the end of the decade, however, the partyhad shifted rightwards and Poplar council became embroiled in corruption. Rose (1988) argued that Poplar’s
initial radicalism and later corruption could not be explained simply by its economic structure, but that the
local culture also had to be considered. She explored the linkages between Poplar’s politics and five aspectsof its cultural life. First, the prevalence of home working and hired labour in Poplar’s economy made tradeunionisation difficult and meant that Poplar’s class politics was mobilised not around trade unions but around
a number of militant left-wing political groups which had a radicalising effect on the local Labour Party. Over
time, however, councillors became more distanced from their working-class base, lessening their sense of class
identity and their radicalism. Second, a strong sense of neighbourhood identity and the importance of the
family had promoted community solidarity which informed the radical politics. Later, nepotism contributed tothe growing corruption. Third, the religious fervour of local activists supported not only a radical Christian
Socialism but also a moral politics which was often non-socialist and sometimes racist in its objectives. Fourth,over time voting Labour became a matter of habit for Poplar residents – part of their culture – such that they
continued to support the party even as its radicalism waned and corruption grew.
Key reading : Rose (1988).

varied with differing combinations of factors such
as housing stock conditions, socio-economic profile
of the population, speed and dimensions of propertyrestitution, time-frames for planning and localactivism, the effects of capital (speculation, con-tinued disinvestments, pressures for land-use
change) and past and present forms of local activism.
(Smith 2000: 135)
Thus the construction of the neighbourhood as a
political space that combined the physical character-
istics of the locality (the housing stock, etc.) with the
social characteristics and the agency of the communitycreated both an arena in which citizen participationcould be mobilised and a set of experiences throughwhich the wider process of political and economictransition could be understood.
Local power and leadership
The sections above have advanced the argument
that place is important in political analysis and cannot
be ignored. There are place-specific characteristics that mediate the impact of wider social, economic and political processes on individual localities, and that influence the way in which people engage withthese wider processes. Moreover, this indicates that
there is a local scale of politics that enjoys a degree
of autonomy and agency and which in turn raises ques-tions about the way that power is produced, circulatedand exercised within localities or communities. Allcommunities (and thus, by extension, all localities)
have ‘leaders’ who are responsible for decision mak-
ing in the day-to-day government of the community,who organise the local political sphere and whorepresent local interests to external actors. There isalways, therefore, some concentration of power withina community.
The analysis of community power, however, is more
complex than may initially be apparent. It may seemstraightforward to ask ‘Who has power in this city?’Direct the question to people in the street and they willprobably give you a straightforward answer – the
mayor, or a major employer, or perhaps even some kindof ‘local mafia’ or political elite. But think for a moment
about these replies. Is it really the mayor who has
power, or the people who elect her or him? Are they‘powerful’ as an individual, or only when ‘in character’as mayor? Or does their ‘power’ rest on there beingother people – administrators, council workers – who
will carry out actions as instructed? If a company is
deemed to be powerful, do we mean the company itself or the directors or the shareholders? How does it actually exercise its ‘power’? And what about theso-called elite? Who are they? How did they get there?
What ‘power’ do they actually have over other citizens
on a day-to-day basis? Come to think of it, what do we
mean by ‘power’ anyway ?
These questions formed the crux of the ‘community
power debate’ in American social science in the 1950sand 1960s between the ‘pluralists’ and the ‘elitists’
(Box 6.5). The debate was partly conceptual – is power
a property that can be possessed or does it exist onlywhen it is exercised? – and partly methodological, theelitists starting with the individuals with a reputationfor power and the pluralists starting with decisions that
demonstrated the exercise of power. Both approaches
revealed elements of the way in which local power andpolitics work, but neither convincingly revealed thewhole picture. By the 1970s the community powerdebate was judged to have stagnated into stalemate(Harding 1995).
Since the 1980s, however, a more comprehensive
approach to community power has been developedunder the aegis of urban regime theory. As Lauria(1997: 1) describes, urban regime theory ‘dispenseswith the stalled debates between elite hegemony and
pluralist interest group politics, between economic
determinism and political machination and betweenexternal or structural determinants and local or socialconstruction’ by shifting attention from decisionmaking to the setting and achievement of strategicgoals. In essence, urban regime theory ‘asks how and
under what conditions do different types of governing
coalitions emerge, consolidate, and become hegemonicor devolve and transform’ (1997: 1–2). Its central thesisis that in order to maintain stable conditions for capitalaccumulation, local regimes are formed which draw
together coalitions of institutions, interest groups andPOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 107

POLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 108
BOX 6.5 THE COMMUNITY POWER DEBATE
The community power debate between elite theorists and pluralists was partly methodological, partly theoretical
and partly interpretative. Methodologically the pluralists criticised the ‘reputational approach’ taken by Floyd
Hunter in the most notable ‘elite’ study of community power in Atlanta, Georgia, which involved asking
individuals in prominent positions in the city to rank other prominent individuals according to their reputation.
Robert Dahl, the leading pluralist, argued that this approach predetermined the results of the study becauseby starting with the assumption that a power elite could be identified by reputation it did not allow for the
possibility that there was no elite. Pluralists further criticised the reputational approach for suggesting that
individuals held power while ignoring the power vested in jobs and social roles and for failing to present
evidence of power actually being exercised (see Dahl 1958, 1961; Harding 1995; Polsby 1980).
These latter two criticisms reflect the theoretical differences between the elite theorists and pluralists over the
concept of power. Hunter had employed the classic definition of power as a property that could be possessed .
For Dahl, however, power needed to be relational – summarised in his own definition (see also Lukes 1974,
1986): ‘A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do’(Dahl 1957: 203). Thus Dahl’s own methodology in New Haven was ‘decisional’ or ‘positional’ in approach.
Concentrating on the three issues of urban redevelopment, public education and political nominations, his team
traced back the germination of particular policies and outcomes to question why particular decisions were
made and who participated in the decision making (Dahl 1961).
By starting from different theoretical standpoints, and by employing different methodologies, Hunter and
Dahl were led to different interpretations of the urban political systems they studied. Hunter in Atlanta ‘identified’
a power structure controlled by a small and largely invisible policy-making elite comprised almost exclusively
of key business leaders together with the mayor. Superficially, government was exercised through the city
council and other public agencies but, Hunter contended, decision-making power rested with the business-led
elite, not with elected officials. In contrast, Dahl argued that New Haven had a ‘stratified pluralist’ system.Only a small number of people were found to have direct influence in decision making and these belonged
to a politicised stratum of the city’s population. However, Dahl argued that this politicised stratum did not
represent a single power elite, as there was no overlap between the individuals with influence in the differentpolicy arenas that he studied. Moreover, while most citizens were not politically active, the pluralists contended
that they possessed a ‘moderate degree of influence’ over their elected leaders whose decisions reflected ‘the
real or imagined preferences of constituents’ (Dahl 1961: 164).
Dahl’s pluralist model has also been criticised on both empirical and methodological grounds. Empirically
it is flawed because not all interest groups are able to compete on equal grounds, not all voters vote and theidentification of a set of competing oligarchies does not equate to a pluralist system (see, for example, Newton’s
(1969, 1976) work on Birmingham, England). More fundamentally, Bachrach and Baratz (1962) claimed
that Dahl, like Hunter, had predetermined his findings by making particular assumptions about power when
selecting his methodology. They disputed Dahl’s definition of power, suggesting that the exercise of power
did not need a decision to be made, but that power is also exercised through the shaping of social andpolitical values and institutional practices to limit the scope of political action. Thus, as they attempted to
demonstrate in a study of Baltimore (Bachrach and Baratz 1970), the ‘power’ of urban policy makers is restricted
to issues and outcomes that are relatively innocuous to the interests of the really ‘powerful’. This thesis provedto be highly controversial, was fiercely rejected by pluralists (see Wolfinger 1971), and created a conceptual
deadlock in community power studies that persisted until the late 1980s.
Key readings : Hunter (1953) and Dahl (1961).

political leaders around the pursuit of particular goals.
Such regimes are contingent in that they must respond
and adapt to changing social, economic and politicalcircumstances (both local and external) and thereforecan evolve in their membership and strategy. As thereare a number of different strategies that local regimes
can adopt (for example, they can be entrepreneurial or
anti-development) local factors can shape the form ofregimes and the subsequent policy outcomes.
Community power in practice:
a case study of Atlanta
Significantly, one of the most important empirical
applications of regime theory was undertaken inAtlanta, the state capital of Georgia in the south-east
United States and the site of Hunter’s research three
decades earlier. In Hunter’s original study he identifiedan elite of forty individuals across four sectors –
government, business, civic associations and ‘society’
activities. The elite were fairly homogeneous in theirsocial background and attitudes – they were mostlymen, and all white. (Hunter identified a separateleadership structure for the black community.) Eleven
were company directors, seven bankers or financiers,
five lawyers, five industrial managers, four senior gov-ernment personnel, two labour union leaders and onea dentist. The remaining five had sufficient privatewealth to support full-time leadership of the city’s civic
and social organisations. They tended to live in the
same desirable neighbourhoods in the north of the city,and were acquainted with each other through inter-locking company directorships and club memberships(Figure 6.1). As Hunter (1953: 10) observes, theirinteractions formed particular geography:
There are certain places in which they make deci-
sions and formulate policies to meet the manychanging conditions that confront them. In locatingthese men of power in a community one finds them,
when not at home or at work, dividing their
time between their clubs, the hotel luncheon andcommittee rooms, and other public and semi-publicmeeting places.
Not all of Hunter’s elite were actively involved in policy
making. Hunter identified a core group of ‘power
leaders’ comprised exclusively of business leaders,together with the mayor, who were regularly consultedand involved in the development of policy. Hunter isless clear on precisely how this influence was exercised,
but places the emphasis less on direct intervention than
on the part played by the elite in maintaining consensuson policy issues and in anticipating challenges andchanges in public attitudes.
Hunter returned to Atlanta to conduct a second
study in the early 1970s (Hunter 1980). Employing
a similar methodology as in his original study, he
again identified an elite of forty leaders. Of these, seven had been on Hunter’s list in 1950, including R.W. Woodruff of Coca-Cola. Several others were thechildren or relatives of names on the 1950 list, mem-
bers of what Hunter labelled ‘Atlanta’s historicallyPOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 109
Figure 6.1 Interlocking club memberships held by
members of Hunter’s power elite in Atlanta
Source: Hunter (1953: fig. 7), copyright 1953 by the
University of North Carolina Press, renewed 1981 byFloyd Hunter, reproduced by permission of the publisher

powerful families’, the influence of some of which could
be traced back to the city’s foundation and develop-
ment in the mid-nineteenth century. Hunter alsoidentified connections between members of the twolists through thirty-six corporations and organisa-tions, including Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines, banks and
newspapers. Hunter hence concluded that the elite
was still business-dominated and still operated throughthe interaction of social and professional networks, but he also went further in discussing how the elite’sinfluence was exercised, linking elite members with
specific policy achievements and recording the exten-
sive representation of elite members, historic familiesand key corporations and organisations on the boardof Central Atlanta Progress (CAP), the body respon-sible for redeveloping the downtown. Yet Hunter alsofound changes in the power structure. New leaders
were emerging from new sectors, particularly property
development; most significantly, the African-Americancommunity was no longer disengaged from the cityelite. Leaders of the black community were now cityleaders, and in 1973 Atlanta elected its first black
mayor.
However, Hunter ultimately failed to explain these
changes because he was unable to offer an explanationas to why the power structure existed in the form hedescribed or why the elite had the members that it had.To explore this bigger picture, Stone (1988) structured
his analysis of Atlanta politics around a new concept
of power, ‘pre-emptive power’, or ‘power as a capacityto occupy, hold, and make use of a strategic position’(p. 83). ‘Pre-emptive’ power is about power to do things,
not about power over others. It is achieved through
the blending together of resources in order to create
a ‘capacity to act’, and as such is described as the powerof social production , not social control . Thus, in Stone’s
(1988) reinterpretation of Hunter’s study, the iden-tification of a policy-making elite is significant notbecause its members can be said to possess power,
but because the networking and interactions through
which Hunter describes the elite as working representthe interaction of individuals with access to differentsets of resources in order to form alliances with thecapacity to act on specific policy issues. The regime
approach goes further, proposing that pre-emptivepower is stabilised through the establishment of
informal arrangements between governmental and
other local organisations to constitute a regime ‘with
access to institutional resources that enable it to havea sustained role in making governing decisions’ (Stone1989: 4). Furthermore, within successful regimes
there is a small core group of actors who are repeat-
edly involved in making key decisions and who forma ‘governing coalition’ that holds the regime together.Although the ‘governing coalition’ superficially soundssuspiciously like Hunter’s elite, Stone distances it
from the negative connotations associated with the
term ‘elite’ by stressing that a governing coalition does not ‘rule in command-and-control fashion’ (Stone1989: 5), but rather is concerned with the co-ordinationand mobilisation of resources.
Hence Stone acknowledged the existence of Hunter’s
elite in the 1940s and 1950s, with informal interaction
through organisations such as the Piedmont DrivingClub, Capital City Club and Commerce Club provid-ing a private operating space for a ‘governing coalition’of business and political leaders. However, Stone
contends that such elite interactions were not sufficient
on their own and that the establishment in 1941 ofthe Central Atlanta Improvement Association (laterCAP) was significant in creating a vehicle throughwhich the big business interests of the elite couldoverride the interests of small business by bypassing
traditional business groups such as the chamber of
commerce. Through elite networking and the CAP thegoverning coalition was able to hold together a stableregime that dominated Atlanta politics throughout the 1940s and 1950s. The elite had allies in the leader-
ship of the black community, but the relationship was
one of black subordination. The active members of thegoverning elite were as one leading figure described:
Almost all of us had been born and raised within
a mile or two of each other in Atlanta. We had gone
to the same churches, to the same golf courses, to
the same summer camps. We had played within ourgroup, married within our group, partied withinour group, and worked within our group. …W e
were white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, Atlantian,
business-oriented, non-political, moderate, well-POLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 110

bred, well-educated, pragmatic, and dedicated to
the betterment of Atlanta as much as a Boy Scout
troop is dedicated to fresh milk and clean air.
(Stone 1989: 56)
During the 1960s, however, a younger, more radical
black leadership rose to prominence, increasing friction
between the governing coalition and the black com-munity. The governing coalition was losing strengthand was vulnerable to occasional defeat, especially on issues where the black community could be mobil-
ised. Coupled with national events and the growth
of the black community as a proportion of the citypopulation, this vulnerability led some in the busi-ness elite to realise that their own future influencerested on building alliances with the black leadership.In consequence, Atlanta endured a period of instability,
as racial politics created divisions within the governing
coalition between integrationists and segregationists,before the integrationists were able to forge a newgoverning coalition between white business leaders andblack community leaders.
The 1970s brought a new challenge from the mobil-
isation of a neighbourhood movement that was ableto threaten the fragile bi-racial coalition. However, as the neighbourhood movement was overwhelminglywhite and frequently anti-development in its cam-paigns, it was unable to forge alliances with either the
black community or the business elite and rather
provided a rationale for their co-operation. Thus by theearly 1980s the neighbourhood movement had faltered,and the governing coalition of white business leadersand black community leaders had become entrenched
as the core of a stable urban regime. In many ways,
Stone notes, this coalition was a revised version of theolder 1950s coalition:
Blacks no longer occupy a subordinate position,
but neither are they dominant. Nor is black par-
ticipation in the coalition inclusive; just as before,
the black middle class are the political insiders.However, that group has expanded to include notonly public officeholders, but also blacks in white-owned corporations, such as Coca-Cola, Delta, and
Rich’s Department Store. The main differencebetween the periods is that blacks control city hall,
whereas earlier they only bargained with city
hall as one of the city’s voting blocks.
(Stone 1989: 135)
The consequence of this accommodation, Stone argues,
was that neither partner had unfettered control of
the policy agenda. Rather only policies that found a middle ground could be successful, while radical black community groups, jobs advocates, and whiteneighbourhood and preservationist groups all found
themselves excluded from the policy process:
Atlanta’s coalition between black middle class
leaders and white business interests is no simplematter of giving the business elite what they want.Its chief policy thrust – a full-throttle development
with almost no restrictions on investors, combined
with strong encouragement and opportunities forminority businesses – brings the coalition togetherand promotes co-operation. Projects that meet thesecriteria move ahead despite enormous obstacles and
numerous pitfalls; those that lack these ingredients
make little headway.
(Stone 1989: 159)
Elite networks and discourses
of power
Urban regime theory provides a useful framework
for exploring the enrolment of particular groups intogovernment coalitions and the selection of policy
strategies, but it is less helpful in offering explanations
about which individuals rise to prominence withinregimes, and the extent to which they are represen-tative of the wider community. This issue is significantbecause there is growing political awareness of theinequalities of representation in local governance. For
example, only 22 per cent of US cities with a popu-
lation of over 100,000 had female mayors in 1999. Thetwo largest cities, New York and Los Angeles, havenever elected a woman as mayor and women make up less than a third of city council members in New
York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston (Table 6.1).POLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 111

In Britain, only 19 per cent of local councillors are
women, and only 3 per cent are from non-white ethnic
backgrounds (Byrne 2000). Similar patterns of skewedrepresentation exist with respect to social class and age.
The gender bias of elected local government is
exaggerated still further when the net of analysis is expanded to include the various non-elected boards
and agencies that are increasingly a part of local gov-
ernance. As these bodies are drawn into ‘governingcoalitions’ with the overwhelmingly male upperechelons of big business, the resulting regimes can be almost exclusively masculine. Tickell and Peck
(1996), for example, describe the coalition of corporate
and governmental interests in Manchester, England,tied together by an elite network, self-styled as ‘theManchester mafia’:
Like the Cosa Nostra , this Mafia is almost exclu-
sively male, although women are allowed into themargins of some of the families …T h ere are
scarcely any examples, in the Manchester scene atleast, of women exercising real power in the city’snew structures of governance.
(Tickell and Peck 1996: 597–8)These inequalities in local governance arise not from
legal barriers but from structural conditions – includ-
ing the time commitment involved, the timing andlocation of meetings and the expense of participation,including loss of earnings – and from culturalconditions – including the prejudices exhibited withinmeetings and by those responsible for recruitment
– which serve to exclude and deter participants from
underrepresented social groups. The determinants of local leadership can hence be reduced to three keycomponents – control of resources, the workings of elitenetworks and discourses of power.
The privileges that follow from the control of some
resources, such as wealth and time, are self-evident.Ownership of land can also be important in localpolitics, both because of the tenants and because of the development potential. Other key resources may
be more subtle – for example, good communication
skills are helpful in local politics and campaigning and can therefore benefit individuals with particularprofessional backgrounds, such as teaching (Ehrenhalt1991; Etzioni-Halevy 1993). However, ‘power’ cannotbe bestowed by control of any one resource, rather
power is the result of different resources being blendedPOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 112
Table 6.1 Gender and local governance in the United States and Britain (%)
Local government members n Male Female Data n.a.
United States
Mayors of cities of 100,000+ population, 1999 218 77 21 2New York City Council members, 2002 51 76 24Los Angeles City Council members, 2002 15 67 33Chicago City Council aldermen, 2002 50 70 30
Boston City Council members, 2002 13 85 15
Britain
County and district councillors, 1986 n.a. 81 19
Council leaders, 1993 448 68 8 25
Council chief executives, 1993 448 97 3Greater London Assembly members, 2002 25 60 40Housing Action Trusts, board members, 1994 n.a. 54 46Training and Enterprise Councils, board members, 1994 n.a. 88 12
District Health Authorities, board members, 1994 n.a. 62 38
National Health Service trusts, board members, 1994 n.a. 60 40
Sources: World Almanac 1999; city council Web sites; Byrne (2000); Tickell and Peck (1996)

to create a ‘capacity to act’. An essential feature of urban
regimes is that they bring together actors with control
over key resources. Business leaders are thereforeimportant because they can contribute financial sup-port, and newspaper editors because they can help to shape public opinion – as can ethnic community
leaders and Church ministers. As such, regimes operate
through ‘elite networks’ that seek to connect indi-viduals with control over or access to key resources inrelatively stable relationships that can be rapidly andeasily mobilised (Woods 1998a). Connections through
elite networks may be important in facilitating par-
ticular policy outcomes – for example, the 1975 fiscalcrisis in New York City was resolved by mediation that depended on contacts via mutual friends of thecore actors (Fischer et al. 1977). More routinely,
elite networks provide a mechanism through which
the everyday interaction of local leadership can take
place, serving, for example, as a vehicle for the recruit-ment of new actors into a regime, or for identifyingappointees to political office.
The operation of elite networks can have distinctive
geographical manifestations. Their membership may
reflect particular spatial clusters of residence or employ-ment, or interactions may take place within particularsettings. For example, Ehrenhalt (1991) describes apicture of small-town American politics where ‘a smalland close-knit elite . . . made most of the important
community decisions in private, frequently over coffee
or lunch in a local coffee shop or restaurant’ (p. xix).In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the elite breakfastedtogether in Kirk’s Restaurant, while in Utica, NewYork, the local Democratic Party boss held court at
Marino’s Restaurant (Ehrenhalt 1991). In these two
cases, elite interaction occurred in public view; else-where, the ‘elite spaces’ may be more exclusive, servingin Goffman’s (1971) terms as private ‘back regions’ inwhich the performances of the ‘front region’ publicpolitical stage may be contradicted (Woods 1998a).
Gaining access to the right ‘elite spaces’ requires
matching cultural norms and expectations – having, asBourdieu (1984) would put it, the correct ‘culturalcapital’. In turn, the definition of the correct ‘culturalcapital’ may reflect local ‘discourses of power’ – the
popularly diffused beliefs and prejudices that establishthe qualities expected of leaders and define what power
or influence an elite may reasonably be expected to have
(Woods 1997). Thus, in Atlanta, both the ‘historicalfamilies’ of the old elite (Hunter 1980) and the clergyand teachers in the black community leadership werebeneficiaries of status attributed through discourses
of power; while in rural England discourses of power
helped to maintain the elite status of farmers andlandowners even as the original material basis of theirpower was eroded (Woods 1997). Discourses of powerare often entwined with the discourses of place through
which people make sense of their locality and its rela-
tion to the wider world. Such discursive associationsserve to affirm the power of business leaders in indus-trial towns, of farmers in rural communities, and todeliver public support for boosterist policies.
Summary
Place matters in the analysis of political processes.
Despite the trend of globalisation and the apparent
upward concentration of power that it entails, local
factors and local actors can still have political effects.The importance of place comes not from any intrinsicenvironmental influence, but from the distinctiveconfigurations of social relations that exist in particularplaces. The discursive understandings of ‘place’ that
people map on to these social configurations can influ-
ence both the structure of power relations withinlocalities and the way in which residents engagepolitically with the wider world.
Two further issues follow from these observations.
First, as places themselves are socially constructed, the
ways in which they are represented and the meaningsassociated with them are open to contestation andconflict. As is discussed further in the next chapter,conflicts over the meaning and representation of placeare frequently a focal point of local politics, as are
conflicts over the ways in which place-specific interests
and identities are employed to legitimise particularpower structures or policies.
Second, although much of this chapter has focused
on the leaders of local communities, non-elite actors
are equally important in constructing and shaping thePOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 113

local sphere of politics. The mobilisation of an active
citizenry at a local scale is examined further in Chapter
8, recognising both the role of the state in promotingcommunity self-organising as part of a new strategyof governmentality and the interventions of grass-roots,bottom-up local protest movements.
Further reading
The subjects covered in this chapter are wide-ranging and
therefore lead into a variety of specialist literature. Theories
of Urban Politics , edited by Judge et al. (1995), provides
an excellent overview of the different theoretical perspec-tives adopted in the study of local politics, includingchapters on pluralism, elite theory and growth machinesand regime theory. Stone’s Regime Politics (1989) is the
best contemporary study of community politics in North
America, while the work of Jamie Peck, Adam Tickelland colleagues on Manchester provide a good Britishexample, to which Cochrane et al. ‘Manchester plays
games: exploring the local politics of globalisation’, Urban
Studies , 33 (1996), 1319–36, and Tickell and Peck, ‘The
return of the Manchester man: men’s words and men’sdeeds in the remaking of the local state’, Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers , 21 (1996), 595–616, are
accessible introductions.The politics of scale are discussed in a number of places,
including Marston’s paper on ‘The social construction ofscale’, Progress in Human Geography , 24 (2000), 219–42,
Brenner’s critique of this work in ‘The limits to scale?
Methodological reflections on scalar structuration’,Progress in Human Geography , 25 (2001), 525–48, Purcell’s
commentary ‘Islands of practice and the Marston/Brennerdebate: toward a more synthetic critical humangeography’, Progress in Human Geography , 27 (2003),
317–32, and Cox’s paper ‘Spaces of dependence, spaces
of engagement and the politics of scale, or, Looking forlocal politics’, Political Geography , 17 (1998), 1–24. See
also themed issues of Political Geography , 16, 2 (1997)
and 17, 1 (1998), and the Journal of Urban Affairs , 25, 2
(2003).
Massey’s article ‘A global sense of place’ is reprinted in
her collection Space, Place and Gender (1994). Fiona Smith’s
chapter on ‘The neighbourhood as site for contesting
German reunification’ is in Sharp et al. (eds), Entanglements
of Power (2000).
The journal Political Geography is a good source of articles
on community politics, while Urban Studies, Urban Affairs
Quarterly and the International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research all carry numerous papers on urban
politics and power.POLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 114

Introduction
In the previous chapter we examined how politics
operate inand through places: how the particular
entwinement of social and economic processes indifferent places can produce different policies andpolitical strategies; and how power is distributed andexercised within communities. In this chapter we
shift attention to the politics of
place – or how places
themselves can be the focus of political conflict andcontestation.
A simple glance at any newspaper will provide
plenty of examples of the politics of place: from globallysignificant conflicts such as between India and Pakistan
over Kashmir, or between Israelis and Palestinians
over the status of Jerusalem, to more localised disputes.Is the Alaskan tundra an environmentally sensitivewilderness in need of protection, or a commerciallypromising oilfield ready for exploitation? Should
Spitalfields market in London be developed as a multi-
million-pound office complex as an anchor for eco-nomic regeneration or is it a vital meeting place for a unique multi-cultural community?
Conflicts of this type arise because places are never
neutral entities with undisputed objective meanings.
Rather they are socially constructed (see Box 6.3) by
individuals and groups who draw on their own experi-ences, beliefs and prejudices to imbue places withparticular characteristics, meanings and symbolisms.Through this process many subtly different ‘places’
may be constructed as existing on the same territorial
space. Often the coexistence is unproblematic becausethe different emphases are minor and do not haveconsequences for policy making. However, occasionallythe different discourses of place that are mobilised are
so incompatible that political conflict erupts over, for example, the appropriateness of particular devel-opments, the legitimacy of would-be local political
leaders or even the place name.
An illustration of how different perceptions about
place can lead to political conflict is provided by thework of Marc Mormont, a Belgian sociologist, on oneof the most culturally important ‘imagined places’ ofthe modern era – the countryside. As Mormont (1990)
describes, rural areas were historically constructed as
predominantly agricultural spaces. In political terms,this meant that the local power structures of rurallocalities were controlled by agricultural and land-owning elites, that government policy was oriented to
the interests of agriculture, and that the politics of rural
areas was essentially subsumed within an agriculturalpolitics (see also Woods 1997). However, Mormontgoes on to detail how processes of social and economicchange in the late twentieth century disrupted thishomogeneous representation of rural space, by, for
example, introducing new discourses that recast certain
rural places as spaces of recreation, or of conservation,or of manufacturing or service sector employment.Thus, as Mormont describes:
there is no longer one single space, but a multiplicity
of social spaces for one and the same geographicalarea, each of them having its own logic, its owninstitution, as well as its own network of actors –users, administrators, etc. – which are specific andnot local.
(Mormont 1990: 34)Contesting place7

Consequently, conflicts can arise when these different
regulatory spaces adopt contradictory policies, or
when the strategies pursued in the management of these spaces clash with the ideals of other imaginedrepresentations of the same territory. For instance, in-migrants to rural areas are frequently attracted
by an idealised notion of rurality – the ‘rural idyll’
– which is sometimes tarnished by the realities ofagricultural practice – noxious smells, pollution, noise and the development of functional but not nec-essarily aesthetically attractive buildings. In Roden,
Minnesota, for example, in-migrant residents passed a
local ordinance forbidding tractors to drive along themain street after 9.00 pm – frustrating the practicalneeds of the farming community (see also Halfacree1994; Murdoch and Marsden 1994; Woods 1998b,2003a). Mormont (1987) identifies such conflicts as
‘rural struggles’ between groups seeking to promote or
defend their own symbolic representations of rurality– or, to use a more generic term, their own discoursesof place.
Such experiences are not limited to the countryside.
Later in this chapter we discuss a conflict over the
‘gentrification’ of an urban community in New York’sLower East Side, which essentially results from a similarproblem of competing ‘social spaces’ overlapping in the same place. Other examples can be found in allkinds of geographical contexts – inner cities, suburbs,
small towns, countryside, etc. – all around the world.
The world in which we live has become too fluid, toointerconnected and too messy for any notion of placesas homogeneous, demarcated territories to be justified,and the inevitable consequence is conflict.
This chapter explores this theme from two broad
perspectives. First, we look at the role of landscape inthe promotion of particular discourses of place, anddiscourses of power within place, and at how sym-bolic landscapes can become the focal point of conflict.Second, we examine the interconnection between
place, community and identity and how conflict over
the development or representation of particular placesis contested because of meanings conveyed aboutcommunity identity.Landscape and power
Landscape is the physical manifestation of place. Places
as social constructs may exist as abstract ideas, on
maps or in written documents, but when we actually
go to a specific place, or we see a place represented in photographs, art or film, what we are experiencingis the landscape of that place. As such, landscapes are
frequently seen as symbolic of the meanings that peo-ple attribute to particular places. By landscape we
are here referring to all the various components that
make up the visual appearance of a place, including the natural geomorphology, elements of cultivationsuch as trees, flowers, crops, gardens and parks, and the built environment of buildings, roads, paths, monu-
ments, and so on. Thus a city centre, a factory, a theme
park or a rubbish tip are all just as much a ‘landscape’as a bucolic pastoral vision that we might associatewith, for instance, ‘landscape painting’.
Moreover, landscapes are not just assemblages of
natural and manufactured objects. Cosgrove and
Daniels (1988: 1) describe a landscape as ‘a cultural
image, a pictorial way of representing, structuring or symbolising surroundings’, and if we follow thisdefinition we can see that landscapes are full of social,cultural and political meaning.
Landscapes are powerful because of the role they play
in structuring our everyday lives. Some of their powerresults from the permanence of certain landscapes, andtheir ability to transcend history; some results from the fact that landscapes are shared points of experiencefor large numbers of people who live in, work in or
visit the same place. As such, points in the landscape
can symbolise particular memories and meanings ofplace, including messages about power and politics.
We refer to landscapes that work in this way as
landscapes of power . A landscape of power operates as a
political device because it reminds people of who is
in charge, or of what the dominant ideology or philo-sophy is, or it helps to engender a sense of place identitythat can reinforce the position of a political leader.Landscapes can express power by emphasising the
gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ – for
example, through the contrasting landscapes of richand poor neighbourhoods – and they can also becomePOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 116

sites through which such relations of power and oppres-
sion are resisted. As Sharon Zukin (1991) remarks
in her book Landscapes of Power , ‘themes of power,
coercion, and collective resistance shape landscape as asocial microcosm’ (p. 19).
What landscapes of power do
and how they do it
Broadly speaking, we can identify four main functions
of landscapes of power. First, they show who is in
charge. Think, for example, of the castles of medieval
Europe. As well as being important military instal-lations, their size, construction and position served as a reminder to local people of the power of a particularbaron or king. When King Edward I of England con-quered Wales in the thirteenth century he ordered
the construction of a series of castles, less to ensure
military security – they could have little practical effect in controlling a dispersed upland population – than to symbolise the dominance of the English.More recently, ‘company towns’ such as Hershey in
Pennsylvania, or Port Sunlight and Saltaire in England,
were not just acts of social philanthropy but also servedas constant reminders to the workers they housed oftheir complete dependence on a single company, andusually, a single industrialist (Markus 1993; Mitchell1993).
Second, landscapes of power remind people of
dominant ideologies or economic interests. An explicitexample of this was the ubiquity of the red star onpublic buildings in communist states, but the physi-cal layout of the landscape and the prominence of
certain buildings can also convey this message. The
dominance of Christian culture in Europe, for example,was historically symbolised by the centrality, size and extravagant design of cathedrals and churches;while the modern skyscrapers of the financial districtsin London, New York, Chicago, Tokyo and other
cities symbolise the power of contemporary capitalism
(Bradford Landau and Condit 1999; Willis 1995;Zukin 1991).
Third, landscapes of power broadcast a statement
about the status of a place – and send a signal to rival
cities or countries. In the late nineteenth century, forexample, the new industrial cities of England and
Wales engaged in highly competitive programmes of
public building, erecting large and elaborate townhalls, commercial exchanges and libraries as symbolsof their wealth, power and importance in a struggle to establish themselves as the country’s ‘second city’.
These ambitious projects were echoed in the grands
projets commissioned in Paris by President François
Mitterrand during the 1980s and 1990s – includingthe Grand Arc de la Défense and the pyramid at theLouvre – aimed at reinforcing Paris’s claim to be a
‘global city’ and France’s status as a world power
(Collard 1996).
Fourth, landscapes of power engender a sense of
loyalty to a place, an elite or a dominant creed. We havealready touched in Chapter 5 on the role played bylandscape in reproducing national identity, and most
capital cities have monumental spaces that perform
this function. Trafalgar Square in London, for example,is an unashamed exhibition of British imperialism andmilitary might and serves as a focal point of patriotism.At a more personal level, public statues celebrate and
venerate particular political leaders and dynasties, as
does, more subtly, the naming of public buildings afterlocal or national ‘worthies’ (Atkinson and Cosgrove1998; Johnson 1995; Osborne 1998).
These functions are performed by landscapes of
power through architecture and through the ordering
of space. Architecturally, the size, shape and building
materials of particular buildings and monuments canexpress power in terms of command over resources,wealth and property. The architectural style used maysymbolise certain discourses of power and place. For
example, classical architecture is often used for govern-
ment and judicial buildings because it implicitlysuggests a link with the classical ideals of justice anddemocracy (Cornog 1988). More explicitly, Napoleoncopied the triumphal arches of ancient Rome in build-ing the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in order to identify
his empire with the power and longevity of the Roman
Empire. Similarly, the use of sculpture, statues, murals,inscriptions and other symbols on and in monumentsand buildings can explicitly convey political messages.
On a larger scale, power is expressed through the
ordering of space, for example in the central locationCONTESTING PLACE 117

of royal palaces, government buildings, monuments
and – at a more mundane level – factories and markets.Other monuments and buildings express powerthrough their visibility – they are meant to be seen and
to be constant reminders to the subordinate population
of an elite’s power. These include monuments situatedon hills above towns and cities, as well as manufac-
tured vistas such as the Mall in Washington DC (Plate
7.1), the royal Mall leading to Buckingham Palace in London and the Grand Axe in Paris from the
Louvre through the Arc de Triomphe du Carousel and the Place de la Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe de
l’Etoile and La Défense. Such landscapes are rarely
constructed on undeveloped territory and power istherefore also expressed through the displacement ofsubordinate populations. When the Earl of Dorchesterwanted to create a lake to show off his new stately home
at Milton Abbas in Dorset in 1770 he moved a whole
village because it was in the way (Short 1991).
Kandy: an overt landscape
of power
Landscapes of power operate at different scales and
with differing degrees of subtlety. One of the bestdocumented examples of an overt landscape of poweris the city of Kandy in what is now Sri Lanka (Duncan1992, 1993). As Duncan describes, political power
in Kandy at the start of the nineteenth century
was based on a discourse of kingship derived from two mythical models. The first, the Asokan model, was based on accounts of a third-century
BCIndian
Buddhist monarch, which is a model of a righteousruler devoted to the welfare of his people, while
the second, the Sakran model, based on the model of
Sakra, the king of the gods, suggests that monarchson earth should also be universal, all-powerful god-kings. Duncan argues that both models of kingshipwere manifest in the landscape of Kandy – the Asokan
by public works and temples, the Sakran by great
palaces and monumental spaces. As the king gradu-ally lost authority over the state bureaucracy in astruggle with his nobles he attempted to compensateby appealing to both discourses of power by buildingmore temples and further elaborating his palace and
monuments.
The result could be seen in the landscape of Kandy
in 1800. The city consisted of two rectangles – thesupposed shape of the city of the gods in heaven (Figure7.1). The eastern rectangle was a monumental space,
representing the city of the god-king come down toPOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 118
Plate 7.1 The alignment of the Washington
monument and the US Capitol as viewed from
the Lincoln monument along the Mall,
Washington DC
Courtesy of Michael Woods

earth and paralleling in its layout the mythical palace
of Sakra, including a shrine to the tooth relic of theBuddha. In the western rectangle, and around the city,
were other temples and shrines. Thus as Duncan (1993)
comments,
Drawing upon the landscape models associated with
the Sakran and Asokan discourses on kingship,Kandy served as a stage upon which a god-king who
was also a Buddhist monarch could display both
his benevolence and ritual power to his nobles andcommoners.
(Duncan 1993: 237)
In 1803 an English army of 3,000 men attacked
Kandy. The king torched the palace, so that it couldnot be desecrated, and fled into the mountains with his army. The British captured the city and ransackedit, leaving a garrison to hold it, but the Kandyansmounted a guerrilla campaign, cutting off the supply
routes, then attacking the weakened British garrison,
and eventually recaptured the city and executed theBritish soldiers. This victory was used by the Kandyanking, Sri Vikrama, to reassert his control over thenobility. He did this by embarking on a magnificent
building programme to demonstrate his power to
supporters and opponents alike.
Between 1809 and 1812 there was nearly continuous
rebuilding and enlarging of the city, palace and royalgardens. Around the palace he built the Celestial
Rampart decorated with an undulating pattern repre-
senting clouds – this was supposed to show the palacerising above the clouds just as the city of Sakra roseabove the clouds on Mount Meru, home of the gods.The massive artificial lake to the south of the city wasequally supposed to represented the Ocean of Milk
at the foot of Mount Meru, while a canal cut around
the perimeter of the city alluded to the annual oceansurrounding Mount Meru. Perhaps the most symbolicstructure was the octagonal tower added to the templeof the tooth relic from which the king addressed his
subjects. As Duncan describes:
This octagonal structure was of great symbolic
significance, for when the king stood in this towerhe stood at the centre of the world with the eightpoints of the compass radiating out around him,
symbolizing and magically reinforcing his power.
(Duncan 1993: 239)
Thus as Duncan concludes:
We can understand this building programme as
an attempt by the last king to create a more perfectreproduction of the world of the gods within hiscapital and thereby to approximate more closely the glory and the power of Sakra, the king of thegods.
(Duncan 1993: 241)
Everyday landscapes of power
Not all landscapes of power are as explicit as that of
Kandy. Sharon Zukin, in coining the term ‘landscapeCONTESTING PLACE 119
Figure 7.1 The city of Kandy in 1800
Source: Duncan (1992: fig. 4), copyright © 1992,
Cambridge University Press

of power’, applied it to the everyday landscapes of the
United States – industrial towns, suburbs, shopping
malls and the ‘fantasy landscape’ of Walt DisneyWorld. In one memorable passage she observes that‘nowhere is the dialectic of concentration and exclusion,power and vernacular, more visible than from the
elevated subway train crossing the East River between
Manhattan and Brooklyn over the Manhattan bridge’(Zukin 1991: 184). On one side of the bridge, down-town New York presents a classic landscape of poweras ‘tall towers of steel, concrete, and glass create a
layered panorama of twentieth-century finance’ (Zukin
1991: 184); but for Zukin the real expression of powerlies in the contrast between the skyscrapers and themore vernacular landscape glimpsed as the subway rises above ground:
the red-brick tenements of Chinatown, built in the
1880s for Italians and Jews, testify to a still activeimmigrant presence. Window level with the trainopen on Chinese-run garment shops, while in thestreets below spill stands of green cabbages and
scallions, purple-skinned eggplant, and oranges.
(Zukin 1991: 184)
Another illustration of everyday landscapes of power
comes from Israel, where Dvora Yanow (1995) hasanalysed the power manifest in the construction
of a community centre in a working-class neighbour-
hood. The centre was designed to offer local childrenan ‘escape’ from neighbourhood life, but as Yanowdescribes, it also emphasises the leadership of the middleclasses and represents the imposition of a middle-class
worldview on the working-class community:
The architecture, landscaping, interior design, and
furnishings of the Community Center buildings tell a story of otherness and difference that has a particular ethnic and class character. It is a life-
style story about Western, middle-class Israeli life
that is told by people who are Western and middle-class to lower-class, development town and urbanneighbourhood residents who are largely non-Western in origin.
(Yanow 1995: 412)As Yanow details, the power of the middle class (and
the powerlessness of the working class) is symbolised
through almost every element of the building’s design,construction and location. While the architect may not have intended it to be interpreted in such a way,the community centre inevitably becomes a symbol
of relative advantage and disadvantage and therefore
of unequal power:
Community Center construction materials – stone,
glass, wood – were not used in residential or other
public architecture in the development towns
and city neighborhoods. More expensive than the local vernacular, they represent the availabilityof financial resources – wealth – and their associatedclass and social status. Interior design elements –paneling, upholstery, appurtenances – repeat this
same message. The scale – the massiveness of built
space – also is much larger than that of surroundingpublic buildings. This expansiveness is echoed inthe wide approaches to the Centers, which typicallyalso are set off on both sides and in back. …S cale
and surrounding space tell of the command of
resources. To take up space physically is also a signof power and control: The Center stands alone,without challenge.
(Yanow 1995: 411)
Because landscapes of all types can symbolise and
express power in these ways, it is unsurprising thatbuildings and monuments in the landscape can becomethe focal point of conflict. This includes conflicts thatsurround new developments that will significantly alter
the landscape of particular places, especially if the
transformation concerned has a greater social or culturalsignificance. Ley and Olds (1988), for example, describethe political conflict that surrounded the Expo ’86 fair in Vancouver, driven partly by the social impactsof developing the exposition’s site, partly by the cost
to public funds and partly as a debate about the cultural
meaning of Expo and the place identity of Vancouver.Landscapes of power are also contested, however,through the distortion of their symbolic order. Forexample, graffiti artists and vandals can subvert the
symbolic meaning of monuments and buildings.POLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 120

The next section briefly discusses three other ways
in which political power is contested through conflicts
over landscape.
Contesting landscape
Monumental landscapes and
the politics of memory
Discussing the ‘power of landscape’ with respect to
the American city, Dolores Hayden has observed that:
Identity is intimately tied to memory: both our
personal memories and the collective or socialmemories interconnected with the histories of ourfamilies, neighbors, fellow workers and ethnic
communities. Urban landscapes are storehouses
for these memories, because natural features suchas hills or harbors, as well as streets, buildings andpatterns of settlement, frame the lives of manypeople and often outlast many lifetimes.
(Hayden 1995: 9)
Hayden describes the encoding of the vernacular
landscape with individual memories and meanings, but other features in landscape – notably monumentsand memorials – are explicitly designed to structure
and shape collective memories and folk memories,
including historical narratives about place. However,just as history is written by the winners, so monu-mental landscapes are built by the winners, and theevents and people they commemorate are rarely
uncontroversial. One side’s victories are another side’s
defeats, one side’s heroes are another side’s villains.
The interpretation of history matters because his-
torical events and sites are used as props to supportpolitical campaigns in the present. Such is the con-temporary power of monuments and statuary that the
state has often been concerned to exercise control over
what and who is commemorated and where.
This is illustrated in Nuala Johnson’s (1995: 59)
study of public statuary in nineteenth-century Dublin.Before the 1850s only two types of statue existed in
Dublin – royal monuments and memorials to Britishmilitary heroes such as Wellington and Nelson. Both
served to reinforce British rule in Ireland and, as
Johnson notes, ‘inscribed Dublin as a provincial capitalwithin a Union whose centre was London’. As Irishnationalism grew, so did demands for the represen-tation of Irish heroes. The first to be commemorated
were literary figures, but in 1898 – the centenary of
the 1798 nationalist uprising – a proposal emergedfor a statue of one of the most charismatic nationalistleaders, Charles Parnell. By this time nationalistsdominated domestic politics in Ireland and the Dublin
Corporation supported the proposal, stating that
‘no statue should be erected in Dublin in honour of anyEnglishman until at least the Irish people have raiseda fitting monument to the memory of Charles StuartParnell’ (quoted by Johnson 1995: 59). However,Parnell was a controversial figure, disgraced for adul-
tery, and the proposal split Irish society. The ensuing
argument – which the pro-statue lobby eventually won – played an important role as a means of debatingwhat kind of nation an independent Ireland might be. As such, Johnson observes, ‘statuary offers a way of
understanding nation-building which moves beyond
top-down structural analyses to more dialectical con-ceptualisations’ (p. 57), in which the bottom-up actionsof the public can be incorporated.
Conflicts over monumental space can relate not only
to the subject and design of a monument, but also to
its location – especially where the site itself is imbued
with historic and political significance that contrastswith the symbolism of the monument. The fusion ofthese various sources of conflict was explored by DavidHarvey in his analysis of the construction of the basilica
of the Sacré-Coeur in Paris (see Box 7.1).
The politics of statues and streets
in Eastern Europe
In few places has the politics of landscape been as highly
charged as in the former communist states of Central
and Eastern Europe. The manipulation of landscapewas explicitly used by the communist regimes toemphasise their power and control, and to try to gen-erate a sense of loyalty and affinity among the public
towards the Communist Party and leadership. As notedCONTESTING PLACE 121

POLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 122
BOX 7.1 MONUMENT AND MYTH: THE BASILICA OF THE SACRE-COEUR
The basilica of the Sacré-Coeur on Butte Montmartre is one of Paris’s most prominent monuments. As David
Harvey observes, ‘its five white marble domes and the campanile that rises beside them can be seen fromevery quarter of the city’ (Harvey 1979: 362) (Plate 7.2). To Parisians it has been a permanently visible symbolsince its construction at the end of the nineteenth century – but a symbol of what?
The first clue is the name: it is a shrine to the cult of the Sacré-Coeur, the sacred heart – the idea that human
guilt needs to be assuaged by offering prayers to the heart of Jesus Christ, which was pierced by a centurion’slance during his suffering on the cross. The cult had gained some popularity in eighteenth-century France.Louis XVI dedicated himself to the sacred heart and Marie-Antoinette’s last prayers before she was executed
were to the sacred heart. As such the cult of the Sacré-Coeur became a symbol of French monarchism. It
enjoyed a second period of popularity in the mid-nineteenth century as French Catholics and monarchistswere faced with the collective threats of republicanism, secularism and capitalist industrialisation. It was inthis period that pressure for a shrine to the Sacré-Coeur to be built mounted, and become embroiled in thepolitics of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1 and the Paris Commune.
The Franco-Prussian War was a consequence of Bismarck’s expansionist policies and his attempts to secure
Prussian authority in the Rhineland. In July 1870 the Prussians invaded France and in September they besiegedParis, a siege that was to last until the following January. For many traditionalist French Catholics and monarchists
Plate 7.2 The basilica of the Sacré-Coeur in Paris, a highly visible
monument in the city’s landscape of power
Courtesy of Michael Woods

CONTESTING PLACE 123
the defeat was a divine punishment inflicted on a morally decadent France, and the nation needed to repent
to the Sacred Heart.
However, at the same time, radicals in the besieged Paris had seized power and declared a republic, the
Paris Commune. The declaration of peace in January 1871 and the election of a conservative government
based at Versailles – a symbol of the old regime – only frustrated the tension, and the new French governmentresolved to get rid of the troublesome radicals in Paris. In March 1871 the French army marched into Parisand seized the battery of cannons on Montmartre. Crowds of working-class Parisians spontaneously set out to
reclaim the cannons.
‘On the hill on Montmartre, weary French soldiers stood guard over the powerful battery of cannons assembled
there, facing an increasingly restive and angry crowd. General Lecomte order his troops to fire. He ordered
once, twice, thrice. The soldiers had not the heart to do it, raised their rifle butts in the air and fraternised
joyfully with the crowd. An infuriated mob took General Lecomte prisoner. They stumbled across GeneralThomas, remembered and hated for his role in the savage killings of the June days of 1848. The two generalswere taken to the garden of No. 6 rue des Rosiers and, amid considerable confusion and angry argument,
put up against a wall and shot’ (Harvey 1979: 370).
The response of the government was to launch a full military invasion of Paris, in which 20,000–30,000
citizens were killed. For the conservatives, however, it was the two generals who were declared to be martyrs
‘who died in order to defend and save Christian society’ and it was as a memorial to their martyrdom that
plans for the basilica of the Sacré-Coeur were finally approved.
There was some debate over its location. It was suggested that it should be built on the site of the present
Opera Garnier, but eventually the hilltop of Montmarte was chosen, because it marked the spot where the
generals had been executed and because it was only from there that the symbolic dominance of Paris could
be assured. The site was originally earmarked for a fortress, but the Archbishop of Paris persuaded thegovernment that ‘ideological protection might be preferable to military’.
Thus by the time building started on the Sacré-Coeur it had become not only a symbol of Catholicism and
monarchism, but also a symbol of atonement for the sins of modernism, a memorial to the ‘martyrs’ killed bythe mob, a totem of national identity and an ideological fortress, reminding people of the consequences ofstraying from Catholic conservatism. The Sacré-Coeur took over forty years to build, and during that time its
conservative associations led to many attempts to stop it, not least by the working-class residents of the districts
of Montmartre and La Villette which were overshadowed by the new structure. As Harvey describes: ‘the Basilicasymbolized the intolerance and fanaticism of the right – it was an insult to civilization, anatagonistic to the
principles of modern times, and evocation of the past, and a stigma upon France as a whole’ (Harvey 1979:
379).
In 1880 a proposal was mooted to build a replica of the Statue of Liberty – being built in Paris at the time
as a gift to the United States – in front of the Sacré-Coeur in order to subvert its meaning. But the proposal
came to nothing, as did all attempts to stop construction. It was finally dedicated in 1919 as a symbol of
French nationalism in the wake of victory in the First World War, by the then President of France, GeorgesClemenceau, who, as a young man, had been one of the leaders of the Paris Commune and one of the main
opponents of the basilica’s construction.
As such the basilica of the Sacré-Coeur works as a landscape of power in multiple ways, but it is also a
contested landscape, the construction of which was actively contested, and the meaning and interpretation ofwhich have continued to be contested.
Key reading : Harvey (1979).

earlier, the red star symbol of communism was ubiq-
uitously used on public buildings, and thousands
of statues of Lenin and other Russian and nationalcommunist leaders were erected. Elaborate warmemorials to the ‘liberating’ force of the Red Armywere constructed, often in prominent locations such
as the Gellért hill overlooking Budapest, while streets,
plazas and even whole cities were renamed aftercommunist heroes. Chemnitz in East Germany becameKarl-Marx-Stadt and St Petersburg in Soviet Russiabecame Leningrad.
Landscape acted as an omnipresent reminder of
communist power and when communism collapsed in 1990 the monuments of the old regime became theimmediate casualties of political change. JournalistTiziano Terzani, for example, describes the demolitionof Lenin’s statue in the Tajik capital of Dushanbe
during the disintegration of the Soviet Union that
followed a failed putsch in 1991:
The execution took place at dawn: precisely at 6.35,
when the first rays of the sun struck the roof of the
socialist-pink palace of the local Parliament, on the
square which a week ago was rebaptized ‘LibertySquare’. They put a steel cable round his neck, a huge yellow crane started pulling, and Lenin, asif unwilling to leave that pedestal from which he had ruled for seventy years, slowly keeled over to
one side and collapsed in pieces: the first statue,
symbol of the October Revolution, to be destroyedin Soviet Central Asia. An event of great historicalimportance.
(Terzani 1993: 251–2)
Similar scenes were repeated across the region. Outside
Budapest a ‘statue park’ was set up as a tourist attrac-tion to rehouse hundreds of unwanted statues removedfrom Hungarian villages, towns and cities. Many of themonuments that were left to stand were no longer
maintained and their growing state of disrepair became
an equally powerful statement of the new politicalorder. Plate 7.3, for example, shows the Russian warmemorial in the small town of Baja, southern Hungary.The memorial had occupied a prime position in the
town park, but by 1996 it had become a potent symbolof the rejection of communism – overgrown and
untended. By contrast, just a couple of hundred metresaway new sculptures representing local Hungarianhistorical figures were clean and cared for.
As the communist landscape of power was dis-
mantled, political conflicts emerged over what shouldreplace it. One example of this was the problem ofrenaming streets in the former East Germany. AsAzaryahu (1997: 479) notes, street names can play
a similar role to monuments and memorials as ‘com-
memorative street names conflate the political discourseof history and the political geography of the modernPOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 124
Plate 7.3 The Red Army memorial in Baja,
Hungary – stripped of plaques and insignia and left untended
Courtesy of Michael Woods

city. Spatially configured and historically constructed,
commemorative street names produce an authorized
rendition of the past.’ Under communism, street namesthat commemorated Prussian leaders were eradicatedand gradually replaced by the naming of streets afterCommunist Party leaders. With the end of communist
rule a new round of renaming was commenced, but
different cities adopted different strategies. In Leipzig,for example, historical Prussian figures were notrecommemorated, but rather new names were inventedthat promoted the new discourse of a united Germany:
While the theme of democratisation was articu-
lated by decommemorating the Stalinist past of the GDR, the theme of national reunification wasmainly articulated in geographical terms, mostnotably by naming streets after former West
German cities, such as Heidelberg, Ulm, Karlsruhe,
Mannheim and Heilbronn. The ‘new’ geographythus inscribed into the street signs meant an exten-sion of the national territory to include both Eastand West Germany in the framework of a united
Germany.
(Azaryahu 1997: 485)
In Berlin the problem was given greater significance
by the decision to relocate the capital of the reunifiedGermany from Bonn. In 1993 the city’s senate assumed
the power to rename streets in areas associated with
the ‘capital city function’ and adopted a programmeof restoring historical names that brought it intoconflict with the more moderate district councils. One particular flashpoint was Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse,
previously known as Wilhelmstrasse. The problem, as
Azaryahu observes, ‘was that this traditional name wasladen with historical associations and nationalisticmeanings unequivocally linked with the GermanReich. A restoration of the old name, therefore, couldalso be understood as an attempt to imply that German
reunification also meant the restoration of the Reich’
(p. 487). Instead the district council proposed the nameToleranzstrasse (Tolerance Street) as a symbol of a new,non-aggressive, Germany polity. This, however, provedunacceptable to more nationalist politicians, who
sought to recreate the previous global importance ofBerlin, and who launched a court challenge. Eventually
the Berlin senate ruled that the street should be
renamed Wilhelmstrasse.
Landscapes of control and exclusion
In the examples discussed above landscape has been
used to convey symbolic power. However, the orderingof landscape can also be employed as a means of phy-sically exerting power by restricting the movement of people, imposing divisions between groups and
controlling development and standards of living.
Atkinson (2000), for example, describes how one of thestrategies employed by Italy to control the nomadicBedouin population of its Libyan colony in the earlytwentieth century was to restrict the Bedouin’s mobilityby forcing them into fenced camps. The passage of arms
and supplies for resistance forces across the desert from
Egypt was also countered by the erection of a 282 kmbarbed-wire fence along the Libyan–Egyptian border.As Atkinson comments:
Although incongruous in the midst of the Saharan
landscape – particularly given the use of modernmilitary and communications technologies – hereagain, Italian conceptions of fixed, impassableboundaries were eventually materialised, in thisinstance, by territorializing the desert interior along
Italian lines.
(Atkinson 2000: 115)
Other states have combined the use of physical barriers
with the ordering of space through bureaucratic mecha-
nisms such as planning laws to order and control their
internal population. In apartheid-era South Africa thepower of the white minority was reinforced by theGroup Areas Act which spatially divided racial groupsin terms of residence (Western 1996). The apartheidcity was planned in a way that gave white areas every
benefit in terms of aspect, weather and access to
resources. In doing so, the law effectively controlledthe movement of the disenfranchised black majorityand denied them access to quality education and healthfacilities. Furthermore, putting the plan into practice
meant moving existing populations, with dislocatedCONTESTING PLACE 125

non-white communities not moved en bloc but rather
broken up and split between different areas, thus
weakening the social ties that might form a basis forresistance. The implementation of the proposals wascontested in a number of places, but only whites’objections were ever taken on board in revised plans.
Such strategies of spatial control are designed to
minimise resistance and therefore permit very littleinternal contestation. However, challenging theassumptions and dynamics of spatial control strategycan be a tool of external opposition to contentious
regimes. This is demonstrated, for example, in the
work of radical Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, whoseproject ‘The Politics of Verticality’ has critiqued Israeliplanning strategy in the West Bank. Through the useof 3-D maps, Weizman shows how the Oslo Accordsallowed Israel to retain sovereignty over air space
and the subterrain even where nominal sovereignty of
the surface was granted to the Palestinian Authority – a vertical division of territory that Weizman acknow-ledges was a practical method to enable the twocommunities to put into practice claims of separate
sovereignty over the same space, but which he also
demonstrates has been exploited by Israel to restrictthe longer-term potential of Palestinian sovereigntyby, for instance, building tunnels and bridges underand over nominally Palestinian territory (Weizman2002).
Contesting community
and identity
A second way of approaching the contesting of place
is to think about place not as a landscape, but as a com-munity. As discussed in Chapter 6, ‘community’ is a vague and malleable term that need not necessarilyhave to do with place, but when we do think of ‘com-munities of place’ we are thinking about groups of
people who develop solidarity and a shared identity
based on an association with a particular territory.Often place association is employed to define certaincharacteristics of a community, so all kinds of imagesand stereotypes are produced and reproduced about
the Scots and the Irish, about New Yorkers andCalifornians, about people from different villages,
or from different city neighbourhoods. As these charac-
teristics become adopted by individuals as part of theirpersonal identity, so individuals are moved to fiercelydefend that particular representation of place. Thisprocess can be a uniting force for a community, but it
can also be used to exclude certain nonconforming
groups and individuals – often defined in terms of race,religion, class or sexuality – from fully participating in the community. When excluded groups choose tocontest the dominant discourse, the questions of what
a place means and how it is represented become a
divisive issue and a source of conflict.
Discourses of place and community can be articu-
lated in a wide range of forms. Sometimes they areencoded in the landscape – as discussed in the previoussection – but they are also articulated in the writing
of local history, in folk tales and folk songs, in guide-
books and postcards, by jokes, by sports mascots andthe chants of sports fans, and by ‘official’ symbols suchas coats of arms and flags. For example, one particularlycontentious dispute over the representation of place
relates to the use of the Confederate flag in the southern
United States. Box 7.2 discusses the debate to removethe flag from the South Carolina state capital, but theflag has also provoked conflict in other states, notablyAlabama and Georgia. In Georgia the issue dominatedthe 2002 gubernatorial elections, with the Democrat
governor who had removed the Confederate cross from
the state’s flag in 2001 ousted from office by the firstRepublican to be elected Governor of Georgia since1876.
Parades, pageantry and politics
Representations of place are also articulated through
festivals, carnivals and civic pageantry. Such localrituals have performed an important function in com-munity building since the medieval period, although
many were ‘invented’ or ‘reinvented’ in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries at a time of great social change and instability. Significantly, thepageantry often tends to celebrate local distinctive-ness and romanticised versions of the past, serving
to reinforce the interests of local power elites and toPOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 126

encourage distrust of change and outside influences
(Woods 1999). This can become an exclusionarymechanism, either explicitly or implicitly – yet the
importance of such ‘traditions’ to local communitiesmeans that challenges to the imagery involved are
fiercely resisted. Box 7.3 describes one such contest overracial stereotypes in a carnival parade in southern
Scotland.CONTESTING PLACE 127
BOX 7.2THE CONFEDERATE FLAG IN SOUTH CAROLINA
The Confederate battle flag – a blue x-shaped cross with thirteen stars set against a red background – is one
of the most controversial political symbols in the contemporary United States. Dating originally from the Civil
War of the 1860s, the flag was resurrected for official use in a number of southern states during the 1950sand 1960s, at the time of the civil rights movement. Webster and Leib (2001) note, ‘due to its association
with both the nineteenth-century Confederacy and racist post-World War II pro-segregation groups, the
Confederate battle flag today inflames regional sensitivities and passions like no other symbol’ (p. 275). Formost African-Americans the flag is an ‘icon of hate’, emblematic of efforts to preserve first slavery and latersegregation. For a majority of white southerners, however, the flag is ‘symbolic of their ancestors’ struggle,
sacrifice and heroism against the perceived destructive power and tyranny of the federal government during
the Civil War and Reconstruction’ (p. 275).
The Confederate flag was raised above the South Carolina state capitol in the early 1960s, ostensibly to
commemorate the centenary of the Civil War. Its placement apparently generated little controversy at the
time, yet, as Webster and Leib note, then ‘the only black presence in the chambers were “porters” who actedin both janitorial and messenger capacities’ (p. 276). The flag emerged as an issue only in 1993 when theGerman car maker Mercedes Benz decided to locate a new plant in Alabama rather than South Carolina and
an Alabamian official indicated that ‘the lack of a Confederate battle flag above the state’s capitol had
played a positive role in the decision’ (p. 277). Over the next seven years demonstrations were mounted byboth pro- and anti-flag lobbies, the debate inflamed by growing racial unrest. Additionally the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) launched a tourist boycott of the state. As in
Mississippi (Kettle 2001), economics became a key motivation behind moves to remove the flag, preciselybecause the flag was read outside South Carolina as a signifier of the social and political attitudes of thestate.
Polls taken during the prolonged debate in South Carolina showed a clear divergence of opinion along
racial lines (Webster and Leib 2001), with the two sides drawing very different interpretations of the meaningof the flag for the place identity of the southern United States. For pro-flag campaigners it was a symbol of the
south as a moral, Christian society. ‘It represents a time when you could walk the streets without fear. A time
when the little man had a chance to make a life for his family. A time when God’s law was above all else’(white Alabamian, quoted by Webster and Leib 2001: 273). For opponents the flag signified a racist societyand represented the dilemma felt by many about southern identity, as expressed by one African-American
writer: ‘I love the South and, until quite recently, fancied myself a Southerner. Even though I was born and
reared in the South and do not plan to ever leave it, I no longer believe that an African-American can be aSoutherner. . . . The African-American, as imported chattel, was the South’s original exile, the bastard who
could not join the fraternity’ (quoted by Webster and Leib 2001: 290).
The racially divided opinion among the public was replicated in the state house, thwarting early attempts
to remove the flag, but the measure was eventually narrowly passed in June 2000.
Key reading : Webster and Leib (2001).

Pageantry and parades can also be used by minority
groups to contest dominant discourses of community.St Patrick’s Day parades in North America, forexample, started as demonstrations of resistance by
Irish immigrants against anti-Irish local politicians,
but evolved in meaning as the Irish assumed greaterpolitical power (Marston 1989). One sign of the Irish
community’s growing confidence was the direction ofthe parade through the main streets of towns such asLowell, Massachusetts, where Marston (1989) notes,
‘the St Patrick’s Day parades, as they wound through
the city streets, promoted a corporate awareness thatPOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 128
BOX 7.3 THE PEEBLES BELTANE FESTIVAL
The annual Beltane festival in the small Scottish town of Peebles is one of many similar ‘traditions’ invented
in the Victorian era. Over the course of a week it involves a series of events that combine ritual with carnival,including a riding of the burgh boundaries, the installation of the warden of Neidpath Castle and a fancydress parade. As Susan Smith has observed, ‘every component of the week-long festival hinges on and
contributes to the social and physical boundedness of the Burgh’ (Smith 1993: 293). Moreover the pageantry
stressed the importance of local culture, with, for example, ‘the preservation of local custom and livelihoodagainst the threat of incomers, outsiders and unwanted social change’ forming a common theme in speeches(p. 293).
One tradition was the presence in the children’s parade of ‘golliwogs’, or stereotype blacked-up figures.
In 1990, however, ‘a former teacher, born in Peebles but resident in Edinburgh’ (p. 296), wrote to the festival
committee and to local teachers complaining that the costumes were racist and asking for them to be withdrawn.Although the committee did not accept that the characters were racist, they reluctantly agreed to the request.Publicity in the local press, however, provoked a storm of protest. Significantly objections presented the complaintas an external attack on the community of Peebles.
How dare someone who is only a visitor tell the people of Peebles and our children to get rid of our
lovable Golliwogs?
I am disgusted at the suggestion that golliwogs are taken out of
OURBeltane . . . For countless years we
have enjoyed OURBeltane processions with all races represented.
A Peeblean obviously has the Beltane future closer to his/her heart than someone who has only seen a
few crownings.
Our festival is timeless . . . please do not subject it to every wind of change, however specious the arguments
of the opposition.
(all quoted in Smith 1993)
Letters of protest were supported by the subversive appearance of golliwog figures in the adult fancy dress
parade and, provocatively, the arrival of national media interest – reinforcing locals’ perception of besiegement.
Thus, as Smith comments, ‘the Beltane is as much about resisting marginality as about affirming the mainstream
. . . the form of the 1991 Beltane symbolizes local resistance to the intrusion of English politics into Scottishaffairs . . . in contesting the meanings attached to parts of the festivals by outsiders, the events of 1991 constitutea protest against the encroachment into local life of those middle class, “high” cultural values associated withthe urbanized Scottish Lowlands’ (Smith 1993: 300).
Key reading : Smith (1993).

it was they, the Irish, who had built the city through
hard labor, and it was they who continued to maintain
it’ (p. 266). Peter Jackson has observed similar spatialdynamics in the Caribbean community’s carnivals inLondon (Jackson 1988) and Toronto (Jackson 1992),yet the events remain as points of conflict over the
representation of the ethnic community and its claim
to place within the city (see also Cohen 1980).
Gentrification and the defence
of community
In the cases discussed above the contested concept of
community has been focused on symbolic represen-tations of the community rather than on the physicalenvironment of place itself. However, conflicts can alsoarise over developments in the built environment, not
for environmental or planning reasons but because
of the perceived harm that would be inflicted on thelocal community. In some instances it may be becausea development would involve the destruction of anentire village or neighbourhood and the forced dis-
placement and possibly break-up of a local community.
More commonly the process is more gradual and more subtle, as property developments attract in newresidents, changing the socio-economic character of the
community. Probably the best documented example
of this is the contestation of gentrification in NewYork’s Lower East Side.
For decades the traditional first home to newly
arrived immigrants, often living in conditions of
extreme poverty and overcrowding, the Lower East Side
fostered a strong sense of community and solidaritywhich created what many regard as the quintessentialManhattan neighbourhood. The features of communityand alternative culture survive today, but the Lower
East Side has also become a fashionable site for
upmarket housing redevelopment, changing the socialcharacter of the population and provoking a vociferouslocal politics contesting the process of ‘gentrification’(Box 7.4).
The area was first settled by German migrants in the
mid-nineteenth century, gaining the sobriquet ‘Klein-
deutschland’ (Little Germany). As the industriousGerman settlers prospered and moved uptown, par-ticularly to the newly developing Yorkville on theUpper East Side, their place was taken by new arrivals,
guided to this ‘immigrant district’ by the ‘street
birds’ who met them at the Ellis Island immigration station. Prominent amongst the new settlers were JewsCONTESTING PLACE 129
BOX 7.4 GENTRIFICATION
Gentrification involves the redevelopment of property by and for affluent incomers to a neighbourhood, leading
to the displacement of lower-income groups who are unable to afford the inflated property prices. The termwas first coined by a sociologist, Ruth Glass, in 1964 to describe the renovation of working-class districts in
London. Similar processes have since been observed in most Western cities as well as in many rural areas.
Urban gentrification is often associated with neighbourhoods with large older properties, such as tenements,that can be easily converted into apartments but which have become run-down owing to out-migration. At thestart of the process property prices are cheap compared with other parts of the city, thus allowing significantprofits to be made. Classic examples include Islington in London, Society Hill in Philadelphia and Waterlooplein
in Amsterdam, as well as the Lower East Side of New York. As Smith (1996) discusses, a number of different
explanations have been proposed for gentrification, including cultural theories linked with changing consumptionpatterns and economic arguments about the benefits of urban living. Smith also examines the role of propertydevelopers and speculators in fuelling gentrification, for example by raising rents to force out lower-incomeresidents.
Key reading : Smith (1996).

escaping persecution in Eastern and Central Europe,
and the Lower East Side rapidly became the social,
political and cultural centre of New York’s 2 millionstrong Jewish community. By 1910 the section of theLower East Side between Hester Street and HoustonStreet boasted over 125 synagogues in an area just a
mile long and half a mile wide.
As immigration to the United States peaked in the
early 1900s, the pressure on space in the Lower EastSide became enormous. Tenement buildings of six or seven storeys would house up to two dozen families,
in conditions that were unsanitary, vermin-infested,
severely overcrowded and deprived of natural sunlight.On the worst blocks of the Lower East Side in 1910over 1,200 people lived on a surface area of just 120mby 50m. Amid the poverty a strong sense of communityand self-help developed. Trade unions were organised,
relief charities were established, and adult education
classes flourished. Many of the beneficiaries of thiseducation became politically active, campaigning forbetter housing and public services.
The first attempt to improve conditions on the
Lower East Side was made in 1890 when the worst
tenements were demolished to create parks and openspaces. However, the major phase of slum clearancecame during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, with manytenements replaced by new public housing complexes.The district continued to attract newly arrived immi-
grants, notably the Chinese and Puerto Rican com-
munities – the latter settling in the northern sectorthey named Loisada. In 1981 over a quarter of its resi-dents had been born outside the United States. Thiscontinuing mêléeof ethnic communities combined with
an eastward drift of ‘bohemians’ from Greenwich
Village following the dismantling of the Third Avenueelevated railroad in 1955 to sustain a vibrant alter-native cultural and political scene in the Lower EastSide, and an enduring sense of community.
However, the combination of low property prices
and the newly fashionable bohemian atmosphere also
appealed to property developers, who began moving induring the 1970s, buying old run-down tenementbuildings and refurbishing them as luxury up-marketapartments. As Neil Smith (1996) shows, the ‘gentri-
fication frontier’ quickly penetrated into the heart ofthe Lower East Side during the late 1970s and early
1980s. Developers even began to change the cartog-
raphy of the district, renaming Loisada ‘East Village’to make it sound more attractive to potential investorsand buyers. The process had a detrimental effect on the community of the Lower East Side in a number of
ways.
First, the redeveloped apartments were sold at
premium prices beyond the reach of local residents.Second, tenants were evicted or forced out by rentincreases so that landlords could redevelop property
for sale or rent at much higher prices. Third, the new
middle-class residents attracted up-market shops andrestaurants, forcing traditional local businesses out;fourth, developers and new residents applied pressureto ‘clean up’ the overall appearance and atmosphere of the neighbourhood, clamping down on the homeless
and others judged to be ‘out of place’.
On the night of 6 August 1988 riot police moved
in to enforce a curfew on Tompkins Square Park in the heart of the Lower East Side, evicting the home-less, youths, drug dealers and drug users who inhabited
the park by night. The operation did not go to plan,
but was resisted not only by the park users, but alsoby local people who saw the action as an attempt ‘to tame and domesticate the park to facilitate thealready rampant gentrification’ (Smith 1996: 3). AsSmith describes, a riot erupted, marking a key moment
in the struggle against gentrification on the Lower East
Side. Resistance to gentrification continues, mobilisedby community groups such as the Lower East SideCollective and the Coalition for a District Alternative(CODA), who use art, direct action and participation
in local politics to further their campaign. Meanwhile
the interests of developers are promoted by state-sponsored public–private agencies like the Lower East Side Business Improvement District (BID) andthe Southern Manhattan Development Corporation.
In 1997 a new focus of conflict in the Lower East
Side emerged when Mayor Rudolph Giuliani started
the process of selling off city-owned ‘communitygardens’ to developers (see Box 7.5). The gardens’ saleis particularly contentious in terms of its meaning forthe local community as it not only contributes to gen-
trification by releasing land for development, but alsoPOLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 130

removes a from of semi-public space that has formed
an important meeting place for the community. At the
same time the city council sold the Charas Community
Center, a former school that had been unofficiallyoccupied and used by community activists since
the 1970s, to a developer intending to turn it intoluxury apartments (Plates 7.4 and 7.5). Through these actions the city authorities effectively weakened theCONTESTING PLACE 131
Plate 7.4 The Charas Community Center in
New York’s Lower East Side, sealed off andready for development
Courtesy of Michael WoodsPlate 7.5 The last protest against the eviction
of the Charas Community Center
Courtesy of Michael Woods
BOX 7.5 THE COMMUNITY GARDENS OF NEW YORK’S LOWER
EAST SIDE
The community gardens, or casitas , of the Lower East Side were created during the 1960s and 1970s when
residents took over derelict plots of land left by the demolition of buildings at a time when the population of
the area was in decline. As well as providing pockets of green space in the midst of a densely packed urban
neighbourhood, the gardens played an important social function. Collectively maintained by local people,
continued

POLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 132
they became meeting places for residents and locations for community events. Many had noticeboards
which publicised community information and political campaigns. The gardens also became an expressionof community identity. While some were very simple, others were themed and some contained distinctivefeatures such as elaborate sculpture (Plate 7.6).
Although not maintained by the city council, the gardens were technically owned by the council’s Parks
Department. In 1997, however, Mayor Giuliani transferred responsibility for the gardens from the Parks
Department to the Housing Preservation and Development Department, with the intention of selling them offfor development. The first four gardens were auctioned in July 1997, together with the Charas CommunityCenter, and bulldozed that December. Community groups mobilised in opposition to the sell-off, concerned
at the loss of valuable social spaces, and their campaign attracted considerable media attention. In May
1999 114 community gardens across New York were saved from development when they were bought byBette Midler’s New York Restoration Fund and the Trust for Public Land for a combined total of $4.2 million.However the policy of privatisation has continued and a number of other gardens remain under threat.
Key readings : For more about the case study see www.cityfarmer.org/nydestroy.html and the ‘garden
preservation’ section of www.earthcelebrations.com.
Plate 7.6 The East Ninth Street community garden, Lower East Side, New York
Courtesy of Michael Woods

organisational framework of the community in the
Lower East Side, and with it the capacity for political
mobilisation.
Summary
This chapter has demonstrated that the contestation
of place is often a central element in political conflict.This arises because the meaning of place is not value-neutral. Different actors – who may be individuals
or organisations – socially construct different places
coexisting over the same territory, and tensions aregenerated when elements of the different ‘imaginedplaces’ prove to be incompatible. As actors then moveto promote or protect their particular ‘discourse ofplace’, political tensions can become political conflict.
It can take a range of different forms and can be focused
on a whole range of different expressions of place. In some cases it is the interpretation of certain featuresin the landscape that is at issue; in others how a placeis represented through pageantry, or how it is sym-
bolised by flags and other insignia; in yet other cases
the conflict may revolve around the impact of develop-ment on the character and identity of the local com-munity. Usually these kinds of conflict are not justabout place. They are also about class or race or genderor other social divisions. But at the same time they are
not entirely reducible to class or race or gender because
of the significance of place in framing the dispute. It is by recognising and exploring the role of place in political conflicts of this kind that geographers canmake a distinct contribution to understanding such
processes.
Further reading
The material covered in this chapter leads to three
different sets of literature for further reading. Harvey’s
article ‘Monument and myth’, Annals of the Association of
American Geographers 69 (1979), 362–81, is an excellent
starting point for reading about landscape and power,while Yanow’s paper ‘Built space as story: the policy
stories that buildings tell’, Policy Studies Journal , 2 3(1995), 407–422, and Duncan’s chapter ‘Representing
power: the politics and poetics of urban form in theKandyan Kingdom’ in Duncan and Ley (eds), Place/
Culture/Representation (1993), are both very accessible
examples of analysis of landscapes of power.
For more on monumental landscapes see Atkinson and
Cosgrove, ‘Urban rhetoric and embodied identities: city,nation and empire at the Vittorio Emanuel II monument
in Rome, 1870–1945’, Annals of the Association of American
Geographers , 88 (1998), 28–49; Johnson, Cast in stone:
monuments, geography and nationalism’, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space , 13 (1995), 51–66; Osborne,
‘Constructing landscapes of power: the George Etienne
Cartier monument, Canada’, Journal of Historical
Geography , 24 (1998), 431–58; Robbins, ‘Authority and
environment: institutional landscapes in Rajastan, India’,Annals of the Association of American Geographers , 88 (1998),
410–35.
For more on power in everyday landscapes see Hayden,
The Power of Place (1995), and Zukin, Landscapes of Power
(1991).
The politics of parades, carnivals and pageantry are
explored by Jackson in two papers, ‘Street life: the politics
of Carnival’, Environment and Planning D: Society and
Space 6 (1988), 213–27, and ‘The politics of the street: a
geography of Caribana’, Political Geography 11 (1992),
130–51, as well as by Marston, ‘Public rituals and
community power: St Patrick’s Day parades in Lowell,
Massachusetts, 1841–1874’, Political Geography Quarterly ,
8 (1989), 255–69, and Woods, ‘Performing power: localpolitics and the Taunton pageant of 1928’, Journal of
Historical Geography , 25 (1999), 57–74. However, the
most explicit discussion of pageantry as a contested event
is given by Susan Smith, ‘Bounding the borders: claiming
space and making place in rural Scotland’, Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers , 18 (1993), 291–308.
The key reading on gentrification in New York’s Lower
East Side (and elsewhere) is Neil Smith’s book The New
Urban Frontier (1996), but see also Abu-Lughod, From
Urban Village to East Village (1994) and Mele, Selling the
Lower East Side (2000).CONTESTING PLACE 133

Web sites
The struggle over gentrification and the sale of
community gardens in the Lower East Side of New Yorkis well documented on the Web. A pro-developmentrepresentation of the neighbourhood is presented by the Southern Manhattan Development Corporation atwww.thelowereastside.org, while different perspectives
can be found on sites relating to the many active
campaigns in the district. The campaigns surrounding thecommunity gardens are reported at length at www.city
farmer.org/nydestroy.html, and in the ‘garden preserva-tion’ section of www.earthcelebrations.com – which also
includes a map of the gardens marking those that have
been destroyed. A report on the Charas CommunityCenter eviction can be found at www.tenant.net/Tengroup/Metcounc/Nov01/charas.html.POLITICS, POWER AND PLACE 134

PEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY3PART

Introduction
In this book we have approached political geography
from three different starting points. In Part 1 we started
with the state, its relation to territory, its use of spatialstrategies and its engagement with the wider globalcontext. Part 2 started with place, first considering thenation as a place, then the role of sub-national localities
in mediating political processes and finally the emer-
gence of conflicts over the meaning, representation andregulation of places. In this final part of the book westart with people. In particular, this chapter examinesthe geographies that are intrinsic to the ways in whichpeople engage with the political process as citizens.
These include the influence of place-specific factors on
voting behaviour, the implications of the territorialpattern of electoral districts on the outcome of elec-
tions, the promotion of the local community as a siteof ‘active citizenship’ and the use of place and space asa resource by protest movements.
Citizenship
Cutting across all the above themes is the concept of
citizenship (Box 8.1). We have already touched on
citizenship, either explicitly or implicitly, in a number
of places in this book. In Chapter 4, for example, wediscussed how work by Mark Purcell has introducedideas of citizenship into régulation theory as a means
of exploring the changing relationship between the
state and the citizen. Notions of citizenship and citizenDemocracy, participation
and citizenship8
BOX 8.1 CITIZENSHIP
Citizenship codifies the relation between the individual and the state. At one level, citizenship is a mark of
belonging – our national citizenship is a sign of the nation-state to which we ‘belong’. This is a legal notionof citizenship which we acquire either through birth or through application, and which then defines certainlegal rights that we enjoy as citizens and certain legal responsibilities that we must perform as citizens. Theright to vote and the responsibility to pay taxes are examples. At a second level, however, citizenship exists
through its practice in ways that may extend responsibilities and restrict rights beyond the legal framework.
For example, the practice of citizenship within a particular local community may be about helping that communitythrough, for instance, various types of voluntary work. Equally, members of some minority groups may findthat their de jure citizenship rights are in practice compromised by, for example, racist or homophobic attitudes
(see Smith 1989).
Key readings : Smith (1989) and Isin and Turner (2002).

action have also been implicit in our discussion of
nation building and nationalism, globalisation, com-
munity power and contesting place.
Citizenship is essentially an unwritten contract
between the individual and the state which defines theresponsibilities that a citizen has to the state, and the
rights that they are entitled to in return. However,
as T. H. Marshall (1950) noted in one of the classicworks on citizenship, the rights and responsibilitiesof citizenship are not set to any absolute standard, butare the product of a dynamic process of social devel-
opment. Marshall details, for example, how in the
emergence of liberal democracy in the nineteenth andearly twentieth centuries the primary emphasis wasplaced on the political rights of citizens, such as theright to vote or the right to freedom of speech. In post-war Europe the focus shifted to social rights, such as
the right to education and to public health services,
as social democratic welfare states were constructed.This was not replicated in the United States, where theeconomic rights of the individual remained moreimportant – a balance that has been introduced into
Europe through the processes of state restructuring
of the last two decades. As such, citizenship is alwayspoliticised and contested.
The three sections of this chapter reflect some of
these different expressions and experiences of citizen-ship. The first section, on electoral geography, focuses
on one of the core rights (and, arguably one of the
core responsibilities) of citizenship – the right to vote. The second section examines the promotion ofan active citizenship , in which the state has emphasised
the responsibilities of the citizen and weakened the
universal nature of the social rights of citizenship.
Finally, the third section looks at the exercise anddefence of citizens’ rights through protest, includingcases in which the meaning of citizenship has beencontested through challenges to the state’s territorialauthority and through manipulation of the symbols of
citizenships – for example, by protest camps issuing
their own ‘passports’.
As the final section will demonstrate, citizenship is
intrinsically geographical. Our citizenship identifiesus with particular territorial units and the validity
of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship havespatial limits. It is therefore surprising that there
has been relatively little direct engagement with the
concept of citizenship by geographers. (For notableexceptions not discussed here see Parker 2002, Painterand Philo 1995 and Woods 2004.) Moreover, muchof the work that has been done has not examined
citizenship as an object of enquiry in itself, but rather
has used citizenship as a tool in critiquing the inequali-ties of modern society. Following an agenda that relatesto the next chapter’s discussion of geography’s engage-ment with policy, geographers have compared the
de jure rights of citizenship that citizens should in
theory enjoy to the de facto citizenship that they actually
experience. This includes work on constraints placedon access to housing by ethnic minorities by racism(Smith 1989), and on how homophobic intimidationrestricts the spaces in which gays and lesbians feel
able to perform rights of expression enjoyed by other
citizens (Bell and Valentine 1995; Valentine 1993).
Electoral geographies
In a democratic society the right to vote – and con-
sequently the right to select and remove governments– is perhaps the most fundamental right of the citizen(see also Box 8.2 on democratisation). However, itshould also be noted that the outcome of elections
rarely reflects the pure, rational decision of the
electorate. Geography keeps getting in the way. In thispart of the chapter we explore the two main ways inwhich this happens – first when local factors influencevoting decisions, and second when the geographical
structure of the voting system distorts the result. We
then examine the cases of two elections where geo-graphical factors were essential in shaping the result – albeit in very different ways – the British generalelection of 1997 and the US presidential election of2000.
Geographical influences on voting
behaviour
The mapping of voting behaviour is one of the oldest
elements of political geography, dating back to 1913DEMOCRACY, PARTICIPATION AND CITIZENSHIP 137

PEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 138
BOX 8.2GEOGRAPHIES OF DEMOCRATISATION
The discussion in this chapter relates primarily to advanced liberal democracies in which citizens enjoy wide-
ranging social and political rights, including the ability to choose (and remove) governments through fair and
free elections. However, much of the world’s population has no such freedoms. In over seventy states, power
is exercised by unelected totalitarian regimes or a superficially ‘democratic’ system is restricted by the suppressionof opposition parties, vote rigging, voter intimidation and controls on the freedom of speech. Since the 1980s
there have been a number of high-profile instances of ‘democratisation’, notably in Central and Eastern Europe,
South Africa and parts of Asia. These events have been positioned by some commentators as forming part ofa ‘third wave of democratisation’ (Huntington 1991). According to Huntington’s model, the ‘first wave of
democratisation’ began in the United States in the early nineteenth century and continued to 1922, embracing
the establishment of parliamentary democracies and the universal franchise in Europe, North America, Australia,New Zealand and parts of Latin America. The ‘second wave’ followed the end of the Second World War andlasted only until around 1962, during which time democracy was reintroduced in parts of Europe and confirmed
in many newly independent postcolonial states such as India. The ‘third wave of democratisation’, it is argued,
began with the overthrow of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal in 1974 and continues to the present day,having reached its crest with the democratisation of Central and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s.
The democratisation of states is of interest to political geographers because, as Bell and Staeheli (2001)
describe, democratisation is often conceived of not just as a historical shift, but also as a geographical processof diffusion. The task of mapping the tide of democratisation has become an industry in its own right, involving
government agencies, policy think-tanks and academic researchers. Bell and Staeheli (2001) argue that in
order to measure the diffusion of democracy on a global scale, mechanisms have had to be constructed tofacilitate cross-national comparisons. In particular this has been done through the use of a ‘democratic audit’,
surveying states against a checklist of political rights and civil liberties, such as fair elections and a free press.
However, Bell and Staeheli contend that this approach reduces democracy to a set of procedures and institutions.For example, they note in the case of the audit used by the Freedom House think-tank that ‘in attempting to
evaluate the openness of a society to dissenting opinion, the survey team examines the kind of laws and
institutional protections for speech, but pays limited attention to actual speech within the country’ (p. 186).They warn: ‘The consequences of conflating the measures of democracy with democracy itself are that it narrows
the realm of possible configurations that might constitute a democratic or representative regime, and it severs
the conceptual link between elections and civil society in such a way that the latter can be left to languish asa regime struggles to create a procedural democracy. The result can be the election of “illiberal regimes”’ (Bell
and Staeheli 2001: 188).
Thus the evaluation of democratisation is a subjective process that is inevitably informed by strategic,
geopolitical, considerations. With this in mind, three further observations can be made. First, the promotion of
Western-style parliamentary democracy can involve the imposition of inappropriate institutions and procedures
to replace traditional forms of political organisation with strong democratic elements, such as tribal councils.Second, strategic considerations can mean that states with a poor human rights record are defended as
‘democracies’ while states in which free elections lead to the rise of parties that are Islamist (e.g. Turkey and
Algeria in the 1990s), xenophobic right-wing (e.g. Austria in the 1990s) or leftist anti-American (e.g. Nicaraguain the 1980s) are subject to international condemnation. Third, the ‘democracies’ of Western states such as
the United States and Britain contain flaws that can produce outcomes that might be condemned as ‘undemocratic’
if they were to occur elsewhere – as the discussion of the 2000 US presidential election in this chapter illustrates.
Key reading : Bell and Staeheli (2001).

when French geographer André Siegfried produced
maps comparing party support in the département of
Ardèche with the region’s physical, social and economicgeography. Siegfried’s work was simplistic, descriptiveand tended towards environmental determinism, butrevealed an essential truism – that voting patterns vary
spatially and that there is a relationship between them
and the spatial distribution of other social and eco-nomic entities. This is not entirely surprising. In most advanced democracies the party system is basedon historical social, cultural or economic ‘cleavages’
– for example, between classes or between religious or
ethnic groups (Rokkan 1970). As these social groupstend to be geographically concentrated, the partiesassociated with them will also find their support vary-ing spatially. So social democratic parties built onworking-class mobilisation have historically secured
more support from urban areas with a higher working-
class population, while pro-employer conservativeparties have attracted support from more middle-classsuburban and rural districts. Similarly, the tendencyof black Americans to vote Democrat is reflected in the
correspondence between voting patterns and the racial
composition of neighbourhoods in cities such as NewYork and Los Angeles.
When the spatial distribution of classes or ethnic
groups shifts over time, so the associated geography ofvoting evolves. For example, middle-class migration
from British cities to suburbs and rural areas in the
1960s and 1970s resulted in an increasing polarisationof rural–urban voting patterns – which weakened againwhen urban working-class solidarity was underminedby economic change in the 1980s (Johnston et al.
1988). However, if voting patterns simply reflected
the political preferences of socio-economic groups the geography would be purely coincidental. On thecontrary, electoral geographers have argued that geo-graphical factors can amplify social biases in voting.
First, people tend to vote in a similar way to their
neighbours, even if their own socio-economic status
suggests that their loyalties should lie elsewhere. This‘neighbourhood effect’ operates because individuals’interpretation of political news and issues is mediatedthrough local discussion, creating a predisposition for
people of all backgrounds to adhere to the dominantpolitical narratives of their locality. For example, Butler
and Stokes (1969) suggested that while 91 per cent
of working-class residents in British mining districtsvoted for the Labour Party, only 48 per cent ofworking-class residents in predominantly middle-class seaside resorts voted Labour. The neighbourhood
effect thesis has been criticised by some writers, who
argue that such patterns can be explained by mobilisa-tion around consumption issues such as housing and transport (Dunleavy 1979; Prescott 1972), but ithas more recently been employed as an explanation
of differential levels of turn-out in elections (Sui and
Hugill 2002).
Second, party loyalties can be disrupted by person-
ality politics and issue voting. A ‘friends and neigh-bours’ effect means that candidates can generally expect to poll more strongly in their home area while
anomalous results can be produced when specific local
issues overshadow issues in the national campaign. For example, in the 2001 British general election thevictorious Labour Party lost a seat, Wyre Forest, to anindependent candidate campaigning on the single issue
of saving a local hospital from closure. Third, variations
in the level of campaigning by candidates and partiesbetween different electoral districts or constituenciescan influence both the voter turn-out and party support( Johnston and Pattie 1997). This is becoming increas-ingly significant as voters behave more like consumers,
selecting between different competing party ‘brands’
rather than following traditional class or ethnicloyalties (Sanders 2000).
Gerrymandering and
malapportionment
Few governments or political leaders are elected simply
on the basis of the number of votes cast. In mostelectoral systems the vote is effectively filtered, eitherby the election of representatives from geographical
constituencies to a legislature or by the operation of
an electoral college. In ‘first past the post’ electoralsystems, such as those used in Britain, Canada and theUnited States, where the winning candidate ‘takes all’,this means that votes cast for a losing candidate in any
constituency are effectively ‘wasted’. A party that losesDEMOCRACY, PARTICIPATION AND CITIZENSHIP 139

in every constituency by just one vote will not be
represented in the legislature, while a party that wins
in every constituency by just one vote will hold all theseats. As such, parties are discriminated against if theirsupport is geographically dispersed and advantaged if their vote is concentrated in particular localities.
Historically, this bias has meant that small parties with
nationwide support but no ‘strongholds’, such as theBritish Liberal Party, have been underrepresented. Itcan also produce dramatic outcomes such as in the 1993Canadian election when the governing Progressive
Conservative Party collapsed from 169 seats to just two
(see also Johnston 2002a).
Which party benefits most from biases in the
electoral system will depend in part on how the bound-aries of electoral districts or constituencies are drawn.For example, Figure 8.1 depicts four towns with equal
populations but different divisions of support between
two parties, which must be organised into two con-stituencies. If town A and town B are paired togetherin one constituency and towns C and D in the otherthen the Red party and the Blue party would each win
one constituency. However, if town A was paired with
town C, and town B with town D, both constituencieswould be won by the Red party.
The deliberate manipulation of electoral district
boundaries for political gain is known as ‘gerry-mandering’ after a nineteenth-century Governor of
Massachusetts, Eldridge Gerry, who authorised a
peculiarly shaped electoral district in Essex County.When a local newspaper’s cartoonist saw a map of the new district he accentuated its resemblance to a
salamander, or as his editor named it, a gerrymander.
There is some debate about the correct application ofthe term today (Johnston 2002a, b; Moore 2002) butno shortage of examples of fragmented, sinuous orotherwise misshapen electoral districts designed, for
instance, with the distribution of racial groups in mind
(Figure 8.2).
In Britain responsibility for delineating parlia-
mentary constituencies lies with an independentBoundary Commission. However, party biases can still
arise. Malapportionment can occur between reviews as
urban-to-rural migration steadily reduces the electorateof urban constituencies while increasing that of ruralconstituencies. This has historically benefited theLabour Party before reviews, as the urban concentrationof its support meant that it needed to poll fewer votes
per constituency to win seats than the Conservatives,
whose vote was stronger in the expanding rural andsuburban areas; but it has also meant that the adjust-ments enacted by each review have immediatelybenefited the Conservatives ( Johnston et al. 1999,
Johnston 2002a).
Acting in combination, these various factors can
have a significant effect on the result of an election, ascan be seen from two contrasting examples – the 1997British general election, where geography helped toexaggerate a landslide victory for the Labour Party, and
the 2000 US presidential election, where geography
was crucial in determining the winner.
The 1997 British general election
The 1997 election resulted in the end of eighteen years
of government by the Conservative Party and theelection of a new Labour government. The period ofConservative dominance was produced by a numberof factors, but was assisted by shifting electoral geog-raphy in which Labour built up huge majorities in
its core urban seats while the Conservatives’ appeal to
the growing middle classes enabled them to spreadtheir vote more efficiently and win seats in rural andsuburban areas and provincial towns (Johnston et al.
1988). In 1997, however, the tables were turned as
Labour was elected with the largest parliamentaryPEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 140
Town A
Red party: 700 votes
Blue party: 300 votesTown B
Red party: 500 votes
Blue party: 500 votes
Town C
Red party: 400 votes
Blue party: 600 votesTown D
Red party: 550 votes
Blue party: 450 votes
Figure 8.1 Different ways of drawing constituency
boundaries can produce different election outcomes

majority for sixty-two years, despite polling fewer
actual votes and a barely higher proportion of the votethan the previous Conservative government had
received in the 1992 election.
The difference in 1997 was where Labour’s votes
came from, and this in turn reflected a more consciousmanipulation of the geography of the electoral systemby both the Labour Party and the electorate. First,Labour adopted a strategy of targeting ‘Middle England’
– middle-class voters in the 100 or so suburban,
provincial city and semi-rural constituencies that itneeded to win to gain power. Both the party’s policiesand its campaign message were specifically tailored to appeal to this relatively small group of voters,
producing a higher than average swing from the
Conservatives to Labour in regions such as south-eastEngland (McAllister 1997; Pattie et al. 1997). Second,
Labour also concentrated its campaign activity in thesetarget constituencies, undertaking relatively littlecampaigning in its ‘safe seats’. The party lost some
votes in its traditional strongholds to fringe parties
and abstentions, but its vote was more efficientlyspread, helping it to win more constituencies ( Johnston2002a). Third, voters too became more savvy about theelectoral system. In many constituencies electors voted
‘tactically’ for the opposition party best placed to defeatthe incumbent Conservative, with Norris (1997)
estimating that tactical voting and exaggerated local
anti-Conservative swings were collectively responsiblefor the loss of forty-six Conservative seats over andabove the national trend (see also Johnston 2002a;Pattie et al. 1997).
The 2000 US presidential election
If geography exaggerated the result of the 1997 British
election, in the American presidential election of 2000it was crucial in determining the winner. After a
prolonged and contentious process the Republican
candidate, George W. Bush, was declared elected with271 of the 538 votes in the electoral college, but withnearly 540,000 fewer actual popular votes than his
Democrat rival, Al Gore. Given the closeness of theresult, geography helped to determine the outcome in
three critical ways.
First, Bush polled popular votes where they counted
for more in the electoral college. The President iselected not by a popular vote but via an electoral collegeDEMOCRACY, PARTICIPATION AND CITIZENSHIP 141
Figure 8.2 US House of Representatives electoral districts in North Carolina. The shading illustrates how misshapen
districts 1 and 12 have become for partisan purposes

in which each state has a designated number of electors
roughly proportional to its population. The candidate
who polls most votes in a state gets all that state’s elec-toral college votes (except in Maine and Nebraska,which have slightly different systems). Although theallocation of electoral college votes is roughly pro-
portional, there are discrepancies. California, as the
largest state, has fifty-four votes, or the equivalent ofone electoral college vote for every 550,000 residents.Wyoming, in contrast, has three votes, or the equiva-lent of one electoral college vote for every 150,000
residents. In other words, a vote cast in Wyoming has
three times the value of one cast in California. In 2000Gore won large states, including California, New York, Pennsylvania and Illinois, but Bush led in moresmall states where each individual vote counted formore (Figure 8.3). Thus Bush’s 4.5 million votes in
the thirteen small states of Alaska, Arkansas, Idaho,
Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, NewHampshire, North and South Dakota, West Virginiaand Wyoming netted him fifty-six electoral collegevotes, whereas Gore’s 5.7 million votes in California
gave him only fifty-four electoral college votes (Archer
2002; Johnston et al. 2001).
Second, Bush also gained more from the efficiency
of his vote spread. Both Bush and Gore won a numberof states by a margin of less than 2 per cent, but whereasGore piled up huge majorities of more than a million
votes in California and New York, Bush was crucially
declared the winner in Florida by 537 votes. Thisnarrow margin brought Bush twenty-five electoralcollege votes – equivalent to the combined collegevotes of the eight smallest states – making the vote of
each one of the 537 electors 1,584 times more influ-
ential than that of the average voter (Warf and Waddell2002).
Third, Bush benefited more than Gore from
geographical variations in the administration of theelection. His narrow lead in Florida was assisted by
a controversial state law restricting the ability of
convicted felons to vote, which disproportionatelydiscriminated against Democrat-leaning black voters,and which did not apply in other states. At a more locallevel, the ability of wealthier (and Republican-leaning)
counties to purchase modern technology for castingand counting votes, while poorer (Democrat) counties
made do with antiquated equipment, made a small
yet crucial difference in reducing errors and completingrecounts in Florida before the deadline imposed by theSupreme Court.
Active citizenship and participation
in communities
Voting may be the classic mode of political par-
ticipation, but it is an increasingly unfashionable one.
Turn-out in the 2001 British general election was a record low of 59.1 per cent of the electorate, whileonly 51 per cent of the voting-age population votedin the 2000 US presidential election. Commentatorshave offered a wide range of explanations for this dis-
engagement, which we do not have space to cover
here, but it is worth noting that one possible factor isthat voters consider the question of who controls gov-ernment to be less important than previously becausegovernments are less involved in delivering services to
people than before. The restructuring of the state in
the late twentieth century, as documented in Chapter4, has cut back the scope of state activity across a rangeof policy areas and has shifted more responsibility on to citizens themselves. This transition can be seenas the emergence of a new form of active citizenship in
which citizenship is perceived not as something that
is passively received from the state, but as somethingthat must be actively performed by individuals throughparticipation in governance and sharing responsibil-ity for the defence of citizenship rights. Thus parents
are expected to raise funds for schools, residents are
expected to join ‘neighbourhood watch’ schemes toguard against crime, and communities are expected toproduce their own initiatives for economic regeneration(Kearns 1995).
The promotion of active citizenship has been
identified by some writers with a shift in governmentality
– or the way in which government renders societygovernable (see Box 2.2). One of the strengths of thegovernmentality approach is the attention it pays tothe apparatuses of security , such as health, education,
social welfare and economic management systems, thatPEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 142

DEMOCRACY, PARTICIPATION AND CITIZENSHIP 143
(a)
(b)
(c)Figure 8.3 States won by George W. Bush and Al Gore in the 2000 US presidential election. ( a) A conventional projection
of the United States. ( b) States represented proportionally to the vote in their electoral college. ( c) States represented
proportionally to the relative weight of each resident’s vote

are employed by advanced liberal states in the govern-
ment of a population (Dean 1999). The precise form of
organisation of these systems, and the extent to whichaccess to the services they provide is positioned as asocial right of the citizen, depends upon the political
rationality adopted by a state at a particular time. Thus
it has been proposed that advanced industrial states
have experienced a transition from a rationality of ‘man-aged liberalism’ – epitomised by the Keynesian welfare state – in which ‘social rights’ were emphasised and state planning was organised at a national scale to a
new rationality of ‘governing through communities’
which ‘does not seek to govern through “society”; butthrough the regulated choices of individual citizens,now construed as subjects of choices and aspirations toself-actualization and self-fulfilment’ (Rose 1996: 41).
The strategy of ‘governing through communities’
does not necessarily mean that territorial communities
have become the key units of government. The strategycan also refer to communities of interest or affiliation,such as ethnic minority communities, that need nothave territorial expression; but commonly it is through
geographical communities that new policy initiatives
are worked, if only because such an approach suits thegeographically structured apparatuses of the state. Oneexample of this can be seen in Australian rural develop-ment policy, which in the 1990s began to emphasisethe importance of building self-reliant communi-
ties that had the capacity, vision and motivation to
drive their own regeneration (Herbert-Cheshire 2000).Direct state intervention in major infrastructure developments was replaced as a strategy by initiativessuch as ‘community builder programmes’, community
leadership retreats and conferences with titles like
‘Positive Rural Futures’. Supporters of this strategy – and similar approaches adopted in most other devel-oped world states – celebrate it as an empowerment of
local communities because it removes decision makingfrom the arbitrary processes of a distant state and places
it in the hands of local citizens. However, critics have
argued that it is more accurately a privatisation ofresponsibility:
For those who advocate the self-help approach to
rural development, its empowering potential forrural people is a fundamental strength. In contrast,
for those authors who are more critical of the under-
lying intentions in governmental discourses of self-help, empowerment represents little more than a rhetoric to obscure the true extent to which powerremains (increasingly) in the hands of political
authorities. Whichever side of the debate individual
authors might take, the main issue for local people,perhaps, is not so much the intent behind discoursesof self-help – that is, whether government policiesare actually constructed around genuine notions
of shared ownership and control or not – but rather,
how those forms of empowerment are actually playedout at the local level; whether individuals them-selves feel empowered by the process or whether,as is suspected, it is not so much control as the addedburden of responsibility that is being devolved.
(Herbert-Cheshire 2000: 211–12)
As Herbert-Cheshire implies, the problem of empow-
erment lies at the heart of any critique of active citi-zenship and ‘governing through communities’. The
concept of active citizenship was originally informed
by a notion of the citizen as consumer promoted by
‘new right’ administrations during the 1980s, whichintroduced a new right of choice for the citizen in their consumption of public services (see Lowndes 1995;Urry 1995). Yet consumer rights are relative to spend-
ing power, and the consumer-citizen discourse has
been disempowering to those with limited resources as universal social rights have been undermined. Moreover, as the community has become positioned as the appropriate site for the practice of active citizen-
ship, so any empowerment that might accrue to the
individual has become subject to the internal dynamicsof community power, as discussed in Chapter 6. Inmany cases, so-called ‘community empowerment’ hasin effect been the empowerment of a community eliteto dictate development strategies or organise services
in ways that meet their own interests rather than
those of the community as a whole (see Box 8.3; Kearns1995). Similarly, the rationality of ‘governing throughcommunities’ has produced a new geography of un-even development, as some communities have greater
resources available (in terms of, for example, the wealthPEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 144

or professional skills of residents) than others either to
provide services and facilities or to compete for fundingand resources from the state.
Participation and social capital
Active citizenship and the rationality of ‘governing
through communities’ are both premised on a strategyof increasing participation in the political process –
both by drawing more people into decision-makingresponsibilities and by encouraging individual citizensto deepen their political participation beyond theephemeral act of voting. Additionally, proponents of
‘community empowerment’ argue that the enhanced
decision-making responsibility forms an incentive tocivic participation. Despite these ideals, however, thereDEMOCRACY, PARTICIPATION AND CITIZENSHIP 145
BOX 8.3 ACTIVE CITIZENSHIP IN BRITISH SOCIAL HOUSING
One dimension of the promotion of active citizenship by the British Conservative governments of the late
1980s and early 1990s was the transfer of responsibility for the management of social housing from elected
local councils to non-profit housing associations. This followed an earlier policy that gave the tenants of socialhousing the ‘right to buy’ their property and was aimed at reforming the management of that housing stock
that remained in public ownership, as well as meeting needs for new social housing. The principle was that
tenants would have direct representation on housing associations. It was argued that housing associations‘deliver accountability “downwards” to communities and are open to the influence, in practice not just inprinciple, of the people they serve. Moreover, they seem to be successful in delivering services which satisfy
most people. . . . If the objective of developing new forms of governance is better government, then Community
Ownership seems to have met with success’ (Clapham et al. 2000: 232).
However, this rhetoric is questioned by Adrian Kearns (1992), who has examined how far the management
committees of housing associations are representative of the communities that they serve. He found that only
12 per cent of all management committee members were housing association tenants, and only 49 per centof committee members lived in any of the neighbourhoods in which their association owned property or wasdeveloping properties. Committee members were also disproportionately male owner-occupiers with professional
or managerial jobs, compared with the population as a whole, while ethnic minorities and young people
were underrepresented. These biases arose in part because of the expectations placed on committee members,and in part because of the methods used to recruit members of the committees. As Kearns observed, ‘the popular
criticism that housing associations are “self-perpetuating oligarchies” would appear, in general, to be well
founded: through the use of personal recruitment methods, new committee members are likely to be fromsimilar social backgrounds to existing committee members, are likely to hold similar views and values, andare unlikely to upset the consensus on committee’ (1992: 28–9).
Kearns concludes that ‘the state is shifting more resources and responsibility into the hands of voluntary and
non-profit-making organisations without putting in place the necessary support arrangements to enable ordinarycitizens to perform the management task in a voluntary capacity’ (p. 32). In the case of housing associations
this raises questions about the extent to which responsibility and power have truly been devolved to citizens,
or whether a new cadre of middle-class professionals has simply been empowered. In other contexts moreserious issues of territorial equality are raised. For example, Kearns (1995) questions the reach of activecitizenship crime prevention schemes, compared with state provision, asking, ‘Does a neighbourhood watch
committee . . . feel that it is governing the entire neighbourhood or just those areas with significant participation
rates?’ (p. 163).
Key reading : Kearns (1992).

is little evidence that such strategies have produced a
greater degree of sustained participation by a larger
proportion of the population than traditional modesof political participation. Research in the United States, for example, has indicated that around a thirdof the population are not involved in any community-based citizen action, and that the engagement of
participating citizens is occasional at best (Table 8.1).
Furthermore, it has been argued that citizen actionhas become concentrated in those areas where parti-cipants believe that there is a real, short-term, chanceof achieving change – issues like ‘the right to shelter;
the right to worship in certain ways; to profess a sexual
orientation; to carry or not carry weapons; the right notto witness pornography’ (Kirby 1993: 142). As Kirbynotes, this development is regarded by some as a retreatfrom emancipatory politics, as it allows the assertion
of reactionary local ordinances while the state appears
impotent: ‘It may seem regressive, insofar as the statecan no longer guarantee human rights, and is reducedto making promises about the length of time one will have to wait for a hip replacement operation’
(p. 142).
The American experiences in Table 8.1 are highly
pertinent as the shift between rationalities of govern-mentality has arguably been less marked in the UnitedStates because social welfare was never developed to the same extent as in Europe, and the political and
economic rights of citizens were always prioritised
over social rights (Esping-Andersen 1990). As such the United States may be seen as offering a prototype for the future of active citizenship elsewhere, but itshould also be noted that active citizenship US-style
is not fundamentally anti-statist in that the resolu-
tion of citizen action is often achieved through localgovernment (Berry et al. 1993; Kirby 1993). In so
far as there has been a revival of community politicsand community governance in the United States it has
been the composite result of two separate processes.
First, consumer-citizens have mobilised to force localgovernments to respond to issues connected with
their own lifestyle choices. Second, the contributionPEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 146
Table 8.1 Citizen participation in fifteen US cities
Level of strong Type or frequency of activity No. of %
participation respondents
0 Respondent participated in none of the activities 2,212 33.41 Respondent participated in Crimewatch, electoral campaign, 1,451 21.9
contacting local officials, helping to form a new group or other activities involving some small degree of personal interaction
2 Respondent worked with others to help solve some community 1,563 23.6
or neighbourhood problem
3 Respondent participated in a specific citizen group or 658 9.9
neighbourhood association less than once a month
4 Respondent participated in a specific citizen group or 343 5.2
neighbourhood association about once a month
5 Respondent participated in a specific citizen group or 399 6.0
neighbourhood association more than once a month
Total 6,626 100.0
Source : Berry et al. (1993: table 4.1)

of community expertise, resources and vision has
been recognised as an important factor in economic
regeneration.
In order to tap into latent community resources, and
to stimulate citizen participation in districts where participation rates have been low, community devel-
opment strategies, not just in North America but also
in the European Union, Australia and New Zealand, areincreasingly focused on ‘community capacity building’.This means facilitating the development of networksand resources that enable communities to evaluate their
own needs, identify their own solutions, access funding
and implement their own projects. The role of externalagencies, including the state, has become the provisionof animateurs to supply professional advice and training.
For example, a number of US and Australian states now have government-supported programmes for
training ‘community leaders’ (see Richardson 2000).
By focusing on the community scale, the ‘capacity-building’ strategy is intrinsically geographical, becauseit promotes place-based solidarity and encouragesparticipants to emphasise the distinctness of their
locality.
Some authors have identified the purpose of com-
munity capacity building as being the developmentof ‘social capital’ (see Box 8.4). The concept of socialcapital highlights the importance of trust and co-
operation as a basis for collective action, proposing that
‘the more people connect with each other, the morethey will trust each other, and the better off they areindividually and collectively’ (Gittell and Vidal 1998:15). It also, however, places current developments
in historical perspective, as it argues that many of the
social and political problems faced by contemporarysociety – including low levels of political participation– are the result of a weakening of social capital duringthe second half of the twentieth century. The concept’s
main proponent, Robert Putnam, has exhaustively
documented evidence of the declining participa-tion of American citizens in a vast range of collectiveactivities – political campaigning, volunteering,membership of civic and professional associations,churchgoing, socialising with neighbours and even
leisure activities such as card playing (Putnam 2000).
Putnam blames these trends on changing workpatterns, changing family structures and the rise of newtechnologies such as television which have promotedindividualistic forms of leisure consumption, and
argues that these have all led to a decline of trust in
American society and hence of collective action.
Although Putnam occasionally disaggregates his data
by state, he rarely presents any kind of geographicalDEMOCRACY, PARTICIPATION AND CITIZENSHIP 147
BOX 8.4 SOCIAL CAPITAL
‘Social capital’ refers to the worth and potential that are invested in social networks and contacts between
people. The term is intended to be analogous to ‘economic capital’ – or financial resources – and ‘human
capital’ – or the skills and attributes of individuals. It has had a number of different precise usages, with some
theorists, like Pierre Bourdieu, employing it at the level of the individual to describe the resources containedin an individual’s social network, and others speaking of social capital in a collective sense to describe thesum value of networks and interactions in a society. Robert Putnam, the American political scientist who haspopularised the term, tends towards the latter position. He further makes a distinction between two main types
of social capital. The first, bonding capital , refers to social networks that bring closer together people who
already know each other. The second, bridging capital , refers to contacts that bring together people or
groups who did not previously know each other. Bonding social capital helps to promote community solidarity,while bridging social capital assists in enabling communities to access external resources.
Key readings : Putnam (2000) and Mohan and Mohan (2002).

analysis of social capital. However, Mohan and Mohan
(2002) have identified a number of ways in which geog-
raphy may engage with social capital theory. First, they propose that a geography of social capital mightbe explored through investigation of spatial variationsin levels of participation, volunteering and the exis-
tence of organisations credited with producing social
capital, linked with the development of spatially dis-aggregated indicators of social capital. Second, theyconsider the application of social capital as a conceptin geographical analysis, highlighting in particular
research on economic growth and uneven development,
work on the effectiveness of government institutionsand investigation of health inequalities. These dis-parate concerns are connected by Mohan and Mohanwith the observation that:
the interest in social capital results from a critique
of overdetermined theorization of links betweenstructural forces and individual experiences, a recognition that contexts matter to the outcomes of social processes, and, in particular, a critique of
the excesses of free-market capitalism and failures
of state intervention.
(Mohan and Mohan 2002: 202)
The usefulness of social capital as an analytical tool
is, however, blunted by the normative agenda that
underlies Putnam’s thesis. That is to say, Putnam is
not content with describing how society is, but alsosets out to describe how it should be – promotingpolicies and initiatives that encourage good neighbour-liness and civic participation as a route to rebuilding
social capital. For this reason, his ideas have received
considerable political attention around the world. At the same, though, they have also been criticised ona number of grounds.
First, Putnam’s explanations for the decline of social
capital are very top-down, linked with global processes
of social and technological change, and thus ignore
the specific circumstances of particular communities,especially low-income and minority neighbourhoods.Similarly, his interpretation of the effect of televisionwatching on participation has been questioned (Norris
1996). Second, his methodology has been challenged,with critics accusing him of charting membership
trends only in types of association that support his
argument and pointing out that the precise way inwhich social capital is created through participationin often mundane activities is never made clear (Levi1996; Mohan and Mohan 2002). Third, there is an
uncomfortable disjuncture between Putnam’s earlier
and later work. In his earlier study of Italy (Putnam1993) he argues that northern Italy has been moreeconomically successful and politically stable than thesouth owing to the denser presence of civic and social
associations in the north, but warns that the high levels
of participation and trust in northern Italy have beenbuilt up over centuries and cannot be easily replicated.However, in his later work Putnam seems to want tocritique the pattern of civic participation in the UnitedStates over a much shorter time scale, and to propose
a short-term programme for restoring social capital.
Finally, Putnam’s analysis of the decline in politicalparticipation in post-war America has been challengedby critics who point to the growth of protest move-ments and of radical forms of citizen action – as we
discuss in the next section.
Protest and citizen action
Not all forms of political participation are in decline.
As conventional methods, such as voting or performing
civic duties as local office holders, have lost some oftheir popularity, so non-conventional methods, suchas protest, direct action and radical citizens’ action,have grown in prominence. In the autumn of 2002 over
half a million people from around the globe gathered
in Florence, Italy, for the first World Social Forum – an event that combined workshops and seminars withprotest marches and demonstrations in promoting anagenda of global peace and justice that was intendedas a counterpoint to the annual meeting of business
leaders and politicians at the World Economic Forum.
The Florence gathering built on earlier mass demon-strations at meetings of the World Trade Organisationin Seattle and Genoa as part of an emergent anti-globalisation movement. Significantly, all three events
involved large numbers of young people – precisely thePEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 148

population group that has become most detached from
conventional politics.
On a broader scale, the latter part of the twentieth
century also saw a massive expansion of pressure-grouppolitics. While Putnam (2000) recorded the down-ward trend of participation in civic and voluntary
organisations in the United States, many campaigning
pressure groups have over the same period enjoyed arapid growth in membership, especially groups asso-ciated with issues such as the environment and humanrights. Friends of the Earth, for example, has grown
from a handful of founder members in four countries
in 1971 to over a million members in sixty-eightcountries by 2002. The participation of many of thesemembers will be fairly passive, and some will be‘cheque book activists’ whose only involvement will be to make regular donations. However, the environ-
mental movement has also been at the forefront of
pioneering direct action protests that no longer relyon the state to take action on behalf of the citizen butwhich engage citizens in direct confrontation (seeMcKay 1998; Wall 1999).
The kinds of political participation described here
have prompted a reworking of citizenship in threeways. First, demonstrations and direct action are anassertion of citizens’ right to protest, but they alsorepresent a lack of trust in the ability of conventionalpolitics to respond to citizens’ demands. Second,
actions such as the demonstrations in Florence, Seattle
and Genoa are a response to the seeping upwards of power away from nation states to transnationalinstitutions and corporations – from the World TradeOrganisation to McDonald’s. As conventional politics,exercised through the apparatuses of the nation-state,
offers no route of direct democratic engagement with
these new centres of power, new forms of citizen actionhave developed to circumvent the state in challengingtransnational institutions and corporations directly as acts of ‘global citizenship’. One notable example of
this was the dismantling of a McDonald’s restaurant
in southern France by activists in the Confédérationpaysanne led by José Bové. When Bové was chargedwith criminal damage he effectively inverted the courtproceedings into a trial of globalisation by calling
environmental and social justice campaigners from
around the world as witnesses (Woods 2003b).
Third, radical action of this kind has proved that
active citizenship does not just occur on agendas setby the state – citizens themselves can define the scopeand purpose of their engagement by embarking on
radical action to protect and promote communities. As
such, non-conventional politics are not just aboutprotest, but can combine advocacy with mutuality,especially around issues that are peripheral tomainstream conventional politics, such as gay rights
and AIDS activism.
Integral to these processes has been a reconfiguration
of the spaces through which citizenship is performed.On the one hand this has involved an up-scaling todraw together participants from across the world totarget transnational institutions and corporations about
issues of global significance in acts of global citizenship.
Yet, at the same time, such protests are always situatedand the ways in which they interact with, manipulateand subvert the geographies of their location canimpact on their success (see Box 8.5). Linked with thisDEMOCRACY, PARTICIPATION AND CITIZENSHIP 149
BOX 8.5 AIDS ACTIVISM IN VANCOUVER
One example of the reworking of citizenship through radical action is Michael Brown’s study of AIDS activism
in Vancouver. As Brown (1997a) describes, citizens’ responses to the AIDS epidemic took a number of forms,
from self-help to political protest, all of which operated in a local political climate dominated by sociallyconservative city and provincial governments that were reluctant to engage with the growing crisis faced byAIDS sufferers. At one level, AIDS activism involved a form of active citizenship as volunteers provided care
continued

is a new localism, in which local communities have
been identified as the starting point for radical action– an approach encapsulated in the slogan of the
environmental movement of ‘Think global, act local’.
New social movements
The rise of non-conventional politics has promoted the
emergence of not just new forms of political action and
citizenship but also new forms of political organisation.Whereas conventional politics has been organisedthrough the formalised structures of political parties,
trade unions, trade associations and lobby groups, thegroups that make up the environmental movement,
or are involved in AIDS activism or anti-globalisation
protests, tend to be less formal, decentred and oftenephemeral in their existence, with little or no directconnection with the electoral process. As such they havebeen characterised as ‘new social movements’ – a
designation that is designed both to distinguish them
from other forms of associational activity that do nothave political objectives, such as social and voluntaryPEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 150
and support for sufferers, often providing services that were not available through the state. At another level,
however, caring voluntarism could not be separated from the political objective of raising awareness of
the AIDS problem. This included the exhibition of a memorial quilt, consisting of 12 ft by 12 ft patchworkscommemorating people who had died from AIDS-related causes. Contrary to some theories of radical
democratic citizenship which have emphasised the importance of confrontation, Brown (1997a) argues that
the quilt was equally a political act of radical citizenship because it served to convert grief and mourning intoa political statement in a highly visible public space. The transgression of public space was also significantfor the more confrontational protest activities of a radical group, ACT UP (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power).Formed in 1990, Vancouver ACT UP aimed to raise awareness and demand positive action from government
and health institutions through public stunts and demonstrations, including a die-in and the occupation of the
Health Minister’s office. Significantly, although the state was nominally the target of ACT UP’s protests, themajority of its actions took place not in state-centred spaces but in the public spaces of civil society – includingtheatres and shopping streets. As Brown (1997b: 157) comments, ‘the state was rarely engaged on its ownturf; rather it was challenged in public spaces of civil society. Civil society, operationalized in public space,was a weapon of resistance against the state.’ This strategy helped to achieve some objectives of raising
public awareness, but it also, Brown argues, contributed to the ultimate failure of ACT UP. The group’s life
span was short, organising just nine events over two years, and it proved less successful than other moremainstream AIDS organisations in influencing the city government. Brown (1997b) identifies the reasons asconnected with geography in two ways. First, he argued that ACT UP misunderstood the nature of local politicsin Vancouver. It was essentially a US model transplanted to Canada which failed to realise either that the
more generous welfare system in Canada limited the scope of its demands of the state, or that local political
culture articulated through the city’s newspapers would be antagonistic to its style of protest. Second, inadopting a political geography of protest that attempted to set civil society against the state, ACT UP failedto appreciate the extent to which the local state and local civil society were interwoven. As Brown (1997b)notes, ‘key state bureaucrats were secretly funding AIDS service organisations, much to [the ruling party’s]chagrin. In other words, by attacking the state fromcivil society, ACT UP failed to acknowledge the ironic
linkages between the two spheres, which were common knowledge in local AIDS politics’ (p. 163). Thus,
while radical democratic citizenship may be oriented around global issues such as AIDS, its actions remainsituated and continue to need to be sensitive to locality.
Key readings : Brown (1997a and b).

organisations and religious movements (see Box 8.6),
and to emphasise that they are the product of a para-
digm shift in politics.
Social movements themselves are not new – the
labour movement being a prime historical example.However, the distinction of ‘new’ social movements
is used to indicate a shift in emphasis in the objectives
of social movement activity:
While the ‘old’ social movements emanated from
the class structure of industrial capitalism and
aimed at uprooting the material inequalities pro-
duced by the mode of production, the ‘new’ socialmovements cut across classes and are guided by non-material considerations.
(Fainstein and Hirst 1995: 183)
According to Claus Offe (1987: 73), this transition
reflects a wider shift between political paradigms – from an ‘old’ paradigm centred around issues ofeconomic growth and distribution and characterisedby action through formal representative organisations,
party political competition and corporatist bargain-
ing to a ‘new’ paradigm centred on issues such as thepreservation of the environment, human rights, peaceand social justice, in which action is informal andspontaneous, operating through protest politics, with
demands formulated in predominantly negative terms.
For Offe (1985) social movements have been key agentsin this transition, critiquing the institutional assump-tions of representative democracy. Instead, he argues,they have forged a new radical politics, expressed
through a critical ideology of modernism and progress,
defence of interpersonal solidarity against bureau-cracies, and new forms of political organisation (see alsodella Porta and Diani 1999: 12). As della Porta andDiani summarise, in Offe’s view new social movements
are characterised by ‘an open, fluid, organisation, an
inclusive and non-ideological participation, and greaterattention to social than to economic transformation’(1999: 12).
Thus the motivation for new social movement
mobilisation cannot be reduced simply to material
gain, but may concern the achievement of symbolic
goals or the defence of symbolic resources. Despite thecontention in some analyses of social movements thatindividuals will participate in collective action onlywhen the benefits that accrue to them as individuals
outweigh the costs (Olson 1968; see also Fainstein and
Hirst 1995), the implication of Offe’s new paradigmis that ‘new’ social movements have emerged in whichthe individual material gain to the participant is notDEMOCRACY, PARTICIPATION AND CITIZENSHIP 151
BOX 8.6 SOCIAL MOVEMENT
Diani (1992: 13) defines a social movement as ‘a network of informal interactions between a plurality of
individuals, groups and/or organisations, engaged in political or cultural conflict on the basis of a sharedcollective identity’. There are four key components to this definition. First, a social movement comprises anumber of different, independent, groups who share a common purpose, but may also on occasion adopt
contradictory policies or strategies and be drawn into conflict with each other. Second, the links between the
component groups are informal – there is no centralised leadership or command. Third, social movementsare engaged in political activity. This distinguishes them from social clubs, voluntary groups and religiousorganisations. Fourth, the uniting force for social movements is a shared identity, not just shared interests.Together, these components allow social movements to be distinguished ‘from various forms of collective action
which are more structured and which take on the form of parties, interest groups or religious sects, as well as
single protest events or ad hoc political coalitions’ (della Porta and Diani 1999: 16).
Key readings : della Porta and Diani (1999) and Diani (1992).

obvious – but where the costs of participation are
balanced by the aim of achieving some greater good.
One might think here of environmental protesters, ofdemonstrators against armament sales to undemocraticregimes and of campaigners against Third World debt.
As these last three examples indicate, the shift in the
object of political engagement between the old and new
paradigms of politics also has a spatial expression. First,because the formal electoral process has become lesssignificant in the practice of politics by new socialmovements, and because many key concerns of new
social movements are about global issues, the nation-
state has become less important as the scale of action,with social movements often campaigning acrossnational boundaries. Second, there has been a con-current shift in the spaces of political action. Whereasthe spaces of political action by ‘old’ social movements
are the sites of state and economic power – parliaments,
government buildings, factories, workplaces – thespaces employed by new social movements are thespaces of social and environmental power and spacesof consumption and communication – supermarkets
and shopping malls, carnivals, fairs and public spaces.
In part this shift reflects the fact that social movementsare not interested in assuming power, in taking overgovernment: rather they seek to change political prac-tice and policy. A key weapon in this respect is publicopinion, and crucially, winning over public opinion
means enrolling the media:
for the most part social movements use forms of
action which can be described as disruptive, seek-ing to influence elites through a demonstration of
both force of numbers and activists’ determination
to succeed. At the same time, however, protest isconcerned with building support. It must beinnovative or newsworthy enough to echo in themass media and, consequently, in the wider publicwhich social movements (as ‘active minorities’) are
seeking to convince of the justice of their cause.
(della Porta and Diani 1999: 183)
In order to meet the need for media coverage, many
protests by new social movements are symbolic in
nature rather than directly threatening to powerholders, thus practising a form of political action that
Paul Routledge has labelled ‘the postmodern politics
of resistance’.
Postmodern politics of resistance
Routledge regards the key difference between older
and newer forms of political action to be the way inwhich contemporary struggles are ‘postmodern’ intheir extensive mediation and symbolic nature. Post-modern politics aims not to capture the state apparatus,
but rather to resist and restrict state power (and
corporate power) when the exercise of that power is perceived to threaten valued environments, com-munities or ways of life: ‘Postmodern politics, then, arecharacterized by heterogeneous affinities that coalescein particular times and places as activist assemblages.
Eschewing the capture of state power, they nevertheless
pose challenges to the state’ (Routledge 1997a: 373).The challenges to the state tend not to be mounteddirectly, but to be mediated through society and themedia, relying on symbolic action to distort and
subvert social and spatial orders:
such a politics mounts symbolic challenges that
are extensively media-led in order to render powervisible and negotiable, and to attract public atten-tion. Such a politics, and the spaces within which,
and from which, it is articulated are frequently
hybrid in character and ambiguous in practice andeffect.
(Routledge 1997a: 372)
Routledge (1997a) demonstrates this model through
the example of a protest against the construction of a new motorway, the M77, through Pollock Park on the edge of Glasgow, Scotland. The protest cam-paign was organised by Glasgow Earth First! andinvolved both local people and participants who came
specifically to join the protesters from elsewhere. It
involved the occupation of the construction site witha semi-permanent protest camp as well as other tacticssuch as protest marches and sabotaging machinery.However, as well as forming a physical obstacle to the
road building, the protest mounted a series of symbolicPEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 152

challenges to the planning of space that had led to road
proposals, to the cultural norms of a car-dependent
society and to the power of the state. These symbolicchallenges involved both the subversion of spatial orderand the subversion of citizenship – the latter beingarticulated by the declaration of the protest camp as a
‘free state’ and the issuing of its own ‘passports’:
The Free State represented the ‘homeplace’ and the
focus of the resistance against the M77, articulatingan alternative space that occupied symbolic and
literal locations. It acted as a place where people
who were interested in the M77 campaign couldlearn more and get involved. …T h e Free State
stood as a critique of the environmental damagecaused by road building and an example of howpeople might live their lives differently. Its politics
of articulation interwove ecological, cultural and
political dimensions.
(Routledge 1997a: 366)
These messages were reinforced by the mixture of
symbols, icons and images created and employed
within the camp (see Plate 8.1):
In addition to the totems and tree houses –
themselves hybrid sites of habitation and tacticalforms of protection for trees – the Free State
comprised a mixture of symbols. Abandoned cars
were used to create dramatic sculptures such as‘Carhenge’. A flag of the Lion Rampant girded thetrunk of a tree near to the entrance of the Free State,next to which was an Australian aboriginal land
rights flag. A wind-powered generator supplied
power to a portable television and stood above amobile phone. Next to images of Celtic knots flewBuddhist-style prayer flags strung from the trees,on which the phrase ‘Save our dear green place’ wasblock-printed.
(Routledge 1997a: 367)
In these ways the Pollock protest camp communicated
a message about a global issue – the environment –through the manipulation of a specific site. To do so it
drew together in a unique, place-specific, combinationcultural symbols and signifiers from around the world
that associated the site with a plethora of struggles from
renewable energy to Aboriginal land rights. In a
different study, of resistance to a military base in India,Routledge (1992) describes a similar combination of physical and symbolic challenges through themanipulation and subversion of space – but drawing
strength from the rearticulation of local representations
of place (Box 8.7). Both examples, however, take us back to an observation that we borrowed fromMichel Foucault at the beginning of this book. Notonly is space, as Foucault noted, ‘fundamental in any
exercise of power’ (Rabinow 1984: 252), but space is
also fundamental in any resistance to power.DEMOCRACY, PARTICIPATION AND CITIZENSHIP 153
Plate 8.1 The ‘carhenge’ sculpture at the
Pollock Free State protest camp
Courtesy of Paul Routledge

Conclusion
This chapter has explored three means of citizen
engagement with the state in a democratic society.
First, through the ballot box as part of the electoral
process; second, as active citizens enrolled in civicparticipation at a local scale; third, through involve-
ment in protest events and social movements. Each of these activities is itself a result of particular rights
enjoyed by citizens in a liberal democracy – the rightto vote, the right to participate in government and the
right to protest – but which are routinely suppressedPEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 154
BOX 8.7 SPACE, PLACE AND RESISTANCE: THE BALIAPAL PROTEST
In 1984 the Indian government announced plans to build a missile testing range in Baliapal, a rural district
in north-eastern Orissa on the Bay of Bengal coast. Baliapal had been selected as the site for the range becauseof its geographical isolation, climate and topography, but the proposed development posed a threat to thelocal agricultural economy and would have displaced some of the region’s 100,000 residents. A movementwas formed to oppose the development by two local politicians, one from the right-wing Janata party, theother from the Communist Party. The resistance movement transcended class and caste divisions, unitingparticipants around a sense of community. It used the traditional local social structure in forming a committeeof traders and village council leaders and adopted a strategy of non-violent resistance that ‘spanned methodsof intervention, non-co-operation and protest, and persuasion’ (Routledge 1992, reprinted in Agnew 1997:231).
At one level the tactics of resistance involved physically obstructing the construction work. Barricades were
erected to stop government officials from entering the area: ‘In order to warn people of approaching government
vehicles, conch shells were blown and thalis (metal plates) were beaten, thereby summoning thousands of
villagers to the barricades. Once there the villagers lay down in the road, forming human road blocks’ (p.232). By restricting access to government officials, the movement subverted spatial order by challenging theterritorial authority of the state. This was also done by ‘demolition squads’ who acted to demolish the newmodel villages being built for the evicted peasants.
At a second level, the Baliapal protest also mounted a symbolic challenge through the discursive mobilisation
of a sense of place. As Routledge records, ‘the Baliapal movement was informed and motivated by a potentsense of place which refined and strengthened the economic motivation provided by the locale. This sense ofplace was epitomized by the movement’s ideology of “Bheeta Maati” (our soil) articulated as “our soil; ourearth; our land”. As one activist remarked to me: “For Baliapalis the land is our mother; our earth; our home.This is in the hearts of the people”’ (Routledge, in Agnew 1997: 233).
Through these tactics, Routledge argues, ‘the emergence of a people’s movement in Baliapal and the
adoption of a potent variety of non-violent tactics has transformed the padi fields and jungles of the area into
a terrain of resistance. . . . The terrain has been articulated socio-politically within civil society where thegovernment’s legitimacy to make policy decisions which are antithetical to local community interests has beenchallenged by a withdrawal of peasant consent. The terrain has been articulated culturally in the form of songs,poems, the Vichar process, various religious idioms and the movement’s non-violent tactics – those “little
tactics of the habitat”’ (Routledge, in Agnew 1997: 235).
Key reading : Routledge (1992).

in states where democracy is restricted or non-existent.
The struggle for democracy can be cast in geopolitical
terms, providing a framework for the ‘new world order’and counterpoising ‘Western’ democracy against ‘non-Western’ autocracy. Such a model, however, invites acritique, not least of the ways in which the meanings
of ‘democracy’ are constructed and of the limitations
of democracy within supposedly ‘democratic’ states.Even in advanced liberal democracies, de jure citizen-
ship rights may not be comprehensively implementedin practice, such that the de facto citizenship of certain
groups becomes restricted – particularly for ethnic
and sexual minorities (Bell 1995; Kofman 1995). Thedifference between de jure and de facto citizenship
frequently has a spatial manifestation – on finding thattheir rights are restricted in particular (often public)spaces, excluded groups create and colonise more
private, marginal, spaces in which greater freedom can
be achieved and the enforcement agencies of the stateor of an intolerant majority may be evaded (Bell 1995;Pincetl 1994; Valentine 1993).
Indeed, citizenship has become an increasingly
important concept for political geographers in part
because the performance of citizen rights and respon-sibilities is so strongly geographical. As noted in thischapter, spatial structures can shape the patterns andoutcomes of political participation by citizens, as in theeffect of electoral district territories on election results
or in the differing opportunities for civic participation
that exist in different localities. At the same time,citizens’ political participation can create new geog-raphies and new spaces. Moreover, space can be a focusof struggles over citizenship, particularly around issues
of public and private space. Citizens’ rights may be
indicated by the extent to which citizens have full,unfettered access to and use of public space, and bythe extent to which the state is limited in its right toenter or regulate private space. In liberal democraciesthe testing of these spatial rights revolves around
concerns such as the surveillance of public space (Fyfe
and Bannister 1996; Goodwin et al. 2000; Koskela
2002), formal or informal regulation of the use ofpublic space by young people (Malone 2002) or thehomeless (May 2000), racial discrimination in access
to housing (Smith 1989) and the policing of sexualpractices in private space (Bell 1995). By contrast,
the absence of citizens’ rights in totalitarian states is
manifested in restrictions on the use of ‘public’ spaceand in the routine invasion of private space by stateagents. Resistance activities may therefore involve thechallenging of these spatial controls, by, for example,
holding illegal demonstrations in public spaces – as
in Wencelas Square in Prague during the Czechoslovak‘Velvet Revolution’ of 1989 and, more tragically, inTiananmen Square, Beijing, in the same year – as wellas through the creation and manipulation of covert
‘spaces of resistance’ as sites of organisation and mobil-
isation (Routledge 1997b; Watts 1997).
Furthermore, citizenship is geographical in that it
connects political actors with particular territorialentities. The discussion in this chapter has primarilyfocused on citizenship as defined in terms of the nation-
state, albeit sometimes articulated within local-scale
communities. There is, however, no intrinsic reasonwhy citizenship should be identified with the nation-state and citizenship, as a concept, has been associatedwith different territorial scales at different points
during history (Isin 2002). In the contemporary era,
‘national citizenship’ is under challenge both frombelow, with the reassertion of locally constituted‘citizenships’, and from above, as the sovereignty of the‘nation-state’ is eroded by globalisation (see Chapter4). The latter includes challenges posed by issues
of immigration and asylum, and by multicultural-
ism within states (Kofman 2002; Yuval-Davis 1999,2000), as well as by the promotion of supranationalforms of citizenship, such as European citizenshipwithin the European Union (Painter 2002). Within
this context, authors such as Yuval-Davis (1999, 2000)
and Painter (2002) have posited notions of ‘multi-layered’ or ‘multi-level’ citizenship in which citizen-ship is defined and articulated by engagement withdifferent scales of political authority and with a rangeof other social identities. Thus as Yuval-Davis (2000)
observes:
very often people’s rights and obligations to a
specific state are mediated and largely dependent ontheir membership of a specific ethnic, racial,
religious or regional collectivity, although they areDEMOCRACY, PARTICIPATION AND CITIZENSHIP 155

rarely completely contained by it. At the same time,
the development of ideologies and institutions of
‘human rights’ means that, ideologically at least,the state does not always have full control of theconstruction of citizenship’s rights, although it isusually left for states to carry them out.
(Yuval-Davis 2000: 171)
Yuval-Davis’s reference to human rights points to
a further recent development, the promotion of anotion of ‘global citizenship’. This concept implies that
all people across the globe should enjoy common
‘citizen’s rights’, but also that the world population as a whole has a responsibility to the global environ-ment and society. Thus global citizenship on the onehand involves the establishment of institutionalmechanisms to define, monitor and enforce human
rights, and on the other hand is a motivating force
for transnational social movements such as the globalenvironmental movement, the fair trade movement and the anti-globalisation movement (Routledge2003). Transnational movements, in turn, both engage
with local and regional citizens’ groups (Perreault
2003) and require locally situated sites of articulationin which their political activities are performed(Routledge 2003). In these ways the spaces and scalesof political mobilisation are constantly being remadeand reconfigured.
Further reading
For reading on citizenship and political geography the
best starting points are Susan Smith’s paper ‘Society, space
and citizenship: human geography for the “new times”?’Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers , 14 (1989),
144–56, and the 1995 themed issue of the journal Political
Geography on ‘spaces of citizenship’.
There is a dearth of good up-to-date literature on electoral
geography, especially work written from an Americanperspective, although Johnston, ‘Manipulating maps andwinning elections: measuring the impact of mal-apportionment and gerrymandering’, Political Geography ,
21 (2002a), 1–31, covers many of the key ideas. Johnstonet al. A Nation Dividing ? (1988), provides a comprehensive
but dated historical account of British electoralgeography. For analysis of the 1997 British general
election the best starting point is the special issue of the
journal Parliamentary Affairs , 50, 4. For the 2000 US
presidential election see papers by Clark Archer and othersin Political Geography , 21, 1 (2002).
For reading on active citizenship see the two papers by
Kearns, ‘Active citizenship and urban governance’,
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers , 17 (1992),
20–34, and ‘Active citizenship and local governance:political and geographical dimensions’, Political
Geography , 14 (1995), 155–75. There are numerous papers
on various aspects of community development, with the
journals Urban Studies, Urban Affairs, the Journal of Rural
Studies and Rural Sociology being good places to look for
examples.
Two edited books provide good starting points for
further reading on the geographies of protest andresistance: Sharp et al. (eds), Entanglements of Power (2000),
and Pile and Keith (eds), Geographies of Resistance (1997).
See also Routledge’s paper ‘The imagineering ofresistance: Pollock Free State and the practice of post-
modern politics’, Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers , 22 (1997a), 359–76, and George McKay’s
edited book DIY Culture (1998).
Web sites
There are numerous resources on the Internet detailing
election results and analysis which can be drawn on forresearch on electoral geography. For American electionsLeip’s on-line Atlas of US Presidential Elections, http://uselectionatlas.org/, is an excellent source of information
not just on the 2000 election but also for elections back
to 1824, with detailed results, analysis and interactivemaps. The US Elections Central site, http://www.multied.com/elections/index.html, is aimed at high-school stu-dents but provides very accessible resources on state-by-
state results as well as information on the functioning of
the US electoral system. The British Politics Pages,http://www.club.demon.co.uk/Politics/elect.html, havedetailed results, maps and analysis of national and localPEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 156

elections in Britain since 1983. For the really serious,
extensive but accessible British election statistics andinformation is also archived on the United Kingdom
Election Results site, http://www.election.demon.co.uk/.Finally, the Political Studies Association provides links
to elections-related Web sites from around the world athttp://www.psa.ac.uk/www/election.htm. DEMOCRACY, PARTICIPATION AND CITIZENSHIP 157

Aberystwyth, August 2003
Political geography has always had degrees of relevance
to, and influence over, real-world issues (House 1973).Sometimes this has not been progressive or productive.The military dictator General Augusto Pinochet, for
instance, was trained as a political geographer and used
this background to remake Chile during the early1970s. According to David Harvey, ‘Pinochet did notapprove of “subversive” academic disciplines such associology, politics and even philosophy’; geography was
his poison for instilling patriotism, regulating culture
and undertaking social engineering (Harvey 1974: 18).As president of the military Junta, Pinochet overthrewa democratic and elected government and undertookbrutal reforms on, among other things, health andsocial policy. Harvey talks about the ways in which
military control allowed Pinochet to smash the actors
and institutions of the progressive Allende regime,which created the space for re-establishing the ‘oldgeography’ of a centralised and dictatorial power base.
At the time of writing, the relationship between
geographers and public policy (defined in Box 9.1) is
being critically questioned and has ‘air time’ in leadingacademic journals (see Dorling and Shaw 2002; Martin 2001; Massey 2000; Scottish Geographical Journal
1999). In 1999 Jamie Peck wrote an editorial state-
ment in the journal Transactions of the Institute of
British Geographers . This was partially a response to
Brian Berry’s (1994) call for more public policy analysis in geography, and also an attempt to provoke a similardebate to that raised by Harvey and others in the 1970s.Peck asked why geographers were not involved in
the policy-making process under the Labour govern-ment, given Britain’s ‘unique insights into “real world”
processes and practices’ (Peck 1999: 131). Repliesfollowed, and the early twenty-first century is a fruitfultime to consider if, or how, political geographers
can contribute to public policy. If geographers are, as
Doreen Massey claims, working ‘themselves up intoquite a lather’ (Massey 2002: 645) then it could beimportant.
This chapter considers the importance of these
debates for political geographers by discussing the
different exchanges between human geography andpublic policy over especially the last thirty years.Although the majority of these debates have takenplace in British geography journals and have often not involved leading political geographers, they have
implications for the wider discipline of political
geography. The chapter starts by looking at linksbetween geography, empire and public policy, andquestions whether this was the Golden Age forgeographers and the policy process. The chapter then
considers the ‘relevance debate’ of the early 1970s,
which pushed public policy back on to the geographicalagenda. It also discusses the more recent exchanges that are recommending a new ‘policy turn’ in the disci-pline. To think about what political geography couldoffer this debate, the chapter concludes by suggesting
that the capitalist state’s role in the policy process is
a key missing link throughout these exchanges andwe discuss how political geography students couldconsider this in their own work. By the end of thechapter it becomes evident that public policy questions
social science itself (Blowers 1974). Our position on
where political geographers can perhaps make adifference is summarised as Box 9.2. Public policy and political
geography9

Geography and empire: the Golden
Age of public policy?
The example of Pinochet can be contrasted with the
more balanced interventions made by Sir Halford
Mackinder. As we suggested in Chapter 1, the early
intellectual foundations of political geography restedon the transition from systematic to regional geog-raphy, which at that time made descriptive connectionsbetween physical spaces (natural regions) and social andpolitical (‘ethnographical’) worlds (Mackinder 1902).
Political geography at the time was very much an
inductive science and it influenced British thinking on the ascendancy of the territorial state, set within acontext of rapidly shifting power relations. Mackinderwas central to this context and after being Director of
the London School of Economics and Political Science– which has historically positioned academics close to
Britain’s national political machinery – time was spentas High Commissioner for South Russia. Chapter 1highlighted that Mackinder’s book Democratic Ideals
and Reality , an interpretation of world power politics,
was presented as a warning to the peacemakers at
Versailles (Mackinder 1919).
Was this the Golden Age of close relations between
human geographers and policy processes? Mackinderwas heavily involved in the Royal GeographicalSociety, which at that time had close links with the
political system, and held numerous positions in com-
merce and industry. Mackinder certainly ‘had the ear’of Ministers. Others followed in this line and acted as advisers to parliamentary committees. Sir DudleyStamp worked closely with the government on map-ping agrarian trends and influenced post-war land-usePUBLIC POLICY AND POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY 159
BOX 9.1 PUBLIC POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY
According to Ron Martin, public policy involves ‘any form of deliberate intervention, regulation, governance,
or prescriptive or alleviative action, by state or nonstate bodies, intended to shape social, economic orenvironmental conditions’ (Martin 2001: 206). Ron Johnston offers a similar synopsis, where pubic policy is
the ‘study of and involvement in the creation, implementation, monitoring and evaluation’ of public initiatives
(Johnston 2000: 656).
Key readings : Johnston (2000) and Martin (2001).
BOX 9.2POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY AND PUBLIC POLICY
The contemporary political geographer is nota policy maker: they can only offer academic analysis on
public policy, but in doing so can influence those involved in policy-making processes. They ‘cannot takedecisions’ (Blowers 1974: 32). That said, we perhaps have a moral obligation to take public policy seriouslyin our ongoing academic analysis. This involves not only writing critically about public policy and the policy-
making process. Where possible, geographers can use their various insights to inform political and policy
practice, accepting the tensions between political/policy action and academic/intellectual critique. What doyouthink?
Key readings : Blomley (1994), Blowers (1974), Harvey (1974) and Massey (2000).

policy. Stamp was later rewarded for his contributions
to the ‘use of the land’ (Dickinson 1976: 7). John House
discusses the involvement of geographers in urban and regional planning since the 1930s, both throughthe involvement of academics in giving policy adviceand also through the direct employment of geography
graduates within the state’s apparatus. Geographers
were the driving forces at the Barlow Commission’s1937–40 inquiry into the ‘Distribution of the Indus-trial Population’ – a key moment in the evolution of the Keynesian welfare state (see Chapter 4) – and
occupied strategic positions within the civil service
(House 1973). Brian Robson saw these interventionsas effective ways of getting the human geography voiceheard (Robson 1972).
After 1945 human geography searched for a
stronger intellectual and scientific identity, and this
pushed political and social necessity into the back-
ground. In Britain, for instance, key ties betweenacademia and policy making were also restructuredthrough the formation of the Institute of BritishGeographers (breaking away from the Royal
Geographical Society). Combined, this created the
space for a ‘new style’ of geography (House 1973).Instead of serving the needs of empire and its ColonialSurveys, and the nation and its Regional Surveys,academics developed a university-based intellectualand pedagogic discipline that went hand in hand with
nurturing human capital in accordance with national
socio-economic needs and modernist political priorities(see Harvey 1974; Unwin 1992). Human geographyalso broadened its intellectual reach by incorporatingdevelopments in, and having a critical dialogue with,
other disciplines (such as sociology, economics and
politics) to capture multiple ways of interpreting‘geographical worlds’. The ‘old style’ geography ofhuman–physical–state interactions (House 1973),which policy makers could perhaps understand, wasgradually replaced by a diverse and intellectually
stimulating set of agendas.The rise and fall of relevance
debates
During the early 1970s a new ‘wind of change’ swept
across academia and brought with it a more ‘radical
geography’ (Berry 1972) that was not based on tradi-tional concerns with location, classification, regularityand conformity. For David Smith and others airingtheir thoughts at the Association of AmericanGeographers conferences, radical geography meant a
politicised ‘social geography’ that practised ‘social
responsibility’ with greater professional involvementin welfare rights, social justice, and political activism’(Smith 1971). The context of this was the VietnamWar, student riots in Paris and growing urban pov-
erty and social inequality (see Watts 2001). Michael
Dear also suggests that some geographers at the timebecame alienated by a geography overly focused onquantitative techniques and under-concerned withreal-world issues (Dear 1999). To cut a long story short,advances in social philosophy appeared to be bringing
with them a renewed sense of academic and political
responsibility.
The watchword of these times became ‘relevance’
– introduced to gauge the degree to which geographerswere making a contribution to the analysis and reso-
lution of economic, environmental and social problems
(Prince 1971). Such claims were contested, and the1970s witnessed a wealth of debates, with clear dis-agreements between liberals, humanists, Marxists and others on howto tackle geography and public
policy. In one intervention Brian Berry argued that
‘an effective policy-relevant geography involves neither
the blubbering of the bleeding hearts nor the machi-nations of the Marxists. It involves working with – and on – the sources of power and becoming part of society’s
decision making apparatus ’ (Berry 1972: 78, our empha-
sis). Berry added that academic analysis had to be
interdisciplinary and follow a problem-orientedapproach, where ‘the solution to social problems wouldbe facilitated by careful, clear projection of policyobjectives, programme alternatives and underlying
economic and social forces, proceeding towards a
solution through experimentation and feedback guidedby theory and analysis’ (ibid.: 80). This challenged thePEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 160

purely intellectual and scholarly pursuit of human
geography, by advocating a more applied discipline.
This created ripples across the Atlantic at the 1974
annual meeting of the Institute of British Geographers.In a presidential address Terry Coppock argued that,amongst other things, strategic research – utilising
computer technology to allow prediction through
modelling – was required to demonstrate the geog-raphers’ role in formulating alternative public policies(Coppock 1974). For Bridget Leach, this debateprovided an opportunity to discuss how policy prob-
lems become politically constituted. Leach argued
that ‘diversionary tactics’ were used by policy elites to protect the legitimacy of the political system and by highlighting such tactics academics could informdebate by empowering opposition groups (Leach1974). Open questions, however, remained as to how
this could be achieved, given that – with the exception
of David Harvey’s interventions – little attention waspaid to uncovering the ‘decision-making apparatus’and ‘sources of power’ under capitalism.
For Harvey, understanding the (public policy) world
was about using this insight to change things and
‘before geographers commit themselves to publicpolicy, they need to pose two questions: what kind of geography and what kind of public policy’ (Harvey1974: 18). The two categories are not separate – theyare seen as linked through the moral obligations that
geographers have to create a better society. Accord-
ing to Harvey ‘relevance in geography was not reallyabout relevance (whoever heard of irrelevant humanactivity?), but about whom research was relevant to andhow it was that research done in the name of science
(which was supposed to be ideology-free) was having
effects that appeared somewhat biased in favour of thestatus quo of the ruling class of the corporate state’
(Harvey 1974: 23). Harvey’s Marxist stance encouragedgeographers to break out of this loop and challenge the‘corporate state’ within capitalism.
Last, and perhaps most interestingly for Peter
Hall, geography had much to learn from politicalscience for uncovering the actors, power networks andorganisational dynamics at work in the policy process.Hall suggested that a new political geography was on the
horizon and:From this, certain central lines of research seem to
follow. The new style of urban political geographer,
for that is what he [ sic] seems destined to become,
will be concerned with the values, the organization,and access to power of groups. He will analyse therelationship of these groups to the decision-making
machinery (and the personalities who operate
this machinery) at different levels of government.He will study how different agents in the decisionprocess – politicians, bureaucrats, technicians,opinion-formers – interact, how they form alliances
and coalitions, how they bargain, promise or
threaten each other to obtain objectives. His concern. . . is to analyse what happens, not to postulatewhat should happen. Yet, by the very fact of expos-ing the way decisions are taken in practice, I wouldexpect and hope that the political geographer
would provide powerful suggestions for future
improvement.
(Hall 1974: 51)
Hall’s ideas were taken forward by geographers in their
work on ‘urban managerialism’, which was interested
in the roles played by different agents (such as localgovernment, central government, builders, estateagents and landlords) in producing cities. Some of thisresearch featured in a special issue of Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers , where Robson argued
it captured ‘a clear reflection of the social concern and
the interest in process rather than form which havemade geography in the middle 1970s a very differentanimal from that of a decade ago’ (Robson 1976: 1).Simon Duncan’s paper on ‘social geography’ and the
city, which questioned how housing systems worked
and who benefitted from them – so that an ‘informationbase’ could be provided to influence ‘political will’ and‘achieve change in the allocation of houses and housingresources’ – was indicative of these process-basedconcerns (Duncan 1974: 10).
The challenge to managerialism contained some
of the explanations for the reduced interest in publicpolicy. Hall’s ‘new political geography’ was continuallychallenged by those who felt that it could not suffi-ciently explain the links between the structure of the
housing market, the actions of agents and institutions,PUBLIC POLICY AND POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY 161

the spatial arrangement of the city and wider capitalist
society (see Bassett and Short 1980). But, instead of
theorising the links between the capitalist state, class, power and urbanisation – which could be fruitfulways of capturing the policy dynamics within thecontemporary city – some Marxists saw this agenda as
ultimately reproducing the ‘corporate state’ by working
within the constraints of capitalism, as opposed totranscending capitalism itself (Martin 2001).
The cooling of ‘relevance’ debates was further aided
by the reaction to these trends. So the argument goes
(Martin 2001), the 1980s gave birth to humanistic
geography and then the recasting of the ‘social’ withinsocial and cultural geography – both counteringstructurally determined processes under capitalism (asexpressed by certain Marxists) and models of expectedbehaviour (as predicted by spatial/regional scientists).
As these authors grappled with new ways of exploring
the action, movement and experience of individualswithin geographical settings (see Area 1980), attach-
ments to public policy became increasingly tenuous.To be fair, public policy was not the object of analysis
for these scholars, who were more interested in ‘place’
and the geographies of ‘everyday life’. Some continuedto work within the tradition of old-school ‘socialgeography’. Robson, for instance, developed an appliedurban geography that influenced those formulatingBritish urban policy (see Robson et al. 1994). Berry
followed a similar career path in the United States,
through research on housing (see Berry 1994).
Trends in academia were not the only explanation
for this movement away from what could be considered‘relevant’ geography. The onset of neoliberalism (see
Chapter 4) in especially North America and Britain
alienated scholars from undertaking policy-relevantresearch. Policy makers required research that wasideologically relevant for justifying privatisation,deregulation and public sector restructuring, and theyturned to economists practising predictive and
normative thinking. Economists were the perfect
ideological bedfellows for the New Right governmentsof the 1980s and 1990s.Public policy in the twentieth
century: shallow, deep or
just grey?
This relationship between economists and policy
makers is one of two entry points for more recentdebates (Peck 1999). The other relates to the increasingdominance of postmodernist thinking and, accordingto critics, the perceived irrelevance of these approachesto real-world issues (Martin 2001). We consider each
of these in turn.
The first agenda is clearly evident in the debate
initiated by Peck, concerned by the fact that few geog-raphers appeared to be advising Britain’s New LabourParty (Peck 1999). Peck’s work at this time centred
on welfare-to-work – a key political strategy in the first
term of Blair’s government which, through geograph-ically specific modes of policy transfer, sought to moveBritain towards a North American (post-welfare)model (see Chapter 4). The key advisers in the UnitedStates and the United Kingdom were right-wing
labour-market economists who manipulated the local
embeddedness of policy, and Peck bemoans the rolesthat these ‘intellectuals’ play in globalising welfarestate restructuring. Given the unique insights thatgeographers possess, Peck asks: where are the geog-
raphers in this policy process; why do economists have
‘the ear of the Minister’; and why are geographersalways at the bottom end of the policy research ladder,examining hard outcomes and being excluded frompolicy formulation (Peck 1999; also Massey 2001)?
Peck’s explanation points to contemporary academic
practices, which privilege abstract scientific knowledge
over and above more practical and policy-orientedconcerns. Because public policy research is not con-sidered scientific or of ‘top-drawer’ quality it is deemedto be ‘bad science’. This process is augmented by
targeted research that can gain universities academic
excellence and their staff promotion. Consequently,geographers are being encouraged to come up withtheoretical innovations and write ‘big papers’ andthrough time this has reduced public policy research
to a ‘grey’, boring and somewhat second-rate academic
practice (Peck 1999). PEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 162

Peck challenges these assumptions and argues that
public policy research does not have to be this way: itcan be theoretically and politically progressive. Policy
research, then, ‘is a legitimate, non-trivial, and poten-
tially creative aspect of the work of academic geog-raphers, but one that we are currently neglecting and/or undervaluing’ (Peck 1999: 131). To take forwardthis agenda and its potential creativity, Peck makes
a critical distinction between ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’
public policy analysis (see Box 9.3) and argues thatgeographers have much to offer in a deep approach thatengages ‘critically and actively with the policy processitself’ (Peck 2000: 255).
In a reply, Jane Pollard and colleagues argue that the
involvement of geographers in public policy is far
greater than that implied by Peck (Pollard et al. 2000).
They agree that geographers are generally not thatinvolved in national-level social policy debates, but
they are involved in other policy areas which have meritand cannot be written off as trivial. This argument is
extended by Mark Banks and Sara MacKian, who urge
Peck to take stock of the ways in which geographersare involved in evaluating the themes of ‘renaissance’,‘partnership’ and ‘social capital’ within British urbanpolicy (Banks and MacKian 2000). Peck’s response
emphasises the importance of teasing out relationships
between different levels of public policy, to overcome
what is seen as the danger of falling foul of the rhetoricof localism (Peck 2000). The challenge for geographers,then, ‘is to connect together the smaller pictures withthe bigger pictures of the policy process, to connect the
specific with the general, without undermining the
integrity of our particular take on the policy process’(Peck 2000: 257). PUBLIC POLICY AND POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY 163
BOX 9.3 BEYOND GREY GEOGRAPHY: SHALLOW AND DEEP POLICY
ANALYSIS
Shallow analysis
This is policy research that is confined to addressing the ‘stated aims and objectives’ of policies from within
an orthodox theoretical position. This often serves the needs of the policy-making system, which it often takes
for granted, by licensing quick-fix solutions. Shallow researchers are often closer to the policy-making processthan their deep colleagues. Examples of shallow researchers include mainstream economists.
Deep analysis
This is research that sees policy as politicised and contested and questions the ‘parameters and exclusions ofpolicy making’. Deep policy researchers often take a theoretically unorthodox position and question the localembedded and path-dependent nature of public policy. Examples of deep research include those undertakingcritical investigations of the policy-making process.
Question
Which group is conducting the most effective form of policy analysis?
Key readings : Peck (1999, 2000).

The approach adopted by Ron Martin is somewhat
different and situates the decline in public policy
research within a broader academic context. Like Peckand others, Martin also feels that human geography is exerting little influence on policy. Rather thanquestioning the motives behind what we publish, or
exploring the general crisis in the social sciences
in relation to ‘relevance’ (see Massey 2001), Martinpursues an internal critique of the discipline. Martinargues that ‘much of what is done under the banner of human geography is unlikely to be seen by policy-
makers as being remotely germane to policy issues’
because it ‘has little practical relevance for policy; infact, in some cases, one might even say little socialrelevance at all’ (Martin 2001: 191). For Martin, thisis why the opinions of geographers are not being soughtwhen it comes to consultations on policy making.
We talk the wrong language, are lost ‘in a thicket of
linguistic cleverness’, ask the wrong questions andgenerally do not deliver research findings that have‘relevance to real-world issues’ (Martin 2001: 196; seealso Martin 2002).
Martin takes issue with the contributions being
made by postmodernism and the ‘cultural turn’ tohuman geography. As we suggested in Chapter 1, thishas been influential in political geography and hassensitised us to the need to consider textual anddiscursive strategies. Critical geopolitics, for instance,
has demonstrated the usefulness of this methodological
approach (see Chapter 3). In Martin’s opinion, however,concern with identity and culture has diverted ourattention from the larger social and political problems
of today. This is partly explained by the cultural turn’s
denial of ‘extra-discursive reality’ – it disengages itselffrom material power relations, and thereby does not accept that such forces also shape identity andpolitics (Martin 2001: 196). Consequently, in Martin’s
opinion, the cultural turn does not engage with the
many processes and practices that provide the sceneryfor social interaction. It does little to challenge the‘structured determinants of sociospatial problems and inequalities’ (Martin 2001: 201). Is this a fair
criticism?
Martin also challenges the research designs that
leading geographers use to demonstrate their claims.Too often our theories are being put into practice with a ‘lack of rigour’: geographers rely too heavily on selective quotations from a limited number of
individuals, located in particular geographical loca-
tions (Martin 2001: 197). This in turn leads to ‘fuzzyconceptualisation’ (Markusen 1999) – our claims do not stand up to serious scrutiny or interrogation.Linked with this, the policy and political implications
that flow from human geography are redundant and
this reinforces a lack of political commitment. Do youagree with their concern?
Levelling criticism is easy and the ‘difficult part is
suggesting what needs to be done, how we should moveforward’ (Martin 2001: 202). We have pulled together
some of Martin’s suggestions for doing a ‘new geog-
raphy of public policy’ in Box 9.4. As you can see, thereare a number of key challenges facing geographersPEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 164
BOX 9.4 TOWARDS A ‘NEW GEOGRAPHY OF PUBLIC POLICY’?
‘There is no single, all-encompassing, universally superior or commonly agreed theoretical framework or
methodological approach on which to base our research. Thus there can be no single approach to policyanalysis, no blueprint for how geographers should integrate public policy into their research or how they should
evaluate its sociospatial impacts. There are different forms of, and approaches to, policy analysis ranging,
for example, from the critical analysis of policy discourses and practices to reveal their underlying ideological,and instrumental content, to extensive empirical analyses of policies to evaluate their intended impacts andunintended consequences, to intensive ethnographic type investigations of precisely how particular policies

tackling this debate and these can be summarised
as: developing intellectual cohesion through practicalsocial research; finding imaginative ways of combiningqualitative and quantitative data to ensure rigour; andusing ‘action based’ approaches to influence the direc-
tion of policies and their outcomes. Students of political
geography will have to make up their own mind as to whether they agree, or disagree, with Martin’scritique. What do you think? Is this debate important?What can political geographers contribute to thisagenda?
Towards ‘deeper’ engagement
with the policy process
We conclude this chapter by addressing what could
be considered a missing link in this debate – namelythe policy process itself, which is linked with how weconceptualise the state’s changing institutional forms,functions and modes of intervention. According toChristopher Ham and Michael Hill, analysing policy
making depends on some appreciation of the insti-
tutionalisation of power and representation in society,which in turn requires some understanding of the stateunder capitalism (Ham and Hill 1993). Rather thanfinding ready-made answers from within our discipline,
political geography might benefit from adopting a‘post-disciplinary’ stance on the state and its politics,
whereby a dialogue is opened up with, and ideas aredrawn from, social and political science.
To engage ‘critically and actively with the policy
process itself’ (Peck 1999) political geography could
offer an insight into the ‘deeper’ political arena. We
could focus on how government responds to andrepresents its wider social environment. Public policyis not just political; it also has profound impacts onsociety by framing socio-spatial relations. Indeed, thetwo go hand in hand – the social and the political are
mutually reinforcing, constructed and embedded in
each other. By understanding the social situations andpolitics that go hand in hand with forms of stateintervention and the multiple terrains through whichthis occurs, political geographers could begin to
understand what makes public policy tick, why
changes take place, and we can also begin to highlightaccess points for those individuals and campaigngroups wishing to practise ‘activism’.
The public policy debate, then, warrants a recon-
sideration of the capitalist state. Murray Low (2003)
has suggested that the state remains an important
missing link in contemporary political geography. Aswe suggested in Chapter 2, the state is everywhere andnowhere: it is the backdrop to almost everything thatwe experience. In the public policy debate, however,
the state rarely makes more than a cameo appearance.PUBLIC POLICY AND POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY 165
affect specific individuals, groups and localities. Each provides a different “cut” on policy, and different
policy issues will require different methods or combinations of methods. Public policy analysis has to bepluralistic, not monistic. We need more interesting and imaginative ways of combining qualitative andquantitative analysis, and of integrating intuition into our research methodologies and analyses. Above all,
for a policy turn to occur in the discipline, our research has to become much more “action-based”. We need
to see research not simply as a mechanism for studying and explaining change, but – by following ourinvestigations through to their implications for possible policy intervention and action – as instigator of change,as an activist endeavour . . . The geography of public policy is not just about evaluating policy impacts.Important though that role is, geographers should also be engaged in fundamental debates over the direction
of society, economy and environment, and what policies would be required to achieve different outcomes.
But, equally, it is surely as important to research and campaign for achievable reforms as it is to debate idealtransformations which have little prospect of being implemented’ (Martin 2001: 202–3).
Key reading : Martin (2001).

One way forward, and acknowledging Martin’s (2001)
point that there are many ‘cuts’ into the cake, is to
take a régulation approach to public policy. As we
suggested in Chapter 4, the régulation approach presents
the state as a complex and broad set of institutions andnetworks that span both political society and civil
society in their ‘inclusive’ sense (Gramsci 1971; Jessop
1997c). From this perspective, state intervention, statefunctions and public policy concerns relate to the‘micro-physics’ of power.
Bob Jessop’s ‘regulationist state theory’ is interesting
in thinking about the links between political geog-
raphy and public policy. Jessop draws on the work ofstate theorists and political activists such as AntonioGramsci, Nicos Poulantzas and Claus Offe to thinkabout the changing institutional forms and functionsof the capitalist state. For Jessop, the state needs to
be thought of as ‘medium and outcome’ of policy pro-
cesses that constitute its many interventions. The stateis both a social relation and a producer of strategy and, as such, it has no power of its own. State power
in relation to the policy process relates to the forces that
‘act in and through’ its apparatus. According to thisview, attempts to analyse the policy process need to uncover the strategic contexts, calculations andpractices of actors involved in strategically selective, or
privileged, sites (Jessop 1990a). This can be sum-
marised as a framework that demonstrates ‘systemsanalyses’ for the undertaking of ‘systematic’ forms of public policy analysis (Ham and Hill 1993) –drawing attention to the intricate links between actors
and forms of representation, institutions and their
interventions and practices, and the range of policy outcomes available. This connects with our argumentin Chapter 1 that political geography recognises intrin-sically linked entities – power, politics and policy,space, place and territory.
Box 9.5 details the six dimensions of the state that
appear in much of Jessop’s work on the institutionalforms and functions of political economy. Three arePEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 166
BOX 9.5 RESTATING THE POLICY PROCESS
Institutional relations within the political and policy system
•Representational regime . This has a concern with delimiting patterns of representation and the state in its
inclusive sense. It uncovers the territorial agents, political parties, state officials, community groups, para-state institutions, regimes and coalitions that are incorporated into the state’s everyday policy-makingpractices.
•Internal structures of the state . This is the institutional embodiment of the above and it underscores the
distribution of powers through different geographical divisions and departments of the state and its policy
systems. This not only allows research to study the apparatus of central government; it also explores theways in which political strategy helps to create sub-national spaces and scales of policy intervention anddelivery. For political geographers, the relationship between the different politically and socially chargedscales of governance is important.
•Patterns of intervention . This is associated with the different political and ideological rule systems that govern
state intervention, such as frameworks of rights and responsibilities, the balance between the public and
private, and the perceived roles of the social partners in the policy process. Additional concerns can includethe discourses of citizenship, social inclusion/exclusion, universal versus targeted and selective serviceprovision, and equality versus allocation through competition.

associated with institutional relations within the
political and policy system. Jessop adds a further three
to tease out the ways in which the state interacts with
its wider social environment. The capitalist state, then,can be viewed as a strategic and relational concern,forged through the ongoing engagements between
state personnel, institutions and public policy imple-mentation. This perspective could assist political
geographers and their students to delve deeper into the
policy process itself. What kind of political geographyfor what kind of public policy?
Further reading
For further reading on the public policy debate in
geography see Martin, ‘Geography and public policy: thecase of the missing agenda’, Progress in Human Geography ,
25 (2001), 189–210; Peck, ‘Grey geography?’ Transactions
of the Institute of British Geographers , 24 (1999), 131–5;
Berry, ‘Let’s have more policy analysis’, Urban Geography ,
15 (1994), 315–17; Coppock ‘Geography and publicpolicy: challenges, opportunities and implications’,Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers , 63 (1974),
1–16; Harvey, ‘What kind of geography for what kind ofpublic policy?’ Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers , 63 (1974), 18–24; Dear, ‘The relevance of
postmodermism’, Scottish Geographical Journal , 115
(1999), 143–50; Dorling and Shaw, ‘Geographies of theagenda: public policy, the discipline and its (re)“turns”’,
Progress in Human Geography , 26 (2002), 629–46; House,
‘Geographers, decision takers and policy matters’ inChisholm and Rodgers (eds), Studies in Human Geography
(1973).
For arguments on activism and political relevance see
Blomley, ‘Activism and the academy’, Environment and
Planning D: Society and Space , 12 (1994), 383–5; Tickell,
‘Reflections on “activism in the academy”’, Environment
and Planning D: Society and Space , 13 (1995), 235–7;
Castree, ‘Out there? In here? Domesticating critical
geography’, Area, 21 (1999b), 81–6; Blowers, ‘Relevance,
research and the political process’, Area, 6 (1974), 32–6;
Massey, ‘Practising political relevance’, Transactions of the
Institute of British Geographers , 24 (2000), 131–4; Blunt
and Wills, Dissident Geographies .
If you are interested in finding out more about the policy
process see Ham and Hill, The Policy Process in the Modern
Capitalist State (1993); Burch and Wood, Public Policy inPUBLIC POLICY AND POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY 167
Wider social relations and civil society
•Social basis of the state . This consolidates the representational regime through civil society, which can be
spatially selective, and explores the different ways in which uneven development is mobilised into the
political system through targeted state strategies.
•State strategies and state projects . This brings some overall coherence to the activities of the state, its forms
of intervention, and its policy-making priorities. The state is seen here as a political strategy, and its variouspolicy and power networks can privilege some coalition possibilities over others and some interest groups
over others.
•Hegemonic project . This mobilises the state and its multifarious policy-making networks and coalitions,
and also tries to externalise/resolve conflicts that can disrupt policy systems, around an ideologicalprogramme of action. It thereby considers the ways in which collective action, forms of knowledge anddiscourses become codified and mobilised to advance particular interests. There are links here with notions
of governmentality (see Chapter 2).
Key readings : Jessop (1990a), MacLeod (2001) and Peck and Jones (1995).

Britain (1989); Offe, The Contradictions of the Welfare State
(1984); Lindblom, The Policy-making Process (1968).
For further reading on the strategic-relational approach
to the state see Jessop, State Theory (1990a), and
‘Institutional re(turns) and the strategic-relationalapproach’, Environment and Planning A , 33 (2001),
1213–35; MacLeod and Goodwin, ‘Space, scale and statestrategy: rethinking urban and regional governance’,
Progress in Human Geography , 23 (1999b), 503–27; Jones,
‘Spatial selectivity of the state? The regulationist enigma and local struggles over economic governance’,Environment and Planning A , 29 (1997), 831–64; Peck andJones, ‘Training and Enterprise Councils: Schumpeterian
workfare state, or what?’ Environment and Planning A , 27
(1995), 1361–96; Goodwin, ‘The changing local state’,
in Cloke (ed.), Policy and Change in Thatcher’s Britain
(1992).
Acknowledgement
This chapter is a shortened version of a paper by
Martin Jones, ‘Human geography and public policy:reflections on recent and not so recent debates’,mimeograph, University of Wales Aberystwyth.PEOPLE, POLICY AND GEOGRAPHY 168

As we write this postscript the city of New York is
marking the second anniversary of the destruction ofthe World Trade Center towers in the Al-Qaedaterrorist attack of 11 September 2001 (briefly discussedin Chapter 3). The tragic, murderous, events of thatday and their consequences have cast their shadow over
political geography as over so many areas of life. Toal
and Shelley (2004), in a review of the state of politicalgeography at the start of the new century, describe theresponse of the United States to the attacks as providingnew definition and clarity to a new geopolitical order
that was already emerging in the wake of the Cold
War. They highlight the contradictions of the post-9/11 era, including the vulnerability of advancedtechno-scientific systems, the obsession with absoluteinvulnerability that sits uneasily with the dynamics of capitalist globalisation, and the lack of self-reflection
about domestic threats to security. Political geography,
Toal and Shelley suggest, has a role in posing andpursuing questions about an unsure and insecurefuture.
The legacy of 9/11 goes beyond geopolitics. Smith
(2002: 98) reveals the attack on the World Trade
Center as an event of multi-scalar significance: ‘a globalevent and yet utterly local’ that was constructed as anational tragedy. The nationalisation of the tragedypermitted the articulation by the US government of
its new geopolitical vision – the launch of the ‘war
on terrorism’ and the targeting of the ‘axis of evil’ thatled American, British, Australian and allied militaryforces first into Afghanistan and then into Iraq. Thecontinuing problem of pacifying and controlling Iraq, with occupying troops confronted by regular
attacks, has led the US administration to seek greaterinternational assistance in the ‘reconstruction’ of the
country, only to meet with suspicion rooted in thediplomatic friction with European governments thatpreceded the war. Farther east, US military personnelare still present in Uzbekistan and other former parts of the old Soviet Union, having been stationed
there as part of the attack on the Taleban regime in
Afghanistan. The ‘new world order’ of the twenty-firstcentury is already looking very different from that of the last century. Yet the new discourse of securityhas its local and domestic-scale manifestations too
– the closure and increased control of public space
around ‘sensitive’ buildings, heightened levels ofsurveillance, and the physical and psychological abusedirected at ethnic communities, especially Arabcommunities, compromising their de facto citizenship
rights (Bayoumi 2002).
In New York itself the local-scale consequences
have become less explicit over time but remain present.On 12 September 2001 The Times newspaper of London
remarked that ‘the political and social geography of [New York] seems destined to change’ (p. 1). These
changes have also been both physical and psychological
– in the use of space in the city, in the meaning oflandscape and in the political opinion and behaviourof its residents (Sorkin and Zukin 2002). As we write,controversy continues about the redevelopment of
the World Trade Center site, resonating with earlier
conflicts over the politics of memorialisation, but alsoindicating a return to ‘business as usual’ in the politicsof urban development.
Elsewhere on 11 September 2003 there is another
crisis in the Middle East peace process, as the Israeli
government threatens to expel the Palestinian leader,Postscript

Yasser Arafat, following two devastating suicide bombs
in Jerusalem. In Cancun, Mexico, the World Trade
Organisation is meeting, with the main debate focusedon the regulation of agricultural trade. The outcomeof the summit will have major ramifications for theregulation of the global capitalist economy and for
the social and economic disparities between North and
South. Outside are thousands of anti-globalisationprotesters, drawn from around the world as part of amaturing global social movement and engaged in a game with police that involves the sophisticated
use, control and manipulation of space. Meanwhile
the population of Sweden is mourning the death oftheir Foreign Minister, murdered as she campaignedfor a ‘yes’ vote in a referendum on membership of the European single currency – a vote that is regardedas a crucial decision for the project of European
integration.
These are for the most part ‘big p’ political stories,
to employ Flint’s (2003) distinction which we referredto in Chapter 1, although it is notable that their effectsinevitably seep into the ‘small p’ politics of everyday
life. The stories of ‘small p’ politics are also happening
all around us as we write, but rarely make the newsheadlines. Stories about the provision of public services,the use of public space, labour relations in the work-place, gender relations in the home, the meaning of landscapes and valued places, campaigns against
proposed developments and for environmental pro-
tection, local politics and citizen participation, and so on.
We live in a dynamic world. The ‘political geog-
raphies’ that are our objects of study at the start of the
twenty-first century are very different from those
of twenty-five, fifty or 100 years ago. It is therefore not surprising to find that the academic discourse ofpolitical geography is also dynamic and responsive to the need to develop new concepts, draw on newtheories, ask new questions and open up new avenues
of enquiry. Ironically, however, political geography
as an academic discipline has not always been quickest
to react to the new agendas, and much of the mostinnovative recent work on politics and geography hasbeen done by others – notably cultural geographers,
social geographers and urban sociologists – a trend that has for some commentators weakened ‘political
geography’ as a discipline.
In Chapter 1 we noted that there is a debate about
the future direction of political geography. One sideargues that political geography needs to reassert its core concepts of territory, state and nation, to establish
firm boundaries to its remit and to reclaim ground
from cultural geography. The other side argues thatthe breadth, vitality and openness of contemporarypolitical geography should be celebrated and extended.We have associated ourselves with the latter camp
and in this book we have attempted to demonstrate
the enormous potential of ‘political geography’ as it ispractised today. As such, our examples have rangedfrom the political-economic analysis of the state to the cultural analysis of landscape and identity; fromthe local scale of building design and protest camps
to the global scale of geopolitics; and from traditional
concepts like territory and nationalism to newertheories and concepts such as the régulation approach
and social capital.
That is not to say that we consider the traditional
political geography concerns of territorial organisation,
state power, geopolitics and electoral geographies to be unimportant – just that to concentrate on thesethemes alone would be to fail to adequately describeand interpret the emerging political geographies of thetwenty-first century. At the same time, the geograph-
ical concepts that underlie these traditional concerns
– ideas of space, place, scale and territory – remainessential to all areas of political geography and it isour sensitivity to the issues of how political processesinteract with these geographical concepts that makes
political geography distinct from other forms of
political analysis. In this book we have drawn not onlyon work by geographers but also on work by politicalscientists, sociologists, economists, historians, urbantheorists, cultural theorists and policy analysts. In somecases these writers have borrowed ideas from geography
and applied them to their own work; in other cases
it has been political geographers who have taken theoriginal non-spatial research and translated it througha geographical filter – but what unites it all is the basictenet that understanding geography is fundamental
to understanding politics.POSTSCRIPT 170

These exchanges with other disciplines have played
a major role in shaping contemporary political geog-
raphy and it is essential that the dialogue remains open. Indeed, there is much that could still be learntin both directions. The relationship between geographyand political science, for example, is perhaps one of
the least explored cross-overs in the social sciences,
particularly when it comes to the translation of politicaltheory. While political geography is saturated withsocial and cultural theory, its use of political theory is strangely limited – yet, to take the theme of Chapter
8 as an example, the insights that could be gained from
engaging with, say, theories of democracy and partici-pation are considerable.In this book we have been able to offer only a snap-
shot of political geography at a certain point in time.
Even in the short period between our writing and you reading these words it is inevitable that the dis-course of political geography will have been modifiedjust a little bit further. New research on new topics
will have been started, new findings presented, new
ideas posited and new theories developed. Perhaps youtoo will contribute to this dynamism. We hope thatwe have demonstrated that political geography is allaround us on an everyday basis, and as such we hope
that we may have inspired you to explore some of the
themes covered here further through your own projectwork, dissertations and theses.POSTSCRIPT 171

Active citizenship The idea that citizens are not
the passive recipients of rights and state benefits,but have a responsibility to be actively involved in
the governing process. Commonly associated with
the strategy of governmentality ( q.v.) of ‘governing
through communities’.
Capitalism A specific social and economic system
that is divided into two classes: those owning the
means of production (land, machinery and factories,
etc.) and those selling labour power. Under thecapitalist mode of production, labour power isexploited to provide surplus value (or profit) andcapitalists compete for this profit through a systemthat necessitates the ‘accumulation of capital’ (see
Box 4.1).
Capitalist world system See World systems analysis .
Citizenship A mark of belonging to a political entity
or collective that both guarantees rights for theindividual and carries responsibilities towards
the collective. Citizenship codifies the relationship
between the individual and the state (see Box 8.1).
Civic nationalism A type of nationalism that is
based on the organisation of the state and whichhighlights the fact that nations are produced as
a result of certain processes. It is often a more
inclusive form of nationalism.
Colony A political and spatial form, often based
on ideas of domination, which is created by thecolonisation of one territory and people by a state,organisation or group of people. Thus the act of
colonialism is characterised by unequal economic,
political and cultural relationships.
Community A collective of individuals who share
a mutual sense of identity and solidarity.Communities are frequently defined in terms of a
territorial association, but need not necessarily be so.
Critical geopolitics A sub-field of political geog-
raphy that critically analyses the production,circulation and consumption of geopoliticalknowledge. (See also Geopolitics .)
Cultural turn The popularisation in human
geography in the late 1980s and early 1990s of the
study of cultural relations, processes and entities,including issues of identity, difference and repre-sentation. Associated with the use of qualitativeresearch methods and the influence of culturalstudies and of post-structuralist and postmodernist
thought.
Democracy A political system based on the principle
of government by the people through majoritydecision making.
Devolution A process whereby political power is
transferred from a national state to regions within
the state.
Discourse A body of knowledge that structures
a particular way of understanding the world (seeBox 1.4).
Electoral geography A sub-field of political
geography that is concerned with the analysis of the spatial aspects of elections, including the influ-ence of geographical factors on voting behaviour and election outcomes, and the spatial patterns ofelection results.
Elite A group or cluster of individuals exercising (or
attributed with) a disproportionate concentrationof power.
Elite theory A political theory that holds that powerGlossary

is concentrated within an exclusive minority group
in society.
Empire A political form which is based on a
subservient relationship between a metropolitanstate and other lands or people. The political formof empire is, thus, closely related to the process of
imperialism.
Ethnic nationalism A type of nationalism that
emphasises the common cultural and historicallinks between a named human population. It isoften associated with ideas concerning the ‘natural-
ness’ of nations. It can, under certain circumstances,
be linked with extreme and exclusionary forms ofnationalism.
Federalism A political system which emphasises the
notion of subsidiarity. In this context, it is believedthat decisions should be made at the smallest
practical spatial scale.
Feminism As a political movement, feminism
advocates the right of women to equality in society;as an intellectual movement, feminism challengesmasculinist discourses and approaches an under-
standing of the world from a female perspective.
Gentrification The renovation of property in rela-
tively less favoured areas by and for affluentincomers, displacing lower-income groups.
Geopolitics A sub-field of political geography
concerned with political relations between states,
the external strategies of states and the global
balance of power.
Geopolitik Literally the German translation of
geopolitics (q.v.), but particularly associated with a
partisan form of political geography practised
in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s that was used
to support the racist and expansionist policies of theNazi party.
Gerrymandering The deliberate manipulation of
the territory of electoral districts for partisan gain.Named after the nineteenth-century Governor of
Massachusetts, Eldridge Gerry.
Globalisation The advanced interconnection and
interdependence of localities across the world –economically, socially, politically and culturally.
Glocalisation A term coined by Erik Swyngedouw
to emphasise the simultaneous erosion of powerfrom the nation scale upwards to the global and
downwards to the local.
Governmentality The techniques and strategies by
which a society is rendered governable (see Box 2.2).
Heartland A geopolitical term referring to an area of
central Eurasia, similar to the territory of present-
day Russia, whose control, Mackinder argued, was
crucial to the global balance of power. Also knownas the ‘pivot area’.
Identity politics The way in which people’s politics,
in recent years, are increasingly being shaped by
aspects of their identity. This can be contrasted with
the traditional dominance of class conflict withinpolitics.
Ideology Ideas and arguments that often help to
sustain a relationship of power and domination.
Landscape The assemblage of physical objects that
comprise the visual surface appearance of an area of
land.
Landscape of power The symbolic representation
of power relations through the landscape ( q.v.),
including both monumental landscapes with an
explicit political meaning and more subtle signifiers
in everyday landscapes, such as the juxtapositioningof skyscrapers and slums.
Lebensraum Literally ‘living space’, a term Ratzel
borrowed from biology to indicate the territoryrequired for the comfortable existence of a state. The
concept was used to justify expansionist policies.
Local state A collective term for the apparatuses of
the state ( q.v.) that exist and operate at a local scale,
usually with reference to a specific locality ( q.v.).
The local state includes not only ‘local government’
(local-scale elected or appointed public authorities)
but also the local branches of the judiciary andsecurity agencies.
Locality A place defined at a local scale with a terri-
torial expression. The term implies a spatial unitthat can be attributed with distinct characteristics
and differentiated from other localities (see Box 6.1).
Malapportionment A term in electoral geography
(q.v.) referring to the disproportionate distribution
of seats in a legislature to a geographical districtcompared with its entitlement on an objective
population-based allocation.GLOSSARY 173

Nation A named human population that is perceived
as possessing a common culture, customs and
territory.
Nationalism An ideology that seeks to promote the
existence of nations within the world. In addition,it can refer to nations’ attempts to reach the political
goal of being constituted as a nation-state.
Nation-state A political form in which the bound-
aries of a state and nation coincide.
Neighbourhood effect A theory in electoral geog-
raphy ( q.v.) that suggests that voting behaviour
is influenced by the geographical situation of the
voter. In other words, residents of a neighbourhoodare more likely to vote the same way than wouldbe anticipated on the basis of social or economiccharacteristics.
Othering A term, advocated by Edward Said, which
refers to the act of emphasising the perceived weak-
nesses of marginalised groups as a way of stressingthe alleged strength of those in positions of power.
Place A point, or area, of space that can be identified
through verbal, written, cartographic or visual
representation.
Pluralism A political theory that holds that power
is widely dispersed within society and that a diverserange of groups have an equal opportunity toinfluence the political process.
Political economy A wide range of different perspec-
tives on the links between state, economy and
society as sets of moving parts and founded onproduction, i.e. the social production of existence.
Post-structuralism A philosophical movement
of the late twentieth century that rejects notions of
essential truth and the rational subject and proposes
instead that meanings are produced within lan-guage and subjectivity is constructed throughdiscourse ( q.v.) (see Box 1.3).
Power The capacity to do something. Politics can
be described as the pursuit and discharge of power,
but there are many different conceptualisations of
exactly what power is and how it works (see Box1.1).
Public policy involves any form of deliberate
intervention, regulation, governance, or prescriptive
or alleviative action, by state or non-state bodies,intended to shape social, economic or environmental
conditions (see Box 9.1).
Public space An area of space to which in theory all
people have a right of access without restriction,selection or payment. In practice, public space is regulated both formally and informally and the
freedom to use public space differs between groups.
Many public spaces are privately owned but openfor public use by convention or for commercialpurposes.
Quantitative revolution A period of transformation
in human geography in the 1950s and 1960s
associated with the introduction of statistical andmathematical methods for geographical researchand analysis, replacing the previous concern withareal differentiation and regional studies.
Region A more or less bounded area possessing some
relative unity or organising principle that distin-
guishes it from other regions. Regions, however, are never closed and are actively produced andreproduced by different forms of agency.
Régulation approach A set of neo-Marxist ideas on
political economy, whereby economies and societies
emerge through social, economic and institutionalframeworks and supports, despite the instabilitiesand crisis tendencies within capitalism (see Box4.2).
Resistance The act of opposing or withstanding
the exercise of power. Geographies of resistance are
concerned with studying the spatial aspects ofpolitical opposition to the state and other centresof power.
Scale A level of representation that is differentiated
from other scales by variations in magnitude.
Geographical scale is differentiated by the spatialdimensions encompassed by each level of magnitudeand is commonly referred to in terms of fixed (butambiguous) increments, including (with increasingmagnitude): local, regional, national and global
scale.
Social capital The worth and potential that are
invested in social networks and contacts betweenpeople (see Box 8.4).
Social construction The ascribing of meaning to
things by and through social interactions. A socialGLOSSARY 174

construct has no fixed meaning outside the social
context of its definition (see Box 6.3).
Social movement A network of individuals, groups
and/or organisations engaged in political or culturalactivity based on a shared identity. The componentsof a social movement may be highly fragmented and
diverse in nature, with no single centre of leadership
(see Box 8.7).
Spatial science A form of human geography that
applied scientific principles and models to theanalysis of spatial processes and spatial variations.
State A political organisation, possessing a degree
of centrality, whose claim to authority is based oncontrol of a defined territory.
Tactical voting The practice by which electors vote
for their second preference candidate in order toprevent a third candidate from being elected.
Territory A space that is imbued with notions of
power, domination and ownership.Urban regime theory A model that proposes that
stability in urban politics is achieved through the
construction of ‘urban regimes’ that draw togetherthe resources of public and private actors to producea ‘capacity to act’.
Workfare A model of welfare reform based on the
movement from a universal rights and needs-based
entitlement to income support and to a selectivesystem combining welfare with work in order toenforce new social responsibilities. British dis-courses involve the term welfare-to-work , while in
North America the term work-first is more common
(see Box 4.9).
World systems analysis A conceptual approach
that proposes that social change at any scale can be understood only in the context of a wider worldsystem, and that change needs to be approached
through a long-term historical perspective (see Box
1.2).GLOSSARY 175

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Page references for glossary entries
are in bold
Abernethy, D.B. 40, 41, 43, 44, 56
Aboriginal people 1–2Abu-Lughod, J. 133
accumulation system 60
active citizenship 137, 142,
144–54, 172
Afghanistan 34, 169Africa 34, 35, 38
after-Fordism 61
Aglietta, M. 59–60, 78, 79
Agnew, J. 2, 15, 16, 17, 37, 46, 48,
50, 56, 96, 154
Aid to Families with Dependent
Children (AFDC) 73
AIDS 149–50
AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power
(ACT UP) 150
Alabama 126
Alaska 115Alexander, L. 2
Allen, J. 67, 68
Althusser, L. 58
Amin, A. 51, 52, 61, 79
Anderson, B. 82, 87, 89, 95Anderson, J. 23, 37, 84, 93
anti-essentialism 58
apparatuses of security 142, 144
Arafat, Yasser 169–70
Arc de Triomphe, Paris 89, 117
Archer, J.C. 142
Area 162
Argentina 50–1
Aristotle 4
Arnold, G. 35Arrighi, G. 48
Association of American
Geographers 15, 160
Atkinson, D. 117, 125, 133
Atlanta, Georgia 108, 109–11Australia 1, 144
autarchy 88
Azaryahu, M. 93, 124
Bachrach, P. 108
Baden-Württemberg 63, 64
Baja, Hungary 124
Bakshi, P. 78
Baliapal, India 153, 154
Banks, M. 163Bannister, J. 155
Baran, P. 59
Baratz, M. 108
Baratz, M.S. 73
Barnes, T. 13
Bassett, K. 162
Bassin, M. 5, 17Baudrillard, J. 12
Bayoumi, M. 169
Bedouin 125
Bell, D. 137, 155
Bell, J.E. 138Belsey, C. 12
Beltane festival 127, 128
Bentham, J. 12–13
Berlin 125
Berlusconi, S. 49
Berry, B. 8, 158, 160, 162
Berry, J.M. 146Bery, L.D. 86
Bhabha, H. 11
Billig, M. 94, 97Blair, Tony 51, 91–2
blocked Fordism 62, 71
Blomley, N. 159, 167
Blowers, A.T. 158, 159, 167
Blunt, A. 167bonding capital 147
boosters 51, 52
borderless world 51, 52
Boudreau, J-A. 100
boundaries 88, 94–5Bourdieu, P. 113, 147
Bové, J. 149
Bowman, I. 7
Boyer, R. 59, 79
Bradford Landau, S. 117Braudel, F. 9, 10
Braun, B. 104
Brenner, N. 21, 60, 68, 79, 103,
114
bridging capital 147
Britain: 1997 general election 137,
140–1; 2001 general election142; active citizenship 145;
economic restructuring 101,
102; electoral system 139–40;
empire 40, 41–2; geopolitics
50–1; local governance 112;memorials 87, 89; national
identity 91–2, 94–5;
neoliberalism 68; public policy
162; territoriality 31; voting
behaviour 139; workfare 77; see
alsoEngland; Wales
Brodie, J. 68Brown, G. 77
Brown, M. 149–50
Brusco, S. 61Index

Budapest 124
Buncombe, A. 104
Burnett, A.D. 2
Bush, George W. 49, 141–2, 143
Busteed, M.A. 8
Butler, D. 139Byrne, T. 112
Calvocoressi, P. 21, 36, 40, 94
Canada 93, 139–40
capacity building 147
capitalism 9, 10, 41, 57, 58, 85–6,
117, 172
Caribbean 129
casitas 130–2
Castells, M. 100
Castree, N. 79, 104
Cathedral of Christ the Saviour,
Moscow 90–1
centralisation 31, 32–3
Centre for Mathematical Economic
Forecasting Studies Applied to
Planning (CEPREMAP) 57
Cerny, C. 73
Charas Community Center, New
York 131, 132
Chile 158
China 21, 22
Christophers, B. 43
citizen action 148–50citizenship 10, 136–7, 154–6, 169,
172; active 142, 144–54, 172;
régulation approach 70, 72–3
city-states 28
civic nationalism 36, 172
civil wars 34, 35
Clapham, D. 145
Clark, G. 26
Clarke, D.B. 14
Clarke, S. 79
class 133
classic Fordism 62Clayton, D. 40
Clegg, S.R. 3
Clinton, Bill 73
Cloke, P. 9
Coca-Cola 51, 53Cochrane, A. 114
Cockburn, C. 100Cohen, A. 129
Cohen, S.B. 9
Cold War 46, 50
Cole, J.P. 7
Collard, S. 117
colony 39, 41, 172
community 105–7, 126, 172;
capacity building 147–8;
empowerment 144–5;
gentrification and community
gardens 129–32; parades,
pageantry and politics 126–9
community gardens 130–2, 133–4community power 107–11
Community Voices Heard 73, 75
company towns 117
concentration 15
Condit, C. 117Confederate flag 126, 127
Congo 86
consolidation 22–7, 36
consumer rights 144
Conversi, D. 94
Cooke, P. 101, 102, 103
Coppock, T. 161, 167Corbridge, S. 46, 48, 50, 56
Cornog, E.W. 117
Cosgrove, D. 116, 117, 133
countryside 115–16
Cox, K. 2, 15, 100, 102–4, 114Crang, M. 91
Crang, P. 55
critical geopolitics 14, 48, 164, 172
Cromwell, Oliver 104
cultural capital 113cultural relations: empires 41–4;
geopolitics 48, 49
cultural turn 10, 172
culture 85, 88
Cyprus 94
Dahl, R. 3, 101, 108
Dalby, S. 14
Daniels, S. 98, 116
de Bernieres, L. 34
de Bilj, H.J. 9
de Burca, G. 55de facto citizenship rights 137, 155,
169de jure citizenship rights 137, 155
Dean, M. 24, 144
Dear, M. 26, 160
decolonisation 44
deconstruction 11, 12
deep analysis 163Delaney, D. 103
delayed Fordism 62
Deleuze, G. 11, 12
della Porta, D. 151, 152
democracy 154–5, 172
Democratic Republic of Congo 86
democratisation 137, 138Denmark 77–8
Derrida, J. 11, 12
Desforges, L. 97, 98
devolution 172
Diani, M. 151, 152Dicken, P. 51, 52, 56
Dickinson, R.E. 160
DiGovanna, S. 63, 64
Dikshit, R.D. 9
discourse 11–12, 13, 14, 172
Dodds, K. 45, 46, 47, 48, 51, 54,
56
Doel, M.A. 14
Donnan, H. 21, 33
Dorchester, Earl of 118
Dorling, D. 158, 167
Drake, C. 14Dublin 121
Duncan, J. 13, 118–19, 133
Duncan, S. 65, 99, 102, 103, 161
Dunleavy, P. 100, 139
Dushanbe, Tajikistan 124
East, W.G. 7–8
East Germany 124–5
Eastern Europe 6, 7, 121, 124–5
economic development 63–5
economic relations 38, 39; empires
40–1, 43–4; geopolitics 47–8,50–1; and globalisation 52, 54
economic restructuring 101, 102–3
Ecuador 95–6, 105
Edensor, T. 97
education 85Ehrenhalt, A. 112, 113
electoral geography 8–9, 137, 138,INDEX 196

154, 172; 1997 British general
election 140–1; 2000 US
presidential election 141–2,
143; gerrymandering and
malapportionment 139–40;
voting behaviour 137, 139
elite 111–13, 172
elite theory 107, 108, 109–10,
172–3
Emilia-Romagna 63
empire 28, 34, 173; and states
39–44
empowerment 144engagement 15–16
Engels, F. 58
England: castles 117; elite networks
113; landscapes of power 117;
local modes of social regulation65, 66, 67; state consolidation
23
England, K. 14, 16
English language 55
Enlightenment 4
Esping-Andersen, G. 73, 146
Esser, J. 60Estonia 85
ETA 83–4
Etherington, D. 78
ethnic nationalism 36, 173
ethnies 85Ettinger, S. 75
Etzioni-Halevy, E. 112
European Union 55
excise duties 23, 26
expansion 15Expo ’86 120
external territoriality 28–9
Fainstein, S.S. 151
Federal Family Support Act 1988
(US) 73
federalism 31, 32, 173
feminism 14, 173
festivals 126–9
Fevre, R. 97
Firestone Tyre Company 38
Fischer, C.S. 113flags 126, 127, 133
flex-Fordism 62Flint, C. 10, 11, 15, 20, 31, 44, 92,
93, 170
Florida 142
Florida, R. 57
folk culture 88, 91
Fordism 57, 60–1, 62, 71forestry 24
Foucault, M. 11–13, 14, 23–4, 153
France 24, 33, 40, 44, 53, 59, 117
Frank, A.G. 59
Freeman, C. 1
Friends of the Earth 149
Fyfe, N.R. 155
Gaile, G. 79
Garibaldi, G. 90
Gellner, E. 83, 85
gender 111–12, 133gentrification 116, 129–30, 173
geography 3–4
geopolitics 5, 14, 44–51, 169, 173
Geopolitik 5, 6–7, 173
Georgia 126
Germany 4–7, 63, 64, 125
Gerry, E. 140gerrymandering 140, 173
Gerth, H. 20
Ghana 33
Gibson-Graham, J.K. 58, 79
Giddens, A. 11, 23, 32, 41, 86Gilbert, E. 97
Giordano, B. 96
Gittell, R. 147
Giuliani, R. 130, 132
Glasgow Earth First! 152–3Glass, R. 129
Glassner, M. 101
Glick, M. 60
global citizenship 156
globalisation 22, 27, 31–2, 33–4,
36, 39, 51–6, 100, 155, 173
glocalisation 100, 173
Goblet, Y. 2
Godlewska, A. 56
Goffman, E. 113
Good, J.B. 43
Goodwin, M. 65, 68, 70, 71, 79,
155, 168
Gordon, C. 24Gore, A. 141–2, 143
governmentality 12, 24, 142, 173
Graham, J. 78
Gramsci, A. 78, 166
grass-roots activists 103, 113–14
Greece 87, 94Gregory, D. 9, 13
Gregson, N. 102
Gruffudd, P. 92, 93
Guattari, F. 11, 12
Habermas, J. 59
habitat 88Halfacree, K. 116
Hall, P. 161
Ham, C. 165, 166, 167–8
Harding, A. 107
Hartshorne, R. 7, 8, 26, 38–9Harvey, D. 9, 49, 66, 79, 94, 100,
121, 122, 123, 133, 158, 159,
160, 161, 167
Haushofer, K. 6–7
Hawthorn, G. 36
Hayden, D. 121, 133
heartland 6, 46, 173
Heffernan, M. 87, 89
Held, D. 34, 51
Helleiner, E. 97
Herb, G.H. 7, 17
Herbert, S. 13Herbert-Cheshire, L. 144
Herod, A. 103
Hershey, Pennsylvania 117
Heske, H. 7
Hewitt, V. 97Hill, M. 165, 166, 167–8
Hirsch, J. 61
Hirst, C. 151
Hirst, P. 51
historical materialism 58
Hobbes, T. 3
Holmes, L. 75homeland 88
Hong Kong 21
Hooson, I.D. 93
Horton, J. 14
House, J. 158, 160, 167Huber, E. 73
Hudson, R. 68INDEX 197

Hugill, P.J. 139
human geography 164
humanistic geography 162
Hungary 124
Hunter, F. 108, 109–10, 113
Huntington, New York 104Huntington, S.P. 138
Hyndman, J. 14
hypercritics 51
Iceland 83
identity 10, 126–32, 164
identity politics 55, 173
ideology 86–7, 173
Ikenberry, G.J. 48
imperialism 39, 41, 48
India 46–7, 115, 153, 154
industrial development 63–5infrastructural power 23, 29
Institute of British Geographers
160, 161
institutional relations 166–7
internal territoriality 28–9
International Journal of Urban and
Regional Research 114
International Monetary Fund 48
internationalisation 52
Iraq 47, 49, 169
Ireland 92–3, 104
Isin, E. 136, 155Israel 93, 115, 120, 126, 169–70
Italy 63, 64, 84, 96, 125, 148
Jackson, P. 10, 41, 129, 133
Jacobs, B. 79Japan 52
Jefferson, T. 32
Jerusalem 115
Jessop, B. 3, 26, 49, 57, 59, 60, 61,
68, 73, 74, 78, 79, 166–7, 168
Jobseekers’ Allowance 77
John, P. 79Johnson, N. 92, 93, 117, 121, 133
Johnston, R. 8, 9, 41, 100, 139,
140, 141, 142, 156, 159
Jonas, A. 57
Jones, C. 40Jones, M. 56, 61, 68, 77, 78, 103,
167, 168Jones, R. 56, 82, 97, 98
Joseph, M. 105
Journal of Rural Studies ,The156
Judge, D. 114
Kandy, Sri Lanka 118–19
Kashmir 46–7, 115
Kasperson, R. 2, 17
Katz, D. 59
Kearns, A. 70, 72, 142, 144, 145,
156
Kearns, R.A. 86
Kedourie, E. 86–7Keith, M. 10, 156
Kellerman, A. 93
Kettle, M. 127
Keynesian welfare states 73, 74
King, R. 41, 42Kirby, A. 146
Kjellen, R. 5
Kofman, E. 14, 15, 155
Koht, H. 84
Korais, A. 87
Koskela, H. 155
Krasner, S.D. 48Krätke, S. 63
Kristeva, J. 12
Kuwait 47, 49
landscape 10, 173; control and
exclusion 125–6; monumental
121, 122–3; and nations 92–3;
and power 116–21; streets and
statues 121, 124–5
landscape of power 116–21, 173
language 55, 82, 84, 85
Larner, W. 68
Latour, B. 3
Lauria, M. 79, 107
Leach, B. 161
Leadbeater, C. 63
leadership 107–11Lebensraum 5, 6–7, 173
Lechte, J. 12
Lee, R. 158
Lega Nord see Northern League
legibility 24–5legitimacy 72–3
Leib, J.L. 127Leipzig, East Germany 105–7
Leitner, H. 79, 103
Lenin, V.I. 41
Levi, M. 148
Ley, D. 120
Libya 125Liepins, R. 105
Lindblom, C.E. 168
Lindh, A. 170
Lipietz, A. 59, 79
local scale 101, 103–5
local state 173; citizenship and
legitimacy 70, 72–3;communities 105–7; elite
networks 111–13; power
and leadership 107–11;
régulation approach 65–6,
68–70, 71
locality 99, 100–1, 102–3, 113–14,
173
location 88
Lodemel, I. 73
Logan, J. 102
London 106, 115, 117, 118, 128–9
Los Angeles 72–3Lovering, J. 61
Low, M. 15, 104, 165
Lowell, Massachusetts 128
Lowndes, V. 144
Lukes, S. 3, 108
McAllister, I. 141
McCann, E. 103
McDonald’s 51, 149
McKay, G. 149, 156MacKian, S. 163
Mackinder, Sir H. 5–7, 17, 46,
159–60
MacLeod, G. 79, 167, 168
McPhail, I.R. 8
Mahan, A. 5
Mair, A. 102–3Major, John 68, 94–5
malapportionment 140, 173
Malone, K. 155
Mamadouh, V. 16
managerialism 161Manchester 112
Mandel, E. 59INDEX 198

Mann, M. 20, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26,
27, 29, 37, 38, 55, 86
Maori 86
Markus, T.A. 117
Markusen, A. 164
Marquez, G.G. 34Marsden, T. 104, 116
Marshall, M. 60
Marshall, T.H. 137
Marston, S.A. 15, 103, 114, 128,
133
Martin, D.G. 103
Martin, R. 158, 159, 162, 164–5,
166, 167
Marx, K. 38, 58
Marxism 9, 58, 100, 161, 162; see
alsoneo-Marxism; structural
Marxism
Massey, D. 95, 99, 101, 114, 158,
159, 162, 164, 167
May, J. 155
Mead, L.M. 73
measurements 24–5
media 152
Mexico 21Mikesell, M.W. 83
military relations 46–7
Millennium Dome 92
Miller, B. 100
Mills, C.W. 20Milton Abbas, Dorset 118
Minghi, J. 2, 17
mini-system 10
Mirkovic, D. 84
Mitchell, D. 10, 117Mitterrand, François 117
mode of regulation 60–1, 65, 66,
67–8
mode of societalisation 60–1
Modena, Italy 61
modernist theories 84, 85–7
Mohan, G. 147, 148Mohan, J. 147, 148
Molotch, H. 102
monuments 87, 89, 117–18, 121,
122–3, 124
Moodie, A.E. 7Moore, T. 140
Mormont, M. 115, 116Morris, J. 40, 41
Morton, W.H. 93
Moulaert, F. 61, 79
Muir, R. 8–9
mujaheddin 34
multi-level citizenship 155–6multinational corporations 52–3,
149
Murdoch, J. 104, 116
Murphy, A. 28, 29
museums 91
Nairn, T. 85–6
Napoleon 117
nation 82, 174; contesting 95–8;
formation 83–7, 88;
geographies 87–95
nation-state 40, 83, 93, 155, 174;
and globalisation 51–4, 55
national identity 10, 55, 91–2,
94–5
nationalism 31, 82, 83–4, 87,
97–8, 174; banality 97; as high
culture 84, 85; as ideology 84,
86–7; socio-economicdevelopment 84, 85–6;
Southern states 36; and the
state 84, 86
Nazis 7
neighbourhood effect 139, 174
neo-Lamarckism 5
neo-Marxism 57, 59
neoliberalism 65, 66, 67–8, 162
New Deal (UK) 77
new social movements 150–2, 154New York City 73, 75, 77, 113,
116, 120, 169; gentrification
and community gardens
129–32, 133–4
New Zealand 68, 86
Newman, D. 21
Newton, K. 108Nimeiry, M. 36
Nineteen Eighty-four (Orwell) 23
Norris, C. 12
Norris, P. 141, 148
North America 30; see also Canada;
United States
North Carolina 141Northern League (Lega Nord) 96
Northern states 34, 36–7, 38, 48,
55
nuclear weapons 46–7
Offe, C. 59, 68, 151–2, 166, 168
Ogborn, M. 13, 23, 26, 31
Ohmae, K. 51
Olds, K. 120
Olson, M. 151
Olympic Games 1–2
Omdurman, Sudan 40
Orwell, G. 23Osborne, B.S. 117, 133
othering 43, 94, 174
O’Tuathail, G. 5, 6, 7, 14, 17, 45,
46
Paasi, A. 21, 96
pageantry 126–9, 133
Painter, J. 2, 11, 15, 16, 26, 27,
65, 68, 70, 71, 79, 137, 155
Pakistan 46–7, 115
Palace of the Soviets, Moscow 91
Palestinians 115, 126panopticon 12–13
parades 126–9
Paris 117, 118, 121, 122–3
Parker, G. 45, 137
Parliamentary Affairs 156
Parnell, Charles Stuart 121
participation 142, 145–54
Paterson, J.H. 6
Pattie, C. 139, 141
Pawson, E. 86Peake, L. 14
Peck, J. 38, 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66,
73, 75, 77, 78, 79, 112, 114,
158, 162–3, 165, 167, 168
Peebles, Scotland 127, 128
Peet, R. 57, 59, 79
Peluso, N. 34, 37perennialist theories 84–5
peripheral Fordism 62
permeable Fordism 62
Perreault, T. 105, 156
Personal Responsibility and Work
Opportunity Reconciliation Act
1996 (US) 73INDEX 199

Petty, Sir W. 4
Philo, C. 14, 137
Pile, S. 10, 156
Pilger, J. 47
Pincetl, S. 155
Pinochet, General Augusto 158Piore, M. 61
pivot area 6, 46
place 3, 99, 113–14, 115–16, 133,
170, 174; community and
identity 126–32; community
and political interests 105–7;
and nation 87, 89–92;significance 99–101, 102–3; see
alsolandscape
Plaid Cymru 92
pluralism 107, 108, 174
Polányi, K. 9, 10policy seepublic policy
policy transfer 38, 162
political economy 9, 48, 57,
78, 174; models 58–9;
régulation approach 57, 59–61,
62–3
political geography 169–71;
defining 2–4; future 14–16;
history 4–14, 45–6; and public
policy 158, 159–67
Political Geography 15, 16, 114, 156
political rationality 144political relations 38, 39; empires
40, 43–4; geopolitics 46–7, 48
politics 2–3
Pollard, J. 163
Pollock Park, Glasgow 152–3Polsby, N. 108
Poplar, London 106
Port Sunlight, Liverpool 117
positivism 9
post-Fordism 61, 62, 65, 68, 71;
see also Fordism
post-structuralism 10–13, 14, 174
postmodernism 152, 162, 164–5
Poulantzas, N. 166
power 2–3, 10, 174; elite networks
111–13; and globalisation 55;
and landscape 116–21; localpolitics 107–11; Olympic
Games 1–2; and space 11, 13,153; states 21; territorialisation
28
pre-emptive power 110
pre-modern theories 84–5
Prescott, J.R.V. 21, 101, 139
pressure groups 149primitive Taylorism 62
primordialist theories 84
Prince, H. 160
protest 137, 148–50, 152–4
Prussia 24
public policy 2–3, 158, 159, 174;
deeper engagement 165–7;Golden Age 159–60; recent
debates 162–5; relevance
debates 160–2
public space 155, 174
Purcell, M. 72–3, 114, 136Putnam, R. 96, 147–8, 149
quantitative revolution 8, 174
Quebec 83, 97
Quichua community 105
Quito, Ecuador 95–6
Rabinow, P. 12, 153
race 41–2, 95–6, 127, 128, 133
Radcliffe, S. 95, 98
radical geography 160
Rambo 48
ratchet effect 26
rational territoriality 29–31
Ratzel, F. 4–5, 6, 17, 38
realism 45
regime of accumulation (RoA) 59,
60, 65
region 174
regional movements 96
régulation approach 57, 59–61,
62–3, 78, 136, 166, 174; after
Fordism 61; citizenship and
legitimacy 70, 72–3; economicand industrial development
63–5; local modes of social
regulation 65, 66, 67–8; local
state 65–6, 68–70, 71; workfare
73–8
Reich, M. 59
Reich, R. 51relevance debates 158, 160–2
religion 42–3
resistance 10, 152, 174
Resnick, S. 58
Reynolds, D. 57
Reynolds, S. 84Richardson, J. 69, 147
Righi, E. 61
rights, citizenship 154–5, 169
Ritter, C. 5
Riverside, California 73, 74–5
Robbins, P. 16, 133
Robins, K. 61Robinson, J. 16
Robson, B. 160, 161, 162
Roden, Minnesota 116
Rokkan, S. 26, 139
Rose, G. 106Rose, N. 24, 144
Rosenthal, L.D. 9
Routledge, P. 152–3, 154, 155,
156
Royal Geographical Society 159,
160
Rural Sociology 156
Russia 6, 46, 90–1; see also Soviet
Union
Rwanda 36
Sabel, C. 61
Sack, R. 21, 28, 32
Sacré-Coeur, Paris 121, 122–3
Said, E. 41, 43
Saillard, Y. 79
St Patrick’s Day parades 128Saltaire, UK 117
Saussure, F. de 12
Savage, M. 102, 103
scale 88, 101, 103–5, 170, 174
sceptics 51
Schumpeterian welfare states 73, 74
scientific forestry 24Scott, A. 61, 62–3, 79
Scott, J. 55
Scott, J.C. 24, 31, 32
Scottish Geographical Journal 158
September 11 48, 49, 169shallow analysis 163
Shambaugh, D. 21INDEX 200

Sharp, J. 10, 48, 156
Shaw, M. 158, 167
Shelley, F. 169
Shields, R. 93
Short, J.R. 118
Short, K. 162Sidorov, D. 90–1, 98
Siegfried, A. 139
Silicon Valley, California 63, 64
Silver, B.J. 48
Sismondo, S. 104
Skansen Open Air museum,
Stockholm 91
slave trade triangle 41, 42
Smith, A. 83, 84–5, 86, 87, 88, 91,
92, 93, 98
Smith, D. 160
Smith, F. 105–7, 114Smith, G. 31
Smith, N. 56, 65, 102, 103, 129,
130, 133, 169
Smith, S. 128, 133, 136, 137, 155,
156
smuggling 33
social capital 147–8, 174
social construction 103, 104, 113,
115, 133, 174–5
social geography 160, 162
social movement 150–2, 154, 175
social structures of accumulation
(SSA) 59
Soja, E. 7
Sorkin, M. 169
South Africa 125–6
South Carolina 126, 127Southern states 22, 34–7, 48, 54–5
Soviet Union 31; see also Russia
space 3, 170; and citizenship 155;
and power 11, 13, 153
space of engagement 104–5
space–time matrix 11
Spain 42–3, 83–4spatial science 175
Spitalfields, London 115
Spruyt, H. 28
Spykman, N.J. 6
Sri Lanka 34Staeheli, L.A. 138
Stamp, Sir D. 159–60Staples Center, Los Angeles 72–3
state 20–2, 165–6, 175;
consolidation 22–7; and empire
39–44; external relations 38–9;
and geopolitics 44–51; and
globalisation 51–6;institutional relations 166–7;
and nation 83, 84, 86, 93–4;
régulation approach 57,
63–78; Southern 34–6;
territoriality 27–34; time
and space 36–7
state Fordism 62Stephens, John 73
Stiell, B. 14
Stokes, D.E. 139
Stoler, A.L. 41
Stone, C. 110–11, 114Storper, M. 79
Strabo 4
strategic relations 38, 39
street names 124–5
structural adjustment programmes
48
structural Marxism 57, 58, 59Sudan 36, 40
Sui, D.Z. 139
Sunderland 68, 71
surveillance 23
Sweden 170Swyngedouw, E. 79, 100
systems theory 9
tactical voting 141, 175
Taiwan 21, 22Tamil guerillas 34
Taylor, P. 2, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 20–1,
31, 32, 37, 44, 92, 93
territoriality 5, 21–2, 27–34, 36;
and globalisation 51; Southern
states 34, 36
territory 3, 93–5, 170, 175
Terzani, T. 124
Thailand 34
Thatcher, Margaret 65, 68
Theodore, N. 68, 79
Thompson, G. 51Thrift, N. 51, 52, 57, 59, 79
Tiananmen Square, Beijing 155Tickell, A. 59, 60, 61, 62, 65, 66,
78, 79, 112, 114, 167
Tilly, C. 21, 26, 27, 28, 86
Toal, G. 169
Togo 33
Torfing, J. 78Toronto 128–9
Trafalgar Square, London 117
Transactions of the Institute of British
Geographers 158, 161
transnational corporations 52–3,
149
transpolitical geography 14Trickey, H. 73
Turkey 94
Turner, B.S. 136
Turok, I. 69
United Kingdom seeBritain
United Nations 47, 53
United States: 2000 presidential
election 137, 141–2, 143; and
Canada 93; citizenship 137,
146–7; Confederate flag 126,
127; economic restructuring102–3; electoral system
139–40; geopolitics 47–8, 49,
50, 169; imperialism 40, 43;
landscapes of power 119–20;
local governance 111–12;neoliberalism 68; public policy
162; régulation approach 59–60;
St Patrick’s Day parades 128;
Silicon Valley 63, 64;
territoriality 21, 32; votingbehaviour 139; and West Africa
38; workfare 73
Unwin, T. 97, 160
Urban Affairs 156
Urban Affairs Quarterly 114
urban managerialism 161
urban politics 70, 72–3, 100urban regime theory 107, 109–11,
175
Urban Studies 114, 156
Urry, J. 100, 102, 144
Valentine, G. 137, 155
Valler, D. 68, 79INDEX 201

Valley VOTE (Voters Organized
Together for Empowerment) 72
Vancouver 120, 149–50
Vandergeest, P. 34, 37
Vidal, A. 147
voting behaviour 137, 139
Waddell, C. 142
Wales 23, 82, 92, 97, 117
Walker, R. 45
Wall, D. 149
Wallerstein, I. 9–11, 20, 41
Walsh, F. 9Walzer, N. 79
Ward, K. 68
Warde, A. 102
Warf, B. 142
Washington DC 118Washington New Town 71
Watts, M. 41, 155, 160
Web sites 134, 156–7
Webber, M. 79
Weber, E. 33Weber, M. 3, 20, 38
Webster, G.R. 127
Weigert, H. 7
Weizman, E. 126
welfare state 73, 74, 77–8, 144
welfare- through -work 77–8
Wencelas Square, Prague 155
West Africa 38
West Point Military Academy,
New York 47
Western, J. 125
Whelan, Y. 98
White, S.B. 73Williams, A. 68
Williams, C. 48, 87, 88, 91, 92,
98
Willis, C. 117
Wills, J. 167Wilson, T.W. 21, 33
Wolff, D. 58
Wolfinger, R.E. 108
Wood, A. 79
Wood, W.B. 36Woods, M. 113, 115, 116, 127,
133, 137, 149
Workfairness 73, 75, 76
workfare 73–8, 175
World Bank 48
World Economic Forum 148–9world economy 10, 11, 20
world empire 10
World Social Forum 148–9
world systems analysis 9–10, 175
World Trade Organisation (WTO)
48, 53, 55, 148–9, 170
Wyre Forest 139
Yanow, D. 120, 133
Yemen 47–8
Yeung, H.W-C. 33, 51, 52, 53,
56
Yugoslavia 84
Yuval-Davis, N. 155–6
zero-sum game 53
Zukin, S. 117, 119–20, 169INDEX 202