Shifting the Territory of Politics

I write this editorial introduction while in Hong Kong for a conference on ‘Asian urbanism’. There is perhaps no more interesting place on the map from which to consider the analytics of territory, politics, and governance. Hong Kong reminds us of the political construction of territory; it challenges the well-established categories through which we name, and constitute the norms of, systems of governance; and it defies the efforts to equate the scope of sovereignty with the geography of territory. I name where I write from because I am convinced that it is important to not only undertake the history of territory, as Elden (2013) has so brilliantly outlined in the first issue of this journal, but also that such a history can only be told from a place on the map. To leave such a place unmarked will simply not do.

In writing from Hong Kong about territory, politics, and governance I must foreground two issues. First, Hong Kong is located at the cusp of a rearranged world. While economic crisis continues to engulf the liberal democracies of the North Atlantic, new formations of economic hegemony are taking shape in the global South. From the rise of the BRICS¹ as a vector of sovereignty and prosperity to assertions of continental unity in Latin America to robust transactions of aid and development that crisscross the global South, a new global order is in the making. This is no longer the world of the Bretton Woods agreements and institutions. But what sort of a world is it? Arrighi (2009) has described this emerging global order as the New Asian Age, a shift of the epicentre of the global political economy from North America to East Asia. I am less convinced with the celebratory discourse of an Asian Renaissance and more interested in how the claim of economic ascendance generates new modalities and territories of rule. Ong (2004) has characterized such territoriality as constituted through graduated sovereignty and zoning strategies. Focusing on what she calls the ‘Chinese axis’, she argues that it is necessary to pay attention to ‘the rescaling of state power across the national landscape and the differential scales of regulatory effect on the rights and privileges of different segments of the population’, or what she terms ‘graduated sovereignty’ (Ong, 2004, p. 72). At the same time, she notes that it is not enough to confine analysis to the scale of national territory. Instead, Greater China must be understood as ‘a state-driven strategy to economically integrate disarticulated political entities as a detour toward eventual political integration’ (Ong, 2004, pp. 70–71). This, she argues, is not the ‘unbundling’ of territory but rather ‘the creation of spaces of political and economic exception’ (Ong, 2004), an argument she takes further in her important text, Neoliberalism as Exception (Ong, 2006). Hong Kong, as the liminal space of Greater China, is an appropriate place from which to consider such territoriality.

Second, Hong Kong exemplifies the complexities of market rule and democratic politics. I write this editorial after a day spent amidst the housing landscape of the city, the curious juxtaposition of mammoth public housing estates with soaring towers of luxury built by the moguls of real-estate speculation. I write this from the periphery known in Hong Kong as the ‘new territories’, one of the many ambitious state-led initiatives to open up new frontiers of urban development. Icon of both global financial capitalism and social welfare, of powerful privatism and powerful state planning, of democratic aspiration and strong executive power, Hong Kong marks the limits of blunt academic accounts of both neoliberalism and democracy. In short, Hong Kong presents a challenge to the normal science through which we otherwise interpret the contemporary world and its processes.

These two issues, amplified by Hong Kong, are of considerable relevance to this volume of Territory, Politics, and Governance. The papers assembled in this issue span a range of topics, from the diffusion of social policy to the diffusion of practices of war. They render the familiar worlds of British politics and the EU economy strange; they make the unrecognized world of Nagorny Karabakh visible and familiar. I do not wish to diminish the distinctive contributions of each paper, but for the purpose of this editorial introduction, and keeping in mind the prompts provided by Hong Kong, I will organize these contributions around the broad theme of the ‘territory of politics’.

In their essay on British politics, Johnston et al. (2013) analyse how new parliamentary constituencies are created, thereby indicating the sheer materiality of the territory of politics. The essay demonstrates both the ‘manipulation of territory’ necessary for electoral politics as well as the limits of such manipulation, especially in the British case. It is useful to interpret these processes as an instance of what Radil and Flint (2013), in their essay, describe as ‘territorial practices of state making’, albeit in the context of post-Cold War Africa. Pairing these two papers together poses the question of whether the seemingly extreme and exotic case of war-ridden Africa can provide insights into the mundane machinations of British electoral politics. I think the answer is yes. Following Agnew's (2005) earlier work on territory and sovereignty, Radil and Flint explore the ways in which ‘diverse territorial practices’, including ‘extra-territorial actions’, extend and remake state sovereignty. It is useful then to consider how the territoriality of the state is constituted through a diversity of arrangements and practices. In their essay on political geographies and public attitudes, Toal and O'Loughlin (2013) demonstrate that such diverse practices inevitably include ‘geographical imaginations’. In other words, the politics of territory is also the politics of representation, vision, and imagination. Toal and O'Loughlin usefully note that such geographical imaginations are not just international visions of diplomacy but also the ‘everyday spatial attitudes and perceptions of residents’ in ‘disputed territories’. Let me suggest that too often the analysis of such representational politics has been consigned to the sphere of cultural studies. By making ordinary and everyday geographical imaginations central to what is otherwise considered politics (the formal politics of sovereignty, diplomacy, and governance) Toal and O'Loughlin greatly expand the territory of politics.

In his editorial introduction to the first issue of this journal, Agnew (2013, p. 1) notes that it is necessary to understand governance and politics at ‘a variety of geographical scales’, including ‘various forms of supranational political organization’. This is precisely what is at stake in the essay by M. P. Smith (2013), on the global diffusion of public policy.² With an interest in both ‘elite-driven’ and ‘democratic’ modes of policy diffusion, Smith follows the travels of conditional cash transfer programmes from the technocracies of Mexico to post-welfare New York City. I borrow the term ‘post-welfare’ from the work of Robert Fairbanks who uses it to highlight ‘new forms of statecraft’ (2009, p. 18) which have displaced welfarism and through which ‘the state redistributes risk, responsibility, and regulatory functions’ (Fairbanks 2009, p. 227). To understand such forms of statecraft it is necessary to conceptualize policy itself as the terrain of politics, as ongoing political work. This is the important insight provided by A. Smith (2013) in his essay on the EU's wine policy. As is the case in the Toal and O'Loughlin essay, Andy Smith interprets territory as not only the political organization of space but also as a ‘stock of symbolic resources’. But in keeping with Michael Peter Smith's emphasis on the institutional alliances through which particular policy agendas are consolidated and implemented, Andy Smith foregrounds the question of ‘social action’. This leads him to the following conclusion: that ‘a territory is, therefore, firstly an institutionalized space which actors from different professions (politicians, civil servants, interest group leaders) set out to represent’ (A. Smith, 2013, p. 207). I see this as an important contribution to the study of territory, one that resonates with Elden's (2013) insistence on understanding territory as a political technology. For Andy Smith, the institutionalized space of territory is thus constituted through various practices of ‘technicization’. To study territory in this way requires what Larner and Le Heron (2002, p. 753) have described as a ‘situated method’, one that is especially attentive to the ‘calculative practices’ through which the economy is produced and governed. In my work on global circuits of policy, I have emphasized that such calculative practices must be understood not simply as emplaced, but rather as dynamic circulations (Roy, 2012). Indeed, in a prescient intervention in the analysis of global finance, Lee and LiPuma (2002, p. 191) had already insisted on the ‘centrality of circulation to the analysis of the globalization of capitalism’. As we consider the territory of politics, so I propose that we pay careful attention—analytically and methodologically—to the relationship between territory and circulation.

Michael Peter Smith's essay is of course centrally concerned with practices and processes of circulation. Yet, what is the politics of such circulation? In tracing the travels of social policy, specifically of conditional cash transfer programmes, Smith draws a sharp distinction between ‘oligarchic’ and ‘democratic’ modes of diffusion. His work is an important contribution to our understanding of the role of ‘wealthy oligarchs’ in the making of global policy, especially in relation to the social formation that has been dubbed philanthrocapitalism. However, I want to suggest that it is also necessary to think beyond the divides of oligarchic capitalism and its democratic alternatives. In my global ethnography of social policy, I have previously suggested that the Washington consensus and its counter-hegemonic alternatives may indeed be closely entangled (Roy, 2010). Put another way, as I noted in my reflection on Hong Kong, we must think beyond the established categories of both neoliberalism and democracy. Here, the essay by Peck (2013) is important and instructive. As in his previous work, Peck argues that ‘neoliberalism, whether or not it is understood to be hegemonic, must be theorized amongst its others’ (p. 135). Indeed, Peck's own research on conditional cash transfer programmes, conducted with Nik Theodore, demonstrates how such policies articulate market rule with pro-poor mandates (Peck and Theodore, 2014). As Ferguson (2007, p. 71) has argued, these emerging social assistance programmes ‘represent a new development within (and not simply against) neoliberalism’. I argue that such programmes must also be seen as an integral part of a rearranged world, one in which bold experiments with poverty policy and social democracy are unfolding in the global South, often in conjunction with equally bold experiments with market rule. Put another way, if Miller and Rose (2008, p. 88) have made the case for how, under conditions of advanced liberalism, the ‘territory of government’ is being reconfigured, such reconfigurations are perhaps in sharpest relief beyond the boundaries of the North Atlantic.

In a recent manifesto, Hall et al. (2013) seek to analyse the present historical conjuncture, what they term ‘after neoliberalism’. In doing so, they foreground ‘neoliberal hegemony’ and ‘its global character’ but also note that neoliberalism ‘never conquered everything’ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 10). In particular, they point to ‘progressive governments and grassroots social movements in Latin America’ as ‘responses’ to neoliberalism (Hall et al., 2013, p. 11). I see Peck's analysis to be somewhat different. For Peck, the social policies of Latin America are not simply examples of the ‘alter-globalisation movement’ (Hall et al., 2013, p. 11) but instead instances of the ‘mongrel forms of market rule’ (Peck, 2013, p. 135) This, I believe, is an important analytical point, and one with important methodological implications for the study of the territory of politics. In his essay, Peck is especially concerned with the question of methodology, seeking to move past the debilitating divides of political economy and ethnography. Building on Burawoy's (2003) work, he calls for the ‘ethnographic archeologist’ as a solution to such divides. This is a promising approach, for it suggests that ethnographic practices of knowledge, be they circulatory or archaeological, bear the potential of enriching and transforming historical materialism. In particular, such methodologies make possible a more complex understanding of the territory of politics.

Notes

1. BRICS, Bangladesh, Russia, India, China, South Africa.

2. Presented as the Inaugural Territory, Politics, Governance Lecture at the Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, 2013.