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Abstract
Our point of departure is the emerging critique of the problematic treatment of scale across various disciplinary engagements with hybridity. Adopting an overarching state-formation perspective, we extend this geographical critique by combining the sociospatial lenses of scale and territory in an analysis of one of the primary animators of political economic change and contestation in post-colonial Melanesia: extractive resource capitalism. Focusing on the Solomons Group of islands, we examine two spatial phenomena at the core of the contentious and frequently violent politics of extraction animating processes of state-formation in these settings: the social and historical production of islands as a scale/territory of violent struggle; and the emergence of the ‘ideology of customary landownership’ as a territorialising and exclusionary project that also has salient scalar dimensions. While these phenomena illustrate the inadequacy of hybridity’s crude spatial ontology, they also demonstrate how hybridity perspectives can play a role in achieving ‘thick description’ of the complex interactions involved in spatialised political economic processes. We conclude by sketching out some agendas for research on the political economy of resource extraction – and, more broadly, state-formation – in the western Pacific that combine spatial perspectives with those of the critical hybridity literature across various social science fields.
Notes
1. Soja, “Thirdspace,” 261.
2. Jessop et al., “Theorizing Sociospatial Relations.”
3. Dinnen and Allen, “Reflections on Hybridity as an Analytical Lens on State Formation.”
4. Dinnen and Allen, “State Absence and State Formation in Solomon Islands”; Dinnen and Allen, “Reflections on Hybridity as an Analytical Lens on State Formation”; Hameiri and Jones, “Beyond Hybridity to the Politics of Scale”; Hameiri et al., International Intervention and Local Politics.
5. Allen, “Melanesia’s Violent Environments”; Peet and Watts, Liberation Ecologies; Watts, “Resource Curse?”
6. de Guevara, “Introduction,” 113.
7. Berman and Lonsdale, Unhappy valley, 5
8. Foster, “Introduction.”
9. For example Huber and Emel, “Fixed Minerals, Scalar Politics”; Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, 91, 92.
10. Hönke, “Transnational Companies and Security Governance.”
11. Bebbington et al., “Contention and Ambiguity,” 893.
12. Boege et al., “On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States.”
13. Wallis, “Building a Liberal-local Hybrid Peace and State in Bougainville.”
14. Allen et al., Justice Delivered Locally.
15. For example Hoenke, “New Political Topographies”; Watts, “Resource Curse?”
16. Allen, “Islands, Extraction and Violence’, “Melanesia’s Violent Environments.”
17. Filer, “Compensation, Rent and Power in Papua New Guinea.”
18. Jessop et al., “Theorizing Sociospatial Relations,” 396.
19. Bhabha, The Location of Culture.
20. Ashcroft et al., “The Empire Writes Back.”
21. Merry 2006.
22. Bagayoko et al., “Hybrid Security Governance in Africa.”
23. Andrews, The Limits of Institutional Reform in Development.
24. Conflict, Security and Development, 106.
25. Nadarajah and Rampton, “The limits of hybridity,” 49, 50.
26. Boege et al., “On Hybrid Political Orders and Emerging States.”
27. Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, 77.
28. Smith, “Afterword,” 172; Brenner, “The Limits to Scale?” 599; Swyngedouw, “Neither Global Nor Local,” 139, 140.
29. Leitner et al., “The Spatialities of Contentious Politics,” 159, 160; Swyngedouw, “Globalisation or ‘Glocalisation’?” 34.
30. Swyngedouw, “Neither Global Nor Local,” 140.
31. Leitner et al., “The Spatialities of Contentious Politics,” 159; Swyngedouw, “Globalisation or ‘Glocalisation’?” 34.
32. Agnew and Corbidge, Mastering Space.
33. Agnew, “The Territorial Trap”; Brenner, “Beyond State-centrism?”
34. Sack, Human Territoriality.
35. Brenner, “Beyond State-centrism?”; Vandergeest and Peluso, “Territorialisation and State Power in Thailand.”
36. Sack, Human Territoriality, 19.
37. Brenner, “Beyond State-centrism?’; Swyngedouw, “Globalisation or ‘Glocalisation’?”; Swyngedouw, “Neither Global Nor Local.”
38. Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism, 91–92.
39. Huber and Emel, “Fixed Minerals, Scalar Politics.”
40. May, “Micronationalism.”
41. Allen, Greed and Grievance.
42. May, State and Society in Papua New Guinea, 202.
43. Craig and Porter, “Political Settlement, Transitions, and Lasting Peace in Solomon Islands?” 23.
44. Craig and Porter, “Political Settlement in Solomon Islands.”
45. Banks, “Understanding ‘Resource’ Conflicts in Papua and New Guinea”; Filer, “The Bougainville Rebellion, the Mining Industry and the Process of Social Disintegration in Papua New Guinea”; Laslett, State Crime on the Margins of Empire; Regan, “Causes and Course of the Bougainville Conflict.”
46. Filer, “The Bougainville Rebellion, the Mining Industry and the Process of Social Disintegration in Papua New Guinea.”
47. Laslett, State Crime on the Margins of Empire, 51–72.
48. The account of the causes of the conflict that follows in the main text is drawn from the analyses of: Allen, Greed and Grievance; Fraenkel, The Manipulation of Custom; Hameiri, “The Trouble with RAMSI”; Kabutaulaka, “Beyond Ethnicity”; Moore, Happy Isles in Crisis; Naitoro, “Solomon Islands conflict.”
49. Allen, “Islands, Extraction and Violence.”
50. Baldacchino, “The Coming of Age of Island Studies”; Gillis, Islands on Our Mind.
51. Allen, “Islands, Extraction and Violence,” 89.
52. Nash and Ogan, “The Red and the Black.”
53. Allen, Greed and Grievance.
54. Hall et al., Powers of Exclusion.
55. Huber and Emel, “Fixed Minerals, Scalar Politics.”
56. Dinnen and Allen, “Reflections on Hybridity as an Analytical Lens on State Formation.”
57. Allen, “Islands, Extraction and Violence,” 86, 87.
58. Ibid., 86.
59. Filer, “Local Custom and the Art of Land Group Boundary Maintenance in Papua New Guinea,” 161.
60. Allen, “Melanesia’s Violent Environments,” 154.
61. Ibid., 155.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid., 157.
64. For example Hoenke, “New Political Topographies.”
65. Ibid., 4.
66. Engel and Nugent, Respacing Africa.