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Introduction: Space, contestation and the political
Geoforum 43 (2012) 663–668
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Editorial
Introduction: Space, contestation and the political A renewed interest in the relations between space and the political has been a defining feature of recent work in geography (Massey, 2005; Sparke, 2005; Dikeç, 2007). This has coincided with a reassertion of the importance of conflict and contestation to understandings of the political. There is, of course, a long and significant history of engagement by geographers with contentious politics and the contestation of uneven spatial relations (e.g. Massey, 1984; Miller, 2000; Routledge, 1993, Sharp et al., 2000). Feminist interventions have powerfully reshaped what is considered political and have foregrounded forms of contestation that have frequently been marginalized or dismissed (Oza, 2001; Sharp, 2003). More recently there has been significant work on the contested political geographies of neo-liberalization (Harvey, 2010; Peck, 2010; Leitner et al., 2007). Debates on neo-liberalization have, however, often subordinated specific dynamics of contestation and political identification to political-economic processes or to particular logics of governmentality. The marginalizing of the political in these literatures has been challenged by work which is more directly attentive to the dynamic practices of contestation. Mustafa Dikeç’s Badlands of the Republic, for example, offers an alternative to Foucauldian inspired work on governmentality by analyzing ongoing challenges to the unequal spatial articulation of banlieues in French cities. Such accounts of the relations between space and politics have developed conversations between political geography and political theory that have often been seen as lacking in the sub-discipline (Agnew, 2003). They have also generated quite polarized accounts of different theorists and traditions and given rise to a significant set of debates in geography and beyond about how to theorize the relations between space, politics and contestation (e.g. Barnett, 2004; Dikeç, 2007; Featherstone, 2008; Gregory, 2004; Korf, 2006; Massey, 2005; Watts, 2004; Woodward et al., 2012). This special issue interrogates what is at stake in different approaches to the relations between space, politics and contestation. These theoretical conversations have taken place in the shadow of the disputed figure of Carl Schmitt, who famously defined the political as friend-enemy distinction (Schmitt, 1976). His work, which is interrogated in-depth here by Meyer et al., 2012 has been brought to debates in geography and beyond largely mediated by the interpretations of Chantal Mouffe and Giorgio Agamben. Chantal Mouffe’s work has been particularly central to asserting the ineradicable character of antagonism to the political. Her engagement with Schmitt has been one of an intellectual adversary who thinks with Schmitt against Schmitt to consider the importance of re-asserting contestation and conflict into understandings of the political (Mouffe, 1999, 2005). This engagement with Schmitt
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has been motivated by a concern that forms of conflict and antagonism have been marginalized in contemporary political life and which has led her and other influential political theorists to diagnose the contemporary epoch as ‘post-political’. This special issue, by contrast, traces different ways in which multiple spatialities and temporalities of contestation have shaped articulations of the political. The terms of debate around space and the political have often been defined through theoretical accounts which marginalise or ignore the generative character of political conduct or activity. Our contention is that these ontologies of the political do not sufficiently engage with the rich and often contradictory ethnographies of actually existing geographies of contestation across different sites and the generative processes of such contestation. To do so necessitates interrogating in-depth the geographies through which forms of contestation are shaped and constituted. The papers here engage with the productive tension between (ontological) theorizing of the political and ethnographically emergent phenomenologies of multiple forms, spaces and sites of contestation. They foreground the multiple temporalities, spatialities and emotional registers at work in generating the political and the mechanisms of politics-as-usual. They contend that these registers cannot straightforwardly be confined to either ‘‘antagonism’’ or ‘‘association’’. The papers assembled here are motivated by a desire to bring together those working on different theorists of space/political and those frustrated by the seeming gap between ‘‘grand’’ theorizations and multi-faceted ethnographies of ‘‘actually existing politics’’ (Spencer, 2007, p. 178). The special issue brings together a combination of scholars, from political sociology and political anthropology as well as geography. Some of the authors have been heavily engaged in the intellectual landscape of political theory, while others have been conducting in-depth ethnographies of arenas of contestation, its actors and the social practices that politics, contestation and violence proper involve – and to arrive through these ethnographies to theoretical considerations of the geographies of contestation and the spatial politics these entail. Three papers (Dikeç, 2012; Barnett, 2012; Meyer et al., 2012) engage with specific theorists of contestation and explore their relevance for space and politics, democratic theory and political geography, but mainly do so with careful attention to the phenomenologies of politics as practiced. The second strand of papers engages with key concepts of contestation, agonism and the political in various empirical contexts (Kothari, 2012; Spencer, 2012; Geiser, 2012; Schlichte, 2012). These ethnographies of contestation and agonism enrich the more theoretical debates by suggesting the diverse, generative accounts of political conduct and activity.
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1. Thinking the political spatially In his book Post-Foundational Political Thought Oliver Marchart distinguishes between associative and dissociative traditions of theorizing the political. For Marchart this division speaks most directly to the respective adherents of the political theorists Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt. He contends that ‘Arendtians see in the political a space of freedom and public deliberation’ privileging an associative moment in the constitution of political life. In this account of the political ‘people in their plurality freely associate within the public realm’ ‘motivated by their care for the common’ (Marchart, 2007, p. 41). The influential Habermasian traditions of deliberative democracy are also bracketed as part of this associative tradition of political theory. Schmittians, by contrast, view the political as a ‘space of power, conflict and antagonism’ (Marchart, 2007, p. 38). For Schmittians, including left neoSchmittians such as Chantal Mouffe, antagonism is a ‘dissociative operation’ that serves as the ‘constitutive political principle of a given community’ (Marchart, 2007, p. 41). This division is clearly very schematic. The papers in this special issue approach issues of contestation in ways which disrupt this stark counter-position of associative and dissociative traditions of thinking the political. Dikeç, for example, argues against readings of Hannah Arendt’s work which situate her as only a theorist of associative forms of the political. Through engaging with the promise of what Dikeç refers to here as ‘space as a mode of political thinking’ the papers sketch out an agenda for thinking beyond such bifurcated ways of thinking the political. They challenge traditions of thinking where notions of association/solidarity and antagonism have frequently been held apart. The papers do not adopt anything like a shared line in this regard, and there are significant and productive tensions and differences between them. A key commonality to both the more theoretically oriented papers and the empirically driven papers, however, is engagement with diverse modalities of contestation. This challenges and refigures a boundary between associative and dissociative forms of political thinking and disrupts the rather stark and binary framing of contemporary debates about the political. As Barnett argues here contemporary accounts of the political, notably associated with Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democratic project, have been structured by a strong ontologising of the political (see also Barnett, 2004). Here a stark division is drawn between ontological forms of the political and the conduct and institutionalized forms of politics. These forms of ‘ideas driven determinism’, in Meyer et al’s terms, downplay the generative character of political activity. Our contention is that thinking spatially can challenge this bifurcated imaginary of the political in productive ways. Foregrounding the dynamic trajectories and connections forged through political activity can assert how multiple identifications can shape political relationalities in diverse ways. This moves beyond the rather reductive accounts of ways of relating conjured by separating and delineating traditions of associative and dissociative theorizing. Here Doreen Massey’s insistence that space is a dimension of multiplicity and co-existence is significant (Massey, 2005). This allows a focus on the way that the political, rather than being primarily either antagonistic or associative, can be the site of coproduction of different modalities and forms of identification. Thus forms of solidarity and antagonism while often being constructed as opposed, can often be co-emergent through the activity of political movements (see Featherstone, 2008, 2012). As Dikeç argues through a reading of a number of key theorists, most notably Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, interrogating connections between space and politics can generate new ways of relating. He argues that ‘political action for Arendt, inaugurates space –
the space of appearance – where individuals are at once related and separated, setting into motion something new and unexpected.’ In seeking to foreground the importance of thinking the political spatially our project is not to police the way that political theorists mobilize and deploy spatial metaphors, concepts and imaginaries. There is a tendency as both Barnett and Dikeç relate here where (political) geographers have positioned themselves as judges of the ways in which others mobilize spatial metaphors and concepts. For Dikeç engaging with the work that ‘space talk’ does for political theorists offers different possibilities. Rather than accuse the thinkers he engages with of ‘not ‘doing’ space or not quite understanding space beyond, perhaps, a few metaphorical references to it’ he pays attention to ‘what animates them in engaging with space talk when theorizing politics.’ Seen in this light, space becomes what Hans Blumenberg has termed a ‘‘metaphor’’ (Blumenberg 1960), a base stock of philosophical (or theoretical) language, which cannot be confined to a purely logical concept; rather, they do something in delineating our worldview(s). By interrogating the work that ‘space talk’ does in the work of different theorists Dikeç foregrounds the ‘multiple spatialities at work in different conceptualizations of politics.’ Such an ethos of engagement can productively enliven our imaginations of the relations between space and the political. This is not to advocate a pan-glossian approach which masks or silences differences. It is, however, to suggest that a more generous approach to these theoretical exchanges and conversations might be productive. (It also emphasizes that geographers might also have things to learn from the ways in which others mobilize spatial imaginaries of the political!). A commitment to probing the spatial imaginaries deployed by key theorists of the political is central to some of the papers here. Meyer et al’s careful critical engagement with the geographical imaginaries at work in Carl Schmitt’s oeuvre is instructive in this regard. They make a significant contribution to the recent turn towards Schmitt’s work in geography (see, e.g., Elden, 2010; Korf, 2009; Legg, 2011). This is, of course, part of a broader inter-disciplinary re-discovery and re-imagining of Schmitt partly motivated by Agamben’s influential readings of Schmitt in his account of the ‘state of exception’ (Agamben, 2005). Meyer et al. trace the many troubling and problematic spatial imaginaries at work in Schmitt’s writings, arguing that in Schmitt’s view political contestation always takes ‘place between territorialized and essentialized containers reflecting a certain political idea’. They contend that this position is firmly at odds with contemporary theoretical readings of space as in process, fluid and multiple. They argue that Schmitt’s belief in the ‘analogy of politics and territorialized space turns out as an anachronism of the heyday of a world ordered by nation-states’. This sense of the fixed character of space in Schmitt’s theorizing is also marked by their critical remarks on Schmitt’s account of the partisan. They argue that Schmitt’s construction of the figure of the partisan was ‘telluric’, that is ‘earthly’ and unchanging. This closes down a focus on the generative character of subaltern spaces of politics (Clayton, 2011). Crucially, in this regard the tension in Schmitt’s nation-centered, and decidedly imperialistic imaginations of the political, are not just challenged by the current, supposedly ‘post-national’ conjuncture, but they are also at odds with the forms geographies of contestation have taken in the past (Featherstone, 2008; Linebaugh and Rediker, 2001). Uma Kothari’s contribution draws attention to the important histories of ‘translocal resistance’ in shaping spaces of contestation. She explores forms of resistance crafted by political figures exiled by British imperial powers to the Seychelles for their engagements in anti-colonial politics. They shaped ‘various forms of subaltern
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resistance’ which connected ‘different colonial spaces’ and which challenge the ‘bounded and territorial understandings of the political that have often informed accounts of anti-colonialism’. This focus on the dynamic trajectories of translocal anti-colonial resistance foregrounds forms of political agency and association shaped through dynamic forms of contestation which have been marginalized by nation-centered accounts of the political. Her contribution emphasizes how tracing the spatialities through which contestation and resistance has been produced can enrich our understandings of political agency and activity. This speaks to a broader contribution of the papers in this special issue which is to assert the importance of the diverse modalities of contestation for accounts and understandings of the political. 2. Modalities of contestation and their spatial and temporal registers Central to recent debates on the political have been a set of binary categorizations of contestation. Thus Chantal Mouffe, and others, distinguish between antagonism as a relation characterized by unbridled hostility towards an enemy and agonism defined as adversarial contestation. For Mouffe a key role of politics is to transform antagonistic relations into agonistic ones. This is arguably an important political aim, but her distinction produces an unhelpfully limited sense of ‘actually-existing’ forms of contestation. The conversations between political theoretical work and ethnographically informed research here push beyond such a reductive framing of the terms of political contestation. As Jonathan Spencer argues in his contribution such distinctions elide the ‘multiple registers’ of the political, ‘comic and tragic, enthralling and appalling, ludic and frightening’ which ‘defy easy reduction to issues of power and resistance, still less the rational instrumentalism of conventional political anthropology’ (see also Chari and Donner, 2010). Stressing these diverse modalities of contestation, and the multiple spatialities they shape and constitute has consequences. A key implication is to unsettle the ways in which the tone of much contemporary writing on the political temporalises difference in modes of and intensity of contestation. Thus a central claim in this regard has been that the current epoch is best understood as ‘post-political’. This contention has been central to the work of different key theorists such as Mouffe, Rancière, and Zˇizˇek and has been given vociferous articulation in geography through the recent writings of Erik Swyngedouw (2007, 2011). These debates, however, tend to rest on a rather, limited and formalized sense of what is properly political. There is little sense of the dynamic trajectories of political activity or an engagement with diverse forms of contestation, though Rancière’s work is helpfully attentive to the ways in which political activity can productively reshape the terrain on which the political is understood (Rancière, 1999). Clive Barnett’s contribution here critically interrogates such conceptualizations of the post-political. He contends that these debates are just ‘one example of a more general worry that the precious force of ‘politics’ is always in danger of being lost or forgotten’. In contrast Barnett explores the resources of forms of critical theory, reimagined on a global terrain, for engaging with forms of ‘ordinary’ democratic contestation. Our contention is that a more lively sense of the generative processes of contestation, and crucially a sense of their persistence, can be given by eschewing the temporalized construction of politics at work in debates on the post-political. To do so it is necessary to interrogate in-depth the geographies through which forms of contestation are shaped. The special issue contributes to these questions through engaging with tensions between ‘‘theory-in-general’’ and ‘‘ethnographically emergent’’ accounts of actually existing politics (of contestation).
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Two contributors (Spencer and Geiser) address the strange silence in the literature on the post-political, which is ‘‘as though, for them, the Third World and colonialism are invisible or insignificant . . .’’ (Kapoor 2008, p. 113). The most straight-forward approach to countering this silence is to confront theorists with violent articulations of post-colonial political contexts. This is the strategy pursued by Urs Geiser who parachutes Chantal Mouffe directly into his ethnographic field site in the Swat valley in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan at the border with Afghanistan. The Swat valley has occasionally hit international media headlines because of a violent ‘‘Islamist’’ opposition movement that the Pakistani government labeled as Taliban. These ‘‘Taliban’’ managed, for a short period though, to take effective control over large sways of this peripheral territory and were only defeated through sheer military force. This is antagonism and contestation in its most brutal form, certainly. For Geiser, this is the result of a failure of modern inclinations of state formation, which are still in-the-making in this post-colonial space and often considered as rather alien to ‘‘traditional’’ mechanisms of politics. Barnett and Spencer pursue a slightly more subtle approach to bridging theory and ethnographies of politics. At least they don’t send Mouffe to the Taliban to learn about antagonism. Both, Barnett and Spencer call for a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenologies of political action (Barnett 2012, p. 3) and the ‘‘[weird] world of actually existing politics’’ (Spencer, 2007, p. 178). But they practice this phenomenological approach in quite distinct ways. Barnett (2012, 2, our emphasis) suggests that ‘‘democracy is best thought of as a complex form containing both agonistic and deliberative moments’’ and supports his position with a careful reading of Nancy Fraser’s Scales of Justice (Fraser 2008). In her adoption of a concept of ‘‘all-affected interests’’, Barnett finds a more ‘‘phenomenological understanding’’ of the political and the worldly register of contentious claims-making in global justice debates and the emerging space of transnational politics, in which ‘‘the centrality of contestation to the political imagination of [. . .] deliberative democracy is exemplified’’ (Barnett, 2012, p. 8). Further Barnett usefully cautions against forms of methodological globalism that have shaped some work on global civil society (Routledge and Cumbers, 2009). To be clear: Barnett does not arrive at this conclusion through a careful ethnography of actually existing spaces of transnational democracy, but he nevertheless insists on a more nuanced categorization of the contingent assemblages of different spatializations of contention and contestation that emerge in the spaces of democratic action. Spencer’s paper is a direct response to Barnett’s call for a phenomenological approach. Spencer is troubled by an affinity, admittedly an unexpected one, between local perceptions of the political and the ontological theories of antagonism that Barnett criticizes for discarding empirical observations in favor of ‘‘more fundamental structures of existence’’. The irony of this is that Spencer comes to find purchase in Schmitt’s (and Mouffe’s) ontology of the political in an ethnographically emergent process. Barnett by contrast criticizes Mouffe on phenomenological terms, but through a theoretical engagement. Spencer finds the antagonistic register analytically appealing as it ‘‘retains some of the moral disturbances [. . .] which is so central to the Sri Lankan sense of the political’’ (2012, 19). Spencer’s ethnographies unravel some of the ‘‘antinomies of community’’ (Watts, 2004; Hasbullah and Korf, 2012), which signify the attempt at keeping boundaries clean – at separating different ethno-nations (Tamils vs Muslims) – as a process of purification, which has elements of defense against the outside and purification of the inner self. An important element in these geographies of antagonism has been the relationship between religion and the political in Sri Lanka (Abeysekera, 2002;
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Klem, 2011; Spencer, 2007). Spencer’s conclusion is a warning not to forget or ignore ‘‘what we might call local normative theory [i.e. that] politics was a source of moral dismay, at once inescapable and undesirable’’ (2012, 24). This local normative theory did not, suggests Spencer, differentiate between desirable (agonistic) and undesirable (antagonistic) registers of the political, pace Mouffe. Two papers in the special issue engage with different levels of intensity of (violent, non-violent) forms of contestation and the intricate claims to legitimize those. For Klaus Schlichte (2012), who studies non-state armed actors (i.e. rebels, insurgents, warlords), contestation is the mise en question of the legitimacy of a single position, a single claim or a whole political or social order. Non-state armed groups who take up weapons to challenge a particular social or political order need to ‘‘transform their power of violence into legitimate rule’’ – or authority. This claim for legitimacy gives their contestation and violent activities a political clout – and counters accounts that have sought to link insurgent movements with criminality or banditry (Korf, 2011). Schlichte provides us with a phenomenology of how violent action is still political – and he arrives at this phenomenology through the theoretical analytics of Norbert Elias and Max Weber. For Schlichte, Elias’ concept of figuration allows the study of the inner life of such groups and the dynamics of power and authority in which violence and legitimacy claims at times converge, but often need to be brought together. Again, here, we find the everyday practices of normativity – the legitimizing of rightful contestation. Kothari’s paper engages with some of the key practices through which translocal geographies of contestation were constructed. Kothari’s account is also intriguing as it shows us some more silent forms of contestation – in her case: letter writing. This resonates with recent work which has situated political activity as the product of assemblages which are ‘temporary aggregates of objects and people’ (Davies, 2012, p. 276). Through letter writing, political exiles kept the colonial administration obliged to deal with them and continued to uphold their status as political exiles by continuously contesting the exile status. This demonstrates how particular sites of contestation can be generated through diverse relations and connections, in contrast to accounts which construct the site as rather bounded and singular (Woodward et al., 2012). It also suggests the importance of different registers of contestation in making and maintaining claims, what Caleb Johnston has usefully termed ‘the political art of patience’ in the context of struggles by adivasi (indigenous groups) to assert citizenship in contemporary India (Johnston, 2012).
3. Coda: emergent sites of the political That contestation still constitutes spaces of the political has been signified by a variety of different forms of protest and public outrage (Sloterdijk, 2006), be it the Occupy movement, the ‘Arab’ revolutions or the mobilizations in Spain, Greece and Britain against neo-liberal reforms and pulverizing forms of austerity. The deepening politicization of the economic crisis suggests why scrutinizing the relations between space, contestation and the political is a significant political task. That the Occupy movement and mobilisations for climate justice have been shaped by the organising practices of counter-globalisation struggles emphasises the effects of dynamic political trajectories on forms of contestation (Chatterton et al., forthcoming). Following such trajectories can also redefine the terms on which the current political conjuncture is understood. Asserting that neo-liberal forms of globalization were deeply contested before 2008, for example, locates the crisis as part of ongoing contestation rather than as an exceptional moment (Featherstone, 2012).
This stress on the politicization of the crisis is closed down by claims that the current epoch is ‘post-political’. The rather impoverished sense of contestation that informs work on the ‘post-political’ is also underlined by forms of (anti-capitalist and anti-state) protest, violence and contestation which are often beyond the radar of international media. The longstanding Maoist insurrection in several states of India, has mobilized marginalized constitutencies in neo-liberalizing rural India (Ahmed et al., 2010). This challenges Indian elites who have sought to silence the Maoist insurrection in the public media. Such insurrections also draw on significant histories of Maoist political interventions in post-colonial India, most notably in West Bengal in the 1970s (cf Roy, 2010. Donner; 2011). In Bolivia concerted protest movements have fought back against neo-liberalization, particularly against the privatization of gas and water. Raul Zibechi notes that for ten or twelve days, during the ‘gas wars’ of October 2003 ‘residents of El Alto, organized through neighborhood councils and other means operated as a neighborhood government that supplanted the delegitimized and absent state’ (Zibechi, 2010, p. 13). These forms of contestation produced the political space for the election of Evo Morales, the first indigenous president in Bolivia. His administration, which has close links to social movements, has in turn found itself the target of massive protests ‘demanding the cancellation of the government’s planned highway set to cut through the ancestral lands of the lowland indigenous people of the Yuracarés, Mojeños and Tsimanes’ (Laing, 2012). The persistence of contentious politics in a different register is signalled by the public demonstrations against the Stuttgart 21 railway station in Germany. This latter protest opposed plans to put the Stuttgart railway station underground, a huge investment project that generated anxieties and rage about neo-liberal urban developments, sponsored by the state. The protest movement only emerged after a lengthy process of planning had come to an end and the plans had been overwhelmingly approved in the regional parliament. The protest generated a paradigmatic drive within German politics to claims for more direct democracy – and provided the impetus for a change of power in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg in the subsequent regional elections. But paradoxically, when the controversy was finally brought to the polls in a direct vote, the adversaries of the Stuttgart 21 project lost. Nevertheless, Stuttgart 21 has become the signum of a Bourgeois protest against the established mechanisms of representative politics, but the legitimacy of, or in other words, the ‘‘rightfulness’’, the appropriateness, of these protests has remained contested in the public debates of Germany, while it also signifies the theatrical registers of passions and rationality that are at work in such forms of contestation (Saar and Staab, 2011). These multiple forms and geographies of contestation are constitutive of markedly diverse articulations of the political. Some of these take the form of anti-capitalist or anti-neoliberal mobilisation, and have often been powerfully shaped by anarchist practices and modes of organizing. Others could be read as expressions of ‘‘Bourgeois’’ discontent, for which Spiegel journalist Dirk Kurbjuweit created the label ‘‘Wutbürger’’ (Kurbjuweit, 2010) for the protesters against Stuttgart 21. Wutbürger could be translated as ‘‘angry citizen’’ – but could also mean angry bourgeois with an ironic, slightly negative connotation: the wealthy bourgeois who is so self-satisfied that he or she needs the public protest event as a kind of thrill. Kurbjuweit’s analysis seems to confirm that political space is inherently theatrical (Barnett, 2012, p. 3). Implicitly, this denies the protest movement a political role, however. Interpretations of spaces of contestation, then, can bear on whether different forms of mobilization become signified as political or not. Particular spatial imaginaries such as contagion, for example, have been mobilized to represent subaltern movements in ways which dispossess them of political agency (Guha, 1983).
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This emphasizes that at stake in different articulations of space, politics, and contestation can be a sense of who or what is counted as political. The papers in this special issue demonstrate that geographies of contestation are diverse empirically, but are also contested theoretically. While quite a few papers critique Chantal Mouffe’s concept of antagonism-agonism (Barnett, Meyer et al., Geiser, Spencer to some extent), the readers may notice slightly different takes on the legacy of Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. Meyer et al. (2012) argue that, first, Schmitt’s philosophy of space is an outdated container space and that one cannot just take bits and pieces of Schmitt’s oeuvre without taking into account his political theology and his political role during the Third Reich, Spencer ‘‘feels no need to apologize for ignoring [this legacy]’’ (2012, 19) and to use his writings selectively. While Barnett finds ontological theories of the political à la Mouffe unhelpful, Dikeç reads the spatial metaphors in some of these ontologies of space and politics as productive and inspiring. In this regard bringing into contestation different takes on the relations between space and politics can itself be a productive and generative process. Acknowledgments We would like to thank Joris van Wezemael who co-edited this special issue and who co-organized the workshop on Space Contestation and the Political held in Zurich in February 2009. Many thanks are due to all those involved in the workshop and to Michael Samers for his commitment to this special issue, for his insightful editorial guidance and his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this introduction. We would like to thank the ESRC Space of Democracy/Democracy of Space Network, the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich and the ETH Zurich for funding this workshop. References Abeysekera, A., 2002. Colors of the Robe: Religion, Identity and Difference. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia. Agamben, G., 2005. State of Exception, Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago University Press, Chicago. Agnew, J., 2003. Contemporary political geography: intellectual heterodoxy and its dilemmas. Political Geography 22 (6), 603–606. Ahmed, W., Kundu, A., Peet, R. (Eds.), 2010. India’s New Economic Policy: A Critical Analysis. Routledge, New York. Barnett, C., 2004. Deconstructing radical democracy: articulation, representation, and being with others. Political Geography 23 (5), 503–528. Barnett, C., 2012. Situating the Geographies of Injustice in Democratic Theory. Geoforum 43 (4), 677–686. Blumenberg, H., 1960. Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Chari, S., Donner, F., 2010. Ethnographies of activism: a critical introduction. Cultural Dynamics 22, 75–85. Chatterton, P., Featherstone, D.J., Routledge, P., (forthcoming). Articulating Climate Justice in Copenhagen: antagonism. The Commons and Solidarity’ Antipode. Clayton, D., 2011. Partisan space. In: Legg, S. (Ed.), Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos. Routledge, London, pp. 211–219. Davies, A.D., 2012. Assemblage and social movements: Tibet Support Groups and the spatialities of political organisation. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (2), 273–286. Dikeç, M., 2007. The Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy. Blackwell, Oxford. Dikeç, M., 2012. Space as a mode of political thinking. Geoforum 43 (4), 669–676. Donner, H., 2011. Locating Activist Spaces: The Neighbourhood as a Source and Site of Urban Activism in 1970s Calcutta. Cultural Dynamics, p. 23. Elden, S., 2010. Reading schmitt geopolitically: nomos, territory and Grobraum. Radical Philosophy 161, 18–26. Featherstone, D.J., 2008. Resistance, Space and Political Identities: the Making of Counter-Global Networks. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. Featherstone, D.J., 2012. Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism. Zed Books, London. Fraser, N., 2008. Scales of Justice. Polity Press, Cambridge. Geiser, U., 2012. Reading political contestation in Pakistan’s Swatt valley – from deliberation to ‘the political’ and beyond. Geoforum 43 (4), 707–715. Gregory, D., 2004. The Colonial Present. Blackwell, Oxford.
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Guha, R., 1983. The Prose of Counter Insurgency. In: Guha, R. (Ed.), Subaltern Studies II. Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp. 1–42. Harvey, D., 2010. The Enigma of Capital and the Crises of Capitalism. Profile Books, London. Hasbullah, S.H., Korf, B., 2012. Muslim geographies, violence and the antinomies of community in eastern Sri Lanka. Geographical Journal, forthcoming. http:// dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2012.00470.x. Johnston, C., in press. The political art of patience: adivasi resistance in India. Antipode 44 (5). Kapoor, I., 2008. The Postcolonial Politics of Development. Routledge, London. Klem, B., 2011. Islam, politics and violence in eastern Sri Lanka. The Journal of Asian Studies 70, 730–753. Korf, B., 2006. Who is the rogue? Discourse, power and spatial politics in Sri Lanka. Political Geography 25 (3), 279–297. Korf, B., 2009. Geographie des Ernstfalls. Geographische Zeitschrift 97 (2+3), 151– 167. Korf, B., 2011. Resources, violence and the telluric geographies of small wars. Progress in Human Geography 35 (6), 733–756. Kothari, U., 2012. Contesting colonial rule: Politics of exile in the Indian Ocean. Geoforum 43 (4), 697–706. Kurbjuweit, D., 2010. Der Wutbürger: stuttgart 21 und Sarazin-Debatte: warum die deutschen so viel protestieren. Der Spiegel 41 (2010), 26–27. Laing, A., 2012. Beyond the Zeitgeist of ‘post-neoliberal’ theory in Latin America: the politics of anti-colonial struggles in Bolivia. Antipode, vol. 44. Legg, S., 2011. Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos. Routledge, London. Leitner, H., Peck, J., Shepperd, E., 2007. Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers. Guilford Press, New York. Linebaugh, P., Rediker, M., 2001. The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors. Slaves and Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Verso, London. Marchart, O., 2007. Postfoundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badou and Laclau. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Massey, D., 1984. Spatial Divisions of Labour. Macmillan, Basingstoke. Massey, D., 2005. For Space. Sage, London. Meyer, R., Schetter, C., Prinz, J., 2012. Spatial contestation? The theological foundations of Carl Schmitt’s spatial thought. Geoforum 43 (4), 687–696. Miller, B., 2000. Geography and Social Movements. University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota. Mouffe, C., 1999. Introduction: schmitt’s challenge. In: Mouffe, C. (Ed.), The Challenge of Carl Schmitt. Verso, London, pp. 1–6. Mouffe, C., 2005. On the Political. Routledge, London. Oza, R., 2001. Showcasing India: gender, geography and globalization. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture 26 (1), 1067–1095. Peck, J., 2010. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Rancière, J., 1999. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. University of Minnesota, Minnesota. Routledge, P., 1993. Terrains of Resistance. Nonviolent Social Movements and the Contestation of Place in India. Praeger, Westport, CT. Routledge, P., Cumbers, A., 2009. Global Justice Networks: Geographies of Transnational Solidarity. Manchester University Press, Manchester. Roy, A., 2010. Walking With the Comrades. Outlook India Magazine, 29 March. Saar, A., Staab, P., 2011. Bahnhof der Leidenschaften. Zur politischen Semantik eines unwahrscheinlichen Ereignisses. Mittelweg 36 20/3, pp. 23–48. Schlichte, K., 2012. The limits of armed contestation: power and domination in armed groups. Geoforum 43 (4), 716–724. Schmitt, C., 1976. The Concept of the Political. University of Rutgers Press, New York. Sharp, J., 2003. Decentring political geography: feminist and postcolonial engagements. In: Agnew, J., Mitchell, K., Toal, G. (Eds.), The Companion to Political Geography. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 59–74. Sharp, J., Routledge, P., Philo, C., Paddison, R., 2000. Entanglements of power: geographies of domination/resistance. In: Sharp et al. (Eds.), Entanglements of Power: Geographies of Domination/Resistance. Routledge, London, pp. 1–42. Sloterdijk, P., 2006. Zorn und Zeit. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Sparke, M., 2005. In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation State. University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota. Spencer, J., 2007. Anthropology, Politics, and the State: Democracy and Violence in South Asia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Spencer, J., 2012. Performing democracy and violence, agonism and community, politics and not politics in Sri Lanka. Geoforum 43 (4), 725–731. Swyngedouw, E., 2007. Impossible ‘‘Sustainability’’ and the Post-Political Condition. In: Gibbs, D., Krueger, R. (Eds.), The Sustainable Development Paradox: Urban Political Economy in the United States and Europe. Guilford Press, New York, pp. 13–40. Swyngedouw, E., 2011. Interrogating post-democratisation: reclaiming egalitarian political spaces. Political Geography 37 (6), 370–380. Watts, M., 2004. Antinomies of community: some thoughts on geography, resources and empire. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 29, pp. 195– 216. Woodward, K., Jones, III, J.P., Marston, S., 2012. The politics of autonomous space. Progress in Human Geography, published online. Zibechi, R., 2010. Dispersing Power: Social Movements as Anti-State Forces. AK Press, Edinburgh.
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David Featherstone School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, East Quadrangle, University Avenue, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK E-mail address: [email protected]
Benedikt Korf Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 12 June 2012
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
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Editorial
Introduction: Space, contestation and the political A renewed interest in the relations between space and the political has been a defining feature of recent work in geography (Massey, 2005; Sparke, 2005; Dikeç, 2007). This has coincided with a reassertion of the importance of conflict and contestation to understandings of the political. There is, of course, a long and significant history of engagement by geographers with contentious politics and the contestation of uneven spatial relations (e.g. Massey, 1984; Miller, 2000; Routledge, 1993, Sharp et al., 2000). Feminist interventions have powerfully reshaped what is considered political and have foregrounded forms of contestation that have frequently been marginalized or dismissed (Oza, 2001; Sharp, 2003). More recently there has been significant work on the contested political geographies of neo-liberalization (Harvey, 2010; Peck, 2010; Leitner et al., 2007). Debates on neo-liberalization have, however, often subordinated specific dynamics of contestation and political identification to political-economic processes or to particular logics of governmentality. The marginalizing of the political in these literatures has been challenged by work which is more directly attentive to the dynamic practices of contestation. Mustafa Dikeç’s Badlands of the Republic, for example, offers an alternative to Foucauldian inspired work on governmentality by analyzing ongoing challenges to the unequal spatial articulation of banlieues in French cities. Such accounts of the relations between space and politics have developed conversations between political geography and political theory that have often been seen as lacking in the sub-discipline (Agnew, 2003). They have also generated quite polarized accounts of different theorists and traditions and given rise to a significant set of debates in geography and beyond about how to theorize the relations between space, politics and contestation (e.g. Barnett, 2004; Dikeç, 2007; Featherstone, 2008; Gregory, 2004; Korf, 2006; Massey, 2005; Watts, 2004; Woodward et al., 2012). This special issue interrogates what is at stake in different approaches to the relations between space, politics and contestation. These theoretical conversations have taken place in the shadow of the disputed figure of Carl Schmitt, who famously defined the political as friend-enemy distinction (Schmitt, 1976). His work, which is interrogated in-depth here by Meyer et al., 2012 has been brought to debates in geography and beyond largely mediated by the interpretations of Chantal Mouffe and Giorgio Agamben. Chantal Mouffe’s work has been particularly central to asserting the ineradicable character of antagonism to the political. Her engagement with Schmitt has been one of an intellectual adversary who thinks with Schmitt against Schmitt to consider the importance of re-asserting contestation and conflict into understandings of the political (Mouffe, 1999, 2005). This engagement with Schmitt
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has been motivated by a concern that forms of conflict and antagonism have been marginalized in contemporary political life and which has led her and other influential political theorists to diagnose the contemporary epoch as ‘post-political’. This special issue, by contrast, traces different ways in which multiple spatialities and temporalities of contestation have shaped articulations of the political. The terms of debate around space and the political have often been defined through theoretical accounts which marginalise or ignore the generative character of political conduct or activity. Our contention is that these ontologies of the political do not sufficiently engage with the rich and often contradictory ethnographies of actually existing geographies of contestation across different sites and the generative processes of such contestation. To do so necessitates interrogating in-depth the geographies through which forms of contestation are shaped and constituted. The papers here engage with the productive tension between (ontological) theorizing of the political and ethnographically emergent phenomenologies of multiple forms, spaces and sites of contestation. They foreground the multiple temporalities, spatialities and emotional registers at work in generating the political and the mechanisms of politics-as-usual. They contend that these registers cannot straightforwardly be confined to either ‘‘antagonism’’ or ‘‘association’’. The papers assembled here are motivated by a desire to bring together those working on different theorists of space/political and those frustrated by the seeming gap between ‘‘grand’’ theorizations and multi-faceted ethnographies of ‘‘actually existing politics’’ (Spencer, 2007, p. 178). The special issue brings together a combination of scholars, from political sociology and political anthropology as well as geography. Some of the authors have been heavily engaged in the intellectual landscape of political theory, while others have been conducting in-depth ethnographies of arenas of contestation, its actors and the social practices that politics, contestation and violence proper involve – and to arrive through these ethnographies to theoretical considerations of the geographies of contestation and the spatial politics these entail. Three papers (Dikeç, 2012; Barnett, 2012; Meyer et al., 2012) engage with specific theorists of contestation and explore their relevance for space and politics, democratic theory and political geography, but mainly do so with careful attention to the phenomenologies of politics as practiced. The second strand of papers engages with key concepts of contestation, agonism and the political in various empirical contexts (Kothari, 2012; Spencer, 2012; Geiser, 2012; Schlichte, 2012). These ethnographies of contestation and agonism enrich the more theoretical debates by suggesting the diverse, generative accounts of political conduct and activity.
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1. Thinking the political spatially In his book Post-Foundational Political Thought Oliver Marchart distinguishes between associative and dissociative traditions of theorizing the political. For Marchart this division speaks most directly to the respective adherents of the political theorists Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt. He contends that ‘Arendtians see in the political a space of freedom and public deliberation’ privileging an associative moment in the constitution of political life. In this account of the political ‘people in their plurality freely associate within the public realm’ ‘motivated by their care for the common’ (Marchart, 2007, p. 41). The influential Habermasian traditions of deliberative democracy are also bracketed as part of this associative tradition of political theory. Schmittians, by contrast, view the political as a ‘space of power, conflict and antagonism’ (Marchart, 2007, p. 38). For Schmittians, including left neoSchmittians such as Chantal Mouffe, antagonism is a ‘dissociative operation’ that serves as the ‘constitutive political principle of a given community’ (Marchart, 2007, p. 41). This division is clearly very schematic. The papers in this special issue approach issues of contestation in ways which disrupt this stark counter-position of associative and dissociative traditions of thinking the political. Dikeç, for example, argues against readings of Hannah Arendt’s work which situate her as only a theorist of associative forms of the political. Through engaging with the promise of what Dikeç refers to here as ‘space as a mode of political thinking’ the papers sketch out an agenda for thinking beyond such bifurcated ways of thinking the political. They challenge traditions of thinking where notions of association/solidarity and antagonism have frequently been held apart. The papers do not adopt anything like a shared line in this regard, and there are significant and productive tensions and differences between them. A key commonality to both the more theoretically oriented papers and the empirically driven papers, however, is engagement with diverse modalities of contestation. This challenges and refigures a boundary between associative and dissociative forms of political thinking and disrupts the rather stark and binary framing of contemporary debates about the political. As Barnett argues here contemporary accounts of the political, notably associated with Laclau and Mouffe’s radical democratic project, have been structured by a strong ontologising of the political (see also Barnett, 2004). Here a stark division is drawn between ontological forms of the political and the conduct and institutionalized forms of politics. These forms of ‘ideas driven determinism’, in Meyer et al’s terms, downplay the generative character of political activity. Our contention is that thinking spatially can challenge this bifurcated imaginary of the political in productive ways. Foregrounding the dynamic trajectories and connections forged through political activity can assert how multiple identifications can shape political relationalities in diverse ways. This moves beyond the rather reductive accounts of ways of relating conjured by separating and delineating traditions of associative and dissociative theorizing. Here Doreen Massey’s insistence that space is a dimension of multiplicity and co-existence is significant (Massey, 2005). This allows a focus on the way that the political, rather than being primarily either antagonistic or associative, can be the site of coproduction of different modalities and forms of identification. Thus forms of solidarity and antagonism while often being constructed as opposed, can often be co-emergent through the activity of political movements (see Featherstone, 2008, 2012). As Dikeç argues through a reading of a number of key theorists, most notably Hannah Arendt and Jacques Rancière, interrogating connections between space and politics can generate new ways of relating. He argues that ‘political action for Arendt, inaugurates space –
the space of appearance – where individuals are at once related and separated, setting into motion something new and unexpected.’ In seeking to foreground the importance of thinking the political spatially our project is not to police the way that political theorists mobilize and deploy spatial metaphors, concepts and imaginaries. There is a tendency as both Barnett and Dikeç relate here where (political) geographers have positioned themselves as judges of the ways in which others mobilize spatial metaphors and concepts. For Dikeç engaging with the work that ‘space talk’ does for political theorists offers different possibilities. Rather than accuse the thinkers he engages with of ‘not ‘doing’ space or not quite understanding space beyond, perhaps, a few metaphorical references to it’ he pays attention to ‘what animates them in engaging with space talk when theorizing politics.’ Seen in this light, space becomes what Hans Blumenberg has termed a ‘‘metaphor’’ (Blumenberg 1960), a base stock of philosophical (or theoretical) language, which cannot be confined to a purely logical concept; rather, they do something in delineating our worldview(s). By interrogating the work that ‘space talk’ does in the work of different theorists Dikeç foregrounds the ‘multiple spatialities at work in different conceptualizations of politics.’ Such an ethos of engagement can productively enliven our imaginations of the relations between space and the political. This is not to advocate a pan-glossian approach which masks or silences differences. It is, however, to suggest that a more generous approach to these theoretical exchanges and conversations might be productive. (It also emphasizes that geographers might also have things to learn from the ways in which others mobilize spatial imaginaries of the political!). A commitment to probing the spatial imaginaries deployed by key theorists of the political is central to some of the papers here. Meyer et al’s careful critical engagement with the geographical imaginaries at work in Carl Schmitt’s oeuvre is instructive in this regard. They make a significant contribution to the recent turn towards Schmitt’s work in geography (see, e.g., Elden, 2010; Korf, 2009; Legg, 2011). This is, of course, part of a broader inter-disciplinary re-discovery and re-imagining of Schmitt partly motivated by Agamben’s influential readings of Schmitt in his account of the ‘state of exception’ (Agamben, 2005). Meyer et al. trace the many troubling and problematic spatial imaginaries at work in Schmitt’s writings, arguing that in Schmitt’s view political contestation always takes ‘place between territorialized and essentialized containers reflecting a certain political idea’. They contend that this position is firmly at odds with contemporary theoretical readings of space as in process, fluid and multiple. They argue that Schmitt’s belief in the ‘analogy of politics and territorialized space turns out as an anachronism of the heyday of a world ordered by nation-states’. This sense of the fixed character of space in Schmitt’s theorizing is also marked by their critical remarks on Schmitt’s account of the partisan. They argue that Schmitt’s construction of the figure of the partisan was ‘telluric’, that is ‘earthly’ and unchanging. This closes down a focus on the generative character of subaltern spaces of politics (Clayton, 2011). Crucially, in this regard the tension in Schmitt’s nation-centered, and decidedly imperialistic imaginations of the political, are not just challenged by the current, supposedly ‘post-national’ conjuncture, but they are also at odds with the forms geographies of contestation have taken in the past (Featherstone, 2008; Linebaugh and Rediker, 2001). Uma Kothari’s contribution draws attention to the important histories of ‘translocal resistance’ in shaping spaces of contestation. She explores forms of resistance crafted by political figures exiled by British imperial powers to the Seychelles for their engagements in anti-colonial politics. They shaped ‘various forms of subaltern
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resistance’ which connected ‘different colonial spaces’ and which challenge the ‘bounded and territorial understandings of the political that have often informed accounts of anti-colonialism’. This focus on the dynamic trajectories of translocal anti-colonial resistance foregrounds forms of political agency and association shaped through dynamic forms of contestation which have been marginalized by nation-centered accounts of the political. Her contribution emphasizes how tracing the spatialities through which contestation and resistance has been produced can enrich our understandings of political agency and activity. This speaks to a broader contribution of the papers in this special issue which is to assert the importance of the diverse modalities of contestation for accounts and understandings of the political. 2. Modalities of contestation and their spatial and temporal registers Central to recent debates on the political have been a set of binary categorizations of contestation. Thus Chantal Mouffe, and others, distinguish between antagonism as a relation characterized by unbridled hostility towards an enemy and agonism defined as adversarial contestation. For Mouffe a key role of politics is to transform antagonistic relations into agonistic ones. This is arguably an important political aim, but her distinction produces an unhelpfully limited sense of ‘actually-existing’ forms of contestation. The conversations between political theoretical work and ethnographically informed research here push beyond such a reductive framing of the terms of political contestation. As Jonathan Spencer argues in his contribution such distinctions elide the ‘multiple registers’ of the political, ‘comic and tragic, enthralling and appalling, ludic and frightening’ which ‘defy easy reduction to issues of power and resistance, still less the rational instrumentalism of conventional political anthropology’ (see also Chari and Donner, 2010). Stressing these diverse modalities of contestation, and the multiple spatialities they shape and constitute has consequences. A key implication is to unsettle the ways in which the tone of much contemporary writing on the political temporalises difference in modes of and intensity of contestation. Thus a central claim in this regard has been that the current epoch is best understood as ‘post-political’. This contention has been central to the work of different key theorists such as Mouffe, Rancière, and Zˇizˇek and has been given vociferous articulation in geography through the recent writings of Erik Swyngedouw (2007, 2011). These debates, however, tend to rest on a rather, limited and formalized sense of what is properly political. There is little sense of the dynamic trajectories of political activity or an engagement with diverse forms of contestation, though Rancière’s work is helpfully attentive to the ways in which political activity can productively reshape the terrain on which the political is understood (Rancière, 1999). Clive Barnett’s contribution here critically interrogates such conceptualizations of the post-political. He contends that these debates are just ‘one example of a more general worry that the precious force of ‘politics’ is always in danger of being lost or forgotten’. In contrast Barnett explores the resources of forms of critical theory, reimagined on a global terrain, for engaging with forms of ‘ordinary’ democratic contestation. Our contention is that a more lively sense of the generative processes of contestation, and crucially a sense of their persistence, can be given by eschewing the temporalized construction of politics at work in debates on the post-political. To do so it is necessary to interrogate in-depth the geographies through which forms of contestation are shaped. The special issue contributes to these questions through engaging with tensions between ‘‘theory-in-general’’ and ‘‘ethnographically emergent’’ accounts of actually existing politics (of contestation).
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Two contributors (Spencer and Geiser) address the strange silence in the literature on the post-political, which is ‘‘as though, for them, the Third World and colonialism are invisible or insignificant . . .’’ (Kapoor 2008, p. 113). The most straight-forward approach to countering this silence is to confront theorists with violent articulations of post-colonial political contexts. This is the strategy pursued by Urs Geiser who parachutes Chantal Mouffe directly into his ethnographic field site in the Swat valley in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan at the border with Afghanistan. The Swat valley has occasionally hit international media headlines because of a violent ‘‘Islamist’’ opposition movement that the Pakistani government labeled as Taliban. These ‘‘Taliban’’ managed, for a short period though, to take effective control over large sways of this peripheral territory and were only defeated through sheer military force. This is antagonism and contestation in its most brutal form, certainly. For Geiser, this is the result of a failure of modern inclinations of state formation, which are still in-the-making in this post-colonial space and often considered as rather alien to ‘‘traditional’’ mechanisms of politics. Barnett and Spencer pursue a slightly more subtle approach to bridging theory and ethnographies of politics. At least they don’t send Mouffe to the Taliban to learn about antagonism. Both, Barnett and Spencer call for a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenologies of political action (Barnett 2012, p. 3) and the ‘‘[weird] world of actually existing politics’’ (Spencer, 2007, p. 178). But they practice this phenomenological approach in quite distinct ways. Barnett (2012, 2, our emphasis) suggests that ‘‘democracy is best thought of as a complex form containing both agonistic and deliberative moments’’ and supports his position with a careful reading of Nancy Fraser’s Scales of Justice (Fraser 2008). In her adoption of a concept of ‘‘all-affected interests’’, Barnett finds a more ‘‘phenomenological understanding’’ of the political and the worldly register of contentious claims-making in global justice debates and the emerging space of transnational politics, in which ‘‘the centrality of contestation to the political imagination of [. . .] deliberative democracy is exemplified’’ (Barnett, 2012, p. 8). Further Barnett usefully cautions against forms of methodological globalism that have shaped some work on global civil society (Routledge and Cumbers, 2009). To be clear: Barnett does not arrive at this conclusion through a careful ethnography of actually existing spaces of transnational democracy, but he nevertheless insists on a more nuanced categorization of the contingent assemblages of different spatializations of contention and contestation that emerge in the spaces of democratic action. Spencer’s paper is a direct response to Barnett’s call for a phenomenological approach. Spencer is troubled by an affinity, admittedly an unexpected one, between local perceptions of the political and the ontological theories of antagonism that Barnett criticizes for discarding empirical observations in favor of ‘‘more fundamental structures of existence’’. The irony of this is that Spencer comes to find purchase in Schmitt’s (and Mouffe’s) ontology of the political in an ethnographically emergent process. Barnett by contrast criticizes Mouffe on phenomenological terms, but through a theoretical engagement. Spencer finds the antagonistic register analytically appealing as it ‘‘retains some of the moral disturbances [. . .] which is so central to the Sri Lankan sense of the political’’ (2012, 19). Spencer’s ethnographies unravel some of the ‘‘antinomies of community’’ (Watts, 2004; Hasbullah and Korf, 2012), which signify the attempt at keeping boundaries clean – at separating different ethno-nations (Tamils vs Muslims) – as a process of purification, which has elements of defense against the outside and purification of the inner self. An important element in these geographies of antagonism has been the relationship between religion and the political in Sri Lanka (Abeysekera, 2002;
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Klem, 2011; Spencer, 2007). Spencer’s conclusion is a warning not to forget or ignore ‘‘what we might call local normative theory [i.e. that] politics was a source of moral dismay, at once inescapable and undesirable’’ (2012, 24). This local normative theory did not, suggests Spencer, differentiate between desirable (agonistic) and undesirable (antagonistic) registers of the political, pace Mouffe. Two papers in the special issue engage with different levels of intensity of (violent, non-violent) forms of contestation and the intricate claims to legitimize those. For Klaus Schlichte (2012), who studies non-state armed actors (i.e. rebels, insurgents, warlords), contestation is the mise en question of the legitimacy of a single position, a single claim or a whole political or social order. Non-state armed groups who take up weapons to challenge a particular social or political order need to ‘‘transform their power of violence into legitimate rule’’ – or authority. This claim for legitimacy gives their contestation and violent activities a political clout – and counters accounts that have sought to link insurgent movements with criminality or banditry (Korf, 2011). Schlichte provides us with a phenomenology of how violent action is still political – and he arrives at this phenomenology through the theoretical analytics of Norbert Elias and Max Weber. For Schlichte, Elias’ concept of figuration allows the study of the inner life of such groups and the dynamics of power and authority in which violence and legitimacy claims at times converge, but often need to be brought together. Again, here, we find the everyday practices of normativity – the legitimizing of rightful contestation. Kothari’s paper engages with some of the key practices through which translocal geographies of contestation were constructed. Kothari’s account is also intriguing as it shows us some more silent forms of contestation – in her case: letter writing. This resonates with recent work which has situated political activity as the product of assemblages which are ‘temporary aggregates of objects and people’ (Davies, 2012, p. 276). Through letter writing, political exiles kept the colonial administration obliged to deal with them and continued to uphold their status as political exiles by continuously contesting the exile status. This demonstrates how particular sites of contestation can be generated through diverse relations and connections, in contrast to accounts which construct the site as rather bounded and singular (Woodward et al., 2012). It also suggests the importance of different registers of contestation in making and maintaining claims, what Caleb Johnston has usefully termed ‘the political art of patience’ in the context of struggles by adivasi (indigenous groups) to assert citizenship in contemporary India (Johnston, 2012).
3. Coda: emergent sites of the political That contestation still constitutes spaces of the political has been signified by a variety of different forms of protest and public outrage (Sloterdijk, 2006), be it the Occupy movement, the ‘Arab’ revolutions or the mobilizations in Spain, Greece and Britain against neo-liberal reforms and pulverizing forms of austerity. The deepening politicization of the economic crisis suggests why scrutinizing the relations between space, contestation and the political is a significant political task. That the Occupy movement and mobilisations for climate justice have been shaped by the organising practices of counter-globalisation struggles emphasises the effects of dynamic political trajectories on forms of contestation (Chatterton et al., forthcoming). Following such trajectories can also redefine the terms on which the current political conjuncture is understood. Asserting that neo-liberal forms of globalization were deeply contested before 2008, for example, locates the crisis as part of ongoing contestation rather than as an exceptional moment (Featherstone, 2012).
This stress on the politicization of the crisis is closed down by claims that the current epoch is ‘post-political’. The rather impoverished sense of contestation that informs work on the ‘post-political’ is also underlined by forms of (anti-capitalist and anti-state) protest, violence and contestation which are often beyond the radar of international media. The longstanding Maoist insurrection in several states of India, has mobilized marginalized constitutencies in neo-liberalizing rural India (Ahmed et al., 2010). This challenges Indian elites who have sought to silence the Maoist insurrection in the public media. Such insurrections also draw on significant histories of Maoist political interventions in post-colonial India, most notably in West Bengal in the 1970s (cf Roy, 2010. Donner; 2011). In Bolivia concerted protest movements have fought back against neo-liberalization, particularly against the privatization of gas and water. Raul Zibechi notes that for ten or twelve days, during the ‘gas wars’ of October 2003 ‘residents of El Alto, organized through neighborhood councils and other means operated as a neighborhood government that supplanted the delegitimized and absent state’ (Zibechi, 2010, p. 13). These forms of contestation produced the political space for the election of Evo Morales, the first indigenous president in Bolivia. His administration, which has close links to social movements, has in turn found itself the target of massive protests ‘demanding the cancellation of the government’s planned highway set to cut through the ancestral lands of the lowland indigenous people of the Yuracarés, Mojeños and Tsimanes’ (Laing, 2012). The persistence of contentious politics in a different register is signalled by the public demonstrations against the Stuttgart 21 railway station in Germany. This latter protest opposed plans to put the Stuttgart railway station underground, a huge investment project that generated anxieties and rage about neo-liberal urban developments, sponsored by the state. The protest movement only emerged after a lengthy process of planning had come to an end and the plans had been overwhelmingly approved in the regional parliament. The protest generated a paradigmatic drive within German politics to claims for more direct democracy – and provided the impetus for a change of power in the southern state of Baden-Württemberg in the subsequent regional elections. But paradoxically, when the controversy was finally brought to the polls in a direct vote, the adversaries of the Stuttgart 21 project lost. Nevertheless, Stuttgart 21 has become the signum of a Bourgeois protest against the established mechanisms of representative politics, but the legitimacy of, or in other words, the ‘‘rightfulness’’, the appropriateness, of these protests has remained contested in the public debates of Germany, while it also signifies the theatrical registers of passions and rationality that are at work in such forms of contestation (Saar and Staab, 2011). These multiple forms and geographies of contestation are constitutive of markedly diverse articulations of the political. Some of these take the form of anti-capitalist or anti-neoliberal mobilisation, and have often been powerfully shaped by anarchist practices and modes of organizing. Others could be read as expressions of ‘‘Bourgeois’’ discontent, for which Spiegel journalist Dirk Kurbjuweit created the label ‘‘Wutbürger’’ (Kurbjuweit, 2010) for the protesters against Stuttgart 21. Wutbürger could be translated as ‘‘angry citizen’’ – but could also mean angry bourgeois with an ironic, slightly negative connotation: the wealthy bourgeois who is so self-satisfied that he or she needs the public protest event as a kind of thrill. Kurbjuweit’s analysis seems to confirm that political space is inherently theatrical (Barnett, 2012, p. 3). Implicitly, this denies the protest movement a political role, however. Interpretations of spaces of contestation, then, can bear on whether different forms of mobilization become signified as political or not. Particular spatial imaginaries such as contagion, for example, have been mobilized to represent subaltern movements in ways which dispossess them of political agency (Guha, 1983).
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This emphasizes that at stake in different articulations of space, politics, and contestation can be a sense of who or what is counted as political. The papers in this special issue demonstrate that geographies of contestation are diverse empirically, but are also contested theoretically. While quite a few papers critique Chantal Mouffe’s concept of antagonism-agonism (Barnett, Meyer et al., Geiser, Spencer to some extent), the readers may notice slightly different takes on the legacy of Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. Meyer et al. (2012) argue that, first, Schmitt’s philosophy of space is an outdated container space and that one cannot just take bits and pieces of Schmitt’s oeuvre without taking into account his political theology and his political role during the Third Reich, Spencer ‘‘feels no need to apologize for ignoring [this legacy]’’ (2012, 19) and to use his writings selectively. While Barnett finds ontological theories of the political à la Mouffe unhelpful, Dikeç reads the spatial metaphors in some of these ontologies of space and politics as productive and inspiring. In this regard bringing into contestation different takes on the relations between space and politics can itself be a productive and generative process. Acknowledgments We would like to thank Joris van Wezemael who co-edited this special issue and who co-organized the workshop on Space Contestation and the Political held in Zurich in February 2009. Many thanks are due to all those involved in the workshop and to Michael Samers for his commitment to this special issue, for his insightful editorial guidance and his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this introduction. We would like to thank the ESRC Space of Democracy/Democracy of Space Network, the Department of Geography at the University of Zurich and the ETH Zurich for funding this workshop. References Abeysekera, A., 2002. Colors of the Robe: Religion, Identity and Difference. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia. Agamben, G., 2005. State of Exception, Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago University Press, Chicago. Agnew, J., 2003. Contemporary political geography: intellectual heterodoxy and its dilemmas. Political Geography 22 (6), 603–606. Ahmed, W., Kundu, A., Peet, R. (Eds.), 2010. India’s New Economic Policy: A Critical Analysis. Routledge, New York. Barnett, C., 2004. Deconstructing radical democracy: articulation, representation, and being with others. Political Geography 23 (5), 503–528. Barnett, C., 2012. Situating the Geographies of Injustice in Democratic Theory. Geoforum 43 (4), 677–686. Blumenberg, H., 1960. Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main. Chari, S., Donner, F., 2010. Ethnographies of activism: a critical introduction. Cultural Dynamics 22, 75–85. Chatterton, P., Featherstone, D.J., Routledge, P., (forthcoming). Articulating Climate Justice in Copenhagen: antagonism. The Commons and Solidarity’ Antipode. Clayton, D., 2011. Partisan space. In: Legg, S. (Ed.), Spatiality, Sovereignty and Carl Schmitt: Geographies of the Nomos. Routledge, London, pp. 211–219. Davies, A.D., 2012. Assemblage and social movements: Tibet Support Groups and the spatialities of political organisation. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37 (2), 273–286. Dikeç, M., 2007. The Badlands of the Republic: Space, Politics and Urban Policy. Blackwell, Oxford. Dikeç, M., 2012. Space as a mode of political thinking. Geoforum 43 (4), 669–676. Donner, H., 2011. Locating Activist Spaces: The Neighbourhood as a Source and Site of Urban Activism in 1970s Calcutta. Cultural Dynamics, p. 23. Elden, S., 2010. Reading schmitt geopolitically: nomos, territory and Grobraum. Radical Philosophy 161, 18–26. Featherstone, D.J., 2008. Resistance, Space and Political Identities: the Making of Counter-Global Networks. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford. Featherstone, D.J., 2012. Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism. Zed Books, London. Fraser, N., 2008. Scales of Justice. Polity Press, Cambridge. Geiser, U., 2012. Reading political contestation in Pakistan’s Swatt valley – from deliberation to ‘the political’ and beyond. Geoforum 43 (4), 707–715. Gregory, D., 2004. The Colonial Present. Blackwell, Oxford.
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David Featherstone School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, East Quadrangle, University Avenue, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK E-mail address: [email protected]
Benedikt Korf Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 190, CH-8032 Zurich, Switzerland E-mail address: [email protected] Available online 12 June 2012