NEW GEO-POLITICS IN EAST ASIA

Abstract:

In Seeing Like a City, Amin & Thrift argue for an alternative science of the city that entails harnessing machine intelligence for the common good, “making visible, rather than taking for granted, the hidden work of algorithms, machines and codes behind the city’s many sociotechnical systems and their effects, so as to make the city fabric a heuristic space in which publics can engage with machine intelligence.” (p. 27) They call, in other words, for a politics of infrastructure that recognizes the distributed intelligence of the city as a sociotechnical machine. While Amin & Thrift offer a welcome revision of ‘the political’ given the more-than-human dimensions of urban assemblages, their abstract conceptualizing of ‘the city’ remains oddly dislocated even as it resembles the generic cities of the capitalist West with which readers of English will be familiar.

This talk seeks to make concrete Amin & Thrift’s abstract ‘city’ and to locate it firmly within the rapidly changing frontiers of hyper-urbanization in China. In so doing, it finds their call for a new politics of infrastructure inspiring yet inadequate. Urban development in China challenges the very notion of ‘citiness’ that animates Seeing Like a City. While infrastructural urbanism in China raises significant, and familiar, questions about (the lack of) public engagement with and benefit from the machine intelligence of new cities, China’s urbanizing spaces look and feel nothing like ‘the city’ imagined by Amin & Thrift’s account. After tracing these new infrastructural spaces at the edges of China’s urban agglomerations, the talk considers a new politics of infrastructure brought about by the enrollment of formerly agricultural spaces into new networks of human (and non-human) circulation and suspension. The sociotechnical analytic pursued here suggests an understanding of an infrastructural politics of survival emerging from the spatial adaptations of the displaced, the uprooted, and the passed-over as they seek to inhabit with meaning and dignity the new world that has been thrust upon them.

Abstract:

Towards the end of the Cold War, the vocabulary of global power, space and economy received a qualitative update. Amongst the terms rapidly gaining prominence since the early 1990s, has been the notion of geoeconomics, the coining of which has frequently been attributed to political strategist Edward N. Luttwak. In his interpretation, it signified a transition away from Cold War ideological and military geopolitical competition, towards commerce and market-based geo-power. Over the past three decades, a “geoeconomics boom” set in, which sees think tanks and a varied body of politico-economic literature making extensive use of the term. Conventionally treated as a neologism, the provenance and earlier iterations of geoeconomics, some dating back more than a century, have been largely ignored by both celebratory and critical accounts. In this paper, we trace and contextualise these earlier instances, leading us to the Geopolitik era in Germany and references to geoeconomics in the United States in the decades after WWII. We thereby offer not only a much-needed genealogy of geoeconomics but also encourage a critical geoeconomics that takes its place amongst other cultures of resistance to imperial, statist and military scripting of the Geo.

Abstract:

The challenges of contemporary migration in Asia have to be understood in the context of the postcolonial development of nation-states in the region. When large-scale labour migration began in the 1970s, many Asian countries had only recently cut their colonial apron strings, and were still in the process of consolidating nation-building projects. In this context, the specific labour migration regime that developed in Asia, was one that minimised challenges to the fragile imaginary of the nation-state in the making. This is accomplished by rendering migrants as transient sojourners whose place in host societies is to sell their labour but make no claims on the receiving nation-state. The migration regime that emerged in Asia was premised on keeping migration temporary, and apart from creating a privileged pathway for highly skilled migrants to gain residency and citizenship, most Asian receiving nation-states ruled out settlement, family reunification, long-term integration, and the acquisition of legal citizenship for less skilled migrants. In this context, this paper first examines how states manage the non-integration of low-waged transient migrants through spatial-temporal strategies of disciplinary power. It then assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and stalled mobility on the regime of enforced temporariness and examines potential pathways forwards towards a more sustainable regime of transnational labour.

Abstract:

Conjunctural analysis is a rather enigmatic practice, observed mostly after the fact and in feats of exemplary execution, apparently somewhat resistant to codification, and maybe too modish for methodological rules. Predicated on the analysis of politically salient ‘situations’, conjunctural approaches combine reflexive theorizing with socially engaged inquiry and context-rich, historicized modes of analysis. Exploring the potential of conjunctural analysis, the presentation will tease out the methodological implications of this rather elusive approach before placing them in dialogue with the case of Chinese capitalism. This is a case that routinely frustrates and confounds extant theoretical frameworks and conceptual categories, sometimes prompting theoretical defeatism. Although conjuncturalism is not methodologically prescriptive, it implies distinctive criteria for problem formulation and research design; for ‘casing’, case selection, and specification; and for the exposition and (re)construction of contextualized theory claims.

Abstract:

Since colonial times, officials, scholars and advocates have insisted that the core principle of Indonesia's customary land regimes is that tenure is collective and inalienable. They have argued against the commodification of land on the grounds that to treat land as a commodity is to invite the destruction of livelihoods and the shattering of life worlds, the dire fate Karl Polanyi described in The Great Transformation. Yet for more than a century, Indonesia's indigenous farmers have willingly commodified their own land as they embrace the production of global boom crops (coffee, rubber, cacao, oil palm). The real transformation for them is not commodification but capitalism, which comes in two formats: from above and from below. The first is the top down enclosure of land for corporate pursuits (mining, plantations, timber extraction); the second is the emergence of capitalist relations among small scale farmers themselves, a shift that imposes a form of market discipline they cannot escape. Recentering capitalism as a term of analysis exposes the true challenge of defending rural peoples' access to land and livelihoods today.

Abstract:

COVID-19 has been the first pandemic on an entirely urbanized planet. Epidemic disease has historically been linked to processes of urbanization, cities have been predominant sites of such outbreaks, and networks of cities have previously shown to be vulnerable to infectious disease in particular. But through much of human history, cities were islands in a sea of rural landscapes. Today, urbanization has become a common, not exceptional, experience and urban life predominates how disease outbreaks emerge, spread and are governed – both in terms of response to current and preparation for future contagion. As cities have often been most affected in epidemic events, it was often those in the social, spatial and institutional peripheries that have suffered most, as has also been the case with COVID.

The collective experience of pandemic disease since 2020 was also overshadowed and made more acute by racial injustice, the continuing climate emergency, and the Russian aggression against Ukraine. These events further deepened the rifts the pandemic had revealed in various ways. Facing a postpandemic urban world involves meeting the immediate needs that the trauma of widespread illness and death has caused and the longterm public health, economic and social effects of such pervasive suffering . It also entails recognizing existing, envisioning further and implementing various modes of urban care and repair that address the entwined crises of infection, structural racism, climate change, and war.