Geographies of the Outlaw

Posted on October 3, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Geographies of the OutlawThe word “outlaw”—outside of the law—implicitly articulates the intimate relationship between geography and the law. From the perspective of state-makers and capitalists, the groups of outlaws I’m collectively labeling “Motley Crews” (as a shorthand) pose a grave ideological and spatial threat to the normative relations between bourgeois philosophies of law, sovereignty, and the state (cf. Spatiality & Power). Poachers, commoners, pirates, bandits are all Motley Crews. Leaving aside the more complicated cases of rebel insurgents and mafia, Motley Crews’ transgressions against property could be classified as “social crimes” (Hay et al. 1975; Hobsbawm 1959). What’s more, they enact the critique that Marxists have long made against the alloyed ideologies of law, property, and state. In reporting on legislation against thefts of wood, Marx explained that the criminal nature of the theft was not in its attack against wood as a sensuous object, “but in the attack on the wood as part of the state system, an attack on the right to property as such” (1842). Drawing from a more consciously and politically assertive example, Rediker similarly explains that 18th Century pirate societies were wedded by a “legal philosophy that was not … an imitation of ‘the legal government’ but rather a critique of it” (2004:42). Continue reading →

Posted in Bandits, Carl Schmitt, Drugs, Elites, Forests, Frontiers, Gender, Historical-Geographies, Illegality, Insurgency/Counterinsurgency, Karl Marx, Land, Law, Michel Foucault, Networks, Pirates, Post-Colonial, Power, Primitive Accumulation, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, Terror, The Body, The Sea, The State, Violence | Comments Off on Geographies of the Outlaw

Street Art and Protest

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Like many others around the world, I was appalled by Troy Davis’ execution—along with capital punishment in general. But I was again reminded about the power of street art and its striking potential to politically express the ineffable when I checked out today’s post by the ever-savvy blog Social Design Notes. It’s Troy Davis’ portrait wheat-pasted on the rails of an iron fence in London by Mentalgassi, a German street art collective. Street Art Utopia has the video of the making of the wheat-pasting (contracted, apparently, by Amnesty International—video here). Recent talk in blogs about guillotines and executions reminded me of something else. Continue reading →

Posted in City, Critique, Everyday Life | 4 Comments

Agrarian Political Economy & Ecology

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

 

My path into agrarian political economy and ecology partly picks up where Marx left off. In culminating his magnum opus, Marx departs from his more dualistic model of the capitalist mode of production, which emphasizes the dialectic of labor-and-capital, by adding a third element: land (Ch. 48, Vol. III). While human labor and the earth are universal factors of production—though historically changing—capital-interest-profit is peculiar to the monstrous world of the capitalist mode of production. With his trinity formula, Marx adds greater conceptual depth to how the capitalist labor process induces an insatiable metabolism between nature and society (Vol I. Ch. 7)—and, in fact, their “irreparable rift” (Vol. III:949). His insights also demand that we place more conceptual and political focus on agrarian struggles in seeking more just and sustainable social relations. Among many other things, political ecology has sought to extend Marx’s unfortunately brief ending to Das Kapital, particularly since agriculture and the politics of resources have posed confounding conceptual problems for critical political economists. But political ecology has done more than simply “fill” gaps; by broadening the scope of critical research on socio-natural interactions it has raised new gaps and new questions. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Antonio Gramsci, David Harvey, Forests, Frontiers, Gender, Karl Marx, Land, Political Ecology, Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation, Race & Ethnicity, Spatiality, Territory, Violence | 1 Comment

Spatiality & Power

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

“A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas… on the soft fibers of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires.”
—Joseph Servan (1780)

“All social life is essentially practical. All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”
—Karl Marx (1845)

“Space is political. Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology or politics; it has always been political and strategic.”
—Henri Lefebvre (1976)
Continue reading →

Posted in Antonio Gramsci, Assemblages, Carl Schmitt, Dialectics, Everyday Life, Governmentality, Hegemony, Henri Lefebvre, Illegality, Karl Marx, Law, Michel Foucault, Power, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, The State, Violence | 1 Comment

A Genealogy of Sovereignty

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Bartelson, Jens. 1995. A Genealogy of Sovereignty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

This was a difficult book so I tried outlining it chapter by chapter: Ch. 1 – Bartelson proposes a genealogy of “sovereignty” and lays out the arguments and methods for his approach for writing a conceptual history of sovereignty through its relationship to knowledge. His question thus becomes not, what is sovereignty, but rather: How have political discourses of and about sovereignty ordered our political reality and our knowledge about that reality. He follows methods of discourse analysis of two broad categories of texts—“traditionary” and “manuals”—from three historical periods (Renaissance, Classical, and Modern). Traditionary texts “furnish blueprints for reality,” while manuals “translate their meaning into reality and action” (9). His central hypothesis is that “sovereignty and knowledge implicate each other logically and produce each other historically” (5).

Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Frontiers, Historical-Geographies, Land, Law, Nation/Nationalism, Niccolo Machiavelli, Power, Scale, Sovereignty, Spatiality, Territory, The State | Comments Off on A Genealogy of Sovereignty

Cartographic Mexico

Posted on August 30, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Craib, Raymond. 2004. Cartographic Mexico: A History of State Fixations and Fugitive Landscapes. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

I remember my social studies teacher in elementary school using the peel of an orange to show us why most world maps distorted the size of countries near the poles. The revelation was particularly aggravating for me because it wounded my innocent nationalist pride: In the faulty world of maps, my country paled in comparison to mighty Greenland. I thought “What a rip!” Pointing out that maps are power-laden representations and documents, rather than impartial “scientific” renderings of inanimate realities has become de rigueur, but Raymond Craib proves much more in his book Cartographic Mexico. On one level, he conclusively demonstrates how maps and map-making have been key components of Mexican statecraft. His thesis would lend itself easily to facile characterizations of scheming, all-powerful state-makers dominating a passive, mostly peasant citizenry. Such an argument would be chalked up to what I call “smoke-filled-rooms” interpretations of history (such rooms of course sometimes are important in particular times and places). Continue reading →

Posted in Boundaries, Land, Law, Maps, Michel Foucault, Nation/Nationalism, Place, Post-Colonial, Power, Science & Tech., Spatiality, Territory, The State | Comments Off on Cartographic Mexico

Global Outlaws

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Nordstrom, Carolyn. 2007. Global Outlaws: Crime, Money, and Power in the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Carolyn Nordstrom’s book is an ethnography about the extra-legal, as she calls them, flows and networks, which she sees as constituting a “series of power grids that shape the fundamental econo-political dynamics of the world today.” She’s interested in “the intersections of crime, finance, and power in activities that produce something of value: monetary, social, and cultural capital, power, patronage, survival” (xvii). The book is implicitly about geographical scale—a pattern for books on similar subjects and rightly so. The politics of scale emerge throughout the book: from the war orphaned cigarette vendor to the transoceanic shipping liners, the regional warlord to the offshore bank account. Nordstrom makes these places, processes, and people come alive throughout the pages of the book. Globalization (licit or illicit) is not a force passively thrust upon people; it is actively shaped by people everywhere, whether they be powerful or ostensibly powerless. Continue reading →

Posted in Drugs, Elites, Forests, Frontiers, Illegality, Law, Networks, Power, Scale, Sovereignty, Spatiality, The Sea, The State | Comments Off on Global Outlaws

The Sicilian Mafia

Posted on August 21, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Gambetta, Diego. 1996. The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Diego Gambetta’s hugely important book conceptualizes the Sicilian mafia as not an organization but as an industry that’s in the business of producing, promoting, and selling private protection. As many mobsters have claimed, “There is no mafia.” Gambetta would agree, but he would be careful to add that there certainly are mafiosi. The commodity that these men peddle—and they are men—is not violence, but protection. Violence is one of many means used to achieve the end of protection. The need for private protection emerges in a context of economic exchange in which trust and guarantees of some kind in the last instance are unavailable. Forms of private protection are particularly prevalent in illicit trades, which are by definition beyond state sanction and regulation. Gambetta says such practices are buttressed in Sicily by an ideology based on a “relativist approach to the relationship between the state and the law” (5). This ideology produces reliance on bargaining with rather than fighting against mafia. Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, City, Drugs, Elites, Illegality, Law, Political Economy, Scale, The State, Violence | Comments Off on The Sicilian Mafia

Offshore

Posted on August 20, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

Brittain-Catlin, William. 2005. Offshore: The Dark Side of the Global Economy. New York: Picador.

This impressive book by William Brittain-Catlin tells the story of the vast “offshore” world that forms an integral—if unacknowledged—part in the globe’s financial architecture. The offshore is a strange interstitial place forged by the enmeshed logics (and contradictions) between capital and the state, between the legal and the illegal, between the territorial and the extraterritorial. The Cayman Islands, as an exemplary and formative case, occupies much of the narrative and analysis. The British Territory also clearly displays the contradictory forces make and unmake the offshore’s peculiar functionality to capitalism and territorial states. Continue reading →

Posted in Elites, Illegality, Law, Networks, Sovereignty, Territory, The State | 2 Comments

Fernando Coronil, R.I.P.

Posted on August 19, 2011 by Teo Ballvé

I just found out Fernando Coronil, a Venezuelan scholar who I really admire, died this week. The Social Science Research Council’s Craig Calhoun wrote a post about Coronil’s untimely death. He was a leading decolonial thinker and a very geographically oriented anthropologist. A sad day. I have one post about Coronil’s co-edited book, States of Violence, and am a big fan of his monograph The Magical State.

Posted in Everyday Life | 1 Comment