Abstract
Modern power is bureaucratized power, institutionalized formally through governmental and non-governmental structures and informally through unwritten social conventions. This report reviews recent political geographic work on the institutional arrangements that enable and constrain all political practice. Institutions here refer to organizations as well as looser semi-institutionalized patterns in public and private life. The report will first examine the scholarship on formal organizations and it will then review the research on professional fields and popular culture. The conclusion highlights the transnationalization and neoliberalization of institutions as a theme that runs through much of contemporary political geography.
I Introduction
Beyond the truism that the production of political space is an institutionalized process, there are two specific reasons to focus on institutions in a political geography progress report. First, long-term social patterns and changes to these patters require institutional entrenchment. For better or for worse, ‘nothing is lasting without institutions’, as Jean Monnet, an architect of European integration, presciently observed in the aftermath of the Second World War. Institutional power and institutional change are slow and often opaque processes: they require concerted efforts to discern and unpack. Second, institutions are undergoing rapid change today, as traditional administrative structures morph into overlapping circles and networks of influence. Although institutions are sometimes dismissed as lumbering iron-cage bureaucracies, the empirical reality is one of instability and transformation at sites ranging from a transport ministry to a cyber-security start-up. The growing use of market mechanisms and private sector management models has brought far-reaching change to public institutions. We are witnessing a new organizational ecosystem of ‘fragmented governing space and more liquid, diverse, and decentered power structures’ (Wedel, 2017: 154). In that ecosystem, influence works through intermeshing hierarchies and networks that transcend national borders and public/private divides within these borders. Political geography, with its interest in the know-where (Agnew, 2007) of knowledge and power, needs to map that system and is well-placed to do so.
This report reviews recent political geographic work on institutions. I treat the term as a heuristic device to discuss (1) the well-established formal institutions that include governmental and intergovernmental structures, corporations, and non-governmental organizations, (2) the partly informal organizational arrangements forged by social movements and civil society groups, and (3) the decidedly loose patterns of political practice and affinity around professional fields and currents of popular culture. I approach institutions as more or less stable patterns in, and mechanisms for, organizing social and political life. Thus defined, institutions encompass organizations as well as the norms and conventions that enable and constrain political practice (Blackburn, 2008: 187). Today’s political geography undercuts the distinctions between formal and informal politics, state and non-state institutions, and domestic and international realms – and this report tries to do the same.
The rest of the report proceeds in three steps. The next section concentrates on the blending of national and international institutions as well as public and private ones. I accentuate the research that examines politics in the international arena, as illustrated in particular by the work on climate change, economic and political crises, and the securitization of political life. The third section focuses on popular culture and professional fields to investigate the cultural conventions that are institutionalized through markets and social trends rather than formal bureaucracies. In an effort to analyse the organizational structures in which scholars themselves work, I highlight the research on neoliberalization, rankings, and core-periphery relations within academic geography. I thereby touch on the institutions that directly shape the very medium of this report – academic scholarship. The concluding section highlights the transnationalization and neoliberalization of institutions as a central theme in today’s political geography. Throughout, I use the word ‘bureaucracy’ as a synonym for a formal institution: in this report, it is a descriptive rather than a subtly derogatory term.
II Organizations
1 Governmental and non-governmental bureaucracies
Public safety and security, military operations and war-making, the provisions of social services, the growing complexity and importance of international agreements around trade or the environment – all demonstrate the central role of the nation-state in contemporary politics. The familiar discussions of everyday life may be about school lunches or public transit – or about burning global issues like climate change – but the institutional arrangements through which the various policy measures are contemplated, designed, implemented, and contested centre on the nation-state. It is easy in a rich country to grumble about ‘the state’ as an overbearing presence ‘out there’, but modern life is unimaginable without the institutional capacity of the state. Most academics are civil servants.
Logically, then, much of contemporary political geography examines the variegated practices and performances of stateness at multiple scales historically and today (see Agnew et al., 2017). The work shows that national, sub-national, and inter-national spaces are institutional constructions and must be situated in the processes that produce it. There is a feedback loop between state power and state institutions: national space is produced through state institutions, and the space thus produced legitimizes the institutions that created it (Kivelä and Moisio, 2017; Pike et al., 2016; Lim, 2017). A similar feedback loop operates between state institutions on the one hand and various market-oriented and civil society groups on the other: many such groups orbit the state and are legitimized by it.
In keeping with the greater emphasis on micro-practices, recent studies focus on politics not only between but also within institutions. These practices are analysed in terms of the neoliberalization of state and non-state institutions and the blending of private and public institutions (Harris, 2017; Jones and Clark, 2018; Kuus, 2018; Moisio, 2018; Otsuki et al., 2016). Geographers illuminate the relations among different branches of the state: the growing role of local government activism as well as the courts in many countries (Braverman et al., 2014; Jeffrey and Jakala, 2015; Pike et al., 2016). Considerable attention goes to translocal mobilization: the connections of corporate and civil society actors and the extraterritorial practices of the state. The effect is two-fold: to highlight the fractured and performative character of state power and to show the spatiality of that power beyond the familiar territorial frames (Koch, 2017; Lentz, 2014; Ragazzi, 2014; Steinberg and Kristoffersen, 2017).
The arguments are grounded in a wide range of cross-scalar issues. These include global trade (Margulis, 2014; Myers and Sbicca, 2015; Naylor, 2017), education (Larner 2015), carbon transitions (Aiken, 2016), finance (Dörry, 2017; Hall, 2017; Langley, 2015), development (Domosh, 2015; Essex and Carmichael, 2016), education (Madge et al., 2015; Nguyen, 2014), terrorism and policing (Hamdan, 2016; Müller, 2015), logistics (Gregson et al., 2017), or current political crises such as Brexit (Bachmann and Sidaway, 2016; McConnell et al., 2017). In all cases, geographers highlight the interface of state and non-state institutions as well as national and international structures.
Geographers used to write little about the bureaucracies that operate on the international arena. They thereby left international and transnational institutions, such as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or the World Bank, largely to the discipline of international relations (IR). The study of global crises, combined with sustained engagements with IR, has prompted close examinations of these institutions. The work on climate change and other global issues is centrally about international efforts to tackle the problem or to avoid it (Dalby, 2017; O’Lear and Dalby, 2016; Weisser, 2014). It shows the blending of geopolitical, geoeconomic, and geosocial strategies (Mitchell and Kallio, 2017) and foregrounds the transnational standardization of all spheres of life. Empirical focus on institutions is indeed one of the main connecting points between political geography on the one hand and the related fields in IR, sociology, anthropology, and legal studies on the other (Kuus, 2015).
2 Security and war-making
The institutions of security – military, intelligence, and police services – are among the most powerful arms of the state in many countries. Although critical security studies were established in IR in the 1990s, political geography has, over the last decade, begun to build a comparable (though not the same) body of work on the institutions of security. This research shows how framing a political issue in terms of security shifts it to the most opaque parts of the state apparatus and insulates it from public oversight. The work illuminates the central role of secrecy and obfuscation in the conduct and legitimation of war-making today (Snukal and Gilbert, 2015; Morrissey, 2017; Dittmer, 2017). It also reminds us that militaries are sprawling organizations: underneath rigid hierarchies are power struggles in which individuals matter and outcomes are contingent (Bigger and Neimark, 2017).
This strand of work illuminates the securitization of complex political issues, such as global warming, development or ecological conservation (Dalby, 2017; Hartmann, 2014; Lunstrum, 2014; Selby and Hoffmann, 2014). Here, too, the extra-territorial reach of state power is a major theme (Hall Kindervater, 2017; Moore and Walker, 2016). The research also intersects with the study of policing and surveillance in IR (Von Lucke et al., 2014), critical military studies (Rech et al., 2015; Woodward et al., 2017), critical legal studies (Jones and Smith, 2015), border and migration studies (Collyer, 2016) and urban geography (Coleman, 2016; Darling, 2016). It shows how the tools of modern bureaucracy, such as standards, lists, and algorithms, function as powerful technologies of knowledge and techniques of governance (Amoore and Raley, 2017; DeGoede and Sullivan, 2016).
III Conventions and traditions
Popular geopolitics – the study of the geopolitical practices that operate through the realm of popular culture – has been an integral part of political geography for over two decades. The work demonstrates that popular culture is not a free-floating realm above institutions; it is firmly embedded in the institutions of markets and nation-states. A Hollywood or Bollywood film is as much an institutionalized product as a top-secret government document. Studies of geopolitical cultures highlight the feedback look between the geopolitical strategies of states and the geopolitical cultures in these states. For example, nation-states increasingly engage in branding efforts, which need to be understood both as marketing and geopolitical strategies (Browning and De Oliveira, 2017; Medby, 2018). Research on popular culture is as diverse and diffuse as the phenomenon it analyses. Building on the studies of news media, films, or maps – both the products and their audiences – recent political geographic scholarship has analysed new films (e.g. Kirby, 2015), school textbooks (Ide, 2016) and computer games (Bos, 2018), as well as less-researched phenomena like rumour (Young et al., 2014) or MOOCs (Sparke, 2016). This work broadens out from the predominantly Hollywood- and United States-centred work that dominated even ten years ago to analyse public discourses in diverse geographical and historical settings (e.g. Löfflmann, 2015; Ouelette and Weiss, 2015; Schlosser, 2017; Tyner, 2015).
There is also considerable research on the geographical narratives that undergird social mobilization. The work foregrounds the role of social media in creating new connection and enabling rapid mobilization across scales (Checker, 2017; Kumar, 2015; Scott and Willis, 2017; Staeheli et al., 2016). The analytical accent on affect is noticeable, not least in the studies of Brexit or Trumpism (Bachmann and Sidaway, 2016; Ingram, 2017).
1 Professions, including academia
The conceptual task that undergirds this work is not about organizational charts; it is rather about the political and social processes that produce these charts. The interest in social rules underneath organizational ones is shared by several social science fields of course, and the work is thus necessarily interdisciplinary. It tackles the flows of norms and traditions that underpin institutional arrangements but are sometimes obscured by them. It combines political geography with sociology, anthropology, and IR in studies of specific fields, such as children’s rights (Kallio, 2018), investment promotion (Sellar, 2018) or diplomacy (Jones and Clark, 2018; Kuus, 2018; McConnell, 2018), to illuminate the struggles for power and authority within professional realms. These struggles are fundamentally geographical as they involve different geographical imaginaries and different spatial patterns in the flows of ideas and influence.
It is not unusual to observe that the phenomenon closest to the analyst is overlooked: too close to the eyes to see. In political geography, that phenomenon is the institution of academia. The processes and power relations that academics criticize operate in academics itself, too, and they are increasingly receiving the attention they demand. Tackling the sociology and political economy of academic publishing, this body of work examines the monetization of academic research by the Big Five publishing houses and the continued dominance of Anglo-American conceptual frameworks and writing traditions in it (Coomes et al., 2017; Kallio, 2016; see also the groundbreaking analysis in Paasi, 2005). There is also a related set of studies on the organization of academic life in the increasingly neoliberal university (Keighren, 2017; Larner, 2015; Morrissey, 2015).
Geography’s relations with area studies and regional geography have been complicated for decades. As Tariq Jazeel puts it (2016: 649): ‘[the discipline of] geography has a geography’. On the one hand, there is a long-established critique of the Eurocentric traditions of human geography, including political geography (Klinke, 2015). There are also critiques of the links between academic geography and the military-industrial complexes of nation-states (Wainwright, 2016; Woodward et al., 2017). On the other hand, there is increasing recognition that detailed regional knowledge is central to geographical sensibility and geographical theorizing (Koch, 2015; Chari, 2016). Such knowledge is also central to geographers’ contribution to public debates. It is regional and area knowledge that is too easy to cut on university campuses and in the civil services of nation-states (Kuus, 2016).
It thus behoves geographers to think carefully as well as critically about the uses and abuses of regional expertise. It is imperative that we not create a strawman of area studies: these are often regional specialists who have produced the best-informed critiques of imperialism and neoliberalism. A fetish of local knowledge, uninformed by a critical theoretical lens, is problematic. A critique of capitalism, colonialism, or neoliberalism that makes universalist claims on the basis of select few places whilst wilfully ignoring other places is no better. Geographers can and ought to use geographical knowledge to unsettle the universalist claims of the larger and more visible scientific fields (Castree, 2017). Regional expertise and its role in the scripting of political space are fundamentally ambiguous and open-ended processes. What we have is not a monolithic field of area studies: what we have, rather, is a set of multiple intellectual traditions with varied connections to social theory, including postcolonial theory, as well as the apparatuses of states (Ashutosh, 2017; Sidaway et al., 2016). 1
Regional perspectives are gaining importance in part because of the greater presence of geographers from diverse parts of the world in the pages of geography journals (see Flint and Mamadouh, 2015). Even a few decades ago, detailed knowledge of some world regions was so rare in English-speaking geography that a handful of well-placed individuals could have outsize influence on entire sub-disciplines. Today, a reader scanning political geography journals quickly notices the diversity of where the authors come from and what places they study. This diversification has been facilitated in part by more diverse editorial teams and advisory boards. This is not a licence for complacency: there is still the power imbalance between those locations (in the Global North) seen as obvious places for generating theory and those places (in the Global South) that are tacitly cast as places of theory application rather than generation. But the pattern is consistently contested. The know-where of academic geography is not only about which places or universities are mentioned in scholarly articles: it is also about the know-where of reviewer selections, editorial boards, and citation cartels.
The core message in this work concerns the neoliberalization of public and private life, from popular culture to the standards of professional conduct in diverse fields. To study these processes, it is not a bad idea to begin with academia as the institutional umbrella under which we conduct our study.
IV Conclusion: Neoliberalization and transnationalization
Two themes both run through political geography and require still closer attention. First, we need further studies of the flex-institutions that are created by neoliberalization and austerity. In such institutions, strategically placed agents ‘serve as connectors’ and ‘coordinate influence from multiple, moving perches, inside and outside official structures’ (Wedel, 2017: 153). We must not dismiss institutions as ‘mere’ bureaucracies: the weakening of democratic and public institutions in many places in the last few years has shown that such institutions cannot be taken for granted. Jean Monnet’s point about the necessity of institutions is worth contemplating especially if one seeks political change: to last, that change needs to be institutionalized, and this cannot be done without a nuanced understanding of existing organizational structures in their specific geographical settings. Bureaucracies do serve the powers that be, but they can also function as sites of resistance to these same powers. To utilize the dual functions of institutions, we need to better understand how these structures work, with what intended and unintended consequences.
To understand the know-where of power, then, we need to analyse the know-where of institutions. Geographers and their expertise in the travels of ideas have much to add to societal understanding of institutional change. We need empirically grounded studies of the neoliberalization of institutions, including those, such as academia, that used to be relatively insulated from this. To investigate institutions is also to better understand academic geography’s role in the broader scientific and social fields of power (Castree, 2017). A richer understanding of institutions would help geographers engage with the professionals who work there: in the context in which many public institutions experience fiscal squeeze, dialogues between academics and policy professionals are more rather than less important (Berling and Bueger, 2017). It is from such dialogues that we can build more effective strategies of cross-disciplinary and public engagement.
The second theme that runs through a great deal of recent work concerns the internationalization and transnationalization of institutions. Transnationalization here refers to the processes through which national, inter-national, and sub-national patterns create new combinations that cannot be neatly summarized in terms of nation-based categories. Whether it is the mobilization efforts of social movements, the struggles for symbolic capital within professional fields, or the international connections of cosseted military institutions, the mechanisms and patterns of political life transcend the national frameworks in which we habitually discuss them. The gap in this work concerns the intersections between theoretical and empirical work: the conceptual argument is often about transnational patterns, but the empirical examples draw conveniently on national case studies. Although it is indeed necessary to locate a geographical phenomenon in a particular place, we must be aware of the institutional frames that are naturalized in the process: locating a phenomenon in a nation-state too often perpetuates methodological nationalism. The task is to combine geopolitical, geoeconomic and geosocial dynamics in our analytical frames so as to trace the transnational connections through which subjects and spaces are constituted. This is not an easy task as it requires careful conceptual and empirical work: the inadequacy of the conventional territorial frames of power must be demonstrated in specific geographical contests. The reconceptualization of the territorial and spatial frames of politics will be the focus of the third report.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: The research presented here in is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.