Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

Why did the United States government eventually intervene decisively in the Bosnian war in the summer of 1995, first with sustained NATO bombing, subsequently by forging the Dayton Peace Accords, and finally by deploying 20 000 troops to a region its military leaders had long claimed was not strategic? In this paper I seek to provide an answer to this question by arguing that Bosnia became strategic because of its geopolitical location in a Europe supposedly secured by NATO and because of the negative sign value it accumulated over the course of its bloody war. The Bosnian war exposed the limits of the Bush administration's New World Order, the inability of the European Union to impose peace, the weaknesses of the United Nations, the impotency of NATO, and the leadership failures of the United States. It thus became strategically important as a threatening sign of disorder in Europe that the United States needed to confront in order to relegitimate NATO and its plans for expansionism, and to regenerate its national exceptionalist identity as a global power. In this paper I consider the role of the media in helping generate Bosnia as a ‘strategic sign’ by arguing that the videocameralistics of the media play an important role in conditioning the practices of foreign policy.

Globalising tendencies have transformed the forms and organisation of business networks. This is particularly true in the rapidly developing Asia-Pacific region where ethnic-based modes of business organisation prevail. Chinese business networks, for example, are posited to play a leading role in propelling the forces of regionalisation in the Asia-Pacific. In this paper, we explore the relationships between globalising tendencies and the changing form of Chinese business networks. We discuss how Chinese business networks, traditionally conceptualised as closed and internally shaped owing to a variety of historically and geographically specific factors, are being (re)shaped by an array of actor-networks with an international business dimension. Groups of actor-networks associated with international finance, the international business media, and multilateral institutions are engaging with Chinese business networks. Through their capacity to enrol relevant Chinese firms into their actor-networks, the international business community is forging changes in some business practices, while also reinforcing other business practices. At the most basic of levels, though, the reshaping of Chinese business practices has been driven by the desire of large Chinese firms to access the financial resources that flow through the global financial system. That such a situation should arise is not surprising given the nature of profits that have been generated from the development process in Asia-Pacific over the past two decades (before the onset of the Asian economic crisis). In the context of the reworking of global capitalism, and the reshaping of subglobal capitalisms, such a relational approach to analysis of economic organisation may help shed some light on the networks that bind together actors and institutions over time and space in uneven (albeit evolving) relations of interdependence.

The scaling of social systems gives rise to a ‘vertical’ ordering that combines with the more familiar ‘horizontal’ ordering by place. But so far this phenomenon has been examined mainly from a political standpoint, and has not as yet received an adequate regulationist treatment. The regulation approach is at heart a systems theory, whereby innovations in accumulation and regulation—whatever their origins—will tend to be selected and woven into a stable pattern if they contribute to the expanded reproduction of capital. It is argued here that the viability of regimes of accumulation, and of modes of regulation, depends in part upon whether an appropriate scale division of labour is established between their component activities. It is suggested from the analysis that it is possible on this basis to develop a regulationist account of the fundamental tendency towards the integration and division of societies at different scales, and the emergence of dominant societal units in each epoch.

During the mid-to-late 1980s, a number of theoretical approaches were deployed to account for some major changes in the sociospatial form of capitalist development. One influential approach—which drew loosely on French regulation theory—chronicled a shift from Fordism to a post-Fordist flexible accumulation, which is characterised, in part, by the rise of ‘new industrial spaces’ . Such accounts were criticised for playing down the constitutive effects of social and political factors in energising such regional prosperity. As debates in the 1990s have sought to address this weakness, much research has demonstrated a greater readiness to address the social and institutional regulation of these new industrial spaces, and more recently, of old (rustbelt) industrial regions. In some respects, though, what we are witnessing is the replacement of a one-dimensional reading of regional transformation—that based on production—by an ‘institutional turn’, which is variously guided by some new directions in the regulation approach, networking theory, and institutional sociology. By fusing the recent work of Jessop and Jenson, the authors seek to deploy a discourse-theoretic regulation approach towards understanding some complex shifts in the regulatory fabric of Lowland Scotland—an archetypal rustbelt region. However, in order to escape a drift towards a one-dimensional ‘institutionalism’, they revisit much (old) contextual ground in an attempt to simultaneously locate the region's political economic mechanisms of transformation and the accompanying ‘politics of representation’ amidst the contemporary transition. The authors conclude that within the United Kingdom, following the institutional possibilities opened up by the late 1990s reconstitution of national and regional governance, there is a real danger of lapsing into a ‘soft institutionalism’ if future analysis on regulation and governance fails to locate socioinstitutional forms within the broader dynamic of political and economic forces.

In this paper I look at the suggestion that time-space compression is changing our experience of time and space. In particular, the extent to which it is seen as raising the importance of a spatial perspective to our understanding of society is contrasted with how some writers have depicted it as rupturing our relationship with the past and its carryover of meaning. For some, this temporal disjuncture is seen as marking the end of History and as reducing our experience of time to a series of ‘perpetual presents’ . These a historical ideas are challenged and a case presented for maintaining an inclusive treatment of what is past, or inertial, within society.