National Meaning-Making in Complex Societies: Political Legitimation and Branding Dynamics in Post-Apartheid South Africa

How does nation branding reflect state–society relations and more pertinently, what does it reveal about the way political power is legitimated by a given state and why? This question seldom receives attention in the rapidly expanding scholarship on nation branding. This article examines and interprets national branding processes in post-apartheid South Africa within the context of larger efforts by political elites to legitimate the new state and society and to address some of the complex legacies of the apartheid past. These efforts targeted domestic and international audiences in distinctive ways, intertwined foreign and nation-building policies, and sought to communicate key ideas about South Africa as state and nation and about the state’s role in the wider world order. The article considers how different groups of state-linked actors participated in exercises of legitimation and the discursive mechanisms that were relied on. Three such mechanisms are highlighted: (i) the construction of a distinct African-style modernity (here termed Afro-modernity); (ii) claims of South African exceptionalism articulated in boosterist branding campaigns; and (iii) expressed, variously through foreign policy signals, diplomatic posturing and hallmark events, the projection of a national role conception as leader on the African continent and of the Global South. These compound political processes had ambivalent and incomplete outcomes, however. This article considers why and what the implications are for the South African state and its society.     

The Geo-Social and Global Geographies of Power: Urban Aspirations of ‘Worlding’ African Students in China

This paper conceptualises the geosocial by examining the transnational connections of African student migrants and their educational experiences in Chinese cities. While there is now an established scholarship on Chinese migration to Africa, new research on the concurrent flow of African migration to China is emerging. Recent publications on African migrants in China tend to focus on the experiences of African traders, drawing out issues of illegality, ‘low-end’ globalisation and their impacts on Chinese trading cities. In comparison, this paper shifts the analytical lens to African educational migration in Chinese cities, foregrounding how global householding patterns reflect and leverage on the geopolitical and geo-economic dimensions of China-Africa relations. The paper shows that individual and family goals are negotiated through educational migration that, on the one hand, is concerned with accumulating human and cultural capital through a learning stint in Chinese cities, and on the other hand, is framed by perceptions of China-Africa relations. The paper argues that through educational migration, transnational social reproduction links Africa with China, but the social differentiation and everyday sociality that the African students experience in Chinese cities reinforce racial coding and development asymmetries. In so doing, the paper draws out how the geosocial reflects and constitutes the geopolitical and geo-economic dimensions of transnationalism.     

Nation Branding for Survival in North Korea: The Arirang Festival and Nuclear Weapons Tests

The article problematises a popular view in nation branding literature that equates nation branding with states’ attendant advertising campaigns. Instead, this article adopts a broader perspective that nation branding can also operate as a policy aimed at enhancing the sense of ontological security among states and as a practice to strengthen the position of the ruling regime by targeting particular audiences within a broader ‘strategic narrative’. From this perspective, this article aims to shed new light on non-liberal capitalist countries’ – specifically North Korea’s – attempts at nation branding policies in terms of various nation branding strategies. In so doing, Clifford Geertz’s anthropological concept of ‘theatre state’ is introduced as an important metaphor to broaden the existing understanding of nation branding by highlighting the unique characteristics of North Korea’s policies of nation branding and nation building. It is argued that great national spectacles such as the Arirang Festival and military demonstrations provide North Korea with a useful platform for participating in the identity competition among other nation states, as well as in the fierce recognition game against the rest of the Korean national community. Obviously, these strategic performances have contributed to communicating with the outside world, deliberately seeking more respect from others, but have simultaneously operated as nation building processes. Therefore, this work concludes that such staged events are sophisticatedly designed to enhance North Korea’s complex interest of nation branding, and, more importantly, argues that techniques and practices of nation branding are neither historically new nor confined to Western liberal capitalist regimes.     

Beyond Myths,Lies and Stereotypes: The Political Economy of a ‘New Scramble for Africa’

Commentators across the political spectrum have increasingly drawn attention to a ‘new scramble for Africa’. This ‘new scramble’ marks the latest chapter of imperialist engagement, with not only Western states and corporations but also those of ‘emerging economies’ seeking to consolidate their access to African resources and markets. The ‘new scramble for Africa’ involves therefore significant transformations related to shifts in global politico-economic power. However, as this article elaborates, much of the burgeoning literature on the ‘new scramble for Africa’ is premised upon problematic substantive, theoretical and ontological claims and debates. In particular, the article seeks to challenge two commonplace and related narratives. Firstly, the highly questionable representations of the scale and perceived threat of emerging powers' (particularly China's) involvement in Africa, in contrast to the silences, hypocrisy and paternalistic representation of the historical role of the West. Second, and relatedly, debate and analysis are framed predominantly within an ahistoric statist framework of analysis, particularly that of inter-state rivalry between China and other ‘emerging’ states vs. Western powers. Absent or neglected in such accounts are profound changes in the global political economy within which the ‘new scramble for Africa’ is to be more adequately located.     

Geopolitics after geopolitics: A French experience

What can be the goal for a state that is no more an empire in an environment where empire cannot be a goal anymore? In this paper, it is argued that there is a classic French geopolitical stance which has conserved a large part of its characteristics over centuries and which can be compared to the attitudes of other European states. It is precisely because this long‐lasting, consistent set of ideas and behaviours is coming apart that it is urgent to put it in the perspective of its own historical development. After some general remarks on the particular part played by France on the European geopolitical checkerboard, the fate of the ‘special relationship’ between France and Africa, as a dramatic case study of the widening gap between the traditional imperial stance and newly emerging realities, is considered. The third aspect of this reflection is an analysis of the original characteristics of the European Union in terms of international relations and the impact of this new context on the evolution of the French state.     

Confronting the Geopolitical Aesthetic: Fredric Jameson,The Perfumed Nightmare and the Perilous Place of Third Cinema

This essay explores the conceptual limitations within Fredric Jameson's notion of the geopolitical aesthetic through an analysis of Jameson's now classic reading of The Perfumed Nightmare; this film is central to his concept of the utopic character of film more generally and, moreover, to his argument on the embeddedness of Third World representations within a global, capitalist system. We suggest that, although Jameson acknowledges the underlying constructed and relational character of ontological categories such as film (despite their reification under capitalism), his theory of historical materialism demands that they also be understood as formed with regard to a socio-economic totality. And, because the recognition of a totality requires a master narrative within which all can be understood and framed within a logic of equivalence, Jameson must by default conceive of epistemology as fundamentally divided between a true and a false consciousness. Taking our own cue from recent developments in anti-essentialist thought, we conceive of such cultural forms as the temporarily fixed embodiment of broader-scale discourses that continually construct and deconstruct the world as we know it, including our understandings of the ‘real’ as well as the ‘economic’, the ‘political’ and the ‘cultural’. In our own re-imagining of The Perfumed Nightmare, we provide a partial response to this, noting how these realms are constituted from the temporary ‘fixing’ of a series of people- and place-based identities, such as those constituted under the rubric of ‘gender’. Accordingly, we re-work the term ‘cognitive mapping’ as the attempt to outline the web of significations within which objects are embedded as well as the concomitant lines of fracture and contradiction that allow for such objects to become meaningful in a host of other contexts.     

Popular Geopolitics,Audiences and Identities: Reading the ‘War on Terror’ in the Philippines

Audience research has traditionally been neglected within the subfield of popular geopolitics. However in recent years, geographers are increasingly focusing on the making of geopolitical meanings by audiences as they consume popular culture and related texts. Drawing on recent assemblage thinking in geopolitics, this paper argues that audiences form part of the animators of a network that links the human body with places, environments, objects and discourses related to geopolitics. By investigating Filipinos’ critical readings of and engagements with the ‘war on terror’ in Mindanao as represented through the national newspaper, the Philippines Daily Inquirer, the agency and power of audiences in the creative enactments of geopolitics and geography are illuminated. As such, understanding the complex interactions between popular media and its audiences can prove useful in casting insights into the everyday, geopolitical ‘playing out’ of issues of terrorism, violence and peace in the Philippines context and beyond.     

Gardens of Eden or Hearts of Darkness? The Genealogy of Discourses on Environmental Insecurity and Climate Wars in Africa

This article argues that the securitisation of Africa’s environment and climate in the early twenty-first century has less to do with multidisciplinary inquiry into the complexities of climate change, development and conflict, and more with historically established paradigms of thinking about Africa, its ecosystems and notions of disorder and violence. Securitisation is the result of a specific moment in the post–Cold War era with its particular geopolitical configuration and of deeply embedded modes of imagining the African continent, its peoples and their relationship with the environments they inhabit. The main objective of this article is to historicise and politicise the prevailing dystopian discourse about climate-induced insecurity. I show that the assumptions and chains of causality that constitute today’s climate wars narrative are remarkably similar in nature to the environmental narratives that underpinned imperialist and post-independence discourses on environment and development, legitimising highly authoritarian interventions against local populations by governments.     

Brand Turkey: Liminal Identity and its Limits

Since the 2000s, Turkish policymakers and private sector interests have combined representations of Turkey as both Western and Eastern with a branding approach to identity in foreign policy, trade and investment promotion, and cultural sector activities. This article analyses how the commodification of its liminal identity as a dual identity allowed Turkey to invoke different aspects of its identity in the West and the East in ways that catered to both audiences and enabled the pursuit of different political and economic objectives. However, the article also notes how this branding strategy was limited by the national identity debates and dominant geopolitical discourses that continued to situate the West and East as mutually exclusive and binary opposite identity markers. Overall, the case of Turkey underscores the complex relationship between branding, identity, and discourse, which has thus far received scant attention in the literature.     

National borders,the global economy and geopolitics: A view from Yemen

The wider geographic scales of the new interdependencies called ‘globalisation’ are not new to peripheral states such as Yemen. In the colonial and post‐colonial world sensitivity to international developments has always been important in the course of local events. What is new is the particular configuration of political and economic institutions at various levels including, critically, the national level. This paper argues that, on the one hand, the new geography of economic and political ‘globalisation’ has left Yemen with distinctly ‘old’ forms of economic integration into world markets, but that, on the other hand, regional geopolitics have opened certain opportunities for Yemen's political elite to refashion itself as a strategic geopolitical player so as to maintain international flows of military and economic aid. The end result is the continued national dominance of these same elite. ‘Globalisation’ in this sense is a national political project.     

South Africa's post-apartheid microcredit experiment: moving from state-enforced to market-enforced exploitation

The international donor community arrived in post-apartheid South Africa in the early 1990s to restructure the economy along neoliberal lines. One of the most important of the interventions it promoted was microcredit, which was widely seen as one of the principal self-help solutions to the exceptionally high levels of unemployment and poverty that prevailed in the Black South African community. In spite of an early ‘boom-to-bust’ episode in the early 2000s and worrying evidence it was actually further impoverishing far more Black South African's than it was actually helping escape from poverty and unemployment, the microcredit model did not lose its international support: if anything, this support was expanded as the international development community desperately sought to ensure the survival of the microcredit model and therefore also the centrality of self-help and individual entrepreneurship as the only way out of poverty for the poor. This article shows how and why the microcredit model was supported so strongly by the international development community and South African financial community in spite of its manifestly calamitous impact on Black South African community. Overall, I conclude, microcredit can be viewed as South Africa's own sub-prime-style disaster which, like the original US version, has mainly served to benefit a tiny financial elite working within and around the microcredit sector, whilst simultaneously destroying many of the most important pillars of the economy and society.     

Where is Serbia? Traditions of Spatial Identity and State Positioning in Serbian Geopolitical Culture

This article studies the geopolitical traditions of spatial imagining of Serbia amongst the country’s political elites since the break-up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. It examines some of the socially dominant discourses of spatial positioning of Serbia as a historical-political narrative. The study argues that one can identify five distinct geopolitical traditions that, in variably overlapping or mutually contradicting ways, address two questions: ‘Where is Serbia’ and ‘How is its perceived smallness felt and described’? A first tradition is that which attributes sacred, divine and martyr-like features to the country, its small earthly “Serbian lands” and people. A second tradition conveys spatially maximised and biopolitical visions of “Serbdom”, amounting to variable designs of a “Greater Serbia” anxious about its felt frontiers and smallness. The final three traditions are the mutually exclusive positioning of Serbia around an East-West axis as either Eastern or Western, or a geographically unique and exceptional bridge between the two, whereby each positioning recasts smallness as a crucial feature of geopolitical exceptionality. The article concludes with some general observations on the challenges of studying geopolitical cultures.     

Geopolitica: The ‘Geographical and Imperial Consciousness’ of Fascist Italy

Very few contributions have been published in English on the Italian geopolitical tradition of the interwar years. This is rather surprising, given the fact that, after Geopolitik, Italian geopolitics was one of the largest and most significant in Europe. This article aims to fill this void, by offering a detailed and critical investigation into this intellectual production. Although the article traces the origins of Italian geopolitics back to the 1920s, its main focus is on Geopolitica (1939–1942), the journal which, more than any others, embodied the attempts to give Italy its own geopolitics. Despite its ambitious proposal to become the ‘imperial-geographical consciousness’ of the Fascist regime, Geopolitica remained largely confined within the circle of academic geography and ultimately also failed to influence the development of Italian geographical tradition.     

Missing from the Map: Chinese Exceptionalism,Sovereignty Regimes and the Belt Road Initiative

ABSTRACT

Historical and conventional international relations (IR) frameworks describe the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) as representing a newly ambitious Chinese drive into global politics that positions China as moving away from its long-time reticence towards foreign entanglements. This raises a contradiction of China being at one and the same time both a defender of its own territorial sovereignty while also being engaged in various projects, particularly the BRI and the associated Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), that point in completely different directions. This paper seeks to build upon and move beyond conventional framings to understand how the BRI represents a conflict over the workings of state sovereignty that such frameworks have trouble addressing. We argue that the absence of an official Chinese government BRI map promotes a ‘useful fuzziness’ with regards to China being open to crafting a new as of yet undefined geopolitical identity. In light of the absence of such a map, this work considers key ideas relating to China’s geopolitical expansion via the BRI in terms of so-called sovereignty regimes – the idea that various practices of authority and control emanating originally from states take different geographical shapes. Conflicts arise when a state, such as China, finds itself caught between the operational imperatives of multiple regimes. By identifying the current sovereignty dynamics raised by the BRI in light of the relevant, yet distinctive historical experience of the Marshall Plan, this work can be used as a model for understanding how China’s current leadership is managing the debate of simultaneously protecting ‘strong borders’ yet also promoting a policy of ‘going out’.     

Catch-up strategies and the latecomer effect in industrial development

Since 2003, the West and Central African (WCA) cotton initiative in the World Trade Organization has stood as an ambitious case of Africa's desire to be integrated into the trading system and yet also receive reparations for past injuries. This article seeks to explore how and why the initiative debuted through close attention to the interdependence between power and language in diplomatic practice. It takes the concept of cognitive framing to explore the relationship between political legitimacy and mobilisation capacities. The genesis of cotton as ‘an issue’ is critically examined, focusing on how the WCA countries constructed a novel ‘competitive victim’ frame to define themselves and the problem. While this opening move was effective, it also featured tensions that were exploited by Northern actors who were threatened by the campaign. I argue that what followed was the introduction of a politically driven ‘counterframe’, which divided the problem into a ‘trade-related’ component and a ‘development-related’ component. It is important to understand why and how this distinction was constructed and monitored. By scrutinising the relationship between framing and institutional power, I suggest that the counterframe won over the original frame, leading to a re-positioning of the demanders and a re-calibration of their expectations.     

Feeding (On) Geopolitical Anxieties: Asian Appetites,News Media Framing and the 2007–2008 Food Crisis

This paper analyses the role of news media in (re)producing geopolitical narratives of food insecurity in relation to the 2007–2008 global food price spike. News content and textual analysis suggests that the media’s representation of the food price spike is partly framed by Western geopolitical anxieties of the ‘threatening rise of Asia’, and features ‘fast growing’ Asian appetites among the main culprits of the crisis. Seeking to explain the widespread circulation of such representation, this paper analyses media-source relationship within the context of market-driven journalism, and suggests that the changing role of news media has in turn contributed to a rapid and uncritical circulation of elite-based interpretation of, and neoliberal geopolitical approach to, food security. The paper points at the importance of critical enquiries into geopolitical representations of food insecurity and of opening media space for a ‘counter-geopolitics of food security’.     

Exchange market pressure,stock prices,and commodity prices in West Africa

As Africa continues its decade of rapid economic growth, the continent also faces the risk of becoming more susceptible to financial ‘contagion.’ Capital flows and trade linkages might cause one country’s currency market to influence those of its neighbors. Likewise, shocks to global commodity or asset markets might induce a crisis in one or more countries in the region. This study generates monthly measures of exchange market pressure (EMP) for four individual West African countries, as well as for the WAEMU franc zone, from 2002 to 2012. Vector Autoregressive (VAR) methods are then used to test for linkages among them, as well as to analyze the effects of various external price shocks. A number of spillovers are uncovered. More importantly, local connections dominate global ones in the case of stock- and commodity-price declines. Ghana, for example, is shown to be a ‘commodity currency’ when West African commodity prices are included in the VAR, but not when a global index is used.     

Resiliency or Change? The Contemporary Canada—US Border

The developed states of North America have not experienced transnational integration to the same degree as those of the European Union. Indeed, some scholars have argued that North American States and the border functions which define their territorial limits, are essentially unchanged in the face of globalisation, hardening rather than softening, and remaining unabashedly archaic and state-centred. This article suggests that although there has been considerable change in the border functions and geopolitical discourses which mediate transnationalism among the highly developed North American states – namely Canada and the United States – the nature and structure of transnational integration has remained more limited than that of the EU. It argues that the reasons for this more limited international integration agenda lie in the specific geopolitical discourses which sustain cross-border institutions and national identity before and after 11 September 2001 (‘9/11’). The Canadian state, for example, has demonstrated considerable resistance to greater levels of integration with the United States, at the same time that it has became increasingly open to cross-border trade under NAFTA. This resistance is based upon a national-identity discourse that relies upon distancing the Canadian state from its larger neighbours to the south. At the same time, however, the national security discourse which has emerged in the Canada and the United States following from 9/11, has failed to close borders to increasing levels of economic integration, and must accommodate the need for a degree of openness to the heightened levels of cross-border trade under NAFTA. As a result, there has been considerable reorganisation and reorientation of borders within North America. It is simply inaccurate to view the continent as a place where borders have remained unyielding to the broader forces of globalisation. If the role of borders in maintaining security while facilitating trade has resulted in an increased awareness of, and concern with the Canada-US border, the latter is not simply a continuation of ‘old-fashioned state-centred geopolitical concerns’ but is instead a newly-fashionedpost-9/11 response to the ramifications of globalised trade and terrorism.     

International Donors,NGOs, and the Geopolitics of Youth Citizenship in Contemporary Lebanon

In the aftermath of 9/11, Western states have increasingly used the promotion of democracy and civil society as a means of effecting geopolitical aims in the Middle East. Democracy promotion has involved extensive financial support of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) who work to instill (neo)liberal-democratic values and norms among populations that are seen to be lacking in these. This article, in examining the production of citizenship as a geopolitical practice, brings critical-geography scholarship into conversation with the critical literature on Western-funded civil society in ‘transitional’ societies. We focus on the case of Lebanon, which has been targeted by Western donors due to its strategic importance in deepening regional geopolitical rivalries. We highlight the pervasiveness of Western democracy discourses in the work of local NGOs, and especially the tendency to view sectarian politics as a source of instability that must be sublimated by new forms of societal consensus. But our account also highlights the scepticism that NGO directors feel toward their own efficacy and toward the influence of Western donors in Lebanese society. Their critical assessments of Western-funded civil society call into question the extent to which democracy promotion can secure Western geopolitical interests, much less enforce Western political supremacy.