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.     

Capitalism,Territory and “Marxist Geopolitics”

This response traces the importance of ideas and politics versus economic determinism in developing a critical approach to geopolitics particularly in questioning the necessary relationship between territory and capitalism. From this perspective, and contra to “Marxist geopolitics,” spatial-political form does not follow from economic function. To argue so leads to an intellectual and political dead end.     

War and Tourism: The Banal Geographies of Security in Colombia's “Retaking”

This paper explores the discourses and practices of state securitisation that Colombia underwent during the last decade. By focusing on the imaginative geographies of security resulting from the unexpected couplings of war and tourism in the country, it delves into the everyday and highly uneven spaces of (in)security forged by the Democratic Security regime. It shows how a feminist take on the geopolitics of war and peace offers a better understanding of the making and unmaking of banal spaces of security and their role in the production of hegemonic state formations in Colombia.     

Finding a Civilisational Idea: “West,” Eurasia,” and “Euro-East” in Russia's Foreign Policy

Civilisations are imagined, ratherm than real, and nations undergoing identity crises typically represent themselves through multiple civilisational visions. Scholars of geopolitics can hardly understand foreign policy without analysing those visions and social contexts, in which they rise and fall. This article selects for analysis three distinct civilisational ideas of Russia – “West,” “Eurasia” and “Euro-East” – associated with Boris Yeltsin, Yevgeni Primakov and Vladimir Putin, respectively. Russia's foreign policy is best understood as reflecting those civilisational ideas rather than merely material power conditions.     

Punitive Entanglements: The “War on Gangs” and the Making of a Transnational Penal Apparatus in the Americas

This paper analyses the export-import business of penal policies that accompanies the “war on transnational street gangs” between the United States and Central America. It argues that far from being a unidirectional export of punitive politics from the United States towards Central America, many of these punitive exports travel “back home”. This creates transnational punitive entanglements that contribute to the contingent convergence of punitive geopolitics and domestic politics in the guise of a transnational penal apparatus that integrates law enforcement agencies and military forces, securocratic epistemic communities and national political entrepreneurs into a functionally cohesive but decentred transnational security structure engaged in a multilayered punitive containment of transnational street gangs across the Americas.     

“Bad” Decisions,Poverty, and Economic Theory: The Individualist and Social Perspectives in Light of “The American Myth”

Social outcomes are analyzed either by placing responsibility for those outcomes on the individual or to locate the cause in a specific social factor – discrimination. Here, I argue that individual decision-making cannot be the cause of poverty, illustrative of one outcome, and that commentary specifying a particular social factor is insufficient to address the fundamental, underlying cause of poverty. Rather, one must examine the nature of the economic system that lies at the root of such issues. In the process of developing the argument, it is shown that the individualist explanation of poverty is linked to the neoclassical framework, and that this individualist explanation is a product of the (capitalist) economic system itself which then induces an ideology both privileging such an explanation and preventing the development of satisfactory theory that would inform proper policy. An example of this point is drawn from the 1960’s “war on poverty” program.

Of Celebrities and Landmarks: Space,State and the Making of “Cosmopolitan” Turkey

This paper analyses the (re)production of Turkey’s liminal-hybrid representations through a combination of sports and music celebrity interventions on a specific landmark. It shows that a country’s representations can be reinforced and reaffirmed with the help of celebrities performing their talent on landmarks such as the Bosphorus Bridge and (in some cases) placing another landmark – Ortaköy Mosque – in the backdrop. Combined with the role of celebrities, these two landmarks that have come to symbolise Turkey’s liminality and hybridity visually, in a very mundane manner, aim to add a cosmopolitan component, a banal one though, to the national identity. This further shows that national identity is not always made and shaped by the citizens of that country, but rather foreigners can actively contribute to certain elements of an identity. The paper also draws attention to the role of the states in the making of celebrity politics, refocusing the attention from politician celebrity interaction to state and celebrity interaction.     

Consumption,Identity, and the Sociocultural Constitution of “Preferences”: Reading Women's Magazines

This paper shows how the concept of identity may figure importantly into shifts in preferences and patterns of consumption. We explore the 1970s emergence of the “working woman” – a woman who worked outside the home and regarded work as central to her identity. Women's magazines were especially involved in working out the “working woman” image, stressing how products could be used to attain her readily-identifiable appearance and efficient, pleasant home life. As such, they played into a shift in social valuation of female identities – away from those centered on traditional feminine pursuits, towards those centered on intensified labor-force involvement, consumerism, and commodified private life.     

“When it rains,it pours”: Fiscal policy,credit constraints and business cycles in emerging and developed economies

Fiscal procyclicality, meaning co-movement between government expenditure and macroeconomic fundamentals, is an important feature of business cycle dynamics for emerging and poor economies. I estimate a panel SVAR to investigate the reasons for fiscal procyclicality. The analysis sheds light on the role of external financial constraints in shaping fiscal policy. My findings suggest that the response of emerging governments to output fluctuations is similar to that of developed governments. However, emerging governments curtail spending in response to increases in the sovereign borrowing rate, which forces their consumption expenditure to act more procyclically. Using counterfactual analysis, I show that the key forces behind fiscal procyclicality are the sensitivity of government spending to international borrowing costs and the procyclical nature of these costs for emerging economies.     

Pigou,Del Vecchio,and Sraffa: the 1955 International “Antonio Feltrinelli” Prize for the Economic and Social Sciences

In 1955, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei awarded the inaugural International “Feltrinelli” Prize for the Economic and Social Sciences to Arthur Cecil Pigou. This paper considers Gustavo Del Vecchio's active role on the selection committee in recommending Pigou for the Feltrinelli Prize and the related correspondence between Pigou, Piero Sraffa, and Del Vecchio. One of the most significant discovery reported in this paper is Sraffa's contention, expressed in an unpublished letter to Del Vecchio, that Pigou had “never been honoured in proportion to his merits.”     

Book Review: “Oligopoly,Auctions and Market Quality” by Krishnendu Ghosh Dastidar

Journal of Quantitative Economics -     

“Remembrance of things past”: Gordon Tullock,the man and the bioeconomist

My tribute paper on Gordon Tullock (1922–2014) provides some memorable stories of Tullock as a person and as a founder of bioeconomics. I include my speech, “Toast and roast: Gordon Tullock,” delivered on the occasion of Tullock’s 80th birthday; also the same “Toast and roast....,” written in the form of a poem, “Ode to Gordon Tullock.” I also discuss Tullock’s contributions to bioeconomics. In a concluding section, I recall a couple of my poignant memories of Gordon Tullock.     

Awash in a Sea of Confusion: Benefit Corporations,Social Enterprise,and the Fear of “Greenwashing”

In the last five years, the majority of U.S. states enacted benefit corporation legislation, creating a new legal form of business that embraces the “triple-bottom line” of people, planet, and profit. Benefit corporation status provides legal protections for directors and officers, who may now balance social and environmental impact with shareholder returns. It also creates rich opportunities for social entrepreneurs, gives investors more socially responsible options, and offers a helpful designation for consumers. I describe the history and purpose of benefit corporations, evaluate their pros and cons, and argue that safeguards against “greenwashing” make benefit corporations a valuable business form of social enterprise.     

Risk-taking channel,bank lending channel and the “paradox of credibility”: Evidence from Brazil

If from one hand credibility is important for the conduct of monetary policy, on the other hand, greater credibility may eventually stimulate the creation of bubbles in the credit market and asset prices through the risk-taking channel, and as a consequence, bring to reality the “paradox of credibility”. The “paradox of credibility” is the new dilemma posed to central banking in the effort to conciliate monetary policy and banking regulation under inflation targeting regimes. Thus, the present work aims to: (i) analyze the impact of central bank actions and the macroeconomic environment on the risk perception of banks, and; (ii) analyze the influence of this risk perception of banks on the credit spread, considering both the credit channel and the risk-taking channel. Based on an econometric analysis, the work provides evidence about: (i) the “paradox of credibility” and the risk-taking channel; (ii) the influence of monetary policies on the risk perception of banks and, as a consequence, on the credit spread; (iii) the procyclical nature of banks in relation to economic activity, and; (iv) the adherence of the countercyclical indicator (called credit gap) proposed in Basel III for the Brazilian case.     

Julian Simon,the problem of socio-ecological resilience and the “ultimate resource”: a reinterpretation

The Review of Austrian Economics - The article argues that the debate between “the limits to growth” movement and Julian Simon could be reconstructed and reinterpreted in the light of...