Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis article contributes a feminist analysis of temporal closure to lively debates within critical urban theory. I argue that in both urban politics and urban theory, claims to a singular and totalizing historical arc flatten the heterotemporalities integral to urban life and ultimately contribute to the evacuation of a diversity of lived experience from the center of each. This argument is grounded in the empirics of contentious land politics in and around Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Through my analysis I demonstrate that the erasure of women's histories through temporal closure and the fixation on their bodies through patrimonial claim making are two sides of an urban politics that seeks to foreclose, name and claim. In this article, written in critical dialogue with planetary urban theory, I advance from this situated analysis to advocate for a crowded field of urban theory, animated by embodied analyses of time built from the heterotemporal and polyvalent lived reality of diverse urban contexts. Crowded urban theory, I argue, makes space for theory building and theory repurposing without scripting the story in advance.

ABSTRACTThis article examines Cambodia's immediate, post‐conflict period of sovereign remaking through the lens of refugee containment, circulation and repatriation. The territorial, nation state dimensions of sovereignty are well known. Yet in Cambodia, where sovereign remaking was yoked to a United Nations intervention, a Westphalian basis for sovereign authority is incomplete. Through an analysis of radio broadcasts and bureaucratic papers of the border Khmer Rouge faction, the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia and the State of Cambodia apparatus, this article argues that forced refugee repatriation (refoulement) links biological circulation to geopolitical violence. Where territorial sovereignty separates inside from outside in thick lines on political maps, biopolitical sovereignty inscribes difference on bodies and ecologies, producing inside and outside as categories of racialized difference.

US hegemony has been the most significant aspect of international relations since the fall of the Soviet Union. The past decade has seen the majority of the world shift under the cultural, economic and military influence of the US. This staggering and as yet unchecked power is in large part gained not through coercion but through persuasion. This ability to convince other actors in the world to act in a way that is beneficial to US interests is consistent with traditional Gramscian notions of hegemony. The content of the global media, as one of the primary disseminators of the hegemon's message inside civil society, should provide insight into the overall debate occurring within it. Thus an examination of the content of the global media leading up to the recent US invasion of Iraq could provide some insight into the relative strength of the global hegemon. The results of this study clearly suggest that the US's "power to define" is in decline and that the hegemon is in the midst of a crisis of authority that could be a sign of its irreversible decay.