Competition, delays, and coevolution in markets and politics

Being surprised and surprising ourselves: A geography of personal and social change

“…Recent scholarship in areas as diverse as non-representational theory (Anderson and Harrison, 2010; McCormack, 2017; Thrift, 2008; Vannini, 2015; see, however, Anderson, 2018), demonic geography (Simandan, 2017), psychoanalytical geographies (Kingsbury and Pile, 2016), and feminist geography (Bondi, 2014; Moss and Donovan, 2017; for a review, see Simandan, 2019b) has begun to incorporate the insight that humans are strangers to themselves (Wilson, 2002) and that, therefore, the explanation of human behavior requires at least as much attention to affect, the preconscious, and the preverbal, as to (allegedly) conscious free-will and (allegedly) rational decision-making. To state that we are strangers to ourselves is to state that we are at least in part opaque to ourselves.…”

“…Spatial surprises may include situations such as finding one’s glasses in the refrigerator, noticing a species of animals well outside its natural habitat, or discovering upon revisiting a city that one’s favorite park has been replaced with condominium developments. Given that place is a means for producing space (Thrift, 1999), a dynamic process of ‘emergent co-becoming’ (Wright et al, 2016: 455), and that our positionality prevents us from accurately keeping track of change in all the places entangled with our subjectivity (Larsen and Johnson, 2012; Pierce et al, 2011; Simandan, 2019b), spatial surprises are a guaranteed feature of life. They have been at least implicitly at the heart of ongoing debates in economic geography concerning industrial location, innovation, and regional economic development.…”

“…Geographers, in other words, have an important contribution to make in situating and politicizing surprise by: (a) problematizing the positivistic and universalist research paradigms of surprise in the cognitive sciences (e.g. Pykett, 2018; Simandan, 2019b), (b) exploring the relationship between surprise and social difference (how do differently raced, gendered, and classed subjects experience different kinds of surprises, and what can we learn about the spatialities of intersectionality if we take the trope of surprise as an analytical entry point; cf. Hopkins, 2017, 2018), and (c) attending to how the phenomenon of surprise is being used for political manipulation and economic gain.…”

Levels of analysis and problems of evidential support in the study of asymmetric conflict

“…I also argue that the manner in which the authors model attack and defense as games of strategy is misleading to the extent that it does not take into account the optimal level of analysis at which such modelling should take place. More specifically, asymmetric conflict is best understood at the finer-grained level of studying the sequences of strikes and counterstrikes that the rival actors have in store for one another (Simandan 2018a; 2019b; 2019c). In other words, it is less productive for the study of conflict to think in terms of attackers versus defenders than to think in terms of the specific chains of moves and countermoves that, taken together, constitute the higher-order “conflict.” De Dreu and Gross mention only in passing this micro-level of analysis (sect.…”

“…This problem should be remedied in their future work by more carefully articulating the study of conflict at finer-grained levels of analysis. As a constructive suggestion of how this task could be carried out, I end this commentary by briefly delineating four complementary criteria for classifying move/countermove pairs (for details, see Simandan 2018a; 2019b; 2019c). The first criterion is intentionality, and its application allows us to appreciate the fact that counterforce creation does not require conscious decision-making, and that, therefore, we can usefully distinguish intended countermoves from unintended counterforces.…”