Rock, water, air and fire: Foregrounding the elements in the Gibraltar-Spain dispute

Abstract

Through the case study of the contested British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar, this paper contributes to discussions on 'territorial volumes' by exploring the role of the 'elemental' in the protracted sovereignty dispute between Spain and Gibraltar. Drawing on scholarship by Elden, Adey, McCormack and others in political and cultural geography, the paper highlights the value of foregrounding the elements of rock, water, air and fire (in the form of the sun) in attempts to understand the tensions between Gibraltar and Spain whilst also demonstrating the significant intersections between the elemental and the human body. Whilst avoiding the snares of environmental determinism, the paper makes the case for an elemental ontology that functions through and with the proclivities and molecular specificities of the elements in order to better understand the construct of the territorial volume, the relationship between elemental and bodily volumes, and the site specific geopolitical realities, fractures and possibilities that are laid bare as the elements are unearthed.

Unlock the Volume: Towards a Politics of Capacity

“…How, he asks, does the geophysical nature of territory shape its politics? (see also Adey ; Gordillo ; Squire ; Steinberg and Peters ). How, he questions, do bodily relations with terrains of water, mud, gravel, ice, snow, alter political engagements?…”

“…The example of operational capacity illustrates how power works differently through volume (even where policy is “flat”) compared with the “articulations” of power (Sharp et al. :3) described by Elden (), Graham () and others (Bridge ; Gordillo ; Squire ; Steinberg and Peters ). Elden and others have demonstrated how power is not expressed across horizontal, planar surfaces (see Elden :49) but rather how power is projected through volumes of space.…”

“…Although capacity has a long history of usage in population studies (Sayre ), it has been absent from a turn towards “volume” as a key analytic idea and tool for re‐imagining and making sense of historical and contemporary socio‐cultural and geopolitical phenomena. As Elden (), Graham () and others (Bridge ; Gordillo ; Squire ; Steinberg and Peters ) have shown, power is not expressed, or directed, across two‐dimensional, areal, planes of space. Power is distributed (and resisted) through height, depth and angles; in other words, through volume .…”

“Do you dive?”: Methodological considerations for engaging with “volume”

“…Bodies, after all, not only exist in‐volumes but function as‐volumes in their own right (Adey, , p. 52). They act, inhabit, shape, and are immersed in the three‐dimensional whilst also having their own three‐dimensional geographies and volumes that interact intimately and minutely with surrounding space (see Protevi, ; McCormack, ; Squire ). Bridge (, p. 55) hints at some of these complexities in his discussion on tunnels—their volume allows bodies to proliferate unseen and “to under‐mine” structures of power but “at the same time the possibilities of this position cannot be separated from the fear of being unable to return to the surface, of permanent exile from the social realm, of becoming lost from the world” (emphasis added).…”

“…Adey (, p. 66) for example, argues that an elemental notion of air may offer a means to explore geopolitics in relation to its constitutive materials, giving space to “the seemingly unspaced,” offering a “thicker materiality” of volumes and materials that “coalesce into certain conditions or possibilities” and structures of feeling (p. 71). As McCormack (, p. 87) suggests, we, as voluminous elemental entities are “completely immersed” in a “kind of envelope of all envelopes that we might call ‘world’.” It is therefore worth thinking through, suggests McCormack (, p. 87) the ways in which “one body, human or non‐human, mediates or translates the affects of another, or in other words how wind becomes shivering, sun becomes warmth, gas becomes death” (see also Squire, ).…”