Toward an Urban Geography of Diplomacy: Lessons from The Hague

Mamadouh, Virginie; Meijer, Anne; Sidaway, James D.; Wusten, H.H. van der

doi:10.1080/00330124.2014.987194

Cited by 16 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…There are a number of ways in which political geographers can study paradiplomacy as it raises multiple, inherently spatial questions. For instance, Mamadouh, Meijer, Sidaway, and Van der Wusten () focus on the urban dimensions of diplomacy in a spatial and historical analysis of a specific city, The Hague. This paper has suggested that geopolitics offers an alternative and productive avenue for geographical engagement with paradiplomacy.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paradiplomacy and political geography: The geopolitics of substate regional diplomacy

Jackson

2017

Geography Compass

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Political geographers have increasingly engaged with "alternative" diplomatic practices, actors, cultures, and sites which transcend traditional state-centric modalities. Despite this growing interest, the term paradiplomacy, referring to the international activities of substate regions, has not featured heavily in the geographical literature. This paper brings debates surrounding the nature and practices of paradiplomacy into conversation with recent political geography scholarship on diplomacy and, in particular, geopolitics. It begins by introducing the increasingly plural understandings of diplomacy that have challenged dominant state-centric discourse and foregrounded the inherent spatiality of diplomatic practices. This is followed by an examination of the dynamic evolution of the term "paradiplomacy." The paper goes on to suggest how theoretical and methodological insights from political geography could be productively interwoven with the study of paradiplomacy. The final section exemplifies this through an exploration of the geopolitics of substate diplomacy. It is argued that by building on methodological insights from critical readings of geopolitics, it is possible to offer a multi-scalar analysis of paradiplomacy which contributes to an ongoing project of political geography-to unsettle and challenge ingrained imaginaries which underpin our understandings of the region, the state, and the international political system. | INTRODUCTIONDefining diplomacy is becoming an increasingly difficult task as the widely held and deeply ingrained statist perspective is challenged by the growing significance of alternative actors in the international political system. While there has been plentiful discussion in the academic literature about the rise of "new" non-state diplomacies, including that of substate regions (paradiplomacy), the popular framing of diplomacy remains attached to the state in two key ways. First, diplomacy is done by states. The actors, processes, materials, and sites of diplomatic practice includingThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Paradiplomacy and political geography: The geopolitics of substate regional diplomacy

Jackson

2017

Geography Compass

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“…Studies of the spatial forms and production of cities which hosts a large community of international professionals are not entirely new. For example, Mamadouh et al (2015) explore the clustering of embassies and international diplomacy spaces in The Hague, noting the spatial security measures these sites require. Of particular interest here, the scholars argue that future scholarship should "consider the residential and consumption patterns of diplomatic personnel and their roles in the reproduction of transnational and elite city spaces and services, from international schools to high-end restaurants" (Mamadouh et al, 2015, p. 571).…”

Section: Figure 5: Examples Of Recent Rents For Three-bedroom Condosmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Studies of the spatial forms and production of cities which hosts a large community of international professionals are not entirely new. For example, Mamadouh et al. (2015) explore the clustering of embassies and international diplomacy spaces in The Hague, noting the spatial security measures these sites require.…”

Section: For Whom the City Boomsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Aid’s urban footprint and its implications for local inequality and governance

Carolini

2020

Environ Plan A

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This paper analyzes how local urban development, and governance therein, are being shaped by the explosion of actors within the donor and investment community in African countries like Mozambique. More specifically, drawing on qualitative fieldwork in Maputo, existing data on aid and private sector flows to Mozambique, and a spatial analysis of new real estate developments between 2009 and 2017, I forward two novel arguments about the negative externcalities fostered by the growing density of the community of international development professionals and their foreign private-sector counterparts in the Mozambican capital of Maputo. First, I show that the increasing density of international actors in the capital city and their living needs, as well as how those needs are treated by the public sector, are deepening a housing, infrastructure, and amenities divide between the rentier and international classes in the city and the majority of low-income residents. Second, I contend that the very readiness of non-tax revenue sources from international agents is enabling a continued reliance on external funding, rather than own-source revenues, for major capital investments. This balance in favor of external financing further diminishes the already weak tax bargaining potential of the local population in making demands for urban development projects that directly serve them. In conclusion, I argue that the international development organizations portending an interest in the enhancement of urban equities and fiscal responsibility across cities like Maputo especially need to rethink their operational presence to better address the perverse externalities of their physical and socio-economic imprints on the urban landscapes in which they operate.

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“…The events that happened around the South African Embassy on 31 March 1990 combined several different political trajectories that were articulated through (and in opposition to) the architecture of the building. To make sense of these dynamics, I draw on and extend geographical debates about the ways in which intersectional solidarity is articulated, alongside considerations of how the material architectures of diplomatic buildings come to matter, geopolitically, at multiple spatial scales (Fregonese, 2012; Mamadouh et al., 2015).…”

Section: Architectures Of Solidarity and Protestmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In recent years, geographers have paid increasing attention to the role of the ‘more-than-human’ in assembling diplomatic cultures and practices (Dittmer, 2017). This field has quickly developed from work which has mapped the location of embassies and the premises of para-diplomatic organisations in the urban landscape, as a means of understanding diplomacy as a spatial practice (Mamadouh et al., 2015), to considering how the rapidly expanding requirements for archiving diplomatic papers impacted first on the architectural design of the new British Foreign Office building in the mid-19th century, and then how its architecture reconfigured the ways in which diplomatic and geopolitical practices circulated through it (Dittmer, 2016). In attending to the role of architecture in constituting ‘diplomatic sites’ (Neumann, 2013) this work builds on a longer tradition of critical geographies of architecture which has moved beyond reading the symbolic meanings (and power) of buildings towards a deeper engagement with the ways in which buildings are lived (Lees, 2001), practised (Jacobs, 2006), and engender particular affects (Kraftl and Adey, 2008).…”

Section: Architectures Of Solidarity and Protestmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘Burn it down!’: Materialising intersectional solidarities in the architecture of the South African Embassy during the London Poll Tax Riot, March 1990

Brown

2019

Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space

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This paper offers a new way of conceptualising how intersectional solidarities are actualised. It recounts and theorises an outbreak of radical internationalism, when working class struggles in Britain and South Africa were unexpectedly linked. It examines how intersectional solidarity was materialised through a process of coming together against the architectural fabric of the South African Embassy and considers the interwoven temporalities that enabled this action to occur. On 31 March 1990, nearly a quarter of a million people demonstrated in London against the Poll Tax that was due to take effect in England and Wales the following day. On the day, the Metropolitan Police lost control of an already enraged crowd and provoked a large scale riot that engulfed the West End of London for several hours. In the midst of the riot, during a short retreat by the police, protesters took the opportunity to attack the South African Embassy in Trafalgar Square – many windows were broken and an attempt was made to set the building alight. Drawing on interviews with former anti-apartheid protesters who were present on that day (and who had concluded a four-year long Non-Stop Picket of the embassy a month earlier), this paper explores and analyses their memories of that unexpected moment when their previously symbolic call to ‘burn it down’ was (almost) materialised. In doing so, it contributes new ways of conceptualising the spatiality and temporality of intersectional solidarity.

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Toward an Urban Geography of Diplomacy: Lessons from The Hague

Cited by 16 publications

References 38 publications

Paradiplomacy and political geography: The geopolitics of substate regional diplomacy

Paradiplomacy and political geography: The geopolitics of substate regional diplomacy

Aid’s urban footprint and its implications for local inequality and governance

‘Burn it down!’: Materialising intersectional solidarities in the architecture of the South African Embassy during the London Poll Tax Riot, March 1990

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