Communication processes are at the centre of our preoccupations. This institutionalization includes both new hegemonic and dissident discourses and the emerging, established or eroding practices and institutions that they justify. The subprogramme investigates the institutionalization of new (geo)political imaginations. This include geographical patterns of power relations, the emergence of supranational arenas, transnational loyalties, and transnational and multi-scalar policy networks, the role of cities in global politics as well as the renewed attractiveness of the territorial state.
This programme aims at contributing to the theoretical debates about the political geographical impact of the unbundling of state territoriality and the changing role of territorial states and geopolitics. The main focus of the subgroup pertains to the way de-bordering and re-bordering processes affect state territoriality, sovereignty, national identities, ethno-territorial conflicts and governance arrangements, and conversely how territorial (national, supra-national and sub-national) institutions handle new opportunities and constraints to mobilize individuals and groups and shape new or changing identities and the creation of new identities.
As a consequence of these contradictory de-bordering and re-bordering trends, both political actors and observers like academics actively engage in the articulation of new geopolitical imaginations to performatively explain the world in which we live and provide guidance for political action. More recently renationalization discourses and rebordering processes have gathered momentum again. Since the end of the Cold War, “globalization” has been deployed as a potentially powerful narrative both to underline the inescapable character of certain economic, political and cultural transformations fostering debordering and the alleged waning of state sovereignty. Among other thing this geopolitical imagination produces a sharp divide between domestic and international politics. Such frames have shaped the understanding of what is politically realistic or possible, how politics is organized, how society is regulated, how people are mobilized for social change and how (potential) conflicts are negotiated. The territorial state and the modern state system have widely dominated the (geo)political imaginations of the past century. Three research themes form the core of the programme, each operating within distinct but increasingly overlapping fields of multidisciplinary study:
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The academic debates in social science and humanities on the current phase of globalization and its differentiated impacts.The development of geographical approaches to globalizations and the refinement of their spatio-social vocabulary (distance, place, territory, scale, network, region, etc.) and methodological perspectives.This shared epistemological point of departure requires a case study methodology that strives for empirically grounded and theoretically engaged work. This approach helps us to distinguish different ontological layers of concrete, place-based cases to foster relational analysis. To grasp these complex relationships, it takes a why-and-how-question approach that encourages a pluralistic use of theoretical lenses across sub-disciplines, including comparative political economy, economic sociology, and economics. Underlying the research on these highly topical and societally relevant issues is a shared conceptual vision that highlights the interaction between institutional contexts and the role of actors and agency. More specifically, the group looks at the intertwined processes of financialization and globalization the development and reproduction of cultural and creative industries the socio-spatial and ethnic division of labour among small businesses in cities the off-shoring of service industries and the emergence of online job marketplaces the position of workers in the emerging textile industry in SE Asia as well as the relationships between territory, identity and governance, notably within the context of the EU.
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