Questioning planetary illiberal geographies: territory, space and power

Abstract

In the news media, stories abound of nationalist outbursts, of authoritarian repression, of populist eruptions and of closures/enclosures of space, and of freedoms. Strikingly, these stories have and continue to be amplified and mobilized by social media. When publics around the world demand the freedom to express themselves and generate online opinion, it can be difficult to distinguish between genuine public sentiment and manufactured outrage. Governments around the world from Donald Trump's America to Rodrigo Duterte's Philippines are proving adept at 'rigging' outbursts, generating repressions and unleashing populist arrows (e.g., 'Send them home', 'Lock her up').Before predicting the demise of liberalism and the dawn of a new, more illiberal age, it is necessary to pause and reflect on the weight, meaning, and construction of these terms and concepts. It is salutary to recall that the term 'illiberal democracy' was first coined in 1997 by the Indian-American journalist Fareed Zakaria (Zakaria, 1997). Zakaria argued that all around the world there were democratically elected regimes routinely avoiding constitutional limits and restraints. His point was simple: democracy is flourishing but constitutional liberalism is not.Twenty years later, we might ask whether normative understandings of illiberalism be made or unmade? Is illiberalism appropriate as a frame for a comparative approach to territory, space and power, given the trouble of categories such as 'East', 'West', and the associated (mis)conceptions about moral geographies and politics? Where are illiberalism's origins, influences, endpoints, boundaries and limits? Certainly, things such as the postcolonial reordering and rescaling of nation-states and the advent of 'do-it-yourself' geopolitics via social media (which has upended hierarchies, rescaled borders and allowed for new types of political encounters) suggest that such a rethink is necessary.Second, before heralding the planetary nature of illiberalism, it is important to zoom in on the local and reconsider the role of situated context, and the embedded/embodied flows of power attached to place. To what degree, for example, are Chinese state-society relations and the oppression of the Uyghur people comparable (or not) with other states, with other oppressions? What lessons can, or cannot, be learned from such a comparison? And does such a comparison perpetuate an East-West moral hierarchy, a sort of illiberal Orientalism?Third, moving away from the mainstream news, from the spectacular and from the violent, we seek to look more closely at the ordinary, the mundane and the everyday operations, flows and embodied performances of illiberalism and illiberal powerin other words, a popular geopolitics (e.g., Agnew & Shin, 2019). Through mechanisms as seemingly ordinary and banal as community centres, public health infrastructure, urban planning strategies, WhatsApp conversations and the local geographies of sanctuary, the relational processes of illiberalism come into view. However,

From post‐political to authoritarian planning in England, a crisis of legitimacy

“…In section 5, we draw on the case of fracking to show how this changing emphasis is taking hold in the English planning system. Before that, we clarify what we mean by “authoritarian turn” at the level of government practices in the UK, while acknowledging that authoritarianism is also present at the level of “the ordinary, the mundane and the everyday operations, flows and embodied performances of illiberalism and illiberal power” (Luger, 2020, p. 1).…”

Planetary Gentrification and Urban Authoritarianism

“…The same applies to comparison of similar exercises in autocracies and democracies, given the illiberal planetary wave that Luger (2020) has spoken about. In the vein of Luger (2023), I'd like to see gentrification studies, going forwards, investigating authoritarianism and the spatialization of illiberal power in the context of different gentrifications around the world, as well as in relation to (and in comparison with) historical gentrifications.…”