States of circulation: Logistics off the beaten path

Schouten, Peer; Stepputat, Finn; Bachmann, Jan

doi:10.1177/0263775819851940

Cited by 46 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 38 publications

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“…Commodity production is coordinated through GPNs: dispersed commercial relationships and layers of subcontracting and vertical disintegration, enabled by multilateral and bilateral political negotiations (Yeung & Coe, 2015). COVID‐19 has highlighted how much humans rely on taken‐for‐granted infrastructures that “make things circulate” (Schouten et al, 2019, p. 779), delivering raw materials, component parts, and specific finished goods to retailers and consumers. COVID‐19 has brought into clearer view the range of intermediary actors and sites, such as ports, that together shape logistical worlds in support of GPNs and other commodity and material mobilities (Birtchnell et al, 2015; Rossiter, 2014).…”

Section: Disruptions To Supply Chainsmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID‐19 and the shifting industrial landscape

Gibson

Carr

Lyons

et al. 2021

Geographical Research

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The COVID‐19 coronavirus pandemic has fuelled debate about domestic industry and manufacturing in light of shocks to global supply chains and shortages of medical and personal protective equipment (PPE). Nevertheless, debates have been poorly attuned to geography and history. Calls for reinvigorated domestic manufacturing conceal the degree to which industrial landscapes are already entwined in geometries of power. This is especially so at ports—increasingly privatised—that have become sites of policy focus and biosecurity panic. Crucial trading zones, ports are being refashioned as growth machines for commodity export, energy, and logistics, undergirding national manufacturing capacity via trade and material commodity flows. Yet ports have also always been vectors for disease transmission and are central places for COVID‐19 crises. Writing from Port Kembla, south of Sydney, Australia, we catalogue five themes warranting geographical analysis and global comparison in light of coronavirus: disruptions to supply chains (with implications for global production networks); domestic industrial capacity and the future of manufacturing; biosecuring industrial sites; precarious labour and work; and vernacular emergency response capacities within industrial communities. Amidst heightened geopolitical tensions, geographers reveal how industrial landscapes are contested. Logistical and biosecurity roles are enveloped by enduring infrastructural materialities, local histories, and regional legacies of skill and ingenuity.

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Section: Disruptions To Supply Chainsmentioning

confidence: 99%

COVID‐19 and the shifting industrial landscape

Gibson

Carr

Lyons

et al. 2021

Geographical Research

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“…Here, critical logistics scholars are arguing a more fundamental role for the state than the mobilisation of logistics as an economic development strategy for specific cities (see Section 2). Schouten et al (2019:786), for instance, argue that logistics and political order co‐produce one another, in the sense that ensuring circulation always requires intervention, and political orders are always reliant on logistics: “the meaningful projection of political power in whatever form—monopolies of force, administrative rule, governmentalities—is always also an affair of ‘action at a distance,’ a logistical problem, which needs to be recognized as essential to the constitution and contestation of political orders.” Several recent studies have explored these ideas. Stepputat and Hagmann (2019), for example, show how since the 1990s efforts to forge a breakaway Republic of Somaliland have been inseparable from attempts to facilitate and secure circulation within and via that territory, most notably through establishing a Berbera port and corridor.…”

Section: Calculation and Infrastructure Power And Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Stenmanns (2019), for example, explores the challenges faced by logistics company Bolloré to impose the operating procedures expected of an advanced port on the everyday realities of Freetown, Sierra Leone, while Schouten (2019) details how rebels in the Congo use the “nonconventional logistics” tactic of roadblocks to exert the power that comes from the ability to disrupt trade flows. Studying “logistics off the beaten path” in this way can also serve to productively expand what are understood to be logistical actors As Schouten et al (2019:782–3) describe, “smugglers, peddlers, independent truckers, women selling cassava tubers at local markets and elephant riders turn out to be just as skilled logistical entrepreneurs as the high‐paid experts of multinational transport companies and they have the same deeply engrained aspirations to overcome frictions, eliminate middlemen…and increase profits over distance.” Shell (2019), for instance, profiles the use of elephants in the mountainous borderlands of Myanmar as a form of “subversive logistics.” In a landscape that is largely impenetrable by standard modes of transport, elephants and their minders become important off‐road logistical actors capable of enabling both resistance against the distant state but also rescue and disaster recovery operations.…”

Section: Calculation and Infrastructure Power And Violencementioning

confidence: 99%

Logistical geographies

Coe

2020

Geography Compass

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Although logistics are fundamentally geographical and of critical importance to contemporary society, it is only relatively recently that human geographers and cognate social scientists have started to meaningfully engage with the topic. This paper explores this recent growth of interest, which encompasses the work of transport geographers, economic geographers, labour geographers, mobilities scholars and critical logistics scholars. It synthesises, reviews and evaluates this research around four themes: logistics, cities and regional development; logistics and global production networks; logistics labour; and infrastructure, power and violence. These themes are presented in the loose order in which they have emerged in the literature; while these topics have originated in particular subdisciplines, important conversations are now starting to emerge between different kinds of scholars both within and across these themes. These conversations have also increasingly connected geographers into vibrant interdisciplinary debates involving researchers from political science, sociology, anthropology, labour studies, and architecture and planning, among others.

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“…Political ecologists have recently emphasized attention to the materiality of resources (Bakker & Bridge, 2006; Richardson & Weszkalnys, 2014), physical geography (Lave, Biermann, & Lane, 2018), and infrastructure (Carse & Lewis, 2017). However, scholars have only begun to explore how transportation and logistics articulate with cultural, political, and ecological processes (Bear, 2015; Schouten, Stepputat, & Bachmann, 2019; Tsing, 2000, 2015; Zeiderman, 2020). Research on shipping, for example, might attend to the spatial margins of networked connectivity and the role of underwater depth in economic connection (Peters, 2020).…”

Section: An Expanded Analytical Framework For Dredging Research: Learmentioning

confidence: 99%

New horizons for dredging research: The ecology and politics of harbor deepening in the southeastern United States

Carse

Lewis

2020

WIREs Water

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Harbor deepening projects in the southeastern United States illuminate a global phenomenon: navigable rivers and coastal estuaries have been dredged to new depths as port authorities and governments compete to accommodate and benefit from new generations of massive oceangoing ships. This urbanized region has dozens of ports situated in estuaries and deltas where major rivers meet the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico. It is also home to the majority of U.S. inland federal waterways, significant cargo traffic, and remarkable cultural and ecological diversity. Moving enormous volumes of underwater sediment is as much a social, economic, and political phenomenon as an intervention in hydrological and geomorphological processes. Therefore, dredging demands an analytical framework that bridges disciplines and spatial scales. Putting dredging research into conversation with scholarship on global shipping, logistics, and port development, we call for an analytical framework that draws upon political ecology and geosocial theory. We use this framework to examine large harbor deepening projects near Savannah, Jacksonville, Mobile, and New Orleans. Each project has been rationalized in terms of accommodating the megaships transiting an expanded Panama Canal and, more generally, linking local and regional economic development to global supply chains. An expanded and comparative framework reveals the geographical scale and variegated politics that characterize navigation dredging today.

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States of circulation: Logistics off the beaten path

Cited by 46 publications

References 38 publications

COVID‐19 and the shifting industrial landscape

COVID‐19 and the shifting industrial landscape

Logistical geographies

New horizons for dredging research: The ecology and politics of harbor deepening in the southeastern United States

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