The return of remoteness: insecurity, isolation and connectivity in the new world disorder

Abstract

Remoteness has returned to world politics. Instead of the flat world’ once proclaimed by leading liberal voices, the world map today looks more rugged and uneven than it has in a long time. While some areas are smoothly connected to global capital and cultural flows, others are becoming more marginalised and ‘distant’, at least from the viewpoint of global centres of power. In this introduction, we build an analytical approach to remoteness as a social and political process rather than a primordial condition. We emphasise three key aspects of remoteness: its deep entanglement with forms of connectivity; its economic usefulness; and its amenability to ‘remote control’. In considering these aspects, we bring anthropology's long heritage of studying ‘marginal’ societies to bear on the political resurgence of remoteness in a new world disorder of proliferating global dangers, lucrative frontier economies and heritage‐making.

Suspicious Surfaces and Affective Mistrust in the South Caucasus

“…But it probably needed the recent interest in phenomena that are usually represented as exceptions to the norm and problems for good life in order for mistrust to be considered a worthy object of investigation per se. In this spirit, the current emphasis on the flip side of positively connoted concepts has not only opened up pathways for investigating phenomena such as ignorance (e.g., Mair et al 2012), remoteness (e.g., Saxer and Andersson 2019), and detachment (e.g., Candea et al 2015) as fully fledged phenomena (and not just as problematic opposites). It has also questioned the 'fetish of connectivity ' (Pedersen 2013), that is, the Durkheimian assumption that all that counts is that which relates (Strathern 2014).…”

Worlding Permaculture School Gardens: Translocal Connectivities and Minor Utopias in Timor Leste

“…. ] drawing on the affordances of infrastructure and landscape in a multi-faceted process of uncertain consequences” (Saxer & Andersson, 2019, p. 151). Ultimately, it asks whether the government can relate to the potentialities of permaculture as shaping the futures of Timor Leste’s children and landscapes, or, on the contrary, whether the curriculum will remain an educational trajectory marked as alternative to national curricula—a translocal minor utopia of a worlding site that “could have been?”…”

Borderland Infrastructures

“…At times, they even end up becoming obstacles rather than conduits for development and connectivity (Walker 1999;Pedersen and Bunkenborg 2012;Demenge 2013). In other words, roads and corridors do not always "demolish distance" -they rather create nodes of legibility and state presence, but in the process, they also increase the remoteness and illegibility of border areas outside their immediate scope (Saxer and Andersson 2019;Rippa 2019b).…”