Klinger Co-Edits Special Issue of Territory, Politics, Governance
Julie Klinger, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, co-edited a recently published special issue of the journal Territory, Politics, Governance with Joshua Muldavin, Professor in the Department of Geography at Sarah Lawrence College.
The issue brings together the latest grounded, intensive, and long-term engaged research in areas undergoing dramatic changes in land use and livelihood security driven in part by China’s global integration. The collection features cases from China, Southeast Asia, the Balkans, and Brazil. Each of these cases examines the multi scalar dynamics among key actors and interest groups that define what China-led development means on the ground for the poorest and most vulnerable, while also examining how deals with China re-arrange existing institutions in partner states.
“In a time of heightened alarmism and speculation about China’s global integration, this collection marshals concrete evidence from diverse cases around the globe to provide a clearer picture of this complex contemporary phenomenon,” Klinger said.
The issue entitled “New Geographies of Development: Grounding China’s Global Integration,” features an introduction from Klinger and Muldavin. From the text of the introduction:
The introduction to this themed issue, ‘New Geographies of Development: Grounding China’s Global Integration’, contributes to ongoing reconceptualization of research approaches to China’s global integration and situates the contributions of the issue within the growing body of multiscalar and ethnographic research on the subject. Grounded studies (1) complexify the actors involved in China’s global integration to focus on those who work in a variety of (un)intentional ways to attract, implement, sustain and resist specific initiatives that constitute China’s overseas activities; (2) revise fixed notions of core and periphery, especially with respect to the origins, flows and destinations of capital, power and goods emanating from China’s metropolises; (3) and rescale the state, capitaland elite interests to identify the key scalar moments at which big policy ideas are transformed into new development geographies. This introduction and the papers in the issue focus specifically on those actions and actors whose work is key to extending the natural resource hinterlands of China, China’s firms and specific subnational interests in partner states to the Americas, Africa and Eurasia under the policy banners of the ‘Go Out strategy’, the ‘Great Western Development Plan’ and the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’.
You can read the entire introduction here and view the issue here.
Julie Michelle Klinger, PhD, specializes in development, environment, and security politics in Latin America and China in comparative and global perspective. Her recent book Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes (Cornell University Press in Fall 2017) received the 2017 Meridian Award from the American Association of Geographers for its “unusually important contribution to advancing the art and science of geography.”