Geographies of Knowledge and Power

The interest of geographers in relations between knowledge, power, and space has a long tradition but it was reinvigorated by critical engagements with Foucault and Gramsci. For Foucault, space is fundamental in any exercise of power, and knowledge and power are integrated with one another. New inventions of communication have influenced the ways in which those in power can generate, store, evaluate and transmit information; the distance over which rulers or headquarters of organizations can give orders and execute control; the spatial division of labor, the scope of surveillance, and the optimal locations for exercising power. Being at or near the center of a domain also has psychological significance because it denotes importance, reputation, competence, and trustworthiness. It increases the chances that experts and scholars will receive public attention and be able to influence key decision-makers. Centers can function as truth spots, and sites of knowledge generation, information control, and power execution.

This chapter explores the multiple linkages between knowledge, civil society, governance, and democracy. Broader questions about relations between knowledge and freedom are placed in the context of whether these linkages are codetermined by an enabling of the knowledgeability of modern actors. Emphasis is placed on the growing opportunities for reflexive cooperation in civil society organizations, for social movements, and for an increasing influence on democratic regimes by growing segments of society. The specific aim of this chapter is more modest. Access to knowledge and the command thereof are at the core of its inquiry. Both access to knowledge and its command are stratified. Three barriers to access to knowledge are examined and questions raised about whether expertise and civil society can be reconciled, whether reconciling civil society and knowledge can be conceived of as a private good, and, finally, whether the social sciences and humanities are a source of enabling knowledge.

This chapter explores the multiple linkages between knowledge, civil society, governance, and democracy. Broader questions about relations between knowledge and freedom are placed in the context of whether these linkages are codetermined by an enabling of the knowledgeability of modern actors. Emphasis is placed on the growing opportunities for reflexive cooperation in civil society organizations, for social movements, and for an increasing influence on democratic regimes by growing segments of society. The specific aim of this chapter is more modest. Access to knowledge and the command thereof are at the core of its inquiry. Both access to knowledge and its command are stratified. Three barriers to access to knowledge are examined and questions raised about whether expertise and civil society can be reconciled, whether reconciling civil society and knowledge can be conceived of as a private good, and, finally, whether the social sciences and humanities are a source of enabling knowledge.

The usual image of the Western Front during the First World War is of static warfare, but this was the product of a dynamic and eventually industrial cycle of aerial reconnaissance and map preparation through which each side had detailed and up-to-date knowledge of the dispositions of its enemy. War on such a scale was a paper war: it had to be planned from those aerial photographs and maps. To staff officers and military planners, therefore, the battle space was a carefully calibrated one in which advances and assaults were meticulously timed and choreographed – in effect, a sort of ‘clockwork war’, which was apprehended in a visual-optical register. But to the infantry who were most intimately involved in those offensives the battle space was a battlefield – what Santanu Das calls a ‘slimescape’ – whose stubborn materiality often confounded the orderly plans of the generals. In order to survive, those troops developed a radically different apprehension of the battle space which did not privilege sight. Their improvisational knowledges were intensely corporeal and constituted a ‘corpography’ whose constructions relied primarily on sound, smell and touch.

Cuneiform sources from two millennia show that in the Ancient Near East kings and their counselors did not rely exclusively on their own professional expertise when there were political decisions to be made. They held off, rather, on putting a plan into action until its feasibility had been examined and confirmed by an independent “expert advisory board.”

Yet the means by which such evaluations were made seem—at least from the perspective of our current worldview—wrongheaded and downright absurd, with the future prospects of political and military undertakings being regularly determined over the course of centuries from the color and shape of the liver of a sheep slaughtered for this very purpose.

Such an examination procedure, which developed into a form of “science,” baffles modern convention, above all because of its blatent lack of concern for the background and purpose of the decision in question. Nonetheless, Mesopotamians, as well as their neighbors, saw the mastery of such divinatory procedures as a decisive reason for the lasting cultural and geopolitical success of Babylonia and Assyria. Mesopotamia’s 3,000-year-long political and cultural domination of the entire Near East seems to prove the effectiveness of their form of political decision-making. In the present paper I examine why divination does not seem to have obstructed practical politics, even though the concept underlying the Mesopotamian divinatory evaluation procedure seems entirely unreasonable.

Struggles for control of the mantle of religious and often political authority in Muslim-majority societies are frequently phrased in opaque interpretations of the past and of what constitutes valued knowledge, blurring lines between tradition and modernity and concealing the vigor of the underlying debates. Yet tradition, like modernity, requires continued reform, reinterpretation, and reinvention. Efforts to sustain the past and adapt it to the present create new, often unexpected, and increasingly public forms of thought and practice in which religious authority becomes ever more fragmented. The relatively recent shift to mass education, especially mass higher education, and new communications technologies have reshaped these struggles in South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, the Balkans, Turkey, and North Africa. There is no singular public Islam, but rather a multiplicity of identities and practices based on competing readings of the past that encourage increasingly open debates over the public or common good and the blurring of formerly sharp distinctions between the religious and the secular.

This chapter explains how millennialism—a theory about a 1,000-year kingdom and its relation to the end of time—influenced early American colonists and provided the basis of current feelings about the United States as a dominant world power. The colonies outside New England as of 1740 were oriented to sober religious traditions that were generally consistent with the anti-millennial nature of European religion. In contrast, the Puritan colonists in New England held an apocalyptic orientation and belief that their colony would play a central role in the final drama of world history. The idea of Protestants battling against the forces of the Antichrist shaped the interpretation of the French and Indian War and the American Revolution. The chapter cites nationalistic poetry and political artifacts to document this millennial worldview, which spread from New England to the rest of the colonies. Despite the disappointments, frustrations, and betrayals of later history, this idea of being a geographical region called to advance freedom, democracy, and peace around the world remains a characteristic feature of American civil religion.

This paper focuses on two “classics” of environmental writing, George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature, published in 1864 and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published a century later. It raises a series of questions about the power and knowledge conveyed by words: Did these books advance unprecedented arguments? Where did their claims come from? Where did they go? How did they work? Were they framed in particularly novel and/or compelling ways? What facilitated their dissemination? How did they gain purchase? When and where were they challenged (if at all)? When and where were they most influential? How did these books gain the reputations they achieved? Considering these questions requires close attention to the tides of history, and the ways in which the words of Marsh and Carson worked in the world. More prosaically this examination draws attention to the economic and social conjunctures in which these books operated.

In his novel The Screwtape Letters (1942), C. S. Lewis wrote that “the greatest evil is … conceived and ordered … by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.” This chapter is about one of those men, the geographer Walter Christaller. He was employed by the Nazi SS and worked under Konrad Meyer in an office in Berlin’s Dahlem district as part of the Planning and Soil Department (Hauptabteilung Planung und Boden). Christaller’s task was to plan the newly Nazi-annexed territory of western Poland in conformance with his central place theory, which he set out in his doctoral thesis in the early 1930s at the University of Erlangen. For western Poland to be transformed into Christaller’s central place model, most of the region’s residents, primarily Jews and Slavs, were forced to leave; many of them were sent to their death. The now “empty space” of western Poland was “reterritorialized” as a German central place by importing Volksdeutsch immigrants. Although Christaller was not a “desk killer” in the same sense as Adolf Eichmann, he clearly played a crucial role in a project that resulted in the death of enormous numbers of innocent people.

Our chapter demonstrates how the discipline of geography was reorganized in a country belonging to the Soviet occupation zone after World War II. After the violent establishment of the Communist system, geography was found guilty of having served the interwar political regime. The old “reactionary” and “bourgeois” geography was demolished, and a new, Marxist-Leninist geography based on Soviet principles was established. The latter derived from economic determinism, and “physical” and “economic” geography were strictly separated. State research institutes, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the Central Planning Office became the most important “centers of calculation” where Soviet-type “big science” was established. Several “old” geographers were pensioned off or exiled from academia. Others were driven to the periphery or forced to compromise with the system. Important positions were given to politically loyal “newcomers.” Geography as a discipline was expected to contribute to the “construction of socialism,” so “bourgeois” subdisciplines without “practical utilization” were dismantled, and “reactionary” human geography was rejected. Instead, emphasis was placed on issues serving the needs of economic planning, such as the socialist transformation of settlement networks, the establishment of a spatial framework for economic planning, and the transformation of nature to promote agricultural production. Geography was, moreover, expected to participate in the propagation of these new goals. Thus, Sovietization thoroughly reshaped Hungarian geography and changed its social, political, and economic roles as a field of science.

The dominant ways in which intellectuals and political elites around the world have come to think about world politics are not the result of either an open search for the best perspective or theory or a reflection of an essentially local perspective. The most prestigious repertoires of thinking about world politics represent the historical emergence of theoretical genres intimately associated with specific times and places which circulate and adapt in association with the spheres of influence of schools and authors with the best reputations and which in turn reflect the current geopolitical order. After providing a brief summary of various ways of conceiving the geography of knowledge, I present four premises for what I am calling the geopolitics of knowledge. I then consider the specific case of how a particular theoretical perspective of peculiarly American provenance came to dominate much academic thinking about world politics outside the United States.

The international community of social scientists has become increasingly sensitive not only to the fact that language and context are crucially related in the construction of scientific accounts, but also to the forms of power (or geopolitics) involved in such relations. The role of language and the links between knowledge and power have also become significant issues in human geography, where many scholars have challenged so-called Anglophonic hegemony. This article will scrutinize how human geography, a context-bound social science, has become understood as international, what internationality means in this new constellation, and how power relations and hegemony are structuring (and are structured in) practices and discourses related to internationality. The paper shows how many institutions—national governments and ministries included—are struggling to transform the operation of the global scientific community according to one format, which increases the importance of the English language as an almost self-evident lingua franca.

Power refers to control, by a person or an institution, over the minds, thoughts, beliefs, and livelihoods of others. With the term “geography of power,” I am referring to the concentration of power in a few spaces that control a world of distant others. My research on global economic policy-making identifies three main kinds of power: ideological power exercised by experts, economic power exercised increasingly by financial institutions, and political power exercised by government and governance institutions. Three power positions have also been identified: hegemony, sub-hegemony, and counter-hegemony. The geometry of power complexes can be known, with some degree of exactitude, through institutional or discourse analysis in the tradition of Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. But events in the period from 2007 to 2010, marking a profound crisis in the structure of global capitalism, force a reconsideration of institutional and discourse analysis and a movement “back” toward structural analysis in the tradition of Karl Marx. That is, we need to consider the following questions: How do knowledgeable, skillful agents competitively produce economic systems that escape collective control, or even collective understanding? How does specialized expertise become generalized chaos? This chapter contrasts institutional with structural analyses of power and space in an explanation of financial crisis under capitalism.

Media control by which the duplication and distribution of knowledge are under attendance is as old as modern media. Efforts at control emerged rather quickly after the printing press was invented, first inaugurated by the Catholic Church but soon adopted by the state(s). The reasons were similar but the conditions varied from country to country. The decline of government control began in England at the end of the seventeenth century; other countries followed with more or less delay. At the end of the nineteenth century, pre-censorship had generally been abolished in the European countries; however, the twentieth century did not become an era of press freedom as expected. This resulted from totalitarian ideologies and two world wars. Additionally, the rise of new media (film, radio, TV) triggered a renewal of control measures. Recently the Internet has emerged as a new battlefield for conflicts between freedom and control. A review of media control at the end of the twentieth century shows a rather mixed pattern, especially for the world as a whole, as evidenced by annual surveys by non-governmental organizations like Reporters Without Boundaries or the International Press Institute.

Taking as its starting point intimate colonial geographies lived by First Nations peoples in northern British Columbia, Canada, this chapter argues that theories of resistance do not allow for adequate theorizing of the ways in which Indigenous subjects navigate powerful forces, especially educational ones, that are intent on assimilating and de-Indigenizing them. Schools, classrooms, and the curricula taught within them are conceptualized in this contribution as tense political sites where conflicting modes of knowledge clash and where, ultimately, Indigenous children grapple with (as opposed to simply resist) expressions of (neo)colonial power. This chapter examines historical and contemporary education systems designed with Indigenous peoples in mind and is informed by discussions among human geographers about the discipline’s ontological turn and the need to reinvigorate social justice considerations within research.

It is widely accepted that communication can move people to do things that they otherwise would rather not do. The article investigates why communication has that power and what the sources of that power are—namely ones beyond violence and authority. In alignment with the sociological, communication science and speech-act literature, the thesis is developed that the power of communication emerges when the communication partners have developed a relationship of respect. In such a relationship communication possesses the power to strengthen identity or to damage it. The power of communication therefore rests on a relationship of respect and the identity-making ability of communication.