Olivier Legrand

Agnew J. (2005), " Sovereign Regimes: Territoriality and State Authority in Contemporary World Politics", Annals of The Association of American Geographers, Vol. 95 (2), Blackwell, pp.437-461 I propose a concept of effective sovereignty to argue that states participate in sovereignty regimes that exhibit distinctive combinations of central state authority and political territoriality. Two basic conclusions, drawing from recent research in political geography and other fields, are that sovereignty is neither inherently territorial nor is it exclusively organized on state-by-state basis. This matters because so much political energy has been invested in organizing politics in general and democracy in particular in relation to states. Typically, writing about sovereignty regards sovereignty as providing norm that legitimizes central state authority. Unfortunately, little or no attention is given as to why this should always entail a territorial definition of political authority and to […]

NEO-LIBERALISM ALIVE BUT NOT-SO-WELL IN THE CITY OF ANGELS: TOWARDS A DEEPER UNDERSTANDING OF THE URBAN GROWTH MACHINE Progressive Speaker and Film Series on Urban Issues in Los Angeles Doheny Library, University of Southern California, March 2, 2006 Sponsored by the Planners Network For comments, please contact the author: Dick Platkin (dickplatkin@yahoo.com or 213-308-6354) Abstract: As the second largest city in the United States, Los Angeles is extraordinarily important to the local “urban growth machine” and to the national “war machine.” But, Los Angeles’s strategic role in these two overlapping machines is tempered by its precarious political situation. In 1992 Los Angeles witnessed this country’s largest urban insurrection since 1863, and all of the conditions which lead to this multi-racial upheaval still exist. To rule this boiling pot Los Angeles’s non-partisan local government has pursued a relentless policy of neo-liberalism since the late 1980s. City Hall’s broad, […]

Taylor, P. J. (1999), Place, space and Macy's, Progress in Human Geography, Vol23 N1, pp.7-27 Abstract: Place and space are treated as the fundamental concepts for answering where and what? Their relationship is defined as a tension with place tending to enabling [habilitant] and space dis-enabling in progressive political practice. The political geography of this position is explored through identifying nation-state and home-household as exemplary examples of place-space tensions. The addition of nation to state and home to household is interpreted as necessarily resulting from the social turmoil [desarroi] that is modernity. While nation turns state space into place, state remain major space producers of the modern age. The way in which home turns household space into place is derived from the identification of three modernities within this new place-space tension was created. For both nation-state and house-household their treatment as place-space tension highlight their […]