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In this paper, I analyze struggles over land in the capital city of Phnom Penh in the course of Cambodia's postsocialist transition. In 1989 Cambodia's socialist regime adopted a set of liberal reforms including comprehensive land reform. While land reform was a source of authority for the regime, the rapidity and unevenness of the land reform process created deep divisions within its state apparatus itself. Drawing on land disputes filed with the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia in 1992 and 1993, I document shifting conditions of ownership and authority in the city. I first discuss the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia land dispute files in general, before analyzing two, group disputes over formerly state lands in detail. Struggles over formerly state lands were particularly contentious, as who could claim, govern, and allocate these lands was an open question in the transitional period. I argue that these struggles were integral to the remaking of state rule. I use the term “postsocialist informality” to foreground this particular historical moment of state–society reconfiguration, while also underscoring the political constitution of the categories of public and private, owner and squatter, themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a critical perspective on the 'new' governance of science and the environment which is increasingly evident in practical attempts to build more constructive relations between science and democracy through hybrid 'analytic-deliberative' processes. The focus is on recent institutional and participatory experiments in the governance of nuclear waste, specifically the work of the UK Committee on Radioactive Waste Management and the trialling of a novel participatory, multicriteria, options appraisal tool called Deliberative Mapping undertaken by the authors as part of this process. Drawing on these attempts to build relations and make connections between citizens, specialists, stakeholders and policy makers, radioactive wastes, and possible courses of action for their long-term management, the methodological performance of analytic - deliberative practices and the contextual influences that frame and govern them is evaluated. The paper demonstrates powerful framing effects operated at the level of specific participatory practices, procedural politics surrounding the design of 'new' governance institutions, and institutional behaviour linked to wider politics of environmental risk and energy futures which narrowed down and marginalised particular discourses, knowledges, meanings, and forms of expression. Unless these often tacit power relations are acknowledged, accounted for, and exposed by all involved, but especially vested interests, analytic-deliberative institutions may well undermine public trust, credibility, and legitimacy rather than promote these democratic virtues as is widely claimed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst to be comfortable is often equated with conservatism and complacency, this paper considers the various and often complex configurations of comfort as a desirable corporeal sensibility. Subsequently, this paper considers what corporeal comfort as an affective sensibility is and can do to theorisations of the sedentary body. The sensibility of corporeal comfort induced through the relationality between bodies and proximate objects is explored to trace through some of the affectual circulations that flow through the sedentary body. With this in mind, forms of subjectivity engendered through the fragility of comfort are at once both active and performed, and folded through the inactive susceptibilities that are beyond activity. Drawing on such an immanent materialism enables us to take more seriously these susceptibilities of the sedentary body and the new moments and spatialities that emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nation-states chop up the modem political sphere into autonomous (sovereign) communities. A vast literature questions the adequacy of this territorial, container-based order in the face of increasingly global patterns of interaction. A remedy is sought in a cosmopolitanization of the political sphere, above all by establishing institutions and by strengthening forms of governance on the inter- national or supranational level. This paper develops an alternative and complementary conception of cosmopolitanization, which stresses the representation of the external world within political institu- tions. Representative cosmopolitanism is a conception which offers a nonterritorially garbled political representation on a global scale in spite of the territorial organization of political institutions and the political sphere. Instead of overcoming the problematic kind of political exclusion which structures the modern political sphere by establishing new institutional levels, the paper aims to expand the sensitivity and thematic reach of existing political collectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on qualitative research conducted in 1999 and 2001 with a group of single mothers in Matagalpa, Nicaragua, this paper examines the contradictory impacts of neoliberalism on work, based on the understanding that economic restructuring can generate both crisis and a space for changes in gender identities. By focusing on the broader picture of women's work and on the intersections between paid and unpaid work, it discusses what happens to these intersections in times of intense political and economic change. Despite the hardships caused by neoliberalism, it appears that work is a site in which gender ideologies can be challenged. The paper has four main sections. First, it explores the ways in which certain cultural processes are intensified under neoliberalism which affects the relationship between constructions of masculinity and femininity. Second, it assesses the impact of neoliberalism on domestic work and the implications of this for GAD (gender and development) understandings of the double burden and of how the balance of women's paid and unpaid work changes under neoliberalism. Third, it examines the ways in which hegemonic understandings of femininities and motherhood and revolutionary legacies can be resistant to the neoliberal present. Finally, it discusses how work under neoliberalism can be a site of female empowerment or self-esteem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I investigate how the changing role of the Chinese state has led to the reformatting of urban space. It is argued that a new rationality of governance, based on both localization and promotion of state authority, has been introduced during the era of economic reform. This dual process has reconstructed China's urban scale which was inherited from the prereform period. The implementation of city-led counties (shi guan xian) in 1982 has provided a good example for illustration. Under this new system, cities have not only been institutionalized as administrative centers, their territory, bureaucracy, and power have also been expanded and hence a new relationship between cities and counties has been forged. These arguments are illustrated by reference to Jiangsu, one of the first provinces to initiate city-led counties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unilateral militarism of the George W Bush administration has rekindled interest in imperialism within geography and elsewhere in the social sciences, leading some authors to refer to a new imperialism, or neo-imperialism. This paper critically interrogates the notion that the foreign policy of this administration represents a significant break from past US practices, with the use of concepts from Gramsci and Poulantzas to analyze the class and class-fractional bases of US foreign policy both during and after the Cold War. It is argued that there are certain important continuities in contemporary US imperialism and that there are also differences that owe to the present, post- Cold-War context. It is suggested that if this analysis of continuities is correct then the problems and dangers posed by the "new imperialism" may not be as readily resolvable within a capitalist framework as is suggested by various contemporary commentators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a commentary on the papers on the geographies of neoliberalism in Latin America in the February 2005 issue of the journal "Environment and Planning." Documentation of national economic policy and political economic trends; Contradictory situations that liberalism faces in the different countries in Latin America; Consideration of the aspects of the relationship between generations, of social reproduction and the workings of liberalism.