Responsible Geographies and how they (dis)connect the world

Essai , 2011 , 6 Pages

Politique - Sujet: Globalisation, l'économie politique

This essay sets out to demonstrate how responsible thinking impacts on geography. It concludes with the argument that taking responsibility indeed shrinks even geographical distance. If responsibility is refused, however, people or events, even if they are in immediate social or geographical proximity, appear distant. The globalizing world, therefore, not necessarily is transforming into a "global village".

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Geographical and responsible thinking decisively Shape the make-up to the world_
• The increasing production of, and easy access to, information (valid or not); the travelling of large sums of capital around the world in no-time; decisions to act or the refusal to do so etc. leave an image of the world as a complex set of relations
• In an attempt to illuminate some aspects of these relations this essay explores connections between geographical and responsible thinking_ To be able to do this a definition of the key terms will be given in the first paragraph_ The second one is going to enrich the terms With examples of the Rwandan genocide and NATO intervention in Libya.
• The third section applies responsible and geographical thinking to the crimes agamst females in Ciudad Juärez, and how they reach from the local into the global
• The summarizing section reinforces points made and arrives at the argument that the two concepts help to explain Why the globalised world is not necessarily a connected one.
• This paragraph breaks down What is meant by thinking responsibly and thinking geographically_
• There are two broad forms of responsibility; connective and compassionate. The first form develops out of connections between cause and effect. Sociologist Young defined it more thoroughly as political responsibility Political responsibility arises out of economic status, power and interconnectedness. This essentially implies that any actor within a system has the right or duty to take responsibility_ Thus, in practice perpetrator and victim act on a level playing field and are obliged to instigate change_ Obviously, this approach does away With a 'victim paradigm', so cooperation instead of hostility is fostered. Blame is not part of the equation, that means that although political responsibility recognizes wrongs it favors implementing measures in the present to change the future rather than compensate for the past (Young, 2003, 42).
• Compassionate responsibility uses emotion as catalyst for taking action. In other words, people need to feel the same emotional trait, such as the pain of a loss, to take action (Barnett et al., 2007, p. 26).
• Responsbility is expressed in actions including compensation, recognition and/or change of lifestyle or intervention.
• However, for there to be an act of responsibility there first must be a demand to act Demands can be immediate or hover around across time and space_ Thus they are mediators to connect responsible and geographical thinking_
• Thinking geographically in this essay relates to location of things and events, and their persistence in space and time. Terms like absence/presence, proximity/distance and territory/flow help to fill the concept With substance.
• The latter ones need in-depth clarification. Territory is a clearly defined and regulated space, be it physically or socially_ More abstract, territories are organisms held together by interactions between and among units. Thus communities, states as well as earth can be seen as territory (Clark, 2008, p. 25). The interactions are created by flows_ Flows consist of people, capital, demands, information, climate etc. and rely on a medium of transport After these descriptions it is obvious that flows determne the physical and political make-up of territory.
• After having clarified concepts and terms, they are now being applied to the examples of the Rwandan genoclde and NATO intervention in Libya.
• The Rwandan genocide in 1994, when more than 800,000 people were slaughtered as the international community very late and reluctantly intervened. This refusal had multiple reasons:
• 1) the lack of a strong demand allowed those With the capacity to intervene (capable actors) to portray the killings as local problem so that there would not be justification to breach the sovereignty of a State
• 2) the US feared a similar disaster as it experienced in 1993 in Somalia
• 3) lt was not in the interest of capable actors to spend blood and treasure on a distant people belonging to the "non-integrating gap of geopolitical imagination" without the outlook for any return (Robinson, 2008, p. 349; Roberts et al. in Robinson, 2008, p. 361, table 85).
• 4) Media injecting an image of inferiority of developing countries into the global information flows, through predominantly Iow (less than 50% in 2004) and negative coverage (Rose, 2008, p. 220ff)
• These factors were the mam tools employed to build a distance between responsibility that could be taken globally and an event happening locally_ This suggests that knowledge is not synonymous With recognition.
• Point four deserves special attention as it was crucial in shifting common view_ BBC Reporter Little admits that the personal impression and ideological frame of the reporter are important in how they present any event (The Open University, 2006, Track 5, 02:30). This implies that there is an undemocratic element inherent in news repoNing, as it is up to non-elected individuals What is made public and how (Silverstone, 2008, p. 73). Centrifugal media like satellite and internet are able to circumvent such tendency because 24/7 circulation of information and pictures reaches a varied audience and achleves thus wide dispersal and impact If this impact triggers emotion the possibility of demands being formulated arises_ This is What happened in the case of Rwanda, when a critical mass of citizens in various countries replaced the refusal of their governments to take connective responsibility With thelr own compassionate responsibility
• Clearly, the intensification of flows did not lead to emotional proximity as long as responsibility was denied_ The other way round, when intensive information flows connected a geographically distant audience via emotion to an event, the recognition that something had to be done prevailed, as the audience was able to place demands to intervene on its governments. Taking responsibility created proximity and foreign intervention began (Keane in Robinson 2008, p. 346).
• The current intervention in Libya works the other way round Here, during the last 10 years, especially the governments of the UK and France created a social proximity to the Gaddafi regime, which they had to transform into a distance on grounds of human rights, in order to be able to attack the regime (via NATO) as result of the brutal response of Gaddafi's troops to non-violent protest (Rogers, 2011).
• The next section examines the interplay of responsibility and geographical thinking in relation to the recent political and physical make-up of Ciudad Juärez_
• Ciudad Juärez is located on the Mexican-US borden and has seen a stunning influx of foreign direct investment as result of the new international division of labor (NIDL) (The Open University 2006, DVD2 week 2, 00:02). NIDL means that corporations in industrialized countries outsource manufacturing and assembling thelr products to so-called third world countries' (Allen, 2008, p. 15). This way jobs lost in industrialized countries were recreated in non-industrialized ones at much Iower labor cost, so multi-national corporations could Stay competitive on the world market and maximize profits_ The use of the terms 'world market' and 'Multi-national Corporation (MNC)' implies that capital is able to ignore territorial boundaries, whereas flows of people are still subject to heavy regulation (The Open University; 2006, DVD2 week 1, 01:40). Mexico in immediate proximity to the highly industrialized USA welcomed these investments as they promised desperately needed jobs_ With the higher appreciation of the presence of corporate capital instead of labor capital by the Mexican government (The Open University, 2006, DVD2 week 1, 09:46) it positioned its spatial territory as valuable receiver of corporate financial flows_ Those financial flows materialized in the form of 'production branches of MNC's, or maquiladoras_ They triggered off massive incoming flows of migrants but also crime (The Open University, 2006, DVD2 week 2, Chapter 2.1 00:05). The rather hostile conditions imposed on the territory (because subject to regulation and intensely interconnected) of labor left its participants vulnerable to exploitation. Because the boundaries of the social territory could be easily crossed, especially women are subject to labor as well as sexual exploitation and violence (The Open University, 2006, DVD2 week 2 Chapter 21, 03:30, 10:00). As in Rwanda, the government did not respond to demands and refused the responsibility to investigate the crimes (The Open University, 2006, DVD2 week 2, Chapter 21. 04:30), but Civil society filled the void With a campaign to permanently make the crimes present throughout the city by placing images of the victims at every crime scene (The Open University, 2006, DVD2 week 2, Chapter 21 04:05). As the global media injected this kind of compassionate responsibility into its information streams, non-governmental organisations became aware of the problem and acknowledged their responsibility to lobby the local government for action (The Open University, 2006, DVD2 week 2, Chapter 22, 04:40). lt could be argued that the absence of responsibility in the proximate local territory was transponed via information flows across boundaries_ There they reached into another territory (organisation), which remade these flows thus creating a proximity to the event which eventually caused the Mexican govemment to take responsibility and prosecute the killings (The Open University, 2006, DVD2 week2, Chapter 22, 05:00)
• Exploring the links between different kinds of responsibility and geography in Rwanda, Libya and Ciudad Juärez showed how the globalising world can be one of proximities or of distances, very much depending to What extent responsibility is refused or taken. In all the cases emotion was key to trigger responsibility toward people, thus creating an interconnected world, where geographical distance is less important The same collapse of distance can be observed when governments take responsibility towards capital, as in the case of the creation of the maquiladora system. The refusal of responsibility on grounds of a defined interest, on the other hand leads to distance, as the reluctant behavior of governments in the examples of the intervention in Rwanda and prosecuting crime in Ciudad Juärez showed_
• lt can be concluded that the interplay between responsibility and geography, facilitated by (financial) interests and emotion, creates forces that determine how the world looks like_
• References
• Allen, J_, (2008), 'Claiming connections: a distant world of sweatshops?' in Barnett, C, Robinson, J, Rose, G. (eds_), Geographies of Globalisation: A Demanding World, London, Sage/Milton Keynes, The Open University
• Barnett, C_, Brook, C_, Morgan, R, Rose, G_, (2007), 'Thinking about Responsibility' in Learning Companion 4 United Kingdom/The Open University, Thanet Press Ltd.
• Clark, N. , (2008), 'Climate changes: Island life in a volatile world' in Clark, N., Massey, D, Sarre, P_, Material Geographies: A World in the Making London, Sage/Milton Keynes, The Open University
• Keane, (1995) in Robinson, J, (2008), 'Geopolitics of Intervention: presence and power in global politics' in Barnett C., Robinson, J_, Rose, G. (eds_), Geographies of Globalisation: A Demanding World, London, Sage/Milton Keynes, The Open University
• Robinson, J, (2008), 'Geopolitics of Intervention: presence and power in global politics' in Barnett, C., Robinson, J, Rose, G. (eds), Geographies of Globalisation: A Demanding World, London, Sage/Milton Keynes, The Open University
• Rogers, P_, (2011), 'Libya: the view from where you are' in OpenDemocracy free thinking for the world; http://wwvv_opendemocracv_net/paul-roqers/libya-view-from- where-vou-are accessed September 9, 2011
• Rose, (2008), 'Envisioning demands: photographs, families and strangers' in Bamett, C., Robinson, J_, Rose, G. (eds.), Geographies of Globalisation: A Demanding World, London, Sage/Milton Keynes, The Open University
• Silverstone, R., (2008), 'Media and communication in a globalised world' in Barnett, C, Robinson, J, Rose, G. (eds_), Geographies of Globalisation: A Demanding World, London, Sage/Milton Keynes, The Open University
• The Open University, (2006)a, DD205 Living in a Globalised World, 'DVD2 Block 4 Review and Conclusio", Milton Keynes, The Open University
• The Open University, (2006)b, DD205 Living in a Globalised World, 'CD 12, A Demanding World: learning from Rwanda', Milton Keynes, The Open University
• Young, l. M., (2003), 'From guilt to solidarity: sweatshops and political responsibility', in Barnett, C., Robinson, J., Rose, G. (eds.), Geograph/es of Global/sation: A Demandmg World, London, Sage/Milton Keynes, The Open University

Zielsetzung und Themenschwerpunkte

Der Essay zielt darauf ab, die Verbindungen zwischen geografischem und verantwortungsvollem Denken zu untersuchen und aufzuzeigen, wie diese die Gestaltung der Welt beeinflussen. Dabei werden konkrete Beispiele wie der Völkermord in Ruanda, die Intervention der NATO in Libyen und die Verbrechen gegen Frauen in Ciudad Juärez herangezogen.

• Die verschiedenen Formen von Verantwortung (verbindende und mitfühlende Verantwortung)
• Die Rolle von geografischem Denken im Kontext von räumlichen Beziehungen, Territorien und Flüssen
• Die Bedeutung von Medien und Informationsflüssen für die Wahrnehmung von Ereignissen und die Entstehung von Verantwortung
• Der Einfluss von globalen Kapitalflüssen und der internationalen Arbeitsteilung auf die räumliche Gestaltung und die Herausforderungen der Verantwortung
• Die Verbindung zwischen geografischer Distanz und emotionaler Nähe im Kontext von Verantwortung

Zusammenfassung der Kapitel

• Der Essay beginnt mit der Definition der Schlüsselbegriffe "verantwortungsvolles Denken" und "geografisches Denken". Es werden zwei Formen von Verantwortung vorgestellt: verbindende Verantwortung, die auf Ursache-Wirkungs-Beziehungen basiert, und mitfühlende Verantwortung, die auf emotionalen Reaktionen beruht.
• Im zweiten Kapitel werden die Begriffe anhand der Beispiele des Völkermords in Ruanda und der NATO-Intervention in Libyen veranschaulicht. Der Essay analysiert, wie die mangelnde Bereitschaft der internationalen Gemeinschaft, Verantwortung zu übernehmen, zu geografischer Distanz und mangelnder Empathie geführt hat.
• Das dritte Kapitel untersucht die Verbrechen gegen Frauen in Ciudad Juärez und zeigt auf, wie diese durch die Globalisierung und die räumliche Nähe zu den USA verstärkt wurden. Der Essay beleuchtet die Rolle von Medien und NGOs bei der Hervorhebung des Problems und der Mobilisierung von Verantwortung.

Schlüsselwörter

Die Schlüsselwörter und Schwerpunktthemen des Textes umfassen Verantwortung, geografisches Denken, Globalisierung, Medien, Informationsflüsse, räumliche Beziehungen, Territorien, Kapitalflüsse, internationale Arbeitsteilung, Völkermord, Intervention, Verbrechen, Ciudad Juärez, Ruanda, Libyen, und die Rolle von Emotionen bei der Wahrnehmung von Verantwortung.

• Université: The Open University
• Auteur: Christian Scheinpflug (Auteur)
• Année de publication: 2011
• Pages: 6
• N° de catalogue: V178696
• ISBN (ebook): 9783656008774
• Langue: allemand
• mots-clé: globalisation, globalization