Environments seen in ‘carto’politics – Review of Strandsbjerg (2010)

Jeppe Strandsbjerg. Territory, Globalisation and International Relations. The Cartographic Reality of Space. 200 pp. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. $81 (hardcover).

 

At heart of the Environmental Humanities is the question of how humans relate to an environment. So what as an ‘environment’? We begin this story where environments were (re)framed according to national boundaries – in Strandsbjerg’s (2010) cartographic reality of space. 

Strandsbjerg’s title suggests a linkage between territories, or territoriality, and the process of globalisation in relation to international relations (IR). He serves a reminder to the literature on globalisation that the epistemic and scientific underpinnings of the territorial (carto)political world-order have not broken down through an increasingly globalised world but is essentially the same as when the nation-states developed. The question Strandsbjerg asks is how the political organisation of space developed historically so that we in modern times understand space in absolute terms (p. 2, 6). The question is relevant in addressing how we today “see” non-territorial socio-political forms. How could an environment be envisioned otherwise than in national terms? 

The study is theory-heavy, armed with several thinkers, Foucault chiefly, and a rich discussion about literature on IR and globalisation. Although it does for for several (re)readings, Strandsbjerg’s approach to the subject illustrates that interdisciplinary readership requires a thorough background on respective disciplines in order to make full use of them. So for the Environmental Humanities to potentially gain the hermeneutical extra, which we assume lies in-between the academic fields, we would need to address as how best to address the many theories and disciplines at play so as not to make an intellectually bland dish of the environmental studies.

Returning to Strandsbjerg again, the historical examples are primarily focusing on Denmark. The choice of case study, apart from the author’s accruement, is that modern IR has modelled its concept of territoriality on the Danish nation-state as it was successively reformed throughout the 15-16 century from a Scandinavian kingdom of personal unions into a Nation-state (p. 145) .

As Strandsbjerg illustrates how a cartographic reality was established, we eventually find ourselves in modern times where tools like Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and satellite imagery are taken for granted as mediators for seeing environments (p. 154).

What is problematic about seeing the world through a cartographic reality? As hinted at previously, it is a view that depicts a world of territories as the only mode of viewing it. Although the modern cartographic enterprise was not begun by nation-states, but by scholars and intellectual clubs, it was effectively adopted in developing them as tools for centralising and mobilising resources. But I would also argue that it becomes problematic to have a territorial ‘gaze’ of Earth when spatial relations springing from it also damage the life-conditions on which society for sustenance. 

These are the questions which Strandsbjerg leave To-Be-Continued at the end of Territory, Globalisation and International Relations. Having described how the discovery of a New Continent served to challenge old authorities on the universality of knowledge (p. 5), I wonder what role the “discovery” of ‘Earthrise’ could play for our modern concept of territoriality and the Earth (Poole, 2008)? It has been argued that the modern sense of ‘globality’, of perceiving the world as global and connected, is itself a continuation of the Western tradition of mapping all territories on Earth into a unified grid (Cosgrove, 2001). But also we see that the right to define what is the cartographic reality is shifting from its previous benefactors, from the nation-states to the companies, e.g. Google Earth. Is then a change in technology what conjures how society ‘see’ territories (p. 155, 156)? If the shift in cartographic reality occurred in the early modern European history, then when did the right to frame that reality change in modern times towards new actors, human and nonhuman? In short then, our question might be: How and when do practices of spatial knowledge production change? 

Note: The review is in relation to questions that keep me awake at night and relevant for my approach to Environmental Humanities. Consequently, it WILL omit other aspects central to the book and its argument. With that see, do visit this recent commentary on Strandsbjerg’s own blogpost regarding his research: http://www.e-ir.info/2013/10/02/cartography-and-territory-in-international-relations/

 

References

Cosgrove, Denis. Apollo’s Eye : A Cartographic Genealogy of the Earth in the Western Imagination. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Poole, Robert. Earthrise. How Man First Saw ‘the Earth’. Yale University Press, 2008. 

Strandsbjerg, Jeppe. Territory, Globalisation and International Relations. The Cartographic Reality of Space. Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

 

Personal Environings of Environmental Humanities

“Reading is for making writing enjoyable.”

This is my first post in the blog and a component to me working out a personal compass to a field I am just emerging into: Environmental Humanities. Why then begin with a fabricated (now real) quote on reading and writing? As I spend my days reading up on history, source material and exams for courses, I tend to think that the end-goal is to give back, to myself and to a growing community of scholars and informed public. For the time-being it all amounts to alot of reading, but in time, and through this blog, I imagine it will result in writing eventually.

So I announce this post to be the humble beginnings of me building an intellectual interior of words regarding environmental humanities, my own personal environing and understanding in a sense.