Collaboratory in Critical Security Methods
The International Collaboratory on Critical Methods in Security Studies is an ESRC funded project (RES-810-21-0072)
Literature Review, Walters: Maps as anti-political economy
Walters contends there is continuity between maps and their cultural milieux. The purchase they hold is dependent upon social and political context. Maps assume things of their readers. Note of this continuity, however, seems to have eluded the scholars critical literature on migration. (And we could say critical security studies generally). As he observes, critical literature on migration as tended to ignore the analysis of maps and visual representation, instead privileging the speech act as its object of analysis (114-115).
- Asserting the cultural nature of maps is a useful move. It presents maps alongside other cultural productions, making them available for interrogation on non-technical terms.
For Walters, it is the “anti-political economy” of certain migrationmaps which is telling. Rather than taking up the question of maps on the terrain of territoriality, he builds on Andrew Barry’s discussion to call attention to the “various ways in which the economic is contained, neutralized, displaced and in some cases made invisible” (118). There are acts of translation going on in the mapping process. (Barry and Walters draw from Latour).
- Controversies can be made technical and governable; the economy can be written in or out of maps, depending on their selections and narrative. There is an economy of visual representation contained within maps.
What counts as critical for Walters is that which challenges the organization of knowledge itself (132). (Kant and Foucault are present here). A “counter-map” need not necessarily be “critical.” In the Hackitectura example, the objective is to call attention to the mapping itself as a form of representation. It does not simply present a second perspective, but rather demonstrates the somewhat arbitrary nature of representation within maps. (E.g. orientation, symbols, scales, perspective). They have the “ambition to map discordant and heterogeneous processes and spaces, to explore their combination, [which] immediately marks it out from official cartographies which, as we have seen, are distinguished by the fact they reproduce the lines which organize and partition social knowledge about migration” (130)
- The “critical” presents alternative perspective, to be sure, but it also challenges the status and organization of knowledge itself.
Anna Stavrianakis says
Couple of extra points I was also quite taken with:
The argument that anti-politics is sometimes necessary in order to manage disagreement and make collective life viable; the task is to differentiate between its forms (119). This is a useful intervention as it requires us to go beyond simply identifying when these processes are taking place, but also to distinguish between their forms and effects.
The productivity of mapping as a practice was interesting, as Walters argues that mapping shapes the meaning of key identities such as "immigration", "state", "economy", and "territory" (116). This requires us to ask "how" questions about the production of particular categories and identities, as well as ask "why" maps take particular forms.
Finally, Walters' discussion of the sociological role of mapping in affirming actors' status as experts (129) and establishing their right and fitness to govern others (128) was a useful complement to the epistemological and ontological arguments made about the practice of mapping per se.
27 May 2010, 19:58
Christian Olsson says
I agree with your points Anna and Christopher.
Concerning the counter-mapping of the issue of foreigners and “illegal migration” in Europe, I would like to take two examples published by the journal Cultures & Conflits in order to raise a few points.
These are the maps: the first is made by MIGREUROPE (a French NGO) showing the formal and informal detention camps for foreigners in Europe: http://conflits.revues.org/index5372.html; The second one was made by the journal Cultures & Conflits on the Schengen Visa. It highlights the different categories that the Visa establishes (in order to allow for a differentiated treatment of different “types” of foreigners subjected to the Schengen Visa) based on the regions from which the foreigners originate (red is the “highly dangerous greater Middle East”; black for the “dangerous South and East” and yellow for the “benign Western world”: http://conflits.revues.org/index919.html (download pdf).
These two maps pretty much illustrate the quotation of Black in Walters’ article (“a map is a representation. What is shown is real, but that does not imply any completeness or entail any absence of choice in selection and representation”, p.124) in that they are just as “true” as the official cartographies, but operate another choice in selection of the relevant subject matters. Actually both of these maps try to represent different aspects of the process of securitization of migration in Europe.
They also both illustrate the point you made Christopher: counter-mapping is not necessarily critical in the way it visualizes spatial relations (it does not necessarily question or deconstruct the dogmas of our traditional geopolitical understandings of the world), but it can be integrated into a critical sociology of security professional (see the two texts on the Challenge project “Mapping the European security professionals” in the library section) by visualizing what is usually hidden while using the same tools as the official cartographies.
In its performativity, the second map can thus be said to be critical in the Kantian sense (questioning established dogmas, in this case by showing that the categories through which they operate have not so much to do with the technicalities of bureaucratic routine as with geocultural clichés) while the first would arguably only be critical in the colloquial connotation of the word (a form of denounciation)
What is interesting about the Schengen Visa map is that it shows that the European Union also functions following geopolitical or geo-cultural assumptions on threats in relation to foreigners (compare to the maps drawn by Samuel Huntington in his book) although these assumptions are never officially transcribed into physical maps as here. In other words, what might be critical about this map is that it actually materializes the unspoken geopolitical assumptions behind migration and mobility control policies in Europe. The categories highlighted by this map clearly show the extent to which the issue of migration and mobility control is linked, by the security professionals, to the one of “islamist terrorism” (more than to the issue of “illegal migration”, or only to the extent that the latter is linked to “islamist terrorism” ) not unlike the Patriot acts in the US.
28 May 2010, 00:07