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This paper aims to investigate some of the diverse perceptions of local populations in Sweden regarding wind energy, focusing on the Ockelbo area. Through a critical discourse analytical perspective, the analysis explores the community's attitudes toward their role in wind energy development and analyzes the presence of discursive elements. The study uses mostly interviews and shows that the local community generally supports wind energy. In contrast to many other areas, the Ockelbo area does not seem to have the individual gap of the Nimby attitude, whereby individuals have a positive attitude toward wind energy in general and a negative attitude toward wind energy in their nearby area. Instead, my informants are generally positive toward wind energy both in general and in Ockelbo. Furthermore, I have related my findings to the theory of environmentality, in which the responsibility for the environment is placed on the population rather than the state through knowledge production about the climate. I argue that elements of environmentality are present in the Ockelbo area through a climate IDF (discursive-ideological formation). This climate IDF frames fossil-free energy as a necessary measure against climate change, that the local population should feel responsible for accepting. This perceived responsibility can be attributed to government rationalities of the state. However, my material shows that the local community does not completely accept responsibility for allowing wind energy. Instead, most of my informants seem to discuss how different aspects of wind energy, such as economic compensation for it, conditions their acceptance for wind energy. Therefore, I do not think that the informants – and perhaps the Ockelbo community in general – are fully internalizing the state’s prioritization of wind energy in areas such as that of Ockelbo.

Efter en utdragen process kantad av kontroverser trädde Sverige in i NATO i mars 2024. Inträdet skedde i ljuset av Ukrainakriget, som lett till att många räds över att även Sveriges säkerhet skulle kunna vara reellt hotad. Många studier och opinionsundersökningar visar hur svenskarnas syn på ett svenskt medlemskap i NATO blivit mer och mer positiv till följd av Rysslands invasion. I denna uppsats undersöks hur människors känslor som oro och rädsla påverkat deras syn på NATO-medlemskapet. Till hjälp har flera olika geografiska teoretiska begrepp använts för att undersöka ämnet ur ett politiskt geografiskt perspektiv så som geography of fear, med fokus på känslouttryck. Även hur känslor kopplar tills ens personliga övertygelse och syn på NATO undersöks. Studiens tillvägagångssätt har varit 6 semistrukturerade intervjuer, där respondenterna varit unga Uppsalabor som gett sin syn på frågorna som ställts om deras syn på NATO samt känslor av oro och rädsla för säkerhetsläget, kopplat till NATO. 

Temporära åtgärder är ett alltmer begynnande fenomen inom samhällsplanering. I den här studien undersöker jag betydelsen av temporära åtgärder som kommunal planeringsstrategi för gestaltning av offentliga rum. Studiens syfte studeras genom att undersöka vad temporära åtgärder medför till ett planeringsideal som genomsyras av permanent planering i det offentliga rummet, hur tid och platsidentitet uppfattas samt hur samhällsplanerare beaktar medborgares åsikter vid planeringen av temporära åtgärder. Med utgångspunkt i teorier som rätten till staden, nyliberalism och platsens själ och essens, undersöker jag temporära åtgärders påverkan på gestaltningen av offentliga rum. Metoden utgörs av semistrukturerade intervjuer med samhällsplanerare inom både offentlig och privat sektor. Studien har identifierat att samhällsplanerare har som ambition att nyttja metoden för att revitalisera offentliga rum genom god gestaltning, som planeringsstrategi riskerar dock temporära åtgärder att följa ett nyliberalt planeringsideal som prioriterar attraktivitet över mänskliga behov. Resultatet tyder på att metoden möjliggör för att långa planeringsprocesser kan frångås för att på ett snabbare och mer flexibelt sätt kunna möta förändrade behov. Temporära åtgärder har således en stor betydelse inom samhällsplaneringen och utgör ett komplement till den permanenta och långsiktiga planeringen.

Uppsatsen utgör en fallstudie av tätortsutvecklingen i Uppsala kommun mellan år 1960 och 2020. Uppsatsens syfte har varit att analysera och förklara mönster och utvecklingslinjer i tätortsutvecklingen utifrån planeringsstrategier och för tidpunkten rådande samhällsideal. Detta har uppnåtts genom en kombination av metoder i form av deskriptiv analys av folkmängddata på tätortsnivå samt en dokumentanalys av fyra av Uppsala kommuns tidigare general- och översiktsplaner.

Resultatet visar att tätortsutvecklingen i Uppsala kommun mellan 1960 och 2020 har genomgått en stor förändring. Perioden från 1960 och som senast mitten till av 1990-talet utgör en första tillväxtperiod som inträffari majoriteten av tätorterna. Efter den första tillväxtperioden avtar befolkningstillväxten som får en stabil till något fluktuerande utvecklingskurva. Denna utveckling kvarstår i flera av tätorterna fram till 2020. På 2000-talet inträffaren ny tillväxtperiod vilket i större utsträckning inkluderar tätorter som inte genomgick den första tillväxtperioden. 2015 och 2020 tillkommer det helt nya tätorter vilket delvis kan förklaras av brist på lämplig tomtmark i befintliga tätorter. Planeringsstrategin för tätortsutvecklingen har förändrats med tiden. Från utbyggnad av befintliga stadsdelar i främst sydlig riktning, till utbyggnad i pärlbandsmönster längs med kommunikationsleder i nord-sydligriktning. På 2010-talet bygger planeringsstrategin på stråkutveckling längs med kommunikationslederna i samtliga av kommunens riktningar. Kommunikationslederna har spelat en avgörande roll för tätortsutvecklingen tillsammans med Uppsala kommuns planeringsstrategier och Uppsalas läge nära Stockholm.

This chapter takes as its starting point a 2012 cover of The Economist with the headline ‘Cry, the beloved country: South Africa’s sad decline’. This cover conjures up a powerful racialized imaginary which connects contemporary emerging markets finance to histories of colonialism and empire. Indeed, by depicting a mob of angry Black men armed with pikes, the cover suggests that the ‘sad decline’ in question (a deep socio-political and financial crisis, credit rating downgrades and large-scale financial capital flight) is due to threatening, uncontrollable and violent masses of Black people. I bring this cover into conversation with a number of quotes from interviews that I conducted with state and private actors in South Africa. I show that what those actors call ‘Afro-pessimism’ – a reference to the remarkable timorousness of international investors in South Africa – is a manifestation of the processes of ‘othering’ and racialization through which South Africa and other sub-Saharan African countries have been discursively constructed as investment destinations. I use the cover and the interview quotes to discuss how relations of race and coloniality are reproduced through the production of financial knowledges and patterns of financial capital flows, with material consequences for the people living in the spaces construed as African emerging markets.

How does the circulation of capital in the form of money and finance mobilize different constructions of “Blackness” across historical-geographical contexts, and how does this produce uneven development? This contribution offers theoretical and methodological provocations to think about this question, drawing on two cases of raced finance: race-based bank lending in the United States, and international investment to sub-Saharan countries. I argue that the impersonal character of social domination under capitalism, expressed in and by the movement of abstract categories (such as the commodity, value, money, the state) requires that we carefully mobilize the notion of abstraction in theorizing the co-production of racialized difference and uneven development. I develop this conceptual argument by way of a sympathetic yet critical engagement with recent scholarship on racial capitalism, and by bringing the critique of political economy into conversation with the Black radical tradition. The key question is not the extent to which cases of raced finance exhibit a paradigmatic “anti-Blackness.” Rather, it is about how the abstractive powers of race and the social forms of capital refract each other in violent configurations, and contribute to giving the capitalist production of space a raced imprint. The co-production of racialized and spatial difference thus enhances processes of capitalist discipline and extraction mediated by money, while the totalizing operations of money reproduce racialized power relations and uneven development. I then turn to the work of Bhandar and Toscano to reflect methodologically on how to mobilize various levels and modalities of abstraction in concrete research.

In this short commentary, I propose to read the book as a student of “state capitalism” and “international financial subordination”. The former refers to a set of scholarly debates concerning the changing role of the state in contemporary capitalism. It asks: what are the (geo)political economic determinants and implications of the current aggregate expansion of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital across the world economy? The latter designates a research agenda dedicated to scrutinizing the sources, manifestations, and implications of developing countries’ per- sistent subordinate positionality in the geographical organization of financial and monetary relations on a planetary scale (Alami et al. 2022). Respatialising Finance is remarkable in its ability to develop a sustained and generative conversation between these two interdisciplinary fields of inquiry. 

Global capitalism is currently experiencing a turbulent and polymorphous (geo)political reordering, encompassing multiple transformations in the landscapes of state intervention, and a drastic reconfiguration of the state's role as promoter, supervisor and owner of capital across the world economy. Can the concept of state capitalism aid us in grasping these transformations conceptually? My answer is yes, with the proviso that state capitalism is neither conceptualised as a national (or regional) variety of capitalism, nor as a new regime of accumulation, but as a flexible means of problematising this historic arc in the trajectories of state intervention. Based on this approach, I offer in this essay ten theses on the new state capitalism, its roots in the dynamics of capital accumulation, its relations to broader material conflicts and its potential futures.

This article opens a conversation between uneven and combined development (U&CD) and state capitalism studies. It reflects on the potential of U&CD to answer the following questions: why has there been an aggregate expansion of the state’s role as promoter, supervisor and owner of capital across the world capitalist economy since the turn of the millennium, and why has this taken an uneven and combined form? I argue that U&CD as an evolving research programme holds great potential in creatively expanding the study of state capitalism and its multi-scalar geographies. It is particularly well positioned to help us elucidate the multilinear and interactive character of present-day state capitalism. U&CD’s heuristics of ‘societal multiplicity’, ‘combination’ and ‘hybridisation’ can help us trace the combinatorial dynamics which result in the cumulative expansion of state prerogatives and their cascading impacts across policy realms and geographic space. Yet the causal mechanisms identified by U&CD (the ‘whip of external necessity’, ‘the privilege of historic backwardness’ and ‘the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous’) are unable to grasp contemporary state capitalist transformations in their historical and geographical fullness, notably due to a tendency to misread spatial unevenness as temporal dislocation. Theorising state capitalism requires that we examine the role of multiple and interacting capitalist states in politically mediating historically determinate transformations in the capitalist labour process, and their ramifications in terms of the temporal and geographical dynamics of value production and circulation. Thus, looking at U&CD from the perspective of the new state capitalism reveals both its analytical strengths and limitations for GPE.

Scholars within the fields of political ecology, environmental political theory, and international political economy tend to evaluate the prospects of state-led environmental transitions in general terms – enquiring as to the capitalist state’s inherent properties and their environmental implications. Less attention has been paid to how the state’s green capacities are conditioned by contemporary evolutions in the form and pace of capital accumulation. Capitalism’s directional pattern of historical development poses unique challenges for green state projects. Its drive to raise labour productivity metabolises nature on a growing scale, while generating conditions of overproduction and rendering a progressively larger portion of the population superfluous to the production process. Thus, the question is not simply whether the state can rise to the challenge of climate change, but rather how states are scrambling to govern the intersecting crises of climate catastrophe, economic stagnation, and surplus humanity. This ‘wicked trinity’ compounds the tensions at the heart of the capitalist state, resulting in an increasing inability to perform its role while sustaining its liberal form. This governance trilemma is illustrated by the case of the solar photovoltaic boom, where the spectacular increase in the productivity and scale of solar panel manufacturing have generated oversupply and falling profitability. States have reacted by indefinitely providing subsidies, financing automation technologies that exacerbate labour superfluity, and relocating solar panel manufacturing to places with authoritarian labour regimes. The case of photovoltaics is a microcosm of the general predicament faced by states as they struggle to govern capitalism’s secular developmental tendencies.

This article takes up recent calls to further problematize race in international political economy by focusing on money at the frontier of global finance. We draw upon the Black radical tradition’s theoretical formulations of racial capitalism, which we bring into dialogue with conceptualizations of money and finance as developed within the critique of political economy. Money is the most supreme and abstract incarnation of wealth and class power, yet it is also suffused with racial and colonial logics of differentiation. To explore this tension, we offer a relational-comparison of two sites of frontier finance, namely cross-border investment and digital financial inclusion in developing countries. We trace the mechanisms through which race affects the operations of money and finance across these two sites. We argue that racialized difference is mobilized and reproduced at three key moments in the construction of investibility at the financial frontier: (1) the re/making of a development ‘problem’; (2) the construction of racialized ideal-typical financial subjects; and (3) processes of risk valuation and the legitimation of surveillance, discipline, and extraction. This allows us to characterize the color of money at the financial frontier as a particularly potent and violent combination of the abstractive powers of race and money.

The theme issue ‘Making Space for the New State Capitalism’ brings together insights from critical economic geography and heterodox political economy through a series of papers published in three installments, each accompanied by an introductory essay written by the guest editors. In this, the second of these introductory commentaries, we explore the consequences of embracing relationality, spatiotemporality and uneven development, together with the second group of papers. Introducing a final group of papers, the third installment will address the challenges and opportunities of thinking conjuncturally.

Sydväst om Falu centrum är Vällansjöarna belägna. Sjöarna utsätter tätorten för översvämningsrisk på grund av utdikningar och korrigeringar i vattendrag uppströms sjöarna som genomfördes då Falu Koppargruva var aktiv. Idag utgör dessa avledningar av vatten ett problem för centrala Falun med risk för översvämning vid höga vattenflöden. Syftet med denna studie är att presentera en alternativ lösning för att minska den totala översvämningsrisken i Falu centrum med fokus på Vällansjöarna. De lösningar som diskuteras i denna studie kopplas till möjligheter att tillfälligt dämma upp vatten och undersökning av lämpliga platser med våtmarker som översvämningshantering. Genom att applicera en GIS-baserad metod har kartor framställts över utvalda områden som varit särskilt intressanta för att uppnå syftet. Resultaten visar att de utvalda områdena rymmer 3 gånger så mycket vatten relativt vad som tillrinner och avvattnar Vällansjöarna under ett dygn vid ett högsta beräknat flöde med 50 års återkomsttid. Därmed har områdena även god potential att ta vara på vattnen vid ett normalflöde. Slutsatsen är att samtliga områden i analysen är lämpade för tillfällig uppdämning av vatten vid höga flöden samt att våtmarker är en potentiell lösning för att minska översvämningsrisken i Falun.