Read The Dictionary of Human Geography Online

Authors: Michael Watts

The Dictionary of Human Geography (113 page)

BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
2.62Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
law of the sea
On 10 December 1982, the third United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS III) was opened for signature in Montego Bay, Jamaica, marking the culmination of over 14 years of work. More than 150 countries participated in draft ing the treaty (representing all regions of the world, legal and political systems, and degrees of socio economic development, and includ ing coastal, archipelagic, island and land locked states, as well as states ?geographically disadvantageous with regard to the ocean space?; see Friedheim, 1993). The Law of the Sea entered into force on 16 November 1994. As of 16 March 2005, the number of parties to UNCLOS III, including the European Community, stood at 149 130 coastal and (NEW PARAGRAPH) eighteen landlocked states. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The treaty aims at ensuring peace and security in the world?s oceans; promoting equit able and efficient utilization of their resources; and fostering protection and conservation of the marine environment. Equally significant is its role in clarifying and balancing the rights and duties of coastal states regarding adjacent mari time areas. Several ?mini packages? of delicately balanced compromises emerged from the lengthy negotiations. For example, the conven tion allows coastal states certain rights in the ?exclusive economic zone? (Articles 55 75) up to 200 nautical miles for the purpose of economic advantage, notably rights over fishing and exploitation of non living resources, as well as the concomitant limited jurisdiction in order to realize those rights. At the same time, how ever, neighbouring landlocked and geographic ally disadvantaged states must be allowed access to those resources of the zones that the coastal state does not exploit. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The LOS reserves the seas and ocean for peaceful and co operative purposes, but regional conflicts, illegal activities (piracy, maritime terrorism and drug smuggling), com petitive and unsustainable exploitation ofmar ine resources, and environmental degradation are undermining human security at an alarming pace. Despite the obvious importance of polar maritime areas, there is a lack of general inter national law rules or conventions dealing with polar law of the sea problems (Chaturvedi, 2000). The LOS raises difficult questions in the following areas: ice covered waters, polar baseline, maritime zones and the deep seabed, high sea freedoms and navigation, and marine pollution and environmental protection. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The international community continues its efforts to strengthen the international legal framework to prevent and suppress acts of terrorism (including acts at sea), safety of navi gation, maritime security and the protection of marine environment. The 1995 United Nations Fish Stocks Agreement, considered the most important multilateral legally binding instrument for the conservation and manage ment of high seas fisheries since the conclu sion of UNCLOS III, calls upon states to establish new regional fisheries management organizations where none exist in a particular region or sub region. Its objectives are to en sure the long term conservation and sustain able use of straddling and highly migratory fish stocks and to protect marine biodiversity. sch (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Rothwell (1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
learning regions
Spatial clusters of linked industries whose continued growth is a func tion of permanent innovation, through inter firm co operation and competition. aggLom eration economies were first associated with industrial districts by the economist Alfred Marshall (1890) and the role of innovation in spatially proximate linked networks of firms is usually associated with the work of Piore and Sabel (1984), who stress that the importance of both formal and informal Linkages within a cluster mean that the whole is more than the sum of its parts because of both the local ?industrial atmosphere? and the ?mutual know ledge and trust? resident there. Scott (2006) uses the alternative term creative field to describe the social relations within such a clus ter, defining it as ?all those instances of human effort and organization whose spatial and loca tional attributes, at whatever scale they may occur, promote development and growth inducing change? (p. 54). Recognition of the importance of such fields to the development of clusters such as Silicon Valley in California has stimulated many public policy initiatives aimed at creating and fostering learning regions as with science parks. rj (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Longworth (2004). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Lebensraum Literally translated as ?living space?, the term was used by Friedrich Ratzel in his representation of the state as an organism (NEW PARAGRAPH) to identify a ?geographical area within which living organisms develop? (see anthropogeo graphy). The term was developed by the Geopolitik school and partially adopted by the Nazis to justify the extension of the borders of the German state eastwards for the benefit of Germans and at the expense of the Slavs, who were represented as inferior and ?unworthy? of the territory (Smith, W.D., 1986; Clarke, Doel and McDonough, 1996). Territorial expansion was represented as a ?natural? consequence of the survival of the fittest (cf. darwiNism). cf (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading Smith, W.D. (1986b) (NEW PARAGRAPH)
leisure
Either freedom from doing some things, or freedom to do other things both definitions connote an existential state that involves pleasure and enjoyment, alongside choice. In many definitions and surveys, it is construed as activities that are not biologically necessary, that are not constrained by demands of work or other social actors, but that are chosen for personal pursuits. Much analysis has looked either at the changing ways in which ?leisure? intersects with other activities or at the changing forms of leisure activities themselves. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The first approach thus looks at how leisure fits into the mix of activities that make up life. The most influential founding work in this re gard is Thorsten Veblen?s Theory of the leisure class (first published in 1899). In it, Veblen sees leisure as a positional good that shows relative status and power within a system of consump tion. For Veblen, ability to consume leisure was a signal ofwealth and status. This was set within the context of long struggles in the later nine teenth and much of the twentieth century between laBour and capital over reductions in the working week and paid holiday time. Con siderable argument has emerged over whether the deregulated economies beginning in the late twentieth century, with demands for 24/7 ser vices, have reversed that trend (e.g. Schor, 1991) or whether people feel more stressed, and leisure is more structured, but may have increased. All these studies focus on the amount ofleisure time. However, difficulties arise about definitions when one considers forms ofleisure that involve ?serious leisure?, such as volunteering or educa tional hobbies (Stebbins, 1992), or sociaL re production, such as cooking or eating, which may be for pleasure as well as necessity. These latter highlight gender issues in definitions, and that men in developed countries enjoy far more choice than do women with what to do with time that is free from paid work. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The second approach focuses upon the nat ure of leisure activities. This approach points to the significance of leisure both economically and in shaping personal identities. Classic criticaL theory argued that nothing was as abhorrent to capital as ?free time? and that leisure was its commodification into a product to be bought and sold. Originally, criticism focused on the fordist mass production of homogeneous leisure products. Adorno and Horkheimer, in the Dialectic of the Enlighten ment, argued that (NEW PARAGRAPH) amusement under late capitalism is the pro longation of work . . . mechanization has such a power over man?s leisure and happi ness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after images of the work process itself. (1979, p. 137) (NEW PARAGRAPH) Later work has argued that in a post fordist or postmodern world these patterns fragment and their meaning changes. Thus many analysts point to the emergence of social groups defined not by work identities but by shared leisure activities, such as dif ferent kinds of music or skateboarding, as subcultures or neotribes (Maffesoli, 1995). Others point to the emergence of a service led ?experience economy?, where we move from selling tangible products to consuming the memory of an event or experience (Pine and Gilmore, 1998). mc (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gershuny (2000); Koshar (2002); Maffesoli (1996). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
liberalism
The view that individual freedom should be the basis of human life. Liberals believe that human well being is maximized when individuals are free to pursue their own interests provided that doing so causes no harm to others. According to classical lib eralism, the state should be as small as pos sible and only as strong as is necessary to maintain the conditions that will safeguard individual liberty. Liberal models of citizen ship thus emphasize the formal equaLity of all citizens, civil rights, the rule of law and the protection of individuals from the arbitrary exercise of state power. Much debate within liberalism has been concerned with how to deal with conflicts of interest between individ uals. Liberal models of democracy emphasize the expression of individual preferences through voting. In economics, liberalism favours private ownership and production and market mechanisms of resource alloca tion, based on the non coerced interactions of individual producers and consumers. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Liberalism has been highly influential. All the world?s major industrialized countries are, formally at least, liberal democracies with market economies. In practice, however, their political institutions and economic systems rarely come close to liberal models, and in many places even basic civil rights are under threat in the name of the ?war on terror?. The governments of some other countries, most notably China, have explicitly eschewed liberal democracy, although market mechanisms have been widely adopted in the economic arena. (NEW PARAGRAPH) Despite its apparent global hegemony, lib eralism has been subject to many critiques and challenges (see, e.g., anarchism; communi tarianism; environmentaLism; fascism; (NEW PARAGRAPH) feminism; marxism; post coLoniaLism; sociaLism). According to some contemporary defenders ofliberalism, religious fundamental ism (see reLigion) poses the principal political threat to liberalism in the early twenty first century. For others, there are inherent limits to liberalism and it is time to chart the con tours of post liberalism (Gray, 1996) or to push the democratizing impulse in liberalism in more radical and pluralist directions (see radicaL democracy). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Geographers have contributed to debates about liberalism in numerous areas. Much research has focused on neo LiberALism: the widespread revival of liberal economics since the 1970s and its application to public policy by national governments and international organizations (Harvey, 2005). Work on geog raphies of the body has questioned the concept of the sovereign and autonomous individual. Geographers have also engaged extensively with debates about rights and citizenship, focus ing on the differential socio spatial distribution of rights and obligations. The fundamental lib eral distinction between the private and pubLic spheres has been destabilized by geographical research into the fluidity and porosity of the /files/02/38/02/f023802/public/private boundary. The universalizing im peratives of liberalism have been challenged by geographers charting the geopolitics of humani tarian and military intervention (Smith, 2006b). Studies of the geographies of governmeNTALitY have revealed how liberal governance involves what Nikolas Rose (1999c) calls ?powers offree dom?. In this view, freedom is a mechanism of governance, rather than its antithesis. jpa (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Gray (1995); Kelly (2005). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
life expectancy
The additional number of years of life that individuals who reach a cer tain age can anticipate. It is calculated by using current data on mortaLity and making assumptions about future trends in growth rates within the framework of the Life tabLe. Life expectancy is most often reported for in dividuals at age zero (i.e. at birth) and shows marked variation over space and time, and by sex and ethnicity/race (Shaw, Davey and Dorling, 2005). Such variations are linked to the access that individuals and groups have to economic, social and political resources, mak ing life expectancy a surrogate measure of social justice within society (e.g. the human development index compares overall well being between societies and is calculated using life expectancy, measures of knowledge and standard of living). ajb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Weeks (1999, ch. 4). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
life table
An accounting framework that shows how many persons die before, and survive beyond, successive birthdays. The methodology dates to the seventeenth century and calculates, among other measures, Life expectancy on the basis of how many mem bers of a hypothetical cohort of 100,000 newly borns survive to reach each of their subsequent birthdays, assuming that the pat tern of age specific death rates that prevailed at the moment of birth continues into the future. While the intermediate information on survival rates continues to be of direct interest to those calculating insurance and pension premiums, the related method of sur vival analysis has emerged as an important tool in longitudinal studies of migration, marriage and poverty (Plane and Rogerson, 1994). ajb (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Rowland (2003, ch. 8). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
life course/life-cycle
The notion of life course has largely replaced life cycle in social science research, to call attention to the socially constructed nature of shifts in experi ence and practice associated with ageing. Research examines both the normative pat terns of behaviour associated with different life stages, and the relationships among social actors at different stages, weaving together production and sociaL reproduction to address such issues as child and elder care, labour force participation, residential mobiL ity and migration (see McDowell, 2003; (NEW PARAGRAPH) Bailey, Blake and Cooke, 2004). While stages in the life course are associated with biological age, these associations vary across time and place, given widespread differences in life expectancy and chances depending on polit ical economic conditions. ck (NEW PARAGRAPH) Suggested reading (NEW PARAGRAPH) Cortesi, Cristaldi and Fortuijn (2004); Katz and Monk (1993). (NEW PARAGRAPH)
BOOK: The Dictionary of Human Geography
2.62Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Jimfish by Christopher Hope
Chocolate Temptation by a.c. Mason
Miami Midnight by Davis, Maggie;
Birthdays for the Dead by Stuart MacBride
Ballad Beauty by Lauren Linwood
The Thicket by Joe R. Lansdale
Come the Dawn by Christina Skye
Searching Hearts by Sabrina Lacey