Archive | Vol. 1/2008 | No. 1

Fach, Wolfgang [Publishing editor]

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Content

Scientific article

Editorial

Fach, Wolfgang

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Pages: 1-2

Scientific article

Analyzing the governance of security: jurisdiction and scale

Valverde, Mariana

Abstract:

Two related arguments are developed in this paper. First of all, it is shown that theoretical work on the governance of security could benefit a great deal from the current literature on law and geography and law and space. Given that security projects tend to presuppose a particular scale (an institution; a neighbourhood, a city, etc.), security theorists would benefit from engaging with the critical work on ‘scale’ that outlines the various political effects of choices of scale (in both cartographic and metaphorical deployments of ‘scale’). Secondly, this article also argues that the analytical resources of ‘scale’ should be supplemented by insights derived from analyzing the workings of jurisdiction. Jurisdiction does not merely distinguish who governs: it also distributes governance in terms of governing capacities, objects of governance, and modes of governance. Taking jurisdiction for granted (for example, by assuming that immigration is state-level but garbage disposal is municipal) thus naturalizes and blackboxes differences in modes of governance that could benefit from being closely questioned. Using the ‘police power of the state’, with its typically urban scale, as the main example, the article shows that unpacking ‘jurisdiction’ can enrich the legal geographers’existing critiques of scale.

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Pages: 3-15

Scientific article