Everyday Authoritarian Space-Time: Cocktail Coves, Alpha-lands, and Exaltations

Keywords: Authoritarianism, Urban Geography, Ethnography, Political Geography, Urban Space, Illiberalism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 63

Abstract

Research on authoritarianism often remains bounded by ‘territorial traps’ (Brenner et al., 2003) like nation-states, or outdated ‘moral geographies’ (Koch, 2019) that rely on reductionist binaries like ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’; or West versus East. The mainstreaming, de-centreing , re-scaling and hybridization of authoritarianism (on the political right and left) is evidenced not only by specific government regimes that span across North, South, East, and West (e.g., Trump; Bolsonaro; Duterte; Modi; Orban; Kagame), but also the way that the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated regimes of authoritarian biopolitical control and surveillance in ways transcending a ‘right’ or ‘left’ clear binary (Simandan et al., 2021 forthcoming). The virtual platforming of authoritarianism likewise troubles top-down framing of state-society structures, and demands a more embodied, everyday approach (Luger, 2020).
This paper draws upon empirical examples taken from ongoing ethnographic observations and social media analysis to suggest that everyday authoritarianism can be envisioned as a spatio-temporal fix (Harvey, 1981) which is expressed, experienced and embodied through a three-pronged spatial taxonomy. This triad is: spaces of banal recreation and leisure (‘cocktail coves’); spaces of em[bodied] discipline and physical cultures (‘alpha-lands’); and spaces of religion and spirituality (‘exaltations’). These spaces are intersecting, attached to fixed-sites, relationally-networked and transnational.