J Glassman
Biographic Data
| ID | 186955 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Glassman |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Glassman |
| SIGNATURE | GLASSMAN J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of British Columbia |
| ORCID | 0009-0008-9294-7643 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 488 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1992 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
The National Security State and the Tech City
Integration between the American state and technology capital has deep roots in the military‐industrial complex that has structured the US geopolitical economy since World War II. This article makes the case for understanding the urban‐regional dimensions of technology capital in terms of a transformation of, rather than as a departure from, Cold War geopolitics. It introduces the concept of a social structure of militarisation to analyse the tra…
Critical geoeconomics, critique of geoeconomics or something else
I argue that a genealogical critique of geoeconomics is highly valuable but a critical geoeconomics, as proposed by Mallin and Sidaway, is of less certain value. Even if a useful critical geoeconomics approach is framed, the real traction in a geoeconomic (or geopolitical, or geopolitical economic) explanation has to be gained by specific analytical approaches that are more granular than the general theoretical vistas provided by geoeconomics, ge…
Critical Political Economy Meets Historical Institutionalism in the Study of Asian Precarity
Infiltrating Society
Puangthong Pawakapan's Infiltrating Society makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Thailand's ongoing political crisis. Pawakapan, a professor in the Department of International Relations at Chulalongkorn University, has herself made other such contributions in the past. But Infiltrating Society is the most systematic account I have read addressing the varied roles of the Thai military in not only policing but also shaping Thai …
Many Marxisms
Revolutionary projects travelling around the world in the last century under the heading of “Marxism” have always morphed into significantly different forms, depending upon precisely where, when, and how they travelled. In this think piece honoring the career of Richard Peet, I argue that Marxism has thus been less a singular and unified phenomenon than a sprawling and variegated experience of resistance to capitalism, colonialism, and imperialis…
Legacies of the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia
This article introduces the pieces collected in this special issue on the legacies of the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia. Linking to the Journal of Contemporary Asia's 50th Anniversary volume, it examines the origins and conflicts associated with the Cold War in Asia. In this special issue, the authors collectively examine the enduring legacies for the region of US engagements that established a set of politically authoritarian regimes trump…
Lineages of the Authoritarian State in Thailand
The legacies of Cold War authoritarianism in Thailand have continued to the present, including in the conduct and the outcome of the 2019 general elections. In this article it is argued that not only did Cold War precedents like the 1969 general election help shape this lineage, but the practices of Cold War authoritarian regimes in Thailand, including the promotion of "lazy" forms of capitalism based heavily on absolute value strategies, shaped …
The Rise of the Octobrists in Contemporary Thailand
Geopolitical economies of development and democratization in East Asia
The term geopolitical economy has been used in a variety of ways within geography and other disciplines. This introduction to the special issue on geopolitical economies of development and democratization in East Asia discusses two of the major ways in which the term has been used-as "geographical political economy" and as "geopolitics plus political economy"-outlining an approach to articulation of these two forms of geopolitical economy
A tale of two industrial zones
Much scholarship on East Asian development has sidelined the crucial role of geopolitics by insisting that wars such as the Vietnam War had limited effects on industrial development and economic growth patterns. We find such arguments unpersuasive, and also unduly reductionist. The Vietnam War, in particular, had unambiguously powerful effects on industrial development in South Korea; but even in cases where the direct effects of war were somewha…
Geopolitical economy and the production of territory
Recent work in political geography and Marxist, critical political economy has refocused attention on the interrelations between political economy and geopolitics. This paper examines the contributions of Antonio Gramsci to the theory of geopolitical economy and the production of territory. Doing so enables two key insights. First, explaining the production of territory requires unraveling multiple-sometimes competing-levels of geopolitical and g…
A Geopolitical Economy of Heavy Industrialization and Second Tier City Growth in South Korea
In this article, we examine heavy industrialization and second tier urbanization in South Korea during the 1970s from a geopolitical economic perspective. We highlight the crucial, spatially complex geopolitical process of forming transnational class alliances, embedded in Cold War geopolitics, which has been neglected within state-centric developmental state theories and approaches to urbanization. Specifically, we trace the changes in the state…
Exploitation
Exploitation is a term that is politically significant because of its varied uses. These uses include morally charged claims implying abusive human conduct and more technical uses that imply systemic patterns of surplus‐value appropriation in the labor process, these latter being complicated by global geographies of capital accumulation.
Towards a Cultural Political Economy
This book review argues that Sum and Jessop's Towards a Cultural Political Economy presents a challenging and rewarding prospectus for cultural political economy, offering a highly comprehensive theoretical positioning of their project in relation to their own previous work and other existing scholarship on the interconnections between culture and political economy. The review also suggests that the book's brief case studies indicate directions t…
Development Theory in Geography
The Geography of 'Vietnam
“Vietnam” connotes far more than it could ever denote, and yet it often connotes very little about Vietnam or the Vietnam War. Growing up in the United States during the era of what Vietnamese call
The Chaebol and the US Military-Industrial Complex
Among scholars of East Asia, the role of US military offshore procurement (OSP) and the military-industrial complex (MIC) has been underplayed in explanations of rapid industrial transformation. Yet the foundations of industrialization in places such as South Korea, when analyzed in strongly 'national-territorial' and state-centric terms of the predominant, so-called 'neo-Weberian' accounts, remain inadequately illuminated. We argue that a geopol…
Cracking Hegemony
The Geo-political Economy of Global Production Networks
The literature on global production networks (GPNs) has made important contributions to our understanding of globalization, overcoming much of the state‐centrism of other kinds of political economic approaches. It has also extended effectively beyond the relatively narrower focus of its predecessors, the global commodity chains and global value chains approaches, to analyze not only the direct process of production but also various social activit…
Cracking Hegemony in Thailand
Gramsci's notion of "hegemony," like Bourdieu's concept of "habitus," seems designed to explain accommodation to existing social structures, rather than resistance. In this paper, however, I draw from the Prison Notebooks some arguments that contribute to a Gramscian understanding of how hegemony may break apart under the weight of the same uneven development processes central to hegemony. Drawing also from Bourdieu, I argue that the conceptions …
Critical geography III
Recent work by critical development geographers has broken down borders between Marxist political economy and postcolonial theory. This has enabled deeper integration of critical approaches to race and culture with political economic analyses of class politics and imperialism, as well as more embracing theorizations of violence within capitalist development. It also potentially opens onto development geographies that more fully address the intern…
Saying the Unsayable
Civilizing the Margins
Settler Garrison
A Kingdom in Crisis
State power beyond the `territorial trap
From Seattle (and Ubon) to Bangkok
Recent work by geographers has highlighted attempts by local groups to 'jump scales' in their efforts to contest the power of global capital. Sometimes such 'scale jumping' is also seen as part of an effort to bypass the nation-state. This paper explores a particular case of scale jumping, which illustrates some of the complexities of the process. Building on the anticorporate globalization momentum generated during the 'battle in Seattle' and th…
The Chaebol and the US Military-Industrial Complex
Among scholars of East Asia, the role of US military offshore procurement (OSP) and the military-industrial complex (MIC) has been underplayed in explanations of rapid industrial transformation. Yet the foundations of industrialization in places such as South Korea, when analyzed in strongly 'national-territorial' and state-centric terms of the predominant, so-called 'neo-Weberian' accounts, remain inadequately illuminated. We argue that a geopol…
Geopolitical economy and the production of territory
Recent work in political geography and Marxist, critical political economy has refocused attention on the interrelations between political economy and geopolitics. This paper examines the contributions of Antonio Gramsci to the theory of geopolitical economy and the production of territory. Doing so enables two key insights. First, explaining the production of territory requires unraveling multiple-sometimes competing-levels of geopolitical and g…
Development geography and the third-world state
Soon after the third-world state was declared impotent, contradictory evidence pointing to the importance of state leadership in development in the Asian miracles came to the fore. This article, through a critical review of the literature, pushes this argument further and claims that geographers have much to contribute to the analysis of the state and its role in development. An appropriate framework for this kind of work is a marriage of radical…
The Geo-political Economy of Global Production Networks
The literature on global production networks (GPNs) has made important contributions to our understanding of globalization, overcoming much of the state‐centrism of other kinds of political economic approaches. It has also extended effectively beyond the relatively narrower focus of its predecessors, the global commodity chains and global value chains approaches, to analyze not only the direct process of production but also various social activit…
The Provinces Elect Governments, Bangkok Overthrows Them”
Urban social movements are often associated with what are considered ‘progressive’ causes and most activists involved in such movements are inclined to describe themselves in such terms. The Thai coup of September 2006 poses problems for any such easy identification. Although executed by the military, on behalf of royalist interests, the coup was supported by an array of primarily Bangkok-based and middle-class groups, many of them associated wit…
Geopolitical economies of development and democratization in East Asia
The term geopolitical economy has been used in a variety of ways within geography and other disciplines. This introduction to the special issue on geopolitical economies of development and democratization in East Asia discusses two of the major ways in which the term has been used-as "geographical political economy" and as "geopolitics plus political economy"-outlining an approach to articulation of these two forms of geopolitical economy
Cracking Hegemony in Thailand
Gramsci's notion of "hegemony," like Bourdieu's concept of "habitus," seems designed to explain accommodation to existing social structures, rather than resistance. In this paper, however, I draw from the Prison Notebooks some arguments that contribute to a Gramscian understanding of how hegemony may break apart under the weight of the same uneven development processes central to hegemony. Drawing also from Bourdieu, I argue that the conceptions …
Recovering from Crisis
Although the Asian economic crisis has been the subject of numerous analyses, the varied and uneven processes by which different Asian countries have recovered from the crisis have received comparatively less attention. This article focuses on the process of recovery in Thailand. While the crisis and recovery both have international dimensions that go beyond individual nation‐states, the case of Thailand can be used to analyze some of the forces …
Chiang Mai and Khon Kaen as Growth Poles
This article examines the concept of urban sustainability within the context of two case studies from Thailand. The Thai state, under the auspices of its development planning agencies, identified the secondary cities of Chiang Mai and Khon Kaen as growth poles in the 1970s. As such, both cities were perceived as engines of regional development in their respective regions of North and Northeast Thailand. The authors critically examine how the stra…
A tale of two industrial zones
Much scholarship on East Asian development has sidelined the crucial role of geopolitics by insisting that wars such as the Vietnam War had limited effects on industrial development and economic growth patterns. We find such arguments unpersuasive, and also unduly reductionist. The Vietnam War, in particular, had unambiguously powerful effects on industrial development in South Korea; but even in cases where the direct effects of war were somewha…
Transnational Hegemony and US Labor Foreign Policy
In this paper I explore the use of Gramsci's notion of hegemony in analyzing the relationships between US labor unions, the US foreign policy establishment, and workers in the global South. The hegemonic position of US capitalists, in relation to both US workers and states in the global South, heavily conditioned the development of American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations foreign policy during the cold war, with path-depe…
Rethinking Overdetermination, Structural Power, and Social Change
Working in the wake of theoretical tendencies that became prominent within geography during the 1980s, many studies of resistance have either bracketed or ignored structural power, with some versions of poststructuralism simply denying that structural power is a useful concept in a world where power is putatively highly fluid and dispersed. These sorts of approaches, exemplified by the recent works of J K Gibson‐Graham, Stephen A Resnick, and Ric…
The "War on terrorism" comes to Southeast Asia
The victims of 9/11 include not only those killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon but the numerous innocents who have perished either in the US-led "war on terror" or as a result of the war's less immediate consequences. Among such consequences are the seeming reversal of processes of democratization and de-militarization in Southeast Asia—processes that had taken root and made significant strides in many countries of th…
Lineages of the Authoritarian State in Thailand
The legacies of Cold War authoritarianism in Thailand have continued to the present, including in the conduct and the outcome of the 2019 general elections. In this article it is argued that not only did Cold War precedents like the 1969 general election help shape this lineage, but the practices of Cold War authoritarian regimes in Thailand, including the promotion of "lazy" forms of capitalism based heavily on absolute value strategies, shaped …
The New Imperialism? On Continuity and Change in US Foreign Policy
The unilateral militarism of the George W Bush administration has rekindled interest in imperialism within geography and elsewhere in the social sciences, leading some authors to refer to a new imperialism, or neo-imperialism. This paper critically interrogates the notion that the foreign policy of this administration represents a significant break from past US practices, with the use of concepts from Gramsci and Poulantzas to analyze the class a…
Legacies of the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia
This article introduces the pieces collected in this special issue on the legacies of the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia. Linking to the Journal of Contemporary Asia's 50th Anniversary volume, it examines the origins and conflicts associated with the Cold War in Asia. In this special issue, the authors collectively examine the enduring legacies for the region of US engagements that established a set of politically authoritarian regimes trump…
Critical geography II
Recent work by critical geographers on race has emphasized the social construction of race and its articulation with other identities and class processes. This report reviews some of this critical geography literature, focusing especially on discussions of the articulations between race and radical politics in North American contexts
Tsunamis and other Forces of Destruction
On the borders of Southeast Asia
Critical geography III
Recent work by critical development geographers has broken down borders between Marxist political economy and postcolonial theory. This has enabled deeper integration of critical approaches to race and culture with political economic analyses of class politics and imperialism, as well as more embracing theorizations of violence within capitalist development. It also potentially opens onto development geographies that more fully address the intern…
Structural adjustment in East and Southeast Asia
Critical geoeconomics, critique of geoeconomics or something else
I argue that a genealogical critique of geoeconomics is highly valuable but a critical geoeconomics, as proposed by Mallin and Sidaway, is of less certain value. Even if a useful critical geoeconomics approach is framed, the real traction in a geoeconomic (or geopolitical, or geopolitical economic) explanation has to be gained by specific analytical approaches that are more granular than the general theoretical vistas provided by geoeconomics, ge…
Economic Crisis in Asia
The economic crisis in Asia has been analyzed by neoliberal and neo‐Weberian scholars as a financial crisis, with the neoliberals asserting that its causes are internal to the countries in question, the neo‐Weberians asserting the causes to be external. This paper offers an alternative, Marxian explanation of the crisis, focusing on the outbreak of the crisis in Thailand. Using Harvey's ideas about capitalist crises and capital switching, along w…
Counter-Insurgency, Ecocide and the Production of Refugees Warfare As A Tool of Modernization
The most dramatic and far-reaching impact of the war in South Viet Nam has been the tremendous shift in population ) ?om the countryside to the cities. In the early 1960s it was still accurate to speak of South Viet Nam as 80 to 85 percent rural. Today no one knowsfor certain the size of theurban population, but it is undoubtedly more than double and perhaps triple what it was a few years ago
Development geography and the third-world state
Soon after the third-world state was declared impotent, contradictory evidence pointing to the importance of state leadership in development in the Asian miracles came to the fore. This article, through a critical review of the literature, pushes this argument further and claims that geographers have much to contribute to the analysis of the state and its role in development. An appropriate framework for this kind of work is a marriage of radical…
State power beyond the `territorial trap
Asian Metropolis
In Asian Metropolis: Urbanisation and the South-East Asian City, Dean Forbes provides an accessible introduction to the rapidly expanding urban areas of South-East Asia. It focuses on the social, economic and environmental problems faced by urban policy makers
Structural adjustment in East and Southeast Asia
Economic Crisis in Asia
The economic crisis in Asia has been analyzed by neoliberal and neo‐Weberian scholars as a financial crisis, with the neoliberals asserting that its causes are internal to the countries in question, the neo‐Weberians asserting the causes to be external. This paper offers an alternative, Marxian explanation of the crisis, focusing on the outbreak of the crisis in Thailand. Using Harvey's ideas about capitalist crises and capital switching, along w…
From Seattle (and Ubon) to Bangkok
Recent work by geographers has highlighted attempts by local groups to 'jump scales' in their efforts to contest the power of global capital. Sometimes such 'scale jumping' is also seen as part of an effort to bypass the nation-state. This paper explores a particular case of scale jumping, which illustrates some of the complexities of the process. Building on the anticorporate globalization momentum generated during the 'battle in Seattle' and th…
Rethinking Overdetermination, Structural Power, and Social Change
Working in the wake of theoretical tendencies that became prominent within geography during the 1980s, many studies of resistance have either bracketed or ignored structural power, with some versions of poststructuralism simply denying that structural power is a useful concept in a world where power is putatively highly fluid and dispersed. These sorts of approaches, exemplified by the recent works of J K Gibson‐Graham, Stephen A Resnick, and Ric…
The spaces of economic crisis
Chiang Mai and Khon Kaen as Growth Poles
This article examines the concept of urban sustainability within the context of two case studies from Thailand. The Thai state, under the auspices of its development planning agencies, identified the secondary cities of Chiang Mai and Khon Kaen as growth poles in the 1970s. As such, both cities were perceived as engines of regional development in their respective regions of North and Northeast Thailand. The authors critically examine how the stra…
Transnational Hegemony and US Labor Foreign Policy
In this paper I explore the use of Gramsci's notion of hegemony in analyzing the relationships between US labor unions, the US foreign policy establishment, and workers in the global South. The hegemonic position of US capitalists, in relation to both US workers and states in the global South, heavily conditioned the development of American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations foreign policy during the cold war, with path-depe…
Entrepreneur-ship and the Internationalisation of Asian Firms
Crossing the Neoliberal Line
On the borders of Southeast Asia
The "War on terrorism" comes to Southeast Asia
The victims of 9/11 include not only those killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon but the numerous innocents who have perished either in the US-led "war on terror" or as a result of the war's less immediate consequences. Among such consequences are the seeming reversal of processes of democratization and de-militarization in Southeast Asia—processes that had taken root and made significant strides in many countries of th…
Tsunamis and other Forces of Destruction
The New Imperialism? On Continuity and Change in US Foreign Policy
The unilateral militarism of the George W Bush administration has rekindled interest in imperialism within geography and elsewhere in the social sciences, leading some authors to refer to a new imperialism, or neo-imperialism. This paper critically interrogates the notion that the foreign policy of this administration represents a significant break from past US practices, with the use of concepts from Gramsci and Poulantzas to analyze the class a…
Primitive accumulation, accumulation by dispossession, accumulation by ‘extra-economic’ means
David Harvey's adaptation and redeployment of Marx's notion of ‘primitive accumulation’–under the heading of ‘accumulation by dispossession’–has reignited interest in the concept among geographers. This adaptation of the concept of primitive accumulation to different contexts than those Marx analyzed raises a variety of theoretical and practical issues. In this paper, I review recent uses and transformations of the notion of primitive accumulatio…
A Not-So-Distant Horror
Key Words: East Timorhuman rightsU.S. foreign policyviolence Additional informationNotes on contributorsJim GlassmanReviewed by
Recovering from Crisis
Although the Asian economic crisis has been the subject of numerous analyses, the varied and uneven processes by which different Asian countries have recovered from the crisis have received comparatively less attention. This article focuses on the process of recovery in Thailand. While the crisis and recovery both have international dimensions that go beyond individual nation‐states, the case of Thailand can be used to analyze some of the forces …
Post-Democracy
Geography of Power
The Ongoing (Ir)relevance of Primitive Accumulation
Thailand in the Era of the Cold War and Rama IX
Critical geography II
Recent work by critical geographers on race has emphasized the social construction of race and its articulation with other identities and class processes. This report reviews some of this critical geography literature, focusing especially on discussions of the articulations between race and radical politics in North American contexts
Political science (41 works) · Law (34 works) · Politics (32 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Economics (24 works) · Geography (20 works) · Political economy (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies (18 works) · Political Economy and Marxism (13 works)