Anarchism and geography : a brief genealogy of anarchist geographies | Simon Springer

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  • Anarchism and geography: a brief genealogy of anarchist geographies | Simon Springer - Academia.edu

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    Anarchism and geography have a long and disjointed history, characterized by towering peaks of intensive intellectual engagement and low troughs of ambivalence and disregard. This paper tracesa genealogy of anarchist geographies back to the modern development of anarchism into a distinctpolitical philosophy following the Enlightenment.

    The initial rise of geographers’ engagementwith anarchism occurred at the end of the 19th-century, owing to E´lise´e Reclus and Peter Kropotkin, who developed an emancipatory vision for geography in spite of the discipline’senchantment with imperialism at that time. The realpolitik of the war years in the first half of the20th-century and the subsequent quantitative revolution in geography represent a nadir for anar-chist geographies.

    Yet anarchism was never entirely abandoned by geographical thought and thecounterculture movement of the 1970s gave rise to radical geography, which included significantinterest in anarchist ideas. Unfortunately another low occurred during the surge of neoliberal poli-tics in the 1980s and early 1990s, but hope springs eternal, and from the late 1990s onward theanti-globalization movement and DIY culture have pushed anarchist geographies into more wide-spread currency. In reviewing the literature,