The Geopolitics of Spectacle: Space, Synecdoche, and the New Capitals of Asia

By Natalie Koch

Why do autocrats build spectacular new capital cities? In The Geopolitics of Spectacle, Natalie Koch considers how autocratic rulers use "spectacular" projects to shape state-society relations, but rather than focus on the standard approach—on the project itself—she considers the unspectacular "others." The contrasting views of those from the poorest regions toward these new national capitals help her develop a geographic approach to spectacle.

Koch uses Astana in Kazakhstan to exemplify her argument, comparing that spectacular city with others from resource-rich, nondemocratic nations in central Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and Southeast Asia. The Geopolitics of Spectacle draws new political-geographic lessons and shows that these spectacles can be understood only from multiple viewpoints, sites, and temporalities. Koch explicitly theorizes spectacle geographically and in so doing extends the analysis of governmentality into new empirical and theoretical terrain.

With cases ranging from Azerbaijan to Qatar and Myanmar, and an intriguing account of reactions to the new capital of Astana from the poverty-stricken Aral Sea region of Kazakhstan, Koch’s book provides food for thought for readers in human geography, anthropology, sociology, urban studies, political science, international affairs, and post-Soviet and central Asian studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781501720932

Natalie Koch

Natalie Koch is a Professor in the Department of Geography and the Environment at Syracuse University. She is a political geographer specializing in the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula region, where she has worked since 2012.

Book preview

THE GEOPOLITICS OF SPECTACLE

Space, Synecdoche, and the

New Capitals of Asia

NATALIE KOCH

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

ITHACA AND LONDON

For Gulya

Personal violence shows. The object of personal violence perceives the violence, usually, and may complain—the object of structural violence may be persuaded not to perceive this at all. Personal violence represents change and dynamism—not only ripples on waves, but waves on otherwise tranquil waters. Structural violence is silent, it does not show—it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters. In a static society, personal violence will be registered, whereas structural violence may be seen as about as natural as the air around us.

—Johan Galtung,

Violence, Peace, and Peace Research (1969)

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Spectacular Urbanism and the New Capitals of Asia

1. Approaching Spectacle Geographically

2. From Almaty to Astana: Capitalizing the Territory in Kazakhstan

3. From Astana to Aral: Making Inequality Enchant in Kazakhstan’s Hinterlands

4. From Astana to Asia: Spectacular Cities and the New Capitals of Asia Compared

Conclusion: Synecdoche and the Geopolitics of Spectacular Urbanism in Asia

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure I.1 The flag of Kazakhstan.

Figure 2.1 Astana’s new administrative center skyline.

Figure 2.2 Billboard reading My heart—Astana!

Figure 2.3 Visitors at the top of Baiterek’s golden orb in Astana.

Map 3.1 Major resource extraction sites and ecological disaster zones in Kazakhstan.

Figure 3.1 Empty harbor in Aral.

Figure 3.2 Kokaral Dam sluice letting water from the Small Sea into the Big Sea.

Figure 4.1 Monumental boulevard in central Ashgabat.

Figure 4.2 The Flame Towers in central Baku.

Figure 4.3 Healthy Path mountain trail on Ashgabat’s outskirts.

Figure 4.4 View of Baku’s revamped Caspian Sea promenade.

Figure 4.5 The Khan Shatyr entertainment complex in Astana.

Figure 4.6 Unofficial view of a Soviet housing block in Baku.

Figure 4.7 The Heydar Aliyev Cultural Center in Baku.

Figure 4.8 Downtown Doha’s iconic skyline.

Figure 4.9 Downtown Abu Dhabi’s skyline.

Figure 4.10 Central Bandar Seri Begawan.

Figure 4.11 The prime minister’s office in Bandar Seri Begawan.

Figure 4.12 The Kampong Ayer water village offshore from Bandar Seri Begawan.

Figure 4.13 Myanmar’s Parliament building in Naypyidaw.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My foray into international research began when I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, when I traveled to Kazakhstan for my senior honors thesis. My first trip there could not have been possible without the unwavering support of Ambassador Kenneth Yalowitz, who was then heading the college’s Dickey Center for International Understanding. This research was generously supported by a grant from the Dickey Center, as well as a Dean of Faculty Waterhouse Research Award and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant. My Dartmouth professors also gave me tremendous inspiration and guidance as I discovered field research, especially Martin Dimitrov, Coleen Fox, Ben Forest, and Richard Wright. Just as important to my undergraduate research endeavors were (and continue to be) my classmates and friends Ingrid Nelson, Tina Urbano, Liz Harrington, Sasha Prokhorova, Irina Kholkina, Mike Belinskiy, Anton Kunayev, and Shaunak Mewada.

Much of the research for this book was conducted when I was at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where John O’Loughlin provided unwavering support throughout my graduate studies. This project owes much to his encouragement and critiques, as well as that of Timothy Oakes, Najeeb Jan, Gearóid Ó Tuathail, and Edward Schatz. I am indebted to Ken Foote for his insights about research design and book projects. At Colorado I benefited (and continue to benefit) from the intellectual stimulation and companionship of Adam Levy, Afton Clarke-Sather, the brilliant Cole Akeson, Ted Holland, Andrew Linke, Magdalena Stawkowski, and Jenn Dinaburg, who passed too early.

I have had the privilege of working with many other colleagues in the United States and abroad who have helped to shape my thinking over the years. Thanks especially to Martin Müller, Anssi Paasi, Beth Mitchnek, Alec Murphy, Mateusz Laszczkowski, Adrien Fauve, Alima Bissenova, Kulshat Medeuova, Kristopher White, Nick Megoran, Marlene Laruelle, Anar Valiyev, David Mould, Kyle Marquardt, Sarah Cameron, Neha Vora, James Sidaway, Robina Mohammad, Khairul Hazmi, Orhon Myadar, Juliet Johnson, Dmitry Gorenburg, Alex Diener, Lauren Martin, Oliver Belcher, Lorraine Dowler, Michael Gentile, Josh Hagen, Sara Moser, Virginie Mamadouh, Sami Moisio, Pauliina Raento, Jason Dittmer, Reece Jones, Marco Antonsich, Lisa Wedeen, Gwenn Okruhlik, Tanya Kane, Jessica Graybill, Kyle Evered, Tamar Mayer, Kris Olds, and Matt Stone. Though I shall not name them here out of concern for their safety, I thank countless colleagues and friends in Kazakhstan. Without their support, and the generosity of research participants willing to share their time, tea, and thoughts, this project would have been impossible. At Syracuse, Margie Johnson has my eternal gratitude for her tireless help and patience. Last, I thank my family for always supporting me and trusting my judgment through the travels, trials, and travails over the ten years of this project.

My graduate and postdoctoral research was generously supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), including a Graduate Research Fellowship and a Nordic Research Opportunity supplement to the fellowship. This project was also made possible by funding from an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement grant (number 1003836), an IREX Individual Advanced Research Opportunity grant, and a U.S. State Department Title VIII grant for work at the University of Illinois Summer Research Laboratory on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia. My research has been supported at various stages by a Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Postdoctoral Fellowship for Transregional Research with funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; grants from Syracuse University’s Office of Sponsored Programs, Geography Department, and the Maxwell School for Citizenship and Public Affairs; and a Central Asia Fellowship from the University of Helsinki’s Aleksanteri Institute.

In addition to numerous engaging discussions and exchanges at invited campus visits and conferences, this research benefited from my sponsored participation in several key events: the 2013 SSRC workshop for Inter-Asian postdoctoral fellows; the 2014 Kazakhstan workshop sponsored by George Washington University’s Central Asia Program, the Uppsala University Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and Riksbankens Jubileumsfond; the 2015 Authoritarianism in a Global Context Richard C. Holbrooke Forum for the Study of Diplomacy and Governance Statecraft in the 21st Century at the American Academy in Berlin; the 2015 Area Studies & Geography workshop at the National University of Singapore; as well as several PONARS Eurasia workshops in Washington, D.C., and abroad. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation or any other granting organization. Any errors here are my own.

Parts of this text have been adapted from the previously published articles Technologizing Complacency: Spectacle, Structural Violence, and ‘Living Normally’ in a Resource-Rich State, Political Geography 37 (2013): A1–A2; The ‘Heart’ of Eurasia? Kazakhstan’s Centrally Located Capital City, Central Asian Survey 32, no. 2 (2013): 134–47; and Exploring Divergences in Comparative Research: Citizenship Regimes and the Spectacular Cities of Central Asia and the GCC, Area 47, no. 4 (2015): 436–42.

INTRODUCTION

Spectacular Urbanism and

the New Capitals of Asia

It is easy to conjure images of Asia’s spectacular high-rise cities: bustling with life and brimming with gleaming skyscrapers and ultramodern infrastructure. For foreign visitors and ordinary citizens alike, the cities of Asia have become iconic of the region’s state-led modernization agendas and increasing integration with the world economy. Asia’s impressive urbanization can largely be explained by pro-market globalization processes under way since the end of World War II, but also in the wake of collapsing communist regimes across the region since the early 1990s.¹ There is, however, a subset of cities whose stunning growth stands apart from this general trend: the new or recently transformed capital cities of the region’s resource-rich states. Political and economic logics well beyond (but not exclusive of) tighter integration with global market capitalism are at work in these cities, seven of which are the subject of this book. The central case is Kazakhstan’s capital, Astana. Other examples in post-Soviet Central Asia include Baku, Azerbaijan, and Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. In the Arabian Peninsula, spectacular capitals can be found in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Doha, Qatar, and, in East Asia, Naypyidaw, Myanmar, and Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei.

Seeking to explain the apparent convergence around spectacular urbanism in Asia’s new capitals, I ask: What makes a city spectacular and for whom? How do spectacular city projects factor into local and regional politics, and what sets them apart from other cities in the region? And more generally, what can they teach us about place, power, and political geography? Most of these cities’ recent building booms have involved transforming the existing urban fabric, while others have entailed developing an entirely new capital (namely, Astana and Naypyidaw). Their differences are important, as we will see. But each is, in one form or another, spectacular. In particular, they have several key commonalities: (1) they are located in nondemocratic and resource-rich states; (2) they have been developed on the basis of strong state planning, quickly, and on an unprecedented scale for their region; (3) they boast lavish built landscapes and celebrations that represent a stark contrast with their surrounding context; and (4) they are designed to display the government’s prosperity and ostensible benevolence in a manner that contrasts significantly with other forms of state austerity and violence found elsewhere. While these capitals are not uniformly successful, these elements all suggest that the image and shape of spectacular cities involves a degree of state intervention and guidance that is atypical of urban development in most cities of the world today.

Spectacular Cities and Their Others

Spectacular urban development is not new. Urban landscapes, and those of capital cities in particular, have long been privileged places for political leaders to express the state’s power and their nation’s unity, promise, and modernity. State planners have put their visions of modernity on display through monumental capital city projects in places as diverse as Ankara, Beijing, Brasília, Islamabad, Paris, Rabat, Riyadh, and St. Petersburg.² When they were first developed, each of these cities was, in one way or another, spectacular—an effect largely achieved through autocratic master planning that was unprecedented for their context. Yet that context was always historically and geographically specific; many people would be hard-pressed to characterize any of these cities as spectacular today. Formerly stunning architectural icons and modernist urban order now look outmoded and fail to visually impress. Not only are visual displays of urban modernity historically and geographically contextual, but also fleeting. As such, to understand how spectacular urbanism works in and across time and space, a decidedly geographic approach is needed. Developing such an approach is the goal of this book.

Anyone interested in global politics will readily note that leaders in some countries take statist spectacle far more seriously than in others. For reasons discussed in chapter 1, today it is primarily, though not exclusively, used in highly centralized (nondemocratic, authoritarian, or illiberal) states. Orchestrating spectacle requires substantial resources, which may be financial or political, obtained through coercion or persuasion as well as corrupt or legal means. Indeed, we shall see these variations at work in the case countries considered here, all of which have substantial natural resource wealth and governments that depend heavily on revenues from these extractive industries. In addition to requiring a certain amount of resources, statist spectacle is always the product of mixed agendas. The producers and participants of any given spectacle will invariably interpret and appropriate it in contrasting ways, but state-based elites publicly aim to unify the message that a spectacle is meant to send. This message often centers on broader identity narratives about the nation, the state, or the government itself. In Kazakhstan, for example, the government’s decision in the 1990s to develop a new capital city, Astana, has been at the center of its political leaders’ effort to institutionalize their power and materially inscribe their vision of modernity in the post-Soviet period.

Spectacular cities, like Astana, are an example of statist spectacle par excellence. But a central argument of this book is that looking at spectacular cities themselves is insufficient to understand the broader geopolitics of spectacle. As a political tactic, spectacle depends on, and indeed reproduces, deeply political understandings of geography. For something to be deemed spectacular, it must stand apart in space, time, magnitude, perceived experience, or some combination thereof. This also implies that it is only ever spectacular over a defined space, for certain individuals, and in contrast to specific images and experiences of the unspectacular. This relationship between the spectacular and the unspectacular is never fixed; it is always contingent on the perspective of any given observer. While these perspectives are also never fixed, geographers seek to discern general patterns in how people make sense of the world and map concepts like spectacular/unspectacular onto certain spaces, places, and experiences. These ways of thinking about space and time are called spatial imaginaries, and they are reproduced in both language and practice, rhetorically and materially.³ Accordingly, to understand the effects of spectacular urbanism as a geopolitical tactic, I examine the spatial imaginaries of individuals who are engaged as spectators, participants, and producers of spectacle.

This approach requires discerning who these people are as political actors, but also raises specifically geographic questions about where they are located and how they interact with one another in and through the material spaces that spectacular urban development conjures—and neglects. While my analysis considers the geopolitical relations and conditions that have given rise to Asia’s diverse spectacular capital cities, I am especially concerned with identifying and locating the unspectacular Others that make these cities intelligible as a form of spectacle. These are the spaces and social experiences that spectacular urban development neglects, and they take an infinitely varied number of forms and unfold at many different scales and temporalities. To understand the geopolitics of spectacle, we must take seriously the diverse and diffuse Others that give it meaning. Of course, I cannot do this comprehensively for each city discussed in this book. Rather, in illustrating what such an approach would look like, I mean to highlight the value of jointly analyzing spectacle and its Others.

In Central Asia, where I have been conducting research since 2005, I argue that the spectacular capital city schemes are largely developed on the basis of marking a radical break with the Soviet past. The three cities considered here, Ashgabat in Turkmenistan, Baku in Azerbaijan, and Astana, are all capitals of Caspian littoral states with access to significant oil and gas reserves in and around the sea. Because of this access to resource wealth, they have been able to set themselves apart from other regional neighbors and to do so through the opulent urban development schemes in their capitals. In these cases, the Soviet past, as well as their poor and politically weak regional neighbors, constitute unspectacular Others. The spectacle of the capital cities in Central Asia is also made possible by the significant social inequalities between ordinary citizens and the elites. This is most vividly illustrated in the case of Kazakhstan, where I unite the view from Astana with the view of Astana from the vantage point of rural residents in the environmentally devastated Aral Sea region.

In the Arabian Peninsula, I focus on recent urban development in Doha, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi, UAE, where I have been conducting research since 2012. Rapid urban development in this region has likewise been made possible by the wealth from local oil and gas extraction for global export. But the UAE and Qatar are quite different from the Central Asian states in that they all have extremely small territories, and an unusually small percentage of their total population has formal citizenship (under 15 percent each). Here I show that a state-centered approach can be a hindrance to locating the social and political Others that make spectacle possible in these two monarchies. Doing so requires a wider understanding of the Arab Gulf capitals’ hinterlands as extending well beyond the state boundaries to touch many countries across Asia and Africa where large numbers of migrant workers in the Arabian Peninsula originate. From this perspective, the center-periphery relations that are conjured through the spectacular city schemes in the Arabian Peninsula, including similarly dramatic social inequalities, begin to look more like those considered in Central Asia.

Last, in East Asia, I consider the capitals of Naypyidaw in Myanmar and Bandar Seri Begawan in Brunei, where I conducted fieldwork in 2015. These two cities represent the biggest contrast to the other cases insofar as planners have not oriented recent developments around crafting an iconic image of the capital. That is, while Naypyidaw and Bandar Seri Begawan are spectacular capitals, they have not been designed around projecting a coherent image of the city to circulate internationally, or even domestically (as we find with the intense city-branding exercises in places like Astana or Doha). The more decentralized planning of Bandar Seri Begawan, for example, pushes against iconicity, while Naypyidaw has actually been closed to the media and foreigners until very recently. In both cases, however, the cities draw much of their spectacular nature from the visual order of modernist urban planning that works to other the past and older urban forms (such as the prevailing water village settlements in Brunei). In Brunei and Myanmar, we also find that the spectacular cities are made possible by the state’s monopolization of wealth from the country’s rich natural resource reserves—resulting in a grossly unequal distribution of wealth justified through paternalist assertions of benevolent rule and apassively accepting population.

Approaching Spectacle Geographically

Spectacle has long been a subject of academic concern, but scholars have not yet sought to theorize it geographically. A geographic approach is important because spectacle has both spatial and temporal dimensions. Typically defined as a large-scale show or display, it is spatially point-based. This means that, while it unfolds at any scale, it is staged at one particular location, such as a city as a whole or a public square within a city. Spectacle is also temporally exceptional: it happens sporadically, occasionally, or only once. Since time and space are relative, so too is spectacle: what is spectacular in one context may be entirely unspectacular in another. Most academic analyses gloss over the relative nature of spectacle, as they tend to focus inward—that is, considering a spectacle itself rather than its place in a broader context. The failure of scholars to adopt a wider lens, however, may be less a theoretical oversight than an indication of a major analytical challenge in studying spectacles: they do not have an easily measurable set of political outcomes. They are spatially diffuse, are experienced contingently, and extend across uneven temporalities. Focusing on the contextual nature of spectacle thus raises important theoretical questions about how to define its Others—those spaces, activities, temporalities, routines, and affects that inform how people draw borders between the spectacular and the ordinary. The relational approach to spectacle I develop spotlights these questions and works to account for a spectacle’s diffuse Others beyond the singular site or event.

As a study in political geography, this book emphasizes the power relations that shape and are shaped by spectacle. While spectacle is certainly not confined to state-led events or projects, my analysis is limited to state-sponsored (or statist) spectacle.⁴ This is because, when employed by government leaders, it takes on special geopolitical significance. At the most general level, statist spectacle has two variations: celebratory and punitive.⁵ Whereas punitive spectacle may include public torture or executions, celebratory spectacles include parades, festivals, capital city development schemes, engineering mega-projects, or iconic buildings such as ultra-tall towers or palaces.⁶ Both celebratory and punitive variants tend to be at work in any given political system, albeit to varying extents. A handful of studies, in political contexts ranging from the Dominican Republic under Trujillo to the Soviet Union under Stalin, have considered the role of state violence as a sort of spectacle, but few do little more than note the apparent contradictions of regimes that simultaneously engage in spectacular forms of state violence and ostentatious celebration culture.⁷

Yet even under the most brutal regimes, leaders will seek to minimize public discussion of the state’s most punitive tactics. In such cases, where state violence is truly pervasive and the general population is well aware of it (as with Stalinist and Nazi persecution), open conversation about it is nearly always off limits. Public discussion about state benevolence, by contrast, is usually vigorously promoted. Using the full range of public relations and ideological tools, repressive regimes tend to amplify the significance of celebratory spectacles and their nonpunitive policies. In their efforts to control and guide popular discourse, authoritarian elites are logically concerned with the spatial manifestation of state benevolence vis-à-vis state violence. This is not merely about grabbing their subjects’ attention and putting celebratory spectacle in their direct line of vision; by making expressions or metaphors of beneficence more visible, a regime can make accusations of violence and austerity appear less credible—sometimes casting them as fictitious or exaggerated claims of its opponents. In both the Dominican and Soviet cases, for example, the state’s repressive tactics were felt most intensely in the peripheral reaches of their territory, far from the symbolic centers in their capital cities. And even today, some citizens will question the historical record of those repressive governments’ crimes. This is to simplify the matter greatly, but it does point to key questions about the geography of spectacle and pushes scholars to ask not only who uses it and with what effect but also where.

Given its etymology, spectacle raises the question of spectatorship and how to account for its necessarily multiple and ever-changing audiences. I consider the primary case of Astana from several different vantage points, asking how the city’s iconic development has been projected across Kazakhstan. Set next to hardship and poverty found elsewhere in the country, spectacular urbanism in Astana is exemplary of how authoritarian governments work to make inequality enchant through the use of spectacle of