Acknowledging Responsibility For Space

What is a responsible geography? From where do its responsibilities spring? And to what does it respond? These have always been critical questions for geographers to ask, but they are now all the more urgent given the ways 'responsibility' is being redefined by global elites to promote everything from pre-emptive social auditing to pre-emptive war. "[W]e now have to be responsible for things we could never have imagined would be our responsibility," notes a typical CEO from Shell Oil (quoted in Skair, 2001: 149). And meanwhile the US National Security Strategy that spoke about bringing "the hope of democracy, development, free markets, and free trade to every corner of the world," explained the presidential prerogative for using pre-emptive war to do this by claiming that: "The United States welcomes our responsibility to lead in this great mission" (Bush, 2002). To be sure, such evangelizing invocations of responsibility are shaped by geographical imaginations aplenty. Globalist visions of flat space, of a smooth, utterly deterritorialized global level playing field thereby frequently do service as the unexamined imaginative geography on which the player-managers of the free market seek to build their putatively non-hierarchical version of a 'free world' (see Sparke, 2005, chapters 3 and 5). And if this building work needs bulldozing with bombs before management through bonds, then the bombing too can be coded as just another act of responsible global leadership: " systems administration " as one budding military manager has called it (Barnett, 2004; see Roberts et al, 2003, for a critique). Yet while such elite