A Geography of Logistics: Market Authority and the Security of Supply Chains

• Published in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 100; no. 3; pp. 600 - 620
• Main Author: Cowen, Deborah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Washington Taylor & Francis Group 01-07-2010; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Borders; citizenship; ciudadanía; Cost-benefit analysis; Economic activity; Economic geography; Economic liberalism; fronteras; Geography; Geopolitics; geopolítica; Globalization; International borders; Logistics; logística; Maritime security; Military logistics; National security; People, Place, and Region; port security; Sea transportation; seguridad portuaria; Spatial analysis; Supply chain management; Supply chains; Territory; U.S.A; 地缘政治; 港口的安全; United States > US
• ISSN: 0004-5608; 2469-4452; 1467-8306; 2469-4460
• DOI: 10.1080/00045601003794908

In recent years, U.S. military and civilian agencies have been rethinking security in the context of globalized production and trade. No longer lodged in a conflict between territorial borders and global flows, national security is increasingly a project of securing supranational systems. The maritime border has been a critical site for experimentation, and a spate of new policy is blurring "inside" and "outside" national space, reconfiguring border security, and reorganizing citizenship and labor rights. These programs seek to govern integrated economic space while they resurrect borders and sanction new forms of containment. Forces that disrupt commodity flows are cast as security threats with labor actions a key target of policy. Direct connections result between market rule created to secure logistic space and the broader project of neoliberalism. Even as neoliberalism is credited with expanding capitalist markets and market logics, it is logistics that have put the cold calculation of cost at the center of the production of space. Since World War II, logistics experts have conceptualized economy anew by spatializing cost-benefit analysis and applying systems analysis to distribution networks. The "revolution in logistics" has changed how space is conceived and represented, and transformed the practical management of supply chains. Historically a military technology of war and colonialism abroad, today logistics lead rather than support the strategies of firms and the security of nations across transnational space. These shifts have implications for the geopolitics of borders and security but also for social and political forms premised on the territory and ontology of national space.