Abstract
Informed by the theoretical and empirical considerations discussed earlier in the book, the final chapter revisits the claim that frontier making has always been fundamental for the circulation and accumulation of capital. The centrality of frontiers is not only due to the demand for minerals, land or other resources, or because frontiers represent fresh market opportunities, but also crucially because it operates as compensation for the saturation of the existing capitalist relations in core areas. At the frontier, the conventional sequence of time and space is suspended and reconfigured, allowing room for the decompression of tensions and contradictions. Consequently, spatial frontiers function as a mirror, where the most bare and explicit features of capitalism are vividly exposed. The final pages examine the meaning and immanence of spatial frontiers, considering them as a laboratory of the historical and geographical agency. It is an invitation for further work and a critical reflection upon the necessity, the configuration and the contestation of spatial frontiers, paying particular attention to the economic and territorial incorporation of the Amazon region and the prospects of political resistance.
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Notes
- 1.
And even beyond the Earth, as there have been serious attempts to bring capitalist relations to outer space, bypassing the 1967 international treaty, in order to mine asteroids and other planets (The Guardian 2015).
- 2.
In his study on territorial conquest and European border disputes, Namier (1942: 69–70) perspicaciously observed that: “One would expect people to remember the past and to imagine the future. But in fact, when discussing or writing about history, they imagine it in terms of their own experience, and when trying to gauge the future they cite supposed analogies from the past: till, by a double process of repetition, they imagine the past and remember the future”.
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Ioris, A.A.R. (2020). Conclusion: Lessons Learned to Expand Frontier Theory. In: Frontier Making in the Amazon. Key Challenges in Geography. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38524-8_9
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