Maritime Port Geographies: Materiality, Labour, and Statecraft in Global Crisis Context

Abstract

This paper surveys geographical research on ports, and traces three emerging directions: materiality, maritime labour, and statecraft. Amidst the rescaling of global value chains, the fragmentation of production, the rise of cargo-mobilities and accompanying labour regimes, researchers have emphasised containerisation, the rise of logistical systems, and the power of lead shipping firms in driving port interchangeability. Yet, multiple crises and challenges—climate change, pandemic disruptions, decarbonisation, geopolitical conflict, trade wars—impact both global shipping and the ports that sustain global capitalism. Furthermore, such crises widen the scope of research beyond the archetypal container port: to heterogeneous, mixed commodity ‘dirty’ ports of varying sizes and degrees of specialisation. In surveying the literature on maritime ports facilitating circulations of diverse materials and commodities, themes of materiality, maritime labour, and statecraft highlight the different, evolving roles played by ports in a crisis-ridden context. Not merely interchangeable nodes in speeded-up flows, ports are variously environmentally risky places; strategic sites for distributing the heterogeneous materials needed for decarbonisation and globalised production; spaces of regulation, enforcement and conflict; and infrastructural projections of state power—bargaining chips in geopolitical deal-making. Geographers are well-positioned to contribute distinctive insights into how diverse commodities, capital, and people are made to circulate through maritime ports to places beyond, and with what effects.