Henry McLaughlin
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
An enclave is a territory, be it political, economic, social, ethnic, cultural, or some combination, surrounded by another distinct territory. This is not to be confused with an exclave, a territory geographically separate from but ‘belonging to’ a central territory. However, exclaves can also be enclaves; for example, between 1949 and 1990 West Berlin was both a political enclave within East Germany and an exclave of West Germany. Subnational economic and urban enclaves have become increasingly relevant in contemporary capitalism and globalization as they provide spaces for reterritorialization, deregulation, racial and socio-economic segregation, financial secrecy, ecological privilege, a ‘fascistic locality’ (Hardt and Negri 2000, 362), and erosion of the public sphere.
Enclaves come in numerous forms. Among sovereign states, Lesotho, San Marino, and Vatican City are enclaves. States such as the Gambia (surrounded by Senegal), or subnational municipalities such as the Spanish cities of Ceuta and Melilla (surrounded by Morocco) on the Mediterranean coast and the US state of Alaska, are within another territory apart from a coastal border, and are therefore considered partial enclaves. Other types include embassies and military bases like the many American “enclaves” scattered across the world, special security zones like the fortified international “green zone” in Baghdad, and post-Soviet “closed cities” which host secretive military research. Many enclaves are open and exist without conflict, like the village enclaves on the Belgian-Dutch border. The status of some, however, are violently disputed, like the majority Armenian Nagorno-Karabakh enclave in Azerbaijan. The latter is an example of a political and ethnic enclave, but there are of course ethnic enclaves which are not inherently political (one only has to look at an ethnic map of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or the Middle East, to see the ill-fated task of dividing political borders around ethnic enclaves). Ethnic enclaves contain a high concentration of an ethnic group compared to surrounding areas, for example “Chinatowns” in American cities. These enclaves work to strengthen social capital and often form networks with each other, but remain part of their surrounding municipal territory.
While political and ethnic enclaves are important for political-economic analyses in terms of capital flows and social capital theory, economic and urban enclaves are more overtly relevant here. On enclaving in the context of globalization, Matthew Sparke writes
The projects and landscapes involved range in spatial scale from large transnational regions and special economic zones, to sub-national resource-extraction enclaves, to business improvement districts within cities and towns, to self-contained tourism resorts such as Disneyland and cruise ships, to personal strategies of self-securitization that range from buying weapons and fortified deadbolts to investment in such mobile enclaves as SUVs, yachts, and for the most mobile yet enclaved of all, private executive jets. (2013, 313)
Enclaves throw a wrench in the narrative of a borderless, deterritorialized world as they reterritorialize at many levels. Economic enclaves such as special economic zones (SEZs), or free trade zones, are especially prevalent in burgeoning East and South East Asian cities (not to be confused with former concession enclaves like Hong Kong and Macau). According to Sparke, they “represent especially opportunistic economic efforts to fix global capital in local space through political exceptionalism,” (314-5). SEZs attract both “peasant farmers who have lost their farmlands as much as to economists who have lost faith in traditional governments” (316). These enclaves both consolidate labor, they keep workers inside, and keep institutional regulatory barriers outside. This is evident in the very architecture of SEZs, which are often demarcated by the same security apparatuses which guard the military enclaves mentioned above and the urban enclaves discussed below.
Continuing on the macro-level, some scholars believe that enclaves precipitate new analyses of globalization. James Sidaway, for instance, writes that in a break from “prior meta-geographical demarcations; the categories such as ‘Developed’ and ‘Third World’… have shattered and re-converged around enclaves” (2007, 336). What we recognize as uneven development is “increasingly expressed in enclave spaces… being governed by a range of legal norms and bounded in an array of formal and informal means that frequently cut-across established state boundaries” (Sidaway 2007, 322). Sidaway cites a range of examples: mineral enclave economies in sub-Saharan Africa, export processing zones in East Asia, and the international (western) enclaves in the financial Gulf State cities. Dubai, for example, has a “constellation” of expatriate compounds, wealthy urban villas, fortified shopping malls, and migrant worker quarters back to back with different types of sovereignty for each. The creation of a financial and tech hub allows its rulers to formally compartmentalize modern or “open” “Western business culture and recreational decadence” and traditional “lineage-based power and Islamic law” into separate geographic spaces (335). To say that the UAE, or any country for that matter, might be too crude of a statement when development appears through an enclaved patchwork.
In contrast to the “open” neoliberal discourse surrounding formal economic enclaves, wealthy urban enclaves are often “closed” out of fear, the desire to exclude, and to enhance social prestige. Just as the economic enclaves “are predicated on efforts to exclude and/or suspend the rights of others” (Sparke 2013, 314), “Urban enclaving has also been marked by similarly stark divisions between the privileged spaces of class-advantaged citizenship and the dangerous and dispossessed margins of sub-citizenship” (323). Urban enclaves have become more prevalent in cities with the loss of industry, the movement of finance to city centers, and increased crime rates in the last forty years. According to Teresa Caldeira,
all types of fortified enclaves share some basic characteristics. They are private property for collective use; they are physically isolated, either by walls or empty spaces or other design devices; they are turned inward and not to the street; and they are controlled by armed guards and security systems that enforce rules of inclusion and exclusion… they possess all that is needed within a private and autonomous space and can be situated almost anywhere, independent of the surroundings. In fact, most of them have been placed in the old periphery and have as their neighbors either favelas or concentrations of autoconstructed houses. (1998, 119)
Caldeira implies that these enclaves emerge dialectically with peripheral slums. Enclaves “appeal to those who are abandoning the traditional public sphere of the streets to the poor, the ‘marginal,’ and the homeless” (114). Furthermore, urban enclaves are visually indistinguishable from their military and economic counterparts. When building these “High tech castles,” as Mike Davis calls them, “Residential architects are borrowing design secrets from overseas embassies and military command posts” (1992, 248). Peter Marcuse, for one, defines these spaces as “citadels,” distinct from pure enclaves. Both are “spatially concentrated areas [with]…members of a particular population group” (1997, 314). However, whereas the enclave self defines “by ethnicity or religion or otherwise, [and] congregate[s] as a means of enhancing… economic, social, political, and/or cultural development,” the citadel is “distinctively post Fordist” (313) and is “defined by its position of superiority in power, wealth, or status in relation to its neighbors, [and] congregate[s] as a means of protecting or enhancing that position” (314).
Urban enclaves are not necessarily physical “fortresses” or “citadels.” There are other ways of protecting and enhancing their position. Marcuse writes that “social patterns and even legal restrictions may be in place that define those areas of concentration as sharply as if there were physical walls” (320). Davis concurs, citing “luxury enclaves like Beverly Hills and San Marino” which restrict “access to their public facilities, using baroque layers of regulations to build invisible walls. San Marino [California], which may be the richest, now closes its parks on weekends to exclude Latino and Asian families from adjacent communities” (246). The urban enclave, like its economic counterpart, develops through both physical and legal infrastructure. Locating a fusion of economic and urban enclaves marked, Sparke writes that residents of “Business Improvement Districts” (BIDs) “can join anti-tax revolts with impunity, and they can support politicians who campaign for ‘smaller government’ and other neoliberal reforms without worrying that this will diminish their own special services. BIDs therefore also represent a political and economic bid to entrench neoliberal norms of citizenship in urban space” (327). BIDs do not require physical infrastructure to “entrench neoliberal norms of citizenship” and create their enclave space.
Economic and urban enclaves enhance political and economic exclusivity, and in doing so erode the public sphere. The goal of these enclaves is “to segregate and to change the character of public life by bringing to private spaces constructed as socially homogeneous environments those activities that had been previously enacted in public spaces” (Calderia 1998, 129). For example, “When planning and development lead to the conversion of office space to residential space in the financial district of Manhattan, the result is a further separation of those working there, now living there also, from the rest of the city” (Marcuse 1997, 319). Beyond zoning, practices like parking permits, checkpoints, and internal passport control might precede the construction of actual walls, but all seek to move public activities into the private. In Empire (2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri also identify this phenomenon:
The urban landscape is shifting from the modern focus on the common square and the public encounter to the closed spaces of malls, freeways, and gated communities… it no longer makes sense to understand social organization in terms of a dialectic between private and public spaces, between inside and outside. The place of modern liberal politics has disappeared, and thus from this perspective our postmodern and imperial society is characterized by a deficit of the political. In effect, the place of politics has been de-actualized. (2000, 188)
Furthermore, the assumption that a fortified enclave or gated community is inherently a local phenomenon, or has some claim to local nature, is misplaced. Sparke writes that “gated communities nevertheless remain worldly in their own way, frequently referencing one another in attempts to normalize the landscapes of neoliberal privilege” (323). Inside the urban enclave, it is difficult to tell exactly where one is in relation to the outside world, only that one is in the spectacle of a global enclave.
Following this, we can add the emergence of an “ecological enclave.” Steve Vanderheiden uses the term “eco-fortress” to describe a mentality towards climate change “characterized by a desire to maintain exclusive control over scarce resources at the expense of the disadvantaged” (2020, 20). It “prioritizes sustainability within one’s own territory above competing ideals like justice and democracy that it practically sets those aside, rather than seeking any kind of balance” (24). Vanderheiden is speaking philosophically, but the “eco-fortress” can also describe a literal type of enclave. For example, many coastal homes in Southern California are surrounded by fortress-like seawalls which literally erode public space, beaches in the public trust, and keep public crises (climate change) out of sight and out of mind. In The Slums of Aspen (2013) Lisa Sun-Hee Park and David N. Pellow describe an eco-enclave of wealthy and ostensibly liberal, environmentally-minded residents in Aspen, Colorado and the peripheral migrant laborers crucial to the city’s economy. There is a growing link between environmentalism, immigration reform, nationalism, and enclaves where
people who construct themselves as the rightful inhabitants or owners of ecological systems and resources exclude others from gaining access to those spaces… some people ‘naturally’ belong… while others naturally do not belong… a new twist on the ‘old’ racism associated with biological differences; it just comes wrapped in a green package. (Park and Pellow 2013, 203)
The eco-enclave might appear as a special garden community, or an ark to outlast climate change, but it often masks old racist tropes.
Finally, offshore “enclaves” lack a clear inside-outside dynamic, but have a crucial role in the global political economy. Oceanic enclaves are surrounded by international waters, and include private islands, tax havens, mobile superyachts, and the Silicon Valley dream of cities at sea. Milton Friedman’s grandson, Patri Friedman, together with libertarian venture capitalist Peter Thiel have founded the Seasteading Institute, which envisions future cities in international waters and a unique seazone in French Polynesia. According to Liam Campling and Alejandro Colas, as both “an actual place and a legal fiction, the offshore world is characterised by exception and exemption: from the laws, regulations and oversight that obtain ‘onshore’ (be that geographical mainland or a legal body of norms and conventions)” (Campling and Colas 2021, 268). The offshore world is seemingly a space for both financial secrecy and futuristic, utopian projects free from politics. However, like their terrestrial counterparts, oceanic enclaves recreate new political sovereignties and “the security of being firmly plugged into the legal, financial and communication networks of global capital” (277). These enclaves become not just a place of separation or deterritorialization, but the recreation of landed enclaves at sea, a reterritorialization.
(See De/Reterritorialization, Enclosure, Geopolitics, Nature, Underdevelopment)
Bibliography
Caldeira, Teresa. “Fortified Enclaves: The New Urban Segregation.” Chapter. In Cities and Citizenship, edited by James Holston, 114–38. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998.
Campling, Liam, and Alejandro Colas. “Offshore.” Chapter. In Capitalism and the Sea: The Maritime Factor in the Making of the Modern World, 267–310. London: Verso Books, 2021.
Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Vintage Books, 1992.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Marcuse, Peter. “The Ghetto of Exclusion and the Fortified Enclave: New Patterns in the United States.” American Behavioral Scientist 41, no. 3 (1997): 311–26.
Park, Lisa Sun-Hee, and David N. Pellow. The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2013.
Sidaway, James D. “Enclave Space: a New Metageography of Development?” Area 39, no. 3 (2007): 331–39. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2007.00757.x.
Sparke, Matthew. Introducing Globalization: Ties, Tensions, and Uneven Integration. Wiley Blackwell, 2013.
Vanderheiden, Steve. Environmental Political Theory. Polity Press, 2020.