Wacquant & Gramsci in Eastern Crete: Land conflict, stigma, and territorial ‘common sense’

This paper aims to bring literature on stigma in conversation with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and to examine the production of territorial stigmatisation beyond the urban sphere, in a local context of socio-spatial struggle for land. I draw on a rich urban geographical scholarship on territorial stigma to examine how regional taint, built around institutional abandonment and the construct of ‘remoteness’, is mobilised to help legitimise and impose large-scale energy and tourism investments as a form of territorial ‘common sense’ in Eastern Crete’s area of Sitia. The paper aims to contribute to the rich body of literature on territorial stigmatisation twofold: by examining the analytical usefulness of the concept to the study of the marginalisation of peripheral regions and the subsequent neoliberal drive for their ‘re-development’ at all costs; and, drawing on Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, by taking a close, critical sociological look at the production and internalisation of stigma within a local context of socio-spatial conflict and struggle.