Driven by the momentous political and economic changes of the past decade and by the resurgence of popular resistance against globalization, the question of global supply chains has come back with a vengeance. Nearly two decades after the optimism around globalization fizzled out, the imperative of circulation remains so deeply ingrained in our world that it is almost invisible.

This paper brings together recent geographical writing on logistics with discussions of margins as paradoxical sites of inclusive exclusion. Building on fieldwork on the docks of Freetown, Sierra Leone – a port that experts in logistics problematize as a ‘contaminated’ place within the global shipping community – this contribution shows that seaports at global margins are in fact at the centre of key projects of global circulation.

Examining the conduits of production and circulation that link the extraction of copper in Chile to its storage and use in China, this article explores the political dimensions of the logistical techniques and technologies that enable these processes.

The city as sanctuary is an ancient concept. As a modern practice in North America and Europe, it has entailed refuge for subjects rendered illegal and placeless by the state, be it asylum-seekers or undocumented immigrants.

This article leverages the concepts of “earmarking” and “pressure” to analyze the space within containers as socially produced rather than arithmetically defined. The analysis draws upon an ethnographic study of container freight from China to Africa.

This article explores and analyzes a form of subversive logistics: the use of trained Asian elephants in the mobilization of cargo and people. The article aims to help theorize the connection between mobility and political subversion, highlighting how landscapes which do not lend themselves to permanent transport infrastructure—and thus the presence of the state—are simultaneously places of potential resistance.

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In this paper, I draw attention to the ever conflicting and contingent nature of infrastructure building through an ethnographic account of the land conflicts present in an ongoing road project in the Colombian region of Putumayo.

Based on an ongoing mapping of roadblocks in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Central African Republic, this article sketches a political geography of “roadblock politics”: a spatial pattern of control concentrated around trade routes, where the capacity to disrupt logistical aspirations is translated into other forms of power, financial and political.

This paper places an empirical focus on logistics to link three strands of inquiry: Ghana’s deep-water oil economy, the built environment of Ghana’s oil-city of Takoradi, and the character of governance at their confluence.