A curation of articles, essays, book reviews and interviews on critical geographical concerns.
Interrogates the spatial dimensions of state power. Contributions analyze the material practices and modes of knowledge particular to anti-statist revolt, citizenship, bordering, interstate conflict, nationalism, political representation, segregation, sovereignty, surveillance, and warcraft among other areas. Especially attentive to demands for alternative forms of political life outside formal state channels.
The large number of recent events and primary sources discussed by Massumi in fact allow for his book to be read as a work of contemporary history just as much as one of philosophy. This immense analytical depth alone will make Ontopower impossible to ignore for scholars on the field of critical theory interested in the "war on terror."
The 2003 Tribunal Agreement may be considered an earlier starting point for the ECCC. This Agreement, many years in the negotiating, was signed between the United Nations and Cambodia at the Chaktomuk Theatre in Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. As I discuss in my paper, "Ordinary Theatre and Extraordinary Law at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal," the choice of location was from far from coincidental on the part of the Cambodian government.
In "Digging for the Disappeared", Adam Rosenblatt examines the work of forensic anthropology teams in the context of criminal and humanitarian investigations of mass killings. His stated goal is to relate and scrutinize the politics and ethics of the forensic investigation of mass graves.
Published with the innovative “Interventions” series at Routledge, Minca and Rowan set out to present Carl Schmitt not primarily as a philosopher or legal scholar—but as a spatial thinker. They argue that space is more than just a conceptual theme that Schmitt developed in the later stages of his career, but a crucial interpretive key to Schmitt’s entire oeuvre.
In his "Israel and Africa: A Geneaology of Moral Geography", Haim Yacobi complicates this picture by cataloging and examining the ways that Israel constructed itself as state space and as a nation against an external world and against “Africa” in particular. By recording a multitude of practices, from architecture to foreign aid to art exhibitions to the arms trade, Yacobi argues that the geopolitical concept of Africa is one of the lenses through which Israel reproduces its internal racial and ethnic boundaries and spaces.
Attending to the experiences of Hawai‘i’s houseless, I unpack the meanings and practices of organized abandonment while proposing that some face structural neglect by “living with abandon.” I argue that the rupturing of life-giving relations entwined with particular places serve as a foundation of organized abandonment.
In reflecting on the current Cuban economic, social and humanitarian crisis, I aim at catching the pulse of the moment to shift the crisis-based discourse to one based on pressure. I focus on two types of pressure – air and blood – to think through the pulse of the post-COVID Cuban crisis.
This article argues that the mobility of animal bodies is deployed to produce a distinctive form of territorial imagination in China, one which foregrounds the friction of terrain at certain sites, and conjures up state fantasies of interspecies relations as/and interethnic friendship. While much recent scholarly literature focusses on the collocation of infrastructure and state power, this article calls for attention to the ways in which states can also mobilize representations of selected sites of roadlessness, and concomitant animal-based mobilities.
Drawing from monster theory, the article reflects on the trans-corporeal body burdening of black plastic bags and the black hands, black bodies, black markets, and black, corrupt, illicit actions with whom and which they are associated. Reconceptualising the (black) single-use plastic bag as an agape, plastic monster that defines, patrols, and transgresses cultural/economic boundaries, this article calls for making explicit the vermicular activities within economic marginalisation and distinguishing them from the discursively constructed amorphous, tentacled mass.
Through a contemporary history of social conflicts surrounding the Corredor, I demonstrate how corporate and State actors work together to make corporations appear as if they were independent from the social contexts in which they operate and therefore free from responsibility for the harms they cause. Following Timothy Mitchell, I call this the “corporate effect.”