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.
In this book, Haesbaert questions the idea of deterritorialization advanced by Arjun Appadurai, Manuel Castells, Bertrand Badie and Paul Virilio in the 1990s. According to these scholars the intensification of mobility (in terms of individuals, goods, and financial flows) and the development of digital technologies would challenge the bond between societies and their territories.
Despite the lack of clear intervention by Western governments in the Egyptian crisis and the Syrian conflict, recent weeks have witnessed noticeable steps from some international actors towards Lebanon—a country that the UK government, among others, thinks is dangerously about to be engulfed by the ongoing conflict in Syria.
Cary Wolfe’s "Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in A Biopolitical Frame" is a novel and timely book that challenges the anthropocentric register of mainstream biopolitics. It is an ambitious and generative interweaving of research, ranging from legal theorisations of animal ‘rights’ to neurophysiological accounts of behavioural plasticity.
Part textbook, and part a more fundamental attempt to analyze a number of philosophical and political issues that surround modern security studies, this book begins with an etymological description of the word "catastrophe" as a "reversal of what is expected" or "an overturning." In "Politics of Catastrophe", Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster aim to demonstrate how catastrophes—whether climate change, terrorism, or health outbreaks—shape security and governance practices.
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.”