People in Nicaragua with a form of progressive renal failure called chronic kidney disease of non-traditional causes (CKDnt) talk in volumes about their condition. I don’t mean that they go on and on about their aches and pains. Most of the thousands of CKDnt patients in Nicaragua were sugarcane plantation workers until they got sick.

‍Sovereignty has long extended through the thermal world. The manipulation of heat fueled industrial production and transportation, expanding the reach of national and colonial forces. The labor of bodies has been managed through the deployment of food and the implicit regulation of metabolisms, as well as the mass thermal communications of air conditioning. The boundaries of cities, nations, and empires have been enforced through thermal violence, whether the dumping of indigenous people on the frozen prairie or the blasting of prisoners with water cannons in subzero temperatures.

One winter morning red dust spiraled from the surface of a broken road. It rapidly gathered volume as a convoy of border-patrol jeeps whizzed past India’s newly constructed border wall with Bangladesh. This infrastructure encloses significant stretches of the 2545-mile-long India-Bangladesh border, South Asia’s longest international boundary. Unlike the rusty fences and fence-like structures that had earlier divided this landscape, the new barrier was distinguished by furiously coiled barbed wires that were placed between angular iron frames.

On the 7th of October 2018, without warning, a sinkhole opened under a busy footpath in Dazhou City in south-west China. Four people fell in and were killed, only two bodies were retrieved. Three weeks later, CCTV footage in south-east Turkey captured an image of two women falling into a sinkhole that opened underneath them. Miraculously, they both survived without any serious injuries.

Despite enfolding several Indian battalions within its hills, the border town of Uri had none of the buzz that I imagined would characterize the “garrison-entrepot” (Roitman 1998). Until the recent release of a Bollywood military-action film titled Uri:The Surgical Strike, the name Uri did not command the kind of patriotic charge associated with places like Kargil or Siachen, symbols of heroic confrontation with Pakistan in the war-map of Kashmir.