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.
Working predominantly in the area north of Johannesberg and the region south of Jerusalem, Clarno investigates the security apparatuses of South Africa and Palestine/Israel through interviews with security officials, poor racialized people, and those who straddle both categories as laborers employed by the security system to police their own communities. This work makes important contributions to conversations about political economies of race and racism, anthropologies of the state, counterinsurgency and security studies.
On the 24th of May 2010, Private Chelsea E. Manning was arrested by the United States government on suspicion of leaking classified military material to WikiLeaks. Manning was an intelligence analyst within the US army, and in 2009 was deployed to Iraq where she had access to classified military databases. We explore two types of data: the data leaked by Manning and released by Wikileaks, and the material of her subsequent court-martial released through Freedom Of Information (FOIA) requests.
In "Geopolitics of Knowledge-based Economy", political geographer Sami Moisio embarks on an analysis of the current geopolitical condition. The book is compact and complex: in 182 pages Geopolitics of the Knowledge-based Economy presents a compelling interpretation on how space, economy and politics intertwine in the early 21st Century, and how a particular economic imaginary has become central in exercising social power through manipulating expectations on the future.
Berda argues that the permit regime in the West Bank is a sophisticated apparatus aimed at the racial management of movement in a settler colonial context. As such, the permit regime serves as a means of controlling and monitoring the Palestinian population through security classifications.
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.”