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.
Hope alone is no answer. Indeed, given hope’s ambiguous relation to despair, fear, and suffering, it seems crazy to desire hope. At risk with the desire for hope is not only our capacity to imagine a world beyond human vulnerability, but also our capacity to bring the future forth.
The time we inhabit—the Anthropocene—poses an unprecedented challenge: the collapse of our metaphysical grounds and the grounds of the earth itself.1 How do we actually think this present, in all its nihilism, catastrophe, mania, and potential? "The Neoliberal Subject", a new book by political theorists David Chandler and Julian Reid, offers two somewhat complementary possibilities for doing so.
In a series of paintings called “Dronescapes,” Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox depicts the iconic figure of the Predator drone against a backdrop of aerial landscapes. In blues and reds, the sky forms a space—a kind of abstract landscape—that the drone traverses, shapes, and occupies.
The recently published volume entitled Agamben and Radical Politics, masterfully edited by Daniel McLoughlin, confronts and engages with such polemics against Agamben’s work, bringing his thought into conversation with various Marxist and post-Marxist strands of political theory and examining these connections with respect to a number of crucial themes central to this revolutionary tradition: history, production, the community, the status of property and the relation between theory and praxis.
Recent scholarship in anarchist geographies has shown the limitations of the state as the privileged analytical framework for political geographies and geopolitics, and the potential openings of giving up statist categories in a geographical understanding of the world (Ince and Barrera de la Torre, 2016). I would argue that Rojava should be considered as a major case for this research agenda and that this book is a stimulating starting point to reflect over non-statist solutions for this region and beyond.
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.”