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In this article we argue that the EU suffers from autoimmunity: a self-harming protection strategy. Drawing on Derrida's political understanding of autoimmunity, we contend that the root of this malfunction lies in the EU's own b/ordering and othering policies, which are intended to immunise the foundational ethos of the EU. For this purpose, we dissect the EU border regime into three linked b/ordering mechanisms: the pre-borders of paper documents that regulate from afar the mobility of the people from visa-obliged countries; the actual land borders often consisting of iron gates and fences regulating mobility on the spot; and the post-border in the form of waiting/detention camps that segregate and enclose the undocumented migrants after entry. We make clear how this discriminatory b/ordering and othering regime has led to a recurrent drawing of ever less porous, inhumane and deadlier borders. Such thanatopolitics finds itself at odds with the humanist values that the EU is supposed to uphold, particularly cross-border solidarity, openness, non-discrimination and human rights. We argue that the EU b/ordering regime has turned fear of the non-EUropean into an increasingly unquestioned – even 'commonsensical' – anxiety that has become politically profitable to exploit by extreme nationalistic and EUrosceptic parties. The core of the EU's autoimmunity that we want to expose lies within this irony: in its attempt to protect what it considers meaningful, the EU has unleashed an autoimmune disorder that has turned the EU into its own most formidable threat. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the special section on "Engaging Geopolitics through the Lens of the Intimate", we first locate the papers collected here in the context of developing an "Intimate Geopolitics" project at the University of Manchester. We then review the importance of 'intimacy' and the concept of 'the intimate' across an array of disciplinary studies, drawing especially on the rich body of work by critical geopolitics scholars who have long challenged categorical binaries and territorial boundaries. Our focus here is exploring what insights we can bring to understanding the nexus of intimacy and global politics by deploying the lens of the intimate--understood as a variety of processes of attachment and relationality--in six globally dispersed case studies. Collectively, the papers presented here not only engage a wide range of issues and locations, but also contribute to research engaging geographically specific contexts and practices. We note that the papers 'cluster' around issues of migration, borders, 'home', asylum and visa regimes, prompting us to suggest that the papers productively inform three foci of inquiry. Specifically, the papers 1) enrich our understanding of bordercrossing beyond simple association of this with the movement of people, things and ideas; 2) deepen our understanding of how geopolitics is constituted by forms of attachments and relationality that are integral to forms of governance; and 3) help us explore how attachments are not simply additive but productive of geopolitical concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to critical and popular geopolitics by exploring the production of BBC Radio 4’s reportage on Europe’s migration ‘crisis’. It draws on original interviews conducted with journalists, producers, editors, and senior commissioners at the BBC to uncover the thought-processes and practices that lie behind its diverse coverage. The paper identifies the professional codes that govern BBC journalists and documents the strategies of storytelling journalists employ to try and secure listener engagement and spark their geographical imaginations. It highlights the power and agency of journalists to construct geopolitical scripts on migration, but also points to creative room for journalists to inflect broadcasts with personal styles of witnessing and reporting. The journalists interviewed emerge as thoughtful and self-reflexive geopolitical ‘agents’ who are aware of their representational power and recognise the tension between objective and impartial BBC reportage and critical issues of emotion, positionality, and situated knowledge. Overall, the paper answers calls for more ‘peopled’ accounts of geopolitics and highlights the importance of investigating the production and practice of journalistic storytelling. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the factors influencing the relocation of EUR-denominated clearing services back to EU central counterparties (CCPs) by the European Commission. It adopts a novel security-centred approach to analyse this decision within the context of a fragmented geopolitical arena marked by uneven development in financial centres. Using the theory of Geopolitical Economy (GPE), this paper examines the implications and risks associated with financial dependencies and the pursuit of autonomy in the global financial landscape. It specifically addresses the risks posed by the dominance of UK CCPs, such as London Clearing House (LCH), in EUR-denominated clearing services and emphasises the EU’s need to bolster its financial autonomy and stability, mitigating these intricate risks in this process. Through this analysis, the paper contributes to the existing literature by offering a novel understanding of the geopolitical-economic factors influencing regulatory actions within financial services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic literature on the trade-labour linkage has tended to operate within a methodological nationalism that reifies the nation-state as the unit of analysis and treats labour rights as universally applicable. This paper instead starts from the premise that the linkage spotlights certain types of work and worker, resulting in geographically differentiated modes of labour governance. Focusing on the post-Brexit reconstitution of trade policy in the UK and its party political discourse, the paper details how labour provisions were written into free trade agreements, export finance arrangements, supply chain reporting requirements and unilateral preference schemes. Its argument is that these were constructed and contested through distinctions made between leading and laggard states; acceptable and unacceptable exploitation; and desirable and undesirable exploitation – each of which had a spatial politics in shaping where and how labour ought to be governed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether addressing violent ethno-nationalism, xenophobic bigotry, or religious intolerance, scholars and educators invoke cosmopolitan notions of a shared planet and common humanity as a means of rising above difference. Cosmopolitanism as an ethical and political orientation places an imperative on seeking out, welcoming, and learning from cultural others. As such, cosmopolitanism involves a process of reducing the social and physical proximity between 'them' and 'us' carried out in the belief in shared commonalities held by a universal 'we.' However, a priori assumptions about who and what constitutes that 'we' at the heart of cosmopolitanism are necessarily partial, situated, and subjective. In this special section, authors consider the tensions, paradoxes, and potentials of cosmopolitanism in diverse settings and from diverse perspectives. Specifically, these papers examine the formation of youthful, cosmopolitan subjectivities and youth involvement in the creation of cosmopolitan spaces, from South-South global volunteering and international missionary trips to the anti-nationalist hip-hop scene in Sarajevo and efforts to enact a civic cosmopolitanism in Beirut. Situated in post-colonial and post-conflict contexts and centering the political subjectivities of young people and their hopeful efforts to bring about a better world, these papers examine the spatial-temporal politics of cosmopolitanism and the tension inherent in creating necessarily bounded spaces grounded in cosmopolitan openness. This introduction frames this examination of grounded and contested cosmopolitanisms as an immanent process of world-building guided by a transcendent worldviews. This framing emphasizes cosmopolitanism as a universal moral outlook and the need to create caring pluriversal worlds capable of accommodating multiple worldviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bringing together literatures on play, (video) games, and alter(native) geopolitics this paper explores how digital games offer playful encounters that challenge popular understandings of geopolitics. While geographical scholarship has exposed the ways video games promote geopolitical and militaristic cultures, this paper concentrates on the disruptive qualities of play. More specifically, the paper focuses on This War of Mine (2014), a game which fosters playful encounters that encourage the player to reflect on the everyday consequences of conflict in urban spaces and their civilian populations. Drawing on an analysis of player reviews of the game, this paper demonstrates how play shapes imaginaries of the geopolitical context(s) of urban conflict and stimulates players to reflect on their attitudes towards violence. In doing so, the paper critically demonstrates how digital games offer important cultural outlets in encountering alternative understandings of geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through an investigation of authoritarian encounters in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, this paper takes seriously the challenges of making geopolitical sense of contextualised micro moments. Working in a minor key, the paper offers three contributions. First, it advances a minor theory, micropolitical sensibility that interrogates the co-constitution of intimate and geopolitical scales. Second, it proposes a loose ethnographic framework to guide the analysis of ordinary moments, link them outside of the immediate, and make fuller sense of the geopolitical: rupture, digestion, connection, and representation. Third, it aspires to destabilise regional container thinking and Orientalising tendencies through a focus on authoritarian practices rather than authoritarian states. Overall, the paper foregrounds a minoritarian reading of the micro-dynamics of authoritarian encounter in order to enrich the conversation on the constitution of the geopolitical, while also offering an intimate and interconnected methodology that encourages critical, safe, and ethical research under authoritarian conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critiques the legitimisation of linear borders in mainstream international relations (IR) through a focus on postcolonial South Asia. It brings insights from political geography in conversation with IR, making three key arguments: 1. The knowledge production on bordering in postcolonial South Asia remains trapped within the cognitive confines of linear bordering 2. Problematising linear bordering can therefore lead to newer critical questions about partition/bordering in South Asia, such as: is there a way to delink democracy and political independence from linear and precisely defined territorial borders? 3. Linear bordering in South Asia has been constitutive of the identities it aimed to isolate. The paper builds its arguments from an IR perspective and relies on IR's treatment of borders, and scholarship on state formation and partition in postcolonial South Asia, to make its case. The paper understands linear borders as straight lines connecting a series of dots on a map in a way that one territory can only fall into one polity. This linear bordering was first attempted by colonial powers in Africa and then transported to other parts of the world. In South Asia, it produced reification of identities thus making divisions of territories appear as simple solutions to vastly complex challenges of identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines and theorises sociability–'the play-form of association'–in diplomatic settings. I highlight the workings of sociable interaction in diplomacy and I explain how we can better discern its broader role in bureaucratic processes. Empirically, I use virtual diplomacy during the COVID-19 pandemic to illustrate the difference that in-person sociability makes in diplomatic practice. The second half of the paper title references a comment by Michael Clauss, Germany's ambassador to the European Union. Asked about virtual diplomacy, Clauss said that Zoom diplomacy is '20% as effective' as the in-person kind. Conceptually, I use contemporary political geography and international relations as well as two thinkers of earlier decades–sociologists Georg Simmel and Erving Goffman–to theorise sociability. Methodologically, I advocate a more playful approach to sources in our study of professional practice. My objective is to prompt further study of sociability in bureaucratic settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the socio-economic and geopolitical outcomes associated with infrastructure development across multiple scales. Starting from the premise that planetary socio-technical transformations in this vein have distinctly national drivers, we focus on the urban agency of Chinese-led investment. The paper explores how different forms of infrastructural development generated by the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) affects transformations in the political and material fabric of cities and their host regions. We approach BRI-related infrastructural practice through three interconnected optics – discourse, instruments, and politics – so as to interrogate the articulation of projects linked to the BRI within the material site of the urban. Based on theorisations of infrastructure from an urban perspective and a critical review of literature on the BRI itself, we develop three illustrative case studies at different spatial scales and within different geographic contexts – in Pakistan, Central Europe and the UK. To examine the cases as well as their embeddedness in broader debates on the topic, we use a systematic review methodology relying on a wide variety of sources. We offer comparative and relational perspectives on the manner in which these relatively diverse cases demonstrate China's role as a global urban actor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper reviews the concept of ontological (in)security as an analytical tool to shed light on (dis)continuous narratives of selfhood engendered by geopolitics. It contributes to a growing body of empirically grounded research by addressing the necessity of a multi-dimensional understanding of individuals' senses of ontological (in)security. The paper is based on qualitative research conducted in Berlin with participants of various age groups and argues that ontological security and insecurity are negotiated through spatial and temporal means. It demonstrates that geopolitical caesuras, as powerful intergenerational geographical imaginations, function as time-space anchors of ontological (in)security. It further studies this multi-dimensionality by conceptualising temporal and spatial means of ontological (in)security and their relational interconnectedness to unsettle the binaries of global and local, and past and present. Finally, this paper recommends reconsidering the usage of ontological (in)security as an analytical tool to mobilise a feminist approach towards geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the break-up of Yugoslavia, Croatia and Serbia have emerged as nationalist states that serve the political interests of ethnic Croats and Serbs, respectively. Despite these regime shifts, historical communities of Croatian Serbs and Serbian Croats still remain within these states. This paper sheds light on the experiences of these minority groups who embody ideological threats to their regimes' nationalist goals. I argue that Serbs in Croatia are heavily marginalised by dominant political narratives that have cast them to bear the brunt of the state's post-war grievances. As a result, they experience institutional discrimination that limits their range of economic and social opportunities. Conversely, Croats in Serbia face less explicit prejudice, though post-war stigmas have pushed many to redefine their ethnic affiliations. Both minority groups are experiencing a steady population decline as the rise in nationalist rhetoric has dissolved their rootedness to these territories. This paper examines a majority-minority dynamic in the context of the literature on modern 'ethnocratic' states and presents a case study for how ethnic minorities navigate through social prejudices and find ways to negotiate access to participation in everyday society, given the structural exclusion from institutions they face as communities deemed hostile by their state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, several private and political cloud initiatives emerged in Europe. This paper demonstrates how the sociotechnical imaginaries of three European cloud projects reveal a performative coupling of innovation and political ideas of control, territoriality and sovereignty. I ascertain three elements of the concept of sociotechnical imaginaries (innovation, boundary making and material properties) guiding the empirical analysis. Taking technology in the making and its role in (geo)politics seriously, this paper shows how imaginaries shape and interact with current geostrategic and political developments in Europe. The analysis of Microsoft's cloud, Bundescloud and GAIA-X reveals that rising privacy and data security issues have been integrated into cloud imaginaries that traditionally highlight progress and innovation. More specifically, state actors and cloud providers link and sometimes merge allegedly opposing technological aspects of innovation and politicised ideas of control such as digital sovereignty. This shift constitutes a move towards erecting political borders and localising IT within a global infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When we think about European integration practices, we rarely consider how they may extend to outer space. Yet, a new global space race is in full swing, in which commercial and government actors worldwide are putting forward bold visions of human futures in outer space. Europe is at the cusp of deciding which role to play in this new Space Age, with the European rocket program Ariane being at the centre of many debates about the future of Europe in space. Controversies about the future of the jointly built and heavily subsidised rocket entangle questions of innovation, in/security, and geopolitical power constellations. This paper traces which kind of space futures are projected onto and realised through Ariane, how the current geopolitical dynamics in the accelerating New Space Age are co-constitutive of how European strategic autonomy is envisioned, and how these futures relate to ideals and tensions of European integration. Mobilising work in science and technology studies (STS) on sociotechnical imaginaries and insights from the emerging social studies of outer space (SSOS), the paper offers unique and timely insights into how future visions of space shape forms of European collaboration in the present and how, conversely, geopolitical relations on Earth shape how and by whom these futures are imagined. The empirical part builds on two years of fieldwork in the European space sector, including interviews and participant observation. It presents three vignettes that highlight different aspects of strategic autonomy. The vignettes concern (1) the broader geopolitical dimension of the European rocket programme, (2) the issue of dual-use and the blurring of boundaries between civilian and military innovation, and (3) European technopolitical integration and the question of power in changing actor configurations. It is argued that the current emphasis on strategic autonomy in the European context represents a significant transformation of the role of space for European (security) integration and direct response to both the commercialisation and the securitisation of space. Moreover, it is shown how the securitisation of (access to) outer space has become a vital force to spur innovation – channelling resources, marshalling funds, and creating political legitimacy, entangling political economies of innovation with geopolitical transformations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Energy security is among the top security concerns of the 21st century requiring technological answers. However, the technological innovations adopted often not only serve to ensure adequate energy access and stable flow of energy, but also foster specific visions of socio-economic and techno-political orders and security. This paper tweaks the analytical lens of sociotechnical imaginaries, in which desired futures are connected to social and technical elements in concrete cases by adding a focus on identity formation and ontological security to the analytical model. Zooming in on the Baltic Sea Region, the paper traces sociotechnical imaginaries tied to the desired future of energy sovereignty through coal and nuclear energy in Poland and the bright future of energy independence through a liquified natural gas terminal in Lithuania. Nationally embedded understandings of how (in)security can be managed through technological innovation and how the desired national energy visions can be attained in the process highlight the importance of ontological security concerns. In tracing those themes, the paper combines a historical view with developments since the mid-2010s in Polish and Lithuanian energy discourse and analyzes the mainstream energy security imaginaries as envisioned by political elites. The study draws on speeches of key political figures, official documents concerning energy planning as well as semi-structured interviews. The analysis highlights how the study of energy innovation in the Baltic Sea Region can contribute to the conversation between critical security studies and science and technology studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The integration of national security concerns in states’ treatment of international migration has become a prominent issue in recent years as global migration is regularly presented as a security threat to host countries. In this paper, we illuminate a number of patterns and determinants of political parties’ treatment of immigration as a security matter–the securitisation of migration–through the comparative study of a new data set of parties’ platforms in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States that spans seven decades. We distinguish between the salience of migration and of security in parties’ platforms and explore the effect of various migration-related domestic-level factors in accounting for both phenomena. Our empirical strategy to assess the extent to which political parties have presented, promoted, and framed the security concerns associated with migration is based on textual data from parties’ platforms. We report three findings. First, parties have increasingly mobilised migration in their platforms regardless of ideological or partisan commitments since the 1990s, and the number of refugees hosted by a country constitutes the primary migration-related explanatory factor for this fact. Second, we show that mainstream right-wing parties account for the increase in the securitisation of migration in parties’ platforms. Finally, among migration-related domestic factors, the number of refugees has (surprisingly) a negative impact on the securitisation of migration in platforms. Overall, this paper illuminates important patterns in how parties discursively link security and migration, and investigates the determinants of this widespread phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationalism remains a major influence on international relations in an increasingly globalised world. Many of the wars that erupted after the Cold War have their origins in ethnic tensions, border conflicts, or national aspirations. Given this, the geo-politicisation of nationalism deserves more attention in the literature. The current study aims to further the area by considering the role of territorial disputes in spawning various forms of nationalism and geopolitics. It develops an analytical framework based on the existing border dispute between Nepal and India in the 'Kalapani' region. Post-2019, the Kalapani dispute not only has represented bilateral border disputes between two entities but also reflects the overall geopolitics of the region. Similarly, it also represents the rise of 'nationalism' as a political anchor point in domestic politics in both India and Nepal. The paper based its assessment on the primary and secondary data analysis. Drawing on the data, this paper argues that border disputes between India and Nepal have two facets that signal the rising nationalism in both sides and the changing geopolitics of South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of China has shifted the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific region. China has tried to influence small island states that were previously under the spheres of influence of Australia and India by offering lucrative offers under its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Small states remain in a quandary about how to approach the evolving regional security paradigm. Using a realism-based perspective, this paper explores small state options through two case studies: Sri Lanka and Fiji and contributes to the scholarly literature by analysing and drawing conclusions about small state options and whether they can opt to return to their traditional relationships and partnerships. The paper draws some conclusions that contrast with some realist assumptions, including a defiance on the part of small island states, who under the right circumstances can upend the status quo in the pursuit of greater economic benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Germany's role in global geopolitics is being renegotiated within current debates about future security architecture, weapons technology capabilities, and the spatiality of future battlefields. This paper introduces a critical geopolitics of technological futures approach and analyses weapons technology discourses through poststructuralist discourse theory and scholarship on technological expectations. It investigates German security policy documents' construction of future threat scenarios, technological visions, battlefields, and the material-technological consequences associated with these futures. It identifies how the geopolitical scenario of 'Westlessness' discursively shifted after Russia's war in Ukraine. It also considers the socio-technical imagination of 'hyperwar', which justifies the development of artificial intelligence-based weapons technologies. Such socio-technical imaginations construct desirable weapons and influence geopolitical leitmotifs. In turn, geopolitical imaginaries affect expectations of future weapons technologies and legitimate the acquisition of specific technologies. Therefore, this paper offers an approach to examining geopolitical power-knowledge constructions in relation to (new) technologies of killing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the terminology of border infrastructures as a way to enrich a multi-perspectival approach to territorial bordering processes that takes seriously their stratifying and racialising dynamics. Building on the analysis of migrant informal dwellings, or ghettos, which are increasingly constructed as naturalised 'black spaces' in the Mediterranean, the paper's contribution is twofold. First, it calls for more situated research into the multiple networks, connections and agencies involved in bordering processes, which often comprise complex interactions across 'formal' and 'informal', 'human' and 'more-than-human' boundaries. Second, it proposes to foreground the socio-materiality of borders-as-infrastructures by analysing how these actively reproduce a logic of separation in both a political and an ecological sense. The article pushes forward a more immersive understanding and methodology that is able to unearth the stratifying, racialising dimensions of contemporary borderwork across and within the confines of nation-state territoriality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The globalisation of food and agricultural trade has brought issues of food safety and biosecurity to the centre of geopolitical research. This paper explores the relationship between food risks and sovereignty practices, a topic that has received relatively scant attention in the scholarship. Going beyond conventional conceptualisations of sovereignty as an external-legal notion that is delimited to the realm of 'high politics' in international relations, this paper points to how it is also expressed and negotiated in quotidian practices of food import and consumption, and how this has contributed to the politicisation of food safety. Focusing on the case of Taiwan, a de facto island state with contested sovereignty status, and comparing the food safety discourses that arose during the outbreaks of Mad Cow Disease and African Swine Fever, we argue that food risks provide opportunities for social and political actors to participate in the everyday construction of sovereignty. While the Taiwanese government's handling of the Mad Cow Disease shows it to be ultimately constrained by the geopolitical reality of fragile sovereignty, the outbreak of African Swine Fever enabled it to legitimise the securitisation of borders and bolster its legitimacy by staging collective defensive actions against perceived external risks. By drawing attention to how sovereignty is produced and performed through practice, this paper further advances recent discussions of sovereignty as a dynamic, social process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to enhance geopolitical understandings of hosting by exploring the practice of bringing guests – known or unknown – into a home. It starts with a recognition that whilst a growing body of geographical literature has explored the geopolitics of home, this has yet to be substantially brought into conversation with the practice of hosting. Grounded within our research on refugee hosting in the UK, and being hosted in Palestinian homestays we contend that an attention to a cultural geopolitics of hosting enriches geographical accounts of hosting. Our case studies muddy the cultural and political borders of both home and hosting and question the multiscalar and relational understandings of hospitality. A cultural geopolitics of hosting then, demonstrates how hosting intersects with dynamics of geopolitics and culture through and in the multiple spaces of home. This paper, shows how a braiding of literatures on home and hosting is productive for understandings of the geopolitics of home, and hospitality at the different scales of the political. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the turn of the millennium, development aid has become more and more entangled with border externalization policies by political entities, such as the European Union. Responding to the increased arrival of refugees in 2015, the European Union formed the Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF), earmarking 3.4 billion Euros to fight “the root causes of irregular migration”on the African Continent. Within the scope of the EUTF, Egypt receives major funds from the program. This paper examines the impact of recently introduced development and livelihood programs, as well as educational and vocational training for migrants and refugees in Egypt under the EUTF. Thereby it shows how the EU aims at transforming Egypt from a so-called transit state to a destination country. The paper further explores how these programs are reshaping the political, humanitarian, as well as migratory landscapes in Egypt, and how EUTF funds are transforming the development, as well the humanitarian sector in the country, beyond its impacts on transit migration stricto sensu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the story of a generous popular mobilisation that made possible a peculiar experience of transnational cooperation since the early 1970s. That is, the campaigns in solidarity with Mozambican anticolonial resistance that made the small town of Reggio Emilia (Italy) a key place in the processes of Lusophone Africa decolonisation, to the point that an often-told anecdote reports that many Mozambican people sympathetic with anti-colonialist organisation Frelimo believed that Reggio Emilia was the ‘capital’ of Italy. Indeed, it was mostly from the Emilian town that concrete aid arrived from Italy to Frelimo’s clandestine guerrilla bases between Tanzania and Northern Mozambique. Based on the exceptional archives surviving in Reggio, which abundantly document the Reggio-Africa solidarity experience showing that it was not limited to Mozambique, and on original interviews with surviving protagonists, this paper extends and connects for the first time literature on city diplomacy with scholarship on critical, subaltern and liminal geopolitics of decolonisation. I especially argue for giving more consideration to a ‘radical city diplomacy’, which provides examples for constructing geopolitical challenges form below to the state and the territorial models that have dominated mainstream geopolitics hitherto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social justice protests that began on 18 October 2019 in Chile were greeted enthusiastically around the globe. The mobilisation ‘woke up’ society and contributed to the collective drafting of a new constitution for the country. Building on ethnographic insights gathered in January–February 2020, this paper analyses forms of violence together with relations of care and solidarity that emerged within the mobilisation. It walks the reader through central Santiago de Chile and discusses the praxis of conducting research in a non-war conflict site, embedded in relations of claiming space (both figuratively and concretely) and creating practices that contribute to greater social justice. Simultaneously, they are enmeshed with manifold forms of violence that need to be addressed for peace to become possible. This paper seeks to contribute to debates on the entangled forms of everyday peace and violence, drawing on feminist research and connecting these with critical geographies of peace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using intimacy-geopolitics as its framework, this paper examines multi-sited violences enabled by digital technologies as interwoven forms of remote warfare. As political geographers have highlighted the ‘trickling down’ of digital weapons technologies from military to police practice, this analysis has tended to stop at the scale of the state. We extend this work by examining technology-enabled coercive control (TECC) within the context of domestic violence through the lens of remote warfare. TECC includes the way abusers use digital technologies to surveil, track, monitor, harass and terrorise their intimate partners. In examining TECC through the lens of remote warfare, this paper contributes to geographic literature by illustrating the common tools and tactics that the military, police and domestic violence abusers use to engage in political violence across sites and scales. We also emphasise the way survivors feel and experience TECC in order to illustrate the intimate emotional dynamics of political violence enabled by digital technologies. We argue that centring intimacy in this way helps to expose how control and domination work within remote warfare – at all scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a key contribution to emerging debates at the intersection of domestic geopolitics and critical military studies by focusing on how veterans and their families experience memory and the commemoration of war. Veterans of the Malvinas War in Santa Fe, Argentina, framed the ‘next generation’ – encompassing their daughters and sons – as central to sustaining memory of the 1982 war and interest in the contemporary geopolitics of the sovereignty dispute. It then presents the sometimes complex experiences and emotions of veterans’ family members in order to highlight the tensions bound up with remembering war, commemorative performances and the everyday geopolitics of the sovereignty dispute. The paper concludes by calling for a domestic geopolitics that engages the voices of veterans and other family members to enable sensitive analyses of the ways memory and the commemoration of war are lived, negotiated, (re)produced, evaded and even resisted through familial spaces and relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst heightened global power rivalries, the geopolitical aspects of the energy transition are taking centre stage, with even liberal-minded countries growing wary about foreign investment in the energy sector and the dependencies created by global value chains of green technologies. Building on current debates on the ‘geopoliticization’ of foreign economic policies, this paper sets out a conceptual framework to assess the extent to which the energy transition is becoming geopoliticized in the European Union (EU) and its impact on international energy relations. Theoretically, the paper makes the case for considering geopoliticization as a missing link in the study of politicization and securitization in International Relations, allowing for a more fine-grained diagnosis of current trends and their likely evolution. Empirically, the analysis identifies structural geopoliticizing dynamics in the EU’s framing of the energy transition, although to different degrees depending on the concrete issue at hand. While demands for factoring in the geopolitical consequences of the energy transition are ever louder, normatively, the paper raises a note of caution against the adverse consequences geopoliticization may have for the global transition to low-carbon energy systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we scrutinise the concept of ‘affective atmosphere’ at the Breitscheidplatz in Berlin, Germany. By unpacking key moments and elements in the Breitscheidplatz’s history, when measures of security and counterterrorism transformed, we investigate how the felt experience of city dwellers and users of the square altered. We argue that the concept of atmosphere, taking the affective dimension of urban life into account, offers an enriching layer of understanding the everyday life in European cities. By focusing on the spatial and affective securitisation that was implemented before and after the attack in 2016, this paper converges everyday urban geopolitics and the concept of affective atmospheres. Bringing together the engagement with experiences of everyday urban life and the atmospheric situation that security and counter-terrorism measure entail in European urban spaces. This paper approximates the felt experience and intangible elements with the help of sensory ethnographies. Shedding light on the aesthetic and sensorial paradoxes of securitisation and counterterrorism measures, hegemonic practices of affective politics and discriminatory spatial expulsion are unravelled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Latin America — the region with the biggest tropical forest on the planet and the largest potential for agricultural expansion — food security and food sovereignty are two competing approaches to food policies. Drawing on decolonial approaches to political geography, this paper provides a comparative analysis of food policies in the four countries (Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, and Bolivia) that make up the Andean Community of Nations (CAN), a supranational organisation that has enacted a regional food policy aimed at reconciling neoliberal and social orientations of its country-members. The paper contributes to the literature that highlights the multi-scalar nature of food security and food sovereignty by exploring the contentious building of food institutions from the grassroots to national and supranational scales in the Andean region. It also contributes to the critiques that highlight the limits to decolonization by explaining how – apart from hydrocarbon and mining dependence – food policies also express the permanence of coloniality in plurinational states. The paper argues that Andean supranational policies are apparent efforts to balance and harmonize the different interests at stake when actually reinforce a neocolonial sovereign state power that deepens the scalar tensions by intensifying the extractive transnational agriculture over pro-indigenous agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Each year thousands of people seeking better lives in Europe make the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean. Many of those struggling or stranded at sea are rescued by 'boat people' comprising NGOs, humanitarian organizations, coast guards and merchant vessels. Under maritime law there is a duty of care towards anyone that experiences difficulty at sea. There is, too, a duty of care by States who under the same law are required to assist ships and allow the disembarkation of those in danger. Yet this practice has important legal, ethical and practical implications and has been challenged by right-leaning political regimes who, making good on election promises to ease immigration, have prohibited such vessels to dock at their ports. This paper, using a case study approach of the humanitarian vessel the Aquarius, considers the ways in which the geographies of care intersect and collide with the geopolitical framing of migrants and refugees. In doing so the paper makes two important contributions. First, it extends conceptualizations of care geographies which are more typically applied to the spatial outworking of health and wellbeing to European migration. It thinks about how care is administered, contested and politicized. The complex concept of care offers a rich lens through which to critique the framing of seaborne migrants and refugees in Europe. Through giving or circumventing legal responsibilities to provide care, seaborne migrants are either humanized or dehumanized. Second, through unpacking the legislative and ethical frameworks shaping search and rescue (SAR) activities in the Mediterranean, we can observe a distinct 'geopoliticizing of care and responsibility' whereby these individuals become pawns in wider power dynamics within the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can the border be considered an epistemological starting point for the analysis of border theories and processes? Whether we look at Rumford's 'Seeing like a border', Mezzadra and Neilson's 'Border as Method', or at Mignolo's 'Border thinking', the answer seems to be a positive one. Similar in their way of employing a different gaze to look at and from the border, yet radically divergent in their methods and outcomes, each of these approaches has indeed provided a unique perspective on borders. However, I argue, a more critical analysis of such approaches reveals how they tend to (1) reproduce those epistemological distinctions that have cut across border studies in the past thirty years and (2) selectively consider some aspects in the analysis of borders, while omitting or overlooking others. All of them appear therefore necessary to grasp the multiplicity of processes, networks, and conflicts that produce and shape – while being simultaneously produced and shaped by – borders. Drawing from, yet critical towards these works, the article will take the border itself as a starting point of investigation, in order to (1) empirically analyse the processes, forces, and conflicts unfolding across borders and (2) analytically interrogate the various epistemological approaches with their advantages and shortcomings. The paper argues that borders should be better thought of as 'meeting points', i.e., places of encounter, interaction/clash, and reassessment/redefinition of different theories and processes. Conceiving borders as such, the paper concludes, can provide a more comprehensive framework for the analysis of borders, capable of looking at them not just as passive places moulded by different forces and encapsulated through conventional theoretical approaches, but as active, complex, and variegated processes capable of generating social outcomes and changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyzes the institutions and regulations that govern the transnational movement of dead bodies in contemporary Europe. With the extension of free movement across the European Union and the subsequent expansion of transnational employment, tourism, and retirement, the repatriation of corpses from one member state to another lies in an ambiguous regulatory space. In exploring how dead bodies move between EU member states, and how their movements are regulated within transnational and national systems, the paper pays particular attention to the legacies and continued relevance of mid-century international agreements. Section 1 contextualises the issue of the transportation of mortal remains, discusses our broader theoretical background, and explains our research methods. Section 2 provides an historical overview of the foundational international regulations governing the repatriation of corpses: the 1937 Berlin Agreement and the 1973 Strasbourg Agreement. In Section 3, we present a comprehensive review of the discussion of repatriation of EU citizens between EU countries that occurred in the European Parliament and Commission between 2000 and 2018. In so doing, we focus on the ways in which understanding institutional action and inaction provides a lens on the operation of supranational competency development and its limits, and on the complex ways in which institutional arrangements are interwound within national, international, and transnational practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to analyse the conceptualisation of space in border studies. My interest in the subject arises because recent articles published on diverse outlets of border studies have advanced the notion that borders are on the move and not necessarily located where it is expected—at the line shared by two sovereign nations. Instead, scholars argued that borders have become dislocated, displaced and can be found in-between, anywhere even if they have been out-sourced or placed off-shore. This notion of borders "everywhere" gives the sensation that borders are becoming a-spatial, a-territorial, space no longer matters, and geography is dead. This paper challenges that view. Thus, the main contribution this paper makes is to bring back space into border theory by tracing and reinserting spatial concepts into the discussion of border studies. The central argument in the paper is that space and borders are closely intertwined—like the ying and yang; borders are space. I argue that we can advance the theorisation of borders from a spatial perspective by delving deeper into concrete spatialisations such as micro spaces or heterotopias (besides the camp. Prison, mental hospitals, etc.) where bordering practices take place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'mapping procedure' is a routine military operation of the Israeli Army in which soldiers map the houses of civilians, collect personal details of family members or take a photograph of the family. The 'Information' collected in the 'mapping procedure' is not archived or passed to the intelligence services following the operation. As the documentation produced is not collected, the central question of this paper concerns how the 'mapping procedure' functions as a practice of governing and how this relates to Israeli colonial identity. The paper contributes to the understanding of the implications of maps within colonialism, and it examines mapping as a de-territorialized performance that contributes to the production of identity. This paper suggests three readings of the 'mapping procedure'. Firstly, as a performative governing tool that implements the hierarchical categorization of people into occupiers and occupied; colonized and colonizers. Secondly, the soldiers that produce the maps are considered as policing forces of a colonial ideology that repeats and mimics British colonialism. Finally, the 'mapping procedure' is framed as a tool to refine and redraw the ethnic Jewish-Arabic binary that is needed to maintain the precarious Israeli colonial identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores contemporary cultures of British military recruitment and considers the domestication of geopolitics as matters of the ephemeral (fleeting, sensory encounters), and of ephemera (everyday objects). It employs an auto/ethnographic approach toward spaces critical to recruitment – the airshow, the home and the body. Three central contributions are developed: first, building on a recent turn to the material in political geography, the paper argues that taking seriously materiality, objects, and 'stuff' enhances our understanding of the connections between geopolitical, militarised and everyday; second, deploying a notion of the geopolitical social, it explores the geopolitical as it is situated in everyday lives and spaces; third, it investigates the tendency for militarised objects to find their way onto and around bodies and into domestic spaces. Set at the interface of literatures in critical geopolitics and critical military studies, the paper concludes that material encounters and everyday objects are matters central to the business of geopolitics and militarism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with data extraction and data circulation that are at stake in refugee governmentality with a focus on the Cash Assistance Programme in Greece. It focuses on the data extraction activities which are part of the cash Assistance Programme and on the ways in which data is shared and not shared among the actors involved. It starts by critically engaging with debates on techno-humanitarianism in refugee governmentality, and it moves on by drawing attention to the constitutive dynamics between data abundance and data disregard. Then, it analyses the extent to which different actors can access and act upon the data. The second part of the article centres on the peculiar modes of subjectivation that asylum seekers are shaped by, as cards beneficiaries and techno-users. It shows that asylum seekers are both passive surfaces of data extraction and, at the same time, are object of a request to speak and to produce data and feedback about their use of the card. The paper concludes with a section about the injunction imposed on asylum seekers to act as autonomous and responsible techno-users and, at the same time, to comply with multiple spatial restrictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Predominant approaches in the rebel governance literature have looked at control over the means of violence as a prerogative of rebel-rulers, or armed/non-armed actors, somehow deterministically linked to territory. Here weapons have been understood as either autonomous technical-factors or as analytically invisible objects instrumental to human agencies and interactions aiming to territorial control. This paper challenges understandings of control over the means of violence as a central property radiating outwardly through hierarchically and geographically ordered spatial containers. It argues that the means of violence are relational networks among heterogeneous human-non-human entities – e.g. weapons, stockpiles, militarised architectures, forms, armed individuals/groups – that generate territory. These networks are controlled and stabilised via diffused techniques and rationalities of control. Drawing on the study of Ta'ang areas of Northern Shan State – among the few in Myanmar where well-established rebel movements have experienced official disarmament and later undertook a full-fledged re-armament – I find that controlling the means of violence occurs via turbulent combinations of technical objects, techniques and rationalities that relate to four main domains: narcotics eradication; institutionalisation; ethnonationality; and humanitarian security. Processes and practices through which attempts to control the means of violence are made entail alternative strategies to re-generate spatial organisational control and shape multiple shifting territories. Empirically exploring a highly under-researched case, the paper provides a view of the diffused character of controlling the means of violence and its mutually constitutive relations with territory, while illuminating also the role of weapons, other technical objects, and techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship in political geography and allied disciplines such as Anthropology and Architecture has used registers such as the elemental and volumetric to explore the calculative, material, technical, and atmospheric interventions in, on, through and beneath the earth's surface. In this special issue, our contributors engage in a 'subterranean turn', as they drill down, dive into, travel through and speculate with underground and underwater domains. Although varied in their geographical environments and locales, and diverse in their time-frames, the papers speak to four themes that constitute a 'subterranean geopolitics.' First, the subterranean is conceptualised as volume with distinct material qualities including height, pressure, depth and shape. There are multiple undergrounds on offer. Second, the subterranean is integral to nation-state building and geopolitical strategies of control, enclosure and exclusion. Third, there is evidence of and for subterranean infrastructures aplenty. States and other actors want to design, experiment and plan with the underground and underwater environments. Finally, the subterranean is never divorced from calculative, legal and technical regimes of regulation, and the cultivation of expertise – scientific, military, engineering – is a crucial element in these contributions to subterranean geopolitics. Taken together, the nine papers in this special issue offer a rich array of case studies including the nineteenth-century volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean (Hawkins 2018), subterranean nationalism in the South Atlantic (Benwell), lead mining in nineteenth-century English Peak District (Endfield and Van Lieshout 2019), a transnational gas pipeline running through Italy (Barry and Gambino 2019), subterranean security in Israel/Palestine (Slesinger 2019), natural gas infrastructure (Forman 2019), deep sea mining off Papua New Guinea (Childs 2019b), US military planning in and under Greenland's inland ice (Bruun 2018), and managing the shipping routes of the English Channel (Peters 2019). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to the special issue on "Peripheral Visions: Security by, and for, whom?", we summarise the core themes of the special issue and outline our relational approach to peripheralisation research in security studies. We explain how and why the papers that form part of the special issue address the power geometries that result from, and contour, uneven landscapes of resilience and (in)security. Taking our cue from current scholarship that conceptualises peripheralisation and polarisation as relational socio-spatial processes, we examine how constructions of centrality and peripheralisation unfold in, and underpin, security politics. We argue that processes of peripheralisation underlie security politics in ways that make peripheralised subjects and places simultaneously central to the production and maintenance of uneven geometries of power. Adding further insights to debates on the power geometries of security, papers in the special issue explore how securitisation builds on, remoulds and (re)produces the peripheralisation of certain people and places (including their discursive construction as peripheral), how peripheralisation relates to uneven productions of (in)security, and how those whose security is most placed at risk through processes of peripheralisation qua securitisation rework dominant logics and policies in their security visions and practices. Our focus is, on the one hand, on the relations through which peripheralised actors, spaces and materialities become central to sustaining privileged securities and, on the other hand, on the everyday practices of securitisation through which risks and precarities are tackled and contested by those peripheralised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For French-speaking geographers, the term urban geopolitics refers to the research stream that the journal Hérodote developed to analyse the increasing complexity of and conflict in and around territorial policies. For their English-speaking counterparts, the concept commonly refers to a more recent approach to analyse among others the militarisation of urban space. Despite their differences, this paper shows that both approaches can be usefully combined. Indeed, a combined approach can shed new light on urban processes by enriching the comparison between seemingly "similar" urban policies in the Global North and South. The aim of this paper is to discuss the merits of the two schools of urban geopolitics. To do so, it compares the creation of green belts in the peripheries of large cities to control urban sprawl: Lyon (France) and Rabat (Morocco). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The extent to which 'geographies of encounter' facilitate tolerance of diversity and difference has long been a source of debate in urban studies and human geography scholarship. However, to date this contestation has focused primarily on hyper-diverse cities in the global north-west. Adapting this debate to the volatile conditions of the nationally-contested city, this paper explores intergroup encounters between Israelis and Palestinians in Jerusalem. The paper suggests that in the context of hyper-polarisation of the nationally-contested urban space, the study of encounter should focus on macro-scale structural forces. In Jerusalem, we stress the role of ethnonationality and neoliberalism as key producers of its asymmetric and volatile yet highly resilient geography of intergroup encounters. In broader sense, as many cities worldwide experience a resurgence of ethnonationalism, illuminating the structural production of encounter may demarcate a broader function for reading contemporary urban geopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Kurdish-led project of democratic confederalism in Rojava (north and north-east Syria) has emerged as an unprecedented experience in eco-feminist and anti-capitalist direct democracy with global significance and regional ramifications. There is however virtually no critical engagement with the project's intellectual foundations in the works of Abdullah Öcalan. This paper seeks to address this gap through a sympathetic critique of Öcalan's historical sociology of the formation and dissolution of the state. It argues that there is a theoretical tension in Öcalan's argument. His account of the originary rise of the Sumerian state is 'internalist' while his analysis of subsequent state-formation processes is 'interactive', which highlights the crucial role of external factors and hence implicitly the decisive significance of the condition of 'societal multiplicity'. The paper then draws on Kojin Karatani's 'modes of exchange' based world history to argue that Sumerian state-formation was also fundamentally interactive occurring within and through societal multiplicity. It therefore demonstrates the need for the incorporation of societal multiplicity in the conceptualisation of democratic confederalism and the analyses of its prospects as a non-statist political community. In so doing, the paper also contributes to critical geopolitics and anarchist international theory through underlining the social history of the rise of the state and the international nature of its dissolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the 'borderscapes' concept in border studies and cognate fields. However, there is a lack of dialogue amongst the proliferating case studies that have adopted the borderscapes concept. Arguably, the theoretical and methodological vagueness of the concept renders it highly appropriable. Yet, articulation of the existing patterns and common conceptual apparatus are necessary for theoretical development and clarity. This paper examines a range of analytical and methodological applications of the concept for their practical implications in human geography by studying the institutionalisation of violence in Melilla – a small Spanish enclave in North Africa. It argues that revisiting Lefebvre's theory on the 'production of space' may be useful for approaching the production of borderscapes through social practices and discursive tools. By examining the place and importance of imagination and experience in conflict situations in this border town, this paper clarifies how the borderscapes concept can be operationalised for analytical and methodological use in bottom-up border research. In doing so, this paper encourages a sustained dialogue between these diverse case studies by challenging the practical application of the borderscapes logic in field research and data analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brexit has opened doors for renewed attention to contested, multi-scalar geopolitical forces grounded in everyday life in borderlands. In this paper, we aim to unravel 'everyday Brexits' in the Gibraltar–La Línea (Spain) borderlands. By studying the 2019 commemoration of the historic 1969 border closure, we concentrate on how local borderwork by residents is mobilised for bottom-up geopolitics in the context of Brexit negotiations. We use a conceptual approach that focuses on multiple layerings of the border and the selectivity of stakeholders to select among these layers to pursue their interests. Based on on-site observations, in-depth interviews, and informal conversations with residents and key actors of La Línea and Gibraltar, we argue that Brexit has increased the tension of already loaded core-periphery relations in Spain. Brexit does not represent a sudden disruption. Rather, we show how Brexit allowed the bottom-up geopolitical mobilisation of latent, strongly historically embedded and continuous cross-borders sentiments of residents. This mobilisation could potentially challenge local cross-border power relations. In the final analysis, we conclude that the bottom-up geopolitics of 'ordinary' residents through everyday bordering processes is central to geopolitics research, including with regard to Brexit and in particular for non-British geographies affected by Brexit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geopolitics journal has undergone some changes and introduced new initiatives. The editorial team has seen transitions, with Takashi Yamazaki and Corey Johnson completing their terms as co-editors and Chenchen Zhang and Lisa Marie Borrelli joining as co-editors. The journal has also introduced two new awards, the Geopolitics Peer Review Award and the Geopolitics Journal Post-Graduate Research Paper Award. Additionally, the journal has partnered with the Oxford Criminologies network and publishes special issues, book review essays, and geopolitical forums. The journal has also increased its number of open access articles and reduced its publication queue. [Extracted from the article]

The concept of 'new' state capitalism has garnered increasing attention among scholars due to the emergence of a polymorphism of state interventions in recent years. These interventions are now being examined through a spatial lens, departing from the previously dominant methodological nationalism. In this case, the 'new' Chinese state capitalism is particularly noteworthy. The People's Republic of China (PRC) has adopted a spatial state-led strategy to facilitate the Renminbi (RMB) transnationalization. This strategic approach transcends traditional national boundaries, stretching across different spaces. Our research focuses on the specific case of Luxembourg in relation to this spatial strategy. We assert that the RMB transnationalization represents a distinctive feature of the 'new' Chinese state capitalism, as it is underpinned by explicit Chinese state policies, unlike other currencies whose global use was the result of growing economies. Moreover, we contend that the PRC's explicit policies regarding the RMB do not aim for full convertibility and widespread acceptance like the US-Dollar (USD). Instead, they prioritise its role as a trade currency for international trade settlements, as the main goal is to reduce the dependence on the USD and to create a stable International Monetary System (IMS) that will bring benefits to its trade-oriented economic model. Overall, this paper significantly contributes to the existing literature by offering a novel perspective on the RMB transnationalization within the framework of the 'new' Chinese state capitalism, emphasising China's quest for autonomy from the USD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Southeast Asia’s coastal communities are the frontliners of climate change impacts. Traditional livelihoods and fish landings are already declining due to changes in sea temperatures and increasingly frequent extreme weather. A human security lens should be used to examine the consequences of climate change impacts on the marginalised communities that suffer directly from it. This study adapts a 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change vulnerability assessment for human and food security and assessment of potential conflicts, merging it with a tool to assess community resilience and adaptability to threats, as a framework to analyse the predicament of Malaysia’s artisanal fishermen. A case study based on 16 years of ethnographic and participant observation in a fishing community that depends on the maritime boundary between Malaysia and Singapore is used to illustrate the above. This paper demonstrates how local knowledge and experience in overcoming change should be used for better climate change adaptation policies and implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]