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Official discourses of Development are being redefined. If the key geopolitical contexts shaping the post‐war Development project were decolonisation and the Cold War, the defining world‐historical transformations shaping the emerging vision of Development are the expansion of state capitalism and the rise of China. The IMF, the World Bank, the OECD, the G20, other multilaterals, and bilateral partners are increasingly taking stock of the rise of state capitalism, and acting as ideational vectors of this emerging regime. However, this new “state capitalist normal” is also portrayed as carrying risks. There is anxiety regarding the direction the political form of global capital accumulation is heading: with the unchecked proliferation of state capitalism possibly blunting competition, politicising economic relations, and intensifying geoeconomic tensions. This anxiety underwrites the current re‐articulation of Development, one which embraces the state as promoter, supervisor, and owner of capital; even as it critiques China’s use of similar instruments.

What do measures of management during this exceptional and volatile time tell us about the regulation of migrant‐driven diversity and its implications in the arrival city? Using the term “differential diversification” from Singapore, I examine how the socio‐political life of the pandemic is deeply entangled with the management of low‐waged labour migrants. Techno‐political discourses and practices of pandemic management accelerated the state’s attempts to differently include migrant workers, revealing the bare viscerality of biopolitics already in place prior to the pandemic. I argue that diversity is ordered through a striking co‐production of migrant management and pandemic management. This paper draws upon government discourses to demonstrate that measures of pandemic management contribute not only to the spatial regime of migrant management. They also articulate and rationalise the subject transformation of the low‐waged migrant to the extent that, on top of being a moral risk, they are also now a medical risk.

This paper discusses the ways in which 2009 novel swine‐origin influenza A (H1N1) was announced and resonated with current pandemic anxieties. In particular, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are used as a lens through which recent pandemic anxieties can be analysed and understood. This entails a closer look at the securitisation of public health and the challenges and struggles this may have caused within public health agencies. In that light, CDC' formal entanglement with global health security and its announcement of the H1N1 pandemic are interpreted, followed by an ethnographically informed focus on various people who were engaged in the H1N1 emergency response and their practices and practical struggles in the face of pandemic anxiety.

Crisis narratives surrounding Europe's 2015 migration influx fuelled demands for new ways of tracking, mapping and predicting human mobility. We explore how market opportunities for technology firms and data analytics start-ups created by the EU's Global Approach to Migration led to solutionistic approaches to compiling and analysing migration statistics. We show that initiatives such as the rebranding of existing platforms and services as migration prediction systems are consolidating policy conceptualisations of migration as risk. Despite the promise of greater granularity, this "big data approach" cannot offer greater certainty about who is on the move and why. Instead such approaches are ill-suited to understanding the complex dynamics of migration and to offering protection to vulnerable people. The marketisation of migration statistics through big data offers a key case for advancing progressive approaches to both migration statistics and global data justice.Los relatos de crisis en torno a las corrientes migratorias hacia Europa del año 2015 han impulsado la demanda de nuevas formas de seguimiento, mapeo y predicción de la movilidad de personas. Exploramos cómo las oportunidades de mercado para las empresas de tecnología y las nuevas empresas de análisis de datos creadas por el Enfoque Global de la Migración de la UE han causado enfoques simplificadores al compilar y analizar las estadísticas migratorias. Mostramos que iniciativas tales como el cambio de nombre de ciertas plataformas y servicios existentes en los sistemas de predicción migratoria están transformando la conceptualización de las política migratoria como un riesgo. A pesar de la promesa de una mayor granularidad, este “enfoque big data” no logra ofrecer una mayor certeza sobre quién está en movimiento y por qué. Al contrario, estos enfoques no son adecuados para comprender las complejas dinámicas migratorias ni para ofrecer protección a las personas vulnerables. La comercialización de las estadísticas migratorias a través de Big Data ofrece un caso clave para avanzar sobre enfoques más progresivos tanto para las estadísticas migratorias y como para la justicia global de datos.

This multi‐authored contribution explores what the COVID‐19 pandemic demands of critical inquiry with a focus on the more‐than‐human. We show how COVID‐19 is a complex series of multispecies encounters shaped by humans, non‐human animals, and of course viruses. Central to these encounters is a politics of difference in which certain human lives are protected and helped to flourish while others, both human and animal, are forgotten if not sacrificed. Such difference encompasses practices of racialisation and racism, healthcare austerity, the circulation of capital, border‐making, intervention into non‐human nature, wildlife trade bans, anthropocentrism, and the exploitation of animal test subjects. The contributions highlight how COVID‐19 provides a needed opportunity to unite new materialist and anti‐racist, anti‐colonial scholarship as well as reimagine more radically sustainable multispecies futures. This requires embracing anti‐colonial humility, confronting debts owed to lab animal frontline workers, and rethinking economic systems that helped unleash COVID‐19 and ensured it became a disaster.

Despite recent attention to “frontier” green economies and the governance of emerging ecosystem services, the specific division of labour in these economies has been little studied. As many such initiatives are in the global South, labour’s marginality potentially contributes to the existing precariousness of those who are more often identified as “participants”. This article examines the roles and vulnerabilities of these actors: the carbon counters, species identifiers, GIS mappers, tree planters and others operating in the shadows. We draw on current understandings of labour and precarity to examine the geographical contours of an apparent and emerging “eco‐precariat”: a socio‐economically diverse group of labourers that address the volatile demands of an ever‐expanding environmental service‐based economy. We illustrate our analysis drawing on examples from a Blue Carbon project in Kenya, ecosystem services project in the Philippines, and REDD+ scheme in Cambodia. We use these examples to theorise the nature of labour in these frontier economies and put forward a framework for analysing the eco‐precariat. We highlight the need to understand the precarity and marginalisation potentially created by this green division of labour in the provision of new ecosystem products and services. This framework contributes to ongoing analyses of labour as a central part of the green economy discourse and to larger discussions in the geographies of labour literature around the future of work in the global South and beyond.

Pesticide exposure in Ecuador's banana industry reflects political economic and ecological processes that interact across scales to affect human health. We use this case study to illustrate opportunities for applying political ecology of health scholarship in the burgeoning field of global health. Drawing on an historical literature review and ethnographic data collected in Ecuador's El Oro province, we present three main areas where a political ecological approach can enrich global health scholarship: perceptive characterization of multi-scalar and ecologically entangled pathways to health outcomes; critical analysis of discursive dynamics such as competing scalar narratives; and appreciation of the environment-linked subjectivities and emotions of people experiencing globalized health impacts. Rapprochement between these fields may also provide political ecologists with access to valuable empirical data on health outcomes, venues for engaged scholarship, and opportunities to synthesize numerous insightful case studies and discern broader patterns.La exposición a agroquímicos en la industria bananera del Ecuador evidencia procesos de ecología y economía política interactuando en diferentes escalas y que terminan afectando a la salud humana. Este estudio de caso ilustra como la ecología política de la salud puede aportar al creciente campo de la salud global. A partir de una revisión histórica de literatura y de datos etnográficos recopilados en la provincia de El Oro, Ecuador, presentamos tres áreas principales donde la perspectiva de ecología política puede enriquecer el campo de la salud global: caracterización perspicaz de trayectorias multi‐escalares y ecológicamente relacionadas que afectan a la salud; valoración crítica de dinámicas discursivas tales como las narrativas escalares contrapuestas; y apreciación de subjetividades y emociones relacionadas con el ambiente entre personas que viven impactos de salud global. El acercamiento entre estos dos campos también puede proporcionar a los ecólogos políticos acceso a valiosos datos empíricos sobre salud, espacios para la praxis y oportunidades para sintetizar numerosos estudios de casos perspicaces para discernir patrones más amplios.

Based on a case study of the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Toronto, Canada, this article suggests that we may have to rethink our common perception of what urban governance entails. Rather than operating solely in the conceptual proximity of social cohesion and economic competitiveness, urban governance may soon prove to be more centrally concerned with questions of widespread disease, life and death and the construction of new internal boundaries and regulations just at the time that globalization seems to suggest the breakdown of some traditional scalar incisions such as national boundaries in a post‐Westphalian environment. We argue that urban governance must face the new (or reemerging) challenge of dealing with infectious disease in the context of the “new normal” and that global health governance may be better off by taking the possibilities that rest in metropolitan governance more seriously.

The geographic extent, xenospecificity, and clinical course of influenza A (H5N1), the bird flu strain, suggest the virus is an excellent candidate for a pandemic infection. Much attention has been paid to the virus's virology, pathogenesis and spread. In contrast, little effort has been aimed at identifying influenza's social origins. In this article, I review H5N1's phylogeographic properties, including mechanisms for its evolving virulence. The novel contribution here is the attempt to integrate these with the political economies of agribusiness and global finance. Particular effort is made to explain why H5N1 emerged in southern China in 1997. It appears the region's reservoir of near‐human‐specific recombinants was subjected to a phase change in opportunity structure brought about by China's newly liberalized economy. Influenza, 200 nm long, seems able to integrate selection pressures imposed by human production across continental distances, an integration any analysis of the virus should assimilate in turn.

Data Availability Statement: The primary data that support the findings of this study are publicly available in The National Archives, the London Metropolitan Archives, and Hansard Parliamentary Debates. Specific references for historical documents used in the paper are given in the bibliography of the paper. Copyright © 2022 The Author. By drawing, among others, on the ideas of the Bakhtin Circle and Judith Butler, this paper explores spatial struggles over the right to free speech at Hyde Park, London, 1861–1962. From the 1860s to the early 20th century, the state gradually constructed a “monologic” discourse about an ideal-typical “indecent” speaker who would “trespass” on Hyde Park through their “excitable speech” against a legally sanctioned right to give a “public address” in the park. This discourse gave the state some room to evict those it claimed to be transgressing “public address”. However, different “heteroglossic coalitions” of regulars ensured that Hyde Park remained not only a “political assembly” to discuss political issues, but also a “social assembly” to exercise free speech on a range of social topics. Indeed, by the 1950s, these coalitions used a nearby road scheme to successfully argue it was the state that was potentially trespassing, or “encroaching”, on free speech at Hyde Park. The Leverhulme Trust. Grant Number: RF-2020-387

This paper studies the politics surrounding the implementation of Pakistan’s first mass transit project, the Lahore Bus Rapid Transit corridor completed in 2013, to interrogate the role that infrastructure mega-projects hold in highly factional and democratising polities of the global South. Drawing on the Lahore BRT as a case study, this paper posits that infrastructure development is increasingly interwoven with conceptions of political legitimacy and “modernising” governance, especially under conditions of nascent democratic competition. We argue that democratisation-led transformations in the political-institutional context of state power has helped fashion new roles for mega-projects, which partly explains why state power is mobilised for projects that had been ignored for several decades. Finally, this paper cautions that this new role for infrastructure, while marking a departure from previous patterns, can simultaneously constrain the possibilities for sustainable interventions going forward.

This paper makes a call for an urban political ecology (UPE) which engages more extensively with Earth’s geological formations. As a material at the centre of global urbanisation process, sand is offered as a geological entry point. The paper presents an analysis of the urbanisation of sand, or the ways in which sand is brought into the urban realm, grounding this reading in Accra—a growing city on Ghana’s Atlantic coast. Drawing from 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, the paper charts the socio-natural politics through which sand is first unearthed from the edges of the city—an extractive processes otherwise known as “sand winning” in Ghana. By examining the forms of power which govern uneven revenue flows to communities, the displacement of farming groups, the widespread loss of farmland and a contested regime of governance, the analysis exposes the socio-natural politics through which the city’s geological baseline is first unearthed.

The emergence over the last decade of large numbers of vulnerable EUcitizens begging on Swedish streets has led to ambivalent responses from the Swedishstate, including from local police forces charged with policing public order. Based onresearch including interviews with vulnerable EU citizens and with police officials intwo socio-economically divergent areas of Stockholm, this paper seeks to understandhow policing practices are motivated and enacted towards this group and how thesepractices are experienced by those targeted. The results reveal a set of policing practiceswhich, whilst framed within a depoliticised logic of what Nicholas Blomley calls“pedestrianism”, work to produce spatially uneven punitive landscapes for those begging.The paper argues that understanding the role of police as “street-level bureaucrats”(following Michael Lipsky), with the agency to escalate or soften revanchistlandscapes, is fundamental to understanding the contingencies at the heart of punitiveurbanisms.

Community renewable energy (CRE) represents a growing empirical and academic turn towards community‐based sustainability and climate change interventions. This paper brings together postcolonial theory and CRE for the first time to outline fundamental tensions in the conceptualisation and application of the idea of community. The understanding of community within the CRE discourse is largely: (1) location‐based; and/or (2) a community of choice that is consciously opted into. Driven by postcolonial theory, this paper counterpoises both as a form of community as contract against an idea of community as solidarity. Its central thesis is that actually existing community, contrary to how the bulk of CRE literature commonly understands it, is a combination of bonds of solidarity and emergent purposes. The paper conceptualises community as fluid bonds of solidarity that align and realign differently around different purposes.

Fairtrade operates its global system through a homogenising but marketable set of standards. Combined with issues around how to include producers in governance, this has led to feelings of disconnection and disenfranchisement for the latter, which are impacting on Fairtrade’s effectiveness and legitimacy. Through a focus on the South African wine industry, this paper argues that the Fairtrade community needs to be reinvigorated through dialogical communication, impactful participation and cultural synthesis to better enact responsibility across its systemic geographical and cultural distances. “Being‐with” its multiple stakeholders makes space for a more responsive, contextual and connected system. Drawing on the ideas of Paulo Freire, the paper concludes that a Fairtrade built on solidarity through a participatory and decentralised system would allow for discussions of the ideals and practices that are essential to negotiating, and not swallowing up, the shifting “we” of Fairtrade and more effectively balancing its local and global responsibilities.

Geographic research on neoliberalism has explored the restructuring of educational landscapes wrought through marketisation of preschool, school and higher-education provision and considered the responsibilisation of parents and children for educational outcomes. This study develops understanding of the contingent emergence of neoliberal educational reform, and its progressive and regressive impacts, through an examination of the burgeoning private tuition market in England and Wales. The paper outlines the contours of the previously hidden supplementary education industry, demonstrating that it reinforces regional and classed inequalities, while opening possibilities for ethnic minority advancement. Conceptually, the paper advances debate about socio-spatial specificity in neoliberal change, showing that the intersection of policy, free markets and consumer behaviour reshapes the educational landscape in ways that extend beyond state intention and control. Through these processes, contingent market forms are produced that offer social mobility for some, but ensure the social reproduction of enduring regimes of power.

This paper explores the relations between maritime labour, the circulation of struggles between different sites, and constructions of transnational subaltern agency. It does this through engaging with the interconnected strikes of Indian merchant seafarers in ports and ships across the British Empire in the Autumn of 1939. These strikes broke out after the outbreak of the Second World War and were in part mobilised against the racialised inequalities which structured maritime labour. The paper foregrounds the relations between practices of blockading ships in ports through refusing to crew them and the circulation of the strikes between ships. I argue that this combination of spatial tactics shaped transnational forms of networked subaltern agency (Balachandran 2012, Globalizing Labour? Indian Seafarers and World Shipping, c. 1870−1945). To engage with the dynamics of subaltern agency through the strikes the paper explores the relations between trajectories of organising, the circulation of demands, and the formation of solidarities.

The paper explores the racialised geography of a series of socialist blocs located in the southern periphery of Bucharest, labelled as a contemporary Romanian "ghetto". Through extensive ethnographic and archival work, it expands on contemporary Western race-aware urban scholarship, advancing an expansive reading of the "plan" as a key element to account for the endurance of foundational dispossession in the context of Bucharest. The goal is to trace how the social segmentations of "class" and "race" have been diagrammed through discontinuous city-making in the last hundred years, refuting a reading of these complex processes as a matter of evolutionary stages between economic regimes, which ends up reproducing a stereotypical representation of the Eastern "other". The paper contributes to a situated approach to racial urbanism, offering the basis for a trans-Atlantic dialogue around the makings and unmakings of urban dispossession.

This paper develops geographical work that is attentive to, and critical of, how safety is lived and narrated. In contrast to previous work on safety that focuses on fear, the paper looks at safety as something more than aspiration for women. To do so, the paper utilises the metaphor of the ‘expatriate bubble’ to explore how safety is constructed and experienced by privileged migrants within Singapore. Utilising research from two projects, we argue that we need to think about how gender and Othering intersect to construct safety. In doing so, we think about how we can use conceptualisations of privileged migrants to research how safety can be understood and therefore practised more widely.

This paper analyses the experimental nature of alternative spaces and the affective, emotional and embodied experience their enactment generates. In so doing, it grounds the analysis on the intentional community of Damanhur (Italy), as an example of experimental spaces. Scholarship concerning intentional communities draws on utopian studies that consider them as utopian laboratories. More recently, non‐representational approaches have emphasised the processual nature of utopias, yet studies have overlooked the experimental nature of these alternative spaces. Drawing upon in‐depth ethnographic data, this paper engages with community experimentations that took place in Damanhur for residents and visitors. It illustrates how utopian enactment is experimental and thus, disordering, unsettling and creative. Moreover, I argue that experimentations are not limited to unsettling the social structure of the community and, when studying the enactment of alternative spaces, emphasis should also be on their capacity to affect the individual.

In recent years “volume” has become a key analytic idea, and tool, for re‐imagining and making sense of historical and contemporary socio‐cultural and geopolitical phenomena. This paper argues that this important work could be pushed in new directions by thinking seriously of how volume might otherwise be interpreted spatially, as capacity . Accordingly, in this paper, we address what we call a “politics of capacity”. To do so, we draw specifically on debates in carceral geography and, in particular, the pressures on the prison system to illustrate our argument. Drawing on notions of “operational capacities” and “capacity building” in the prison setting, we outline a manifesto for volumetric thinking that moves beyond expressions of power that cut through height, depth and angles, to an understanding of how power is conveyed through maximum and minimum capacities; density and mass; and capacity‐building techniques.

This article deals with the transformations occurred in the government of refugees in the Mediterranean since 2013, when the military-humanitarian operation Mare Nostrum was launched by the European Union. The paper analyses how military and humanitarian practices are entangled in governing refugees and develops the notion of military-humanitarianism. The Mediterranean borderzone has undergone radical reconfigurations over the last few years. Particularly, new technologies of control for strengthening the role of the Mediterranean Sea as a pre-frontier of Europe have been put in place. The production and the declaration of a "refugee crisis" in Europe has contributed to producing important shifts within the field of humanitarianism: from a politics for alleviating suffering, humanitarianism has progressively been redefined as a politics of rescue. Simultaneously, military actors, such as the Navy, have gained center stage in performing humanitarian task (saving migrant lives at sea). Our paper interrogates the spatiality of these processes.

Drawing on the Marxian theory of ground rent this paper develops an analysis of “global commodity chains” (GCC) with agrarian roots. There is an acknowledgement that the concentrated downstream governance of primary commodity based GCC has created a set of ‘asymmetrical’ power relations which blocks the transmission of value upstream towards small producers. This paper argues that this research under-specifies what is meant by value and rent and in doing so marginalises the analysis of value production before its journey through inter-firm relations. We demonstrate the importance of theorising the value constitution of commodities produced on the land and the forces that contest the payment of ground rent and thereby shape the geography of GCC. Based on empirical research conducted around Ecuador’s ‘post-neoliberal’ cocoa re-activation plan, we identify the class politics and production mechanisms through which value and rent escapes the hands of a stratified network of small owner producers.

Recent treatments of environmental justice have highlighted the need to move beyond focusing upon inequalities in the distribution of environmental risks to address other aspects of environmental injustice, including unequal participation and recognition. While acknowledging the importance of extending environmental justice to include these other dimensions of justice, this paper argues that more, not less, analytical attention needs to be devoted to the diverse logics of distribution of environmental risks. In light of continuing dilemmas associated with whether environmental inequalities can be just or, alternatively, that environmental inequality and injustice are co-extensive, this paper proposes to untangle some key connections between environmental inequalities and injustice through a critical confrontation of environmental justice with risk-class analysis. Focusing on the positional or relational distribution of environmental bads as analysed in risk-class analysis, this paper argues that bringing these two bodies of knowledge together can illuminate how relational inequalities have characteristics that make them particularly illegitimate from a justice perspective, thus making an advance in identifying key connections between environmental inequality and injustice.

Gender is largely under-theorized in the now well-developed literature on dispossession; this paper contributes to the analysis of the gender dimensions of dispossession by bringing the literature on dispossession into conversation with the feminist literature on social reproduction, specifically, depletion of social reproduction. Drawing on qualitative field research, the paper provides a gendered analysis of the multiple vectors of dispossession affecting the Miyana, a Muslim community living in the Little Rann of Kutch, an estuarine zone in central Gujarat within which prawn harvesting and salt production are their symbiotic seasonal livelihood activities. Using the concept of depletion as a diagnostic tool, I argue that the assessment of depletion due to dispossession requires investigation of the levels of mitigation, replenishment or transformation available to individuals, households and communities within the circuits of production and social reproduction.

The environmental movement in the global North is in a state of impasse. It appears that despite the renewed international focus on climate change, and the actions of innumerable social movements, a “solution” to the problem appears as one, without a viable solution. It is the contention of this paper that climate change has no clearly viable solution as it is a seemingly impossible problem. This paper investigates how the problem of climate change is constructed as a global object of political action and how it functions to render politics into a matter of calculative action, one that seeks—but fails—to take hold of a slippery carbon infrastructure. It concludes by suggesting one possible solution to this dilemma is to turn away from the global scalar logic of climate change and towards a situated focus on questions of infrastructure, or what Dimitris Papadopoulos calls “thick justice”.

Swarms of police drones, fleets of overhead delivery bots, and flocks of private security drones are set to multiply the complex interfaces between state, capital, and sense. This paper explores the military and economic enclosure of the atmosphere by drones. For centuries, capitalist enclosure has privatized and secured common spaces: territorializing new power relations into the soil. Enclosure now operates through an increasingly atmospheric spatiality. The birth of airpower enabled new vertical regimes of state power, capital accumulation, and violence. Now, drones are materializing both intimate and pervasive colonizations of local, national, and international airspace. Crucially, this discloses new morphologies and ontologies of urban (in)security, in which an atmospheric state polices deterritorialized aerial circulations. Such a reenchanted atmosphere collapses the geopolitical and geoeconomic in uncertain robotic orbits. This paper, which connects past and present, is driven by a deeper concern for the existential dimensions of dronified skyscapes, subjects, and violence.

This paper sets out a new research agenda for work on postcolonial development, sovereignty and affect. It examines how ideals of postcolonial independence play out through the more heterogeneous affective atmospheres that disrupt neat paradigms of sovereign control and non-sovereignty in everyday life. The example employed is everyday life in a Caribbean government office, but the paper develops a wider set of new conceptual tools and ethnographic approaches so as to facilitate research in postcolonial studies and affect more generally.

This paper examines processes of financialisation in the Arab world, a region that has been almost completely absent from the wider financial literature. The paper shows that financialisation is much more than simply the expansion of financial markets within neatly bounded sets of social relations operating at the national scale. In the Arab world, financialisation has been marked by the growing weight of regional finance capital—most specifically, those capital groups based in the Gulf Cooperation Council—in circuits of capital operating at all scales. This has important implications for processes of class and state formation. Approaching financialisation in this manner—moving away from methodologically nationalist assumptions and the literature's largely singular focus on the advanced capitalist core—brings into focus the significance of cross-scalar accumulation patterns, their spatial hierarchies, and geographic unevenness. The paper thus reaffirms the need for a more spatially sensitive approach to financialisation.

How can we analyse the (re)emergence of squatting in relation to the current housing crisis in Italy? Centred on the case of Rome, the paper theorizes this return as resulting from processes of subjectification in the housing sector linked to the raising of indebtedness as a main dispositif of capitalism under neoliberal/austerity urbanism agendas. The political economy-oriented literature on neoliberal/austerity urbanism is bridged with the post-Marxist approach of Maurizio Lazzarato. Debt is seen as the archetype of social relations, shaping and controlling subjectivities, making the “work on yourself” essential to the reproduction of (indebted) society. However, given the circular nature of power, indebtedness can be generative of new processes of subjectification aimed at subverting the same power relation. In this sense, the paper operationalizes the conceptualization of Foucauldian subjectification recently proposed by Judith Revel, emphasizing how subjectification always results from (1) an action/gesture and (2) a consequent deconstruction of the identity.

This paper addresses the work of early critics of colonialism and Eurocentrism within Italian geography in the Age of Empire. At that time, a minority but rather influential group of Italian scholars, influenced by the international debates promoted by the anarchist geographers Reclus, Kropotkin and Mecnikov, fumed publicly at Italy's colonial ambitions in Africa. Their positions assumed, at least in the case of Arcangelo Ghisleri, the character of a radical critique of both political and cultural European hegemony. These approaches were linked to a similar critique of “internal colonialism”, both Austrian in the Italian-speaking regions of Trento and Trieste, and Piedmontese in southern Italy. Based on primary sources, and drawing on the international literature on imperial geography and colonial and postcolonial sciences, this paper conjures up the Italian example to discuss how some European geographers of the Age of Empire were also early critics of racism, colonialism and chauvinism, and how these historical experiences can serve current debates on critical, radical and anarchist geographies. Riassunto Questo articolo analizza il lavoro di uno tra i primi geografi anticolonialisti, Arcangelo Ghisleri, che fu anche tra i protagonisti della circolazione e traduzione delle idee di Elisee Reclus in Italia. Attraverso l'analisi di fonti primarie, mostro come Ghisleri, repubblicano di sinistra, partecipo in una critica dell'imperialismo che non si limitava all'opposizione politica contro singoli eventi come le politiche imperiali italiane in Africa, ma metteva in discussione tutto il discorso coloniale. I circuiti internazionali che elaborarono tali critiche, fortemente influenzati dall'anarchismo, proposero una precoce messa in discussione dell'unicita del punto di vista della geografia, rifiutando l'etnocentrismo e sostenendo visioni scientifiche che tentassero di comprendere empaticamente il punto di vista dell'Altro. Questo articolo porta un contributo ai dibattiti attuali sulle geografie anarchiche esplorando le basi storiche della loro costruzione transnazionale e cosmopolita, nonche ai dibattiti attuali sul postcolonialismo, fornendo un ulteriore caso di studio sulle geografie eterodosse e anticolonialiste in Europa.

This paper examines and critically interprets the interrelations between religion and the Occupy movements of 2011. It presents three main arguments. First, through an examination of the Occupy Movement in the UK and USA—and in particular of the two most prominent Occupy camps (Wall Street and London Stock Exchange)—the paper traces the emergence of postsecularity evidenced in the rapprochement of religious and secular actors, discourses, and practices in the event-spaces of Occupy. Second, it examines the specific set of challenges that Occupy has posed to the Christian church in the UK and USA, arguing that religious participation in the camps served at least in part to identify wider areas of religious faith that are themselves in need of redemption. Third, the paper considers the challenges posed by religious groups to Occupy, not least in the emphasis on postmaterial values in pathways to resistance against contemporary capitalism.

This paper examines some of the emerging critical civil society debates in relation to the one-state solution being the most appropriate geo-political arrangement for the articulation of freedom, justice and equality in Palestine-Israel. This is done with reference to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions’ 2012 statement in support of a bi-national state and the ensuing critiques it attracted from Palestinian supporters of the one-state position. Drawing on these debates which have largely revolved around Jewish Israeli rights to political self-determination in Palestine-Israel, this paper proposes that alternative versions of self-determination as cultural rights for the established Hebrew-speaking national community represent a more inclusive form of self-determination in the eventuality of decolonisation.

Emerging in the cracks of the ownership model are alternatives to state/market provision of affordable housing and public/private-led regeneration of declining urban neighbourhoods, centred on commoning and collective dweller control. This paper explores how the community land trust model can become an effective institutional solution to urban decline in the context of private property relations. It explores a case study of a CLT campaign in Granby, a particularly deprived inner-city neighbourhood in Liverpool, England. The campaign seeks to collectively acquire empty homes under conditions of austerity, which have opened up the space for grassroots experimentation with guerrilla gardening, proving important for the campaign in gaining political trust and financial support. This paper discusses the potential of the CLT model as a vehicle for democratic stewardship of place and unpacks the contradictions threatening to undermine its political legitimacy.

This paper examines the gendered politics of national and international networking amongst peasant farmers' movements in South Asia. In particular the paper provides an ethnographic account, based upon the author's critical engagement with the Bangladesh Krishok (farmer) Federation and the Bangladesh Kishani Sabha (Women Farmers' Association), of the Climate Change, Gender and Food Sovereignty Caravan that was organised in Bangladesh in 2011. The paper draws upon Antonio Gramsci's theory of the philosophy of praxis and feminist research on social reproduction, dispossession and materiality to interrogate the spaces of encounter and solidarity-building practices of the Caravan between different communities in the country and between different social movement actors. The paper examines how processes of political organisation and consciousness-raising within and between social movements are problematised by gendered power relations. The paper concludes with suggestions concerning how the philosophy of praxis in Bangladesh might be "engendered" to incorporate a politics of social reproduction.

On 26 December 2003 an Israeli activist was shot by the Israeli Army whilehe was participating in a demonstration organized by Anarchists Against the Wall (AAtW)in the West Bank. This was the first time Israeli Soldiers have deliberately shot live bulletsat a Jewish-Israeli activist. This paper is an attempt to understand the set of conditions, theenveloping frameworks, and the new discourses that have made this event, and similarshootings that soon followed, possible. Situating the actions of AAtW within a muchwider context of securitization—of identities, movements, and bodies—we examinestrategies of resistance which are deployed in highly securitized public spaces. We claim thatan unexpected matrix of identity in which abnormality is configured as security threat renderthe bodies of activists especially precarious. The paper thus provides an account of the newrationales of security technologies and tactics which increasingly govern public spaces.

This paper investigates the contemporary economic crisis, and explores crisis theories developed by Marx and Marxists alongside discourses surrounding human geography and the urban condition. Two positions currently dominate Marxist crisis theory: realization/overproduction and Law of the Tendential Fall in the Rate of Profit. Within human geography, however, scholars rarely discuss crisis theory in and of itself, and when they do, they tend to rely solely on the realization/overproduction approach popularized by David Harvey. This paper argues that both approaches aid a conceptualization of the current crisis while deepening our understanding of changing urban policies and landscapes. This paper also claims—in contrast to Keynesians' calls—that crises are “solved” by destruction and devaluation of capital, not an increase in effective demand. These debates, as of yet not thoroughly discussed in human geography, can provide us with new knowledge concerning the current crisis and contemporary urban policies.

This paper examines two potential lacunae in understanding low-income residents’ experiences of contemporary state-led gentrification via a study of neighbourhood restructuring in Salford, UK, 2004–2014. The first is the localised politics preparing the ground for neighbourhood “redevelopment” and housing demolition. The second is the blighted social landscape which emerges with the subsequent stalling of this project. A focus on “before” and “after” is adopted in order to disrupt the linear policy and “effects” temporalities that much qualitative gentrification research tends to inhabit. We see how state-led neighbourhood restructuring does not simply displace, but carries residents from “empowerment” to abandonment and transfers them from active struggle into devitalised limbo. As such, the paper demarcates challenges and opportunities for resident mobilisation inherent in a vacillating urban renewal programme, powerful in its inception but which has since “hit the buffers” (Lees 2014, Antipode 46(4):921–947) in light of global and municipal fiscal crises.

This paper critically analyses the construction of eco-cities as technological fixes to concerns over climate change, Peak Oil, and other scenarios in the transition towards “green capitalism”. It argues for a critical engagement with new-build eco-city projects, first by highlighting the inequalities which mean that eco-cities will not benefit those who will be most impacted by climate change: the citizens of the world's least wealthy states. Second, the paper investigates the foundation of eco-city projects on notions of crisis and scarcity. Third, there is a need to critically interrogate the mechanisms through which new eco-cities are built, including the land market, reclamation, dispossession and “green grabbing”. Lastly, a sustained focus is needed on the multiplication of workers’ geographies in and around these “emerald cities”, especially the ordinary urban spaces and lives of the temporary settlements housing the millions of workers who move from one new project to another.

In recent years some commentators have looked at successive waves of UK urban policy from the perspective of gender, although these commentaries have been somewhat marginal within wider discussions of urban policy and politics. This article seeks to make the case for a renewed emphasis on gender, which moves beyond tracing the role of men and women in relation to urban policy programmes, in two particular ways. First it is argued that a more sophisticated analysis of the gendered nature of urban governance is needed, in other words how forms of gendered labour, subjectivity and power work through and within policy projects; and second that there should be a wider consideration of what feminist visions of cities and politics, both past and present, might contribute to the project of a critical, and hopeful, analysis of urban policy and politics. The paper seeks to make a practical as well as theoretical intervention in relation to gender and feminist perspectives on UK urban policy. It is argued that there has been a silence around such issues in recent years, both in analysis and in policy discourses, and that this silence has masked how gendered labour and power has often been woven into urban governance. For example, forms of women-centred organising have been relied on in a range of government projects seeking to build community and participation within poor neighbourhoods. Such reliance may be increasing in a context of austerity. As well as this critical analysis of current policy, the paper argues for the reinvigoration of feminist visions of cities that suggest different framings of aspects of urban life. For example, rethinking the lines between public and private spheres might result in different forms of housing or sites of civic participation. Through engaging anew with such perspectives cities might become more just, caring, and equal for all.

This paper discusses (homo)sexualization as entrepreneurial strategy in Buenos Aires. City-marketing capitalizes on Buenos Aires' reputed passion and tolerance. Yet homonormative framings collide with politicized cultures of sexual dissidence. Cultural entrepreneurialism promotes profit-making sexual diversity, but social actors also construct their queerness outside, even in opposition to, market-driven urbanism. This paper argues that queered tango practices differ from those of mainstream LGBT circuits and coalesce with those who contest the genre's touristification, designed to trigger selective redevelopment. The paper first examines the explanatory purchase of cultural entrepreneurialism and homonormativity outside Euro-America. Empirical sections then show that the redefinition/re-territorialization of gayness aggravates socio-spatial fragmentation, while governmental appropriations of tango legitimize exclusionary world-class-city politics. Nevertheless, the paper's first-person ethnography of queer tango uncovers territories of radical difference and trans-local solidarity networks. The paper ends by suggesting the need for further research into the conflictive intersections between urban globalization and globalizing queerness.

This paper examines the politics of open defecation by focusing on everyday intersections of the body and infrastructure in the metabolic city, which produces profoundly unequal opportunities for fulfilling bodily needs. Specifically, it examines how open defecation emerges in Mumbai's informal settlements through everyday embodied experiences, practices and perceptions forged in relation to the materialities of informality and infrastructure. It does so by tracing the micropolitics of provision, access, territoriality and control of sanitation infrastructures; everyday routines and rhythms, both of people and infrastructures; and experiences of disgust and perceptions of dignity. It also examines open defecation as embodied spatial and temporal improvisations in order to investigate the socially differentiated efforts and risks that it entails. More broadly, the paper seeks to deepen understandings of the relationship between the body, infrastructure and the sanitary/unsanitary city.

This paper offers a critique of the theory of homonationalism, which has become virtually hegemonic in contemporary queer thought and activism. Some theorists have tried to distance homonationalism from its popular/activist manifestation of “pinkwatching”, which refers to the increasingly vocal efforts of queer anti-occupation activists to expose the Israeli government's efforts to “pinkwash” its treatment of Palestinians by touting its record on gay rights. The paper argues, however, that both suffer from fundamental conceptual flaws and ultimately have more to do with the contexts in which they circulate—“gay” cities in the US and Europe—than Israel–Palestine. The paper suggests a political and analytical shift away from the totalizing theory of homonationalism—and the simplistic critiques of pinkwashing inspired by it—to a more complex and contextualized focus on the ways in which ordinary bodies are regulated in their movements through time and space.

This paper contributes to an empirical and theoretical understanding of democracy and political participation in India through an ethnographic study of the meanings attached to voting in rural Tamil Nadu. Based on a study of voting in a rural constituency during the 2009 national elections, the paper explores the variety of motivations that compel people to vote. It explores how voting is informed by popular understandings of rights and duties as citizens, programmatic policies and their local implementation, commitment to caste and party loyalties, and authority of charismatic leaders. The paper explores the roots of the political consciousness and rights awareness that underpin high levels of electoral participation. It suggests that elections form unique moments that allow ordinary people to experience an individual sense of citizenship and of democracy itself while at the same time allowing them to pursue projects of recognition, respect and assertion as members of communities. It is precisely this dual feature that makes voting so enduringly attractive to India's contemporary electorate.

While many urban policies and practices claim to offer an “alternative” to the “mainstream” of urban entrepreneurialism, they remain under-theorised and prone to alignment with entrepreneurial agendas. In this paper I examine fare-free public transport (FFPT) as a salient example of an alternative urban policy. Looking at Aubagne (France) and Tallinn (Estonia), I explore what happens when an alternative policy “comes to town”. I detect how FFPT enters local urban regimes, and study the (non-)participation of public transport passengers and workers in the decision-making process about whether and how to abolish public transport fares. My analysis reveals that albeit alternative policies such as FFPT seem to oppose entrepreneurialism, they may hinge on urban regimes that span across institutions, leave the local configurations of power unchallenged, and strenghten local elites. The adaptability of alternatives to diverse political and intellectual positions explains their resilience. Consequently, their radicalcharacter cannot be taken for granted and remains an object of political struggle.

This paper examines how middle-aged and older post-Soviet immigrants in eastern Berlin navigate the neoliberalized landscape of work-based integration in face of their long-term unemployment. I first show how these immigrants’ own insistence on the centrality of paid work for their feeling integrated contributes to their experience of collective despondency and enrollment in exploitative quasi-markets, including workfare. Focusing on this insistence, I examine how it draws strength primarily from their continued subscription to the conceptions of self as deeply socially embedded, and of work as a practice of such an embedding, adopted through their Soviet-era socialization into the culture of dispersed personhood and obligation to work, rather than from their adoption of neoliberal concepts of citizenship in Germany. Contributing to geographies of post-socialist experience of neoliberalized regimes of citizenship and immigrant integration this paper thus highlights how some of the aspects of post-socialist subjectivities dovetail unexpectedly with the neoliberal project.

This paper presents traditional retail markets in the UK caught between a narrative of decline and revival, on the edge of a gentrification frontier. Traditional indoor and outdoor markets have become somewhat residual in many British cities but essential for many low-income citizens that rely on their affordability. At the same time, the market is being reinvented for a wealthier type of customer interested more in local, environmentally friendly, ethical and “authentic” shopping experience. We take the case of Kirkgate Market in Leeds, the largest of its kind in Britain to analyse the process of disinvestment by the local authority, displacement of traders and customers and rebranding of the market for a new wealthier customer base. The paper is based on an action-research project on which one of the authors is involved alongside traders and other campaigners to defend the public nature of Kirkgate Market in Leeds.

This paper applies an anarchist approach to ongoing debates on the politics, nature and function of territory. Recent work in geography has problematised dominant modes of territory, but has stopped short of a systematic critique of how statist spatial imaginations and practices reproduce and perpetuate the dominance of both capitalism and authority in society. In this paper, I deploy anarchist thought and practice to argue that territory must be viewed as a processual and contested product of social relations. This is linked to the notion of prefiguration; a distinctive concept in anarchist thought and practice embedding envisioned future modes of social organisation into the present. Using examples from fieldwork with anarchist-inspired groups, I explore anarchist prefigurative politics as a means to re-imagine how practices of territorialisation and bordering might be deployed as part of a broader project of social transformation.

Re-reading the economic landscape of the western world as a largely non-capitalist landscape composed of economic plurality, this paper demonstrates how economic relations in contemporary western society are often embedded in non-commodified practices such as mutual aid, reciprocity, co-operation and inclusion. By highlighting how the long-overlooked lived practices in the contemporary world of production, consumption and exchange are heavily grounded in the very types and essences of non-capitalist economic relations that have long been proposed by anarchistic visions of employment and organization, this paper displays that such visions are far from utopian: they are embedded firmly in the present. Through focusing on the pervasive nature of heterodox economic spaces in the UK in particular, some ideas about how to develop an anarchist future of work and organization will be proposed. The outcome is to begin to engage in the demonstrative construction of a future based on mutualism and autonomous modes of organization and representation. © 2012 The Authors. Antipode© 2012 Antipode Foundation Ltd..