Introduction to the Special Issue: Subterranean Geopolitics

Abstract

ABSTRACTRecent 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).