This article engages with the spatial dynamics of reactionary authoritarianism in white urban secession movements around Atlanta. These movements seek to incorporate, annex, de-annex, or otherwise utilize municipal boundary change to carve off exclusive communities from a diverse metro. Such movements have, for almost two decades, traded largely on the austerity logics of neoliberal urbanism and privatized governance; recent secessionist efforts, such as the movement for a so-called Buckhead City, have instead taken on more explicitly reactionary valences. Drawing upon the Frankfurt School—particularly Walter Benjamin’s conceptual development of phantasmagoria —I seek to position the recent Buckhead City movement as an attempt at realizing what the geographer Natalie Koch calls ‘authoritarian univocality’ in service of the reproduction of possessive geographies of whiteness, demonstrating how a critical practice of [un]grounding can help geographers to challenge emergent formations of racial authoritarianism at multiple scales.

This paper examines the ‘local’ politics of mobile public policies through a comparative analysis of Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) in two left behind English market towns: Tamworth and Wellingborough. The representing of BIDs as a successful and transformative public policy elsewhere does not guarantee their smooth reproduction everywhere, of course. This paper argues that ‘local’ public policymaking is inherently contingent and indeterminate. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, the paper makes three key contributions to the wider academic literature. First, it underscores the importance of explaining – rather than assuming – the means through which places ‘arrive at’ mobile policies and how they become embedded (or not), foregrounding the processual, power-laden and situated nature of public policymaking. Second, in revisiting the concept of institutional thickness/thinness, the paper calls for greater attention to meso-level analysis to unpack the conjunctural ‘local’ politics shaping the uneven making-up of mobile public policy. Third, the paper examines the afterlives of policy failure, arguing that ‘failure’ does not always constitute an absolute but rather might also be understood as merely a pause, a precursor to the emergence of a related policy. In doing so, the paper highlights the continued importance of the relational and territorial nature of the politics of public policymaking.

Water justice, which ensures equitable access and active participation in governance, is crucial for enhancing the effectiveness of regional environmental governance. However, the intricate connections between socio-spatial inequalities and responses to water injustice within authoritarian contexts remain complex and contested. Specifically, while macro-level water governance in China has been widely studied, the micro-mechanisms of how state power shapes subjectivities to quell resistance, and how local actors navigate these constraints through everyday adaptation, require further empirical grounding alongside emerging scholarship. Existing water justice research has extensively examined these relationships, yet their manifestation within specific authoritarian political regimes—particularly in how technocratic knowledge monopolies and co-opted participation mechanisms operate—warrants deeper investigation. Rather than introducing a new framework, this study applies the concept of hydrosocial territories to scrutinize the power dynamics in the Gaoyou Irrigation District (GID) in China. By mapping the hydropolitical hierarchy, it reveals how power struggles among stakeholders—the central state, GID Administration, Water Users Association, and GID water users—produce four dimensions of water injustice, including distributive, procedural, recognitional, and socio-ecological injustices. The study also critiques authoritarian environmentalism for reinforcing power imbalances and exacerbating water injustice through discursive and material means.

What is the aftermath of an uprising in a city? How do cities contain the remains of ‘the event’? This article addresses these questions through a focus on German visual artist Kaya Behkalam’s Augmented Archive project. Described as a ‘digital art and research project’, The Augmented Archive is a phone app that presents an archive of urban space in Cairo during the 2011 uprising and its aftermath. Utilising GPS technology, augmented reality, and video streaming, the app leads the user through the city’s past, present and future. As users navigate Cairo through the app, they are presented with videos recorded in the same place at a time now passed, evoking the heady, hopeful, but also violent days of revolution and counter-revolution. Users are also invited to upload their own video content to the app. The Augmented Archive is therefore a palimpsest; past, present and future overlay and speak to one another. By exploring the Augmented Archive , this article considers the implications the app has on our understanding of time and temporality in relation to urban space in the aftermath of large-scale political events. Navigating the city through the app can lead to a disjuncture in the way we experience time. The Augmented Archive brings to the fore the way(s) in which the past continues to live in the present. In doing so, I argue, the app presents a critique of chronological, linear notions of time, and offers itself as an archive where multiple temporalities can coexist.

This paper investigates what it means to study geopolitical borders and bordering “after Nature,” in a context where the Nature–Culture binary is increasingly being challenged. It examines the implications of reconceptualizing borders as naturalcultural entities and the theoretical, analytical, and methodological consequences of such a shift. Our work offers a twofold contribution. First, we engage with existing literature on borders and the more-than-human, arguing that transcending the Nature–Culture divide expands the multiperspectival approach to border studies by acknowledging nonhuman agencies in (de)bordering processes. This broader perspective aligns with longstanding efforts in border studies to recognize the diversity of actors involved in shaping and dismantling borders. While taking nonhuman agency seriously is essential, we contend that this is only a starting point. To fully integrate the implications of moving beyond the Nature–Culture divide, multiperspectivism must be revised to embrace a pluriversal ontology—one that accounts for the multiplicity of human and nonhuman perspectives. Such an approach enables a rethinking of geopolitical borders with nonhuman others and transforms key border studies concepts such as B/ordering and Othering. Second, we apply this broadened and revised multiperspectivism to a concrete case: the whale. By analyzing whale–human entanglements in two “contact zones”—the Mediterranean and the postcolonial North—we examine how multispecies relations shape (de)bordering dynamics. We argue that this naturalcultural perspective deepens and complexifies analyses of power relations, while enriching our understanding of who creates borders, what borders do, and how they might be reimagined.

This paper explores the socio-spatial dynamics of safety for Muslim women who wear the hijab in Western urban public spaces. Integrating critical interdisciplinary studies, it extends debates on urban planning to include the ‘invisible work’ of identity management. We demonstrate how Muslim women tactically negotiate their identity and safety, adapting their appearance and behaviour in response to their environment and status, both as minorities and women. Taking East London as its case study, and drawing on interviews with twenty-two Muslim women, our findings indicate that spatial interventions like clear sight lines and community spaces intended to enhance safety and inclusivity cannot sufficiently address the ingrained political, cultural and social biases that generate insecurity. While recognizing the limits on the outcomes of planning, we build on calls for a more phenomenological approach to planning for public space. We argue that integrating cultural diversity and fostering inclusion demands a broader understanding of ‘safety’: one that recognizes the complex ways in which minority communities experience urban spaces. To achieve this, we focus on the importance of planners being more sensitive to intersectionality to engage more fully with power dynamics that inform a sense of safety in public space.

London’s borough councils are adapting to the increase in asylum-seekers since 2020. I explore their shift from reactive to more strategic and proactive responses, observed during a series of ‘design lab’ workshops between January and June 2023 in the Greater London Authority’s Asylum Welcome programme. Driven by a need to be better prepared to support people seeking asylum, I examine how councils built capacity despite limited funding and no clear role within asylum policy. I find that capacity-building is a multi-stage process that extends beyond new skills and resources. It requires resolving dilemmas to clarify roles and goals, and building confidence through knowledge and partnerships, before developing skills for implementation. Ultimately, I show that such capacity-building processes reveal how local government does political work through its practice: they affirm the local state’s duty of care to people seeking asylum. Though they struggle to change asylum policy without central government reforms, this research nonetheless recasts local governments as well-equipped to adapt to new and uncertain challenges.

This article introduces the concept of graduated hospitality to theorize how migrant reception in Mexico’s non-border cities is perceived as shaped by uneven distributions of logistical capacity and moral accountability across institutional and territorial scales. Drawing on eight weeks of ethnographic fieldwork with CAMMI and allied actors in Querétaro (2022), I examine how participants assign responsibility for perceived successes and failures of a UNHCR-supported resettlement program. In comparison, logistical shortcomings were often attributed to local factors; critiques of national and transnational actors, including the UNHCR, centered on moral and geopolitical concerns. Extending Ong’s notion of graduated sovereignty and engaging Mezzadra and Neilson’s hypothesis that contemporary bordering renders scale simultaneously volatile and determining, I develop graduated hospitality as an analytic for tracking pattern subjective allocations of moral and functional responsibility across institutional and territorial scales. The analysis specifies an attribution gradient—functional critiques concentrate locally, while moral critiques scale up—thereby offering an empirically grounded refinement to debates on differential inclusion. I treat interlocutors’ expressions of ambivalence or confusion about such responsibility as a second-order phenomenon, illuminating how these attribution patterns are experienced and negotiated. In short, graduated hospitality names both the uneven distribution of responsibility across scales and the scalar legibility of those distributions, making territorial re-scaling through migration governance more empirically traceable.

Most models for international environmental governance acknowledge that the participation of non-state actors is critical; however, this participation is limited to a pre-political level in which scientific communities have a predominant role and indigenous ontologies are often marginalized. This article contextualizes these discussions by examining how ontological differences are incorporated or excluded in the international environmental governance of the Amazon rainforest. By exploring the interactions between Indigenous peoples and scientific communities, it examines the prospects of institutionalizing these interactions within the Amazonian Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO). The article relies on research during the years 2021-2024 involving semi-structured interviews and the comparative analysis of the the Science Panel for the Amazon (SPA) procedures and reports with the main international scientific platforms dedicated to the environment: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The article argues that the inclusion of Indigenous peoples in these panels is not about knowledge co-production. Scientists conceive these panels through their Western universalist ontology as apolitical sites to collect, systematize, and diffuse scientific knowledge. In contrast, for Indigenous peoples, these are spaces for political exchanges on which they seek to formulate their political ontology and the proper ways to protect their world. Based on these findings, the article proposes reimagining scientist platforms and international decision-making forums as spaces for ‘pluriversal governance’.

This article argues that value can be a key concept for bridging between geopolitics and economic geography, providing a historicised account of a subterranean geopolitical space as it shifts from a valuation regime focused on strategic use value to one focused on commercial exchange value. This argument is pursued through an empirical investigation of the tunnel system within the Rock of Gibraltar, tracing how they have been valued differently in different times due to technological and geopolitical change. Empirically, the article traces the creation of the tunnels by the British military from the 18th century until the mid-late 20th century, paying careful attention to the role of materiality, geology, and the broader techno-political assemblages that enabled and sustained that investment (until they no longer did). Crucially, the empirical investigation continues into the present, as the geopolitical value of the tunnels has largely been replaced by efforts to extract commercial value from them. While most of the tunnels have not found commercial use, the paper finds that the most successful commercial enterprises have used them in ways congruent with their fortress origins and the materiality of the Rock. The article concludes by arguing that the value of subterranea is imagined at the point of initial human investment, but once that investment materialises the value emerges from a wider relational space – drawing together the geology of the site, the people who work there, and broader circuits of empire and capital.