ABSTRACT By focusing on Sri Lanka and Maldives as small island states where Sino-Indian competition is evident, and adopting a Gramscian theoretical approach, this paper examines the spatialisation of power and deterritorialisation of sovereignty in the Indian Ocean. It poses two core questions: Where is power located in the oceanic space? And what does sovereignty mean in a maritime context? Through an analysis of Sri Lanka’s emphasis on infrastructure and Maldives’ prioritisation of land reclamation and spatial reconfiguration, this paper advances two interlinked arguments. First, it demonstrates that small states do not merely resist great power hegemony but actively shape the domains and modalities of competition, thereby exercising governance in spaces traditionally dominated by great powers. Second, in exercising this agency, small states enact a form of sovereignty that transcends territorial autonomy, embracing the fluidity and dynamism of oceanic spaces. Overall, this paper disrupts conventional geographies of power that rigidly separate domestic from foreign, autonomy from dependency, and land from sea, offering a reimagined framework for understanding governance in the Indian Ocean.

ABSTRACT Since the 2010s, the Russian Federation has devoted significant resources to promoting its own interpretation of cyber norms. To this end, Russia has engaged in various cyber dialogues in different multilateral settings. The article adopts a constructivist perspective to explain Russia’s role as a norm entrepreneur, shaped by its great power identity and underlying vulnerabilities both domestically and internationally. We examine Russia’s norm-promotion strategies within the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and the United Nations (UN). We argue that within the CSTO – where cultural homogenisation among members promotes a common outlook – socialisation is an effective approach for advancing cyber norms. In contrast, within the UN – where actors from diverse backgrounds converge – Russia persuades others to endorse its proposed cyber norms by clustering them together with founding international principles, such as national sovereignty, non-interference, and territorial integrity. Against this backdrop, we further inquire why Russia’s promotion of cyber norms within the UN has not been significantly affected by its malign cyber activities and its ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while these developments have partly challenged Russia’s entrepreneurship and cyber cooperation within the CSTO.

ABSTRACT This special issue explores articulations and repercussions of violence and the (un)even distribution of safety in European reception and protection regimes from interdisciplinary perspectives. It seeks to disentangle, challenge and ultimately better understand the very idea of Europe as a safe haven, the scientific and political implications that derive from its shortcomings and to query the very values that supposedly underpin European liberal democracies. While much of the existing literature within geography and allied disciplines focuses on the state violence deployed to prevent people from entering or staying on European territory, this special issue also asks to what extent and how people continue to experience violence after having obtained (temporary) legal protection. The contributions illuminate how neither the arrival on a certain territory, nor legal recognition offer fully reliable safety to displaced people. This reinforces doubt cast upon the promise of liberalism and raises the question: Why do we see liberal values and promises failing? Who is entitled to protection, under what conditions and what does safety really mean? How does the myth of liberal Europe produce different kinds of subjects rather than offering a safe haven to those seeking protection? To address these questions, contributors employ different theoretical approaches and draw on evidence from different geographical settings to address the ambiguities of safety, vulnerability and violence in everyday life and their distribution across bodies and space.

ABSTRACT The ‘relational turn’ signifies a shift in the focus of the social sciences and humanities towards relationships rather than isolated entities. One of the key recent developments in this perspective is an emphasis on the co-constitutive relationship between the agent and its environment, leading to a reconsideration of geography as a science of human-environment relations in today’s world. Similarly, the relational turn has significantly influenced perspectives in political geography and geopolitical studies since the 1990s. Revisiting the relational turn in these fields, this special issue aims to clarify how islands and seas form interconnected geopolitical realities as mutually constitutive and inseparable geographical features within contested territories. Six articles were selected from the papers presented at the International Geographical Union Thematic Conference on ‘Islands in Relations’ held in Osaka, 2023. They examine the conference theme from different angles and with various approaches. All of them provide theoretical and/or conceptual insights into island relationality, supported by empirical cases spanning a wide geographic area, from the Arctic Circle to the Pacific Ocean. This makes the special issue both intellectually enriching and empirically comprehensive, systematically demonstrating the importance of relational approaches to current geopolitical issues surrounding islands.

ABSTRACT Border studies have recently been focussed on what happens when borders close, leaving the question of border reopenings both largely unexplored and unconceptualized. We argue here for a new focus on border dematerialisations to complement existing work on border materialisations. This is supported by a detailed, interdisciplinary study of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan border conducted by a geographer and an economist. Having been largely sealed for many years, a change of leadership in Uzbekistan in 2016 precipitated a major policy shift promoting transboundary trade, cooperation and movement. Using both macroeconomic data analysis and ethnographic study, we trace what Uzbekistan did to reopen borders and show the economic and political consequences.

ABSTRACT Borders become most visible across space through their material manifestations. On the fringes of territory, these manifest as border walls, which demarcate the beginning of difference. These walls, while tangibly imposing, are susceptible to both physical and metaphysical subversion, making them leaky and ineffective. Due to these inconsistencies, there is a need to broaden the ontological underpinnings and material expectations of the wall. The paper reimagines walls with learnings from the processual turn in border studies and the focus on b/ordering. It argues that walls should be understood as objects that embed difference affectively into a landscape, emphasising their territorialising performance rather than their physical presence. The paper uses the case of Belfast, as the peace walls in this context offer an alternative perspective on border walls that transcends traditional concerns with sovereignty and territorial demarcation. Across the city, objects and symbols express the narratives and power relationships occurring in space, especially in places of contest, where the ordinary everyday can become politically charged. Beyond the walls, the paper also considers gates, road signs, and flags in Belfast, to demonstrate an approach of using the material landscape to reveal how affective encounters of difference occur in expressions of territorial belonging. By turning to the fringes of identity, I will show how difference is subtly embedded into everyday objects, which affect movement despite not preventing access explicitly through their physical form. I argue that these objects should be considered walls alongside their masonry counterparts, as they constitute territorial identity through both sameness and othering, with the polarity of belonging and exclusion defining the b/ordering process.

ABSTRACT This paper examines the impact of the Russian aggression against Ukraine on the daily life of Kaliningrad society. The example of the Kaliningrad Oblast proves that in geopolitically sensitive areas with changing border conditions, the population shows a high degree of resilience to external shocks. Introducing the concept of border resilience, specifically social borderland resilience, the paper argues that border communities can adapt and create new daily adaptations strategies to achieve life satisfaction despite geopolitical tensions. The resilience of Kaliningrad’s residents is evident in their changing cross-border mobility and creative solutions to accessing inaccessible goods and services. The analysis, based on in-depth interviews with Kaliningrad residents, offers insights into the socio-economic effects of border restrictions and the residents’ resilience and adaptability, contributing to the broader discourse on border resilience.

ABSTRACT Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has affected the status of Eastern Europe in global life. From a backward ‘buffer zone’ in both European and global affairs, it has emerged at the forefront of ideas, initiatives, and strategies for addressing the turbulent dynamics of world affairs. This ‘Ukraine moment’ does not represent a novel development but has compelled a confrontation with the complex realities of East European unmapping. Unmapping refers to a set of insurgent dispositions which seek to challenge the spatio-ontological cartographies of epistemic provincialisation, geopolitical peripheralisation, and geocultural passivity, in which Eastern Europe appears to have been consigned. It is in their encounter with China during the second decade of the twenty-first century that East European actors began to unmap from the geopolitical semiotics of their stigmatisation by actively navigating the complexity of a multi-order world. They developed two distinct unmapping modalities – that of ‘frontline democracies’ and ‘illiberal democracies’. Both indicate that Eastern Europe is becoming a ‘frontline region’. The experience of East European unmapping demonstrates that while they are located at the interstices of several world orders, frontline regions are anything but the passive recipients of external agency; instead, they are spaces of bordering, debordering, and re-bordering transformations through which regional actors engage in the active selection, priming, and translation of the rules, norms, and practices of different world orders.

ABSTRACT Russia has been involved in Africa since Tsarist times, but its involvement has ebbed and flowed. Nonetheless, the idea of Africa as an open political landscape in which Russia could act as a great power has been relatively persistent, often in connection with the domestic resurfacing of civilisational discourses on Russian exceptionalism. Recently, there has been much concern in the West about the expansion of Russian projection in Africa, with some suggesting that Moscow is establishing a sphere of influence. Our analysis of Russia’s geopolitical imagination and its subsequent practices does not lead us to conclude that a deliberate attempt to establish a genuine sphere of influence is underway. Instead, we see an opportunistic endeavour to assert and shape a geographically continuous sphere of interest (Russian: sfera interesov), negotiating with local partners forms of collaboration that reflect and prompt change in the international system.

ABSTRACT All de facto states exist within the context of continuous geopolitical competition. While such competition can pose risks to their survival – particularly, if it escalates into active warfare with unpredictable outcomes – it can also, paradoxically, enhance their chances of survival. In some cases, the rivalry incentivises patron states to actively support secessionist entities, seeing their survival as aligned with their own strategic interests. For de facto states, such rivalry creates opportunities to (re)negotiate their geopolitical roles – shaped both by their desired self-image and by their strategies for engaging with ‘others’ to secure the roles they seek. This conceptual paper examines the processes through which geopolitical roles are constructed and explores how de facto states navigate interactions with external actors, while being defined and constrained by geographical markers such as territory, resources, and population. To illustrate geopolitical role constructions at work, the paper then briefly demonstrates how de facto state role conceptions emerge in specific temporal and geopolitical contexts.