ABSTRACT This article examines the interplay between securitisation, policy networks, sovereignty, and the spatialisation of power in addressing Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) fishing as a transnational environmental crime (TEC). It explores how large and smaller states combat IUU fishing while asserting sovereignty amid territorial disputes in the South China Sea (SCS) and the Indian Ocean. TEC, valued at US$1 trillion annually, undermines state sovereignty by disrupting economies and border controls. ASEAN, promoting regional cooperation since 1967, offers governance insights for the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA). Hosting the world’s busiest sea lanes, ASEAN and IORA face severe maritime security challenges. Territorial disputes in the SCS and shifting Indo-Pacific power dynamics further complicate ocean governance. This article assesses ASEAN’s relevance for IORA, the securitisation of IUU fishing, its implications for sovereignty and power spatialisation, and how governance frameworks contrast with major powers’ maritime territorialisation strategies.

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 This forum highlights the disruptive implications of AI for the geopolitical landscape by examining its integration into command-and-control systems, military doctrines, and global security discourses. These transformations are embedded in core debates on spatial power projection, supply chain control, technological sovereignty, shifting international alliances, and the changing geography of innovation hubs. AI-assisted arms races are thus understood not only as strategic phenomena between states, but also as drivers of spatial reconfiguration in the global security order. Challenging the reductive metaphor of a singular ‘AI arms race’, the forum conceptualises contemporary rivalries as overlapping, AI-assisted competitions that amplify key strategic domains such as nuclear deterrence, cyber warfare, and air warfare.

ABSTRACT This Special Issue explores the spatial politics of trade through a constructivist lens. While recent debates in international trade policy have emphasised geostrategic concerns, we argue that space in trade governance is not merely a geopolitical backdrop, but a politically contested arena. The establishment, management, and contestation of trade relations are shaped by, and contribute to, social constructions of space, including the power structures that underpin them. Borrowing from political geography and the literature on spatial imaginaries, we set out the conceptual categories and guiding questions that structure this Special Issue. We examine how trade policies construct spatial imaginaries that reflect and reproduce geopolitical hierarchies, particularly between the Global South and North. With a focus on the trade politics of the European Union and the United Kingdom, we demonstrate why it is beneficial to analyse trade through a nuanced conceptualisation that understands space as contingently constructed, rather than as a neutral container.

ABSTRACT This article examines how elite brokers reshape sovereignty and territorial control through mega-infrastructure development in the Indian Ocean region. Through an ethnographic study of the US$14 billion Chinese-funded Colombo Port City development in Sri Lanka, it analyses how presidentially appointed Commissioners exercise unprecedented authority over territorial governance through three interrelated mechanisms: legal-institutional innovation that creates exceptional jurisdictions, physical transformation of maritime space, and economic regulation that engineers specialised zones. These ‘infrastructure brokers’ represent a fundamental departure from traditional development intermediaries who operate at society’s margins. Unlike conventional brokers who mediate within existing frameworks, these elite actors architect new institutional arrangements that simultaneously extend and transcend state authority. Operating at the nexus of state power and international capital, they produce differentiated zones of governance that accommodate global investment while maintaining assertions of national control. By revealing how territorial authority is reconfigured through the intersection of elite agency and spatial production, this analysis contributes to understanding sovereignty’s transformation in an era of mega-infrastructure competition across the Global South.

ABSTRACT Following the need for critical reflection on post-Soviet bordering and othering, notably between Ukraine and Russia, this paper focuses on the triple borderland of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, and the originally trilateral festival celebrated there annually since 1969. The study relies on content analysis of festival programmes and media reports from the three countries covering the Festival editions from 2001 to 2022 with the main focus on the period of 2014–2021. By examining the disruptions and resignifications that the Festival was subject to before and after 2014 and asking why the Festival survived this rupture, this paper provides a new perspective on how the short-lived, authentic dialogue among Ukraine, Russia and Belarus and their border regions was replaced with a performance of dialogue. By synthesising the literature on borders, spectacle and performance, a heuristic model to study changing functions of border festivals is proposed identifying ten such functions. The paper shows that the Festival at the tri-point of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus has had at least five out of the ten border festival functions over its half a century of existence. The paper discusses comparatively the Festival in relation to its different editions and in relation to other border festivals worldwide. It is expected that the heuristic for studying changing functions of border festivals will facilitate future cross-national and cross-temporal comparative studies of border festivals.

ABSTRACT This article examines the territorial claims of the mapuche people regarding what they consider their ancestral space, Wallmapu, along with highlighting a geopolitical issue for the states of Argentina and Chile. Additionally, it introduces local, transnational, and international ideas and practices that problematise and allow reflection on central concepts and rules of the state-centred international order, such as territory, sovereignty, and borders. The work is situated in the critical debates of International Relations, through the significance of other actors, narratives, and dynamics marginalised in this field, such as indigenous peoples. In the case of the mapuche people, their conception of territory and the construction of Wallmapu extend beyond mere geographical space, encompassing both material and immaterial dimensions. These conceptions transcend state boundaries through political practices, relationship with nature, and evolving conceptualisations that increasingly challenge and differentiate from state-centric logic. This occurs despite the extensive historical and contemporary constraints they have faced.

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of strategic narratives in the context of the European Union’s geopolitical turn. Focusing on the narratives surrounding Georgia’s EU candidacy application, it explores how these narratives function in geopolitical settings as bordering practices. The analysis unfolds in four parts. First, the conceptual framework based on strategic narratives explores how relational approaches can contribute to the understanding of emerging narratives and bordering practices. Second, a methodological section outlines the empirical approach to study strategic narratives. Third, through engaging with Georgia’s EU candidacy application process, the paper analyses how a group of civil society organisations, as a community of practice, narrate Georgia’s candidacy to address the geopolitical tensions. In conclusion, the paper discusses how these civil society organisations use strategic narratives as a practice, to address geopoliticisation relationally.

ABSTRACT This article develops ‘the imperial gaze’ concept to explore how maps not only represent the world, but also do things in geopolitics, even provoking mass demonstrations. It examines China’s early-modern and contemporary maps to highlight how they create an imperial gaze that guides Chinese understandings of world order. If your cartographic ‘view of the world’ produces your ideological ‘worldview’, then it is important to see how China’s early-modern maps inform the PRC’s twenty-first-century claims in the South China Sea. The article argues that Chinese cartography does things in geopolitics by mobilising the affective governance of an assemblage of hybrid combinations of tradition and modernity, East and West, and Sinocentric and Westphalian conceptions of space. In this way, it examines how historical maps of China and contemporary maps of the U-Shaped Line in the South China Sea work with each other to provoke the imperial gaze that celebrates China’s territorial expansion, laments its lost territories, and fights to recover them. It concludes that the imperial gaze is not peculiar to the PRC, thus further comparative research will help to see how it works in other polities as well.

ABSTRACT The EU’s external border restricts the movement of unwanted individuals and subjects them to necropolitical governance. Such governance is sustained by epistemic and affective borders, determining whose lives and deaths are deemed meaningful. Maurice Stierl has proposed the concept of ‘grief activism’ as a form of transformative politics that can subvert such borders. In this paper, we further develop this framework in the specific context of Eastern EUrope, using Lithuania as a case in point. This research explores how the Lithuanian grassroots initiative Sienos Grupė (English: Border Group) engages with the lives and deaths of illegalised migrants and their relatives, invisibilised by the border regime. While research on grief activism has tended to focus on commemorations of migrant deaths, we argue that its scope should be expanded to engage with the entire ‘live-death continuum’ – including the ongoing erosion of conditions for a liveable life in an unequal world. This broader framing provides tools to situate violence against migrants historically and relationally, while seeking to foster alternative directions of affect and political engagement. Drawing on engaged ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2024), semi-structured interviews with members of Sienos Grupė, and an analysis of the group’s public communication, we examine how activists seek recognition for those excluded from dominant regimes of grievability.