Geopolitical Scales Research Articles

Transnational queer cultures and digital media: an introduction

Abstract Queer cultures have long been transnational and in times of rapid technological advancements, large migration flows, and intense cross-cultural exchanges, queer connections are evolving in new forms and meanings. These developments occur at the intersection of various intertwined geopolitical scales: urban, regional, national, continental, and global, as well as physical and digital. This introduction synthesizes various theoretical and methodological discussions to highlight the ambivalences of contemporary queer cultures, focusing on their intrinsic transnational and digital conditions. The authors contributing to this issue demonstrate that understanding queer cultures in the digital age requires examining the roles of various actors, including big tech employees, online platform volunteers, queer influencers, audiences, and migrants. They also highlight how queer digital cultures transcend national borders and challenge oppositional binaries, such as local vs. global and the West vs. the Rest, all while maintaining a critical perspective on the ambivalences of digitality.

A new global review of bird atlases and their contribution to knowledge

ABSTRACT Capsule Over 600 bird atlases projects have been implemented across 93 countries, with at least 380,000 participants. Bird atlases with larger geographical scope had greater research impact but those utilizing online data submission and so higher number of participants had lower research impact. Aims To provide a comprehensive global review of bird atlases, to explore the impact of bird atlases in research, and identify variables that influence impact. Methods A database of bird atlases was compiled. Variables were extracted including: overall survey effort (an index generated using principal components analysis (PCA) comprised of total survey area, number of participants, and number of data records); research impact (an index generated using PCA comprised of bibliometric measures extracted from Scopus and Google Scholar); geographical details; fieldwork, project, and publication timing; fieldwork methods. We then used mixed linear models to explore how these variables differed across atlases, and which were predictors of research impact index. Results As of 2021, over 600 bird atlases projects have been implemented across 93 countries, with at least 380,000 participants worldwide. Total survey area, geopolitical scale, and number of atlas generations had significant positive relationships with research impact. Negative relationships were found between research impact and whether an atlas was published in English and the use of online data submission platforms like eBird. However, we found a significantly positive relationship between atlases using online data submission and our measure of survey effort. Conclusions Bird atlases have been undertaken all around the world at a wide variety of geopolitical scales, and are likely to be influential through widespread impact on knowledge, including research impact and citizen science involvement. Atlases utilizing online data submission generate more data and have a higher level of participant engagement but are less frequently cited by researchers in both scientific and grey literature.

Between the Minor and the Intimate: Encountering the Authoritarian (Extra)ordinary in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine

ABSTRACT Through an investigation of authoritarian encounters in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, this paper takes seriously the challenges of making geopolitical sense of contextualised micro moments. Working in a minor key, the paper offers three contributions. First, it advances a minor theory, micropolitical sensibility that interrogates the co-constitution of intimate and geopolitical scales. Second, it proposes a loose ethnographic framework to guide the analysis of ordinary moments, link them outside of the immediate, and make fuller sense of the geopolitical: rupture, digestion, connection, and representation. Third, it aspires to destabilise regional container thinking and Orientalising tendencies through a focus on authoritarian practices rather than authoritarian states. Overall, the paper foregrounds a minoritarian reading of the micro-dynamics of authoritarian encounter in order to enrich the conversation on the constitution of the geopolitical, while also offering an intimate and interconnected methodology that encourages critical, safe, and ethical research under authoritarian conditions.

Coherence of marine alien species biosecurity legislation: A study of England and Wales

The marine environment is particularly at risk from the intentional and unintentional introduction and spread of invasive alien species (IAS); preventing their introduction and spread from occurring is therefore, a key component in the on-going management of marine IAS. Ensuring legislation is coherent and consistent is essential to the success of managing the existing and future impacts of marine IAS. We explore the coherence (determined as consistency and interaction) of marine biosecurity legislation for IAS at different geopolitical scales. There was consistency between both the Bern Convention and Convention on Biological Diversity and European and national legislation that had been created in response. There was a lack of interaction evidenced by the Ballast Water Management Convention, which had not yet been transposed into regional (mainly European) or national legislation. Implementation measures such as legislation should be coherent as any failure in the chain could potentially weaken the overall effort to establish and maintain biosecurity and achieve behaviour change.

An overview of Canada’s National Pollutant Release Inventory program as a pollution control policy tool

Formed under ‘right-to-know’ legislation and public disclosure principles, Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers (PRTRs) are a key policy tool for pollution control. PRTRs affect both social and environmental policy outcomes by making facility pollutant release quantities available to stakeholders. While PRTRs operate under similar principles, they are designed to reflect national priorities. This study investigates and critically discusses the stated policy goals of Canada’s National Pollutant Release Inventory (NPRI) to other PRTRs. Notably, there are issues involving data completeness and accuracy, creating gaps in inventory emissions, thereby not reflecting actual emissions. While relative pollutant release levels have decreased, overall toxicity has increased. Coupled with the omission of toxicity factors and pollutant thresholds from the NPRI, this creates a false sense of progress for stakeholders. Making pollutant release data more comprehensive would improve stakeholder engagement and better inform the decision-making process which can be applied to policies across geopolitical scales.

Large-scale probabilistic identification of boreal peatlands using Google Earth Engine, open-access satellite data, and machine learning.

Freely-available satellite data streams and the ability to process these data on cloud-computing platforms such as Google Earth Engine have made frequent, large-scale landcover mapping at high resolution a real possibility. In this paper we apply these technologies, along with machine learning, to the mapping of peatlands–a landcover class that is critical for preserving biodiversity, helping to address climate change impacts, and providing ecosystem services, e.g., carbon storage–in the Boreal Forest Natural Region of Alberta, Canada. We outline a data-driven, scientific framework that: compiles large amounts of Earth observation data sets (radar, optical, and LiDAR); examines the extracted variables for suitability in peatland modelling; optimizes model parameterization; and finally, predicts peatland occurrence across a large boreal area (397, 958 km2) of Alberta at 10 m spatial resolution (equalling 3.9 billion pixels across Alberta). The resulting peatland occurrence model shows an accuracy of 87% and a kappa statistic of 0.57 when compared to our validation data set. Differentiating peatlands from mineral wetlands achieved an accuracy of 69% and kappa statistic of 0.37. This data-driven approach is applicable at large geopolitical scales (e.g., provincial, national) for wetland and landcover inventories that support long-term, responsible resource management.

Pissing On the Past: The Highland Clearances, Effigial Resistance and the Everyday Politics of the Urinal

When and where one can urinate is increasingly politicised around the globe. As an example of bio-political power, the provision, regulation and access to public toilets reflects larger structures in any given society. However, there is another side to micturition, that is the use of urine as a manifestation of bodily power over another/others. This article analyses the politics of the urinal through a close reading of the men’s toilet in The Lismore pub in Partick, Scotland, thus bringing together these two threads via the concept of everyday effigial resistance. In our interrogation of a politicised urinal that asks users to ‘piss’ on historical figures associated with the Highland Clearances, we aim to push International Relations to follow Enloe’s call for the study of ‘mundane practices… and the most intimate spaces’ by considering the most banal aspects of the human condition as part of its remit. Our case study serves as an explicit political intervention, one which through its geographic and geopolitical scales makes an argument for engaging with the mundane, vernacular and vulgar in everyday IR. Pisser sur le passé : les dédouanements des hautes terres, la résistance à l’effigie et la politique quotidienne de l’urinoir

Healthcare not airfare! Art, abortion and political agency in Ireland

Ireland’s near-total abortion ban was, in effect, a policy of offshoring abortions. Before the May 2018 vote to repeal it, the 8th Amendment allowed for conservative and nationalist groups to celebrate the idea of Ireland as an ‘abortion-free’ territory, while forcing women to travel to England for abortion or self-manage abortions with illegal pills at home. Artists in the Irish pro-choice movement have contested the public silence around abortion and abortion-travel; in doing so they have disrupted the political narrative of ‘abortion-free Ireland’ by symbolically re-placing Irish abortion seekers in public spaces. These place-based artistic interventions have larger significance for the changing relationship between women, reproduction, and the state. Drawing on ongoing debates in critical and feminist geopolitics, this article addresses the relationship between geopolitics, art, and political agency to theorize the role of pro-choice Irish artworks in challenging the enforced silence that surrounded abortion travel. It builds on geographical engagement with Jacques Rancière to address the feminist geopolitics critique of geopolitical scales and sites of ‘serious’ geopolitics. The article examines three artworks that depict Irish women’s experiences of abortion-related travel to England as part of the larger political campaign for liberalization of Ireland’s abortion laws.

Politics, values, and reflexivity: The case of adaptation to climate change in Hampton Roads, Virginia

Climate adaptation planning is said to be a necessary and inevitable facet of future societies, and is rapidly occurring across a range of geopolitical scales. Previous scholarship suggests that a democratic decentralized approach, one that fosters inclusive participation and representation, is central to achieving equitable and sustainable outcomes of adaptation. However, recent studies frequently characterize the adaptation process as dominated by a techoscientific approach, among expert and elite actors, that tends to obscure or neglect the perceptions and desires of more marginalized members of society. This paper employs a values-based approach to better understand motivational factors for a closed and non-inclusive adaptation process. Through a case study of early, yet formidable stages of adaptation planning in the urban, coastal region of Hampton Roads, Virginia, empirical data among the epistemic community were gathered by interviews and participant observation at de facto adaptation planning forums. Research results document an exclusionary process favoring the participation and representation of technocratic elites and the exclusion of elected officials and local citizens. When linking these case study findings to value theory, inferences are made that adaptation planning in Hampton Roads is motivated by dominant institutional actor values of power and security, those that are theorized to be in opposition to values fostering social and environmental justice. In light of these research results, this paper calls for a critically reflexive adaptation practice, thereby challenging values, assumptions, and beliefs of the self, as well as social structures and power relations that shape adaptation planning.

Crossing the Bosphorus: Connected Histories of “Other” Muslims in the Post-Imperial Borderlands of Southeast Europe

AbstractSituated in the borderlands of Southeast Europe, this essay explores how enduring patterns of transregional circulation and cosmopolitan sensibility unfold in the lives of dervish brotherhoods in the post-Cold War present. Following recent debates on connected histories in post-colonial studies and historical anthropology, long-standing mobile and circulating societies, and reinvigorated interest in empire, this essay focuses ethnographically on how members of a dervish brotherhood in Bosnia-Herzegovina cultivate relations with places, collectivities, and practices that exist on different temporal, spatial and geopolitical scales. These connections are centered around three modes of articulation—sonic, graphic, and genealogical—through which the dervish disciples imagine and realize transregional relations. This essay begins and concludes with a meditation on the need for a dialogue between ethnography and transregional history in order to appreciate modes of identification and imagination that go beyond the essentializing forms of collective identity that, in the post-imperial epoch, have been dominated by political and methodological nationalism.

“We suffered in our bones just like them”: Comparing Migrations at the Margins of Europe

AbstractIn this article, I trace how return migrants (former labor emigrants) from Andalusia, Spain draw on their regional history of emigration as a resource for claiming the moral authority to assess immigrants from the global south. By comparing their own migratory experiences and those of new migrants, Andalusians renegotiate competing ideas about their region's membership in Europe, a question with renewed political saliency during the ongoing economic crisis. Specifically, they use comparisons to claim a more central place in Europe for Andalusia, while at the same time eschewing moral culpability for Europe's mistreatment of labor emigration. To do so, Andalusian return migrants mobilize discourses of migrant suffering at various geopolitical scales of belonging, often mapping Andalusians’ experiences of emigration and return onto the region's historical trajectory of Europeanization. The scaling up and down of discourses of migrant suffering in the context of historical narratives of migration enables Andalusians to claim moral superiority based on their non-European, migrant past while also claiming European belonging in the present. Memorializing and assessing migrant suffering thus become forms of discursive work that help construct the political and moral limits of Europeanness. Through analysis of this process, I call for a more central focus on return migration and the intersection of multiple kinds of population mobility in migration research and in the study of European unification.

Ecosystem monitoring for ecosystem‐based management: using a polycentric approach to balance information trade‐offs

Ecosystem monitoring for ecosystem‐based management: using a polycentric approach to balance information trade‐offs

Viewpoint Re-evaluating the place of urban planning history

This commentary seeks to prompt new discussion about the place of urban planning history in the era of contemporary globalisation. Given the deep historic engagement of urban planning thought and practice with ‘place’ shaping and thus with the constitution of society, culture and politics, we ask how relevant is planning's legacy to the shaping of present day cities. Late twentieth century urban sociology, cultural and economic geography have demonstrated the increasing significance of intercity relations and the functional porosity of metropolitan boundaries in the network society, however statutory urban planning systems remain tied to the administrative geographies of states. This ‘territorial fixing’ of practice constrains the operational space of planning and, we argue, also limits its vision to geopolitical scales and agendas that have receding relevance for emerging urban relations. We propose that a re-evaluation of planning history could have an important part to play in addressing this spatial conundrum.

Human population, economic activities, and wild bird conservation in Mexico: factors influencing their relationships at two different geopolitical scales

Population growth poses threats to biodiversity, specifically to sensitive species. Therefore, an understanding of the conflict between biodiversity and human population is needed to enable long-term planning of development and conservation policies by state and federal governments and society based on limitations and potentials of environments. We used a geopolitical approach to analyze data on human demography, economic activities, natural vegetation, avian diversity, and protected areas of the 32 states of Mexico and the 30 districts of the state of Oaxaca. Using factor analysis, we identified the biodiversity-rich geopolitical units that have a large human population and are developing intense economic activities. We then carried out a series of linear regressions between the resulting factors to test whether they were related, suggesting areas where conservation conflicts may exist, and found that relations between human activities and natural resources vary from region to region. These results help us identify geopolitical units that require detailed studies of the interactions between population and natural resources, and also highlight the importance of using geopolitical scales as study units, where most conservation and development policies are determined, to inform local stakeholders and decision makers.

Designing the Nation: The Belgian Railway Project, 1830–1837

In contrast to the strategy of most European countries, the first railways in Belgium were not introduced during an experimental phase with local lines, but conceived as a coherent infrastructural frame facilitating transnational transport, as well as unifying and injecting Belgian regions with industrialization. This was inspired by Saint-Simonian ideals. As the Belgian railway network was the translation of both national and international aspirations, this article ties into the growing body of literature on networked technologies operating on these geopolitical scales. The history of network planning in Belgium complements this literature on (inter)national railway systems by focusing on the earlier nineteenth century. Methodologically, the network is examined from the viewpoint of the “heterogeneous engineering” that produced the infrastructure plans, thus going beyond the traditional view by using the material dimension of railway design to analyze the conception of infrastructure as actual nation-building, or the organization of territory and society.

Climate adaptation planning in practice: an evaluation of adaptation plans from three developed nations

Formal planning for climate change adaptation is emerging rapidly at a range of geo-political scales. This first generation of adaptation plans provides useful information regarding how institutions are framing the issue of adaptation and the range of processes that are recognized as being part of an adaptation response. To better understand adaptation planning among developed nations, a set of 57 adaptation plans from Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States was evaluated against a suite of 19 planning processes identified from existing guidance instruments for adaptation planning. Total scores among evaluated plans ranged from 16% of the maximum possible score to 61%, with an average of 37%. These results suggest adaptation plans are largely under-developed. Critical weaknesses in adaptation planning are related to limited consideration for non-climatic factors as well as neglect for issues of adaptive capacity including entitlements to various forms of capital needed for effective adaptation. Such gaps in planning suggest there are opportunities for institutions to make better use of existing guidance for adaptation planning and the need to consider the broader governance context in which adaptation will occur. In addition, the adaptation options prescribed by adaptation plans reflect a preferential bias toward low-risk capacity-building (72% of identified options) over the delivery of specific actions to reduce vulnerability. To the extent these findings are representative of the state of developed nation adaptation planning, there appear to be significant deficiencies in climate change preparedness, even among those nations often assumed to have the greatest adaptive capacity.

Fools Banished from the Kingdom: Remapping Geographies of Gang Violence between the Americas (Los Angeles and San Salvador)

This essay explores how the policing, incarceration, and deportation of Salvadoran immigrant youth are reshaping the parameters of urban experience between Los Angeles and San Salvador. It argues that these disciplinary governmental practices have transformed the geographies of belonging, exclusion, and citizenship between the once putatively separate cultural and political spheres of the United States and Central America. These efforts to reassert national sovereignty through zero-tolerance policing strategies as they combine with the growing intersection between criminal and immigration law, only, and most ironically, induce and reproduce transnational flows. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with deported youth and young adults, the essay focuses on the crucial place of the city and of the local police beat in the production of their emergent transnational subjectivities. The experiences of these immigrant youth indicate that the complex flows and the multiple geopolitical scales of analysis at work in Los Angeles's urban barrios now make it impossible to engage with the cultural politics of one side of this social field without simultaneously accounting for those at play on the other side in San Salvador. These politics of simultaneity demonstrate the analytical power that both transnational and urban studies stand to gain from a mutual engagement with each other, and call for transnational urban studies as a new domain for research.

Resources and conflict in the Caspian Sea

The management of resources can shape or alleviate conflict. This article examines the case of the Caspian Sea as littoral states vie for oil fields in the transboundary water body. These five states have promoted conflicting proposals for the division of Caspian resources and are staking their claims through a mix of diplomatic efforts, international agreements, commercial contracts and militarization. Geoeconomic power has not fully surpassed more traditional, military control of territory in this context which continues to be complex on several geopolitical scales.

The need for more integrated policy for air quality, acidification and climate change: reactive nitrogen links them all

Abstract Considerable quantities of bioavailable nitrogen (N) are released in the production of food and energy. The chemically bound nitrogen formed in this way amounts to 1.5 times the naturally formed amount, leading, to a number of environmental problems. The nitrogen compounds involved are mobile, reactive, and can be transformed into one another. A given N-containing molecule can, in fact, contribute successively to different environmental problems (through a cascade effect). In order to deal with all of these environmental reactive nitrogen (N r ) problems environmental policies are explored for synergies and integration. This is done by focusing on food production and energy use. There is already much policy related to many N r problems at various levels: Dutch, European, global. Some of these policies are, or need to be, integrated with other policies. An integrated approach to nitrogen-related environmental problems will be more effective on all environmental and geopolitical (i.e. national, European and global) levels, and will therefore make for more efficient and cost-effective policy. The need for more coordinated policy for air quality, acidification and climate change is apparent. At the moment there is no policy or policy forum focusing on N r as a whole. The importance of closing the N-cycle would merit a place on the agenda in the various geopolitical scales. This would bring integrated approaches to dealing with environmental N r problems closer. The Netherlands has a high level of reactive nitrogen and associated environmental problems and also has some useful policy experience in addressing these problems. The Dutch experience is therefore reviewed and set in the context of recent research and policy developments at the European and global level.

Scale and conservation planning in the real world

Conservation planning is carried out on a variety of geopolitical and biogeographical scales. Whereas considerable consensus is emerging about the most appropriate procedures for identifying conservation areas, the spatial implications of conducting conservation planning at divergent scales have received little attention. Here we explore the consequences of planning at different geopolitical scales, using a database of the mammalian fauna from the Northern Provinces of South Africa. The conservation network resulting from treating the region as one unit is compared with networks generated separately for the provinces nested in that region. These outcomes are evaluated in terms of (i) their land use efficiencies, (ii) their spatial overlap, and (iii) the impact of algorithm attributes. Although land use efficiencies are greater on broader scales, on average the spatial congruence between the broad-scale regional network and fine-scale provincial networks was less than 14%. Algorithms using different selection rules fail to improve this disturbing outcome. Consequently, scale has an overwhelming influence on areas identified as conservation networks in geopolitical units. This should be recognized in conservation planning.