Political Geography Research Articles

The challenge of devolved English governance and the rise of political spatial inequality

Abstract The UK is characterised by spatial inequality between and within regions, alongside an over-centralised asymmetric model of governance. In England especially, these features are stark, and throughout the last decade, politicians have responded by forging a distinctive programme of English devolution focused on city-regions. In this article, we analyse the core drivers of the English devolution agenda to understand its impact on the future trajectory of British politics. We identify the predominance of a narrow economic vision of devolution that systematically negates other agendas. The result is a failure to address the trade-offs inherent in the devolution process, alongside an inadequate engagement with the growing demand for democratic revitalisation. In the long-term, we argue that the empowerment of the largest cities in England and the relative neglect of non-urban areas will exacerbate power asymmetries within the UK political system in both centre-periphery and centre-local relations, a phenomenon we term ‘political spatial inequality’. There is a risk of resurgent ‘territorially based populism’ stemming from this uneven political geography which has the potential to exacerbate political instability and significantly reshape UK politics in the wake of Brexit. English devolution is a prescient example of how policy ‘solutions’ can in turn create new problems that pose major challenges for policymakers.

‘All my friends here are ghosts’: everyday geo-legalities in a rural poultry town

ABSTRACT In recent years, feminist legal geographers have pressed for deeper engagement with the lived experience of law’s spatial logics including methodologies that extend beyond the study of legal discourse, practice, and enforcement to include ethnographic and other qualitative approaches that centre the experiences of those living with legal precarity. Building upon the work of feminist political geographers concerned with intimacy geopolitics, the concept of everyday geo-legalities emphasizes the ways that people interpret the spatiality of law, legal practice, and state policing and how it affects their lives, livelihoods and im/mobilities. This research reveals how undocumented im/migrants in a small, rural poultry town interpret and socially negotiate their racialized legal status in terms of im/mobility, heighted workplace pressure, increased job-related health risks, persistent fears of immigration raids, family separation and deportation, and prejudice and policing due to discourses of racialized criminalization. Social and familial relations, however, are central to the everyday negotiation of these dynamics, as community connections and care emerge from experiences of marginalization. This paper thus emphasizes how social relations are central to analysing the complexities and contradictions of everyday legal geographies.

Dennis DIJKZEUL and Margit FAUSER (eds.), Diaspora Organisations in International Affairs (Oxon, Routledge, 2020)

Diasporas and their organisations, which traditionally aimed to serve their interest in the homeland and abroad, have long been studied under several social science disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, political science, and geography. At the beginning of the 2000s, for instance, human and political geographers started to focus on diaspora realizing that it is a geographical concept, which addresses various geographical themes such as dispersion, boundaries, territory (as homeland), and identity. The “geographical turn” contributed to the concept theoretically, and also to transnationalism and migration studies empirically by which cases were reconsidered through the lens of geographical concepts, such as space, place, and time. Similar to geographers’ arguments, diaspora organisations (DO) -as a distinct form of collectivity- and their activities are very relevant to what we study in International Relations (IR), especially when it comes to exploring DOs’ role that transcends state borders in development, human rights, conflict, and peace. In that regard, attempts to introduce novel contributions from various disciplines have the potential to significantly enhance our comprehension of the theory of diaspora and its associated organizations.

Normalisation of evacuation under slow emergencies: The imposed story of ‘Beautiful New Hong Kong’

AbstractHong Kong, in contrast to its previous image as a glamourous global city, has recently been associated with negative keywords such as oppression, fear, violence and even human rights emergency, following the 2019 Anti‐Extradition Law Movement and later the implementation of National Security Law (NSL) in 2020. Meanwhile, the Hong Kong Special Area Administration presented a post‐NSL policy direction as promising a ‘Beautiful New Hong Kong’. This paper is aimed at understanding how Hongkongers have continuously lived with/against the imposed (re)writing of Hong Kong. We examined how Hongkongers have been taking initiatives to raise awareness about the ‘slow emergencies’ in Hong Kong and to counter it in various forms of ‘evacuation’, whether they are on the move or staying put in place, in order to pursue future‐making. We carried out a multi‐sited study on the two kinds of Hongkongers between January 2020 and August 2023. We talked to those who already left Hong Kong for Taiwan, the UK, Canada, and so forth, and with those who were debating about relocation and at the same time preparing for departure if necessary. We strategically read ‘evacuation’ in two senses: First, evacuation responds to emergencies and therefore by adopting ‘evacuation’ is itself a disagreement with the Beautiful New Hong Kong policy as curated by the state. Second, evacuation responds to geography of future and politics of simultaneity. We conceptualised ‘normalisation of evacuation’ to understand the future‐making behind the move in Hong Kong. The particular kind of evacuation discussed took shape in two forms, relocation elsewhere and reorganisation in situ, both of which, in our analysis, are demonstrating Hongkongers' agency in pursuing geographies of future beyond the state‐led agenda.

Bounded Spaces – The Enduring Allure of Territorial Identities and the Lasting Value of Paasi's Conceptualisation of the Institutionalisation of Regions

AbstractThis commentary revisits the main elements of Paasi's ideas about the institutionalisation of regions and bounded spaces. It reviews his analysis of the identity of a region and the regional identity of its residents (as addressed in his TESG 2002 article). Next, it discusses how his work on bounded spaces contributed to the reinvention of border studies in political geography and how his innovative conceptual work grounded in and written from Finland, was inspiring for a whole generation of researchers working at the margins of the Anglo‐American academic world. Finally, it reasserts the enduring value of his heuristic framework in a time where the complexity of social spatialisation and of spatial socialisation has greatly increased.

Theorizing Multiple Geographies: Interrelations of Space and Multiplicity in Geographical Research

ABSTRACTStarting from the observation that the notion of “multiple geographies” has gained considerable traction in geographical research in the past years while its theoretical foundations have often remained abstract, in this paper we contribute toward elaboration of multiple geographies as a research perspective, recognizing its potential as a valuable framework for analyzing divergent spatial relations. Initially, we provide an overview of the diverse applications of multiple geographies through a review of relevant literature, focusing on papers within the realms of political geographies that mention the term in their title or abstract. Subsequently, we categorize these papers thematically, identifying three main theoretical strains: post‐colonial geographies, uneven geographical development, and feminist geographies. We then propose a theoretical scaffold for navigating the complexities of multiple geographies by engaging with broader discussions on plurality and multiplicity in relation to the aforementioned strains. Finally, we synthesize the insights garnered from this analysis, exploring the potential of a multiple geographies research perspective to contribute to a nuanced understanding of the diverse ways in which space is produced and experienced. Our contribution aims to enrich ongoing debates within human geography on how space can be redefined in more relational, decolonial, socially just, feminist, and diverse ways, opening pathways for pluralistic geographical imaginations.

Measuring postal access and direct delivery services among Native American reservations in Montana and South Dakota

ABSTRACT Over the past two decades voting by mail has increased. As the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the 2020 political season, absentee voting increased to over 43% of all votes cast in the November Presidential Election. In recent years, many states have passed laws to limit the scope of absentee voting as necessary to curtail voter fraud. Though no evidence exists that fraud is more likely with mail-in voting, such laws have been found to have a disproportionate impact on some groups of voters more than others. This is true of many Native American communities that often rely on absentee voting. This study will utilize geospatial methods to examine postal realities for Native American on reservations in Montana and South Dakota. By illustrating where postal services are or are not located, a fuller contextual analysis of the issue can be provided. Such methods can enhance current methodologies utilized by political geographers.

Methodological reflections on radio and podcast listenership in political geography

Methodological reflections on radio and podcast listenership in political geography

Cybernetic States: Communication, Control, and State-Space in the Advanced Research Projects Agency

While political geographers have researched state restructuring extensively over the past forty years, few have explored the role of cybernetics in this process. Conversely, although a wide spectrum of scholars outside of geography have shed light on aspects of cybernetic governance, they have yet to incorporate insights from political geography. In both cases, the political geography of cybernetic state power remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, the article explores the nexus of cybernetics and state restructuring in the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), a Cold War US defense research agency, circa 1958 to 1969. It analyzes Congressional testimonies by ARPA-sponsored scientists and engineers alongside their academic publications and other papers to grasp how they conceived of and actively sought to transform state-space. The article makes two arguments. First, while geographers treat state restructuring as a function of neoliberalization or War on Terror securitization, the process was set in motion near the start of the Cold War. It was then that ARPA's appeal to cybernetics to resolve geopolitical conflicts cemented the logical, organizational, and technical foundations for neoliberal and War on Terror state mutations. Second, the main thrust of ARPA responses to Cold War crises involved restructuring state-power in the mode of a cybernetic feedback control system. These efforts bring into relief a distinct object of analysis, the state control system (SCS), which offers geographers fresh perspectives on state restructuring and opens new pathways for interdisciplinary research.

Climate change crisis in Iraq

Climate change is progressively becoming a serious and discussed issue. Besides this, there are clear evidence, observed, and confirmatory reasons for the multi-dimensional climate change impacts worldwide. Just as the countries and regions have not played an equal role in environmental pollution, heat retention, and climate change. Similarly, the effects of these phenomena are significantly different in the countries; thus, many of the main vulnerable places and others are its beneficiaries. Apart from other fields, the areas that are heavily damaged will also be affected in terms of political geography and geopolitics. Generally, the Middle East, typically Iraq, is one of the countries that will be heavily affected by climate change. This research investigates the climate change geopolitical dimensions of Iraq using the descriptive-analytical method. The findings illustrate that present and future climate change are the provenance of many complications, including environmental, economic, and political and security, both at national and international level.

Political Geographies of Rural Electrification

The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) played a central role in delineating the Tennessee Valley as an energy region. Utilizing mapping as critical practice, this study delves into the spatial history of the region, examining how the construction of an integrated network of hydroelectric dams by the TVA underpinned a regime of techno-environmental development. By bringing together historical cartographic information and archival sources, mapping reveals how environmental, technological, and social infrastructures intertwined to create a complex geopolitical terrain. The emergent geography of the region demonstrates the TVA’s belief that techno-environmental region-building could serve as a vehicle for progressive social change and provide a substitute for existing racialized political geographies. However, despite the TVA’s public intentions, the benefits of development were unevenly distributed, ultimately perpetuating racial disparities and socioeconomic inequities. As our need to rethink energy infrastructure gains urgency, the map and accompanying text hope to provide reflection on the infrastructural underpinnings of the Tennessee Valley, offering potential insight for contemporary discussion on energy transitions.

“Once it was Ireland, Now it is Kenya”: anti-colonialism and internationalism in the pages of the Connolly Association’s Irish Democrat in the 1950s–60s

ABSTRACT Irish Democrat was the paper of the Connolly Association, a diaspora organisation established to build support for Irish republicanism within the British labour movement. The Connolly Association and the Irish Democrat had strong links to the Communist Party of Great Britain, which advocated for a peaceful mass movement to challenge the British presence in Northern Ireland and to remove discrimination faced by Catholics in the Six Counties. Encouraged by the wave of decolonisation across the British Empire in the 1950s-60s, both the CA and the CPGB saw the struggle against Unionist rule in Northern Ireland as analogous to events in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This paper explores the narration of anti-colonial and national liberation movements elsewhere in the British Empire in the pages of the Irish Democrat and the overdetermination of Irish national questions by post-war discourses of radical decolonisation. It also traces the formation across difference of specific solidarities between the Connolly Association and other migrant communities within the multicultural political geography of post-war Britain, including out of campaigns against racial discrimination, the “colour bar” and post-war immigration controls.

The petrochemical industry in the energy policy of the Kurdistan Region (A Study in Political Geography)

Petrochemical industries have a special importance in the development of the country, because their products are used as raw materials in most other industries. Therefore, in this study, we focused on the petrochemical industry in the energy policy of the Kurdistan Region. In this study, both force analysis and analytical methods were used, and to reach the scientific responses, we divided the research into three main axes. The first topic analyzes the framework of the research and the second deals with the petrochemical industry and its importance, while the third topic deals with the energy policy and petrochemical industry in the region, as a result we concluded that despite the importance of this type of industry, but so far this type of industry has not been taken care of in the Kurdistan Region.

A Comparison of Stephen Harper’s and Justin Trudeau’s Arctic Narratives: Toward a New Geography of the Canadian North

This article intends to compare the political narratives on the Canadian Artic produced by the governments of Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–2015) and Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (2015–2023), with a specific focus on the identity dimension of these two sets of political narratives. Harper’s Arctic narrative, served by a unique personal commitment of the PM, promoted a radical shift from the historic Canada centred on the Laurentian region to a new Arctic Canada and in so doing, created a new political geography of Canada. In Justin Trudeau’s Arctic narrative, priority was given to reconciliation through the development of state-to-state relations with Indigenous communities. Embodied by the person of Governor General Mary Simon and concretized by the cooperative approach of Trudeau’s Arctic and Northern Framework, this new agentivity of Northern Indigenous peoples has ushered in a new decolonial geography of the Arctic. Unexpectedly, these successive official narratives of Arctic Canada have proven complementary in striving to move the center of gravity of the country north, thus creating new perspectives on Canadian identity and political geography.

An Emerging New Tourism Destination: Geographic Resources and Tourism Potential of the Province of Masbate (Republic of the Philippines)

The Masbate Province surrounded by the Sibuyan Sea, Visayan Sea and Samar Sea, is located in the central part of the Philippine archipelago and includes 3 large islands (Masbate, Ticao and Burias) and many smaller islands. All the islands within the borders of Masbate Province are just one part of the Luzon Islands Group in terms of physical geography; also in terms of political geography and administrative geography, they are located within the “Bicol Administrative Region”. In terms of administrative structure, there are 20 districts, 1 city (Masbate City) and 550 Barangays in the Masbate Province. Even though the Masbate Province has rich natural resources and mines, great agricultural and fishing potential, it has so far failed to achieve the desired success in international tourism. In this study, Masbate, Ticao and Burias, which are the largest islands of the Masbate province, are investigated and analyzed separately and both their geographical features, tourism potential and tourism attractiveness of these islands are accounted for. In this article, the main accommodation facilities, major nature reserves, islands and beaches within the borders of Masbate Province, as well as natural and cultural tourism attractions are examined; additionally, the tourism advantages and disadvantages of Masbate Province are addressed. The main purpose of the study is to introduce the tourism resources, cultural riches and natural beauties of the Masbate Province, which actually is not very popular among the international tourists, to the readers, both to popularize the name of the Masbate Province to the global tourism markets and offer new holiday options for the inquisitive tourists.

A Gold Ounce for Every Throat Cut

Peace in the Banda Oriental, at the borders between the Spanish and Portuguese empires in the Río de la Plata region, marks one of the major developments in the political geography of Latin America from 1777-1801, yet the subject has not been studied rigorously. This chapter explores how this peace came about after failing several times previously. Both Spanish and Portuguese colonial agents and policy-makers affected such peace by overcoming resistance to imperialism. A Luso-Hispanic policy of removal resulted in the Jesuits’ loss of power in South America. Several successful mapping expeditions reduced Iberian dependence on native guides, limiting indigenous control over European colonization. Near extermination of cattle in the region and increased Spanish and Portuguese patrols over grazing lands curbed much of the illicit cattle hunting in the Río de la Plata. And the Spanish conquest of Colonia del Sacramento, a key contraband base, decreased smugglers’ activity in the region. As the power of these non-governmental actors diminished, Iberian empires augmented their claims to sovereignty in the region and could finally affect the peace that Lisbon and Madrid so desired. This moment demonstrates a brief apogee in Iberian colonial control in the late eighteenth century.

On pipelines, readiness and annotative labour: Political geographies of AI and data infrastructures in Africa

Data infrastructures are expanding rapidly across African societies, renewing the promise of modernisation, and providing a massive data resource to the dominant tech powers of the world. Google's private undersea cable, named Equiano, landed in west Africa with the intention of igniting data services, smart environments, investment opportunities and jobs. Non-governmental and multilateral agencies are busy supporting African governments in building regulatory frameworks that aim to ‘ready’ countries for the 4th industrial revolution. Young Africans labour in remodelled shipping containers to annotate data and train algorithms. While future promises pan out in wide-angled, utopian visions, this paper sets out an approach to understand African contexts as sites of heterogeneous experience of data infrastructures that are historically and politically contingent. The paper explores the spatial politics of extraction, surveillance, and exploitation in three examples of the Equiano pipeline, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Readiness Index, and the AI annotative labour force. We challenge the homogenising discourses of global tech companies and transnational governance institutions in accounting for the geographical histories of colonialism and its afterlives in African societies. We further call for empirical studies that examine the granular multiplicities of data, providing nuanced understandings of AI in and from Africa.

The Razor’s Edge: The Western Sahara Conflict as a Geopolitical Antagonism in the Algerian Morrocan Relations

This article explores the origins of the Western Sahara conflict, and the contrasting interpretations of the factors which have kept it as an unresolved conflict after Spanish forces withdrew in 1975. This article shows how Algeria and Morocco continue to disagree on even the most basic facts of the dispute's history, and suggests that the continuation of the dispute is the result of conflicting models of statehood and historical narratives. Also, it explores ways in which developing concepts within political geography have contributed to understanding the ongoing significance of the region for all the parties to the conflict. Additionally, this paper argues that the contemporary contours of the Western Sahara conflict cannot be seen divorced from the larger geopolitical and balance of power developments in the Maghreb region. Algeria- Morocco relations in general and the Western Sahara conflict in particular are not only influenced by the local political, security and social dynamics, but also by the larger systemic and sub-systemic imperatives.

Powers of the Gun: On Violence, Frontier and Community

ABSTRACT Since the mid-1990s, the Free Burma Rangers (FBR) – a self-defined ‘multi-ethnic humanitarian movement’ operating in Myanmar, Iraq, Syria, and South Sudan – has supported and trained rebel movements and civil society organisations to create spaces of relief and rescue in war zones at the frontiers of their polities. Central to the FBR’s logic and praxis is the use and governing of weapons as military means in order to ‘immunise’ communities of the oppressed from violence. Aside from their politically disputed character, this article takes the activities of the FBR as an entry point to ask: how are the relations between weapons and humans governed in war frontiers? And how does the management of military means reproduce different forms of political community with their political space? Situating these questions in political geography’s literature on frontiers, the article brings in dialogue Roberto Esposito’s analysis on the relationship between violence and (political/impolitical) community with critical approaches on weapons in security studies to show how violence, frontier, and community stand in a co-constitutive relation. Rather than looking at violence and military means as an instrument for the territorialisation of an ideological-political project at the frontier, I analyse the frontier as a politico-military device consubstantial to a political community with its biological body and political space. Drawing from fieldwork methods, I argue that the governing of human-firearms relations constitutes the political community and the human subjectivities part of it by producing frontiers as zones of distinction and encounter between the civilised and the ‘not yet’. The paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it empirically substantiates the co-constitutive rather than instrumental relation between violence and the frontier. Second, it shows how the immunitary apparatuses that govern the encounters between humans and weapons, in shaping the political community, shape also ‘the dehumanisation of Man’s human Others’. Third, zooming onto the life experiences of activists taking part to FBR and resistance forces, it differentiates between the political and impolitical forms of community produced by managing violence.

The Causes of the Russian-Ottoman War (1877-1878)

The Eastern Question had numerous regional aspects. Conflicts and crises on the southeastern periphery of the Ottoman Empire, which was already facing numerous internal problems and external pressures, were not particularly novel during the 19th century. These issues were usually resolved without endangering peace in Europe. Offensive realism views great powers as the most significant actors in the international system. The political geography of the Balkans was largely reshaped by their interests, regardless of their inadequate understanding of the complex situations and peoples in that volatile region, defined by the “architecture of roads and inns.” The Great Eastern Crisis (1875-1878), a dramatic stage in the prolonged resolution of the Eastern Question, began with the Serbian uprising in July 1875 in the Bosnia Eyalet. It continued with the Bulgarian uprising in April 1876 and the war between Serbia and Montenegro against the Ottoman Empire in July of the same year, initiated in support of Orthodox Christians in the Bosnian pashaluk, but “in truth to expand their territory and consolidate their still insecure independence.” European public opinion during the escalation of the crisis, when the Ottoman side had military superiority, was being prepared for harsh interventions against the Ottoman Empire. This sentiment was particularly pronounced in Russia. Russia did not reconcile with the provisions of the Treaty of Paris in 1856 and the previous failure in the Crimean War (1853-1856), which was a struggle for access to the straits - the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. It sought ways to free itself from the imposed provisions of that treaty. The entire “Russian 19th century” passed under the sign of the Slavophile dream of Constantinople - “which sooner or later must be ours,” as well as the “southern, warm seas.” Every Russian war with the Ottoman Empire in that century activated, on the Russian side, the armed participation of Orthodox peoples in the Balkans. Russia supported their movements, involving them in a “historical clash” with the Ottoman state. Pan-Slavism also served as a justification for Russian military-political interventions. Essentially, it represented the ideology of Great Russian imperialism. For the great powers, the key motive was interest, not imaginative “historical connections” and “brotherly emotions.” Benjamin von Kállay wrote that the “struggle of Russia against Turkey” was one of the “most interesting, most important facts of world history.” Religious motives were present in all Russo-Ottoman wars. These conflicts had, to a greater or lesser extent, political consequences in the Balkans. All peoples have separate stories and different dates in their memory. After the war of 1812, the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877-1878, an integral part of the Great Eastern Crisis and a continuation of the Crimean War, was the only foreign policy event that had a significant impact on all layers of Russian society. It became one of the “most ideologized” in Russian history, as the causes, course, and consequences of the war were directly related to public opinion. Numerous Slavophile associations constantly urged the tsar to liberate Christians in the Balkans from the “Turkish yoke.” According to numerous accounts, the war with the Ottoman Empire was invoked to a considerable extent by the press. It fueled the “Pan-Slavic fire” in Moscow and St. Petersburg, which forced the Russian government in 1877 to undertake diplomatic actions, following the Ottoman suppression of the Bulgarian uprising in 1876 and alarming reports of their mass suffering, while neglecting the significant Muslim losses on the other side, to start a war with that empire for which it already had plans and goals prepared. Russian intervention, amidst propaganda and the “Bulgarian horrors,” was expected, considering the broader ambitions of this imperial state.