Political Geography Research Articles

Seeing the state in waste? Exploring the everyday state and imagined state performance in Lusaka's lower income settlements

In this paper I demonstrate the ways that the everyday state is produced in and through Lusaka's rubbish, although the state is largely absent from the day‐to‐day management of the solid waste in the city. This analysis draws insight from over 90 semi‐structured interviews with a range of respondents in Lusaka, primarily focussed on the cities’ lower income settlements. I build on the overlapping conversation in political geography on the state as assemblage and the prosaic on the one hand, and the everyday state in the Global South on the other to focus on three key aspects of the production of the state: materialities, performance and temporalities. I argue that in order to understand the state in present day Lusaka, one must account for the history of state performance and imaginaries of the state that was. And secondly, that even in the absence of the state, the state may continue to perform and be known.

Conceptualising US Immigration Detention as Carceral Real Estate

AbstractThe US Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates the largest detention system in the world, holding over 35,000 people in October 2023. The vast majority of this capacity is outsourced to corrections firms, particularly the two largest, CoreCivic and GEO Group. This article analyses how private corrections firms finance US immigrant detention capacity as a specialised asset class of government real estate. To understand the emergence of “carceral real estate”, I bring political geographies of migration into conversation with economic geographies of real estate. In doing so, I argue that creating “carceral real estate” enables the abstraction and valuation of migrant life as rent and, in turn, presumes a continuously flowing, fungible migrant population. In this context, migrants valued as underpaid labour in the wider economy are re‐valued for their unproductivity in detention. And yet this idealised geography of human and economic flows never fully materialises, but is instead rife with volatility, disruption, and political contestation. The article closes by discussing implications for abolition geographies.

Damage, recovery, and the geographies of military–civil entanglements

ABSTRACT This paper explores two forms of entanglements between military and civilian phenomena and activities, in contexts of recovery from damaging events. One concerns global civil–military entanglements in low earth orbital space, where recovery from damage is necessary for sustaining the civilian and military service support systems on which we increasingly depend. The other uses the damage caused by the UK state’s regimes of financial austerity to highlight how gendered, spatialized forms of personal labour through military Reserve forces sustain recovery. Both suggest ways in which military and political geography and geographers can find new ways of thinking through civil–military entanglements.

The analysis of voting preferences of West Pomerania inhabitants in the years 2001–2020

The article concerns the voting preferences of West Pomerania inhabitants in comparison to the whole country regarding parliament elections, European Parliament elections, presidential elections, except for self-government elections. Taking into account different characteristics of the last type of elections, a separate article has been prepared to discuss them. Applying the comparison method, the election results have been analyzed in terms of political geography. The comparison of territorial diversity of political behaviors has shown how political preferences have evolved with respect to division into provinces, country districts and towns ruled by presidents in reference to, among all, three main political parties (PO RP, PiS and SLD). It has been checked if since 2005 the Platform has really managed to dominate the West Pomeranian political scene and also if any differences in voting preferences occur depending on the place of residence or the type of elections? Subject to the analysis have been election results without the study of factors having impact on them, that is electoral campaigns and events on the political scene (they will be discussed in a separate publication). Regarding the typology of political parties ideological and programme criteria has been applied resulting in west-wing (SLD), central (PO RP) and right-wing division.
 The analysis has shown that there are no significant differences between the results of different types of elections. Regardless, the results from the whole country in West Pomerania in years 1993–2004 left-wing preferences were demonstrated, in years 1993–2004 central and since 2015 central-right. However, analyzing the results depending on the place of residence, together in three types of elections, in 8 the results between country districts and president cities in majority have overlapped and in 6 of them the differences have occurred.

Infrastructuring environmental (in)justice: green hydrogen, Indigenous sovereignty and the political geographies of energy technologies

Abstract. Against the backdrop of ongoing planetary crises, this paper discusses the ambivalent relationship between large-scale material infrastructure, particularly energy technologies, and environmental justice. Inspired by relational and practice-oriented understandings of infrastructure, it develops a conceptual approach for energy-related environmental justice research, which is exemplarily applied to the emerging issue of green hydrogen, drawing on brief insights from the hydrogen frontrunner countries Colombia and Canada and associated struggles over Indigenous sovereignty. This “infrastructural lens”, based on three epistemological shifts – from infrastructure to “infrastructuring”, from social imaginaries to “sociotechnical imaginaries” and from human infrastructuring to “planetary infrastructuring” – provides deeper insights into how patterns of justice and injustice are practically infrastructured and what kinds of imaginaries they evoke or are entangled with. Moreover, it makes tangible how practices of infrastructuring can themselves become part of a broader political ontology, that is, of struggles over ways of being and ways of relating to planet Earth.

Evaluation of II. Abdulhamid and his Period in Terms of Political Geography

Political Geography is a branch of science that has started to make a name for itself, especially in the last years of the 19th century all over the world. Ottoman Sultan II. Abdulhamid Khan was the leading actor of the world political scene in those years. He was an important personage influencing world politics in the years when such a science emerged. Examining the II. Abdulhamid period will certainly attract attention. Socio-cultural power, which has an important place in political geography, the characteristics of the human who make up a nation are the power formed by educated people equipped with technical knowledge. In a sense, it means that the citizens of the state are well educated from the lowest level to the person who governs the state. From this point of view, Sultan II. Abdulhamid Han was a very perfect carpenter. He also used this carpentry profession in state administration. Because the job of the carpenter is to create perfect furniture sets from raw wood. While governing his state, he showed the whole world that the Ottoman Empire was not destroyed by correcting the unsound parts of the state. After he was dethroned, the collapse of the state accelerated, and those who dethroned him desired for him to come back to power.

Speculating on shale: Resource-making and the ‘politics of possibility’ in Poland and the UK

This paper focuses on the speculative character of knowledge and action in relation to subterranean resources, drawing on the curtailed histories of shale gas development in Poland and the UK. It adopts a political-economic orientation towards speculation rather than a narrowly financial one, seeking to understand the ‘politics of possibility’ associated with speculative resources. Specifically, we build on work in political geography to understand speculation as a form of productive ‘resonance’ replicating across epistemic, economic, and political domains. Thinking of speculation as resonance – as synchronous vibration across different areas of social life, stimulated by and intensifying uncertainty - offers a novel way of thinking about the possibilities of subterranean resources for forging political alignments. We show how speculation was integral to demonstrating the resource potential of shale in both Poland and the UK, and consider how this speculative character of shale subsequently infiltrated into economic and policy realms. Resonating across these domains, and amplifying epistemic uncertainties about shale, speculation produced a politics of possibility orientated towards ‘gambling’ on potential outcomes. By taking seriously the political possibilities of the uncertainties attached to subterranean resources, we extend the value of speculation as a concept for analysing the constitutive role of uncertainty in political-economic governance.

The island as a political interstice

Islands are often defined with respect to their physicality, namely small pieces of land surrounded by water. One inherent assumption is that islands can be defined distinctly from other geographic entities, such as the often-presumed dichotomies of island-mainland and land-water. This vocabulary is imbued with political meaning, especially that the opposite of an island is apparently the “main land”. Island studies challenges these notions, reinterpreting them in contemporary political domains, with one framing being interstitiality. From this baseline and drawing on some political geography work, this paper argues that the interstitial island is principally a political construction. Islands are, or at minimum can be, multiple forms of interstices, but they are very much created as such—whether inadvertently, deliberately, or a combination—making the island a political interstice. This paper follows this line of reasoning by selecting two characteristics discussed in island studies and geography with respect to islandness: separation and connection. The result is to explore separation and connection as interstitial, demonstrating that politics infuses the discussions, conceptualisations, and practicalities of the interstitial island, although this situation is not necessarily detrimental. Philosophically and practically, many advantages result from constructing the island as a political interstice, suggesting that island interstitiality has far more political than physical value.

More-than-human political geographies: Abjection and sovereign power

This article unravels the processes of abjection that render certain nonhumans as abject, devoid of value and amenable to elimination and killing. It argues that these processes play a constitutive role in practices of state-making and sovereign power. Abjection works towards the exclusion and rejection of certain parts of a supposed socio-material order, which, for one reason or another, confuse dominant categorizations, trespass certain spatial boundaries or challenge socially produced distinctions and hierarchies (Bataille, 1970 [1934]; Kristeva, 1982). Abjected nonhumans thus regularly become the target of state-induced practices of elimination and culling – as is the case, for instance, with species classified as ‘invasive’, as ‘pests’, as ‘biosecurity threat’ or as ‘disease reservoirs’. Yet, abjection also points to the ability of nonhumans to unsettle, challenge and confuse dominant boundaries and established orders. Abject beings inhabit “unruly edges” (Tsing, 2012) from which they challenge and transcend sovereign impulses to order, govern and eliminate their existence. Taking cue from previous works on abjection and sovereign power, on the one hand, and works on the role of nonhumans in political processes, on the other, I argue that abjection and state-making are not only intertwined but also crucially played out in relation to nonhuman forms of life and death. My wider conceptual aim is to illustrate what an engagement with processes of abjection has to offer for the agenda of more-than-human political geographies.

Justice in energy transformations as a spatial phenomenon: A framework for analyzing multi-dimensional justice claims

Energy transformations not only evoke multi-dimensional claims for just distribution, recognition, and procedures, but also reveal how these claims depend on and shape the spatial context that they address. The aim of this contribution is to provide a framework that connects spatial and multi-dimensional aspects of justice in energy transition research. It builds on literature in the fields of just transition studies and energy justice. While the relevance of considering space and scale in socio-technical transitions is widely acknowledged, a conceptual framework can help to connect justice and spatiality in transitions and support scrutiny of their interconnections. The present work seeks to address this gap by incorporating contributions from the fields of political geography and political theory. Accordingly, it discusses central intersections in the moral–spatial tension field. Spatial justice claims are conceptualized as referring at the same time to moral (substance-related) and spatial dimensions of (in)justice and relating both to each other. The paper conceptualizes how justice claims refer to multiple scales, center-periphery relations, interterritorial and infrastructure-related concerns as well as to place-based attachments. It discusses the positioning of actors in this moral-spatial field as well as the reference to directional patterns of responsibility and effect. Attention to spatial justice claims further discloses processes of boundary construction, perpetuation, and contestation as well as the regional entrenchment of widely shared justice claims. Transformation-related political institutions and processes in affected regions reveal how various spatial justice claims are publicly related to each other.

Unmade in America: The gendered politics of birth tourism in the United States

This paper interrogates the discursive production of the “birth tourist” and associated opposition to jus soli birthright citizenship in the United States. I trace the intersecting axes of heteropatriarchy and racism that underpin history of opposition to jus soli citizenship, and position contemporary media and political attention to “birth tourism” as an extension of those axes. Through a critical discourse analysis of popular media coverage and public commentators, I position the “birth tourism” category within a broader national discourse of white supremacy, before linking this discursive production to national-level regulatory efforts. Interrogating the “birth tourist” categorization as a discursive tool of white, patriarchal ethnonationalism, I advance the study of political geographies of fertility and argue that contradictions embedded within the “birth tourism” discourse ultimately work to fuel fears of white supremacy's collapse. Keywords: birth tourism, birthright citizenship, white supremacy, intersectionality, feminist geopolitics.

Siyasi Coğrafyada Bloklar ve Blokların Güçlendirilmesinde Eğitimin Rolü: Türk Devletleri Teşkilatı Örneği

Bu araştırma siyasi coğrafya açısından bloklar ve bu bloklardan biri olan Türk Devletleri Teşkilatına üye devletler arasındaki ilişkilerin geliştirilmesinde eğitimin rolü üzerinde durmaktadır. Ülkeler arası bloklar kurulması çeşitli faktörlere dayanır. Ekonomik, siyasi ve kültürel etkenlerle oluşturulan bloklarda temel ilkelerden birisi ülkeler arası ilişkilerin geliştirilmesidir. Bunu toplumsal ve siyasal düzlemde kalıcı olarak sağlamanın etkili yollarından biri şüphesiz eğitim uygulamalarıdır. Araştırmanın ana hipotezi Türk Devletleri özelinde siyasi birliklerin sürdürülebilirliğini sağlamada eğitimin rolü ve özellikle öğrenci hareketliliğinin önemli bir argüman olduğudur. Literatürden ve ArcGIS’le yapılan şekillerden de anlaşılacağı üzere Türk Devletleri Teşkilatının asil üyeleriyle gözlemci üyeleri bölgesel ve küresel konumda güçlü bir siyasi birlik oluşturma potansiyeline sahiptir. Teşkilat bilhassa son yıllarda jeopolitik önemi artan bir örneklem olarak dikkati çekmektedir. Türk Dünyası olarak bilinen geniş coğrafi alanda toplumsal ve siyasal bağları güçlendirmek için eğitim uygulamalarının geliştirilmesi ve bu uygulamalardan birisi olan öğrenci hareketliliğinin daha fazla yaygınlaştırılıp işlevsel hale getirilmesi gerekmektedir. Bunu sağlamak için tüm öğretim kademelerini kapsayan ve yeniden yapılandırılmış bir Türk Dünyası Öğrenci Hareketlilik Programı kurgulamak mümkündür. Bu sayede öğrenci hareketliliğinin artacağı ve bunun Türk Devletleri Teşkilatı üyeleri arasındaki ilişkilerin gelişmesine ve toplumsal birlikteliğin kalıcı hale gelmesine zemin hazırlayacağı düşünülmektedir. Ancak Türk Devletleri Teşkilatına üye olan devletler arasında eğitim konusunun henüz yeterince gündeme gelmediği ve öğrenci hareketliliğinin yalnızca sınırlı olarak Yükseköğretim kademesini kapsadığı görülmektedir. Ayrıca teşkilata üye devletlerin temel eğitim ve ortaöğretim kademelerinde geliştirilmeye açık birçok alan olduğu ve bu ülkeler arasında öğrenci hareketliliğinin son derece düşük kaldığı tespit edilmiştir. Bu konuda yeniden yapılandırılmış eğitim uygulamalarına ihtiyaç olduğu ve öneri planın bir alternatif olarak değerlendirilebileceği ifade edilebilir.

Russia's spatial anxiety and the construction of geographical knowledge

AbstractThis commentary addresses the dimensions of Russia's ‘spatial anxiety’—its inability to come to terms with the territorial delimitations of neighbouring states and, consequently, the preoccupation of mainstream political geography with the study of Russia‐centric territorial representations. Although geographical inquiry contributed substantially to understanding Russian territorial politics, most studies are often reduced to an analysis of the official Russian geographical canon. The purpose of this commentary is to unpack these disciplinary approaches by drawing attention to the local, indigenous and peasant geographies that the statist perspectives have unearthed and utilised, while at the same time accentuating the two assumptions that this project might imply—on the re‐territorialisation of the federation and the decolonisation of Russian area studies.

Swirling, splashing, slowing: Towards gentle volumes

‘Volume’ is increasingly mobilised as a conceptual framework through which to engage, embrace and interrogate space in three-rather than two-dimensional terms. This includes attending to heights and depths and acknowledging that social and political lives do not play out across a flat surface. Whilst ‘volume’ literature is burgeoning, we argue that there is a need to take into account the politics of gentler iterations of the three dimensional. At present, work on volume in political geography is often articulated through the lens of state and military actors, and practices of conflict, control, and violence. Inspired by recent work in geography exploring ‘gentleness’ as both analytic frameworks and methodological sensibility, this paper complicates existing understandings of volume by foregrounding the gentle. In doing so, it makes two key contributions. First, it brings the analytic and sensibility of gentleness to bear on volume, providing a means to reapproach volume through terms that exceed state-centric accounts. Second, it interrogates the geopolitics of the gentle as it is found, circulates and is comprised in heights and depths, everyday spaces and unexpected practices alike. Through the case studies of Tibetan prayer flags and a rain playground, the article reconsiders the forceful and transformative politics of gentle/gentler volumes.

An Optimization Case Study in Analyzing Missouri Redistricting

Every 10 years, U.S. states redraw their congressional and state legislative district plans. This process decides the political landscape for the subsequent 10 years. Prior to the 2021 redistricting cycle, Missouri enacted new criteria for state legislative districts. The Missouri League of Women Voters (LWV-MO) contacted the authors to analyze the potential impact of these new criteria on the map-drawing process. We apply recombination (a spanning tree method) within a local search optimization framework to analyze the interplay between political geography, constitutional requirements, and political fairness in Missouri. We use this framework to produce district plans that satisfy the new criteria and prioritize different aspects of fairness. The results, quantified by several measures of fairness, reveal an inherent Republican advantage in Missouri because of the state’s political geography and constitutional requirements. We conclude that Missouri’s political geography and constitutional requirements prevent the optimization framework from substantially improving political fairness in state legislative plans. In contrast, the framework can substantially improve political fairness in Missouri congressional plans, which are not subject to the new requirements. The LWV-MO used this work to advocate for fairness and transparency in their testimonies for the Missouri redistricting commission’s public hearings. History: This paper was refereed. Funding: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program [Grant DGE-1746047]. S. H. Jacobson was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research [Grant FA9550-19-1-0106]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/inte.2022.0037 .

Algorithmic Maps and the Political Geography of Early-modern Japan

Many of our conventional mapping practices are ill-suited to the complexities and nuances of pre-modern politics, especially in the non-Western world. Choropleth maps suggest that political borders are clear and uniform, but early modern politics was characterized by ill-defined and overlapping political spheres. This study uses interactive maps to explore the case of composite state borders in early modern Japan. Using points, rather than polygons, to represent villages, we reproduce how Tokugawa-era officials understood political space primarily as population nodes, not as clearly defined polygons. In lieu of conventional borders, we calculate Voronoi polygons to show where political authority was spatially fragmented. Using logit analysis we show that increased spatial contiguity allowed lords (daimyo) to establish monopolies and tax their holdings more intensively. Other factors, such as the lord’s rank, figure prominently in the historiography, but can not be substantiated in our analysis.

Teaching geopolitics through sport

ABSTRACT This paper reflects on teaching sport in political geography undergraduate courses in the United States, through which I simultaneously aim to de-essentialize geopolitics and de-essentialize sport. I integrate sport examples in diverse courses on political geography and teach a dedicated “Geopolitics of Sport” course. By framing my approach to the political geographies of sport around the specific term “geopolitics,” I deliberately tap into a sense among Americans that it is a “more serious” topic than “geography.” Since students in my courses rarely come from Geography, but are primarily majors in Political Science and International Relations, “geopolitics” invites them to approach sports geography as a serious subject and to be more open to the field of geography. Since geography remains a neglected subject in US schools and universities, teaching sports geography through geopolitics, and geopolitics through sports geography, can be a powerful way to encourage critical geographic reasoning, especially among non-geography majors.

Creeping up on the Roman Provincial

AbstractAround the year 1200, the court of the Roman pope produced a list of all the bishops – and hence of all the cities – in the Christian world. For the next three centuries this text was copied and updated by kings, priests, lawyers and academics across Europe. The numerous surviving manuscripts of this text – the so–called ‘Roman provincial’ – have received some attention from scholars, but the sheer number of manuscripts has meant that any attempt to catalogue and study them en masse is all but destined to fail. This article suggests a different approach: that the most interesting feature of the provincial manuscripts is their differences; the ways in which copyists changed the ecclesiastical and political geography of Europe to meet their own preferences and expectations. Political geographers and modern historians have long been aware of ‘contested cartographies’ and battles over borders on maps; by studying the Roman provincial we can apply such lenses to the medieval world too. Thirteenth-century kings were quite as aware as we are that maps and lists constitute, rather than just describe, political realities.

Cross-Border Regional Languages: Picard and West Flemish at the Franco–Belgian Border

This article investigates the role of the Franco–Belgian border in regional language activism in the Hauts-de-France region in northern France, as well as whether activists perceive it as a resource for or obstacle to the valorisation or revitalisation of regional languages. Hauts-de-France, which was recently formed after the merger of two former regions, now recognises two regional languages: Picard and West Flemish. Both are considered endangered by UNESCO and are cross-border, in that both languages have also been historically spoken in parts of Belgium. Based on a study of the institutional context and fieldwork carried out with activists who promote these languages, the aim of this contribution is to highlight how activists perceive the border. The Franco-Belgian border is sometimes seen as an obstacle, sometimes as a resource on the West Flemish side, and more often ignored on the Picard side. This article stands midway between cultural geography and political geography, because one of the challenges of studying representations of the border is to understand the role it can play in activists’ strategies.

Book Review on Political Geography: “The New Map” of Yergin

Book Review on Political Geography: “The New Map” of Yergin