Political Geography Research Articles

Visualising and mapping historical networks of international diplomatic training

AbstractWhat might methodological approaches drawing on Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and Social Network Analysis (SNA) offer to sub‐disciplines in geography which have traditionally been dominated by qualitative and often micro‐scale research, such as historical or political geography? How might these approaches—often understood as opposing—be brought together to advance transnational research in particular? This article responds to these questions through a reflection on a recent project on the geopolitics of diplomatic training in the mid‐twentieth century. Building on the established use of biography to focus transnational analyses within a complex abundance of sources, the project complemented such close‐reading with computational methods of distant‐reading, able to analyse large datasets to produce prosopographies and network visualisations that help identify diffuse and larger scale political and geographical relationships. The article concludes with a consideration of how such methods might be effectively integrated in the historical or political geographer's toolkit.

Smart ignorance: Instrumentalising useful unknowns to bureaucratise and rescale power in the city

Critical geography inextricably associates smart cities with modalities of entrepreneurial governance, the privatisation of government assets and functions, and an effectively diminished role of the state in urban governance. In this article, I argue that this is an incomplete examination of ‘actually existing smart cities’ as it overlooks the bureaucratisation of city government through rescaling, which occurs via the instrumentalisation of ambiguity and ignorance. Furthermore, the existing literature focuses on the rescaling of power in ‘spaces of exception’ or enclave developments, but does not adequately address what happens when these corporate parastatal entities land in ‘actually existing’ cities where urban spatialities and political geographies are alreacy established and do not need to be formulated afresh. I draw on rich qualitative research in one case study of an ‘actually existing’ smart city – Pune in western India – to explore how the implementation of a smart cities programme results in a bureaucratisation of city government through existing useful unknowns, and generates further ambiguity around issues of authority and power in city government. This article offers a significant conceptual contribution to the understudied political geographies of city government by moving beyond the examination of zones of exception and investigating the dynamics of integrating privatised governance mechanisms into a historical ‘actually existing smart city’ with a formalised city government dating back to the late 19th century.

The Place of World Economy Research in the Heterodox Analytics of Eurasian Integration

Aim. The article shows the increased productivity of heterodox approaches in the part of economics that studies the problems of the world economy, including regional integration.Methods. Illustrations of the apparent paradoxicity (for representatives of the economic mainstream) of geopolitical and world economic dynamics after 2022 are used to explain the importance of analyzing economic processes in the world economy, taking into account approaches of related social disciplines. The connection of some important scientific results of Russian scholars in the field of economics with the achievements of historians, orientalists and cultural scientists, representatives of economic and political geography and studies of international relations is shown.Results. The article describes the boundaries of the mathematization of the considered segment of heterodox analysis related to the unreliability of world economic statistics, with examples of the successful application of approximate (in a broad sense relative to mathematical terminology) calculations to assess shifts in foreign trade and foreign direct investment in contemporary Russia. The author demonstrates that the heterodox approach reveals the absence of contradiction between Russia’s intensification of Eurasian economic integration (including within the narrow limits of the EAEU) and our country’s efforts to build a more equitable polycentric world order, including strengthening the BRICS format. Greater interdisciplinary transparency for heterodox economists against the background of representatives of the mainstream, among other things, makes it possible to intensify fruitful cooperation between scientists and practical analysts representing analytical centers — think tanks of the post-Soviet space and neighboring countries in the interests of developing integration projects.Conclusions. The proposed methodological framework can enhance the effectiveness of the work of the analytical community of Russia and its friendly countries in obtaining new applied conclusions in the economic sphere, especially in terms of enhancing the effectiveness of integration efforts in Greater Eurasia. At the same time, heterodox economists are more receptive to cooperation with historians, political scientists and other analysts who have focused on Eurasian economic integration.

“There, seated upon the toilet, apparently in the midst of defecation, was the president of the United States”: Toilets and elite politics in the USA and UK

What can we learn about elite politics from the humble toilet? How do the relations between toilets, bodies, and waste materially and discursively reveal, and become enrolled within, the summits of state political power? While there has been a growth in research on the political geographies of the body, including work on toilets, and a long history of research on elite politics, the two intellectual concerns and debates have not been brought together. Yet the toilet and the bathroom, in both their material and discursive reproduction, provide intriguing insights into the seemingly sanitised, even disembodied domain of elite politics. We explore the space, use, and meaning of the toilet in two powerful contexts: the White House in the United States, and Downing Street in the United Kingdom. Shaped by differences in cultural and political context, we study the ways in which toilets feature in the working of elite power, and how that connects to gender, sexuality, race, nakedness, humour, and space in the (re)making of the political. By making the toilet an object of study we aim to shed light on this often forgotten and silenced, yet inevitable geography of elite politics.

Making sense of clandestine graves: Material epistemology and the political geography of uncertain knowledge

How might we begin to establish meaning, understanding and justice out of something that is meant not to be found? In this article, we approach the growing problem of clandestine graves to ask what can be read from them, including why they matter, why they are found, and how they are becoming an intractable part of life for millions of citizens. Departing from the clandestine graves of São Paulo and Mexico, we argue that these material spaces are produced by ambiguous governance structures, and in turn reproduce them in ways that are unevenly knowable. The characteristics of these spaces that are otherwise shrouded in suspicion and deliberate efforts to make them unknowable reveal patterns and practices of political order while simultaneously creating certainty and fear about the governance they perpetuate. In taking the mass grave as an epistemology, we seek to establish identifiable tenents and patterns for further research and action while recognizing the challenges in asserting a knowledge claim about material spaces that are so intentionally, but unevenly, unknowable.

Far-right Ecology and Geopolitical Resentment at Europe’s Periphery: The Case of Romania’s “Conservative Revolution”

Building on insights from political geography and the social sciences, this paper illuminates the diversity of European far-right politics in general and far-right ecologism in particular by contextually examining a party at Europe’s margins—the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). Based on a discursive thematic analysis, our objective is to show how AUR challenges existing theoretical accounts, predominantly tethered to the Western and Central European experiences. While most influential scholars emphasize far right’s culturalized view of religion and the fixation on immigration, AUR outlines a theological vision of politics and perceives emigration as a critical problem. Moreover, it co-opts the language of anticolonialism to articulate a socio-ecological critique of global extractive capitalism in a semi-peripheral context. These specificities are essential for understanding the party’s outlier position within far-right ecologism: AUR places the environment at the very centre of its programme—and not merely as a strategic add-on to attract voters or respond to domestic or external pressures. To substantiate our claims, we reconstruct three dimensions of its hyper-nationalist, Orthodox geographical imaginary: AUR’s complex, human, and natural resource nationalism; its focus on food sovereignty and the Romanian peasant as an exemplar of sustainable agriculture; and the protection of “the last virgin forests in Europe” as central to Romania’s national identity and prosperity. We conclude that AUR effectively mobilizes historical geopolitical resentment at Europe’s margins and addresses it with a promise of recovered plenitude that endangers democratic politics.

What repoliticisation means and requires: Creating the climate for disagreement

This paper makes a conceptual distinction between repoliticisation and politicisation and evaluates what this means for post-foundational political geography and its collective endeavour of achieving a more egalitarian future. Post-foundational political geography is being consolidated as a distinct disciplinary subfield. Within the existing body of literature, significant attention has been directed towards depoliticisation and post-politicisation, but repoliticisation is yet to amass the same critical attention. While literature nonetheless considering repoliticisation treats it as almost synonymous with politicisation, in this paper, I argue repoliticisation is more specifically about enacting, or opening the door to, politicisations. To illustrate the case, I draw upon (auto)ethnographic, scholar-activist work, operating as a carbon accountant for the City of Manchester, UK, as part of a wider project evaluating the role experts (could) play in restricting and enabling political change. Taking post-foundational political geography's insistence that expert, technocratic modes of governance depoliticise seriously, and in mobilising this distinction between repoliticisation and politicisation, I explore what existing subjects like accountants can do to repoliticise. Doing so illustrates how repoliticisations could be triggered from within existing orders of politics and demonstrates how repoliticisation and politicisation are overlapping, related, yet distinct, concepts.

‘I felt’: Intimate geographies of sentient diplomacy

This paper explores feelings in diplomatic intimacies in the United Nations in New York. Drawing upon arguments in philosophy on emotional experience and supported by oral testimonies of diplomats, it supplements and complements the rich body of work on practices in diplomacy by exploring how feelings can reach out and be directed towards things in the world beyond the bounds of the body and this is part of the phenomenology of everyday diplomatic lives. I set out three key interconnected goals in order to personify state diplomacy: First, I show how feelings are bound up with cognition and perception and are not the mere effects of these. Secondly, I link feelings with the affective context of the United Nations Security Council in order to expose everyday existential experiences of individual diplomats. Thirdly, I reveal the perceived importance of eliciting events in this geopolitical setting, and the personal meaning of these to diplomats as expressed through their own feelings as state representatives. This is a unique approach to understanding diplomacy in political geography, and also the first of its kind in the study of the intimate geopolitics of the UN.

Spatial prediction of armed conflicts from the perspective of political geography using bivariate frequency ratio method (FR) in East African States

Armed conflicts, as significant human phenomena, profoundly impact populations and reflect a state's capacity to fulfill its responsibilities. These conflicts arise from various causes, necessitating robust predictive models to understand their spatial distribution. This study employs the Bivariate Frequency Ratio (FR) method to spatially predict the occurrence of armed conflicts across the East African States, drawing on 42 political geography-related criteria. The development of the predictive model involved classifying the region into five conflict-prone categories influenced by critical political geography factors. Geospatial datasets, curated in a GIS environment, were sourced from approved online portals. The findings indicate that Burundi exhibits the highest vulnerability to armed conflict, followed closely by Rwanda, Uganda, and Somalia. Ethiopia and South Sudan show a moderate risk, while predictions for Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Mozambique suggest lower likelihoods of conflict. The model's accuracy was validated using the Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve, demonstrating its effectiveness. Furthermore, the model's applicability extends to other regions, offering a valuable tool for global conflict prediction.

Territorialising the cloud or clouding the territory? Volumetric vulnerabilities and the militarised conjunctures of Singapore’s smart city-state

This article explores how the volumetric characteristics of cloud computing can create new expressions of territoriality, which in turn can reveal new axes of vulnerability and threat. Whilst recent work in political geography has sought to “locate” the cloud through analyses of data centre geographies and data-driven processes of smart urbanism, we look beyond the material plane and consider the amorphous territorialities of voluminous data instead. As much as these data are acted on by the legal-regulatory mechanics of the state in a bid to territorialise them, so too do these data volumes serve to cloud, and thus obscure, territory. Processes of territorialising and clouding exist in a state of dialectical tension with each other, and reveal the volumetric vulnerabilities of cloud computing. We validate these theoretical claims through an analysis of in-depth interviews with senior stakeholders in Singapore's Smart Nation initiative. In Singapore, defending the city is equivalent to defending the nation, which causes the military to play an outsized role in securing the city-state. We consider how the attack surface of the city becomes a more voluminous construct with cloud computing, how strategies of geofencing attempt to secure the cloud, and how these processes reveal the increasingly militarised conjunctures of everyday life. Overall, these insights reveal a need for political geography to continually evolve its theoretical premises in line with the rapid digitalisation of the world.

The struggle against post-truth politics has always been about white supremacy: Lessons from the informational praxis of SNCC

Exacerbated but by no means invented by President Donald Trump, post-truth politics are defined as a disregard for facts in political discourse and policymaking. The post-truth era is dominated by two forms of informational praxis: misinformation and disinformation. Through the archival record of civil rights organizations, we argue we should not see the present era of post-truth politics as new but instead see it as part of a more prolonged struggle over white supremacy and the broader effort to contain challenges to the US economic and racial order. By contextualizing the geography of post-truth politics, the strategies and tactics civil rights groups use to counter white supremacist lies are important to understand, especially in an era where social media can spread lies and disinformation at lightning-quick speed. Thus, we also explore how civil rights organizations challenged disinformation and the control and suppression of information perpetuated by those in power.

Ventography and the spatial politics of wind

This article explores the co-production of wind energy resources and UK maritime territories in the North Sea. It shows how endeavors to map wind for energy are shaped by specific spatial imaginations, which are in turn making it possible for the UK to advance sovereign claims over volumetric spaces offshore. This follows a long history of efforts to study and map wind movements alongside significant chapters of colonialism, imperialism, and territorial dispossession. The practices involved in the transformation of atmospheric circulations into territorial claims center on what I call ventography: the systematic study and cartographic representation of wind in relation to political boundaries, a project which is shaped by, and subsequently enrolled in, territorialization, sovereign performances, and border regimes. In this vein, the intangible nature of wind, often thought to be beyond the grasp of spatial politics, is being transformed into a resource that is coming to play a role in the production and reconfiguration of space in altogether new ways. Through a focus on the UK’s attempts to transmute wind power into territorial power, this article traces how ventography is reshaping the scales and configurations of contemporary political geographies.

Meeting the critical challenge: re-tooling and re-founding defences of local democratic institutions

ABSTRACT Local government studies was born as a sub-division of public administration, but was progressively cross-fertilised with a range of disciplines, notably political geography and urban studies. This buffeted what had been normative foundations of the field, notably liberal democracy, and challenged meanings of key concepts from its lexicon, including the ‘local’, democracy, government, place and scale. These cherished concepts have been re-imagined and are now more than ever ‘up for grabs’. Subsequently, normative theorising about the local government waned. This paper argues that we need to meet the challenge set by these new insights and ask what would a defence of local government look like if we took them into account? In doing so, we should recognise both their value and limitations; engaging in the challenge will reveal the need to re-visit some long-held assumptions about not only the value of local democratic institutions but also their continuing fundamental relevance.

Voting and Violence in Competitive Autocracies: The Case of the 2008 Runoff Election in Zimbabwe

ABSTRACT How, when and where violence is deployed during periods of extreme regime crisis is determined by regime support expectations. Regimes use political geography to direct violence and ensure political compliance. Areas have ‘core’ high regime loyalty, ‘swing’ loyalty where government and opposition have supporters, or ‘costly’ and loyalty opposition support. During elections, regimes accommodate, suppress or force voters in each area. In runoffs, regimes use new information to increase vote share in core support areas, and use violence against suspected defecting voters. In Zimbabwe during 2008, violence patterns maximised the regime’s favourable political geography, placing typically safe communities in danger.

Empire, redux: Towards a new political geography of race war

This essay revisits geographical debates on empire to clarify how broader geopolitical economies of power and violence have always been experienced at the scale of the everyday as an intimate politics of relation- and difference-making. It is guided by two questions that promise to stretch geographical writing on empire in new ways. They are: how has empire always been a racial project? And how has imperial race-making historically gone hand-in-hand with imperial place-making? Both questions force us to reckon with empire as a multi-scalar project that entangles the foreign and the domestic, the intimate and the global, and so on.

ANALISIS GEOGRAFI POLITIK FAKTOR-FAKTOR YANG MEMPENGARUHI KEBIJAKAN POLITIK DAN HUBUNGAN ANTAR- NEGARA

The aim of this research is to find out what factors can influence political policies and relations between countries within the scope of political geography. The method used in this research is literature study and descriptive qualitative. The results of this research found that geographic and political factors influence political policies and inter-state relations, and understanding how the geographic and political environment influences state structure, political policies, and inter-state interactions is crucial in making more accurate predictions and create more effective political policies.

PENGARUH LETAK, LUAS DAN BENTUK TERHADAP PEMERINTAHAN NEGARA SERTA BATAS NEGARA INDONESIA

This research aims to analyze the influence of location, area and form on state government based on the geographical context of Indonesian politics. The analysis was carried out by reviewing papers containing descriptions of the influence of the location, extent and shape of Indonesia in terms of political geography. The discussion begins with the influence of Indonesia's astronomical and geographical location, the size of its territory, islands and seas, as well as the shape of its landmass on state government. The research results show that geographical location, area and shape have positive and negative influences on Indonesian government in various political, economic, social and cultural aspects.

Constructing disposable farmworkers: Interrogating narrative and legal contours of the US racial capitalist state

In this paper, I draw on feminist narrative analysis to reconsider the exceptional character of agriculture under the law and its embodied consequences for contemporary agricultural guestworkers in Georgia, USA. Through engaged participant observation alongside farmworker advocates and archival research of legal texts, I consider the interplay between the law and everyday narratives in (re)constructing the racialized agricultural labor system. I interrogate a century of immigration laws, labor laws, and foreign labor schemes and examine how systems of selective inclusion play out on the ground. My analysis is informed by a theoretical framework that asserts that the US racial capitalist state developed in tandem with conceptions linking territory, whiteness, and the virtues of agriculture. Merging literatures on racial capitalism and the racial state, political geographies of immigration, and agricultural exceptionalism, this paper advances an understanding of the importance of interrogating the farm labor system to illuminate key mechanisms of exclusion characteristic of the US racial capitalist state. I argue that the state's construction of “disposable” farmworkers exposes the extent to which the racial capitalist state acts to discipline labor and uphold racialized hierarchies of “American” identity.

Political geography I: Blue geopolitics

This report provides an overview of contemporary scholarship on the political geographies of oceans. While oceans were overlooked for many years as theories of sovereignty, territory, and borders focused on terrestrial politics, the significant impact of climate change resulted in a new focus on the role oceans place in global environmental and political systems. At the same time, the enclosure of over 40 percent of the oceans as territorial seas, exclusive economic zones, and extended continental shelves through the Convention on the Law of the Sea produced burgeoning literature on maritime borders and conflicts. The report proposes the concept of blue geopolitics to capture an oceanic turn in political geography theories.

Motivating government on threatened species through electoral systems

AbstractMany of the proposed solutions to the global biodiversity crisis rely on national governments to act. The conservation movement needs to motivate governments or face an ongoing extinction crisis. Here we explore how linking biodiversity to electoral systems may assist in motivating government action. Using Australia as a case study, we analyze the intersection of 151 electoral districts and 1651 threatened species. We show all districts contain at least 14 threatened species. Half of the species analyzed (n = 801, 49%) are confined to one district (n = 44), with 1345 (81%) species intersecting with less than five. This geographical information shows that alongside local social and economic issues, the threatened species crisis can be made relevant to all Australian elected representatives. Locally relevant information can encourage integration of species needs into the scope of political representation. As such, linking biodiversity to political geography offers a potential pathway to creating transformative change.