Perilous Journeys: Visualising the Racialised “Refugee Crisis”

This article explores the benign and malignant power of the visual in the racialised framing of the ongoing “European refugee crisis”. Bringing together literatures on racial discourses, visuality, storytelling and decoloniality for the first time, this paper breaks new ground in our understandings of the political possibilities that visual storytelling offers in shifting “lines of sight” in an increasingly vitriolic anti‐refugee climate. It does this by analysing prominent graphic narratives created by the non‐profit organisation PositiveNegatives, animating the refugee experiences of Syrian men in Scandinavia. We consider the affective engagements that such progressive storytelling promotes and the decolonial potential invested in it, arguing that the modality and content of narratives of this genre offer important scope to provoke encounter and empathy. Contributing to geographies of race, migration, visuality and decoloniality, we suggest that these narratives allow new and gently radical ways of resisting the dehumanising impetus of mainstream media discourses.     

Visualising everyday geographies: practices of vision through travel-time

Responding to recent debates in human geography on the need to explore more complex renderings of everyday visuality, this paper explores some of the fluid relationships between everyday visuality, materiality and mobility through practices of contemporary railway travel in Britain. Based on extensive empirical research, this paper explores three different but related visual practices experienced during the course of a railway journey. First, it looks at how sublime forms of vision emerge to produce a variety of passive embodied effects. Second, it looks at how more attentive visual practices are implicated in the temporal organisation of the journey and have the capacity to activate changes to routine. Third, it looks at how the physical materiality of the carriage interior serves to mediate the visual field in particular ways and gives rise to a series of freedoms and constraints. Whilst the visual consumption of landscapes viewed through a window is often taken to be an axiomatic part of the travelling experience, this paper demonstrates the importance of apprehending how a multiplicity of visual practices affect how perceptions of time, space and location unfold over the course of a journey.     

The Politics of Development Metrics and Measurement: Impact Evaluations in Fairtrade‐certified Plantation Agriculture

This article presents an analysis of impact evaluations in the case of Fairtrade International in order to track the political effects of metrics and measurement procedures in development practice today. Metrics or ‘indicators’ have long been understood to have the effect of transforming the political visions of socioeconomic change that shape development interventions into seemingly non‐contentious, technical models. The common practice among development organizations of using such metrics as evidence of apolitical, technical development outcomes has wide‐ranging implications for the field of development and for development subjects. The article explores two specific implications by detailing impact evaluations on three Fairtrade‐certified cut‐flower plantations, which Fairtrade International contracted to inform a 2014 revision of its certification standards. The authors find, first, that debates over competing visions or definitions of development became concealed in technical debates over adequate metrics and measurements; and, second, that such debates over metrics and measurement consolidated the roles of experts and expert knowledge as mediators of what development can or should be. These findings enhance prior critiques of the supposed neutrality of development metrics by illustrating empirically how the processes of defining metrics and measurement conceal and circumscribe political debates over the meaning and making of development practice.     

Geopolitics and visuality: Sighting the Darfur conflict

In the many considerations of visual culture in geography, there are few works concerned with the visual culture of contemporary geopolitics. In seeking to rectify this lacuna, this paper outlines elements of a research project to consider the way visuality is a pivotal assemblage in the production of contemporary geopolitics. Signalling the need for a conceptual exploration of the importance of vision and visuality to all forms of knowledge (rather than just those associated with or manifested in specific visual artefacts like pictures), the paper argues that understanding the significance of visuality for geopolitics involves recasting visual culture as visual economy. This enables the constitutive relations of geopolitics and visuality to shift from the social construction of the visual field to the visual performance of the social field. This argument is illustrated through an examination of some of the documentary photography and photojournalism covering the most recent outbreak of war in Darfur, Sudan, beginning in the summer of 2003. Exploring the tension in these pictures between the established disaster iconography of ‘Africa’ and the desire to image genocidal violence and war crimes, considering in particular the way photography captures identity, the argument concludes with reflections on the way the visual performance of the social field that is Darfur structures our encounters with others.     

REFORM AND REVOLUTION IN SCANDINAVIA, 1917–1919

The articles in this special issue, entitled Reform and Revolution in Scandinavia, 1917–1919: Entangled Histories and Visions of the Future, deal with the political turmoil in Scandinavia in the late 1910s, accelerated by the First World War and the revolutions in Russia in February/March and October/November 1917 and eventually in Germany in the autumn of 1918. Their special focus is on the political debates about reform and revolution and the related visions of the future of political order and social structures in national contexts and across borders. The articles examine how actors with different agendas in different contexts exploited the opportunities opened up by a window of change. None of the Scandinavian countries were directly involved in the theatre of war, but the whole of Scandinavia was associated with the hostilities in many other ways. The revolutionary processes in Russia affected Finland directly but – reflecting the events spreading from Petrograd – the debates about the legitimacy of the established political order intensified in all Scandinavian countries. The articles demonstrate how the debates and political processes took diverse forms in varying national contexts but were often more dependent on international relations, transnationally interconnected and entangled, than has traditionally been recognized in nation-state-centred historiographies.     

Cartographically constructing Kurdistan within geopolitical and orientalist discourses

Maps are powerful geopolitical tools, which are widely used to represent conflicts over territory, boundaries, citizens, and resources. But maps do more than represent. They are also discursive tools, which reflect, express, and help create geographic knowledge, political agendas, and social stereotypes. Through a longitudinal study of American journalistic cartography of Kurdistan – an ambiguously defined region that has often been in the midst of geopolitical conflict – this paper argues that maps reflect and recreate dominant geopolitical discourses, which are often intricately linked to orientalist discourses. A critical analysis of the design elements of place names, map text, border demarcation, and symbology revealed that these representations not only reflected the political and social narratives of the time and space in which they were created, but also constructed and communicated subtle and blatant positions towards the Kurds and Kurdistan. More specifically, these maps frequently marginalized the Kurds by questioning their geopolitical territorial claims, and also portrayed them in typical orientalist discourse as violent rebels or backward victims depending on the U.S. agenda in the region at the time. This paper will show how these interrelated discourses worked together in the cartographic image to portray the Kurds in a manner that generally supported and legitimated the dominant U.S. geopolitical position of a particular event.     

Popular culture,post-truth and emotional framings of world politics

ABSTRACT

With the election of US President Donald Trump, the separation between high and low politics and the line between fiction and reality has become fundamentally blurred. Yet popular culture offers an important vector through which we might make sense of this political turmoil. The purpose of this essay is two-fold: conceptually, I examine how television provides opportunities for the insight into the visual and emotional registers of the post-truth era. I illustrate this empirically by examining two popular television series – Homeland and The Good Fight. I argue that the power of popular culture is derived from its visuality as the intersection of image and sound, through which emotional registers related to anxiety and outrage can be elicited and visually narrated. Even more so, the visual nature of popular culture has a strong affective component that shapes how we experience representations of reality and reveals the power and political significance of popular culture.     

Young islanders,the meteorological imagination,and the art of geopolitical engagement

There is scant literature analysing how young islanders regard climate change, particularly in terms of resilience, agency and a geopolitical aesthetic. To address that gap, this paper offers a theoretical framework and empirical example responding to such issues. The work's theoretical foci are upon the role of the artist as interlocutor; the importance of arts practices in encouraging children to participate in climate change debates and actions; and the potential of what anthropologist Tim Ingold has called the meteorological imagination. These three matters inform a two-year praxis project – A Map of a Dream of the Future – involving methods from the geohumanities and engagement with young islanders, academics, artists and writers, community cultural development workers, and educators. Together, we worked on various activities to draw out our individual and collective ideas about islands, arts, climate change, and geopolitics. In the process were created an education kit, children's workshops and exhibitions, and a professional art installation at a major national arts festival. At the same time, new insights have been gained about how the meteorological imagination may be a significant resource by which to work with children as they come to terms with a future whose climate has changed.     

A climate terrorism assemblage? Exploring the politics of climate change-terrorism-radicalisation relations

Despite a series of claims from Bernie Sanders (2015), Barack Obama (2015), and others arguing that climate change, radicalisation, and terrorism are connected by complex causal relationships, there is very little academic examination of the politics of these claims. Building on DeLanda’s (2006) account of assemblages and social complexity, this paper conceptualises climate change-terrorism-radicalisation relationships as a ‘climate terrorism assemblage’. A ‘climate terrorism assemblage’ is a complex, emergent ‘whole’ formed from a heterogeneous range of interacting geopolitical components (e.g. climatic factors, migration, think tanks and academic publications, and a discourse of ‘climate security’). Specifically, a climate terrorism assemblage is characterised by ‘strategic territorialisations’: context-specific, multi-scalar points at which political claims of causal links between climate change, terrorism, and radicalisation are crystallised. Strategic territorialisations are produced in two, interrelated contexts. First, using the case study of the Syrian Conflict, a climate terrorism assemblage reveals an intricate, contested politics of ‘drawing lines’ which link climate change, terrorism, and radicalisation. Secondly, the paper argues that, at the points at which causal links are constructed between climate change, terrorism and radicalisation, a climate terrorism assemblage territorialises around intersectional subject formations, in particular a young masculine subject vulnerable to potential radicalisation and terrorism. Overall, the paper concludes that a climate terrorism assemblage provides a productive analytic frame to investigate the contested power relations of climate change-radicalisation-terrorism connections.     

The critical geopolitics of the Uzbekistan–Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley boundary dispute, 1999–2000

In 1999 the Uzbekistan–Kyrgyzstan Ferghana Valley boundary became a brutal reality in the lives of borderland inhabitants, when it became the key issue in a crisis of inter-state relations. Mainstream explanations have suggested that the Soviet boundary legacy and convergent post-Soviet macro-economic policies made conflict inevitable. Drawing on critical geopolitics theory, this paper questions the implicit determinism in these accounts, and seeks to augment them by a political analysis. It suggests that ‘the border crisis’ was the product of the interaction of complex domestic power struggles in both countries, the boundary itself acting as a material and discursive site where elites struggled for the power to inscribe conflicting gendered, nationalistic visions of geopolitical identity. It concludes by insisting upon a moral imperative to expose and challenge the geographical underpinnings of state violence.     

Still not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier: the geopolitics of the Kosovo war 1999

The Kosovo war of 1999 brought the checkered legacies of Russian and Western geopolitics back to the forefront of international relations. Central to the discussions of the Balkans is its century-old legacy as a Shatterbelt or Crush Zone. Though not identified by Saul Cohen as a Shatterbelt during the Cold War, the region is now located where the maritime (Western) and land power (Russian) geostrategic realms come into contact. NATO expansion and Russian insecurities about the region’s future have revised interest in geopolitical linkages and historical antecedents. The tradition of pan-Slavism, linking Russia to the Balkans cultural and political networks, has been uneven and is now subject to intensive debate within Russian political circles. In 1999, public opinion surveys showed consistent support in NATO countries for the bombing of Yugoslavia but strong opposition in Russia and other Slavic states. The surveys also question many stereotypes, especially the geopolitical visions of Russian citizens. Modern geopolitics is differentiated from classical geopolitics by the insertion of public opinion into the formation of geopolitical codes and foreign policy, in both the western countries and in Russia. In such an environment, the Balkans will remain central to the strategies of the great powers but public opinion, modifying geopolitical cultures, will ameliorate confrontations.     

Lost in conceptualization: Reading the “new Cold War” with critical geopolitics

Focusing on the debates on energy security in Germany, this paper analyzes the structure, logic, and circulation of the “new Cold War” as a geopolitical narrative. We use the literature in critical geopolitics to analyze the conceptual implications of an apparent dissociation between the media and governmental stance toward the new Cold War and its embedded geopolitical logic. The relationship between the “kind” of geopolitics inherent in the new Cold War and the different “forms” in which it circulates suggests a blurring of boundaries between all such geopolitical forms, through multiple crossings-over between institutions, textual genres, and circulating actors. The media presence of the New Cold War also highlights the ambiguity of the “popular” in popular geopolitics, which is further refracted on other geopolitical forms which share its characteristics. This not only makes imperative the more precise formulation of key conceptual categories such as popular or banal geopolitics, but also calls into question the link between the state and particular geopolitical logics, as well as the relationship between the mass media and geopolitics.     

After Geopolitics? From the Geopolitical Social to Geoeconomics

Abstract:  This paper makes two central arguments. First, the popular language of geopolitics needs to be understood as historically emerging from and helping create a "geopolitical social", which both crosses and crafts traditional borders of internal and external to the national state. Second, we suggest that geoeconomic social forms are gradually supplanting this geopolitical social. After establishing the geopolitical social associated with traditional geopolitics, from Ratzel to Bismarck, we examine the erosion of geopolitical calculation and the rise of the geoeconomic. We trace emerging geoeconomic social forms in three domains: the reframing of territorial security to accommodate supranational flows; the recasting of social forms of security through the market; and the reframing of the state as geoeconomic agent. Neither an exercise in "critical geopolitics" nor an endorsement of Luttwakian style geoeconomics, this paper assumes no straightforward historical succession from geopolitical to geoeconomic logics, but argues that geoeconomics is nonetheless crucial to the spatial reconfiguration of contemporary political geography.     

Queensland Aborigines,Multiple Realities and the Social Sources of Suffering Part 2 Suicide,Spirits and Symbolism

ABSTRACT This is the second part of a paper that explores a range of magico‐religious experiences such as immaterial voices and visions, in terms of local cultural, moral and socio‐political circumstances in an Aboriginal town in rural Queensland. This part of the paper explores the political and cultural symbolism and meaning of suicide. It charts the saliency of suicide amongst two groups of kin and cohorts and the social meaningfulness and problematic of the voices and visions in relation to suicide, to identity and family forms and to funerals and a heavily drinking lifestyle. I argue that voices and visions are used to reinterpret social experience and to establish meaning and that tragically suicide evokes connectivity rather than anomie and here cannot be understood merely as an individualistic act or evidence of individual pathology. Rather it is about transformation and crossing a threshold to join an enduring domain of Aboriginality. In this life world, where family is the highest social value and where a relational view of persons holds sway, the individualistic practice of psychiatric and other helping professions, is a considerable problem.     

When climate justice goes wrong: Maladaptation and deep co-production in transformative environmental science and policy

Maladaptation to climate change is often portrayed as arising from the unjust exclusion of vulnerable people. In turn, analysts have proposed knowledge co-production with marginalized groups as a form of transformative climate justice. This paper argues instead that maladaptation arises from a much deeper exclusion based upon the projection of inappropriate understandings of risk and social identity that are treated as unquestioned circumstances of justice. Drawing on social studies of science, the paper argues that the focus on co-production as an intentional act of inclusion needs to be considered alongside “deep” or “reflexive” co-production, which instead refers to the non-cognitive and unavoidable simultaneous generation of knowledge and social order. These processes have linked visions of planetary justice with an understanding of climate risk based on global atmospheric change, and an assumption that community forms an antidote to individualism. The paper uses a discussion of adaptation in western Nepal to illustrate how such deep forms of co-production have significantly reduced understandings of “what” adaptation is for, and “who” is included. Maladaptation, therefore, is not simply unjust implementations of an essentially fair model of adaptation, but also the allocation of exclusionary visions of what and for whom adaptation is for. Debates about transformative climate justice therefore need to understand how their critiques of classical liberal justice generate exclusions of their own, and to engage vulnerable people in reframing, rather than just receiving, circumstances of justice. There is also a need to examine how these circumstances remain unchallenged within environmental science and policy.     

Politicized moral geographies: Debating biodiversity conservation and ancestral domain in the Philippines

Research in political ecology has paid inadequate attention to the multifaceted cultural politics surrounding discourses of environmental conservation in the developing world. Specifically, it has tended to neglect the rich politicized moral geographies integral to conservation debates. This paper, then, makes the case for thinking about conservation as an envisioning process sensitive to these politicized moral geographies as well as their linkages to political and economic processes. After a brief critique of political ecology, the paper sketches a theoretical approach in which environmental conservation is understood as a process of envisioning social relations, moral discourse and socionatural place. The approach is used to explain two contrasting visions of conservation based on the notions of integrated protected areas management and ancestral domain which are prominent today in the Philippines. The conclusion reiterates the call for a discursive political ecology alive to the politicized moral geographies that condition conservation trajectories.     

Geopolitics at the margins? Reconsidering genealogies of critical geopolitics

Critical geopolitics has become one of the most vibrant parts of political geography. However it remains a particularly western way of knowing which has been much less attentive to other traditions of thinking. This paper engages with Pan-Africanism, and specifically the vision of the architect of post-colonial Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, to explore this overlooked contribution to critical engagements with geopolitics. Pan-Africanism sought to forge alternative post-colonial worlds to the binary geopolitics of the Cold War and the geopolitical economy of neo-colonialism. The academic division of labour has meant that these ideas have been consigned to African studies rather than being drawn into wider debates around the definitions of key disciplinary concepts. However Nyerere's continental thinking can be seen as a form of geopolitical imagination that challenges dominant neo-realist projections, and which still has much to offer contemporary political geography.     

Leaders,dreams and journeys: Italy's new political communication

This article argues that the modernization of Italian political campaigns and their relationship with the media have led parties and candidates to reconceptualize both their symbols and their rhetorical visions. In contrast to the past, Italian political communication now appears clearly 'Americanized' and candidate-centred. Candidates evoke symbolic visions stressing leadership and personal characteristics instead of referring to the ideological and party symbols that dominated the old campaigns. As in the USA, dreams and journeys are now used in Italy as political images, and communication focuses on the construction of leadership. The author argues, however, that despite these similarities, the Italian personalization of politics differs in many respects from that found in the USA, above all in the lack of institutionalization of political symbols in Italy.     

Life and Death Decisions in our Posthuman(ist) Times

Abstract: Geography, like much of social science, is witnessing a resurgence of interest in Michel Foucault's formation of biopower—the power to make live and foster life. This paper seeks to engage with this interest by staging a dialogue between the work of Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow on the one hand and that of Giorgio Agamben on the other. I propose that, while Rose and Rabinow provide a diagnostic for our emerging geographies of “life itself” and outline allied forms of political citizenship known as “biosociality” or “biological citizenship”, it is Agamben who enables us to consider the limit figures to this form of political inclusion. To draw out these limit figures I focus on recent debates surrounding end‐of‐life decisions and provide examples from the Dignity in Dying campaign and the Not Dead Yet movement. Throughout, I situate this paper within recent debates on posthumanism and the posthuman in geography. In doing so I effectively ask: why, in our seemingly posthuman(ist) times, does much of Western politics seek to decide on the form, the right and, inevitably, the limit of human beings?