Unpacking climate services: Knowledge politics,beneficent humanitarianism and the realpolitik of risk management in China

In the last four decades, climate services (CS) have moved from being limited forecasting tools in their predictive capacity to becoming involved in the shaping of risk assessment instruments with global reach affected to enhance adaptation to climate change. Yet, they have been relatively overlooked by human geographers and critical risk theorists, whose interests have been to document the political processes involved in shaping climate change and the global scientific enterprise it has generated. By looking at the ways in which CS have been developed and exported to countries deemed as climate-vulnerable, the paper sheds light on two simultaneous kinds of knowledge politics that are occurring at the interstices of global human security aspirations and the realpolitik of local practices. The first emerges from the ways in which CS political relevance has been secured by climate scientists in the midst of grand developmentalist and humanitarian ambitions, what we have called beneficent knowledge politics. The second comes from the nitty-gritty of risk management practices in countries to which CS are exported, in this case China, and highlights how a myriad of knowledge and sensitivities involved in shaping risk and science have been overlooked by the superseding ideals underpinning the production of CS and their application to wider climate adaptation agenda. By doing so, the paper contributes to the geographies of risk and emergencies as well as to the geographies of science by enhancing our understanding of the knowledge politics at play in the development of and resistance to technocratic climate governance.     

The birth of cyberwar

Within western security discourse, the threat posed by cyberwar has risen from a barely acknowledged concern to one of the greatest challenges confronting the West and the world in only a few short years. How did this happen so quickly, and what are the consequences for how security is performatively enacted? We argue that an event that occurred in 2007 catalyzed cyberwar's actualization as a new policy object, and has continued to affect the discursive practices materializing cyberwar since 2007. After a brief genealogy of cyberwar imaginings prior to 2007, the article interrogates how the 2007 events catalyzed cyberwar's materialization, and the discursive practices that have worked performatively to stabilize and institutionalize a knowledge-power assemblage named cyberwar as a new policy object. In particular, it traces the ways in which the site and situation of cyberwar's birth have affected the emerging apparatuses of cybersecurity, how the event enabled Estonian cybersecurity specialists and political and military elites as “catalyzing agents and shimmering points” in the emerging cyberwar resonance machine, while Tallinn became elevated as a cybersecurity center of calculation, and finally how the events of 2007 have served as a precautionary baseline for the anticipatory actions through which future cyberwars are made present.     

Domestic drone futures

We are in the midst of a global turn to the drone. In the context of the ‘unmanning’ of contemporary life, this article explores urban drone futures as they are speculated through the under-examined sites of patents and speculative design. Approaching the drone as it is anticipated, it examines the role of speculative visualizations in the fostering and constitution of urban drone imaginations and futures. While recognising growing scholarly attention to the drone as it manifests in increasingly diverse more-than-military contexts, it argues that there remains a need to expand the methodological toolkit employed in the drone's study. Through the lenses of patents and speculative design, it calls for the diversification of both the sites through which the drone is approached, and the temporalities engaged in its critical accounting. Collectively, this article pursues an alternative political geography of the ‘domestic’ drone as it is actively imagined. It explores both the capabilities with which the anticipated drone is imbued, and the potential implications of dronified social relations and everyday life. Attending to patents and speculative design as anticipatory drone sources offers contribution to both drone geographies, drone methodologies, and political geographies of the robotic more widely.