Human Geography

This paper problematizes the use of surveillance technologies such as drones for security governance in Afghanistan by foregrounding the spatial conditions of the possibility of such measures. How did the security architecture in Afghanistan become so fragmented to require technologies such as drones as extensions of the government security surveillance apparatus to govern ungoverned space? While much literature on drones considers how drones rewrite spaces in their theaters of operation, it is also true that space is rewritten to enact governance-by-drone in the first place. In Afghanistan, historical shifts in the global political economy resulted in spatially fragmented security architecture, thus laying the spatial pre-conditions for security governance-by-drone. This paper brings together debates on geopolitics and geoeconomics with those of roll-back, roll-out, and roll-over neoliberalism to construct a genealogy of spatial reconfiguration in Afghanistan. It begins by exploring earlier geopolitical forms of statecraft in Afghanistan, which focused on augmenting state power through large-scale development projects. It then moves on to show how these were replaced by geoeconomic forms of statecraft that emphasized the rolling back of government involvement, heavy privatization, and foreign investment, resulting in deeply fragmented security architecture. Finally, neoliberalism's roll-out and roll-over phases correlate with reviving geopolitical forms of statecraft aimed at territorial consolidation. The new geopolitical, however, is a form of statecraft that tends toward territorial power through compensatory technological means like drones as opposed to meaningful development. Rulership was leaning toward this new authoritarian, technocratic model well before the capture of these technologies by the Taliban after its transition to power following the 2021 US retreat.

This article draws on ethnographic and visual documentation of the Aurora Saint Anthony Peace Garden in Saint Paul's historic Black neighborhood, Rondo. The article draws on these insights to argue that the Rondo-elder-led collective, Urban Farmer Garden Alliance, and the Aurora Saint Anthony Peace Garden create and sustain an intimacy of Black food sovereignty in the context of gentrification in Rondo. This paper also argues that the community gardens in Rondo are trying to restore collective Black intimacy with land and food disrupted by urban renewal along with lack of access to affordable food in this historic neighborhood in the Twin Cities.

In 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the general elections in India with a thumping majority for the second consecutive term. The BJP government has undertaken controversial policies which have been interpreted as flowing from its ideology of Hindutva, an ideology of aggressive Hindu nationalism. As a result of pursuing these policies, there has been a hollowing out of democracy in India according to scholars and reputed international organizations. On the other hand, in the last 8 years, the Indian economy has gone through major slowdowns and policy-induced crises, which the pandemic has further intensified. The paper tries to look at these political and economic processes under the Modi government simultaneously. It shows that the conditions of the Indian people have deteriorated during BJP rule. However, this has not affected the political fortunes of the government. The paper tries to answer how one can view the economic stagnation witnessed during the last 8 years together with the rise of Hindu nationalism in India. We argue that BJP wants to redefine the Indian nation in its Hindutva image. Such a re-imagination backed by state power has postponed the political blowback resulting from the economic crisis. Additionally, the BJP has articulated a new politics for the poor (without redistribution) and a new politics of caste to sustain its hegemony. The enduring dominance of BJP in the political domain of India even after a below-average economic performance during the last 8 years is therefore a result of multiple factors pertaining to Hindutva, nationalism and a new politics of caste and the poor.

The EU-border agency Frontex is one of the main actors involved in the bordering of the EU. Its practice reaches from the deployment of border police and equipment to the production of knowledge about the border and migration. Departing from a critical analysis of the documentaries "Frontex – Einsatz gegen Flüchtlinge – Festung Europa" (2013) and “Die Frontex-Recherche: Eine EU-Agentur und der Umgang mit Menschenrechtsverletzungen” (2019) on Frontex, this article examines the mutual interrelations of discursive and material bordering. Based on a combined reading of Laclau's work on difference and Mezzadra and Neilsons concept of borders as tools of structuring social reality through difference, the reproduction of the border is discussed. The border becomes the place where the border is enacted and reproduced on a material and discursive level. This practice of bordering is rooted in a reproduction of capital and of racist imaginations of refugees.

In 2022, engineers at Rice University revealed a new procedure to reanimate the corpse of a spider. Hailed as a biotechnological achievement, the experimental procedures designed to convert death into useful, productive labor portend a deepening of necrocapitalism and the violence of science. In this commentary, we call attention to three overlapping dimensions epitomized by scientifically reanimated spiders: (a) the fetishization of violence, (b) the subsumption of life and death to circuits of capital, and (c) the contradictions inherent in necrocapitalism. We view the necrobotic spider as an omen, one that calls us to refigure our understanding of violence in a post-humanist and post-anthropocentric way.

The Citizens’ Movement in Sri Lanka is a turning point in the country’s political history, encouraging similar movements in the South Asian region. Diverse socioeconomic and ideological constituencies within the movement are united in protesting economic hardships—particularly food and fuel shortages—that the majority of the movement’s stakeholders attribute to political culture. The movement is a reaction to the political crisis brought about by the economic crisis, and it believes that resolution must begin with a political revolution. The movement’s concrete achievements are unprecedented. It has radically transformed the culture of dissent. The movement succeeded in removing key members of the Rajapaksa family from power. It freed people from the fear of dissent and convinced them of the benefits of using culturally diverse methods to withstand state power. By bursting the bubble of racist ethno-religious nationalism, the movement has prompted discussions about the emancipatory possibilities of a broad range of issues. Although the movement’s stakeholders primarily focus on political regime and combating state suppression, the movement has reinvigorated conversations about the necessity of radical economic reforms. Agriculture must be brought to the center of the movement’s conversations to bring about positive synergy between political and economic reforms to sustain the movement and achieve its goals.

Eisenhower once highlighted the growing undemocratic influence of the ‘military-industrial-complex’ (1961) and the enormous opportunity cost associated with it (1953). Since the late-1990s, military spending around the world has been growing but, despite its overall significance, research on it has not followed suit. There remains no consensus on the economic effects of military spending, both in the sense of economic dynamism and whether it ‘crowds-out’ other forms of state spending, like welfare spending. Understanding such primarily depends on how the relationship between the economy and the state is theoretically understood. The present paper outlines in brief three theoretical schools on the state-economy nexus, ultimately arguing that state-backed military spending should be situated as a countertendency to the ‘law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall’.

In this essay, I argue that the ongoing global food crisis, beyond a conjunctural price increase, is an expression of the structural crisis of social reproduction experienced by the classes of rural labour in the Global South. By interrogating the reports and policy recommendations of international organizations on global food insecurity, the essay focuses on the internal relationship between the crisis of social reproduction for the classes of labour who cannot produce and who cannot consume sufficient and healthy food.

This review article considers recent scholarship on the geographies of nationalism by focusing on three key binaries that have defined the field of nationalism studies: inclusive/exclusive (geographies of community), love/hate (geographies of emotion), and past/future (geographies of time). It argues that asking who participates in constructing such conceptual dualisms, geographers can offer important insights about how nationalist discourses underpin contemporary practices of governing ourselves and others as political subjects—and their multifarious spatial dimensions. Geographers are well positioned to investigate the drawing of conceptual boundaries as political acts, with real effects in the world, rather than intellectually “wrong.” As such, this article calls for nationalism scholars not to outright reject binaries, but to take them seriously as a way to open up broader questions about the geographies of nationalism that all subjects of today's state system must confront.

This review explores the production and management of hunger under capitalism through the work of four scholars’ embeddedness with expanding feeding lines in rich but unequal countries of the Global North. We engage with their methodologies, placing the material and discursive infrastructures undergirding the explosion of charitable food networks within the rich literature on food and hunger in geography. Bringing Food Bank Nations, Feeding the Crisis, Feeding the Other, and A Mass Conspiracy to Feed People in conversation reveals the critical function that charitable food assistance plays in revaluing food waste on behalf of the corporate food regime and disciplining people navigating precarious life in urban spaces. We also highlight the possibilities that the fraught politics of the feeding line afford to scholar activists and activist scholars advancing movements for food justice, food sovereignty, and the right to food.