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To expedite the construction of barriers along the border with Mexico, U.S. Secretaries of Homeland Security have waived an extensive array of laws since 2005 when authority for such actions was first delegated to that position as part of the REAL ID Act. This paper contextualises the political origins of what is referred to as Section 102(c) waiver authority, shows how these waivers are used to dramatically expand border barrier construction, and reviews legal challenges. In doing so, it connects the use of waivers in governance as viewed through the study of law with the theoretical prominence of Agamben in the discipline of geography. By examining the specific ways in which these legal practices and their geographic expression have institutionalised a state of exception that pushes the boundary of legal acceptability, we arrive at a more transdisciplinary understanding of the role of states of exception as a tool of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Control over access to the Indian Ocean is often seen through a highly securitised lens. Strategic actors have long sought to use geographical constraints to maintain the region as a relatively enclosed strategic space. It has only a few narrow maritime entrance points and the littoral is not well connected to the interior of the Eurasian continent. These factors have contributed to the historical domination of the Indian Ocean by a succession of extra-regional maritime powers and the virtual exclusion of Eurasian land powers such as China and Russia. This paper considers how the physical geography of the Indian Ocean has contributed to its control by some powers and the exclusion of others. It then discusses China’s Maritime Silk Route/One Belt One Road initiative, which includes growing interests in Indian Ocean ports and plans to build new overland pathways to connect China with the Indian Ocean. The paper concludes that while China’s growing maritime interests in Indian Ocean are strategically important, it is the new overland routes connecting the Eurasian hinterland with the ocean that have the potential to change the entire geostrategic character of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Home to more than 160 million people, the Nile River Basin has become one of the hotspots of the global quest for food, water and energy security. Moving closer to its completion, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) highlights the interplay between the food, water, and energy sectors and their implications on geopolitical power relations in the region. Despite Ethiopia having the highest volumetric contribution to the Nile river flow, Egypt has maintained hydro-hegemony over the basin for several decades on the basis of historical claims and colonial agreements. Egypt has stated that its volumetric share of the Nile’s water is not sufficient to sustain its growing population, declaring water availability a matter of national security. However, for Ethiopia, the GERD represents a crucial moment in its development agenda, acting as both a counterhegemonic power play, as well as a means to improving the hydropower capacity of the country, and ensuring future food security. This paper explores the various hegemonic and counter-hegemonic strategies employed by Egypt and Ethiopia respectively, highlighting the various ways in which food, water, and energy concerns are intrinsic components of the asymmetric power configurations of the Nile River Basin. By navigating the debate surrounding the GERD, this paper highlights the necessity of incorporating the food, water, and energy nexus into studies of hydro-hegemony and counter-hegemony. This allows the future policy direction for nexus management and governance in the Nile River Basin to move beyond benefit sharing, instead steering towards power sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper scrutinises the translation of sovereignty into daily actions at the border. The Soviet Union established a heavily securitised and sealed border, which was perpetuated in post-Soviet, civil war-stricken Tajikistan by assigning the task to the Russian Federation’s border forces. After having taken over the task of guarding the border, the slowly recovering post-conflict state tried hard to maintain its own border control. Drawing on interviews with borderland people, this article discusses the convergence of Tajikistan’s strong claim but weak support for sovereignty, with the daily life of the borderland people. It will show how – given the Pamirs’ special status as a border district – far-reaching sovereign authority of state agents, aiming to provide security at the border, has been translated into arbitrary actions ensuring individual benefits and has been hidden by intransparency. The article argues that the lack of adequate support from the central government encourages state representatives at the border to reinterpret the sovereign power assigned to them in order to serve their own individual benefits and purposes. Instead of being used to maintain the state territory, the sovereignty’s power is diverted to serve individual interests, in the end serving to destabilize the border, the opposite of the intended purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the way NATO conducts its interventions has altered since the Global Financial Crisis. The pressures of the Global Financial Crisis have forced NATO to shift from the sustained peacekeeping operation in Afghanistan to what I refer to as the trans-scalar space of intervention in Libya. Trans-scalar spaces of intervention are spaces where violence is temporarily concentrated by a transnational military apparatus to eliminate a perceived threat as efficiently as possible. The threats targeted are contained within a particular national locale and are unable to manifest themselves transnationally; their capacity is therefore several orders of magnitude below the force projection abilities of the transnational military force seeking its destruction. I examine how NATO’s creation of these new types of spaces has impacted global security and undermined territorial-based forms of governance. Despite the ensuing chaos which enveloped Libya after NATO departed, with their low cost and speed at which they can be organized this style of intervention will likely be replicated in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geopolitics today is increasingly marked by the violent convergence of (in)security, market integration, and dispossession. Yet few studies address the connected, counter-insurgent geopolitics of ostensibly ameliorative, women-focused development interventions in the (post)colonial world. This paper charts a new theorisation of the geopolitics of development by focusing on gendered social movements, intersecting relations of difference, and social reproduction in two seemingly distinct areas: rural Guatemala and urban India. It introduces a transnational feminist geopolitical analytic – based on relational comparison, critical ethnography, and collaborative dialogue – to elucidate both specificity and global interconnection. Specifically, this consists of analysing struggles over dispossession through processes of ‘de(bt)velopment’ in the Ch'orti’ Highlands and ‘redevelopment’ in Mumbai at key historical conjunctures. These struggles illuminate not only (in)securities experienced by marginalised groups but also the transformative potentialities and domesticating limitations of social mobilisation. In conclusion, the paper offers insights into the how of doing more liberatory geopolitical praxis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper builds upon feminist critiques of security interventions in the name of ‘protecting women’ to link United States municipal policing practices for intimate partner violence with global security interventions. Policing intervention into intimate partner violence emerged in the last twenty-five years; however as I argue, these policing practices are situated within narrow conceptions of masculinist security that often fail to address victims' multiple security needs. While not dismissing the importance of arresting intimate partner violence abusers, this paper examines the ways that policing can create additional and different embodied fears and insecurities for victims. Using the tools of emotional geopolitics, this paper traces victims’ fears following the arrest of their abuser to understand the temporal and spatial moments of fear in relation to security interventions. This methodological approach examines the limitations of masculinist protection while reimagining security to consider the emotional security needs and fears of those being protected. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper critically assesses the CIA's drone programme and proposes that the use of unmanned aerial vehicles is driving an increasingly “dronified” US national security strategy. The paper suggests that large-scale ground wars are being eclipsed by fleets of weaponised drones capable of targeted killings across the planet. Evidence for this shift is found in key security documents that mobilise an amorphous conflict against vaguely defined al-Qa'ida “affiliates”. This process is legitimised through the White House's presentation of drone warfare as a bureaucratic conflict managed by a “disposition matrix”. These official narratives are challenged by the voices of people living in the tribal areas of Pakistan. What I term the Predator Empire names the biopolitical power that digitises, catalogues, and eliminates threatening “patterns of life” across a widening battlespace. This permanent war is enabled by a topological spatial power that folds the distant environments of the affiliate into the surveillance machinery of the Homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Geopolitics has a tradition of adopting a downward looking view-from-above, which is imbued with an imperialistic ‘god's eye’ perspective. Although acknowledged and critiqued, this paper argues that it needs to be actively re-orientated to encompass the discourses and practices of looking up. The paper analyses the practices of looking up and surveilling the sky through which air defence is achieved. It interrogates the ways in which UK air defence is represented in official documents and analyses the activities of the Royal Air Force's Air Surveillance and Control System. The paper argues that this system enacts a vertical geopolitics that goes beyond those understood in other geopolitical literatures and offers suggestions for developing our understandings of a volumetric vertical geopolitics that recognises the aerial view as generated from below as well as from above. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes the case for a broadening of conceptual vocabularies in security studies by extending the sub-discipline’s predominantly geopolitical focus to the ‘geosocial’. Based on a review of work on human security and of feminist and anthropological research on (in)security and violence, we argue that there remains a need for further conceptual development to which geosocial approaches can make a significant contribution. They move us beyond compartmentalisation towards understanding social relations as a key medium through which connections between different forms of (in)security are forged. This prompts the mapping of a wider kaleidoscope of intersecting security issues, experiences, practices, subjects and topographies that include, but are not exhaustively explained by, geopolitical and geoeconomic processes. Drawing on findings from a participatory research project conducted with marginalised young people in Leipzig (Germany) between 2014 and 2015, we argue for greater attention to four issues that are rarely thematised in security studies and which geosocial approaches bring more squarely into focus: 1) social relations as a key connective tissue through which different dimensions of (in)security are entangled and through which these entanglements are given shape; 2) social relations as sources of security and insecurity; 3) security practices as including the emotional and practical labour invested in sustaining, moulding or dealing with the breakdown of social relations; and 4) the topographic stretching and hybridisation of social relations that furnishes not just cultures of fear but can also generate greater senses of security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses South Korea's ‘brand Korea’ initiative and the impact of cultural transformations on the South Korean national security narrative. The paper considers the practices of identity and security representation in South Korea and outlines how cultural transformations in a country which has built its national security on an assumption of racial and ethnic homogeneity are affecting relations between South and North Korea. The paper argues that these issues can be explored through a critical geopolitics perspective and that the key relationship resides in the narratives and representations of threat and ‘the foreigner.’ The paper discusses critical geopolitics within a non-Western context and explores how cultural transformations are creating new narratives and new representations of the relationship between foreigner, national identity and national security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out to address the increasing strategic power of logistics management in the context of commodity and corporeal mobilities. In doing so it looks to the strategy of interconnectivity in order to address the management of legitimated mobilities. It is argued that the geopower of commodity mobility is premised on the infrastructural strength offered by logistics management, a form of spatial and temporal control that operates through increasingly territorialising means. However, given the infrastructural ‘tension’ that processes of standardisation have created, the paper also concerns the appropriation of commodity mobility networks for the purposes of illegitimated corporeal mobility. In part this is intended to develop the critiques of globalisation which challenged the image of transnational mobility networks as part of a borderless, boundless present typified most readily by the flows of information, capital and commodities. By contrast the ‘desperate mobilities’ of undocumented immigrants attests to the rather more tangled manifestations of mobility that many individuals have to traverse. In particular I focus on the fallibility of strategic sites within global commodity movement and the uses of ‘extra-logistical knowledge’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2001, border security policy between Canada and the US has morphed from “smart borders” to the present “beyond the border” (perimeter security) agreement resulting in the expansion of new techniques of border surveillance including pre-emptive profiling of travellers and biometric data sharing. In this paper, we argue that these border agreements have increasingly resulted in a changing experience of sovereign power for those crossing the border. This is demonstrated through a discussion of: the major border policies between Canada and the US since 11 September 2001, developed under the influence of US hegemony; how these policies perpetrate a generalised state of exception; and how these policies affect refugees, migrants, and citizens. Reading Agamben’s insights from a sociological perspective, we argue that the presumption of security-through-surveillance erodes border crossers’ human rights, and that some people – those from disadvantaged race/class backgrounds – are more affected than others by the implementation of the evolving border regime. We also emphasise the contingencies and unintended consequences of the ongoing projects. The conclusion offers brief comments on the consequences of these developments on Canadian identity and points out the directions for future research in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the export-import business of penal policies that accompanies the “war on transnational street gangs” between the United States and Central America. It argues that far from being a unidirectional export of punitive politics from the United States towards Central America, many of these punitive exports travel “back home”. This creates transnational punitive entanglements that contribute to the contingent convergence of punitive geopolitics and domestic politics in the guise of a transnational penal apparatus that integrates law enforcement agencies and military forces, securocratic epistemic communities and national political entrepreneurs into a functionally cohesive but decentred transnational security structure engaged in a multilayered punitive containment of transnational street gangs across the Americas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent geopolitical changes and the strengthening of the security/economy nexus have multiplied the types and functions of territorial borders in the Baltic Sea Region (BSR). These borders have been insufficiently addressed in previous research even though macro-regions cross over multiple borders, which are highly affected by geopolitical events and conflicts. This paper contributes to the debate about multiple borders with particular emphasis on the question how de- and re-bordering affect the regionalisation process in practice and how it influences the cooperation within the BSR. The results, which are based on a discourse analysis of a corpus of documents, show that the region-building process in the BSR itself creates new borders, which define the level of the member state’s political participation in the region. The governance of macro-regions would benefit from the development of such analytical frameworks that take into account the impact of the multitude of borders on the practical level. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper analyses the alternative territorialities that characterise the conflict on the installation of a US military MUOS ground station in Sicily (Italy). On the one hand, the proponents see territory from a techno-centric vision as a site of strategic importance for the global politics of securitisation since it serves the optimisation of the US military ‘system of systems’. On the other hand, the No-MUOS mobilisation resists this image of territory by claiming it as a place of everyday life, and opposes hegemonic territorialisation through the manipulation of an ensemble of discursive and practical mediators within different spheres of action. The local conflict around a radar infrastructure evolves into a clash between different logics of territorial organisation: a conflict mostly concerning the control over spatial borders, knowledge production, and imaginary circulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Border security has become one of the key means by which the sovereignty and security of powerful nation-states is projected. This paper offers a set of observations of the Australian Commonwealth’s descriptions and instructions for its embrace of border security. Border security is legible here as a geopolitics that transforms the rights and responsibilities of maritime jurisdictions into a space of security that projects national sovereignty through the interdiction of boat arrivals. Its intensification asOperation Sovereign Bordersis read as a further variation within national sovereignty, one that elevates the decisionist prerogative into total deterrence.Operation Sovereign Borderspushes the limits of sovereignty’s existence in the state toward a total domination of space, perception and human life in Australia’s maritime jurisdictions, in the name of the nation. This necessitates the development, defence and reinforcement of a regionally engaged materiality that is embodied, extended, enacted, and distributed. The intended effect of this coordinated effort is to secure the nation’s sovereignty as a unity, but the broader effect has been to devalue offshore life to secure onshore interests, in a way that now necessitates indefinite offshore detention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on a long history of spatial control through walling in the region, walls and fences have been built in the Middle East in recent years to undertake a range of practices. Gated communities, residential and security compounds, anti-migrant walls, separation barriers and counter-insurgency fences can all be found in the Middle East. These walls address and govern problems that take the population as their subject. These walls all share a common frame of viewing the populations they work to govern as ‘problematic’ in multiple ways. This paper explores how walls have been and continue to be used in governing populations through mobility and incorporating a combination of disciplinary and biopolitical techniques through a range of spatial and territorial repertoires. As such it works to bridge the divide in border studies and critical security studies between geopolitical/topographical and biopolitical/topological approaches to borders and governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impacts of recent food, financial, and energy crises have reinvigorated a geopolitical enframing of global food security that makes foreign development assistance a primary component of national security strategies. This centres elite fears of hunger and underdevelopment and strongly shapes policies and strategies adopted in response. Geopolitical fears of hungry and food insecure populations are compounded by the politics of austerity and cuts to foreign aid budgets and social spending. This paper examines the geopolitics of food security, fear, and austerity as expressed in the rhetoric and strategies of major aid donor governments, especially the US and UK, and proposes an alternative geopolitics that builds from the affective dimensions of hunger, food insecurity, and vulnerability as experienced by the hungry and poor. The example of farmer suicides and agrarian political mobilisation in India demonstrates how this affective alternative geopolitics may be constructed and examined. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the discourses and practices of state securitisation that Colombia underwent during the last decade. By focusing on the imaginative geographies of security resulting from the unexpected couplings of war and tourism in the country, it delves into the everyday and highly uneven spaces of (in)security forged by the Democratic Security regime. It shows how a feminist take on the geopolitics of war and peace offers a better understanding of the making and unmaking of banal spaces of security and their role in the production of hegemonic state formations in Colombia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholarship at the development-security nexus has called for greater attention to space to better understand grounded encounters with security and insecurity. Through an examination of embodied engagements with space, this paper details the way migrant women in Southeast Turkey experience security and insecurity in their day-to-day lives in regards to gendered violence. Against the backdrop of state investment in gendered development as a mechanism of conflict mitigation, the reach and mobility of women in and across new spaces in the city has grown. At the juncture between these spaces – the classroom, courtroom, and home – lie conflicting narratives about nation, community, and family that pose implications for the physical well-being of women. To this end, interviews with migrant women and development administrators and teachers suggest that (human) security be understood as embodied and relational, experienced differentially across time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Critical security scholars have argued that biometric identity technologies, databanking, digital surveillance, and risk analysis reveal not a blockaded boundary but a border that follows transboundary migrants as they move within and between national territories. Managed through risk-based technologies, this networked, contingent border respatialises inclusion and exclusion, forming a border that is potentially everywhere and nowhere in particular. At the same time, immigration scholars have shown how immigration authorities deploy policing, inspection, and identification practices both within and beyond territorial boundaries, making life increasingly uncertain for noncitizens. In the US, Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) authority to detain noncitizens has become a key spatial strategy in domestic counter-terrorism, interior immigration enforcement and border securitisation. Thus, transboundary migration and state responses to it trouble analytic distinctions between domestic and foreign policy, immigration and national security, the border and the interior. This paper builds on recent work in immigration geopolitics to analyse how detention, in particular, works to contain individual migrants and deter future migrants. Focusing on noncitizen family detention, this article situates US noncitizen detention in a broader milieu of pre-9/11 US immigration enforcement law and post-9/11 security practices. I then analyse how detention congeals a number of spatial strategies – remoteness, isolation, spatial ordering, inter-centre transfers, and criminalisation – that work to destabilise migrants' support networks. Modulated with digitised border and identity surveillance technologies, detention foregrounds the persistence of disciplinary tactics in risk-dominated security regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a political ecology approach to the study of borders through consideration of a lemon's travels in contemporary North American border space. Following discussion of recent work on the dynamic, multi-scalar, and process-based character of modern borders, I suggest that such critical approaches could be usefully augmented by drawing on ideas about socio-material networks advanced by Bruno Latour. By adopting a political ecology framework, border scholars would be able to consider more fully the materiality of borders and bordering processes. Through the example of the lemon, I demonstrate that in constructing the fruit as a particular socio-material artifact that embodies multiple threats to US national space, it and its carrier become implicated in the regulation of political-economic and geopolitical networks that are seemingly far removed from the object of concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush downplayed traditional 'realist' security concerns by defining America's goal as countering threats generated by the internal characteristics of Arab societies. Bush advanced a strategy of regional transformation based on regime change in Iraq and economic, social, and political reform across the Arab world. This strategy, however, failed to address the security interests of regional governments while generating insecurity for Arab societies. To explain these results, the article develops a framework for understanding the Middle East regional system that recognises the role of societal discourses of insecurity and the system's multipolar structure. The framework is used to suggest an alternative strategy for US Middle East policy. Rejecting both a renewed project of regional transformation and a return to neorealism, the paper outlines a strategy based on managing a multipolar, pluralist system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'War on Terror' has justified a whole new set of re-territorialisations of security and identity, also in the 'West'. In this paper, I highlight one particularly powerful aspect of the idea of the 'West under threat': one wedded to the idea of a demographic-reproductive menace. Such ideas are not only the prerogative of extremist fringes, for the two authors whose work is discussed in this piece are very much part of the mainstream: Samuel Huntington, whose latest book Who Are We? America's Great Debate focuses on the 'deconstruction' of American identity and the threat represented by hyper-fertile immigrant populations and Italian writer-journalist Oriana Fallaci, whose two most recent books have launched an offensive against the 'Islamic Reverse Crusade' that threatens to 'submerge and subjugate' Europe. Certainly, the intimations of a 'threat' to the West are in no way new, nor are they a unique product of the 'War on Terror'. What is new, however, is the force with which they are being articulated today and the ways in which they are entering into popular circulation, in both Europe and America. What is more, on both sides of the Atlantic, those raising the sound of alarm for 'The Death of the West' prescribe not only a re-affirmation of (Western) ideals, but also - and increasingly - a set of policies for the biological survival of the West. 'The Death of the West' is thus not only a parable of political and geopolitical decline, but also a morality play regarding real deaths and, especially, real births. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European integration is often naturalised, so that the movement of a particular state towards integration, or away from it, is understood as being underpinned by eternal and everlasting national forces. The political struggles within the EU applicant states have not inspired scholars to produce sensitive studies of the “national debates” carried on in applicant states, even though this is exactly the field of political action where politico-geographical categories such as national identity, sovereignty and security come to be enthusiastically articulated. This paper both seeks to explain the struggle over Finland's decision to join the EU by focusing on the argumentation of those actors who “lost” the political struggle, and introduces the geographies that the opponents of Finnish EU membership produced. It is therefore aimed at illustrating the politics that underlay the geographical articulations which referred to either “national identity” or “sovereignty”. The purpose of doing this is to trace the competing geographies involved in the Finnish EU struggle and to point out that they were indeed based on long historical traditions which competing political actors used as a source of legitimation in their political action. Most of the themes highlighted by the No-EU camp are prominent in contemporary EU debates, too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]