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This paper explores the contested status of political sovereignty and the role of infrastructure in establishing political power in Crimea, a Ukrainian territory taken over by Russia in 2014. I analyze the complexities of the construction of the Crimean Bridge, a huge infrastructure project completed by Russia in 2019 to connect Crimea with Russia, along with the bridge's practical and symbolic value. I suggest that apart from performing a socio-economic function, the bridge has been invested with significant symbolic power, and provides material routes and forms for the construction of a unified national geohistorical consciousness. I argue that the Crimean bridge has become a "focal object" for Russian cultural biopolitics, providing a space for the state-sponsored performances of power that have come to define both the Russian political agenda and efforts to reconnect Crimea historically to Russia. Indeed, the bridge has not only connected the banks of the Kerch Strait between Crimea and the Russian mainland but has also connected different and often competing narratives of Russian history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the new understanding of power that emerges in the late works of Leo Tolstoy, as an early premonition of ideas subsequently elaborated by Michel Foucault, particularly his seminal conception of bio-politics. In works such as The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), The Kreutzer Sonata (1889), and particularly the novel Resurrection (1899), Tolstoy undertakes precisely the kind of "struggle against power" which Foucault identifies as a fundamental task of the modern intellectual: "a struggle aimed at revealing and undermining power where it is most invisible and insidious". In confronting the manifold manifestations of a new logic of power – a logic that he never manages to grasp fully – Tolstoy continues to rely on analytical perspectives he ostensibly denounces. Yet no one went further than Tolstoy in acknowledging and combating his own complicity with the system of power, both as a landowner and an intellectual. From this perspective Tolstoy heralds the transformation of the intellectual and conscience subsequently called for by Foucault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is the introduction to a cluster of articles on Cultural Biopolitics in Russia. After providing an overview of biopolitical theory and its recent applications to the study of Russian history and politics, the author introduces the notion of "cultural biopolitics" as a theoretical bridge between biopolitical theory and cultural studies. Culture is conceived as a realm of "soft" power in which biopolitical rationalities are reinforced or challanged. Given its many historical entanglements with power, Russian culture in particular provides a rich field of inquiry for scholars of modern biopolitics. The introduction concludes with short summaries of each of the articles in the cluster, which are divided into two categories: "Biopolitics of Writing" and "Biopolitical Performance". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically examines the concept of "green resilience" – the mobilization of gardens and urban green spaces for enhancing the resilience of communities and cities in the face of increasing uncertainty and risk. Drawing inspiration from seminal work in human-plant geographies, it explores the governmental functions and political implications of green resilience, arguing that these spaces serve as key forms of state rule and biopolitical power. The study employs the notion of green resilience as a "composition," emphasizing the assembling of diverse human and nonhuman actors in resilience projects. The developed compositional ontology highlights the importance of aesthetic and visual practices in green resilience projects and reveals how these are continuously decomposed and recomposed by the involved actors. The paper develops its arguments through a "paradigmatic case study" of various green resilience projects in New York City – including survivor trees, memorial groves, and community gardens. The study illuminates the multiplicity of green resilience initiatives and the underlying governmental logic by comparing these projects. Through its analysis, the paper contributes to the literature on resilience as an emerging governance paradigm. It reveals how green resilience projects embody a multiplicity of practices, uncovers the first comprehensive comparative analysis of various forms of green resilience, and offers a critique of resilience from within. The study concludes by identifying three tensions or contradictions of (green) resilience as a form of biopolitical government: visibility and invisibility, knowledge and ignorance, and control and emergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• German far-right groups are increasingly aligning themselves with ecological ideas. • Völkisch settlers combine care for nature with xenophobic nationalism. • The (racial) future is a key terrain of struggle for this political ideology. • Far-right future-making takes place through an anticipatory and immunological register. • The utopian dimensions of far-right ecological praxis need to be better understood. Focusing on the resurgence of so-called völkisch (ethno-nationalist) settlements in northern Germany over the past three decades, this paper explores the emergent socio-spatial forms through which nativist and xenophobic responses to the ecological crisis are being expressed. It argues that political ecologies of the future cannot be understood, in the present conjuncture, without taking into account those actors which are working to manifest the future in explicitly racialised and immunitary forms. After providing an overview of the development of völkisch movements and ideologies since the 19th century, I introduce contemporary actors and organisations which are attempting to reconfigure the climate crisis as a matter of right-wing concern. These strategies position Nature as a signifier that stitches together far-right concerns about the infiltration of the German Volk and landscape by racialised threats, facilitating a form of ecological praxis through rural settlement projects that is heavily centred around a homogenous and naturalised notion of German identity. Rather than an outright denial of the impending urgency of the climate crisis, I argue that völkisch discourses represent a different, and arguably more dangerous response to the spectre of ecological disorder, and one which works in an immunological and anticipatory register. The affective intensity of these imaginaries and strategies also demonstrate that the terrains of hope, possibility, and even utopia increasingly hold the potential to be claimed by the violent and exclusivist ideologies of the far-right. No mere harbinger of 'things to come', völkisch strategies represent a mode of responding to the climate crisis in the present, and of prefiguring an ethno-nationalist 'solution' which must be taken seriously by activists and scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a critical look at biopolitical practices under the current regime for wolf conservation in Germany. One profound difference between human and more-than-human biopolitics is that it concerns multiple, more-than-human bodies, demanding a close examination of governance practices aimed at enabling conservation. My core argument is twofold: first, I argue that conservation policies in Germany attempt to frame wolves as collectivities and apply a population perspective on these animals. However, the very technologies that aim to monitor wolves as population, namely genetic analyses, also produce individual wolves that complicate conservation efforts due to their affective force (Lorimer, 2015). Second, as active wolf management in the form of population control is rare due to legal regulations, there is a strong focus on livestock protection measures. These infrastructuring practices (Barua, 2021) continue to fail because they rest on the idea that convivial coexistence can be quantified and ignore that technologies such as fences can alter animals' atmospheres (Lorimer et al., 2019) profoundly. As a result, infrastructuring practices aimed at enabling coexistence may run counter to their initial purpose. With fences becoming habitats, lively and discursive multispecies relations are renegotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The governance of COVID-19 has involved the proliferation of territorial practices, through border controls designed to regulate movements not only across national and state borders, but also within cities and city regions. We argue that these urban territorial practices have been significant to the biopolitics of COVID-19 and warrant close scrutiny. Focusing on the Australian cities of Sydney and Melbourne, this paper offers critical analysis of the urban territorial practices of COVID-19 suppression, which we categorise as practices of closure, confinement and capacity control. We observe these practices in measures including 'stay at home' orders, residential building and housing estate lockdowns, closure of and capacity limits on non-residential premises, postcode- and municipality-level restrictions on movement, and hotel quarantine. These measures, we argue, have reinforced and at times exacerbated pre-existing social and spatial inequalities. However, we also recognise COVID-19's real and highly uneven threats to life and health, and therefore ask what a more egalitarian form of pandemic governance might look like. We draw on scholarly writing on 'positive' or 'democratic' biopolitics and 'territory from below', in order to outline some more egalitarian and democratic interventions that have been pursued to suppress viral transmission and to reduce vulnerability to COVID-19 and other viruses. This, we argue, is an imperative of critical scholarship as much as the critique of state interventions. Such alternatives do not necessarily reject state territorial interventions per se, but instead point towards a way of addressing the pandemic by recognising the capacity and legitimacy of biopolitics and territory from below. They point towards ways in which we might see a pandemic 'like a city' in a way that prioritises egalitarian care through a politics premised on democratic negotiations among diverse urban authorities and sovereignties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the precarious lives of the Kurdish kolbers, underground laborers who transport cargo on their backs across Iran's border with Iraq. Throughout their arduous journeys, kolbers experience various forms of violence, including direct shooting by border guards. Findings from interviews with the kolbers indicate that kolberi, a strenuous, dangerous, precarious type of labor, is a response to pervasive unemployment in Iranian Kurdistan (Rojhelat), and a long-term consequence of the Iranian state's systematic economic disinvestment in the Kurdish region. Although kolbers assert agency within their labor at localized scales, the social organization of kolberi is a reaction to the Iranian state's biopolitical strategies of economic disinvestment and violence. Drawing on a biopolitical framework, we illustrate the analytical interconnections among the economic marginalization of Rojhelat, violence against the kolbers, and the kolbers' precarious lives. The article offers ideas for future research that come out of our examination of the complexities of kolberi—an examination that demonstrates the importance of incorporating political-economic, ethno-territorial, and biopolitical factors in analyses of underground border exchanges and precarious marginalized lives. • Kolbers are underground Kurdish laborers that transfer cargo on their backs across Iran's border with Iraq and Turkey. • Kolbers experience various forms of violence, including direct shooting by Iranian border guards. • The strenuous labor of kolberi is a response to the pervasive unemployment and underdevelopment in Iranian Kurdistan. • Kurdistan's underdevelopment is situated within a geopolitical context of systematic state disinvestment and securitization. • Kolberi's precarity is simultaneously a part of, and a resistance to the Iranian state's biopolitical strategy in Kurdistan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]