{"title":"Spatialities of slow resistance in Congo-Brazzaville","authors":"Charden Pouo Moutsouka","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103320","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103320","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the spatial dynamics of resistance under authoritarian rule, using Congo-Brazzaville as a case study. Against the backdrop of President Denis Sassou Nguesso's enduring authoritarian rule and intensified repression following the 2015–2016 elections, Congolese resisters are transforming domestic and sacred spaces such as private homes and churches into terrains of resistance. Through empirical research and drawing on theories of everyday resistance, spatial strategies, and slow resistance, the paper reveals how these terrains of resistance have endured even after overt protests subsided. It argues that understanding the spatialities of resistance in Congo-Brazzaville requires examining how Congolese navigate and subvert state power through subtle, everyday acts of resistance that exploit the spatial dynamics of authoritarian control. The findings highlight the emotional, spatial, and temporal dimensions of resistance, illuminating how these practices contribute to the gradual construction of oppositional political consciousness that reconfigures power relations over time. By examining these spatio-temporal practices of resistance, the paper challenges narratives of political apathy under Sassou's rule and contributes to the rich scholarship of critical political geography and resistance studies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 103320"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143724932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“We pay with our life and our body:” Gendered and intimate geopolitics of vias Pa'l Norte","authors":"Linn Maria Biorklund","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103317","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103317","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Focusing on life history narratives produced with Central American women on the move in southern Mexico and engaging an intimate geopolitics lens, this article presents differential gendered, classed, and embodied experiences embedded in the vias (routes) <em>Pa'l Norte</em>. The expression <em>Pa'l Norte</em>, commonly used by those traversing migratory routes in Mexico, is not limited to ‘towards the north’ in a literal or geographical sense. Based on ethnographic and participatory research, the article illustrates how <em>Pa'l Norte</em> is both a tangible and imagined destination that encompasses diverse relational intimacies, including safety, hope, love, fear, and trauma. Assuming a geopolitically produced gender exclusion in crossing borders, it explores how changes in infrastructure and migration policies since 2020, including the halt of <em>la Bestia</em>, a transpacific cargo train frequently used by migrants, along with transnational migration governance aimed at preventing northbound movement, have influenced people's (dis) ability move in southern Mexico, perpetuating historical exclusions and violence, including the erosion of women's bodily autonomy. By gendering the concept of viapolitics and providing an intimate reading of it, the article unpacks how women's intimate experiences of moving slowly and paying with their bodies, and sometimes their lives, in southern Mexico today relate to other women's experiences in different places and times.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 103317"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-24","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143682082","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Re-thinking the Russian World construct: Historical roots, conceptual tenets, and contemporary typology","authors":"Tomáš Mareš , Petr Sosna","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103315","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103315","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the evolution of the <em>Russian World</em> construct throughout history and presents a new typology of its post-Soviet development. To this end, critical geopolitics is utilized as a general analytical framework, examining the <em>Russian World</em> as a particular type of geographical imagination. It argues that since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the <em>Russian World</em> construct has undergone at least four developmental stages, each one characterized by a particular range and design, a set of policies and goals, and instruments to achieve them, all of which reflected and/or drew upon previously established ideational strands. The findings show that in its most current form, the concept has developed into a kind of “catch-all” approach designed to garner support for Russia outside of the potentially narrow confines of the Russian ethnolinguistic community, allowing Moscow to pursue and achieve a wide variety of strategic foreign-policy goals both within and outside of the post-Soviet space.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 103315"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143642260","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Political geographies of everyday life and agency in camps","authors":"Kara E. Dempsey , Pablo S. Bose","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103316","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103316","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Millions of displaced people currently live in various camps throughout the world. Asylum and refugee camps – both formal and informal – are growing in size and scope, becoming more permanent features on their respective landscapes. Our attention in this article is focused on the space of the camp itself, which has long been marked by profoundly unequal relations of power. A common theme that characterizes camps, whether operated by the UNHCR or any other group, is that of control exercised over the inhabitants’ daily lives, routines, and mobilities. In this article, we consider what the reality of camp life looks like for those within them, drawing on the voices of the (multiple) dispossessed and how they experience everyday life in these places. Our argument is not that camps represent spaces of control; that much is both self-evident and confirmed by much scholarship through the years. Drawing on interviews with camp residents –both refugees and asylum seekers–across different regions and displaced by different contexts, we look at some of the key features that characterize life within the camp, that illustrate what forms control might take, and also indicate the ways in which camp residents seek to actively resist and transform those regimes of control.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"119 ","pages":"Article 103316"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143628167","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Aiko Ikemura Amaral , Mara Nogueira , Gareth A. Jones
{"title":"Re-framing popular governance in Brazil: Re-insurgent and entrepreneurial arrangements in the urban peripheries","authors":"Aiko Ikemura Amaral , Mara Nogueira , Gareth A. Jones","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103307","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103307","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In the <em>periferias</em> of Brazil, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the role of local actors to organise and manage networks, resources and discourses to support and advance residents’ demands. In this article, we argue that the pandemic gave visibility to emerging arrangements which remain under-theorised and under-analysed. Specifically, we examine how these arrangements reveal what we label re-insurgent and entrepreneurial forms of popular governance. Drawing upon fieldwork in Belo Horizonte and São Paulo, we examine how trajectories of autoconstruction and urban consolidation contribute to differently outline, legitimise and tend to local claims and demands. We show they rely and build on distinct networks of influence and resources, and encompass alternate combinations of state, private, and civil society actors, to both reinforce and challenge the urban inequalities and power asymmetries.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"118 ","pages":"Article 103307"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143610707","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Housing movements: From solidaristic discourse to solidaristic fields","authors":"Greta Weston Werner","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103088","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103088","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article considers interview data from a study on social housing in Vienna with reference to scholarship on solidarity and field theory to contribute to the conceptual development of ‘people power strategies’ (Tattersall & Iveson, 2021) related to housing. It takes up Madden and Marcuse's (2016) call for a focus on people and politics and offers a case study of Viennese housing to show an example where such a focus has found success. It argues that Vienna's high percentage of socially housed households was developed and is maintained through deliberate and constant work by actors in the social housing field. It shows the types of ‘social skill’ (Fligstein, 2001) that contribute to a strong social housing sector in Vienna. The paper develops the concept of <em>solidaristic social skill</em> as a ‘people power strategy’ (Tattersall & Iveson, 2021). Solidaristic discourse works against the stigmatisation which so often divides nascent housing movements.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"117 ","pages":"Article 103088"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140469157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intersecting housing crises and the future of the welfare state","authors":"Sarah Knuth","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103263","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103263","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"117 ","pages":"Article 103263"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143592497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Creating the anti-sexist city: The potential of the local state in combatting sexual harassment","authors":"Kate Boyer , Lucy Such","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103290","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103290","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In this article we advance theory by developing a conceptualisation of the local state as an active player in the promotion of anti-sexist urbanism. While recent theory has explored ways in which the local state has promoted socially progressive goals under neoliberalism, this work has focused almost entirely on economic-rather than social-goals. We extend this work by developing a concept of the local state in the promotion of social and gender-justice agendas. We do this by bringing scholarships on the local state; feminist urbanism and arts-led feminist activism to bear on a case study of Bristol, UK. Through an analysis of the ways Bristol has activated urban space to challenge sexual harassment through collaborations with artists and third-sector partners, we extend understanding of how the local state can re-script urban space as spaces of resistance, through which more emancipatory forms of urban life might be possible. We argue that the local state has an important role to play in combatting sexual harassment and other forms of gender-based violence and drawing forth the anti-sexist city. We advance theory in and beyond Geography about what local states can be and do, and submit that the forms of urban innovation seen in Bristol constitute a model of how the local state can promote anti-sexist place-making.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"118 ","pages":"Article 103290"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143519538","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Towards a new “Black political” in Colombia: A decolonial perspective, or “Blackness elsewhere”","authors":"Ulrich Oslender, Carlos Agudelo","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103253","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103253","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"117 ","pages":"Article 103253"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143592496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Working with, against and beyond the state: A response to Katie Meehan's ‘Water Shutoffs, Social Reproduction, and the Carceral State’","authors":"Alejandro De Coss-Corzo","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103264","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2024.103264","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This response builds on Katie Meehan's 2023 <em>Political Geography</em> RGS plenary address on “Water Shutoffs, Social Reproduction, and the Carceral State”. Thinking with the case of Mexico City, I consider what other racial divisions of nature might be created through the exclusionary and violent logics of state infrastructural power. I focus particularly on the labour that sustains these forms of violence, and ask how we can depart from labour to think about political ecologies otherwise.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"117 ","pages":"Article 103264"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143592498","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}