Political Geography最新文献

Testing the liberal borders of the EU: (De)Constructing the right of asylum through informality 对欧盟自由边界的考验：（二）通过非正式形式构建庇护权

IF 4.9 1区社会学

Political Geography Pub Date : 2026-04-01 Epub Date: 2026-01-29 DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103499

Francesca Fortarezza

{"title":"Testing the liberal borders of the EU: (De)Constructing the right of asylum through informality","authors":"Francesca Fortarezza","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103499","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103499","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Along the Balkan route, pushback practices are systematically used to obstruct asylum seekers' access to EU countries and their protection systems. This style of governance is characterised by widespread unaccountability and impunity, with human rights being systematically violated and justice rarely achieved. Focusing on the Italian-Slovenian border and the 'informal readmissions' that took place between 2020 and 2021, the article explores how state actors resort to informal methods to circumvent legal and procedural constraints on their sovereignty and evade their obligations towards asylum seekers and refugees. Concurrently, it shows how independent solidarity networks not only compensate for institutional negligence in providing reception services to asylum seekers but also assume a ‘pseudo-judicial’ role when the rights of these people are denied, monitoring and analysing systemic human rights violations and border violence for legal action against the perpetrators. In this way, the study sheds light on the relational dynamics between state and solidarity actors in border zones and how both strategically engage in and leverage in/formal practices to either deny or uphold the right of asylum. It demonstrates the pervasive role of informality in asylum governance and highlights how, within illiberal regimes, operating on the margins of official norms and institutions is as much a technique of power ‘from above’ as it is a strategy of resistance ‘from below’.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"126 ","pages":"Article 103499"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146078710","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}

引用次数: 0

Enduring crises, dynamic border work: Migration governance in Ventimiglia since COVID-19 持续的危机，动态的边境工作：自COVID-19以来文蒂米利亚的移民治理

IF 4.9 1区社会学

Political Geography Pub Date : 2026-04-01 Epub Date: 2026-01-14 DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103485

Silvia Aru

{"title":"Enduring crises, dynamic border work: Migration governance in Ventimiglia since COVID-19","authors":"Silvia Aru","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103485","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103485","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Roja migrant camp in the Italian border town of Ventimiglia, near France, was closed on health grounds. This was a critical moment for border management at Ventimiglia, which has been a strategic area in the EU's internal border regime since 2015, when France reintroduced systematic border controls. This article takes its cue from this event to explore the interplay between institutional border work and crisis in Ventimiglia in recent years. Critically drawing on existing literature on border and crisis, this study identifies three key analytical dimensions: 1. The national authority's narrative use of the ‘pandemic crisis’ to legitimise closing the camp; 2. The subsequent institutional political crisis at the urban level that has led to a greater securitisation of migrants' presence in the city; 3. The social and material crisis faced by migrants in the city as a consequence of worsening bordering practices. Based on extensive fieldwork and document analysis, this study contends that ‘crises’, far from being solely moments of disruption, offer a particularly productive lens for examining the transformations currently reshaping border regimes. By placing the crisis and its articulations at the centre of the investigation, this work advances the theoretical debate by highlighting the violence of institutional border work, both by deconstructing the narrative surrounding crisis and its strategic use by authorities, and by addressing the socio-material crisis experienced by migrants, which is often omitted, concealed, or disregarded.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"126 ","pages":"Article 103485"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145978158","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}

引用次数: 0

Book review forum 书评论坛

IF 4.9 1区社会学

Political Geography Pub Date : 2026-04-01 Epub Date: 2026-01-10 DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103479

Shae Frydenlund, Nicole T. Venker, Matthew Walton, Aye Lei Tun, Francesco Buscemi, Elliott Prasse-Freeman

引用次数: 0

State making at the infrastructural frontier: bureaucratic practices and the techno-politics of hydraulic infrastructure in post-revolutionary Mexico City 基础设施前沿的国家制定：墨西哥城后革命时期水利基础设施的官僚实践和技术政治

IF 4.9 1区社会学

Political Geography Pub Date : 2026-04-01 Epub Date: 2025-12-23 DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103482

Alejandro De Coss-Corzo

{"title":"State making at the infrastructural frontier: bureaucratic practices and the techno-politics of hydraulic infrastructure in post-revolutionary Mexico City","authors":"Alejandro De Coss-Corzo","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103482","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103482","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper analyses the role that bureaucrats play in processes of state-making at the infrastructural frontier. It does so through a close archival analysis of administrative contentions in the building of the Lerma System, an interbasin water transfer built in Central Mexico between 1942 and 1951 to supply Mexico City with fresh water. The Lerma is understood as part of a broader techno-political transition in post-revolutionary Mexico, where large infrastructures were simultaneously territorialising state power and materialising a push for modernisation, urbanisation and industrialisation. In critical dialogue with scholarship that theorises this transition as one of authoritarian centralisation, this paper shows that this process was riddled with contentions within the state apparatus, which shaped the way these infrastructures were built and had profound implications for the historical and contemporary techno-politics of hydraulic infrastructure in Mexico City. By focusing on bureaucrats and administrative practices, this paper contributes to scholarship that theorises the heterogeneity of the state and its effects by highlighting the constrained agency these state workers have in face of profound techno-political changes and political economic and ecological transitions.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"126 ","pages":"Article 103482"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145842617","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}

引用次数: 0

Maritime security technologies and coastal neo-fortification 海上安全技术和沿海新防御工事

IF 4.9 1区社会学

Political Geography Pub Date : 2026-04-01 Epub Date: 2026-01-08 DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103483

Alexandra E.J. Hall

{"title":"Maritime security technologies and coastal neo-fortification","authors":"Alexandra E.J. Hall","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103483","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103483","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Data technologies promise new ways of tackling maritime security challenges - from trafficking and smuggling, to environmental crime and terrorism. This is particularly the case at coastlines, where global security threats manifest as local maritime issues, and where general maritime traffic conceals small vessel landings, drug drops and clandestine movements. Coastlines are increasingly sites of technological neo-fortification, the prime aim of which is the detection and tracking of seaborne movement. This article draws on qualitative fieldwork with volunteers monitoring the British coast and research on global maritime security technologies. It gains critical traction on new technologies by placing them within a history of littoral fortification, which I show has always been concerned with discerning movement at sea. I make two contributions. First, I show that the machine learning technologies govern maritime movement through movement, weaponising the ocean's materiality in the pursuit of so-called dark targets. Second, I argue that the techno neo-fortification of coastlines is underpinned by algorithmic spatialities and differentiations that seek to render wider ocean movement controllable. Bordering and security practice - from launching life-saving search and rescue missions, to targeting 'small boats', countering illegal fishing and disrupting smuggling - is re-ordered via these spatialities and differentiations. Contemporary maritime security technologies do not enhance existing practice: rather, they are reorganising sea borders, reconfiguring the relationship between territorial and global waters, and altering how life is governed at sea.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"126 ","pages":"Article 103483"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145939659","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}

引用次数: 0

Imposing connectivity: Privileging an elephant corridor over ecotourism in the Sigur Plateau, South India 壮观的连通性：印度南部西格尔高原的大象走廊优先于生态旅游

IF 4.9 1区社会学

Political Geography Pub Date : 2026-04-01 Epub Date: 2025-12-29 DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103477

Ananda Siddhartha

{"title":"Imposing connectivity: Privileging an elephant corridor over ecotourism in the Sigur Plateau, South India","authors":"Ananda Siddhartha","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103477","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103477","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A substantial body of critical scholarship has examined how conservation territories are expanded beyond protected area boundaries through territorialisation. This involves specific strategies such as regulating access, enforcing boundaries, and delineating spatial domains to secure control. More recently, wildlife corridors have emerged as a key mechanism for this expansion, justified by their role in maintaining connectivity between fragmented habitats. While much of the literature focuses on how conservation is prioritised over other land uses, an important question arises: what happens when a corridor is imposed on a landscape where ecotourism is already established? This article examines such a situation by analysing the case of the Sigur elephant corridor, in the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, officially notified by the state administration and the judiciary in 2010. As part of this notification, resorts located within the corridor were ordered to close and their buildings demolished. This not only had an immediate impact on these establishments but also triggered a chain of effects on the lives and livelihoods of people living within the landscape, and further exacerbated contestations between the Forest Department and other actors. I demonstrate how the discursive power of the ecological idea of the corridor was used to territorialise this landscape, signalling a decisive governance turn whereby the political geography of the landscape is increasingly dominated by a conservation logic. This conclusion has important implications for how political ecology should understand the changing role of conservation in Indian society and beyond.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"126 ","pages":"Article 103477"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145885344","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}

引用次数: 0

Civilian militia formation and protection against rebel violence: Evidence from Nigeria 平民民兵组织和对叛军暴力的保护：来自尼日利亚的证据

IF 4.9 1区社会学

Political Geography Pub Date : 2026-04-01 Epub Date: 2026-01-22 DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103497

Imrana Buba, Jana Krause

{"title":"Civilian militia formation and protection against rebel violence: Evidence from Nigeria","authors":"Imrana Buba, Jana Krause","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103497","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103497","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Why do some civilian defense militias effectively protect civilians while others fail and seem to only exacerbate rebel violence against civilians? Many irregular civil wars involve civilian defense militias, i.e., informal civilian groups that cooperate with the state military to protect their communities. Despite a burgeoning literature on militias in civil wars, research on variation in militia emergence and protective effects remains limited. Drawing on field research in northeastern Nigeria's Boko Haram conflict, we explain how local variation in militia formation shapes militias' protective effects against rebel violence. We argue that when repressive conflict conditions in state-dominated areas create incentives for civilian violent resistance, a community's collective action capacity, defined by local leadership and social cohesion, determines whether militias are community-initiated or imposed by state forces. Communities with high-capacity form <em>community-initiated militias</em> and maintain social control over their activities, which enables militias to effectively protect civilians against rebel violence. By contrast, communities with low capacity often host <em>state-initiated militias</em> and struggle to establish social control over their members, which renders them ineffective against rebels. Our findings contribute to a more nuanced understanding of civilian protective agency by showing that the capacities enabling neutrality and nonviolent resistance can also empower communities to form militias that effectively resist rebel violence.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"126 ","pages":"Article 103497"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146038165","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}

引用次数: 0

Geonarratives of outer space: How astronaut memoirs narrate conquest 外太空的地理叙事：宇航员回忆录如何叙述征服

IF 4.9 1区社会学

Political Geography Pub Date : 2026-04-01 Epub Date: 2026-01-22 DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103493

Darshan Vigneswaran , Enrike van Wingerden

{"title":"Geonarratives of outer space: How astronaut memoirs narrate conquest","authors":"Darshan Vigneswaran , Enrike van Wingerden","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103493","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2026.103493","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article examines astronaut memoirs as geonarratives - historically charged narratives that shape and are shaped by geographic order and world-making. As outer space exploration gains momentum, these memoirs construct relationships between Earth and space and reinforce distinctions between “home” and the extreme, unfamiliar environment beyond. We situate astronaut memoirs within the longer tradition of exploration narratives by highlighting their continuities with and distinctions from colonial-era accounts. These memoirs employ similar geonarrative techniques to position astronauts as authoritative figures who mediate knowledge of faraway spaces. However, they also reveal new modes of relating to space's materiality, as survival depends more on technological mediation and extensive institutional structures. We identify three characterizations of the astronaut - as model, soldier, and pioneer - which shape the imagination and material reality of space travel. While these astronaut memoirs reinforce visions of human expansionism, we also explore moments of rupture and divergence that offer alternative ways of narrating relations to outer space.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"126 ","pages":"Article 103493"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"146038163","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}

引用次数: 0

IF 4.9 1区社会学

Political Geography Pub Date : 2026-04-01 Epub Date: 2025-12-15 DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103464

Somdeep Sen , Debbie Lisle , Naji Safadi , Lana Tatour , Rhys Machold

引用次数: 0

Technopolitics of water appropriation: How Mumbai claims hydrological dominance in its metropolitan region 用水的技术政治：孟买如何在其大都市区宣称水文优势

IF 4.9 1区社会学

Political Geography Pub Date : 2026-04-01 Epub Date: 2025-12-21 DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103473

Sachin Tiwale

{"title":"Technopolitics of water appropriation: How Mumbai claims hydrological dominance in its metropolitan region","authors":"Sachin Tiwale","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103473","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103473","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The paper advances scholarship on water appropriation by examining the appropriation process at the metropolitan scale, foregrounding inequities in intra-metropolitan water distribution, and applying the lens of technopolitics to deepen insight into the processes underpinning water appropriation. It illustrates how water is legitimately appropriated for the city of Mumbai, depriving other municipal corporations, councils, and industrial centres within the metropolitan region. The paper demonstrates how technical decisions—such as adopting a river basin development approach and framing the diversion of water originally reserved for irrigation to Mumbai as a temporary and emergency measure—were strategically employed to legitimise appropriation as a natural, depoliticised process. The river basin approach, typically perceived as promoting integrated planning, was used to carve out the Mumbai Hydrometric Area (MHA), following hydrological boundaries to gain control over water resources on the mainland. Meanwhile, framing water diversion as a technical and emergency measure assisted in avoiding potential criticism from farmers and civil society. The sense of urgency was crafted by overestimating water demand and exaggerating short-term water shortages, thereby limiting the scope for long-term solutions and presenting diversion as the only viable technical option. Through these technopolitical manoeuvres, Mumbai, geographically located on an island, legitimately secured control and selectively appropriated suitable water resources on the mainland.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"126 ","pages":"Article 103473"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2026-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145799914","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}

引用次数: 0