Political Geography最新文献

{"title":"Two crises. Constructing the meaning of the “climate crisis” by the residents of Gdańsk","authors":"Danuta Uryga ,&nbsp;Hanne Cecilie Geirbo ,&nbsp;Małgorzata Romanowska ,&nbsp;Ewa Duda","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103422","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103422","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Widespread mobilisation is needed to mitigate the climate crisis and adapt to its ongoing consequences. Drawing on the ‘pedagogy of common place’ we attend to the conceptual basis for individual barriers against climate action and ask ‘how do urban residents conceptualise the climate crisis in the context of their city?’ We have conducted four focus group discussions in the city of Gdańsk, Poland, each with a duration of 2 h. Two groups consisted of people with ‘moderately environmental' views, and two groups consisted of people with ‘strongly environmental views'. Across both groups, we found a conceptual distinction between a ‘big crisis' (global), calling for an urgent and devoted response but also instilling severe distress that triggers distancing, and a ‘small crisis' (local), which is also emotionally challenging but easier to relate to because it concerns local, tangible issues. Based on our findings, we suggest that evoking the ‘small crisis' can be a means of mobilising citizens outside the category of those with ‘strongly environmental views’ to engage in actions to mitigate and adapt to the ongoing climate action.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"123 ","pages":"Article 103422"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145106522","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":"The appeals of communism: Extracting confessions from the communist subject in the Vietnam war","authors":"Oliver Belcher","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103295","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103295","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This plenary examines the historical relationship between confession, power, and military intelligence in US empire through an analysis of the RAND Corporation's ‘Motivation and Morale’ Project during the Vietnam War (1964–1968). Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault, I trace how Western confessional practices evolved from religious to psychological domains, and instrumentalised to unique effect in Cold War military interrogation programs. I focus on the attempt of American social scientists to understand and categorise the ‘Communist personality type’ through ex-Communist confessional literature and prisoner interviews. I argue that RAND's interrogation methods in Vietnam emerged from this broader intellectual context, reflecting both the period's anti-Communist ideology and colonial power relations. Through extensive archival research, the plenary demonstrates how RAND researchers' attempts to extract ‘psychological truths’ from Vietnamese prisoners and defectors ultimately produced distorted cultural representations that reinforced American military assumptions. I connect these historical practices to contemporary instances of prisoner interrogation and torture (Guantamano Bay, Abu Ghraib).</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"123 ","pages":"Article 103295"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145579167","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":"Response to commentators","authors":"Oliver Belcher","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103431","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103431","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"123 ","pages":"Article 103431"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145579169","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":"Space to think? Chinese think tanks and the uneven development of party-state power","authors":"Jamie Peck","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103408","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103408","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The campaign to propagate a new generation of think tanks “with Chinese characteristics” has been one of Xi Jinping's signature projects. Charting the rise of China's “new-type” think tanks and their evolving organizational ecology, the paper asks what it means to think like a party-state through an extended ideational infrastructure. This question is explored with reference to the idealized (liberal, Western) norm of the “independent” think tank, but more importantly on its own terms, and in relation to the distinctive spatiality of party-state power in China. To this end, the paper juxtaposes a top-down reading of China's think-tank program, via authorized policy frameworks, mandates, and “guidance” from Beijing, with the experiences of an outlier case, the strategically important region of the Greater Bay Area (GBA), encompassing Hong Kong, Macao, and the Pearl River Delta. Literally and politically distant from Beijing, this was an historic epicenter of the reform process, with a long-established reputation for experimentation and independent thinking. Here, new-type think tanks are being rolled out in tandem with the ideological project of national unification, the ongoing “integration” of this uniquely heterogeneous and globally integrated region, the securitization of Hong Kong, geoeconomic stresses, and geopolitical realignments. The paper argues that the conditions of existence and operating environment of Chinese think tanks render them for the most part creatures of, and appendages to, an unevenly developed party-state, albeit with consequences that are not entirely predictable.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"123 ","pages":"Article 103408"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145267268","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":"Durable governance assemblages at the margins: Introduction to the special issue","authors":"Matthew A. Richmond ,&nbsp;Frank I. Müller","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103428","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103428","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This introduction to the Special Issue outlines key concepts and entry points for the analysis of ‘durable governance assemblages at the margins’. The notion of the state's margins sheds light on the ways that states continually revise their forms of order-making in relation to populations that they deem illegible and unruly. However, we argue it is necessary to also consider the role of relatively organised nonstate actors who also contribute decisively to the coordination of collective life in these settings. Analyses of governance have captured the growth of multi-actor arrangements in diverse contexts, but have typically focused on formally constituted organisations, rather than the socially embedded but institutionally invisibilised actors that typically operate at the margins. The concept of assemblage helps to capture the multipolar, situated and dynamic governance arrangements, involving both state and nonstate actors, that emerge in such contexts. Rather than just emphasising continual flux, conceiving of governance assemblages as durable helps to identify how such arrangements are in fact sustained over time through the consolidation of relationships and routines between different actors and in relation to both stable and lively material environments. To further develop this approach and introduce the diverse contributions to the SI, we present six analytical entry points, which we label: (1) the everyday state; (2) direct contestation; (3) subaltern self-organisation; (4) alternative authorities; (5) hidden interfaces; and (6) governance ecologies.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"123 ","pages":"Article 103428"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145267267","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":"Governing through extra-territoriality: Jordan's clothing production zones as tools of imperial power and authoritarian rule","authors":"Katharina Grüneisl","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103430","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103430","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Jordan's Export Processing Zones (EPZs) for clothing production form part of political geographies of US imperialism in the Middle East, and have served to bolster Arab-Israeli normalisation and authoritarian governance. A close-up study of these <em>extra-territorial</em> production spaces reveals how ‘free trade’ and associated neoliberal development agendas served to lastingly reconfigure political geographies in Jordan. Preferential US trade policies – granted to Jordan in exchange for signing peace with Israel in 1994 – translated into the creation of extra-territorial production zones (EPZs) and transformed Jordan into an attractive manufacturing location for the footloose global garment industry. Fiscal and regulatory exemptions facilitated the exploitation of labour and land reserves, benefitting a narrow local elite and thus generating new business-state alliances in favour of normalisation agendas. When Transnational Corporations (TNCs) for clothing production replaced most Jordanian-Israeli joint ventures in the EPZs in reaction to the 2001 full Free Trade Agreement with the US, foreign corporate actors began to assume a prominent role in Jordan's state performances. The co-production of positive macro-economic indicators that keep Jordan eligible for loans; as well as the redistribution of extra-territorial privilege to regions where the regime's political legitimacy is contested; expose shared mechanisms of <em>governing through extra-territoriality.</em> Taken together, this close-up empirical exploration of the extra-territorial clothing production regime challenges the façade of economic stability that Jordan's integration into global markets generated. Instead, it foregrounds how US free trade policies widened the rift between official state politics and the lived realities of most Jordanians, producing grievances that can only be managed through authoritarian repression.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"123 ","pages":"Article 103430"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145267264","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":"Migrant struggles in the Darién Gap-Tapón: Rethinking a more-than-human border","authors":"Mauricio Palma-Gutiérrez","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103426","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103426","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The Darién rainforest between Panama and Colombia has been commonly conceived as a wild, inaccessible, and lawless borderland marking a social and territorial rupture in the Americas. Yet, recent precarious migration journeys have challenged its imagined function as a “natural border” between the “South” and the “North” of the continent. Amid migration management anxiety, authorities and institutional actors have sought to re-instate the border, by positioning the rainforest as both a dangerous place and a place in need of conservation. In this text, I advance a More-than-Human framework to approach mobility-related complications in this context, which are meaningful in assessing how people on the move navigate re/bordering throughout their trajectories. Conceptually, I rely on the bilingual term <em>Darién Gap-Tapón</em> (“clog”) and assess how migrant struggles are mediated by the agencies of non-human lives, geomorphic bodies, and things. In so doing, I comment on a thematic analysis of an eclectic virtual dataset produced between 2021 and 2024, including 19 portrayals of migrants' journeys on YouTube. Using the metaphors of <em>unclogging</em> and <em>reclogging</em> in my analysis, I approach the complicated, overlapping, and often diffuse ways in which the Darién both <em>borders</em> migrants’ mobility and <em>struggles</em> along with migrants for mobility. I hence contribute to the dialogue between Critical Border Studies and More-than-Human ontologies aiming at imagining viable analytical alternatives on dominant unequal forms of global migration management.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"123 ","pages":"Article 103426"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145158091","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":"Residual urbanism: sanitary infrastructures and the governance of waste in Rio de Janeiro","authors":"Mariana Cavalcanti ,&nbsp;Maria Raquel Passos Lima","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103406","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103406","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This article is an historically-minded ethnographic exploration of the making of Rio de Janeiro's first sacrifice zone. Drawing from research undertaken in and on the neighborhood of Caju since May 2022 as part of a collective research and documentary film project, we revisit the structuring of 19th-century sanitary governance in Rio de Janeiro by focusing on three key infrastructures built by the state in the 19th century: a cemetery, a landfill, and a hospital for the treatment of epidemic diseases. Our research methods include ethnographic fieldwork, photography and filmmaking, in-depth interviews with residents and social actors such as government officials, street level bureaucrats, activists and local political leaders, and iconographic archival research in public city archives and in residents' private collections. We propose the idea of <em>residual urbanism</em> as a perspective to explore the logics of agglomeration and the generative dimension of infrastructures produced through the everyday governance of death, waste and disease. Finally, we examine the entanglements of nature, labor, knowledge and politics that highlight the invisible centrality of materialities, relations, agents and processes at the margins of modern master narratives of urbanization.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"122 ","pages":"Article 103406"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144888762","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":"Local and indigenous knowledge systems on nature-based solutions: Addressing Green Colonialism in Mangrove restoration of the Indian Sundarbans","authors":"Mehebub Sahana","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103405","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103405","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Nature-based solutions (NbS) have increasingly become mechanisms of ‘<em>green colonialism</em>,’ driven by global interest in green development within a green capitalist framework. The dual impact of ‘<em>green colonialism</em>’ and climate change is creating a compounded burden on marginalised and Indigenous communities, highlighting the urgent need to address its effects on their livelihoods and to advocate for their active participation in climate adaptation efforts. Drawing on extensive ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2024), qualitative geo-spatial analysis (2018–2024), and reflexive epistemologies through first-person narratives rooted in personal lived and work experiences, this study establishes a theoretical foundation to address two critical questions: how does NbS influence ‘<em>green colonialism</em>’ in the Indian Sundarbans, and how might Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS) contribute to NbS for mangrove regeneration and climate adaptation? Findings indicate that Indigenous communities face substantial obstacles in asserting their environmental rights, often affected by externally imposed NbS conservation practices. Furthermore, integrating LINKS can enhance community-led NbS, embodying an “<em>alternative environmentalism</em>” that challenges dominant green development paradigms. This article contributes to the global climate adaptation debate by illustrating how ‘<em>green colonialism</em>’ exposes the intersection of capital expansion and environmentalism, and the marginalisation of LINKS within this framework.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"122 ","pages":"Article 103405"},"PeriodicalIF":4.9,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144878212","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":"Urbanisation, democracy, and political regime transformations","authors":"Nick Dorward ,&nbsp;Sean Fox ,&nbsp;Kristian Hoelscher","doi":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103382","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103382","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Cities, and the process of urbanisation more broadly, have long been associated with political change – and democratisation in particular. However, there is little cross-country empirical research on the relationship between urbanisation and political change, and a tendency to conflate urbanisation with industrialisation and economic development. This gap is significant for two reasons. First, many of the hypothesised mechanisms linking urbanisation to political change are associated with socioeconomic changes driven by industrialisation and economic development. Second, many low- and middle-income countries have undergone rapid “urbanisation without industrialisation”. What then are the political consequences of urbanisation without industrialisation?</div><div>To answer this, we draw a key conceptual distinction between <em>urbanisation</em> – the increase in the relative share of a country's population living in urban areas – and <em>urban population scale</em> – the absolute size of urban populations. While much of the literature focuses upon the political implications of urbanisation, we argue that the sheer scale of urban populations may be more consequential for political change. Specifically, we suggest that although the hypothesised associations between urban living and democratic preferences among citizens are weak, urban living facilitates political engagement, and hence large urban populations may stimulate political change.</div><div>We test this hypothesis with cross-national regressions analysing the determinants of levels of democracy and episodes of political regime transformation since 1960 in 161 countries. We find no association between levels of urbanisation or urban population size and levels of democracy. By contrast, we find a positive and significant association between urban population size and political regime transformations, with a bias towards democratic change. Our study offers important insights into the relationship between urbanisation and political change and the political implications of rapid urbanisation without industrialisation unfolding in many parts of the world today.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48262,"journal":{"name":"Political Geography","volume":"122 ","pages":"Article 103382"},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2025-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144535921","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}