Feminist Geopolitics

In this chapter I examine the interrelationship between im/mobility and humanitarian triage. Humanitarian interventions in border spaces have increased as the world’s borders become more exclusive and violent. These interventions are undertaken by a range of actors from border police, coast guards and state militaries and non-state humanitarian actors. Elsewhere I have called these interventions ‘humanitarian borderwork’. This humanitarian borderwork not only has an intimate relationship to the border but also to im/mobility. It is this relationship with im/mobility that I want to focus on here. In shifting the gaze from borders – while remaining mindful of their presence – to im/mobility, scholarship on humanitarian work in border settings can more comprehensively grasp the challenges humanitarian actors face and the new ways of working they produce. Work on humanitarianism in border spaces has predominantly focused on how humanitarianism changes borderwork; a shift to focus on mobility allows us to also consider
how this work changes humanitarian practice. In so doing, it uncovers humanitarianism’s uncomfortable relationship with mobility, dominant rationalities of intervention and the ethics of care. But more than this, it asks humanitarianism in practice – traditionally self-declared as apolitical – to re-examine its relationship with the political structures that
produce differentiated and risky regimes of mobility.

The central argument of this dissertation is that while the immigration enforcement policies of detention and deportation are politically positioned as critical strategies for protecting U.S. homeland security, these policies actually create insecurity at multiple scales. The project, grounded in both critical geopolitics and feminist political geography, endeavors to interrogate the ‗master narratives' behind these restrictive policies. First, the dissertation explores the historical, political, and cultural factors behind the United States' increased use of detention and deportation, as well as the deepseated structural factors driving Ecuadorian migration to the United States. Then, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Ecuador with deportees and family members of detained migrants, the study seeks to understand ways in which these policies are embodied both within and outside U.S. borders. It is suggested that the detention and deportation system engenders chaosor the appearance of chaosin numerous spaces and for various groups of individuals. Three ‗chaotic geographies' of the system are explored in order to scrutinize the enactment of immigration policy: the operation of the system itself, detainees' experiences, and reverberations of detention and deportation in Ecuador. Data show that inside U.S. borders, these enforcement policies interact recursively with processes of racialization and criminalization to generate insecurity for detained migrants and discipline employees to behave in particular ways. In addition, due to its inherent disorder and confusion, the detention and deportation system projects a cloak of impenetrability that hides the powerful actors behind its expansion, faults, and abuses. The dissertation then investigates how the chaos of detention and deportation extends transnationally to countries of migrant origin to produce insecurity precisely at the scale of the home for migrants' families, communities, and for returned migrants. In Ecuador, detention and deportation increase economic and ontological insecurity for family members and returned migrants in ways that spread throughout communities.

Birth is usually depicted as a moment of celebration, of love and tenderness. The often sanitised image of birth, however, belies the ways in which birth spaces are spaces of acute geopolitical contestation. At the centre of this contested space is the birthing body. That body is a strange hybrid: it belongs in part to the woman who labours, the becoming-mother, and in part to the not-yet-child she is working to bring forth. In part it belongs to the labouring process, the flood of hormones and waves of contractions that carry a woman off to labour land. Or, it is a body that becomes subject to the tools and technologies of a medicalised birth. What the sanitised images of birth conceal is that a woman's birthing body is overdetermined by competing rationalisations of obstetricians and nurses, midwives and doulas, and her own hopes and expectations about the kind of birth she wants. Here the discursive and the material intermingle in the spaces of birth and in the moment in which both a new child, and his or her new mother, come into being in the world. In this paper I begin to map the networks of human and non-human actors that shape the space of birth and compete to govern the birthing body. Working with preliminary results from ethnographic research with mothers I argue that a closer examination of the intricacies of birth experiences reveals this as the site of an intimate geopolitics, where women's bodies are the territories contested through multiple and overlapping claims of diverse actants.

A B S T R A C T The question of refugee rights and immigrant entry to the UK presently has come under attack with the rise of nationalist sentiment and the exit of the UK from the European Union. The figure of the Muslim migrant has been normatively constructed to represent a limit to UK's multiculturalism (and, arguably globally). Such anti-Muslim sentiment operates via displacing racialized bodies from UK public culture. This article situates the ways in which racialized queer Muslim subjects attempt to maneuver structural racism and heteronormativity in the UK. The article argues that queer Muslim immigrants perceive queer spaces in Central London as white spaces. Secondly, we will analyze how the racialized queer Muslim subject creates ethno-racial specific spaces that are located outside central London. We argue that queer migration needs to be understood as an embodied experience by paying attention to how racialized queer Muslim migrants moves through multiple spaces in the city. The article develops a mixed method approach through an analysis of Ian Iqbal Rashid's film A Touch of Pink (2004) alongside Raisa Kabir's recent exhibition In/Visible Space: Reflections on the Realm of Dimensional Affect, Space and the Queer Racialised Self (Rich Mix, April, 2013) and the narrative of a gay identified working class Muslim immigrant male from East London. We argue that queer Muslim migrants reside on the margins of British symbolic culture through a non-belonging to one's religious identity. Such non-belonging is a spatialized experience. An analysis of the film, exhibition and our ethnography reveals the ways in which sexuality is constructed and conferred through racialization and creates precariously situated queer Muslim migrant subjects within present day UK.

Oil exploration and production activities are directly linked to global climate change (GCC) and we cannot overlook how oil-producing communities are affected by the presence of oil companies. Paying attention to these sites enable us to understand the intricacies of the stage where oil companies act out their neoliberal scripts that directly impact GCC. Through its focus on an oil producing community in Southeastern Turkey, this chapter shifts the attention from meta-narratives to the narratives of micro-sites by moving beyond the local/global binary, thereby addressing an important gap in current literature and articulating the intimate human experience linked to GCC. I seek to detangle some of these narratives by problematizing the local/global binary through the global intimate (Mountz and Hyndman, 2006), taking an intersectional approach (Collins, 1998), and using a postcolonial feminist theoretical lens (Sharp, 2003).
The comprehensive analysis provided in this chapter through in-field experiences and the oil discourse suggest that GCC is co-produced and co-sustained by transnational companies and coerced local communities. Any action to transition out of the catastrophes of GCC will have to address the local complexities and inequalities, as the case of Şelmo shows their multifaceted entanglement.

The constructs of 'territory' and 'terrain' are the subject of increasing scrutiny within political geography. While momentum builds in their interrogation as both diverse and lively practices, and complex political technologies, this article takes pause. Drawing on a rich and diverse range of feminist scholarship, it seeks to reflect upon existing trajectories and provide provocation for further accounting. Inspired throughout by, and seeking to bring to bear, a feminist perspective on territory and terrain, this article follows a tripartite structure. First, it critically explores the bodies of knowledge historically underpinning the concepts of territory and terrain. Developing a call for a feminist historiography of territory and terrain, we reflect upon both the gendered evolution of the concepts, and their ongoing reproduction in conceptual debates. Second, it seeks to both highlight and diversify embodied accounts and accountings of these concepts. Here, thinking with and beyond the body, we turn to the non-human and spiritual to explore territory and terrain in expanded and extended ways. Lastly, we examine bodies of expertise, reflecting on academic territories and terrains, and highlighting potential concepts and methodologies seeking to (re-)sculpt and (re-)articulate understandings of territory and terrain. The paper, whilst not all-encompassing, serves as an important provocation that seeks more equitable accounts of political geog-raphy's messy, muddy, and lively territories and terrains.

With the advent of the Trump presidency we are facing
the most anti-refugee and immigrant administration in
recent U.S. history. This follows on the heels of the Obama
era, characterized by record deportations and severe U.S.
policies of deterrence towards Latin American refugees and
migrants in its own backyard. This aggressive expansion
of U.S. Homeland Security migration control included:
outsourcing enforcement to Mexico; re-introducing
migrant family detention; increasing ‘family unit’ raids; and
accelerating immigration court hearings. These strategies of
state deterrence and enforcement heightened vulnerability
of asylum-seeking women and children from Mexico and
Central America to human and legal rights abuses. I employ
a feminist geopolitical approach to interrogate the intimate
and embodied spaces of migration controls that ground the
workings of the state in the normalized, routine, and informal
practices of state officials and in the experiences of vulnerable
yet resilient women and children refugees. Drawing upon
examples from two research projects, informed by personal
experience as a volunteer, I critically examine the everyday
state practices of U.S./Mexico migration enforcement in three
arenas - border security spaces, legal spaces, and carceral
spaces. I contend that rather than an ‘immigrant or refugee
crisis,’ these restrictive and intimate performances routinely
deployed by border and legal bureaucrats reproduce and
reinforce the structural and systemic crisis of rights and
responsibility we are currently witnessing. Through a feminist
ethic of care, social justice, and action, migrant and refugee
narratives of everyday restriction may be deployed in resisting
rights abuses and fostering responsibility, humanity, and
hospitality towards newcomers.

This chapter uses noncitizen family detention in the United States to show how border-crossing magnifies children's uncertain legal status. The chapter first describes the legal precedent for family detention as an immigration enforcement practice and situates it in immigration geopolitics and children's rights literatures.

Between 2008 and 2016, more than 50,000 Chinese citizens migrated to Ghana to mine gold on small-scale concessions. This is particularly surprising given that small-scale mining is an activity reserved for Ghanaian citizens. Foreign gold mining is mediated by various intersecting political economic and geopolitical shifts, including unprecedented gold demand, economic crisis, and informal conditions to Chinese loans. Based on long-term, mixed-methods fieldwork, and drawing from feminist geopolitics research, we argue Ghana’s recent gold rush portends gendered implications for bodies in rural areas. We center our discussion on bodies to demonstrate the ways extractive practices increase vulnerability among women and children, including teen pregnancy and mercury exposure. Yet, women also contest foreign mining and its myriad implications (e.g., refusing to sell land and entering sites while menstruating despite being “forbidden” to do so). A feminist geopolitics perspec- tive allows the tracing of specific political economic processes (Chinese monetary policies, informal loan conditions) to other sites (Pokukrom, the pregnant teen), thereby enabling a clearer understanding of how supportive interventions might occur.

In an age of increasing state (in)security, groups are coming together on their own to build alternative nonviolent securities. They are making connections across distance and difference which focus on the safety of bodies (often by actually moving bodies), and ground geopolitics in everyday life. The term anti-geopolitics focuses on resistance to hegemonic geopolitics (material or discursive), rather than this sort of effort to build something new. Feminist geopolitics is a form of anti-geopolitics that not only takes apart but also puts the pieces together in new ways - with broader definitions of security for more bodies in more places. Yet it has not generally looked at that practice as engaged in outside of academia. I propose the term alter-geopolitics for a type of feminist geopolitics as a way to extend both the concepts of anti and feminist geopolitics. I argue for the term as a reminder to look to grassroots practice, to the ways that groups are doing geopolitics in the streets, in homes, in jungles, and in many other spaces ‘off the page’. Though they may not think of their work as geopolitics, framing it in this way can open fruitful conversations. As academics we have much to learn and offer through collaboratively thinking with such groups about security. I have been doing this with international accompaniers in Colombia and discuss their work, and the peace community of San José that they accompany, as forms of alter-geopolitics.

El siguiente artículo propone analizar la emergencia de una geopolítica desde las dinámicas cotidianas de los habitantes, en una zona donde persiste una tensión diplomática histórica, como es el caso de la frontera chileno-argentina sobre los Campos de Hielo Sur en la Patagonia. Desde la mirada de la geografía crítica e inspirándose de la corriente feminista de la geopolítica, se lleva a cabo una investigación donde se plantea la necesidad de repensar la frontera más allá del marco de las políticas que apelan al reforzamiento del Estado- Nación, a la seguridad y al control del territorio. Se explorarán las narrativas geopolíticas que emergen desde el habitar, las prácticas sociales que espacializan la frontera, como también su materialización política. Se consideran para este estudio las ciudades de Villa O’Higgins en Chile y la de El Chaltén en Argentina, en tanto que comunidades ancladas en el margen de los territorios nacionales, y donde el turismo se convierte en un agente que redefine las practicas espaciales en zona fronteriza.

The  following  article  proposes  to  analyse  the  emergency of geopolitics from the everyday life dynamics  of  its  inhabitants,  in  an  area  where diplomatic historical tensions persist, as is the case in the Southern Icefields of Patagonia on the Chilean-Argentinian border. The investigation will be based on a critical geography approach and  inspired  on  feminist  geopolitics,  where  it is  argued  that  there  is  a  need  to  represent  the  border beyond the political frame that summons the reinforcement of the Nation-State, security, and the control of territory. The article explores the  geopolitical  narratives  that  emerge  from dwelling, the social practices that spatialize the border, as their political materialization. For this study, the towns of Villa O’Higgins in Chile and El  Chaltén  in  Argentina,  will  be  considered  as communities rooted at the edge of the national territories,  where  tourism  redefines  the  spatial practices on the border zone.

Geographers have demonstrated how discourses and practices of security are unevenly experienced and
mapped onto space, often paradoxically creating insecurities in people’s lives. Yet, all too often, the fluid
nature of power is difficult to articulate; the intimate is either eclipsed or treated as a passive victim of
national and global processes. To draw attention to these erasures, feminist geographers have adopted
geometric visualisations that prompt new questions about the importance of intimate spaces for
understanding security. This paper highlights three visual motifs, by Katz, Pain and Smith, and Shalhoub-
Kevorkian, which we apply in our different fields of intimacy-geopolitics.

This article examines geopolitical violence, gender and political constructions of scale from the site of the body to international discourse and politics. The political constructions of scale and body-politics analyzed in this study draw on feminist and political geographic analysis and an empirical study of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA). This study includes an examination of state, military and paramilitary violence from below as articulated through the lens of RAWA's documentation and political framing. RAWA clandestinely used photographic and video technologies to document the corporeal results of state/military violence and politically constructed scale by way of linking this violence to international discourses and political action. A number of opportunities, challenges, and pitfalls are identified as part of RAWA's geopolitics of violence from below. The post 9-11-01 U.S.-led military invasion of Afghanistan demonstrates a significant shift in the management and manipulation of RAWA's documentation. Both the U.S. and RAWA politically constructed scale and drew upon western-led ''universal'' moralities and human/women's rights discourses for alternative purposes. This paper also discusses the use of gender politics and its various manipulations to resist, criminalize, or legitimize the use of violence in the name of human/women's rights.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the notion of Palestine/Israel as a 'laboratory' for the production and export of advanced weapons, security knowhow and technology. Critics of Israeli wars and the ongoing colonization of Palestine use the laboratory metaphor to make sense of Israeli state policies and practices used in controlling Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and fighting wars but also to address how Israeli instruments of violence come to travel elsewhere. This article brings these discussions into sharper focus by examining how the concept of the laboratory is employed in making sense of Israel's perceived centrality in global patterns violence and militarism, here termed the laboratory thesis. The article argues that although the thesis develops powerful insights, it has analytical limitations. It further calls into question the thesis' polemical force, suggesting that critical references to Palestine/Israel as a laboratory reinforce misleading ideological tropes at the core of Israel's settler colonial project. The article takes these concerns as an opportunity to reassemble the policing/ security laboratory as a critical concept, in relation to Palestine/Israel, the global war on terror and beyond.

نظرًا لحداثة هذه الصناعة (أي الجغرافيا السياسية النسوية) في علم الجيوبوليتيك (الجغرافيا السياسية)، ولاشتمالها على مجموعة من العلوم والمجالات الفكرية، ونظرًا لقلة الانتاج الفكري في هذا المجال باللغة العربية، أرى أنّه من ضرورات المنهجية الصحيحة، الابتداء بمدخلٍ تعريفي يضيء بعض الآفاق أمام القارئ العربي. وهذا ما سيتناوله القسم الأول من هذه الورقة.
وانطلاقًا من كون هذا العلم من جهة، فرعًا من فروع الجغرافيا السياسية التي بدأت في الأصل كسندٍ للطموح التوسّعي في أوروبا، ومن جهة أخرى صوتًا صارخًا في برية العنصرية الفجّة وفرط الذكورية السائدة، نجد أنفسنا أمام إشكالية أساسية تتلخص بالسؤال التالي: هل تم استدعاء فئة "نساء" ضمن أماكن محددة لمشاريع جيوسياسية سائدة، كشكل من أشكال "مناقضة الجيوبوليتيك"، و/أَم في مكان آخر للتلاعب بالأعراف الجندرية الموجودة لأهداف جيوبوليتيكية؟ هذا ما سنحاول الإجابة عليه في القسم الثاني من هذه الورقة.

"Se presenta un marco para abordar el
estudio de la integración regional transnacional
en sus dimensiones simbólicas, políticas y sociales, atendiendo a la presencia de algunas redes temáticas de mujeres que tienen como marco y escala de acción América Latina.""

In the United States and beyond the challenges of global climate change are increasingly being governed via the militarization of nation-state borders rather than, or in addition to, the mitigation of carbon emissions and collective strategies for climate adaptation. In this article we apply the concept of “geopopulationism,” introduced by Bhatia et al. (this issue), to think through the zero-sum Manichaean logics of traditional geopolitical calculation and the ways these become applied to climate governance via the securitization of climate change-related migration. In order to disrupt this securitization of climate policy, we draw on the insights of feminist geopolitics and what Koopman calls “alter-geopolitics” to consider how contemporary grassroots movements like the Sanctuary movement and #BlackLivesMatter have made connections between political, economic and environmental vulnerabilities while developing relationships of solidarity and care that broaden, disseminate, distribute and regenerate security as an expansive and inclusive project. We conclude by considering ways that scholars can continue to ally ourselves with and contribute to these grassroots efforts.

This paper draws from research on small-scale maize production in Mexico’s Central Highland region to discuss the geopolitical implications of everyday agricultural practices. An overwhelming majority of maize farmers in this region, as well as in the country more broadly, continue to cultivate locally-adapted maize varieties they have bred themselves – criollo maize is the vernacular term – despite decades of concerted government attempts to effect the widespread adoption of commercially-bred and licensed hybrid varieties. This state effort to restructure agricultural systems and food security according to nationalist and capitalist priorities is one tactic in a long and violent struggle for control over peasant land and labor in Mexico. By integrating feminist scholarship in geopolitics and in political ecology, I am following the lead of geographers who regard the materialities of everyday life as a foundation for political tensions and conflicts that are constantly unfolding along intersecting lines of difference. Though geopolitics has rarely turned its attention directly to theories of intimate socio-ecological relations, I argue that the field has much analytical and political leverage to gain by engaging with political ecology, and that feminist geographic imaginaries provide a crucial space in which to do so.  This approach allows for an analysis of how a dominant geopolitics of land and agriculture is being undermined through the routine production of criollo maize, revealing new potential for creating broad political alliances with social movements that are currently working toward alternative visions of agriculture and food security.

There is growing recognition within feminist scholarship that managing displacement is a highly contested, politicized, and gendered process. This article seeks to contribute by demonstrating that the processes of resettlement and repatriation (both thought of as ‘solutions’ to displacement) are also contested, politicized, and gendered. My analysis
is situated within feminist geopolitics and includes empirical data collected from interviews with and observations of Mozambican/Angolan refugees, their hosts, and institutional actors at Ukwimi Refugee Settlement (URS), Zambia. Specifically, the discussion focuses on two realities. First, that resettlement to formal, organized settlements (like URS) actively displaces gender dynamics, as illustrated by the case of Mozambican refugees resettled to URS. Second, that large-scale, organized repatriation also displaces gender relationships in profound ways, as demonstrated
by the large-scale repatriation of Angolan refugees from URS. In the midst of multiple displacements, the daily (and highly gendered) struggles of people at URS reflect the
concrete ways in which refugees and their hosts actively seek to emplace themselves at URS.

This paper argues for the importance of attending to both affective and emotional experience in analyzing the origins and effects of border and immigration efforts in the U.S. / Mexico border region.  We do so by engaging with theoretical understands of the politics of affect and emotion among cultural and feminist geographers and social scientists.  We then examine Arizona’s SB 1070 and its connection to a larger history of border and immigration enforcement in Arizona. Drawing from ethnographic work, interviews, and media and policy analysis, we engage with narratives provided by border area ranchers to unpack how these ranchers’ encounters with unauthorized migrants have changed over time.  We then examine how the everyday fear and anxiety associated with these encounters drive political activism and state intervention in the region. We conclude by discussing how this intervention, in turn, reproduces racial and gender hierarchies, hierarchies that are themselves affectively mediated.

This paper uses a framework of ‘ontological security’ to discuss the psycho-social strategies of self-securitization employed by ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland. We argue that broad discourses of securitization are present in the everyday risks and threats that young people encounter. In response and as resistance young people employ pre-emptive and pro-active strategies to preserve ontological security. Yet, these strategies are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction as young people withdraw from social worlds or revert to essentialist positions when negotiating complex fears and anxieties. Drawing on feminist geographies of security the paper presents a multi-scalar empirical analysis of young people’s everyday securities, connecting debates on youth and intimacy-geopolitics with the social and cultural geographies of young people, specifically work that focuses upon young people’s negotiations of racialized, gendered and religious landscapes.

Feminist political geography (FPG) is a vibrant, diverse, provocative and contested field of inquiry. This special issue highlights those scholars connecting FPG approaches, methodologies and arguments to critical work in other sub-fields of our discipline, and beyond it. In doing so we open up a productive conversation about both the current limitations and the new insights FPG offers for understanding power and the political. The papers included in this special issue offer a lively, constructive and productive set of debates around FPG that reflect the energy and dynamism of our sub-field and that bring new ideas, arguments and engagements into conversation.

This paper draws attention to the intimate frontiers of geopolitics to analyze how quotidian political boundaries are delineated and disputed through mundane discursive practices. My empirical focus is the USA–Mexico borderlands wherein US citizens frequently encounter material evidence of undocumented immigrants and their (unauthorized) border crossings. The materials encountered include identity documents and personal mementos as well as objects needed for survival like water bottles, backpacks, medication, shoes, and clothes. Close encounters with these intimate objects, I argue, have become primary sites wherein everyday framings of belonging are constituted in the borderlands. Drawing on field research in Arizona, I illustrate how cultural prescriptions for bodily comportment in relation to these objects are enlisted in the production and disruption of quotidian framings of ‘American’ or ‘those who don't belong in America.’

Cet article se focalise sur les limites intimes de la géopolitique afin d'examiner de quelle façon les frontières politiques ordinaires sont définies et contestées par des pratiques discursives banales. Cette recherche empirique porte sur la région frontalière des États-Unis et du Mexique dans laquelle des citoyens américains trouvent des preuves matérielles d'immigrants sans papiers et de leur passage (non autorisé) de la frontière. Parmi ces matériaux, on retrouve des cartes d'identité et des souvenirs personnels en plus des objets de première nécessité tels que des bouteilles d'eau, des sacs à dos, des médicaments, des chaussures et des vêtements. Il est soutenu que les rencontres de proximité avec ces objets intimes sont devenues les principaux lieux par lesquels s'élaborent les définitions du sens d'appartenance dans la région frontalière. Une étude de terrain menée en Arizona montre à quel point les prescriptions d'ordre culturel concernant le comportement corporel en lien avec ces objets servent à la production et au bouleversement des cadres ordinaires de définition pour les termes «Américain» et «ceux qui n'ont pas leur place aux États-Unis».

Este papel se enfoca en las fronteras íntimas de la geopolítica para analizar cómo se delinean y discuten las fronteras políticas cotidianas a través de prácticas discursivas rutinarias. Mi enfoque empírico se basa en los terrenos fronterizos de los Estados Unidos y México, donde los ciudadanos estadounidenses a menudo encuentran pruebas materiales de inmigrantes no documentados y pruebas de sus pasos fronterizos (no autorizados). Los materiales que se encuentran incluyen documentos de identidad, recuerdos personales y también objetos necesarios para sobrevivir, como botellas de agua, mochilas, medicamentos, zapatos y prendas de ropa. Sugiero que los encuentros íntimos con estos objetos íntimos se han convertido en sitios primarios donde las enmarcaciones cotidianas de pertenencia se constituyen en los terrenos fronterizos. Haciendo uso de investigación de campo de Arizona, ilustro el modo en que las normas culturales para el comportamiento corpóreo con relación a estos objetos son alistados en la producción y el desbarato de enmarcaciones cotidianas de ‘americano’ o ‘aquellos que no pertenecen en América.’

This paper explores the affective making of geopolitics through an analysis of how long-term residents of Turkey narrate their encounters with displaced people from Syria. Situating these narratives in relation to Turkey's policies and practices concerning the Syrian war and Syrian refugees, our project asks: What are the affective dimensions of encountering Syrians in Turkey and how do these encounters unfold an embodied geopolitics on the street and in neighbor-hoods? Our analysis of focus group conversations (conducted between 2014 and 2016 in Istanbul, Konya, and Malatya) centers on three dimensions of the affective geopolitics of the Syrian refugee crisis in Turkey. First, we draw out feelings of threatening proximity, in which the denigration of Syrian bodies and lives converges with the desire for a spatial organization of bodies that would put literal boundaries between " us " and " them. " Second, we present how the Adalet and Kalkınma Partisi's geopolitical orientation towards leadership in the Muslim Middle East and official rhetoric regarding Turkey's obligation to the Syrians as part of Muslim unity do not preclude the anxiety citizens express about the embodied presence of displaced Syrians in their daily lives. And finally, we address the politics of pain and the problems of translation in the encounter with the other. Here, we argue that the imminent, embodied, and affective challenge posed by the arrival of more than three million Syrians in Turkey concerns the ethics of how to hear, understand, and respond to the pain of others.

The following is me keynote presentation at the 3rd World Congress on Climate Change and Global Warming, Dubai, UAE, October 2017.

My aim is to show how legislative processes ostensibly aimed at drafting laws that embody justice and equality have become systemically co-opted and corrupted through the machinations of legislators beholden to a donor class whose profit-objectives depend on the unfettered extraction of hydrocarbons.  It’s thus no surprise that the denial of anthropogenic climate change has come to inform not only energy-legislation, but potentially all law-making insofar it has become imperative to insure against profit-suffocating regulation. Senator James Inhofe offers an apt example.  In 2015 he sponsored two bills, one acknowledging that climate change real, but denying that it’s anthropogenic; another to make English the official language of the U.S., the “English Unity Act of 2015.”  While the first attempts to circumvent the debate concerning climate change, the second aims to discourage border crossings; two apparently different issues until we realize that many migrants are climate change refugees. Inhofe denies climate change but tacitly recognizes that it produces conditions for migration. He calls human-made global warming a “hoax,” but sponsors a bill to deter migrants seeking to flee its consequences. Throughout Inhofe’s defense of the two bills, he refers to illegal immigrants as drug-runners and terrorists, a narrative that offers just what he needs: it detracts from the facts about climate change refugees and provides “justification” for policies like President Trump’s “wall.”  It provides apparent substance to the American president’s references to “radical Islamic terrorists” alleged to cross from the South, and helps to justify U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord.  In the world according to climate change denial, drafting law is less about social or environmental justice and more about insuring the hegemony of multinational energy interests. There are no winners.  But there are losers: a planet that can no longer support human life makes refugees of us all.

"While recent scholarship has paid critical attention to the changing
relationship between territory and borders, there remains much to
be said about the ways in which borders are being pushed outwards
via immigration enforcement. In this paper, I argue that one must
look outside the borders of the policymaking state to understand the
geopolitical depth and breadth of immigration enforcement policies
and practices. I examine ways in which US migrant detention
and deportation reverberate in Ecuador. Research in Ecuador with
detained migrants’ family members and deported migrants shows
that the impacts of these policies are far from contained along
with the migrant’s incarcerated and “removed” body; instead,
they extend spatially and temporally beyond US borders, and into
local, personal spaces and places in Ecuador. I demonstrate that
scrutiny of the extra-border geographies of immigration enforcement
policies allows us to identify the uneven, unpredictable, and
sometimes violent ways in which these policies expand in practice.
This research also suggests that detention and deportation
do not meet US policymakers’ stated objective of deterring future
migration."

Academic and popular debates examining the geopolitics of the Falklands Islands/Islas Malvinas have focused overwhelming attention on the 1982 war and its aftermath in ways that foreground (in)security in predominantly militaristic terms. Notwithstanding these tendencies, this paper seeks to think through another example of ‘invasion’ of the Falkland Islands that has been important in provoking and sustaining insecurity among Islanders. The film Fuckland (2000), directed by José Luis Marqués, was shot covertly in the Falklands without the consent of Falkland Islanders who unwittingly star in it. By examining the scales, sites, practices and shifting temporalities of Fuckland, as well as the everyday insecurities it (re)produces, we show how the bodies, homes and community of Falkland Islanders have been territorialised in the Argentine geopolitical imagination, and therefore subject to modes of violence. Fuckland also exposes the enmeshing of practical, popular and everyday geopolit...

We live in an increasingly drone-saturated world. In this article, we bring drone scholarship and feminist geopolitics into dialogue to interrogate the drone-home. We re-orient military- and state-led accounts, foregrounding the growing range of non-state actors enacting and subject to the drone as it is increasingly employed in the Global North. In so doing, we develop the concept of ‘everyday droning’ as the honing and homing of military technology and drone capitalism. Examining militarization and enclosure at the scale of everyday home life, we urge future geographical work to engage with everyday droning being actively seeded in the domestic here-and-now.

This paper examines the geopolitics of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation's reserve, situated in a toxic petrochemical complex known as Canada's 'Chemical Valley.' While this reserve holds the perilous title of worst air-pollution in the country, research exploring the profound impacts that this toxic environment has on Indigenous communities remains limited and tends to resort to simplistic framings. In this paper we suggest that Michel Foucault's concept of the 'heterotopia' is a helpful prism through which to view Aamjiwnaang in more complex, political terms. We also suggest, however, that this prism has a limited scope when it comes to exposing intimate experiences of global toxins. Drawing on a feminist geopolitics, we seek to stretch Foucault's heterotopic approach in order to show how the reserve is intimately colonized and contaminated by Canada's chemical production. Vitally, our approach gleans insight into the everyday ways that Aamjiwnaang is governed by and also disrupts colonial configurations. Moreover, our paper illuminates how a feminist heterotopic approach can reorient research towards a deepened understanding of Indigenous-led modes of environmental justice.

This article examines embodied geopolitics in Afghanistan by way of gender roles and relations among and between international workers and Afghan recipients of international information, aid, development and (in)security. My analysis is theoretically situated within critical feminist geographies and includes empirical data collected from qualitative surveys, interviews, focus groups and observations of Afghans and international workers in Kabul, Afghanistan (2006. There is a significant and growing number of scholarly feminist critiques of and debates over the US-led international coalition's gendered approach to 'saving' Afghanistan from the Taliban. This article seeks to add to these studies by discussing these geopolitical encounters at the scale of bodily interactions. Specifically, it discusses how gendered freedom and savior fantasies illustrate spatial practices of othering through exclusion and intimacy, before turning to how these are enacted through representation, behavior, mobility and sexuality.

Special Section: Feminist Perspectives on Diplomacy

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Brazil took advantage of its economically and politically privileged position to challenge global normative structures. In 2004, the concept of “non-indifference” was integrated into the Brazilian vocabulary of foreign policy, justifying and legitimating the country’s acceptance of the invitation to command the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH). On the one hand, non-indifference can be read as a discursive maneuver that enabled Brazil to accommodate its non-interventionist agenda to an old geopolitical game, given the pressure imposed upon “global players” to respond effectively and assertively to threats to international peace and security. On the other hand, the “Brazilian way” could also be seen as an alternative to a highly masculinized geopolitical approach to international security. This paper explores possible limitations, tensions and/or opportunities that emerge from the encounter between a feminist diplomatic agenda and a masculinizing ordering of the international space. It does so by contrasting Brazil’s ambition for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), the club of powerful states, with Brazil’s diplomatic and military performance during MINUSTAH, widely evaluated as a success due to characteristics such as solidarity, generosity, flexibility and the “warm conviviality” of Brazilian culture.

BRaFrancine Rossone de Paula (2019) Brazil’s non-indifference: a case for a feminist diplomatic agenda or geopolitics as usual?, International Feminist Journal of Politics, 21:1, 47-66, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2018.1542282

Feminist geographic analysis has demonstrated that violence inflicted on women is embodied, experienced and personal and at the same time, linked to global socio-political and economic processes and patriarchal norms. Consequently, violence is a complex system instead of a norm located in certain places. In heavily militarised societies, patriarchal power regimes are even more prevalent because states' security strategies promote a masculinist understanding of protection as to who should be protected and by whom-and from what. This study draws on feminist geopolitical analysis and explores how feminist activists in Honduras experience and resist violence in their everyday lives. The research is grounded in interviews, focus-group discussions and participant observation with Honduran activists. The findings demonstrate that violence and its effects are firstly embedded in women's everyday lives through feelings of fear and unsafety on the streets, at the workplace and at home. Secondly, violence operates through structures and institutions such as the military and police, impunity for violence against women, and the juridical restriction of reproductive rights. Thirdly, the internationally financed war on drugs and 'development' projects contribute to violence-thus, there is a link between intimate experiences of violence and global economic and military powers that sustain violence. Activists therefore argue that, for their needs, the state's and international organisations' security approaches are inadequate. The paper weaves together feminist visions of collective self-care and discusses activists' strategies against violence. This study contributes to a growing feminist geographic scholarship linking women's bodily experiences with violence and responds to calls for complicating notions of violence. Carmen: I think what happens a lot to all of us women is that we are facing many problems with this 'security' they are selling us; security based on repression, security based on militarisation, security based on closing us more and more inside our homes. And well, I think, as women, there is a lot of backlash regarding our autonomy and our bodies, of sexual and reproductive rights. I don't know…there are just so many things involved.