Since the 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act, asylum seekers in the UK have been dispersed across the country to zones of accommodation on a no choice basis. This paper examines the political practices ...and governmental rationalities which accompany the allocation of asylum accommodation in Britain through the National Asylum Support Service (NASS). The paper draws on discussions of the UK border as a site of ‘domopolitics’, the governing of the state as a home, to suggest that domopolitics is productive of particular relations of calculation, regulation and discipline through which the lives of asylum seekers are conditioned. These entangled modes of governance, it is argued, find expression in a logic of accommodation which acts to discipline asylum seekers and to reinsert modes of arbitrary sovereign authority into a regime of governmental regulation. The rationalities of governance that accompany accommodation create an account of housing which is deliberately decoupled from feelings of security, as accommodation becomes a key space through which a relation to the border is lived for asylum seekers. Domopolitics is thus shown to be productive of a politics of discomfort for those at the limits of the nation.
► The domopolitics of asylum combines elements of security, sorting and discipline. ► Domopolitics demands practices of asylum accommodation and discomfort. ► Through the regulation of accommodation border practices emerge in everyday life. ► Accommodation is tied to the affective discomfort and marginality of asylum seekers.
The aim of this article is a political-geographical analysis of political and economic relations between the Slovak Republic and the countries of the world from 1993 to 2019. We spatially analyze ...more than 15,000 trips of Slovak government officials to countries around the world and their relation to foreign trade. Using the statistical method of correlation, we examine the degree of relationship between trade indicators and political interactions (represented by government visits) in more than 150 countries around the world. We cartographically define spatial concentration, especially the high direct correlation between trade and trips, and examine the factors and causes of this correlation on the example of selected countries with significant values. The countries of the Eastern Partnership, the Middle East, the Western Balkans, and East Asia have the highest correlation coefficients. Our article seeks to contribute to the discussion on the effectiveness of economic diplomacy using geographical approaches.
The article discusses a theoretical framework for investigating regionalisation and geopolitical regionalisation, employing the activity-geospatial approach. The main theoretical foci of this study ...are system-forming, or region-building, socio-geo-adaptation and geopolitical relations. The article examines various types of transboundary and transnational geopolitical regionalisation as manifestos of geopolitical relations. These types are categorised based on scale, functional area, historical and geographical characteristics, quality, legal status and geospatial features, placing particular emphasis on the Baltic region. An essential aspect of studying a region involves identifying and defining its spatial boundaries. Since determining the exact limits of the Baltic region remains problematic, this article examines various approaches to address this issue, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses, particularly in the context of geopolitical analysis. The concluding part of the article explores several centuries of the evolution of the Baltic Sea region, divided into historical geopolitical stages. It is highlighted that the geopolitical essence of the Baltic region was changing radically over time. Particular attention is paid to the current state of the Baltic regional geopolitical entity, which is classified as a conflict-ridden or confrontational geopolitical region in the ‘Eurasian arc of instability’ interpreted as a geopolitical macroregion.
Dutch agriculture transformed during the renaissance and the industrial revolution by integrating its unique physical geography with the political and economic realities. Today, the Netherlands is ...the second-largest exporter of agricultural products in the world. How did this tiny nation achieve these results? Will this level of agricultural productivity continue? What elements, if any, are competing with this significant element of foreign earnings?
Raco explores the local social imaginaries and the politics of intersectionality in a super-diverse city of London England. Drawing on in-depth ethnographic evidence from London, Raco argues that ...there is much to be gained from combining more normative insights on changing social imaginaries with recent writings in geography on the importance of spatio-temporal settings in shaping encounters. The former provides a series of propositions over the changing form and character of contemporary political change but lack a broader spatial and temporal sensitivity to the embedded nature of social imaginaries and how these challenge, or may even undermine, broader generalisations. The latter open up new terrains for empirical analysis by challenging generalised diachronic accounts, but their public policy implications often remain implicit.
Political geography has devoted substantial attention to visual popular culture. Where the aural has been considered, this has generally been through the spoken-word (e.g. radio) or lyrics (e.g. ...popular music). The geopolitics of instrumental music – music without words – is yet to be considered in depth. This article provides an outline of how such media might be approached, building on affectual analyses of sound in human geography. In particular, it examines the example of instrumental film score. It suggests that, rather than just providing background to the visual component of film, score provides a key mode through which geopolitical knowledges are communicated. Through case studies of musical constructions of identity/difference from three geopolitical periods – World War Two, the Cold War, and the War on Terror – this article makes the case for adding instrumental musical literacy to political geography's methodological toolkit.
We investigate the effect of territorial stigmatisation on ontological security through a qualitative case-study of Bradford politics during the 2015 General Election. Territorial stigmatisation and ...ontological security are important constructs in political geography but there is relatively little research on how territorial stigmatisation effects ontological security in everyday lived experience – in this case, the lived experience of political contests. We conducted thirty in-depth interviews, generated three themes and present and analyse these three themes in the form of three ‘created dialogues’ as outlined by Sullivan (2012), with a smaller sample of ten out of thirty of our participants. Drawing on Bakhtin’s (1981) concept of ‘chronotope’ we identity three key effects of territorial stigmatisation on ontological security: i) A negative reputation of ‘parallel societies’ has the potential to create double meanings for the inhabitants of that society; ii) Local reputation enhances ontological security through linking particular places to particular personalities but potentially decreases ontological security for a district as a whole; iii) Everyday lived experiences sometimes acquire charged emotional symbolic significance, which could encourage the reflexive side of ontological security. Our findings went through a positive member-checking process with five of the participants.
In 1885, Kropotkin called for geography to be ‘a means of dissipating hostile prejudices’ between nations that make conflicts more likely, and ‘creating other feelings more worthy of humanity’. As a ...body of scholars, we have risen far more ably to the negative task of ‘dissipating’ than to the positive charge of ‘creating’: Geography is better at researching war than peace. To redress that imbalance, we need both to
conceptualise more clearly what we mean by peace, and make a
commitment to researching and practising it. These arguments are made with reference to the broader literature and research along the Danish/German, Israeli/Palestinian and Kyrgyz/Uzbek interfaces.
► Geography has handled the study of war with more depth and panache than the study of peace. ► This needs rectifying in order to make geography more useful. ► We must do two things: conceptualise peace, and make a commitment to it.
A large and fruitful literature has focused on the impact of colonial legacies on long-term development. Yet the mechanisms through which these legacies get transmitted over time remain ambiguous. ...This article analyzes the choice and effects of legislative representation as one such mechanism, driven by elites interested in maximizing jointly economic prospects and political influence over time. We focus on malapportionment in the legislatures of the original 13 British North-American colonies. Their joint independence created a unique juncture in which postcolonial elites simultaneously chose the legislative and electoral institutions under which they would operate. We show that the initial choice of apportionment in the state legislatures is largely a function of economic geography, that such a choice generated persistent differences in representation patterns within states (political inequality), and that the latter shaped public goods provision in the long run.
Set against the backdrop of past, contemporary and possible future mining-related violence on islands in the western Pacific, this article explores how scholarship on the politics of scale, as well ...as strands of the burgeoning island studies literature, might sharpen our understanding of the political economic and violent effects of extractive resource enclaves in Island Melanesia. Drawing upon field research in Bougainville and Solomon Islands, I argue that just as Melanesian islands were produced as a scale of struggle in the context of the introduction of capitalist social relations under colonialism, so too have they emerged as a critical, albeit problematic, scale of struggle in contemporary contestations around extractive resource capitalism under the current round of globalisation and accumulation by dispossession. I suggest that this politics of scale lens enriches our understanding of how “islandness” can be an important variable in social and political economic processes. When the politics of scale is imbricated with the well-established idea of the island as the paradigmatic setting for territorialising projects, including the nation-state and sub-national jurisdictions, islandness emerges as a potentially powerful variable in the political economic struggles that attend extractive resource enclaves. I also highlight, in the cases considered here, how islands can become containers for internal socio-spatial contradictions that can be animated by extractive enclaves and can contribute to the island scale becoming violent and “ungovernable”. The article advances recent efforts to bring the island studies literature into closer conversation with political and economic geography.
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