Routledge Research in Place, Space and Politics – serie

This book follows the travels of Nanay, a testimonial theatre play developed from research with migrant domestic workers in Canada, as it was recreated and restaged in different places around the globe. This work examines how Canadian migration policy is embedded across and within histories of colonialism in the Philippines and settler colonialism in Canada. Translations between scholarship and performance – and between Canada and the Philippines – became more uneasy as the play travelled internationally, raising pressing questions of how decolonial collaborations might take shape in practice. This book examines the strengths and limits of existing framings of Filipina migration and offers rich ideas of how care – the care of children, the elderly and each other – might be rethought in radically new ways within less violently unequal relations that span different colonial histories and complex triangulations of racialised migrants, settlers and Indigenous peoples.This book is a journey towards a new way of doing and performing research and theory. It is part of a growing interdisciplinary exchange between the performing arts and social sciences and will appeal to researchers and students within human geography and performance studies, and those working on migration, colonialisms, documentary theatre and social reproduction.

This book offers interdisciplinary and cross-national perspectives on the challenges of negotiating the contours of religious tolerance in Europe.In today’s Europe, religions and religious individuals are increasingly framed as both an internal and external security threat. This is evident in controls over the activities of foreign preachers but also, more broadly, in EU states’ management of migration flows, marked by questions regarding the religious background of migrating non-European Others. This book addresses such shifts directly by examining how understandings of religious freedom touch down in actual contexts, places, and practices across Europe, offering multidisciplinary insights from leading thinkers from political theory, political philosophy, anthropology, and geography. The volume thus aims to ground ideal liberal democratic theory and, at the same time, to bring normative reflection to grounded, ethnographic analyses of religious practices. Such ‘grounded’ understandings matter, for they speak to how religions and religious difference are encountered in specific places. They especially matter in a European context where religion and religious difference are increasingly not just securitised but made the object of violent attacks.The book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, philosophy, geography, religious studies, and the sociology and anthropology of religion.

This book unpacks the links between oil energy, state power, urban space and culture, by looking at the Petro-Socialist Venezuelan oil state. It challenges the disciplinary compartmentalisation of the analysis of the material and cultural effects of oil to demonstrate that within the Petrostate, Territory, Bureaucratic Power and Culture become indivisible. To this end, it examines how oil is a cultural resource, in addition to a natural resource, implying therefore that struggles over culture implicate oil, and struggles over oil implicate culture. This book develops a story about Venezuela as an oil state and the way it deploys its policies to instrumentalise culture and urban space by examining the way Petro-Socialism manifests in space, how it is imagined in speeches and how it is discursively constructed in adverts. The discussion reveals how a particular culture is privileged by the Venezuela state-owned oil company and its social and cultural branch. The book explores to what effect the state-owned oil company constructs a parallel notion of culture that becomes inextricable from land, akin to a mineral deposit, and tightly controlled by the Petrostate.The book will appeal to researchers who are interested in Resource Management, Environmental Studies, Cultural Studies and Political Geography.

The embodied directedness of human practice has long been neglected in critical socio-spatial theory, in favor of analyses focused upon distance and proximity. This book illustrates the absence of a sense for direction in much theoretical discourse and lays important groundwork for redressing this lacuna in socio-spatial theory.Many accounts of the social world are incomplete, or are increasingly out of step with recent developments of neoliberal capitalism. Not least through new technological mediations of production and consumption, the much-discussed waning of the importance of physical distance has been matched by the increasing centrality of turning from one thing to another as a basic way in which lives are structured and occupied. A sensibility for embodied processes of turning, and for phenomena of direction more generally, is urgently needed. Chapters develop wide-ranging and original engagements with the arguments of Sara Ahmed, Jonathan Beller, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Virginia Held, Bernard Stiegler, Theodore Schatzki, Rahel Jaeggi, Hartmut Rosa and David Harvey. This book reinterprets practice, embodiment, alienation, reification, social reproduction and ethical responsibility from a directional perspective. It will be a new valuable resource and reference for political and social geography students, as well as sociologists and anthropologists.

This book unravels the role of democracy after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and reflects important debates surrounding the security of Muslim communities in the years to come. It looks at the problems of torture, violence and the legal resources available to contemporary democracies to confront terrorism.While terrorism is often regarded as one of the major threats to the West and the nation-state, this book explores the notion that a disciplined sense of terror is what keeps society working. The strengths and limitations of liberalism are examined, as well as the ethical dilemma of torture and human right violations in the struggle against terrorism. This book carefully dissects the origin of the nation-state and how it keeps society united.The author offers a creative and unique approach to democracy and worldwide terrorism, exploring the consequences for the nation-state. This book looks at the connections between terrorism, mobility, consumption, torture and fear. It will be of interest to researchers as well as postgraduate and postdoctoral students within the fields of Human Geography, Politics, Media and International Relations.

This book explores the hopeful possibility that emerging geographies of postsecularity are able to contribute significantly to the understanding of how common life may be shared, and how caring for the common goods of social justice, well-being, equality, solidarity and respect for difference may be imagined and practiced. Drawing on recent geographic theory to recalibrate ideas of the postsecular public sphere, the authors develop the case for postsecularity as a condition of being that is characterised by practices of receptive generosity, rapprochement between religious and secular ethics, and a hopeful re-enchantment and re-shaping of desire towards common life. The authors highlight the contested formation of ethical subjectivity under neoliberalism and the emergence of postsecularity within this process as an ethically-attuned politics which changes relations between religion and secularity and animates novel, hopeful imaginations, subjectivities, and praxes as alternatives to neoliberal norms. The spaces and subjectivities of emergent postsecularity are examined through a series of innovative case studies, including food banks, drug and alcohol treatment, refugee humanitarian activism in Calais, homeless participatory art projects, community responses to the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand, amongst others. The book also traces the global conditions for postsecularity beyond the Western and predominantly Christian-secular nexus of engagement.This is a valuable resource for students in several academic disciplines, including geography, sociology, politics, religious studies, international development and anthropology. It will be of great interest to secular and faith-based practitioners working in religion, spirituality, politics or more widely in public policy, urban planning and community development.

This seminal book explores the complex relationship between popular geopolitics and nation branding among the Newly Independent States of Eurasia, and their combined role in shaping contemporary national image and statecraft within and beyond the region. It provides critical perspectives on international relations, nationalism, and national identity through the use of innovative approaches focusing on popular culture, new media, public diplomacy, and alternative "narrators" of the nation. By positing popular geopolitics and nation branding as contentious forces and complementary flows, the study explores the tensions and elisions between national self-image and external perceptions of the nation, and how this complex interplay has become integral to contemporary global affairs.

As with so many facets of contemporary western life, architecture and space are often experienced and understood as a commodity or product. The premise of this book is to offer alternatives to the practices and values of such westernised space and Architecture (with a capital A), by exploring the participatory and grass-roots practices used in alternative development models in the Global South. This process re-contextualises the spaces, values, and relationships produced by such alternative methods of development and social agency. It asks whether such spatial practices provide concrete realisations of some key concepts of Western spatial theory, questioning whether we might challenge the space and architectures of capitalist development by learning from the places and practices of others.Exploring these themes offers a critical examination of alternative development practices methods in the Global South, re-contextualising them as architectural engagements with socio-political space. The comparison of such interdisciplinary contexts and discourses reveals the political, social, and economic resonances inherent between these previously unconnected spatial protagonists. The interdependence of spatial issues of choice, value, and identity are revealed through a comparative study of the discourses of Henri Lefebvre, John Turner, Doreen Massey, and Nabeel Hamdi. These key protagonists offer a critical framework of discourses from which further connections to socio-spatial discourses and concepts are made, including post-marxist theory, orientalism, post-structural pluralism, development anthropology, post-colonial theory, hybridity, difference and subalterneity.By looking to the spaces and practices of alternative development in the Global South this book offers a critical reflection upon the working practices of Westernised architecture and other spatial and political practices. In exploring the methodologies, implications and values of such participatory development practices this book ultimately seeks to articulate the positive potential and political of learning from the difference, multiplicity, and otherness of development practice in order to re-imagine architecture and space. .

Across the globe, political movements opposing privatisation, enclosures, and other spatial controls are coalescing towards the idea of the ‘commons’. As a result, struggles over the commons and common life are now coming to the forefront of both political activism and scholarly enquiry. This book advances academic debates concerning the spatialities of the commons and draws out the diverse materialities, temporalities, and experiences of practices of commoning.Part one, "Materialising the Commons" focuses on the performance of new geographical imaginations in spatial and material practices of commoning. Part two, "Spaces of Commoning", explores the importance of the turn from ‘commons’ to ‘commoning’, bringing together chapters focusing on the "doing" of commons, and how spaces, materials, bodies and abstract flows are intertwined in these complex and excessive processes. Part three, "An Expanded Commons", explores the broader registers and spaces in which the concept of the commons is at stake and highlights how and where the commons can open new areas of action and research. Part four, "The Capture of the Commons", questions the particular interdependence of ‘the commons’ and ‘enclosure’ assumed within commons literature framed by the concept of neoliberalism. Providing a comprehensive introduction to the diverse ways in which ideas of the commons are being conceptualised and enacted both throughout the social sciences and in practical action, this book foregrounds the commons as an arena for political thought and sets an agenda for future research.

Much environmental activism is caught in a logic that plays science against emotion, objective evidence against partisan aims, and human interest against a nature that has intrinsic value. Radical activists, by contrast, play down the role of science in determining environmental politics, but read their solutions to environmental problems off fixed theories of domination and oppression. Both of these approaches are based in a modern epistemology grounded in the fundamental dichotomy between the human and the natural. This binary has historically come about through the colonial oppression of other, non-Western and often non-binary ways of knowing nature and living in the world. There is an urgent need for a different, decolonised environmental activist strategy that moves away from this epistemology, recognises its colonial heritage and finds a different ground for environmental beliefs and politics. This book analyses the arguments and practices of anti-GMO activists at three different sites – the site of science, the site of the Bt cotton controversy in India, and the site of global environmental protest – to show how we can move beyond modern/colonial binaries. It will do so in dialogue with Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, María Lugones, and Gayatri C. Spivak, as well as a broader range of postcolonial and decolonial bodies of thought.

Were the occupations of 2010–11 – from Spain to Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street – a success or failure? Are they the model for urban radical politics? This book challenges common understandings and underlying assumptions of what constitutes activism and resistance. It proposes a critical urban theory of politics and citizenship that is grounded in the city as it is inhabited. For those who are marginalized, the city is a double-edged sword of oppression and emancipation. This book argues for an intersectional approach that actively dismantles hierarchies and embraces a wider range of acts of resistance and creative transformation, one in which we recognize these acts of citizenship as a form of constitutionalism. Wood reframes the theorization of protest and of the city, 'post-political' literature and the history of protest, and Marxist and anarchist ideas about the time and space of politics. Through this, she adopts a unique approach to provide new theoretical insights and challenges to post-political thinking.This book will be valuable reading for those interested in political, urban and social geography, in addition to political economy and progressive politics in the urban context.

From Sovereignty to Solidarity seeks to re-imagine human mobility in ways that are de-linked from national sovereignty. Using examples from around the world, the author examines contemporary practices of solidarity to illustrate what such a conceptualization of human mobility looks like. He suggests that urban and local scales, rather than the national scale, is a better way to frame human migration and belonging. The book ultimately proposes that solidarity, rather than sovereignty, offers an alternative approach to imagine how human mobility should, and already does, occur. This book will be relevant to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in disciplines such as Migration Studies, Urban Studies, Human and Political Geography, and Refugee Studies. It is also relevant to researchers, development workers and human rights/environmental activists, and other intellectual practitioners.

This book offers interdisciplinary and cross-national perspectives on the challenges of negotiating the contours of religious tolerance in Europe.In today’s Europe, religions and religious individuals are increasingly framed as both an internal and external security threat. This is evident in controls over the activities of foreign preachers but also, more broadly, in EU states’ management of migration flows, marked by questions regarding the religious background of migrating non-European Others. This book addresses such shifts directly by examining how understandings of religious freedom touch down in actual contexts, places, and practices across Europe, offering multidisciplinary insights from leading thinkers from political theory, political philosophy, anthropology, and geography. The volume thus aims to ground ideal liberal democratic theory and, at the same time, to bring normative reflection to grounded, ethnographic analyses of religious practices. Such ‘grounded’ understandings matter, for they speak to how religions and religious difference are encountered in specific places. They especially matter in a European context where religion and religious difference are increasingly not just securitised but made the object of violent attacks.The book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, philosophy, geography, religious studies, and the sociology and anthropology of religion.

This timely, insightful and expert-led volume interprets the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election from a geographical standpoint, with a focus on its spatial dimensions.With contributions from leading thinkers, this book highlights the unique circumstances of the election, including the Covid pandemic and a president who falsely alleged that it was a massive fraud, particularly after he lost. The volume offers an introduction and 11 chapters that examine the run-up to the election, the motivations of Trump supporters, the election results themselves, case studies of the battleground states of Wisconsin and Georgia, and the chaotic aftermath. Accompanied with an engaging plethora of figures providing a visual demonstration of data trends, both national and local case studies are considered throughout this book, as well as right-wing radicalization, the role of Cuban-Americans, race, and threats to American democracy.This book is an ideal study companion for faculty and graduate students in fields including geography and political science, sociology, American studies, media studies and urban planning, as well as those with an interest in U.S. politics more generally.

This timely, insightful and expert-led volume interprets the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election from a geographical standpoint, with a focus on its spatial dimensions.With contributions from leading thinkers, this book highlights the unique circumstances of the election, including the Covid pandemic and a president who falsely alleged that it was a massive fraud, particularly after he lost. The volume offers an introduction and 11 chapters that examine the run-up to the election, the motivations of Trump supporters, the election results themselves, case studies of the battleground states of Wisconsin and Georgia, and the chaotic aftermath. Accompanied with an engaging plethora of figures providing a visual demonstration of data trends, both national and local case studies are considered throughout this book, as well as right-wing radicalization, the role of Cuban-Americans, race, and threats to American democracy.This book is an ideal study companion for faculty and graduate students in fields including geography and political science, sociology, American studies, media studies and urban planning, as well as those with an interest in U.S. politics more generally.

Power and Space sets out the inherently spatial nature of power today and seeks to change the conversation around how power exercises us in the contemporary moment.The essays brought together in this book are a response to the fact that conventional descriptions of power and its ordered geographies no longer chime with our lived experience. Spatiality matters to the workings of power nowadays, and this book sheds light on what it is that we face when power is exercised through more subtle, spatially nuanced arrangements. It is divided into three parts, each representing a different kind of engagement with power’s relationship to space, from the spatial shifts in the way power is exercised through to its assemblage-like entanglements and, in turn, its progressive topological character. Throughout the book, a wide range of social, political and economic examples are drawn upon to illustrate a more provisional sense of power, ranging, for instance, from the seductive logic of privatized public spaces to the attempt by a data analytics company to manipulate political behaviour, through to the offshore spaces invented by rising financial elites to challenge the established banking order.Illustrating the new-found abilities of the powerful to make their presence felt, this book provides an accessible account of the practical workings of power in the present day. It will be invaluable to students and academics in human geography and urban studies as well as politics, sociology and cultural studies.

Power and Space sets out the inherently spatial nature of power today and seeks to change the conversation around how power exercises us in the contemporary moment.The essays brought together in this book are a response to the fact that conventional descriptions of power and its ordered geographies no longer chime with our lived experience. Spatiality matters to the workings of power nowadays, and this book sheds light on what it is that we face when power is exercised through more subtle, spatially nuanced arrangements. It is divided into three parts, each representing a different kind of engagement with power’s relationship to space, from the spatial shifts in the way power is exercised through to its assemblage-like entanglements and, in turn, its progressive topological character. Throughout the book, a wide range of social, political and economic examples are drawn upon to illustrate a more provisional sense of power, ranging, for instance, from the seductive logic of privatized public spaces to the attempt by a data analytics company to manipulate political behaviour, through to the offshore spaces invented by rising financial elites to challenge the established banking order.Illustrating the new-found abilities of the powerful to make their presence felt, this book provides an accessible account of the practical workings of power in the present day. It will be invaluable to students and academics in human geography and urban studies as well as politics, sociology and cultural studies.

This book presents digital placemaking as a new testing ground for urban democracy. It explores the participatory practices of digital placemaking and their implications on blurring formal and informal boundaries of decision-making and urban politics.Drawing on examples from Australia, China and Taiwan, the book examines how contemporary cities are witnessing an era when digitality becomes a mode of placemaking and participation becomes an urban condition. Such developments manifest as urban activism, creative branding, tech placemaking and digital governance that trigger changes in urban engagement and politics. This book views digital placemaking through an assemblage lens to demonstrate how it can be a relational site of contentions and collaborations among civil society, industries and governments without observance of strict boundaries. Contrary to an often binary and zero-sum reading of urban politics, this book advocates for a tripartite assemblage model of urban politics that is neither hierarchical nor deterministic. This book proposes an ouroboros model as a systematic approach that conceptually anchors digital placemaking studies to the nexus of urban institutions and digital technologies. It reconceptualises urban politics as a relational process of nuances, contingency and complexity in the flux of cosmopolitan power movements and inquiries. Ultimately, the book develops the notion of socio-technical natality to counter the myth of tech inevitability and instil a thesis of hope and change.This book will interest researchers, policymakers and professionals in urban studies, media studies, cultural studies, urban communication, creative placemaking, community engagement, urban advocacy and urban governance.

This book presents digital placemaking as a new testing ground for urban democracy. It explores the participatory practices of digital placemaking and their implications on blurring formal and informal boundaries of decision-making and urban politics.Drawing on examples from Australia, China and Taiwan, the book examines how contemporary cities are witnessing an era when digitality becomes a mode of placemaking and participation becomes an urban condition. Such developments manifest as urban activism, creative branding, tech placemaking and digital governance that trigger changes in urban engagement and politics. This book views digital placemaking through an assemblage lens to demonstrate how it can be a relational site of contentions and collaborations among civil society, industries and governments without observance of strict boundaries. Contrary to an often binary and zero-sum reading of urban politics, this book advocates for a tripartite assemblage model of urban politics that is neither hierarchical nor deterministic. This book proposes an ouroboros model as a systematic approach that conceptually anchors digital placemaking studies to the nexus of urban institutions and digital technologies. It reconceptualises urban politics as a relational process of nuances, contingency and complexity in the flux of cosmopolitan power movements and inquiries. Ultimately, the book develops the notion of socio-technical natality to counter the myth of tech inevitability and instil a thesis of hope and change.This book will interest researchers, policymakers and professionals in urban studies, media studies, cultural studies, urban communication, creative placemaking, community engagement, urban advocacy and urban governance.

This book links the current wave of political polarisation to the polarisation taking place between cosmopolitan and parochial identity discourses and their antagonistic valuation of iconic urban and regional places.Instead of looking for explanations of polarisation only in left-behind regions, this book analyses how societal changes favouring cities, like globalisation and individualisation, created an urban hubris which is now challenged. A careful analysis of the different valuations of specific iconic places like those linked to borders, waterfront apartments, and livestock farms in different Western European countries shows that this polarisation between cosmopolitan and parochial identity discourses goes deeper and further than the rise in support for national populism. It shows the growing spatial polarisation through the enclavisation of the cosmopolitan new bourgeoisie in cities, further polarising the antagonistic valuation of different iconic urban and regional places as either disgusting examples of urban arrogance or parochial bigotry.The broader spatial and temporal perspective adopted in this book is of interest to anyone who wants to look beyond the national political headlines. It will help students, researchers, human geographers, political scientists, and sociologists better understand the intricate relation between identities, politics, places, and societal developments.

This book links the current wave of political polarisation to the polarisation taking place between cosmopolitan and parochial identity discourses and their antagonistic valuation of iconic urban and regional places.Instead of looking for explanations of polarisation only in left-behind regions, this book analyses how societal changes favouring cities, like globalisation and individualisation, created an urban hubris which is now challenged. A careful analysis of the different valuations of specific iconic places like those linked to borders, waterfront apartments, and livestock farms in different Western European countries shows that this polarisation between cosmopolitan and parochial identity discourses goes deeper and further than the rise in support for national populism. It shows the growing spatial polarisation through the enclavisation of the cosmopolitan new bourgeoisie in cities, further polarising the antagonistic valuation of different iconic urban and regional places as either disgusting examples of urban arrogance or parochial bigotry.The broader spatial and temporal perspective adopted in this book is of interest to anyone who wants to look beyond the national political headlines. It will help students, researchers, human geographers, political scientists, and sociologists better understand the intricate relation between identities, politics, places, and societal developments.

The book presents a reinterpretation of the meaning and practices of uncommoning. It provides a critical reflection on the frontiers of the modern world where uncommoning is often the key driving- force underpinning a deceitful democracy and an exclusionary socio-economy. Uncommoning is a socio-spatial process of othering, grabbing and reordering that particularly impacts indigenous peoples.This book revisits classical, contemporary and decolonial literature, as well as documents, reports and archival data, to analyse the Paraguayan case of uncommoning. It examines how these processes have deep roots in the shortcomings of Western thinking, including religious, juridical and moral doctrines. The book also demonstrates that Europe has major responsibilities and cannot be removed from the search for responses and alternatives. After a detailed theoretical elaboration, informed primary by Hegel’s socio-spatial sensibilities, the book empirically analyses the ‘worldless’ production of Paraguay as a country with a fragile sovereignty and whose development is, more than anything else, highly subtractive.The text will be of interest to scholars and researchers in development, indigenous studies, decolonisation, human geography, agribusiness, South American studies, as well as policy-makers in international development agencies and NGOs.

The book presents a reinterpretation of the meaning and practices of uncommoning. It provides a critical reflection on the frontiers of the modern world where uncommoning is often the key driving- force underpinning a deceitful democracy and an exclusionary socio-economy. Uncommoning is a socio-spatial process of othering, grabbing and reordering that particularly impacts indigenous peoples.This book revisits classical, contemporary and decolonial literature, as well as documents, reports and archival data, to analyse the Paraguayan case of uncommoning. It examines how these processes have deep roots in the shortcomings of Western thinking, including religious, juridical and moral doctrines. The book also demonstrates that Europe has major responsibilities and cannot be removed from the search for responses and alternatives. After a detailed theoretical elaboration, informed primary by Hegel’s socio-spatial sensibilities, the book empirically analyses the ‘worldless’ production of Paraguay as a country with a fragile sovereignty and whose development is, more than anything else, highly subtractive.The text will be of interest to scholars and researchers in development, indigenous studies, decolonisation, human geography, agribusiness, South American studies, as well as policy-makers in international development agencies and NGOs.

This book presents how urban megaprojects uniquely expose the complexities of competitive authoritarianism. Through an analysis of Skopje 2014, it argues that accelerated, symbolically charged urban transformation reveals how such regimes govern space, manage constraint, and assemble power through the intertwined dynamics of implementation, ideology, and resistance.The book offers conceptual and empirical tools to analyse urban megaprojects as windows into the inner workings of competitive authoritarian regimes. It employs a qualitative, process-tracing approach grounded in historical analysis and extensive empirical material. It reconstructs the emergence and implementation of Skopje 2014 through interviews, archival and secondary sources, media materials, and close observation of spatial transformation, triangulating evidence across different types of data to capture how authoritarian power operates over time and across arenas. By following Skopje 2014 across political decisions, spatial interventions, and moments of resistance, and by triangulating interviews, historical context, and empirical observation, the analysis makes visible forms of authoritarian coordination, constraint, and adaptation that are rarely captured through institutional or regime-level indicators, the book provides a detailed reconstruction of how an urban megaproject is conceived, implemented, justified, and contested over time.The book is intended for scholars and students in political science, sociology, and urban studies along with historians interested in the politics of urban space and long-term patterns of development. It will also be of interest to researchers and graduate students focusing on Southeastern Europe, comparative authoritarianism, and urban design politics, as well as policy analysts and practitioners concerned with urban governance and authoritarian politics.

This book explores the intellectual legacy of John Agnew, one of geography’s most influential thinkers of the past 50 years. It examines Agnew’s transformative thinking on geopolitics, territory, place, and context, demonstrating how his ideas reshaped political geography and continue to inform contemporary scholarship across geography, political science, and international relations.Through a comprehensive understanding of Agnew’s contributions to geographic thought and their enduring relevance, this book offers reflections on key concepts such as the territorial trap, critical geopolitics, context, and place-based politics, showing how Agnew challenged conventional wisdom and encouraged new ways of thinking about geographical concepts. The chapters also subtly reveal how the practices of scholarly collaboration, academic mentorship, and the ways of conducting research have changed and evolved over recent decades. By connecting Agnew’s ideas across these changing contexts, this volume serves as both a retrospective appreciation and a forward-looking resource for geographic inquiry.This volume is essential reading for scholars and students in political geography, human geography, international relations, political science, and political sociology. It will appeal to those interested in geographic theory, geopolitical analysis, territory, context, and the concept of place. It also reveals how research unfolds within and across disciplinary boundaries, offering insights into collaborative scholarship at the intersection of space, power, and politics.

The book examines how contemporary states confront financial turmoil and weakened autonomy while crafting strategies to consolidate power and sustain development within their territories. Using Reach as its lens, the book traces how state expansion and private capital interact across diverse regions and territorial settings.This book spans themes such as animal ecology, tourism studies, regional development, infrastructural studies, and space exploration. Despite their thematic diversity, each chapter follows the same thread: distance as a device for organizing frontiers of state expansion and governance. From the assertion of territorialization in remote areas to the state’s increasing inability to mediate urban problems under market‑driven governance, the book offers a window into the effects of longstanding neoliberal policies and the efforts of different states to double down on market‑friendly, financially backed strategies to assert territorial authority. Drawing upon theoretical and empirical cases from countries like Argentina, Australia, Bolivia, Canada, Chile, Finland, and Switzerland, this volume brings together focused attention on specific themes or regions to examine the contemporary territorial configurations at global, regional, and national scales. In doing so, it provides a comprehensive understanding of states, their economies, and their contemporary processes of territorialization.The Political Economy of State Reaching will be of value to graduate students and researchers in political economy, economics, geography, international relations, public policy, development studies, anthropology, and sociology, as well as an interested general public.

This multidisciplinary book explores the utopian impulses in modern social thought, tackling the most pressing and interconnected planetary challenges. It combines a reconsideration of our dystopian present with a critical investigation of socio-spatial utopias, which suggest alternative modes for human-nature and inter-human interactions in an imagined sustainable, dialogical, and inclusive world.Based on a content analysis of scholarly publications, policy documents, and intergovernmental agendas, four analytical chapters systematise visions which shape the contours of contemporary socio-ecological, socio-economic, socio-cultural, and socio-political utopianism. Addressing the most existential global risks, utopian futures require more than sustainable development, degrowth, or global justice. The book explicitly underscores the urgent need for an open-minded dialogue, an inclusive knowledge order, lasting peace, and other marginalised concepts which can contribute to dismantling the bastions of particularism and facilitating collective actions. Among many competing visions, the main challenge is how to integrate the most progressive ideas into a coherent utopia for a future which all want and a future which fits all.The book is written in the common language of the knowledge that is co-created by the fields of global studies, political and cultural geography, environmental sociology, and international relations. The multidisciplinary approach makes this work appropriate reading for researchers, social thinkers, policymakers, and students who are interested in contemporary planetary utopias.

This book problematizes and draws attention to the complexity of the notion and praxis of return migration by drawing from the Zimbabwean Dispensation Permits (DZP), Zimbabwean Special Permits (ZSP) and Zimbabwean Exemption Permits (ZEP) which were granted to Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa by the South African government from 2009 up to now.Situated within the problematics of the discourse of return migration and drawing on the case studies of return migrants in different parts of Zimbabwe, the book provides a nuanced discussion and understanding of the complexity of return migration in the context of nationalism, nativism, xenophobia and the contradictions of temporary migration policies as an instrument to meet labour market demands while simultaneously avoiding the permanent settlement of migrants, among other logics of inclusion and exclusion.Contractualisation, Humanitarian Fatigue and the End of Solidarity will be useful for researchers as well as graduate and undergraduate students of African Studies, Human Geography, International Studies, Migration Studies, International Relations and Political Science.

The embodied directedness of human practice has long been neglected in critical socio-spatial theory, in favor of analyses focused upon distance and proximity. This book illustrates the absence of a sense for direction in much theoretical discourse and lays important groundwork for redressing this lacuna in socio-spatial theory.Many accounts of the social world are incomplete, or are increasingly out of step with recent developments of neoliberal capitalism. Not least through new technological mediations of production and consumption, the much-discussed waning of the importance of physical distance has been matched by the increasing centrality of turning from one thing to another as a basic way in which lives are structured and occupied. A sensibility for embodied processes of turning, and for phenomena of direction more generally, is urgently needed. Chapters develop wide-ranging and original engagements with the arguments of Sara Ahmed, Jonathan Beller, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Virginia Held, Bernard Stiegler, Theodore Schatzki, Rahel Jaeggi, Hartmut Rosa and David Harvey. This book reinterprets practice, embodiment, alienation, reification, social reproduction and ethical responsibility from a directional perspective. It will be a new valuable resource and reference for political and social geography students, as well as sociologists and anthropologists.