This study examines the subjective dimension of residential segregation by investigating whether residents of vulnerable neighborhoods perceive their neighborhoods differently from the wider population, how such perceptions vary across neighborhoods and national contexts, and which domains exhibit the strongest differences. Drawing on original comparative surveys from six vulnerable neighborhoods in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden alongside national population samples, the study provides novel descriptive evidence on patterns of subjective residential segregation. Cluster analysis reveals that vulnerable neighborhoods across countries resemble one another more closely in their neighborhood perceptions than they resemble their respective national populations, suggesting substantial subjective residential segregation. The findings further show that subjective residential segregation is most pronounced in two domains central to equal opportunity: perceived social disorder within neighborhoods and perceptions of unfair treatment by government institutions and peers.
One of the first things travelers to the Indian Himalaya remark upon are the curious, often rhyming and comedic, road signs of the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) dotting the strategic roads of the region. In this article, I ask what role road signs play in physically narrating, constructing and altering the imagination of the contested high-altitude region of Ladakh. I provide a combined discursive and visual analysis of military-origin road signs in Ladakh, drawing on a series of fieldwork trips across 2019-2025. I make two core contributions. First, I add to the literature on the political geography of road signs, by demonstrating their expansive role in re-narrating an entire region. Second, I contribute to our understanding of Ladakh's geopolitics and its place in the Indian state. Specifically, I argue that road signs are an important means of marking contested territory for the Indian Army, and construct specific ideas of nationalism, sacrifice, masculinity, and safety. The crucial narrative of these road signs is India's military prowess and engineering skill, making the region safe for both the nation and for tourism. These ideas are blended with gender, particularly hypermasculinity, and the need to dominate nature for the state.
The Military Demarcation Line (MDL) on the Korean Peninsula is often treated as the archetype of a clear, militarized border. Yet it is increasingly described as ‘unclear,’ a puzzling claim for a boundary long regarded as rigid and well enforced. This article argues that such ‘unclearness’ does not reflect the absence of a border, but rather uncertainty in its operational reference: which baseline is actionable, which representations and markers can be relied upon, and which institution can authoritatively verify and reconcile discrepancies. Bringing border studies into dialogue with science and technology studies, the article reframes border clarity as an ongoing infrastructural achievement sustained through the alignment of maps, markers, records, and verification procedures. Drawing on armistice texts and annex maps, Military Armistice Commission records, operational regulations, and subsequent geospatial updating efforts, it shows why the MDL is a critical case: militarization sustains strong behavioral prohibitions while simultaneously constraining inspection, maintenance, and supervised access—the practical work that keeps representational layers mutually useable. When these conditions deteriorate, the line does not disappear; it persists through partial, contested, and sometimes incompatible operational versions. The article develops the concept of versioned demarcation to capture how demarcation is repeatedly reassembled across changing technical systems and institutional routines. It demonstrates that disputes that appear to concern ‘where the line is’ are often conflicts over verification, access, and custodianship, and offers a framework for analyzing ‘unclear borders’ beyond the Korean case.
This article examines what water defence means in a popular neighbourhood, produced through the labour of its residents. It conceptualises water insecurity as a force of displacement and examines how this unfolds in popular neighbourhoods. It focuses on the Water Defence Committee of Santo Domingo (WDC), a neighbour-based organisation in southern Mexico City that emerged in response to unreliable supply and the political manipulation of water distribution, and that campaigned for a new well connected to the pipe network. The analysis shows that water defence in this context involved reducing uncertainty, confronting clientelist forms of distribution, and shaping the neighbourhood's future. It argues that these are interrelated mechanisms through which water defence became a form of place defence. For WDC members, defending water meant defending their capacity to live and remain in their neighbourhood. By analysing water defence as place defence, the article contributes to debates on water insecurity, urban political ecology, infrastructural citizenship, and everyday environmentalism. Una versión del texto en español está disponible como material complementario.
A prominent international agenda for land governance reform has a particular focus on making land governance more gender equal, and situating land governance within communities. Research on land governance reform suggest that the process is rife with contestation, specifically involving de facto authority. Rather than assume that de facto authority operates in preexisting, bounded spaces, this article considers how de facto authorities create spaces that challenge reforms for gender equality. Liberia offers a clear example of a place where this international agenda is being pursued. The article explores how two de facto authorities construct spaces that limit gender equality provisions. One of these was used to subvert the expectation that newly formed land governance bodies would resolve disputes in open community meetings, rather than ‘the bush’ (a site women are excluded from). Another is that of ‘community development associations,’ which span geographic space between ‘the community’ and the capital city. Through considering how these de facto authorities constitute the community in space and time, this paper shows the limitations to thinking ‘the community’ as a bounded space for land governance, and rather shows it as made up of several overlapping spaces, some of which uphold gendered exclusions.
The emerging geopolitics of critical minerals hinges not only on their extraction but also on their transformation. Smelters, refiners, magnet factories, and other processing facilities are new sites of geopolitical competition and dependencies, linking countries that increasingly see one another as strategic rivals. This article introduces the concept of midstream geopolitics to move beyond notions of resource geopolitics often focused on extraction sites and supply routes to account for the diverse narratives, regulations, commercial relations, and technologies that shape and enable the transformation of ‘critical’ raw materials, including cobalt, lithium, rare earth elements, and other minerals, into industrially useable forms. These midstream capacities are now central to competition among great powers such as the US, EU, and China, as well as regional actors (e.g., Japan, South Korea, Malaysia), each seeking to secure, control, or bypass processing chokepoints in supply chains. China's longstanding investment in processing, enabled in part by Western divestment from industries deemed too polluting, shaped the contemporary strategic landscape. Our framework identifies multidirectional influences—between the downstream, midstream, and upstream—structuring midstream geopolitics and details nine policies through which states exert geopolitical and geoeconomic power over industrial and technological advances. Our analysis underscores the need for attention to the midstream and highlights its growing (geo)political significance, particularly in relation to strategies of onshoring, reshoring, and friendshoring.
The constitutive role of migration, mobilities and borders in state formation and the production of state power is well documented. Existing scholarship has largely focused on the politics and governance of migration, on encounters at and within state borders and often vis- à-vis a single type of cross-border mobility. Building on critical perspectives on everyday borderwork and state power as a relational topological force, this paper advances the regime of bordering as an analytical framework for a fine-grained and relational understanding of state power in postimperial borders, like the Greek-Turkish border. Epistemologically, this framework adopts a comprehensive mobility lens, rather than focusing on one type of mobility or borderwork, and combines a topological approach to power with a place-based analysis of cross-border mobilities and interactions in political, economic and social spheres. Empirically grounded in Greek-Turkish relations and the cross-border mobilities in the Thracian borderlands, the framework enables capturing the accumulated effects of mobility-related borderwork in the interrelated transnational geopolitical, geoeconomic and geosocial spaces. As such, it offers a spatially and temporally connected understanding of state-mobility relations.
Inferring individuals’ vote choice based off of aggregate data often estimates candidate preference by racial group using Bayesian statistics. One context in which this happens often is in voting rights litigation, where plaintiffs must prove that minority voters have a clear candidate-of-choice and white voters consistently vote against this candidate. In small jurisdictions or jurisdictions with low turnout, even if racially polarized voting exists, EI models can produce large standard errors and overlapping confidence intervals to imply unclear voter preferences. Point estimates from EI models can also be substantively similar because EI RxC treats different racial groups symmetrically. This means that by design, EI models offer conservative estimates of heterogeneity in group preferences. Building on Hariharan et al., 2026, we offer an additional type of analysis to supplement assessments of candidate preference by race. Racially Polarized Voting (RPV) Dispersion Plots evaluate variations in candidate preference across precincts by plotting the deviation between a null standard – that candidate preference is distributed across precincts in proportion to the number of votes that cast within each precinct. The plots visually depict how those deviations correlate with within-jurisdiction variation in racial and ethnic demographics. We validate the RPV Dispersion Plots using higher-turnout elections in which federal courts have concluded that ecological inference models demonstrate racially polarized voting.
In the contemporary global political economy, the ‘resource frontier’ is a primary site of intense capital speculation and accumulation as well as regulatory experimentation. Whether driven by the dramatic expansion of the agricultural complex, the incessant growth of extractive industries, or the ‘green’ imperatives of climate change adaptation and mitigation, these spaces are, far from being ‘empty zones’, characterized by overlapping jurisdictions, contested land titles, and the presence of ‘shadow’ or ‘fragmented’ state architectures. This Special Issue brings together five distinct ethnographic and institutional analyses to interrogate a central, troubling paradox: how corruption—conventionally framed as the absence or failure of law and governance—has become a foundational tool in the co-constitution of legal and territorial order at the resource frontier. Moving beyond overly simplistic ‘principal-agent’ models, the contributors revisit the political ecology of resource corruption, arguing that such corruption is an essential mechanism of state territorialization in these frontiers. From the miombo woodlands of Tanzania to the palm oil frontiers of the Peruvian Amazon, these articles demonstrate how ‘illicit’ practices are used to produce ‘legal truths’ that facilitate land and green grabbing, rent accumulation, and the further marginalization of indigenous and pastoralist communities.
With over 60% of refugees living in urban areas, understanding refugee children's urban citizenship and integration is critical yet remains underexplored. This article frames analyses of refugee children's urban integration by treating it as a fundamentally spatial problem, rather than primarily a legal or policy one. Situated within political geography, it argues that the urban neighborhood—through its infrastructures, institutions, and everyday encounters—operates as a key site where governance is enacted and where citizenship and (non)citizenship are practically negotiated. By foregrounding spatial relations, it makes visible dimensions of legal liminality that are often flattened in policy-centric accounts. Ambiguous legal status is experienced through access to schools, mobility constraints, and contested claims to public space, producing distinct everyday emotional geographies of belonging, fear, or uncertainty. Methodologically, the article proposes a mixed, child-centred spatial approach and provides two different examples of how it was used to understand urban refugee integration. In Kampala, teachers' perceptions and geospatial analyses of school and residential patterns show how location and school-level opportunity structures mediate educational access amid uncertainty. In Tel Aviv, residents' perceptions, children's accounts, and municipal and traffic data show how everyday encounters in contested spaces shape safety, recognition, and exclusion. Read in juxtaposition, the cases generate broader conceptual insights into how spatial politics, refugee policy, and urban inequality co-produce refugee children's integration, underscoring spatial analysis as essential for understanding children's urban non-citizenship.
The construction of global South and global North geographies have long shaped and been shaped by the mobility of humanitarian staff toward crises (Lester & Dussart, 2014). Less attention, however, is given to how these humanitarian geographies are also shaped by the evacuation of humanitarian staff from crises (Adey, 2024). Evacuation exposes the limits of humanitarian missions to address suffering amid and despite dire circumstances, as it also starkly illuminates existing hierarchies that value the lives of humanitarians over those they aim to help. Yet, there is little research on how humanitarians understand evacuations. This research addresses this gap by asking: How did humanitarian organizations and international staff navigate and understand evacuation during the COVID-19 pandemic and to what effects? This question emanates from mobility studies, which are attuned to how the humanitarian sector's practices of mobility and immobility reify racio-colonial geographies of the global North and global South. Based on 30 in-depth interviews with humanitarian workers, I argue that international humanitarian staff exercise evacuation refusals—choosing not to exercise South-North mobility at the start of the pandemic because of perceived inequities between themselves, their “local” colleagues, and those they aim to help. However, I also demonstrate how evacuation refusals are co-constituted by racio-colonial mobility hierarchies, in that they are also understood by international humanitarian staff as facilitating a “normal life” for them via their jobs and everyday lives in otherwise unprecedented circumstances. These findings have two major implications for humanitarian studies in political geography: (1) they reframe current literature on how COVID-19 (re)shaped they everyday practice and construction of humanitarian geographies and (2) they deepen and extend findings that show how humanitarian labor and (im)mobility both challenge and (re)produce global North-South hierarchies.
The Yanuncay River Basin, in Azuay Province, Southern Ecuador, is facing mounting pressures from extractive industries, particularly large-scale mining and hydropower projects, that seek to grab and control the river and related territories. This article presents the counter-mapping methodology that was used with impacted communities residing along the river's headwaters and páramos. It presents and discusses how through an engaged participatory discussion, negotiation and resulting visualisation process, a grassroots map of their territory was co-created. This map reflects the communities' ecological knowledge, their experienced emotional and lived relations as well as their socio-economic dependence on their territory. The map is now being used and discussed by these communities and their broader river defence networks to support their efforts to protect the river. Based on our analysis we argue that counter-mapping is not merely a technical practice of visualisation but a political process of resistance that allows communities to articulate, express and reframe what in their territory matters to them (‘matterialise’). This matterialisation enables them to visually represent and discursively manifest their spatial-political and onto-epistemological territorial visions and interests. These challenge prevailing development models that threaten their river and related livelihoods in name of socio-economic progress.
Sacramento is home to an extensive system of prisons and policing and to a severe housing crisis. It is also home to a coalition of abolitionist organizations fighting to end incarceration and housing precarity. For these organizations, incarceration and housing precarity are approached simultaneously as they impact the same people, benefit the same capital interests, and produce overlapping conditions of life inside and outside of prison. In this paper, I conceptualize this situation as a carceral housing crisis. I identify the everyday mechanisms that drove this crisis through interviews with people experiencing homelessness, incarceration, and probation. I then contextualize these mechanisms with practices developed by abolitionist organizers in Sacramento to intervene. In doing so, I consider how abolitionist ideals are made material through local practices of non-capitalism and non-coercion.
This article uses Debord's ‘spectacle’ and Lacanian psychoanalysis to theorize tourism authenticity as a fantasy (i.e. a story we tell ourselves to make sense of the world). Some tourism types sell ‘authenticity’ by offering experiences of ‘pristine’ nature and ‘exotic’ people. Often, such tourist destinations are ‘spectacularized’, referring to the triumph of representations in modern capitalism that creates an ‘authentic’ reality through repetition. However, such representations are selective and conceal uncomfortable elements. They are crucial for creating and perpetuating fantasies, which sustain their appeal through desires yet remain practically unattainable. We analyze the institutionalized promotional tourism discourse surrounding the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), in particular representations regarding nature, local cultures, adventures, and attempts to ‘do good’. Covering parts of Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, KAZA was created for conservation, peace-building, and socio-economic development purposes, largely relying on tourism. We examine the narratives of diverse national and international stakeholders involved in KAZA and how these create and maintain an authentic fantasy in their publicity efforts. This way, we contribute to tourism studies and psychoanalytic political ecology by combining Lacanian fantasy and the specific role of spectacularization, developing a synthesis that helps to analyze and understand the appeal and implications of selling authenticity. We argue that spectacularized fantasies stimulate jouissance: a particular type of ambivalent enjoyment/pleasure that includes ‘painful’ (dark and horrific) elements that generate and sustain desire by promising illusory fulfillment while ensuring its persistent suspension by concealing underlying hierarchies and contradictions in society and nature.
Studies on ethnic entrepreneurship and political agency often highlight how minority business owners leverage commercial spaces for cultural visibility and political voice. However, the mechanisms transforming these spaces into sites of representation remain under-theorized. This study challenges the liberal-democratic normativity in Global North scholarship, which normalizes political voice as a desirable and viable branding choice. Instead, I introduce the concept of Situated Entrepreneurial Activism to argue that entrepreneurial agency is geopolitically contingent, where the regime dictates whether politicization functions as a marketable asset or a financial liability. Using commercial gentrification as a critical backdrop, positioning ethnic entrepreneurs at the intersection of competing class and ethnic interests, I analyze how different political environments shape this agency. Through a Critical Juxtaposition of Latino entrepreneurs in the US (Barrio Logan) and Arab entrepreneurs in Israel (Old Acre), the research reveals two distinct patterns: In the liberal-democratic context of California’s Barrio Logan, notwithstanding its structural challenges and rising political polarization, diversity functions as a market asset; consequently, Latino entrepreneurs engage in Cooperative and Separatist Entrepreneurial Activism, transforming political slogans into 'consumer products.' Conversely, in Israel’s ethnocratic and conflict-driven setting, Arab entrepreneurs perceive politicization as a liability, prioritizing class identity or adopting Covert Entrepreneurial Activism. This pragmatic "Resistance through Presence" prioritizes asset preservation and physical rootedness over overt politicization. By framing commercial spaces as geopolitical indicators, this study shows how regime type and political tolerance shapes the shifting value of minority entrepreneurial activism.
