The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Serie: Wiley Blackwell Companions to Geography
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1474

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

A comprehensive and timely overview of the subdiscipline of political geography, equipping readers with the intellectual tools to explore complex global phenomena

The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography offers a wide-ranging overview of the dynamic field, providing critical insights into the ways political geographers investigate and interpret the rapidly changing world. Reflecting the dramatic shifts in global events and politics over the past decade, this thoroughly updated volume bridges theoretical debates and empirical research to provide a clear and comprehensive understanding of foundational themes and critical contemporary issues.

With contributions by an interdisciplinary team of leading experts, the second edition of the Companion incorporates fresh perspectives on topics including climate change, terrorism, the intersection of materiality and politics, geopolitical ecologies, natural resources, and identity politics. New and revised chapters address topics such as peace, health, water politics, ocean geographies, postcolonialism, feminist geographies, and practice-based methods in geography. Throughout the book, the authors highlight the connections between the shifting political landscape and core concepts of power, borders, territory, sovereignty, nationalism, citizenship, and more.

Whether for classroom use or research, The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography is a valuable resource for anyone looking to explore the dynamic field of political geography. It is an ideal textbook for students of political geography, political science, international relations, and environmental studies, and also serves as a key reference for scholars and professionals seeking an in-depth understanding of the latest developments and intellectual trajectories of the field.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

List of Figures and Tables

Cover Concept

List of Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Chapter 1: Introduction

Traditions and Transitions in Political Geography

Outline of the Book

References

Framing Political Geography

Chapter 2: Political Geography in Historical Context

Early Unity of History and Geography

Modern Geographers in the Age of Empires

Between Two World Wars

The Cold War's Paradigm Shift

Conclusion

References

Chapter 3: The Politics of Political Geography

The Politics of Political Geography's Revitalizations

The Politics of Translating Political Geographies

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

References

Chapter 4: Geopolitics of Knowledge

The Geopolitics of Knowledge

Globalizing Science, Neoliberal Rationalities, and the Rise of the Hegemony Debate

The Key Themes of the Hegemony Debate

The Continuity of the Anglophone Hegemony

Conclusion

References

Chapter 5: The Powers of Maps

Critical Cartography

Counter‐mapping

Making Maps in Political Geography

Conclusion

References

(Contested) Key Concepts

Chapter 6: Power

Taking Power Seriously

Power as Capacity

Discipline and Biopower

New Geographies of Power

Power's Futures

References

Chapter 7: The State

Tracing the State

The State System

The State as Experience

Decolonizing the State

Conclusion

References

Chapter 8: Sovereignty

State Sovereignty

From Sovereignty to Sovereign Power

Contemporary Geographies of Sovereignty

Conclusion

References

Chapter 9: Territory

Territory as a Political Conception

Territory as a Social Construct

Territory as a Bottom‐Up Approach to Economic Development and Spatial Planning

Decolonizing Territory

Territory as a Way of Thinking about Societal Transformation

Conclusion

Note

References

Chapter 10: Scale

Cartographic and Quantitative Approaches to Scale in Political Geography

From Scale Effects to Scalar Politics

Rescaling the State

Relational Scale: Unbounding Place and Politics

Scale as a Lens on Territory, Place, and Network

Conclusions

Acknowledgments

References

Chapter 11: Borders

Border Studies Revived

From Bounded Rationales to Border Thinking

From Linear to Topological Limits

The Mobile Border

Conclusions

References

Chapter 12: Citizenship

Political Geographies of Citizenship

The Uneven Spatiality of Political Membership

Political Community

Struggles over Citizenship Rights

The Everyday Spaces of Citizenship

Outlook: Crises of Citizenship, Expansion, and Repair

References

Chapter 13: Security

Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Security

Securing Volumetric Spaces

Security, Data, and Technology

Borders and Mobility

Climate‐Changed Futures

Securing Logistics

Conclusion

References

Chapter 14: Conflict

The Notion of Conflict

Evolution in These Approaches

Questioning War

Influence of the Sociotechnical Context: The Example of Cyberwar

Conclusion

References

Chapter 15: Peace

Critical Geographies of and for Peace

Geo‐graphing Peace: Spatialities, Materialities, Politics, and Pedagogies

Conclusion

References

Chapter 16: Place and Memory

Topographies and Sites of Collective Memory

Official Places of Memory

Place‐Based Intergenerational, Spectral, and Anticolonial Memory

Conclusion

References

Approaching Political Geography

Chapter 17: Spatial Analysis

Timeless Fundamental Concepts

Changes in Spatial Analysis

Effects of Local Violence on Public Opinion in the North Caucasus of Russia

Conclusion

References

Chapter 18: Political Economy

Transnational Articulations of State and Capital: Political Geography and Geopolitical Economy Approaches

Uneven Development and Capitalist Variegation in Economic Geography

The “New” State Capitalism?

Conclusion

References

Chapter 19: Geopolitics and Critical Geopolitics

Historical Roots: Classical Geopolitics

Critical Geopolitics: Foundations

Critical Geopolitics: Critiques

Ongoing Research Agendas in Critical Geopolitics

Conclusion

References

Chapter 20: Feminist Political Geography

Methodologies and Research Methods

Gender, State, Nation

Corporeal Geographies and Body Politics

Domestic Spaces and Informal Politics

Conflict and Security

Borders, Mobility, and Security

Conclusion and Feminist Political Geography Futures

References

Chapter 21: Postcolonial and Decolonial Political Geographies

Origins and Developments of Postcolonial and Decolonial Theories

Postcolonial and Decolonial Political Geographies

Critiquing the “Colonial Present”: The Wars in Gaza and Ukraine

“New” Empires? The Belt and Road Initiative and Chinese Geopolitics

Conclusion: A Pluriverse of Political Geographies

References

Doing Political Geography

Chapter 22: Electoral Geographies

A Brief History of Electoral Geography

Distorting the Outcomes of the Popular Will

The Spatial‐Analytic Tradition

Historical Materialist and Political Economic Electoral Geographies

Sociocultural and Poststructuralist Electoral Geographies

Feminist Electoral Geography

Indigenous Electoral Geography

Electoral Geography Outside of the Anglo‐American Sphere

Conclusion

References

Chapter 23: Nationalism and Nation‐Building

Definitions and Characteristics of Nationalism

“Classic” Nationalism: Nineteenth‐Century Europe

Nation‐Building

Ethnic and Civic Nationalism

Inclusions and Exclusions

Conclusion

References

Chapter 24: Multilevel Governance

How Multilevel Governance Has Evolved

Multilevel Governance in Bloom and in Upcoming Crosscurrents

The Governance of Metropolitan Regions

Provisional Completion

References

Chapter 25: Social Movements

What Is a Movement, or “Who Moves What How?”

The Spatialities of Social Movements

Spatialities of Solidarity

Movements’ Territoriality

How Geographers Move with Movements

Conclusion

References

Chapter 26: Identity Politics

Attributes of Identity Politics

Religion

Queering Identity Politics

Conclusion

References

Chapter 27: Digital Media

Media Affordances

Digital Media and Scales of Sovereignty

Conclusion

References

Chapter 28: Migration

Migration and Local Territorial States

Migration and National Territorial States

Migration, Interstate Relations, and Supranational and Global Governance

Conclusion

References

Material and Environmental Political Geographies

Chapter 29: Material Political Geographies

What Exactly Is “Material”?

Sensing the Material

Assembling the Material

Making the Material Political

Future Paths

Toward Intermaterialism

Toward a More Refined Grammar of the Material

Toward Material Ethics

References

Chapter 30: Popular Culture

Popular Geopolitics

Popular Geopolitics 2.0

Political Consumerism, Fandom, and Resistance

Affective Registers of Popular Geopolitics: Humor

Conclusion

References

Chapter 31: Natural Resources

A Burgeoning Field

Extractivism

Plantations

Conclusion

References

Chapter 32: Geopolitical Ecologies

The Roots of Political Ecology

Resource Frontiers and State‐Making

Making Critical Mineral Frontiers

Maintaining Critical Mineral Frontiers

Toward a Geopolitical Ecology

References

Chapter 33: Water Politics

Water, Politics, and Power

Politics, Water, Spaces

Hydropolitics

Water, Technology, Infrastructure

Water, Worlds, Politics

Water Futures

Acknowledgment

References

Chapter 34: Health Geographies

Medical and Health Geography

Health, Politics, and Political Geography

Politics of Food and Diet

Geographies of (Health)Care

Challenges and Future Directions

References

Chapter 35: Ocean Geographies

Disputed Islands and the Oceanic Gray Zone

Asylum Seekers and Migration

Fisheries and Infrastructure

High Seas Governance and Science Studies

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

References

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Tables

Chapter 17

Table 17.1 The influence of violence taking place in various space–time sca...

List of Illustrations

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1 Wheel of power: a conceptual framework for understanding the Angl...

Chapter 5

Figure 5.1 World map in the back of a ninth‐grade school‐issued planner, in ...

Figure 5.2 The Frontex map, analyzed by Van Houtum and Bueno Lacy (2020)....

Figure 5.3 Artist's depiction of the European male leaders debating control ...

Figure 5.4 Dead and Missing Migrants, 2021, by Nicolas Lambert – CNRS/Migreu...

Figure 5.5 The “Real World Map” with an eight‐dash line read as China's dema...

Chapter 14

Figure 14.1 State‐based conflict by type of conflict (1946–2022).Creativ...

Chapter 17

Figure 17.1 The 82 primary sampling locations for the 2005 survey in five re...

Figure 17.2 The number of violent events aggregated within 80 spatiotemporal...

Chapter 23

Figure 23.1 Ethnic/national diversity in the Austro‐Hungarian Empire 1911....

Guide

Cover Page

Table of Contents

Series Page

Title Page

Copyright Page

List of Figures and Tables

Cover Concept

List of Contributors

Notes on Contributors

Begin Reading

Index

Wiley End User License Agreement

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Wiley Blackwell Companions to Geography

Wiley Blackwell Companions to Geography is a blue‐chip, comprehensive series covering each major sub discipline of human geography in detail. Edited and contributed by the disciplines’ leading authorities each book provides the most up to date and authoritative syntheses available in its field. The overviews provided in each Companion will be an indispensable introduction to the field for students of all levels, while the cutting‐edge, critical direction will engage students, teachers, and practitioners alike.

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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political GeographyEdited by Virginie Mamadouh, Natalie Koch, Chih Yuan Woon, and John Agnew

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The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Political Geography

Second Edition

Edited by

Virginie Mamadouh, Natalie Koch,Chih Yuan Woon, and John Agnew

This edition first published 2025© 2025 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Edition HistoryJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd. (1e, 2015)

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The right of Virginie Mamadouh, Natalie Koch, Chih Yuan Woon, and John Agnew to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication DataNames: Mamadouh, Virginie, 1963– editor | Koch, Natalie editor | Woon, Chih Yuan editor | Agnew, John A. editorTitle: The Wiley Blackwell companion to political geography / Edited by Virginie Mamadouh, Natalie Koch, Chih Yuan Woon, John Agnew.Other titles: Wiley‐Blackwell companions to geographyDescription: Second edition. | Hoboken, NJ : Wiley‐Blackwell, 2025. | Series: Wiley Blackwell companions to geography | Originally published as: A companion to political geography. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2024062223 (print) | LCCN 2024062224 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119753971 cloth | ISBN 9781119753896 adobe pdf | ISBN 9781119753919 epubSubjects: LCSH: Political geography | GeopoliticsClassification: LCC JC319 .C646 2025 (print) | LCC JC319 (ebook) | DDC 320.1/2–dc23/eng/20250312LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024062223LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024062224

Cover Design: WileyCover Image: Photo by Natalie Koch, Mural by Máisel López Valdés

List of Figures and Tables

Figures

4.1

Wheel of power: a conceptual framework for understanding the Anglophone hegemony debates.

5.1

World map in the back of a ninth‐grade school‐issued planner, in Morgantown, West Virginia, USA.

5.2

The Frontex map, analyzed by Van Houtum and Bueno Lacy (2020).

5.3

Artist’s depiction of the European male leaders debating control of different parts of Africa during the Berlin Conference of 1884, Adalbert von Rößler (†1922), published in

Allgemeine Illustrierte Zeitung

.

5.4

Dead and Missing Migrants

, 2021, by Nicolas Lambert – CNRS/Migreurop.

5.5

The “Real World Map” with an eight‐dash line read as China's demarcation of the nine‐dash line.

14.1

State‐based conflict by type of conflict (1946–2022).

17.1

The 82 primary sampling locations for the 2005 survey in five republics of the North Caucasus.

17.2

The number of violent events aggregated within 80 spatiotemporal dimensions (3‐month breaks by 10 km boundaries) for each of 82 survey sample locations in the North Caucasus.

23.1

Ethnic/national diversity in the Austro‐Hungarian Empire 1911.

Table

17.1

The influence of violence taking place in various space–time scales on survey respondents’ concerns about terrorism and war in their area.

Cover Concept

Natalie Koch

The picture on the cover was taken when I was visiting the Katara Cultural Village in Doha in February 2023, shortly after the 2022 FIFA Men’s World Cup was hosted in Qatar. Opened in 2010, Katara was a government project to position the State of Qatar as a “cultural beacon” and to create spaces for new forms of cultural exchange. Katara regularly hosts special events, including for the country’s annual National Day celebrations, which for the past 10 years have emphasized the unity of Qatari citizens and non‐Qatari residents. The football mural painted on this Katara wall ahead of the FIFA World Cup is the work of the Cuban artist Máisel López Valdés and is entitled Los amigos cubano y catarí (The Cuban and the Qatari friends). It illustrates how the venue was folded into the state’s celebratory story of global exchange at the 2022 event.

It also shows how the nationalist story of citizen/noncitizen friendship was an essential element of that positive story – the two boys serving as icons of both groups. But just as FIFA so often does in promoting the men’s championship as its premier event, women and girls are quietly excluded from this nationalist image. They are perhaps subtly appealed to as mothers, but agency is ceded to the young boys who will grow up to embody the ideals indexed here – of friendship, cooperation, joy, and delight in common experiences like football. The Katara mural thus highlights this book’s concern with what is visible and invisible in how political geographers approach politics, space, and identity across many scales and contexts. And it reflects our goal of provoking deeper questions about what immediately meets the eye.

List of Contributors

Paul C. AdamsDepartment of Geography and theEnvironmentUniversity of Texas at AustinAustin, TX, USA

John AgnewDepartment of GeographyUniversity of CaliforniaLos Angeles, CA, USA

Anne‐Laure Amilhat SzaryUniversité Grenoble AlpesCNRSSciences Po Grenoble – UGAPacteGrenoble, France

Joshua BarkanDepartment of GeographyUniversity of GeorgiaAthens, GA, USA

Silvia BinentiDepartment of Conflict andDevelopment StudiesGhent UniversityGhent, Belgium

Fabien CanteDepartment of GeographyUniversity College LondonLondon, UK

Amaël CattaruzzaFrench Institute of GeopoliticsUniversité Paris 8Saint‐Denis, France

Karen CulcasiDepartment of Geology andGeographyWest Virginia UniversityMorgantown, WV, USA

Cristina Del BiaggioPacteUniversité Grenoble Alpes, CNRS,Sciences Po GrenobleGrenoble, France

Jason DittmerDepartment of GeographyUniversity College LondonLondon, UK

Patricia EhrkampDepartment of GeographyUniversity of KentuckyLexington, KY, USA

Hilary FaxonW.A. Franke College of Forestry andConservationUniversity of MontanaMissoula, MT, USA

Md Azmeary FerdoushDepartment of Geography andEnvironmentLoughborough UniversityLoughborough, UK

Jennifer L. FluriDepartment of GeographyUniversity of ColoradoBoulder, CO, USA

Benjamin ForestDepartments of Geography andPolitical ScienceMcGill UniversityMontreal, Canada

Coleen FoxDepartment of GeographyDartmouth CollegeHanover, NH, USA

Po‐Yi HungDepartment of GeographyNational Taiwan UniversityTaipei, Taiwan

Alex JeffreyDepartment of GeographyUniversity of CambridgeCambridge, UK

Shaun JohnsonDepartment of GeographyUniversity of KansasLawrence, KS, USA

Andrew E.G. JonasSchool of Environmental SciencesUniversity of HullHull, UK

Halie KampmanDepartment of GeographyPennsylvania State UniversityUniversity Park, PA, USA

Brian KingDepartment of GeographyPennsylvania State UniversityUniversity Park, PA, USA

Kendra KintziCornell Atkinson Center forSustainabilityCornell UniversityIthaca, NY, USA

Natalie KochGeography and the EnvironmentDepartmentMaxwell School of Citizenship andPublic AffairsSyracuse UniversitySyracuse, NY, USA

Kirsten KoopPacteUniversité Grenoble Alpes, CNRS,Sciences Po GrenobleGrenoble, France

Sara KoopmanSchool of Peace and Conflict StudiesKent State UniversityKent, OH, USA

Yu‐Chia LinDepartment of GeographyNational Taiwan UniversityTaipei, Taiwan

Andrew M. LinkeSchool of Environment, Society andSustainabilityUniversity of UtahSalt Lake City, UT, USA

Virginie MamadouhDepartment of Geography, Planningand International DevelopmentStudiesUniversity of AmsterdamAmsterdam, The Netherlands

Andrea MarstonDepartment of GeographyRutgers UniversityNew Brunswick, NJ, USA

Lauren L. MartinDepartment of GeographyUniversity of DurhamDurham, UK

Sami MoisioDepartment of Geosciences andGeographyUniversity of HelsinkiHelsinki, Finland

Martin MüllerDepartment of Geography andSustainabilityUniversity of LausanneLausanne, Switzerland

Luca MuscaràDepartment of EconomicsUniversity of MoliseCampobasso, ItalyPacteUniversité Grenoble Alpes, CNRS,Sciences Po GrenobleGrenoble, France

Camille NoûsLaboratoire Cogitamuswww.cogitamus.fr

John O’LoughlinInstitute of Behavioral ScienceUniversity of ColoradoBoulder, CO, USA

Anssi PaasiGeography Research UnitUniversity of OuluOulu, Finland

Carine PachoudAGIR – INRAEUniversity of ToulouseToulouse, France

Joe PainterDepartment of GeographyDurham UniversityDurham, UK

Shaina PottsDepartment of GeographyUniversity of California Los AngelesLos Angeles, CA, USA

Joseph S. RobinsonIndependent scholar

Michael SamersDepartment of GeographyUniversity of KentuckyLexington, KY, USA

James D. SidawayDepartment of GeographyNational University of SingaporeSingapore

Chris SneddonDepartments of Geography andEnvironmental StudiesDartmouth CollegeHanover, NH, USA

Karen E. TillDepartment of GeographyMaynooth UniversityMaynooth, Ireland

Violante TorreDepartment of Geography andSustainabilityUniversity of LausanneLausanne, Switzerland

Clotilde TrivinDepartment of Geography andSustainabilityUniversity of LausanneLausanne, Switzerland

Barney WarfDepartment of GeographyUniversity of KansasLawrence, KS, USA

Philippa WilliamsSchool of GeographyQueen Mary University of LondonLondon, UK

Chih Yuan WoonDepartment of GeographyNational University of SingaporeSingapore

Herman van der WustenHuman GeographyPlanning and International DevelopmentUniversity of AmsterdamAmsterdam, The Netherlands

Notes on Contributors

Paul C. Adams is professor of geography at University of Texas at Austin. His visiting appointments have included associate professor II at the University of Bergen (2015–2020), and Ander Visiting Professor in Global Media Studies, Karlstad University (2016–2017). He has also held Fulbright Fellowships to University of Bergen (2010), and McGill University and University of Montreal (2001). His books include Geographies of Media and Communication (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2009) and Disentangling: The Geographies of Digital Disconnection (Oxford University Press, 2021, with André Jansson). He is founder of the Media and Communication Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers and currently serves as the Human Geography Editor for Annals of the American Association of Geographers. His research interests lie in communication processes as revealed through various geographical frameworks.

John Agnew is Distinguished Professor of Geography and Italian at UCLA. He was a co‐editor of two previous editions of this Companion. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and a former president of the American Association of Geographers and the Regional Studies Association. In 2019 he received the Vautrin Lud Prize in Geography. His most recent book is Hidden Geopolitics: Governance in a Globalized World (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).

Anne‐Laure Amilhat Szary is a full professor at Grenoble‐Alpes University and honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France. A political geographer dedicated to border studies, her research questions the interrelations between art and culture in and about contested places. She is a founding member of the antiAtlas of borders collective (http://www.antiatlas.net/en/), an art‐science project.

Joshua Barkan is an associate professor of geography at the University of Georgia, where he studies the role of law in shaping geographical political economy. His first book, Corporate Sovereignty: Law and Government under Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2013), examined corporations as political institutions. His current research explores the long history of concession agreements in the transformation of political space.

Silvia Binenti is a PhD student in the Department of Geography at University College London and a teaching assistant at Ghent University. Her research combines geographical and anthropological insights to look at the geopolitics of everyday objects. Her current research focuses on political T‐shirts in Italy.

Fabien Cante is lecturer in urban and development geography at University College London. His ethnographic research in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, examines the politics of peace‐building from the perspective of everyday life, urban atmospheres, and the media infrastructures that shape them. He writes and teaches across geography, anthropology, and cultural studies, centering the Black Atlantic as a comparative frame and space of critical theory.

Amaël Cattaruzza is a professor at the Institut Français de Géopolitique, Université Vincennes‐Saint‐Denis Paris 8. He studies contemporary conflictuality from various perspectives (including borders and conflicts, postconflict, military geography) and is currently particularly interested in the geopolitics of digital space as part of the GEODE (Geopolitics of the Datasphere) research group and the IFGLab laboratory. From 2020 to 2024, he was President of the French Geography Committee.

Karen Culcasi is associate professor of geography at West Virginia University. Her recent book, Displacing Territory: Syrian and Palestinian Refugees in Jordan (University of Chicago Press, 2023), won the 2023 Meridian Book Prize for Outstanding Scholarship. She is currently working on a project on anti‐Muslim discrimination in rural West Virginia. She teaches courses on Political Geography, Geographies of the “Middle East” (though she prefers the term “Southwest Asia and North Africa”), Digital Cartography, Geopolitical Theories, and Geographic Thought.

Cristina Del Biaggio, affiliated to the Pacte research center, is assistant professor in geography at the Université Grenoble Alpes. She analyzes the geographical, political, and social dimensions of migration. Her research currently focuses on the conditions under which migrants cross the Alpine borders. Adopting a forensic architecture approach, she co‐investigated on the death of a migrant woman at the French–Italian border. She is co‐leading a project aiming at building a unified database of deaths at Europe's external and internal borders.

Jason Dittmer is professor of political geography at University College London. His research focuses on the everyday dimensions of geopolitics, from popular culture to diplomacy. His current research focuses on heritage in Gibraltar.

Patricia Ehrkamp is Arts & Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. Her research examines contemporary processes of refugee geopolitics, trauma, immigration, citizenship, and democracy in the United States and Europe.

Hilary Faxon is an assistant professor of environmental social science at the W.A. Franke College of Forestry and Conservation at the University of Montana. Her research interests include struggles for land and democracy in Myanmar and environment, development, and technology in Southeast Asia.

Md Azmeary Ferdoush is lecturer in geography and environment at Loughborough University. He is the author of Sovereign Atonement: Citizenship, Territory and the State at the Bangladesh‐India Border (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and co‐editor of Borders and Mobility in South Asia and Beyond (Amsterdam University Press, 2018). He was named Stanley D. Brunn Early Career Scholar by the Political Geography Specialty Group of the American Association of Geographers in 2023.

Jennifer L. Fluri is a professor of geography at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a feminist political geographer whose research has focused on gender, geopolitics, and economic development in Afghanistan during the nearly 20‐year US occupation. With the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, her research transitioned to an examination of the gendered experiences of Afghan evacuees, refugees, and asylum seekers in the United States and Canada, and the continuation of women‐led enterprises in Afghanistan. She has authored over 40 peer‐reviewed articles and book chapters, is co‐author of three books, and has co‐edited two books. She is the co‐founder and co‐director of the Housing Research and Education Center, which works to inform political policy, amplify community voices, support agencies working on housing access and affordability, and build relationships with community stakeholders and residents to strengthen housing access for all.

Benjamin Forest is an associate professor of geography at McGill University and is affiliated with the Department of Political Science, Centre for the Study of Democratic Citizenship, and McGill Institute for the Study of Canada. He received his PhD from UCLA in 1997 and taught at Dartmouth College from 1998 to 2006. His current research examines redistricting and political community, the political representation of ethnic minority groups and women, the politics of memory and identity, and various issues of governance.

Coleen Fox is a senior lecturer in the Geography Department at Dartmouth College. Her research examines transnational environmental governance, the political ecology of river restoration, and conservation politics.

Po‐Yi Hung is a professor of geography at National Taiwan University. He uses food, agriculture, and fisheries as lenses to look into border and territoriality, mobility and infrastructure, nature and society. He has conducted research in Taiwan, China, the Highlands of Southeast Asia, and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. He is the author of Tea Production, Land Use Politics, and Ethnic Minorities: Struggling over Dilemmas in China's Southwest Frontier (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

Alex Jeffrey is professor of political and legal geography at the University of Cambridge. His latest is book is The Edge of Law: Legal Geographies of a War Crimes Court (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Shaun Johnson is a PhD student in geography at the University of Kansas. He earned his BS in Geography and Political Science from Illinois State University and his MA in Geography from the University of Kansas. His research interests include electoral and political geographies and the study of digital networks of care.

Andrew E.G. Jonas is professor of human geography at the University of Hull. His PhD is from The Ohio State University under the supervision of Kevin R. Cox. His co‐authored and edited books include The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives Two Decades Later (SUNY Press, 1999), Interrogating Alterity (Ashgate, 2010), Territory, State and Urban Politics (Ashgate, 2012), Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction (Wiley‐Blackwell, 2015), Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics (Routledge, 2018), and Handbook on Changing Geographies of the State (Edward Elgar, 2020).

Halie Kampman is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University. Her current work focuses on the opioid epidemic in Appalachia, where she collaborates with the interdepartmental Consortium on Substance Use and Addiction. She earned her PhD in environmental studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she led collaborative social science–oriented projects on food and health geographies in Senegal and Ghana.

Brian King is professor and head of the Department of Geography at the Pennsylvania State University. He is a broadly trained geographer whose work focuses on livelihoods, conservation and development, environmental change, and human health. Over the past decade he has worked in projects in southern Africa exploring how social and ecological systems are being transformed by HIV/AIDS. More recently, his laboratory group has examined how Covid‐19 is transforming the US opioid epidemic.

Kendra Kintzi is a postdoctoral fellow with the Atkinson Center for Sustainability at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the political ecology of decarbonization, smart development, and the possibilities for just environmental governance in Southwest Asia.

Natalie Koch is professor of geography at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs. She is a political geographer who works on geopolitics, authoritarianism, identity politics, and state power in hydrocarbon‐rich countries, primarily in the Arabian Peninsula. In addition to editing several collections, her monographs include The Geopolitics of Spectacle: Space, Synecdoche, and the New Capitals of Asia (Cornell University Press, 2018) and Arid Empire: The Entangled Fates of Arizona and Arabia (Verso, 2022).

Kirsten Koop is a geographer and assistant professor in geography at Université Grenoble Alpes. She works at the intersection of critical development geography, territorial sciences, and sustainability transitions studies and she is interested in the levers for societal transformations in times of global change. She is currently doing research on changing imaginaries, narratives, and practices induced by citizen initiatives in the Alps.

Sara Koopman is an assistant professor in the School of Peace and Conflict Studies at Kent State, which is a living memorial to the student peace protesters killed there by the National Guard in 1970. She is a feminist political geographer interested in the sociospatial aspects of peace and peace‐building and how interlocking systems of unequal power and privilege shape those. She looks at solidarity efforts that work across both distance and difference to build peace and justice with a particular focus on global North–South international solidarity, how it can fall into colonial patterns, and how to avoid these. She is particularly inspired by organizing for peace in Colombia, in which she has long been active.

Yu‐Chia Lin is a research assistant at National Taiwan University, where he earned his master's degree in geography. His research interests generally are at the intersection of political and economic geographies.

Andrew M. Linke is associate professor of geography, University of Utah. He obtained his PhD in 2013 from the University of Colorado‐Boulder Department of Geography. His research interests lie in political violence, political geography, human–environment interactions, spatial statistics, and geographic information systems. He has published research articles in Political Geography, American Sociological Review, Global Environmental Change, Scientific Reports, Population and Environment, Journal of Peace Research, and other journals.

Virginie Mamadouh is associate professor of political and cultural geography at the University of Amsterdam. She was a coeditor of the previous edition of this Companion. She has published on geopolitics, globalization, diplomacy, and European integration and she served as the chair of the Commission on Political Geography of the International Geographical Union.

Andrea Marston is assistant professor of geography at Rutgers University. Her research explores the political economics and cultural politics of resource governance in Latin America. She is author of Subterranean Matters: Cooperative Mining and Resource Nationalism in Plurinational Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2024).

Lauren L. Martin is associate professor of political geography in the Department of Geography at Durham University. She has published research on immigration detention, carceral economies of migration control, and humanitarian technology. Her current research explores the politics of technological change in refugee humanitarianism and refugee reception in postindustrial cities.

Sami Moisio is professor of spatial planning and policy in the Department of Geosciences and Geography at the University of Helsinki. His recent books include Geopolitics of the Knowledge‐Based Economy (Routledge, 2018) and The Urban Field: Capital and Governmentality in the Age of Techno‐monopoly (co‐authored with Ugo Rossi, Agenda Publishing, 2024).

Martin Müller is an urban and political geographer and professor in the Department of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Lausanne. In addition to maintaining a theoretical interest in the overlaps of and differences between actor‐network theory and assemblage thinking, his current research looks at the skewed geopolitics of knowledge production and at cities in the global world. Using the concept of the “Global Easts,” he seeks to take global theory beyond the binaries of North and South and expand the horizons of decolonial theory.

Luca Muscarà is professor of political geography, geopolitics, globalization, and sustainable development at Università del Molise, Department of Economics. An Honorary Fellow of the Société de Géographie, Paris, he is a research associate at Pacte, Laboratoire de Sciences Sociales, Grenoble, from where he co‐developed an exhibition on Jean Gottmann's photo archives. His recent historical research includes works on David Lowenthal and Michael Walzer.

Camille Noûs was born in France in 2020, embodying the community's contribution to research work in the form of a collective signature. This co‐signature asserts the collaborative and open nature of the production and dissemination of knowledge, under the control of the academic community. Camille Noûs is a member of the multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary Cogitamus research group. By co‐authoring this text with Camille Noûs, the authors of Chapter 9 are endorsing the values promoted by this collective signature. For more information, see: https://www.cogitamus.fr/camilleen.html.

John O’Loughlin is College Professor of Distinction in Geography and a Fellow of the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado‐Boulder. He obtained his PhD in 1973 from the Pennsylvania State University. He was editor of Political Geography 1981–2015 and Eurasian Geography and Economics 2001–2017. His research interests are in the geographies of conflict, including the relationship between climate change and conflict in Sub‐Saharan Africa, especially Kenya, and territorial conflicts in the former Soviet Union.

Anssi Paasi is emeritus professor of geography at the University of Oulu. He is the author of Territories, Boundaries and Consciousness (Wiley, 1996). His coedited books include The Sage Handbook of Human Geography (Sage, 2014), The New European Frontiers (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014), Regional Worlds: Advancing the Geography of Regions (Routledge, 2015), Handbook on the Geographies of Territories and Regions (Edward Elgar, 2018), and Borderless Worlds for Whom? (Routledge, 2019).

Carine Pachoud has a Master’s degree in agronomy and a PhD in geography. She holds a junior professor chair at France's National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE) in Toulouse. She analyses societal transformations from a territorial perspective and develops participatory approaches to accompany transformations, focusing on mountain areas.

Joe Painter is professor of geography at Durham University, where he teaches urban and political geography. He works on geographies of state formation, urban and regional governance, European integration, territory, and migration. His books include New Borders: Hotspots and the European Migration Regime (Pluto Press, 2019) and Rethinking Territory (Edward Elgar, forthcoming).

Shaina Potts is an associate professor of geography and global studies at UCLA. She is an economic, political, and legal geographer with a focus on the articulation of transnational political economy, geopolitics, and law. She is especially interested in the mutual constitution of technical, legal, and economic practices, on the one hand, and sovereignty, empire, and territoriality, on the other.

Joseph S. Robinson is a political and cultural geographer whose work sits at the intersection of memory studies, transitional justice, trauma studies, peace and conflict studies, and the study of time and society. He received his PhD in Geography from Maynooth University in 2020 and is the author of Transitional Justice and the Politics of Inscription: Memory, Space, and Narrative in Northern Ireland (Routledge, 2018).

Michael Samers, who obtained his DPhil from Oxford University, is professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, having previously held positions at the Universities of Liverpool and Nottingham. A Fulbright Scholarship awardee in France, and former co‐editor of Geoforum, he is the author of Migration (with Michael Collyer, Routledge, 2017, 2nd ed.), Cities, Migration and Governance: Beyond Scales and Levels (with Felicitas Hillmann, Routledge, 2024) and Migration and Nationalism (with Jens Rydgren, Edward Elgar, 2024).

James D. Sidaway has served as professor of political geography at the National University of Singapore since 2012. He previously taught at the University of Amsterdam and several universities in the UK. Drawing from his broad interests in political geography, James's longstanding fascination with the history and philosophy of geographical thought and the relationship between geography and a range of traditions in area studies have recently led him to studies in decolonial Muslim geographies.

Chris Sneddon is a professor in the Departments of Geography and Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College. His research focuses on environmental politics, the geopolitics of development, water conflicts, the politics of environmental knowledge production, and the hydropolitics of the Mekong River basin.

Karen E. Till is professor of cultural geography at Maynooth University and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. She collaborates with diverse publics on initiatives supporting place‐based memory‐work and care in cities wounded by state‐perpetrated violence. Her publications include The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (University of Minnesota, 2004) and the Traveller Community Mapping Coolock Story Map: Storied Places of Belonging and Unbelonging, co‐authored with Pavee Point Traveller and Roma Centre, TravAct Coolock, and Maynooth Geography.

Violante Torre is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant in urban geography in the Department of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Lausanne. Her doctoral research project focuses on decentering iconic buildings by understanding them as made, remade, and renegotiated on the ground through human–material relations, everyday practices, and affective experiences. Her work focuses on Istanbul's Hagia Sophia and its latest conversion from museum to mosque, centering city dwellers' experiences of symbolic and conflictive urban space.

Clotilde Trivin is a PhD candidate in urban geography in the Department of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Lausanne. Her Swiss National Science Foundation–supported doctoral project investigates large‐scale cultural buildings as “affective buildings,” exploring both how their sociomaterial entanglements are experienced and assembled as well as enmeshed in broader urban assemblages. Drawing on more‐than‐human geographies and architectural geographies, her project examines the ways in which the European Solidarity Centre (Gdańsk, Poland) is materially assembled, affectively experienced, and politically mobilized to make and unmake urban imaginaries.

Barney Warf is a professor of geography at the University of Kansas. His research and teaching interests lie within the broad domain of human geography. He has studied a wide array of topics, particularly information technologies as viewed through the lens of political economy and social theory. He maintains an active interest in political geography, including elections, voting technologies, the US Electoral College, and the geographies of Donald Trump. He also edits Geojournal.

Philippa Williams is professor of geography in the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London. She researches, teaches, and writes on experiences of the state, citizenship, violence/nonviolence, everyday peace, and the everyday geopolitics of digital India. Philippa is co‐author of Privacy Techtonics: Digital Geopolitics, WhatsApp and Democracy in India (Bristol University Press, 2025).

Chih Yuan Woon is an associate professor at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. He is a political geographer who has research interests in critical geopolitics, postcolonial geographies, and issues to do with peace, nonviolence, and security. Currently he is examining the geopolitical and geoeconomic implications of China's “rise,” contextualizing such debates through the Belt and Road Initiative as well as China's ongoing interest and interventions in the polar regions. He has served as the co‐editor of Territory, Politics, Governance (2019–2023) and the RGS‐IBG Book Series (2020–2023) and sits on the editorial boards of Critical Military Studies, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Geography Compass (Political Geography Section), Territory, Politics, Governance and The Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography.

Herman van der Wusten is professor emeritus of the University of Amsterdam, where he taught political geography. He has studied Dutch electoral politics and has also been active in the field of international relations. His current main interests are political center formation in Europe, EU governance, and diplomacy.

Chapter 1Introduction

Virginie Mamadouh1, Natalie Koch2, Chih Yuan Woon3, and John Agnew4

1Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

2Geography and the Environment Department, Maxwell School of Citizenship & Public Affairs, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA

3Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore

4Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

On July 26, 2024, the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Paris showed the usual tension between the celebration of the movement's values of “excellence, respect, and friendship” on the one hand and nationalism‐infused competition between states on the other. Yet the opening was also innovative: for the first time, the parade of national sports delegations was staged outside a stadium, replaced by a fleet of vessels of various shapes and sizes crossing the city on the Seine River. In this way, Paris's urban spaces were used to invite the Games' global audience to feel included in the spectacle to a new and remarkable degree. But political divides were not cast off in the Seine display. As with all events since the modern Olympics began in 1896, the alleged political neutrality of the Games was ambiguous: national sports federations are organized territorially but some are states and others are not. The US territory Puerto Rico, for example, has had its own Olympic team since 1948, and in 2016 the International Olympic Committee introduced a Refugee Olympic Team. And as in years before, 2024 saw certain delegations deprived of their national flag. These anomalies originated in international sanctions (e.g., against Russia and Belarus) or national vetoes (e.g., the People's Republic of China accepting Taiwan's participation as “Chinese Taipei,” but with a strict ban on all Taiwanese flags and symbols at Olympic events and surrounding public spaces).

The intersection of sports and politics is well established (Koch 2017). Mega sporting events like the Olympics vividly demonstrate how national sentiments are galvanized among sports participants and supporters alike. Sometimes they can be the source of national unity; other times, they can kindle or reignite national divides. A month before the Olympics the 2024 UEFA European Football Championship tournament saw the spark of various nationalist flashpoints. Fans from Serbia screamed about Kosovo during their games, even though Kosovo was not a participant. They were remembering the still‐rankling secession of largely Albanian Kosovo as they attended what was supposed to be a football game, not a political rally. Scottish fans played nice everywhere, but when their team was eliminated in a loss to Germany, England fans celebrated in excess. The football festivities in the summer of 2024 remind us that Europe's football fans, self‐selected as they may be, firmly grasp the nationalist sentiments that still haunt Europe nearly 80 years after the end of World War II. The irony is that many of the players of Europe's national teams are first‐ and second‐generation immigrants, whose very presence in Europe is an issue that excites contemporary nationalism more than the traditional animosities, such as England versus Germany.

Pundits and academics alike have asserted that the recent revival of nationalist sentiments is a response to the excesses of globalization, including the decline of the welfare state, the loss of supposedly preferable manufacturing jobs, and the seeming collapse of national‐ethnic homogeneity in the face of dramatic increases in international migration – at least in the United States and Western Europe. Nostalgia for lost golden ages, such as the 1950s postwar boomtimes in the United States and Germany, and waning hope for a brighter future in the local places people call home, have also been identified as significant factors. Fictive as it may be, reinstating national territorial sovereignty is cast as a solution in this reactionary nationalist storyline. In the United States this has manifested in the “Make America Great Again” campaign of the far‐right former president and president‐elect Donald Trump, and in the United Kingdom it fueled the ill‐fated Brexit decision, which saw Britain leave the supranational community of the European Union (EU).

This trend to what can be called “national populism” mobilizes particular geopolitical imaginaries in the United States and Western Europe, but it is far more widespread. From India to Brazil to Russia, Argentina, Israel, South Africa, and China, similar sentiments are on display. The commonalities include increasing hostility to international cooperation and the so‐called liberal international order, suspicion about foreign investors and foreign aid, anger toward US hypocrisy about the integrity of only some national borders, fear of foreign interference in national affairs, and defensiveness against liberal cultural trends emanating from the so‐called West that challenge “traditional” norms about gender, religion, and social hierarchies.

The reactionary spirit of today's national populism is hardly new. But it has taken on new life following a series of major geopolitical shifts, including the global financial crisis of 2008–2009, the Arab Spring movements beginning in late 2010, the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, and the Covid‐19 pandemic. In each case, populist politicians reacted to events by playing to the anger and resentments of populations experiencing poor employment prospects, facing corrupt elites cashing in on political ties, and threatening cultural shifts. And in many cases, immigration and territorial borders became an easy focus for populist attacks, even though populists seldom acknowledge that contemporary migration stems from the legacies of colonialism and neocolonial interventionism, and the authoritarianism of governments and corporations alike.

For example, the 2015 influx of refugees in Europe was largely the result of the Arab Spring uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa – some of which toppled US‐backed authoritarian regimes (as in Egypt and Tunisia) and others of which led to prolonged civil war (as in Syria and Yemen), but none of which has since brought democracy and civil liberties, let alone economic prosperity, to their countries. This failure is not a failure of vision on the part of the Arab democracy activists: their fight may have started by attacking an oppressive regime, but they found themselves fighting a structure of oppression facilitated by Western empire, past and present, in the region. This includes a long history of militarism, most recently reflected in the disastrous results of the United States' interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan in the so‐called War on Terror (from 2002 onward).

But as with the British and French colonial undertakings in the region in the previous century, American war‐making in some places was accompanied by supporting their autocratic neighbors, as in Egypt. Yet European narratives about the 2015 immigrant “invasion” did not reflect on these imperial histories and presents, instead preferring sensational stories that blamed the victims. Similar victim‐blaming attacks on migrants and asylum seekers have been seen at highly politicized border crossing points between the United States and Mexico, Myanmar and Bangladesh, Syria and Turkey, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and Sudan and Ethiopia. Politicians fueling populist agitation consistently overlook the fact that the individuals crossing these borders are fleeing civil war, genocide, unemployment, and failed states – and sometimes all of these – instead framing their national communities as righteous defenders of their homelands. Nationalist protectionism, enacted through xenophobic rhetoric and harsh border security measures, was already on the rise before the Covid‐19 pandemic began in early 2020, but that gave yet more fuel to this fire.

Covid‐19 showed that planetary problems invariably cross territorial borders, but many political leaders around the world intensified their commitment to the dream that closed borders were the solution. The result was ill‐coordinated global responses that led to a set of disparate and ultimately deadly outcomes. In many countries, border closures revived the sense of being alone in the world and increased calls for national autonomy and even autarchy, rather than encouraging a deeper sense of global community. This spur to reterritorialization was enhanced by the perception of vulnerability to the vagaries of global supply chains shipping goods halfway around the world, including those necessary for dealing with Covid‐19 like personal protective equipment. On top of disturbed supply chains due to work and transport stoppages, one of the most iconic pictures from the pandemic is of the gigantic container ship the Ever Given stuck in the Suez Canal in March 2021. Behind it, hundreds of other ships sat waiting to make the trip through the canal, while hundreds of others rerouted to older, longer shipping lanes around Africa. The call to domesticate production was not an unsurprising result of both the supply‐chain backups and the price increases that followed. This period was a turning point when retreating behind familiar borders looked like a solution for many.

The wars erupting in Ukraine in 2022 and Gaza in 2023 would also seem to suggest a revival of nationalist imperatives enacted at territorial borders. Both can be viewed as border disputes, but they are also much more than that. Each involves competing claims to parts or the whole of some other national territory. There are many places where such conflicts could now erupt, for example between China and Taiwan, the two Koreas, Sudan and South Sudan, or Venezuela and Guyana. There also many devastating so‐called civil wars, often with external sponsors, such as those in Myanmar, Yemen, and Sudan, as well as countries in which the writ of central government does not hold in regions and localities dominated by narco‐gangs and insurgents, such as Mexico, Haiti, Ecuador, and Colombia. All of this is occurring in a geopolitical context in which the United States is politically polarized over its precise role in intervening in international territorial disputes, but is nonetheless wary of ceding its global leadership to states like China and Russia.

Territorial questions continue to be at the center of geopolitical metanarratives today, but economic questions are never far away. For example, economic hegemony is a fixture of the perennial prophecies of a “new Cold War” between the United States and China (Schindler et al. 2024