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Lockdown and the intimate: Entanglements of terror, virus, and militarism
Abstract
Despite their wide implementation since the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns are not spatial interventions unique to public health emergencies but have also recently been used to tackle the aftermath of acts of terrorism against crowded public spaces in cities. In this paper, we argue that lockdown, as a state-sanctioned security measure, bears longer political (often violent) histories that link individual mobility to geopolitics in corporeal and even visceral ways. Drawing on research on the lockdown of Brussels in 2015 and 2016 and the state of emergency in France between 2015 and 2017. We put these counterterrorism lockdowns in conversation with the lockdowns imposed as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. The paper analyses the embodied, emotional and spatial politics of lockdown through the lens of intimate geopolitics. Specifically, we explore two themes: the reconfiguring of the intimate sphere in the terrorism/pandemic nexus and the curation of micro-vigilance between counterterrorism and public health. In doing so, we argue that the militarism of the state responses to COVID-19 virus needs to be understood as more than discursive framing of the “war on virus”, but rather a making present of a “war-like” situation to intimate bodies, spaces and subjectivities. The sphere of the intimate is thus considered at the forefront of the spatial logic of lockdown, as it deploys assumptions about (in)security, threat, danger and preparedness in ways that entrench and exacerbate existing social inequalities.
... In political geography, early feminist approaches (Dowler and Sharp, 2001;Hyndman, 2001;Smith, 2001;Staeheli et al., 2004) have developed into a more recent and diverse critical scholarship into the reproductions of geopolitics in the realms of the everyday, affective (Militz and Schurr, 2016;Woon, 2013), corporeal (Fluri, 2011), and intimate (Barabantseva et al., 2021;Laketa and Fregonese, 2022). There has also been substantial engagement with emotions in relation to global politics (Dodds and Kirby, 2013;Pain and Smith, 2008;Woon, 2013).Ó Tuathail (2003 argues that the 'affective tsunami' of the War on Terror (WoT) 'mixes the cultural into the corporeal' and turns emotions into factors in the diplomatic discourses, performances, calculations, and actions underpinning the invasion of Iraq. ...
How are terror threats and counterterrorism measures experienced in everyday urban spaces? We argue that thinking atmospherically about the spaces of urban encounters with (counter)terrorism is important, firstly, to identify and question feelings and dispositions shaped by discourses, practices, and infrastructures of (counter)terrorism; secondly, to contribute spatial perspectives of felt experience to literatures on security and (counter)terrorism in geography and beyond; thirdly, to connect official understandings of (counter)terrorism with its everyday felt experiences and materialities. We highlight two conceptual and empirical arenas – the crowd and the question of difference – where atmospheric approaches to urban (counter)terrorism can be developed.
... Almost all institutions of higher education reported to UNESCO that they had been negatively impacted by COVID (Marinoni, Van't Land, and Jensen 2020). And beyond schools and universities, other educational infrastructures and activities tied to everything from the intimate contexts of personal dwelling and viability to the institutions of social cohesion and stability were upturned by the pandemic (Blanco 2021;Jeffrey and Dyson 2022;Lewis and Morgan 2021;Laketa and Fregonese 2022). In this grim context educators turned to whatever tools were closest to hand to jerry-rig lock-down-compliant teaching efforts. ...
While COVID-19 has underlined many global interdependencies , it has also made clear the ways in which these globalised connections are structured by profound inequalities. Teaching in this context has been deeply challenging for many educators around the world. For related reasons, though, the pandemic has also created new provocations for global citizenship education (GCE) attuned specifically to the problems of health vulnerability and sub-citizenship caused by socio-economic inequalities. Describing one such educational opportunity, we examine the lessons learned from connecting two university courses across continents through a Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL) collaboration in the middle of the pandemic. Our courses brought together students from India and the US online to study how health vulnerabilities under COVID compared in the two countries. The collaborations of our Indian and American students helped them to develop practical skills in communication across a vast distance, while also offering cosmopolitical opportunities for learning ‘other-wise’. Based on their reflections on their learning in the course, we suggest that the COIL approach provided a useful set of lessons about how global citizenship education can be enhanced through transnational and collaborative, but also critical and comparative attention to sub-citizenship in the world at large.
This article draws on ethnographic work with tour guides in Kingston and local radio animateurs in Abidjan to document their “atmotechnics” – the practices through which they enliven urban atmospheres. Through cross-contextual juxtapositions, we delve into the relational intricacies and contextual variegation of atmotechnics. Crucially, we point to their complexity and significance in cities whose atmospheres are fractured by racialized socio-economic divides and practices of territorial control. We show that tour guides and radio hosts animate atmospheres of conviviality that are radically indeterminate: they evade and unsettle dominant models of “reconciliation” or “social cohesion,” inviting us instead to think/feel commonality within and despite fractures. In making this argument, we contribute to scholarship on urban atmospheres, which acknowledges their political nature without considering the street-level agencies that shape them; and we extend scholarship that theorizes conviviality as a non-normative mode of interrelation.
Between 2018 and 2020, dramatic changes in US-Mexico policy transformed experiences of asylum on the border. Quotas on applications at ports of entry (known as "metering"), the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and the deployment of the pandemic era “lockdown” through Title 42, each severely limited asylum opportunities. In response, a host of informal waiting lists emerged, developed and were utilized by a binational network of non-governmental and government agencies, shelters, cartels, and individuals. In this article we use a feminist geographic lens to examine the intimate geopolitics of esperar created by these lists. Via in-depth oral histories with Mexican asylum-seekers, shelter staff, legal advocates, and the wider border bureaucracy, we examine their formation, everyday management, the slow violences and immediate threats they posed, and their work as an informal technology of state control. Our analysis demonstrates how the lists operated as informal tactics of diversion and delay, producing a false sense of certainty while using indefinite waiting times as soft and surreptitious mechanisms to block displaced people’s legal claims for asylum. This imposed distinctly gendered burdens on women and youth. However, we also identify how the lists, where appropriated by migrants themselves, became tools to resist the hierarchies of the US nation-state and its territorial impositions. Our work extends established political geographic analyses of migration by attending to the interscalar, quotidian, and embodied realities of border practice – manifest amidst today’s lockdown by the slow violences of waiting.
In this introduction to the Special Issue ‘Infrastructural Stigma and Urban Vulnerability’, we outline the need to join up debates on infrastructural exclusion on the one hand and urban stigma on the other. We argue that doing so will allow us to develop a better understanding of the co-constitutive relationship between the material and the symbolic structures of the city shaping urban exclusion and vulnerability. Positing that stigma is not merely a symbolic force but has significant material effects, we show how urban dwellers often experience it in deeply embodied ways, including through impacts on their physical health. Furthermore, stigma is not only imposed on the built environment through discourse, it also emanates from the materiality of the city; this agentic role of the city is often disregarded in sociologically-informed approaches to urban stigma. When infrastructures become sites of contestation about urban inclusion, stigma can be utilised by stigmatised residents to demand connection to public networks, and the wider symbolic inclusion this entails. Through examining the issue of infrastructural stigma in cities and urban territories across the Global North and Global South, as well as the places in between, the nine articles in this Special Issue pay attention to the global relationalities of infrastructural stigma. Ultimately, our focus on the infrastructural origins of stigma draws attention to the structural causes of urban inequality – a reality which is often occluded by both stigma itself and by prevalent academic approaches to understanding it.
The COVID-19 pandemic has at once exposed, exploited and exacerbated the health-damaging transformations in world order tied to neoliberal globalization. Our central argument is that the same neoliberal plans, policies and practices advanced globally in the name of promoting wealth have proved disastrous in terms of protecting health in the context of the pandemic. To explain why, we point to a combinatory cascade of socio-viral co-pathogenesis that we call neoliberal disease. From the vectors of vulnerability created by unequal and unstable market societies, to the reduced response capacities of market states and health systems, to the constrained ability of official global health security agencies and regulations to offer effective global health governance, we show how the virus has found weaknesses in a market-transformed global body politic that it has used to viral advantage. By thereby turning the inequalities and inadequacies of neoliberal societies and states into global health insecurities the pandemic also raises questions about whether we now face an inflection point when political dis-ease with neoliberal norms will lead to new kinds of post-neoliberal policy-making. We conclude, nevertheless, that the prospects for such political-economic transformation on a global scale remain quite limited despite all the extraordinary damage of neoliberal disease described in the article.
Urban conflict literature has attempted new comparisons between contested cities in conflict zones and cities with no armed conflict. This literature tends to use representational frameworks around defensive planning and normative government discourses. In this article, I propose to expand these frameworks and to engage with epistemologies of lived experience to produce new relational accounts linking “conflict cities” with “ordinary cities”. The article accounts for the lived, sensory and atmospheric in exploring the legacies of conflict on the everyday urban environments. It then reflects on the everyday and experiential effects of counterterrorism in ordinary cities. While this is designed to minimize threat, it also alters urban spatiality in a way reminiscent of urban conflict zones. It then explores the unequal impacts of counterterrorism across urban publics, and their experiential connections with practices of counterinsurgency. The article is structured around two ‘shockwaves’ entwining lived experiences across seemingly unrelatable urban settings.
Much of the contemporary scholarship reproduces a disembodied approach to (counter)terrorism that fails to account for bodies, experiences, and subjectivities “at the sharp end.” To broaden the empirical focus and the ensuing blind spots, this article analyzes the varied and interdisciplinary approaches that put to the fore the intimacies of terrorism and the responses to it. It asks: What can the conceptual and methodological framework on embodiment and affect tell us about (counter)terrorism and terror threat? The conclusion argues that this framework does not merely extend the apparatus of terror/security to lived experience, but rather seeks to reframe the dominant notions of what terror/security is, how it is practiced, by whom, and with what effects.
This article focuses on the massive house searches and house arrests that occurred during the state of emergency in France between 2015 and 2017. It draws from critical studies on counterterrorism as well as sociology of the intimate to analyze the aftermath of these measures on the Muslim households that experienced these procedures without being sentenced afterward. It examines how house arrests and searches redefine the respondents’ relationships to their domestic space and local environment as these places become spaces of fear, surveillance, discipline, and self-control. The analysis reveals a set of embodied and discursive strategies to prove an innocence that implies a reappropriation of state categories around social integration and the promotion of an acceptable and non-suspect religiosity.
Purpose
This paper aims to explore the mental health impact of domestic violence and abuse within the context of the global pandemic. This paper will explore factors contributing to rising rates of violence and mental health problems exacerbated by stressors related to the global pandemic, including public health measures implemented to prevent the spread of coronovirus disease (COVID-19). It will also explore what can be learnt from the current pandemic situation to prevent domestic violence and abuse in future emergency situations and pandemics and will provide suggestions, for policy, practice and future research.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is informed by discussion between authors as experts in the field, their reflection on the current situation and review of available literature. Synthesising information from best practice guidance across the global literature, this paper proposes a best practice framework using an ecological approach to address intimate partner violence in times of pandemic, crisis or natural disaster.
Findings
This paper aimed to explore the mental health impact of domestic violence and abuse within the context of the global pandemic.
Originality/value
This paper provides an analysis of available literature and explains impact of COVID-19 on domestic violence and abuse.
In the context of current decolonial geographical debates calling for action-oriented approaches to changing geographical knowledge construction, we propose cuerpo-territorio as a way to achieve this goal in Anglophone feminist geography. In Anglophone geography, emotions and embodiment have been studied through a range of ethnographic methods. There are intrinsic limitations of verbal and written data, however, because sensitive emotions might be triggered by an interviewer’s questions and participants might be reluctant to share those. Cuerpo-territorio is a distinct geographical, decolonial feminist method grounded in the ontological unity between bodies and territories. We show how this visual, hands-on, and participatory method can overcome these limits and bring about coproduced validated knowledge. By having participants draw the territory on the body, knowledge is cocreated with the voices and experiences of participants having primacy in the research process. This coconstructed knowledge is produced in an accessible format for participants and the general public, facilitating a process of advocacy by participants themselves. We make the case that research in Anglophone feminist geography concerning embodiment can benefit from employing cuerpo-territorio. This article responds to the need for more practical and methodological action toward decolonizing geography and strengthens existing literature in Anglophone feminist, decolonial, and indigenous geographies that make the connection between embodiment and land through the use of the cuerpo-territorio method from Latin America.
We argue that predictions of a ‘tsunami’ of mental health problems as a consequence of the pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) and the lockdown are overstated; feelings of anxiety and sadness are entirely normal reactions to difficult circumstances, not symptoms of poor mental health. Some people will need specialised mental health support, especially those already leading tough lives; we need immediate reversal of years of underfunding of community mental health services. However, the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on the most disadvantaged, especially BAME people placed at risk by their social and economic conditions, were entirely predictable. Mental health is best ensured by urgently rebuilding the social and economic supports stripped away over the last decade. Governments must pump funds into local authorities to rebuild community services, peer support, mutual aid and local community and voluntary sector organisations. Health care organisations must tackle racism and discrimination to ensure genuine equal access to universal health care. Government must replace highly conditional benefit systems by something like a universal basic income. All economic and social policies must be subjected to a legally binding mental health audit. This may sound unfeasibly expensive, but the social and economic costs, not to mention the costs in personal and community suffering, though often invisible, are far greater.
Drawing on non-representational theories in geography and beyond, this commentary provides an autoethnographic account of the material and spatial dimensions of the law as well as its effects and affects on bodies in-between two countries, Italy and Finland, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
This commentary first documents the ways in which President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration has evoked securitized discursive strategies that frame Brazil’s national response to COVID-19 as a matter of defense instead of public health. We then ask: What does it mean to talk about the virus and the ways to address it through war-framings? We argue that the Bolsonaro administration has framed the COVID-19 pandemic as an extra-territorial threat in an effort to create internal stability while failing to handle the matter effectively. Such politically motivated spatial framings inhibit an effective response in Brazil and pose a severe threat to public health. Once COVID-19 becomes securitized, the response is framed by the military bureaucracy rather than public health authorities, resulting in dangerous consequences.
The emergence of “situational awareness” as a response to the perception of a new terrorism in European cities marks a significant shift in the conceptualization of security. Focusing on a recently introduced German Federal Police program that trains ordinary officers in their capability to handle “complex life threatening situations of police operation” the article explores how situational awareness introduces a warrior logic into policing and urban subjectivity and modifies our understanding of security at large. It points us to the limitations of preparedness and concretizes the hitherto elusive call to resilience. Three analytical dimensions – space-time, sensing and connectivity – will be developed to render the situation thinkable for empirical research as well as to grasp security as a “live” mode of government.
This paper explores the affective making of geopolitics through an analysis of how long-term residents of Turkey narrate their encounters with displaced people from Syria. Situating these narratives in relation to Turkey’s policies and practices concerning the Syrian war and Syrian refugees, our project asks: What are the affective dimensions of encountering Syrians in Turkey and how do these encounters unfold an embodied geopolitics on the street and in neighborhoods? Our analysis of focus group conversations (conducted between 2014 and 2016 in Istanbul, Konya, and Malatya) centers on three dimensions of the affective geopolitics of the Syrian refugee crisis in Turkey. First, we draw out feelings of threatening proximity, in which the denigration of Syrian bodies and lives converges with the desire for a spatial organization of bodies that would put literal boundaries between “us” and “them.” Second, we present how the Adalet and Kalkınma Partisi’s geopolitical orientation towards leadership in the Muslim Middle East and official rhetoric regarding Turkey’s obligation to the Syrians as part of Muslim unity do not preclude the anxiety citizens express about the embodied presence of displaced Syrians in their daily lives. And finally, we address the politics of pain and the problems of translation in the encounter with the other. Here, we argue that the imminent, embodied, and affective challenge posed by the arrival of more than three million Syrians in Turkey concerns the ethics of how to hear, understand, and respond to the pain of others.
This article investigates the limits of the concept of militarization and proposes an alternative concept: martial politics. It argues that the concept of militarization falsely presumes a peaceful liberal order that is encroached on by military values or institutions. Arguing instead that we must grapple with the ways in which war and politics are mutually shaped, the article proposes the concept of martial politics as a means for examining how politics is shot-through with war-like relations. It argues that stark distinctions cannot be made between war and peace, military and civilian or national and social security. This argument is made in relation to two empirical sites: the police and the university. Arguing against the notion that either the police or the university have been “militarized,” the article provides a historical analysis of the ways in which these institutions have always already been implicated in martial politics – that is, of producing White social and economic order through war-like relations with Indigenous, racialized, disabled, poor and other communities. It concludes by assessing the political and scholarly opportunities that are opened up for feminists through the rejection of the concept of militarization in favor of the concept of martial politics.
Nearly 15 years after 9/11, it is time to grapple with the way in which imperatives of preemption have made their way into routine security practice and bureaucratic operations. As a growing literature in security studies and political geography has argued, preparing for catastrophe, expecting the worst, and scripting disasters are central elements of contemporary, speculative security culture. One of the most-discussed findings of the 9/11 Commission Report was that US security services had insufficiently deployed their imagination to foresee and preempt the attacks. This article introduces a special issue that offers a range of in-depth empirical studies that analyse how the imperative of routinizing the imagination' plays out in practice across different policy domains. It deploys the lens of performativity in order to conceptualize and explain the materialization of preemption and its situated entanglements with pre-existing security bureaucracies. We detail the idealized traits of a security of the interstice', which include interoperability, emergence, flexibility and analytical foresight that are meant to bridge the perceived gaps of security spaces and the temporal bridges between present and possible futures. The lofty rhetoric of preparing for the worst and bridging the gaps encounters numerous obstacles, challenges and reversals in practice. As becomes clear through the notion of performativity, such obstacles and challenges do not just stand in the way' of implementation, but actively shape the materialization of preemption in different sectors.
The US penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, was retrofitted in 2008 to offer the country's first federal Special Management Unit (SMU) program of its kind. This model SMU is designed for federal inmates from around the country identified as the most intractably troublesome, and features double-celling of inmates in tiny spaces, in 23-hour or 24-hour a day lockdown, requiring them to pass through a two-year program of readjustment. These spatial tactics, and the philosophy of punishment underlying them, contrast with the modern reform ideals upon which the prison was designed and built in 1932. The SMU represents the latest punitive phase in American penology, one that neither simply eliminates men as in the premodern spectacle, nor creates the docile, rehabilitated bodies of the modern panopticon; rather, it is a late-modern structure that produces only fear, terror, violence, and death. This SMU represents the latest of the late-modern prisons, similar to other supermax facilities in the US but offering its own unique system of punishment as well. While the prison exists within the system of American law and jurisprudence, it also manifests features of Agamben's lawless, camp-like space that emerges during a state of exception, exempt from outside scrutiny with inmate treatment typically beyond the scope of the law.
Governments in Europe and around the world amassed vast pharmaceutical stockpiles in anticipation of a potentially catastrophic influenza pandemic. Yet the comparatively mild' course of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic provoked considerable public controversy around those stockpiles, leading to questions about their cost-benefit profile and the commercial interests allegedly shaping their creation, as well as around their scientific evidence base. So, how did governments come to view pharmaceutical stockpiling as such an indispensable element of pandemic preparedness planning? What are the underlying security rationalities that rapidly rendered antivirals such a desirable option for government planners? Drawing upon an in-depth reading of Foucault's notion of a crisis of circulation', this article argues that the rise of pharmaceutical stockpiling across Europe is integral to a governmental rationality of political rule that continuously seeks to anticipate myriad circulatory threats to the welfare of populations - including to their overall levels of health. Novel antiviral medications such as Tamiflu are such an attractive policy option because they could enable governments to rapidly modulate dangerous levels of (viral) circulation during a pandemic, albeit without disrupting all the other circulatory systems crucial for maintaining population welfare. Antiviral stockpiles, in other words, promise nothing less than a pharmaceutical securing of circulation itself.
This article makes the case for a new field in International Relations (IR): the Global Politics of Medicine. It argues that significant avenues of research can be opened up by focusing on medicine and the life sciences, in order to both challenge current IR theories, and develop new theoretical and empirical insights in IR. In particular, the article challenges the validity of securitisation theory, and specifically the argument that health has been securitised. Showing instead that medicine and warfare have been imbricated from the nineteenth century as strategies of population, it challenges securitisation theory's ahistoricism and its assumption that social security and international security (and the norm/exception) are analytically divisible. Bringing this into the present through the examples of triage, psychological resilience, and genetic intelligence in counterinsurgency, it traces how warfare and medicine now ambitiously seek to treat populations as sets of individual bodies. Arguing that we cannot retreat to some mythical state of politics ‘prior’ to securitisation, it draws out how the fields of war, health, and medicine are nonetheless highly contested. The article concludes by challenging the fields of Global Health, war, and security studies, but also suggests novel routes for pursuing the study of the Global Politics of Medicine.Alison Howell is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Rutgers University – Newark. She is the author of Madness in International Relations: Psychology, Security and the Global Governance of Mental Health (Routledge 2011). She can be reached at: alison.howell@rutgers.edu
Wars do not maim with bullets and bombs alone but cause economic and environmental destruction that leave enduring bodily harms. Preparations for war-making also cause negative health effects, from toxic waste to the redirection of social wealth from investment in social needs. The commonsense juxtaposition of exceptional war to normal peace makes it difficult to recognize processes of militarization, the violent continuities between war and peace, and geographic ties binding spaces of relative health with spaces of harms. This article advances a critical geographic analysis of violence to analyze the ways in which militarization and structural violence reinforce one another. A 2007 cholera epidemic in Iraq was militarized through material and discursive geographies of cholera and violence. Humanitarian claims to cure cholera rested on this dualistic geopolitical imagination, distorting the agents of violence and erasing the grave effects of peacetime and wartime structural violence. By situating cholera within a broader historical and geographic context that shows links between “wartime” and “peacetime” places also suffering premature deaths from the destruction or abandonment of necessary infrastructures, a critical human geography can contribute to struggles for peace and justice.
This article describes the emergence of a new geopolitics of disease following the end of the Cold War and offers a framework for thinking about it. Three main questions are asked. First, why is disease now a geopolitical issue? Second, how has this new geopolitics emerged? And third, what are the implications of the emergence of disease as a geopolitical issue for the meaning and practice of global health? It is argued that disease is now seen as a geopolitical issue in terms of four main dimensions: destabilisation, sovereignty, the instrumentalisation of health, and geopolitical economy. Second, this new geopolitics has emerged in the context of larger debates about globalisation, development and security, and has emanated primarily from Northern institutions. Third, drawing on critical approaches to security, it is suggested that while the securitisation of health offers certain benefits, it also carries risks. The article identifies a number of critical tensions in the new geopolitics of disease as a way of negotiating these risks and anchoring the concept of global health security in a larger vision of health in an era of globalisation.
Background
Depression and anxiety affect 4–14% of Australians every year; symptoms may have been exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined recent patterns of antidepressant use in Australia in the period 2015–2021, which includes the first year of the pandemic.
Methods
We used national dispensing claims for people aged ⩾10 years to investigate annual trends in prevalent and new antidepressant use (no antidepressants dispensed in the year prior). We conducted stratified analyses by sex, age group and antidepressant class. We report outcomes from 2015 to 2019 and used time series analysis to quantify changes during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020–February 2021).
Results
In 2019, the annual prevalence of antidepressant use was 170.4 per 1000 women and 101.8 per 1000 men, an increase of 7.0% and 9.2% from 2015, respectively. New antidepressant use also increased for both sexes (3.0% for women and 4.9% for men) and across most age groups, particularly among adolescents (aged 10–17 years; 46–57%). During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, we observed higher than expected prevalent use (+2.2%, 95% CI = [0.3%, 4.2%]) among females, corresponding to a predicted excess of 45,217 (95% CI = [5,819, 84,614]) females dispensed antidepressants. The largest increases during the first year of the pandemic occurred among female adolescents for both prevalent (+11.7%, 95% CI = [4.1%, 20.5%]) and new antidepressant use (+15.6%, 95% CI = [8.5%, 23.7%]).
Conclusion
Antidepressant use continues to increase in Australia overall and especially among young people. We found a differential impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in treated depression and anxiety, greater among females than males, and greater among young females than other age groups, suggesting an increased mental health burden in populations already on a trajectory of increased use of antidepressants prior to the pandemic. Reasons for these differences require further investigation.
This essay advances an affective agenda in urban geopolitics that studies the everyday felt experience of urban terrorism. It takes as examples the relations between the spatial politics and affective atmospheres of Place de la République (Paris) and Place de la Bourse/Beursplein (Brussels) in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of 2015 and 2016. Intersecting feminist geopolitics and non-representational geographies, the essay bridges geographical studies of experience and affective atmospheres with experiential accounts in urban geopolitics. It argues for a renewed conceptual engagement and scholarly focus on the affective dimensions of urban geopolitics and security, that highlights the contested and unequal topographies of everyday experience in the aftermath of terrorism in urban Europe.
Governmental policies to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) have directly and decisively intervened with literally every facet of people’s life transforming the geographies of everyday lives across the Global South and North. In this paper, we explore the shifting relationship of urban dwellers to public space during the COVID-19 pandemic with the aim to unravel the uneven ways lockdown measures and restrictions on movement have impacted the residents of Athens, the capital of Greece. By focusing on the way the relationship of different social groups to public space has been affected by governmental measures, we show how the reconfiguration of the production of urban public space has disproportionately affected people along lines of class, ethnicity and gender. We argue that governmental measures have so far deepened systemic inequality, segregation and social, spatial and environmental injustice in the city and have imposed unprecedented restrictions in people’s democratic rights, consolidating a shift towards a more authoritarian version of neoliberal urbanism. By opposing and challenging the possibility of only dystopian futures that has dominated public discourse and collective imagination within this ongoing global public health crisis, we address a call to radical scholars and activists to start envisaging possibilities for a plural use of space and a new undisciplined, radical politics of coexistence in shared, safe spaces along the lines of a geography of togetherness, care and resistance.
This article discusses some of the challenges posed by the introduction of COVID-19 certificates as a privileged tool for opening up mobility and access in order to restore a semblance of normality to social life. While at present there is no international consensus either on how – or why – such certificates should be used or on how they should be designed and applied, a growing number of countries have already introduced COVID-19 certificates in one form or another. Yet the scientific community as well as the World Health Organisation (WHO) have expressed caution, noting that such certificates might disproportionately discriminate against people on the basis of race, religion and socioeconomic background, as well as on the basis of age due to the sequencing of the vaccine rollout. Indeed, while the new COVID-19 certificates may appear to promise a magical solution enabling us to free up global mobility and reopen economies, they actually risk creating new borders and new forms of inequality through an exclusionary sorting and profiling mechanism that delimits “safe” from “unsafe” bodies, based on differential access to “immuno-privilege” – but also differential forms of “bio-securitisation”. They also provide an illusion of pandemic safety – assuring citizens that through the “fetish” of the certificate “safe travel” can magically be reinstated. Securing territories and populations has always been, in Foucauldian terms, a matter of “making a division between good and bad circulation and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad”. We can therefore reasonably expect growing contestation, including before courts, around COVID-19 certificates in their different national and international iterations, as their inherently discriminatory nature and other unintended consequences such as those stemming from the use of persuasive – as opposed to the more traditional coercive – governmental power begin to unfold in their performative trajectory.
Criminological engagement with urban environments has burgeoned, including investigations into the criminological sense of place and into the atmospheres of crime and justice. This article analyses cities under lockdown in the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Used in numerous cities, lockdowns conjoin public health initiatives and crime control to restrict the location and activities of citizens. Drawing on textual and ethnographic exploration of lockdown in Melbourne, Australia, the article examines how we make meaning in lockdown through processes of sensory and spatial interpretation. Such an approach exposes both atmospheres of control, through the criminalization of everyday activities, and numerous instances of subversion through resistance to and adaptation of the spatial and sensorial characteristics of lockdown. The article argues for the importance of the sensory as a means of conceptualizing, repopulating and redesigning future cities after lockdown ends.
COVID-19 is highlighting and exposing how public health and geopolitics intersect across spaces, scales, and settings. Existing literature focuses on the geopolitical determinants of health such as the allocation of foreign health-related assistance in postcolonial spaces and the relationship between population health and the health impacts of exploiting resources for economic benefit. How populist nationalism shapes public reactions to disease has also been documented. There is a popular geopolitical dimension to how COVID-19 is portrayed-with expertise questioned, conspiracies circulated, lockdowns contested, and mask-wearing ridiculed. Calls to keep "foreign" pathogens and viruses out of national territory carry with them possibilities for exceptional measures, xenophobic politics, and heightened surveillance on the border and beyond. The place of the World Health Organization (WHO) within global health security remains complicated by the intersection of public health and geopolitical contexts. By using three themes, within and beyond the WHO, we explore how COVID-19 has been productive of three geopolitical narratives: public health as emblematic of great power rivalries, the bordering of the virus, and the (surgical) facemask as power projection. Our paper concludes with an assessment of how important it is to track and trace the relationship between health and geopolitics.
This 40-day diary tracks the ordinary effects of self-isolation and quarantine on a small island off the British Columbia coast. Drawing on reflections on the emotional and embodied dimensions of self-isolation, and on observations of the effects of physical distancing in public spaces, the writing paints a picture of COVID-19 as atmospheric dis-ease. Whereas disease is sickness and disorder, dis-ease is a social malaise infecting the body public via atmospheric contagion. Atmospheric disease, it is argued, is a shared mode of attention and a mix of effects permeating a place with the diffused rhythms, shared sensations, contagious moods, and common orientations typical of self-isolation.
Several recent international health crises have revealed significant vulnerabilities in global pandemic preparedness. The 2014 Ebola fever epidemic expanded into an international threat far more quickly than experts anticipated, and the 2018 Ebola fever epidemic continues to expand, even with new technological innovations designed to control the disease. The 2015 yellow fever outbreak in Angola exhausted global vaccine supplies and put millions of people at risk. This article argues that global health authorities failed to anticipate the magnitude of these outbreaks because the field has not been updated to address the ways recent changes in international political economy are combining with environmental instabilities of the Anthropocene to increase epidemiological risks. Many public health textbooks and teaching materials continue to rely on variants of 20th-century modernization theory to explain and predict global health trends. Since the end of the Cold War, however, there has been a dramatic reconfiguration of governance in many parts of the world, and these macro-level changes are accelerating ecological destruction and fueling armed conflict in ways that will reduce the range and effectiveness of public health methods and prevention technologies that were successful during the 20th century. The combined effect of these institutional and environmental changes will increase global pandemic risks in the Anthropocene, even for infectious diseases that are easily preventable today.
In this introduction to the special section on “Engaging Geopolitics through the Lens of the Intimate”, we first locate the papers collected here in the context of developing an “Intimate Geopolitics” project at the University of Manchester. We then review the importance of ‘intimacy’ and the concept of ‘the intimate’ across an array of disciplinary studies, drawing especially on the rich body of work by critical geopolitics scholars who have long challenged categorical binaries and territorial boundaries. Our focus here is exploring what insights we can bring to understanding the nexus of intimacy and global politics by deploying the lens of the intimate--understood as a variety of processes of attachment and relationality--in six globally dispersed case studies. Collectively, the papers presented here not only engage a wide range of issues and locations, but also contribute to research engaging geographically specific contexts and practices. We note that the papers ‘cluster’ around issues of migration, borders, ‘home’, asylum and visa regimes, prompting us to suggest that the papers productively inform three foci of inquiry. Specifically, the papers 1) enrich our understanding of bordercrossing beyond simple association of this with the movement of people, things and ideas; 2) deepen our understanding of how geopolitics is constituted by forms of attachments and relationality that are integral to forms of governance; and 3) help us explore how attachments are not simply additive but productive of geopolitical concerns.
At a time of acute housing crisis, hotels are increasingly being deployed to give temporary shelter to homeless families in wealthy cities. This paper explores the socio‐political implications of the use of hotels for temporary accommodation, drawing on research conducted in Dublin. Specifically, we argue that the housing of homeless families in hotels exposes how they are made out of place in the city, even in the spaces allocated to house them. Hotels are spaces designed for the respite of others but, for homeless families, they conversely offer no relief and are even actively disruptive to their lives. The paper explores three ways in which hotels, presumed to provide restorative breaks from everyday routines, conversely act as points of rupture for homeless families. First, we consider how hotels are marketed as spaces where social reproductive work can be enjoyably put on hold. However, we argue that these perceived conveniences are experienced as disruptive for families forced to live in hotels for months, even years, at a time. Second, we explore the juxtaposition between the well‐being and health benefits hotels are designed to offer guests and the devastating physical and mental health implications for homeless families living in hotels. Third, we compare how hotel management and marketing emphasise the importance of customer service as integral to a hotel's success, while simultaneously shaming and stigmatising homeless residents. The paper concludes by calling for greater attention to be paid to how hotels, normally considered sites of rest, become sites of rupture when used as temporary accommodation, exacerbating the stigmatisation and threats to well‐being that homeless families suffer.
In this paper we explore the relation between affect and security through a case study of one technique for making futures present and actionable: the use of exercises in UK emergency planning after the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act. Based on observation of exercises and interviews with emergency planners, we show how exercises function by making present an interval' of emergency in between the occurrence of a threatening event and its becoming a disaster. This interval' is made present through a set of partially connected affective atmospheres and sensibilities. By making futures present at the level of affect, exercises function as techniques of equivalence that enable future disruptive events to be governed. Through this case study we argue against epochal accounts that frame the relation between affect and security in terms of an age of anxiety' or a culture of fear'. Instead, we understand security affects to be both a means through which futures are made present in apparatuses of security and a part of the relational dynamics through which apparatuses emerge, endure, change, and function strategically.
What characterizes emergency today is the proliferation of the term. Any event or situation supposedly has the potential to become an emergency. Emergencies may happen anywhere and at any time. They are not contained within one functional sector or one domain of life. The substantive focus of the articles collected in this special issue reflects this proliferation: they explore ways of governing in, by and through emergencies across different types of emergencies and different domains of life. In response to this proliferation, the issue opens up critical work on the politics of emergency beyond the ‘state of exception’ as dominant paradigm. Emergency is treated as a problem for government that calls for the invention of new techniques or the redeployment of existing techniques. Through this shift in emphasis, the articles in this issue disclose relations between modalities of power and emergency life that differ from the ‘lightening flash’ of a sovereign decision on the exception taken from outside of life, or the capacity to ‘mould’ an always-already emergent life from within life.
This paper reviews both established and emerging literatures that problematize conceptual divisions (once) held between the public arena of geopolitics on the one hand, and the so-called ‘private sphere’ of everyday life on the other. Tying into current concerns in critical and feminist geopolitics, I aim to understand how the home has been theorized and empirically researched as a material and ideological entity of geopolitical significance. The paper covers the themes of modern warfare; home(land) and nation; and the domestic worlds of ordinary, dissident and elite geopolitical actors. It argues that while a rich source of scholarship has coalesced around the influence of geopolitics on the home at different spatial scales, more research should explore how geopolitics is influenced by, and emerges from, the home. In exposing this inequitable, yet ultimately untenable binary division, the paper calls for geographers to ‘make space’ for home in geopolitics.
In recent years, there have been exhortations for scholars working in the area of critical geopolitics to be more committed in initiating ‘primary fieldwork’. These appeals are predicated on the belief that the subdiscipline's apparent over-reliance on secondary (re)sources neglect the ways in which political processes and dynamics ‘play out’ on the ground. Not denying the validity of such observations, I further argue that critical geopolitics needs to take into account the fieldwork process which can arguably shape the progression and outcomes of research. Drawing on my ‘field’ research on violence and terrorism in the Philippines, I propose that thinking critically about how emotions are intertwined in the conduct of fieldwork can provide a pathway to appreciate the unpredictable nature of the research process and the wider contexts/agencies that shape research outcomes and knowledges produced. Crucially, the witnessing of violence/terror is emotionally demanding, often bequeathing the researcher with fully embodied experiences of the ‘real’ situation on the ground. It opens up the researcher to different emotional engagements and connections with his/her respondents, which in turn allows for critical reassessments of issues pertaining to danger, ethics and responsibility. In this sense, ‘emotional fieldwork’, as I term it, has much to offer to critical geopolitics if incorporated as part of the subdiscipline's methodological consciousness. It not only provides researchers with useful navigational guidelines to traverse the tricky research terrains of working in ‘dangerous’, conflict-plagued regions but it also provides the basis for weaving more accurate and situated narratives that complements and advances deconstructivist critiques of dominant geopolitical discourses in and around certain locales.
Should the global AIDS pandemic be framed as an international security issue? Drawing on securitization theory, this article argues that there is a complex normative dilemma at the heart of recent attempts to formulate the global response to HIV/AIDS in the language of international security. Although “securitizing” the AIDS pandemic could bolster international AIDS initiatives by raising awareness and resources, the language of security simultaneously pushes responses to the disease away from civil society toward military and intelligence organizations with the power to override the civil liberties of persons living with HIV/AIDS. The security framework, moreover, brings into play a “threat-defense” logic that could undermine international efforts to address the pandemic because it makes such efforts a function of narrow national interest rather than of altruism, because it allows states to prioritize AIDS funding for their elites and armed forces who play a crucial role in maintaining security, and because portraying the illness as an overwhelming “threat” works against ongoing efforts to normalize social perceptions regarding HIV/AIDS. These overlooked dangers give rise to a profound ethical dilemma as to whether or not the global AIDS pandemic should be portrayed as a security issue. The article concludes that securitization theory cannot resolve this complex dilemma, but that raising awareness of its presence does allow policy makers, activists, and scholars to begin drawing the links between HIV/AIDS and security in ways that at least minimize some of these dangers.
This paper is an introduction to and a reflection on this Special Issue on “Concepts of Home.” It raises the issues inherent in considering the complex notion of “the home.” We highlight the significance of power and patriarchy, household tasks and caring, and space and place, in the analysis of “domestic” social relations and the meanings and politics surrounding “the home.”
This paper questions the recent recasting of fear within critical geopolitics. It identifies a widespread metanarrative, `globalized fear', analysis of which lacks grounding and is remote, disembodied and curiously unemotional. A hierarchical scaling of emotions, politics and place overlooks agency, resistance and action. Drawing on feminist scholarship, I call for an emotional geopolitics of fear which connects political processes and everyday emotional topographies in a less hierarchical, more enabling relationship. I employ conscientization as a tool to inform the reconceptualization of global fears within critical geopolitics, and to move forward epistemological practice and our relationship as scholars with social change.