Sara Fregonese’s research while affiliated with University of Birmingham and other places

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.

The lockdowns imposed upon cities, regions, and countries as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic are extraordinary state-sanctioned spatial interventions, both in terms of scale and scope. However, rather than a time-delimited event nor an exceptional circumstance of a temporary crisis, the pandemic lockdown was entangled with long-standing and on-going intimate and embodied histories of political violence, upheaval, militarization, displacement and dispossession. Be it as a result of war, terrorism, natural disaster, or pandemic – lockdown is more than an intervention in physical space and infrastructure alone. It is also an intervention that mobilizes, and often relies on, the sphere of the intimate along different and often unequal geographies of vulnerability. In this Theme Issue, we build on feminist geopolitics and feminist political geography to examine the intimacies of lockdown, seen through the experiences of refugees, migrants, low-income residents, as well as within the contexts of war and terrorism. Here, the politics of embodiment, domesticity and affectivity is central for understanding how lockdowns actively shape and are shaped by intimate geographies, thus advancing the theorization of the lockdown more broadly. The contributions to this Theme Issue gather around the following questions: how does the spatial politics of lockdown mobilize the sphere of the intimate? More broadly, how does the intimate help forge possibilities and places of counter-narratives of solidarity, shared vulnerabilities and care in contrast to renewed militarization, rising authoritarianism, violence, and the expanding spatialities of confinement in everyday life?

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.

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.

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.

This special section addresses how the spatiality of terrorism and security responses mobilize and impact the realm of experience. The articles presented here expose how terrorism is encountered as a felt experience by urban residents in Europe through an analysis that encompasses several realms including the body, the intimate, the domestic, and the urban public space. These works develop existing scholarship on the European urban geographies of terrorism, by looking beyond established approaches to normative range of actors and infrastructures that underlie terrorism and counter-terror security responses, and by exploring the fine-grained connections between felt experience, urban space, and global politics. Moreover, in focusing on the experiential landscapes of terror, we start exploring geographies where healing, trust, and societal reconnection can be imagined in the wake of terror.

Reading Reece Jones’s Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move. 224 pages, Verso, New York and London (2017), p. £16.99 (hardback), ISBN: 9781784784713 - - Book Review Forum, Published online in Political Geography Journal - 6th January 2020 - access to published version: - - [https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102129] - This forum is around Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right to Move by Reece Jones, the winning volume of the first edition of the biennial book award of the Political Geography Research Group of the Royal Geographic Society with IBG (PolGRG) in conjunction with Political Geography Journal. The book award was established in 2016 to give recognition to new academic volumes that engage with the thematic remit of PolGRG and contribute to develop the diverse field of political geography more widely. In line with the diversity of PolGRG interests and membership, the PolGRG Book Award is aimed at published volumes advancing the debate around themes spanning territoriality and sovereignty; states, cities, and citizenship; geopolitics, political economy and political ecology; migration, globalization and (post)colonialism; social movements and governance; peace, conflict and security. All this appreciating the implications of these phenomena with gender, race, class, sexuality and religion.