Drawing Imperial Lines: Sovereignty and Tacitus’ Germanicus

This essay focuses on Germanicus’ performance of sovereign power in Tacitus’ Annales 1-2. That power is seen in the differentiation of citizen from non-citizen and Roman territory from non-Roman territory. Roman violence in Germany contrasts with Germanicus in the East. There he recognised a shared history and community. Sovereign power required a recognition of the sovereign by the citizen and of the citizen by the sovereign. An individual’s membership and a territory’s place within the Roman Empire depended not on innate characteristics but political negotiation. Ancient political geographies gave primacy to the political rather than the territorial in determining citizenship.

Critical political geographies of slow violence and resistance

Engaging Rob Nixon’s conceptualization of slow violence, this special issue provides a critical framework for how we understand violence relevant to political geography. In this introduction, we highlight three key contributions of the collection that build upon and extend Nixon’s framing of slow violence. First, we attend to the spatialities of slow violence, revealing how the politics of disposability and racialized dispossession target particular people and places. Next, we foreground critical feminist and anti-racist perspectives that are largely absent in Nixon’s original account. And third, through engaging these approaches, the papers together employ an epistemological shift, uncovering hidden and multi-sited violences that prioritise the accounts of those who experience and are most affected by slow violence.

For political geographies of fertilities

Debates ranging from parental leave within universities to abortion rights, ‘anchor babies,’ racialized maternal mortality, and the continued disproportionate role of indigenous children within foster care systems demonstrate the wide range of politics informed by fertility. In this paper, I aim to prompt further academic research and personal reflection about the politics that underpin questions about fertility and the life course. There is an analytic potential and political urgency to understand these debates under the conceptual umbrella of ‘political geographies of fertility,’ as matters of fertility cross disciplinary and subdisciplinary boundaries and are – literally – matters of life and death. In this paper, I argue for framing fertility as a continued state of being, an anticipatory weight, that influences lives, behaviors, and politics at a variety of scales, from the border and the nation-state to academic workplaces and the body. By considering the range of spaces and scales where the politics of fertility take shape, I hope to encourage future researchers to devote attention to what gets made political through fertility – including but not limited to the biological events of reproduction.

Education, secularism, and illiberalism: Marginalisation of Muslims by the French state

Laïcité, France’s idiosyncratic principle of secularism, is a unique term that today engenders state forms of illiberalism, especially against marginalised communities in France. French Muslims experience instances of discrimination and ‘othering’ as the state endorses illiberal policies in the name of laïcité. These state acts of symbolic violence transgress political geographies and affect French Muslims’ perceptions of identification, citizenship, and belonging. Building on nine interviews with French Muslim higher education students, this article demonstrates ways in which illiberalism operates in the lives of French Muslim higher education students. It identifies the role of the French secular school in the making of gendered Islamophobia. This article serves as means for better understanding the lived experiences of French Muslims and recognising the socio-political changes that need to be made in France to protect and empower marginalised groups against state illiberalism.

Where is Iran? Politics between State and Nation, Inside and Outside the Polity

Three powerful spatial dynamics are at work in the analysis of a country’s political orbit. One is the classic remit of the international relations between states. The second is the mainstream remit of political analysis, the national dialogue – sometimes open, often constrained – between the state and its inhabitants. In addition, the third is the cross-border space between the state and its citizens who – as diaspora, exiles, and migrants – live in other countries. Too often, each is analysed in isolation, part of the intellectually unedifying division of academic work. In this chapter, we explore where contemporary Iranian politics exists and how it is played out through each of these political geographies.

Political geography 1: Extractions

This progress report incorporates the concept of extraction as an umbrella term for political and geopolitical analyses of the spaces, sites, settings, and scales of power, authority, influence, and resistance. The political geographies of extraction discussed in this report include an assemblage of human-and-nonhuman actors across divergent epistemologies and ontologies, as well as forms of recognition, representation, and repression within and across states, borders, and spatial scales. The research surveyed here covers both state and non-state actors to address national and corporate methods commensurate with ongoing and new conflicts over resources, how they are extracted, conserved, distributed, shared, and hoarded.

Feminist political geographies: Critical reflections, new directions

Feminist political geography (FPG) is a vibrant, diverse, provocative and contested field of inquiry. This special issue highlights those scholars connecting FPG approaches, methodologies and arguments to critical work in other sub-fields of our discipline, and beyond it. In doing so we open up a productive conversation about both the current limitations and the new insights FPG offers for understanding power and the political. The papers included in this special issue offer a lively, constructive and productive set of debates around FPG that reflect the energy and dynamism of our sub-field and that bring new ideas, arguments and engagements into conversation.