Political Geography Open Research最新文献

The Russian invasion of Ukraine illustrates the increasingly judicialized nature of international relations and geopolitics. By viewing aspects of the invasion as illegal – in particular through the identification of war crimes and crimes against humanity – the international response draws attention to the political geographies of international criminal investigation. Human rights groups, academics, journalists, and open-source forensic investigations have joined forces to collect, evaluate and analyze the violent nature of war crimes. While similar shifts in evidence gathering have been observed in the case of the Bosnia-Herzegovina war and the Assad regime's violence against Syrian citizens, the use of evidence-gathering technologies and evidence-securing institutions in the case of Ukraine is distinctive. In this scholarly intervention we seek to illustrate the intimate geopolitics of evidence gathering by zooming in on two different elements that shape evidential procedures in Ukraine: i) the blurring of civilian/military boundaries; and ii) the challenges of access. By evaluating what is new and what is similar to previous war sites, we suggest that these two areas reflect a geopolitics of evidence gathering, highlighting its global-local intimacies. Both these areas are well positioned to foster new research on the (geo)legal nature of war crimes in political geography and beyond.

Advantageous positions for politically overrepresented groups and rural political discontent are widely debated in academia. However, the role urban political overrepresentation may have in benefiting urban citizens and as an explanation for rural political discontent has hitherto received little attention. This paper addresses urban overrepresentation within national politics and suggests how this, in turn, engenders favorable policies for extremely urbanized municipalities. The paper refers to the Dutch context to illustrate how urban political overrepresentation operates, the access that municipalities with different degrees of urbanization have to public funding, and how they profit from the region deals between 2017 and 2020. The most urbanized municipalities in the Netherlands are found to be politically overrepresented at the national level and have relatively good access to public funding. This is likely to produce benefits for these municipalities and their inhabitants. This paper discusses how these benefits may be an explanation for political discontent in other municipalities.

In this article, we examine the discourses of NGOs participating in and sustaining India's conservation “regime of exclusion”. We suggest that these NGOs utilise discursive technologies to produce forests and forest-dwellers in ways that legitimise racialised and caste-based exclusion from conservation spaces. We focus on two examples. First, we analyse a petition filed by conservation NGOs against India's Forest Rights Act (FRA), which recognises the customary forest rights of historically marginalised Adivasi and Other Traditional Forest-Dwelling communities. This petition was intended to delegitimise the FRA, and it prompted a court decision that could potentially displace approximately 1.19 million forest-dwelling families. Second, we analyse how conservation-induced dispossession in India is increasingly framed as “voluntary resettlement”, which we suggest normalises and depoliticises dispossession and legitimises arguments against the FRA. Through these examples, we find that discursive technologies produce forests and forest-dwellers in ways that rely on and reproduce existing social hierarchies shaping access to land, resources, and power. We unpack the characteristics and motivations of this conservation regime; particularly the discursive productions through which conservation organisations position their “expert” forest claims above the claims of forest-dwelling communities, authorising the creation of “inviolate” conservation spaces through exclusion. Understanding discourse as the articulation of knowledge and power through which material realities come into being, we problematize the dominant understandings of conservation that underlie dispossession and the discursive technologies that legitimise it.