Consequential theory, consequential geography

Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 2025-01-27 · 2 citations

Disruptive Geographies and the War on Gaza: Infrastructure and Global Solidarity

Geopolitics · 2025-06-04 · 16 citations

This forum explores the geopolitics of infrastructure in the context of Israel’s war on Gaza, situating the current genocide within longer histories of settler colonialism, spatial control, and transnational complicity. As homes, hospitals, and schools are reduced to rubble, this destruction is not only military, but infrastructural–an assault on the material conditions of Palestinian life. Infrastructure emerges here not as background, but as a primary mechanism of governance, dispossession, and colonial reordering. From roads and borders to electricity grids and telecommunications, the systems that organise everyday life in Gaza and the West Bank are also those that fragment space, enforce dependency, and suppress self-determination. Rather than viewing this destruction in isolation, contributors trace how it is sustained by regional and global circuits of capital, logistics, arms, and energy. Gaza’s collapse is embedded in a broader political economy of militarism, where supply chains, defence industries, and financial infrastructures turn dispossession into profit. Yet, this forum also foregrounds counter-infrastructures and practices of resistance: from survival networks and subterranean spaces of refusal, to workers’ strikes and transport disruptions that challenge the flows sustaining Israeli militarism. Together, these essays ask what it means to ‘follow infrastructures’ in a moment of mass atrocity–what such a method reveals about power, complicity, and potential rupture. The forum moves beyond documenting destruction to consider how infrastructure is both a tool of domination and a terrain of struggle. Across scales and contexts, it highlights how Palestinians resist infrastructural warfare and how international solidarity movements can intervene in the systems that enable it. In doing so, the forum contributes to a growing body of politically accountable scholarship, mapping not only how infrastructures sustain violence, but how they might be reimagined.

We can’t wish away the state

Dialogues in Human Geography · 2025-08-21

This commentary thinks with Kass and Dunlap's ‘Rioting as Legitimate Abolitionist Practice’, which draws on Joy James’ (2005) distinction between procedural, insurrectionary, and autonomous abolitions to argue against the former in favor of the latter two forms of abolitionist praxis. While the authors argue in favor of an insurrectionist thesis and view the riot as a space of ungovernability, I offer two sympathetic critiques: first, the argument reproduces procedural, insurrectionist, and autonomous abolitions as ontologically distinct forms, as if each marks a discrete and distinct practice of abolitionist struggle, operating in separate realms of the social movement ecosystem when their boundaries are in fact more blurry. Second, in placing only one of the three approaches on the side of counterinsurgency, the authors set up a dichotomy between procedural, insurrectionary, and autonomous abolitions, even as the latter two forms, far from remaining ungovernable, elicit countervailing responses from the state and civil society that insurrectionists cannot ignore in foregrounding a prefigurative politics. Given that abolitionists cannot wish the state away, I draw a tentative conclusion that we need multiple strategies in any revolutionary transition, ones equipped to address the recursive cycles of co-optation that infect multiple expressions of struggle and that require corresponding reassessements of tactics and strategy in the struggle for the abolition of prisons and police.

Police abolition

Contemporary Political Theory · 2023-06-21 · 10 citations

An ''against'' and a ''for'': abolitionist reckonings with the state Geo Maher's A World Without Police is an unflinching excavation of our punitive and carceral present.It demands that we understand the institution of policing in its totality and assess the fullness of the damage it has done, as well as how much better the world could be if the police were rendered obsolete.To read this book is to feel both the joyful rage of the long hot summer of 2020 and a renewed commitment to its unfinished struggle.

Beyond the Chokepoint: Blockades as Social Struggles

Antipode · 2023-04-17 · 37 citations

Abstract Blockades are a long‐standing tool used by political groups of various kinds to interrupt or redirect flows of materials, capital, and people. In this introduction to the Symposium, “On the Blockade: Geographies of Circulation and Struggle”, we review recent debates concerning the politics of spatial disruption, chokepoints, and circulation struggles. In doing so, we question some tendencies to fetishise the seizure of capital circulation as a de facto progressive form of disruption to the contemporary order. We argue that blockades ought to be considered not merely as tactics or pure negations of capital, but instead are articulations of collective life and open‐ended attempts to build power. Thinking with blockades thus requires accounting for not only their spatial disruption but also their distinct historical contexts and social forms. We introduce the articles in this Symposium through an analysis of five modalities through which blockades can be interpreted: as moments of refusal, redistribution, provocation, subject‐formation, and concrete utopia. Finally, we describe five future directions for scholars and movements: insurgent mapping, feminist interpretation, expansion of blockade networks, analysis of reactionary blockades, and broadening the geographical and historical scope of study.

Docking

2022-06-06 · 13 citations

This chapter demonstrates how docking – the process by which maritime shipping comes to shore – as well as port governance associated with docking, are crucial forces in the global economy. It traces how ports secure their place in global trade, with public and private partnerships in port governance resulting in rapid expansion of large-scale port infrastructures on the one hand, and increasing corporatisation of port services on the other. It demonstrates the importance of examining the social and political economic consequences of port governance, as ports adapt legal and infrastructural apparatuses to compete for a piece of the global logistics pie

Disruption from above, the middle and below: Three terrains of governance

Review of International Studies · 2022-10-21 · 7 citations

Abstract The term disruption has become a buzzword for our times, although there is little clarity over what the term means, how it is deployed, and towards what ends. In order to understand the analytical and political stakes that are embedded in the deployment of ‘disruption’ as a rationale for various sources of upheaval, in this article I argue that these three terrains of disruption should be understood as theories of governance, and term them ‘disruption from above’, ‘disruption from the middle’, and ‘disruption from below’. Each terrain of disruption embodies different ethoses, actors, and goals: the first connoting elite-driven creative destruction and innovation; the second obfuscating the capitalist imperative that produces world-systemic upheavals; and the third seeking to expose the structures of violence and inequality built into such practices. I illustrate these three terrains through a structural account that traces the popularity of the disruption discourse from its origins to its material application; analyse an illustrative example of the assetisation of infrastructure and how it bureaucratises governance and shifts relations of power; and conclude by examining infrastructural forms of protest against such forms. I argue that the confusion over what disruption means, who exercises it, and upon whom is not a coincidence: rather, disruption's polysemy is structurally produced as a way to disguise ongoing capitalist crisis as a technical problem that market innovations can solve.

The Logistical Sublime and Its Wasted Remains

Singapore Art Museum eBooks · 2022-11-22

LINEAGES OF INFRASTRUCTURAL POWER:

2021-10-05

The Countersovereignty of Critical Infrastructure Security: Settler‐State Anxiety versus the Pipeline Blockade

Antipode · 2021-10-27 · 43 citations

Abstract Scholars argue that blockades of infrastructure pose an economic threat to capital circulation. This explains how activists can gain power through strategic spatial occupations and why states seek to protect “critical infrastructure” from disruption. However, Indigenous‐led blockades of pipelines gain power not (only) by disrupting economic flows alone, but by eliciting state anxieties about the racialised political, psychic and economic project of settler colonialism. Analysing public discourse surrounding the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines, including legislative measures introduced to criminalise protest since the blockade at Standing Rock, we reframe critical infrastructure security as a component operation of settler countersovereignty . The criminalisation of Indigenous dissent through the state’s escalation of protest legislation is an investment in maintaining settler political authority, leading us to conclude that blockades must be understood not only as a form of anti‐capitalist resistance, but also as a locus of anti‐colonial struggle.