**with usual apologies for cross-posting** 

Final Call for Papers

Urban Geopolitical Landscapes Beyond Militarism

Conveners: Sara Fregonese (University of Birmingham) and Jonathan Rokem (University College London)

Sponsored by the Political Geography Research Group (PolGRG)

2018 RGS-IBG, 28 August- 31 August 2018, Cardiff University, Cardiff

Urban geopolitics is a heterogeneous, interdisciplinary corpus of study, but until recently its anglophone branch has relied on few case studies, the majority of which dealing with heavily militarised conflict situations: overwhelmingly Israel/Palestine and post-9-11 cities, either those securitised from the War on Terror, or those targeted by it. This dominance of militarism, warfare and their technologies is curious for at least two reasons. Firstly, because the term “urban geopolitics” was first employed in francophone academia to investigate not total warfare, but less extreme and ordinary environments – but by no means less impactful on individual lives and unequal urban power dynamics (Hulbert, 1989). Secondly, because feminist approaches to geopolitics, with their emphasis on the embodied and everyday experience of wider geopolitical processes, has developed almost in parallel with anglophone urban geopolitics, and yet the two subdisciplines have remained almost unconnected. The danger with the militaristic and techno-centric approach in urban geopolitics is that of normalising technologies and strategies of warfare against cities (Sidaway, 2009), besides normalising cities as substitutes of the state’s role in defending boundaries, securing territory, and managing mobility (Bialasiewicz 2015).

This session aims to redress the militaristic and techno-centric approach of urban geopolitics. In a 2001 special issue of Herodote, Yves Lacoste invited to expand the focus of geopolitics not to simply re-scale classical geopolitics into the city, but instead to adapt and renegotiate what the geopolitical is and how it works in the particular context of the town. Building on this argument, the session invites papers that:

• approach the links between urban space and global politics beyond militarism and open conflict
• highlight the ordinary experience of geopolitics in cities
• Trace the embodied, affective, and elemental expressions and negotiations of geopolitics that matter to everyday urban life

Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words to [log in to unmask] and [log in to unmask]  by Friday 2 February 2018.

All best wishes, 

Jonathan and Sara