Environment and Planning D: Society and Space

This talk examines how US empire operates as a topological formation that projects security and war power through mediated arrangements of power, mobile technologies, and blurred genres of rule that link far-flung sites in intimate and often indeterminate ways. Drawing on over a decade of research conducted in Palestine on the embedding of Washington's counterterrorism regime into monetary transactions and aid flows inbound to the Palestinians, this talk presents a different analytic of the US war state—one that realizes its destructive effects not only through spectacular modalities of violence and warfare, but increasingly so, through a quieter, temporally stretched process of constriction that progressively erodes conditions of livability through forced disconnection and isolation, or what we might call “asphyxiatory violence.” Tracing the political work the terrorism designation performs on racialized life, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the governing and repression of populations within the United States, this talk, constructs a different theoretical apparatus of war and empire—one enacted through the point of the terrorism list.

This paper examines a political ecology assemblage surrounding date plantations in the Jordan Valley to shed light on time politics as power struggles constituted by humans and beyond-the-humans in the borderland during our time of climate change and the recurring regional cycles of violence. Moving beyond the temporality of climate change as crisis and emergency, the paper examines the political dynamics of climate change routines, such as the distribution of new species and its containment technologies. Analyzing the borderlands’ date plantations’ timescape as constructed of ecological time, sociotechnical time, political time, and ethical market times, I argue that climate change politics in the borderlands are time politics made and remade by humans and nonhumans alike. Bringing Israeli, Palestinian, and Jordanian state officials, state scientists, farmers, agri-tech developers, activists and beyond-the-human actors like the Red Palm Weevil and the technologies to contain it, the paper illuminates the temporal nature of power and the temporal power of nature in borderlands. By doing so, I explore the co-constitution of beyond-the-human agencies, border politics, and the temporalities of climate change.

In the last decades, the term digital sovereignty, together with technological sovereignty and strategic autonomy, has become common vocabulary within the EU. While originating in discussions about global computation and the erosion of national sovereignty, the discourses underpinning the use of digital sovereignty resonate with earlier colonial notions of ‘rescuing Europe’ and the ‘balance of powers’ recurring throughout the history of European integration. The discussions about EU digital sovereignty and its infrastructuring remind us of the EU's colonial past by re-inserting so-called European values into the expansion of digital infrastructures in Europe and beyond. While the literature studying the emergence of European digital sovereignty showcases how the use of the term underlines and confirms a geopolitical turn within the EU, it has not yet discussed its historical colonial connections. This article demonstrates, first, that the sociotechnical imaginaries attached to the infrastructuring of the EU's digital sovereignty re-actualise an earlier nexus between the European integration project and colonial extractive infrastructures predating the creation of the EU. Second, with the case of the Global Gateway, this article shows how this nexus gains new life through the infrastructuring of digital sovereignty, again unfolding in the Global South.

Land grabbing is a persistent and highly dynamic global phenomenon whereby people's power over territories are alienated through multiple and ever-changing strategies. In this article, I examine these shape-shifting strategies and mechanisms that continue to deprive people of land, livelihoods, and autonomy. Drawing on interviews, archival research, and document analysis, I study land grabbing for conservation purposes in Tanzania, focusing especially on the important and ongoing case of the Maasai dispossession from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA). Engaging slow violence and developing the concept of necro-scapes, I argue that land grabbing in NCA works significantly through mechanisms and tactics that make its environments hostile and its landscapes unlivable for inhabitants. These include, among others, the denial of social service, the prohibition of specific livelihood strategies, exposing communities to dangerous wildlife, and deepening border regimes, especially in relation to climate change. Complementing more overt and direct forms of violence through eviction and police force, these mechanisms constitute strategies of land grabbing that are indirect, covert, structural, and slow, but no less devastating. Scholars interested in land, coloniality, and conservation, as well as activists and allied organizations must work to carefully trace these hydra-headed tactics of land grabbing in support of projects for rural autonomy, decolonization, and resource sovereignty.

Dakar is replete with incomplete houses that are often viewed pejoratively to denote the supposed ‘failure’ of African cities. However, this perspective occludes analyses of the popular economies and socialities emanating from these same structures. This article explores the everyday lives of property guardians (known locally as gardiens) living in the unfinished diaspora-built homes of Ouakam, Dakar (Senegal). Combining a critical historical analysis of post-colonial and post-socialist land and property arrangements in Ouakam with three ethnographic vignettes, the article unravels everyday articulations of property on the ground and develops the notion of entanglement to explore how property is produced, enacted, negotiated and re-arranged by gardiens. It shows that a propertied landscape characterised by opacity paradoxically enables gardiens to hold their place in the city and argues that entanglement illuminates different registers of agency, prompting us to re-imagine the politics and possibilities of life in the interstices of property.

This in-depth case study examines the grassroots movement that coalesced between 2014–2019 to contest the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in Iowa. We investigate how Iowa organizers from the Bakken Pipeline Resistance Coalition, Mississippi Stand, and Little Creek Camp employed diverse actions to resist DAPL including participation in the Iowa Utilities Board permitting process, a legal challenge, protests, and sabotage. Drawing on data collection and fieldwork conducted between 2020–2023, we argue that the transgressive movement used insurgent planning to transform Iowa's energy landscape, provoking a strong response from the state including surveillance and a “Critical Infrastructure Bill”. We demonstrate that Iowa organizers traversed invited and invented spaces, creating a resistance toolbox used in contemporary energy contests. This case study unsettles the idea that organizers must work either within or outside state-led institutions to enact change; expands the geographical focus of insurgent planning; and uses an intersectional lens to make visible the work of women, Indigenous, and rural organizers in Iowa.