ABSTRACT Citizenship by Investment (CBI) schemes – programs facilitating foreign nationals to purchase citizenship – can help governments of the Global South raise essential revenue. They can also exacerbate and facilitate corruption and undermine security, which has led to some Western governments taking action against countries that operate CBI schemes. To date, there has been scant research on the discursive contexts that shape geopolitical narratives framing Western understandings of, and responses to, CBI schemes in the Global South. In this article, we examine representations of Vanuatu’s CBI scheme through a critical discourse analysis of media reporting in Australia and New Zealand. We find that media mostly reproduce what we label the ‘security-governance nexus’ which stresses concerns about the scheme’s negative impact on security, foreign interference, and governance, to the detriment of counter-geopolitical narratives that highlight the importance of the Vanuatu’s CBI scheme for its independent economic development. In turn, we show that media play a critical, though overlooked, role in reproducing a geopolitical imagination that reflects donor priorities and interests, at the expense of efforts within the Global South to forge independent pathways to economic development.

Georgia’s current political crisis can be analyzed through many lenses, as this journal has done on many occasions. However, to fully grasp the root causes of the crisis, one must examine Georgia’s journey toward state-building. This journey is also a story of an interplay of historical legacies, external influences, and internal challenges. Georgia’s political crisis, […]

ABSTRACT This paper uses intimate geopolitics to disrupt the focus of ‘rural as white’ narratives in rural geographies. ‘Rural as white’ narratives have evolved from settler colonialism, systemic racism, Orientalism, and institutionalised genocide and enslavement that shape and uphold geopolitical positions of the United States. Meanwhile, intimate geopolitics, particularly Pain’s (2021) concept of geotrauma, has served as a lens to view the local impacts of global phenomena in intimate spaces (Pain 2014). I demonstrate how connecting geotrauma and ‘rural as white’ narratives to the experiences of people of colour living in rural Rust Belt spaces provides a more nuanced approach to rural scholarship. Scholars have noted how geopolitical actors and states intimately impact people’s everyday lives (Barabantseva, Ní Mhurchú, and Spike Peterson 2021). I demonstrate how nationalism and geopolitics shape intimate experiences for many minoritized communities in rural spaces. More importantly, I show how everyday geopolitical rhetoric manifests as rural geotrauma in rural Rust Belt communities.

Since late 2024, the Georgian Dream (GD) has pursued a foreign policy that can best be described as self-isolationist, damaging, and minimalist. Its primary objective is not to promote Georgia’s national interests and ensure its security, stability, and prosperity, as prescribed by the now-defunct Foreign Policy Strategy or National Security Concept, but to preserve the […]

ABSTRACT In the summer of 1931 famed US aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife, Anne, flew their Sirius aircraft from Washington DC, westward across northern Canada, Alaska and the Bering Strait to Japan and China. Although touted as a vacation, they were in fact surveying for Pan American Airways’ first trans-pacific air route, an endeavour that would further project US power across the Pacific. This paper uses this example to advance a way of thinking about the capacities of radio to be geopolitical beyond the popular culture mass-media broadcaster focus on much extant work on radio geopolitics. Two examples, focusing on Anne Lindbergh’s role as radio operator for this flight, are used to bring assemblage thinking and radio geopolitics together to advocate for the creation of a radio geopolitics assemblage, which provides a way to engage with how different uses of radio can be inculcated in the projection of power across space.

ABSTRACT Building on the notion of geopolitical imaginaries, this paper delineates three distinct and successive periods in the French engagement with the Sahel: first, the (post)colonial era characterised by the Sahel’s unique and peripheral position within France’s ‘pré carré’; second, the War on Terror era, marked by the Sahel’s integration into a global ‘arc of crises’; and finally, the current shift towards prioritising competition among major powers. This article sheds light on the processes whereby geopolitical imaginaries informing foreign policy have been transformed and reshaped. The French retreat from the Sahel took place in a context where the limitations of French security architecture became evident and where Sahelian military juntas elaborated their own antagonistic, sovereigntist geopolitical imaginary. Amidst anxiety and uncertainties, France grappled with the tension between its stated ambition to build better relations and the self-perception of an exceptionalist role on the African continent.

ABSTRACT This paper presents a postcolonial analysis of the role played by local IOM staff in the state-building work in Djibouti, a small state in the Horn of Africa. It argues that the way IOM constructs the role of the local staff reduces the asymmetric nature of its intervention, playing a crucial role in the organisation’s state-building objectives. The data is analysed using the ’subaltern standpoint’ method and 'postcolonial relationalism’ theory. The ethnographic description that follows details how the division of labour between local and international staff aligns with IOM’s historical goal of creating a world composed of separate, racially and culturally homogeneous nation-states. It explores how this division between local and international staff shapes the local staff’s national identity and seemingly enhances their sovereign power while giving the IOM foreign intervention into state migration policies the face of endogenous dynamics.

As nationwide protests continue in Georgia, marking one of the largest resistance movements against the Georgian Dream’s rule since it came to power in 2012, the European Union faces a crucial opportunity to counter Russia’s influence in the region. Vladimir Putin’s efforts to expand Russia’s influence in Europe are multifaceted. In Ukraine, it employs military […]