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War affects women from the bedroom to the battlefield, but for most women war is experienced within intimate spaces. Intimate spaces are rarely the focus of mainstream academic research or media reporting; thus women's experiences with war and displacement are often concealed. Building from literature in feminist geopolitics that helps focus our attention toward everyday and intimate geopolitics, I conducted in-depth interviews with Syrian women refugees in Jordan in order to examine how they are coping. Of the many ways that they've learned to cope, these women asserted that earning an income and adjusting to altered gender performances and relations have been both dire and formative. Many Syrian women refugees have become income providers for the first time in their lives. Some women have become their families' sole providers, and other women are now heads of households as well. Bringing literature from feminist geography, transnational and migration studies, and critical home studies together with feminist geopolitics, I offer the ideas of coping and coping labour as a framework to examine the intimate spaces of displacement. I highlight that paid work is understudied within feminist geopolitics, but such a focus renders important insights into how gender shapes experiences of displacement and how displacement is reshaping gendered relations. In this paper, I show that in the intimate spaces of displacement women have taken on traditionally masculine practices, but while their gendered performances shift, they are simultaneously entrenched as the ideals of appropriate feminine and masculine performances are recreated. Though these multiple gendered performances are creating numerous demands and challenges for Syrian women refugees, these women are also experiencing an increased sense of strength, confidence and respect as a result of their shifting performances.

This article contributes to the existing literature on the securitisation and militarisation of national borders through an examination of the humanitarianisation of contemporary border enforcement efforts. Drawing on discourse and policy analysis and ethnographic fieldwork at the southern border of the United States, I argue that humanitarian discourse and rationality have been integrated into the way in which border enforcement efforts are both framed and justified. I term the resulting discursive configuration the safety/security nexus to draw attention to the way in which migrant safety and border security are seemingly reconciled in official state discourse and policy. I then employ a feminist geopolitical framework to unpack the political and ideological significance of this process. In doing so, I argue that the humanitarianisation of border enforcement has three primary effects: it works to counter the challenges of transnational human rights organisations and constituencies that argue that border enforcement policies violate transnational human rights; it justifies the continued militarisation and securitisation of national borders; and it upholds the territorialised logic of sovereignty and rights upon which state efforts to secure, fortify, and regulate transnational mobility are founded. In turn, this article illustrates that understanding contemporary regimes of border governance necessitates attending to the entangled relationship between militarisation, securitisation, and humanitarianism.

This special section builds on recent scholarship on territory and borders to call for attention to the ways that bodies are central in their constitution. Through a wide range of case studies from the delivery room to Tahrir Square, the six contributors find territory and borders in unlikely places, and reveal new lines of inquiry through their explorations of the ways that bodies both are marked by territory and borders and take an active role in their making. The contributors bring together recent work on territory with literatures from a divergent set of literatures, including feminist geopolitics, queer theory and actor network theory, to build a case for an embodied and material understanding of the intersections of bodies, territory and borders. We argue that territory is made, in part, through bodies – an intimate geopolitics. Bodies challenge and subvert state control of territory, become vulnerable to violence due to state bordering practices, and experience and produce smaller-scale forms of territory in the refugee camp or hospital. Borders can limit our epistemological vision or expand it. Seeking to expand embodied nationalism and build on scholarship on globalisation that cuts across scale, we approach the body as an active, territorial agent in processes of border and territory-making. Here, territory becomes a versatile, but grounded and material, focal point, allowing for the embodied experiences of border-crossers, but also for other racialised, gendered and sexualised bodies as they give birth or seek to build neighbourhoods.

This article critically examines the entanglements between 'security' and the geopolitical and geo-economic formations that assist in the cyclical continuation of conflict. The author questions the biopolitical configurations of state and private forms of militarised security. The author's approach to this research addresses the spatial and corporeal aspects of civilian security in contemporary conflicts zones — with a specific focus on Afghanistan. Drawing on the work of feminist political geographers, this article highlights the corporeal as a key site of analysis for the everyday and seemingly apolitical spaces occupied by civilians living amidst political conflict. This descriptive analysis of security and insecurity focuses on four specific areas: (1) Afghan civilian security measures, (2) domestic spaces as sites of security and violence, (3) mobile forms of security and insecurity and (4) the divergent perceptions and experiences of security/insecurity between international civilian workers living in Afghanistan and Afghan civilian citizens. While macro-scale analyses of security and civilian agency in various locations are important for geographic inquiry, it remains imperative that geographers and other social scientists examine the particularities of specific conflict sites and situations in order to avoid one-size-fits-all responses to or analyses of political conflict — and subsequently flattening civilian experiences through aggregated forms of knowledge production. This paper seeks to investigate several key aspects of feminist political geography by examining the multiple and varied experiences of the everyday within this conflict zone.

This article employs a critical feminist geopolitical frame to analyze American Sniper, a film focused on US military intervention. This approach is especially useful to unpack the spatial, temporal, and political nuances that shape and are shaped by power relations, intimate domains, and discursive and ontological fields beyond the rigid demarcation of sovereign states. American Sniper allows us to situate the nexus of US foreign policy and public perceptions of political events within and beyond US borders. We counter dominant, masculine representational systems within this film through an exploration of the film’s presentation of military and humanitarian interventions vis-à-vis racialized tropes, Orientalist assumptions, and differing scales of difference between viewers and events onscreen. In particular, we define and deploy a type of critical feminist geopolitical frame, the sensible encounter—an active exchange of knowledge and affect between viewer and film—as a way to explore agency and decolonize the politics represented onscreen.

In Colorado, meat processing and packing industries profit from the low-wage labor of foreign born workers and refugees in particular. Scholars and journalists have examined the hazardous and environmentally unjust workplace conditions in meatpacking, and detailed refugee struggles in North American resettlement geographies. Our research builds from this work to examine how multi-scalar geopolitical processes shape processes of refugee resettlement and refugee labor in Colorado’s meatpacking industries. Methods for this work include analysis of secondary data and twenty-two semi-structured interviews with various actors knowledgeable about refugee resettlement and/or agricultural production in Colorado. We argue various intersecting geopolitical processes—from immigration raids of meatpacking plants to presidential-level xenophobic discourses and ensuing immigration policies—interact to impact refugee resettlement and participation in the meat production sector. Moreover, while the U.S.’s neoliberal model of outsourcing resettlement to non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has been widely critiqued, we argue NGO employees, many of whom identify as foreign-born and/or refugees, work to build connection and belonging among refugees in challenging resettlement environments. We suggest a feminist geopolitics approach, which examines how the “global” and the “intimate” are deeply intertwined, is a useful perspective for understanding complicated racialized spaces in the rural United States, including efforts to build connections and empower refugee identities.

The making and implementation of global policy are prominent areas of activity for the global refugee regime, with a specific focus on policy relating to the categories of vulnerable refugees. Recent collective efforts globally have highlighted the importance of meaningfully including refugees themselves; and a discursive shift away from the language of vulnerability towards that of empowerment in policy making, and humanitarian assistance. Despite this, efforts to implement these commitments have largely been unsuccessful, raising questions about how refugees are engaged in these processes, and in what ways the label of vulnerable continues to influence the making and implementation of global refugee policy. Using the case of Canada’s engagement with the global refugee regime, and with refugee women in particular, this article argues that the continued framing of refugee women as vulnerable has impeded progress, and that for transformative policy to be realized, refugee women must be seen as actors with capacity to participate, and must be included in all processes of policy making, implementation and evaluation. A feminist geopolitical framework is presented as a way to decenter states and institutions in favor of centering the individual embodied experiences of refugee women in global refugee policy making. By doing so, empowerment can be realized in policy and practice.

Birth is usually depicted as a moment of celebration, of love and tenderness. The often sanitised image of birth, however, belies the ways in which birth spaces are spaces of acute geopolitical contestation. At the centre of this contested space is the birthing body. That body is a strange hybrid: it belongs in part to the woman who labours, the becoming-mother, and in part to the not-yet-child she is working to bring forth. In part it belongs to the labouring process, the flood of hormones and waves of contractions that carry a woman off to labour land. Or, it is a body that becomes subject to the tools and technologies of a medicalised birth. What the sanitised images of birth conceal is that a woman's birthing body is overdetermined by competing rationalisations of obstetricians and nurses, midwives and doulas, and her own hopes and expectations about the kind of birth she wants. Here the discursive and the material intermingle in the spaces of birth and in the moment in which both a new child, and his or her new mother, come into being in the world. In this paper I begin to map the networks of human and non-human actors that shape the space of birth and compete to govern the birthing body. Working with preliminary results from ethnographic research with mothers I argue that a closer examination of the intricacies of birth experiences reveals this as the site of an intimate geopolitics, where women's bodies are the territories contested through multiple and overlapping claims of diverse actants.

Kidnapping, originally considered a problem for the super wealthy, has quickly spread to epidemic proportions among the relative poor, especially among clandestine international migrants. This article examines how people's relationship to the US–Mexico border shapes their vulnerability to kidnapping. Moreover, through one long ethnographic vignette and survey data of deportees' experiences with kidnapping, this article explores how the border helps produce and shape kidnapping. By exploring the border as topological, based on the relationships created through clandestine migration and deportation, we can see how kidnapping operates to produce certain, highly varied subjectivities. Moreover, this article explores the contours of sexuality and masculinity for a feminist geopolitical take on some of the darkest chapters of the war on drugs in Mexico.

Geographers have demonstrated how discourses and practices of security are unevenly experienced and mapped onto space, often paradoxically creating insecurities in people's lives. Yet, all too often, the fluid nature of power is difficult to articulate; the intimate is either eclipsed or treated as a passive victim of national and global processes. To draw attention to these erasures, feminist geographers have adopted geometric visualisations that prompt new questions about the importance of intimate spaces for understanding security. This paper highlights three visual motifs, by Katz, Pain and Smith, and Shalhoub-Kevorkian, which we apply in our different fields of intimacy-geopolitics.