The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) herald a new phase for international development. This article presents the results of a consultative exercise to collaboratively identify 100 research questions of critical importance for the post‐2015 international development agenda. The final shortlist is grouped into nine thematic areas and was selected by 21 representatives of international and non‐governmental organisations and consultancies, and 14 academics with diverse disciplinary expertise from an initial pool of 704 questions submitted by 110 organisations based in 34 countries. The shortlist includes questions addressing long‐standing problems, new challenges and broader issues related to development policies, practices and institutions. Collectively, these questions are relevant for future development‐related research priorities of governmental and non‐governmental organisations worldwide and could act as focal points for transdisciplinary research collaborations.

Refugee camps and reception and identification centres (RICs) have long been imagined as ‘the best’ or ‘most suitable’ places for displaced people by states and border management authorities. In contrast, informal housing often provided by activist groups, is frequently framed as a part of the urban ‘badlands’. Drawing on research carried out between 2015 and 2019 in key spaces in Greece and Serbia along the so‐called ‘Balkan Route’, this article engages with the concept of the ‘badlands’ as a lens through which to consider the different types of housing made available for refugees in key urban centres. Following Dikeç (2007), Neely and Samura (2011), and Shabazz (2015), we examine how sites of refugee accommodation are imagined through the lenses of place, space and race and how this shapes policy responses. We ask: what are the main divergences and variations between formal refugee housing and informal sites? Why, given the poor conditions of most refugee camps, are they still viewed as the ‘best’ solution to housing? What role do policy decisions play in ‘othering’ spaces, places, groups and individuals? We examine the spatial effects of multiple policy levels and interventions (EU, national, local, grassroots) on refugee accommodation.

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This article examines the intersections between the visual, spatial and material and considers how these interactions capture the border politics of everyday ‘banal’ objects. We do this by looking at some of the objects and things that constitute the ‘Balkan Route’ through Europe: posters, signs, directions, notices, flyers and maps produced by state authorities and volunteer-led aid networks. We use objects to reflect more broadly on how seemingly banal and everyday things become incorporated into the political work of states and become constitutive of fluid borders. We argue that everyday objects become visualisations of states and authorities, and help to make and regulate physical spaces. We show how each visual object encountered along the route gives us a broader insight into the macropolitics of European border regimes, specifically the effects of ‘closed borders’ and the criminalisation of aid networks. The article pushes forward the ‘aesthetic turn’ debate in international relations by bringing in insights from political geography and materialism, and suggests that a walking methodology can be a productive way of encountering the visual and understanding how its physical location creates political effects.

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