This article conceptualizes how infectious microbes create real borders that are not dependent on human meaning making or identity. By territorializing interfaces between contagion and ecology, infectious agents engage in bordering practices by determining where citizens can move around safely, and thereby challenge the bordering practices and biosecurity efforts of nation-states. Based on empirical examples of microbial borders, evidence from the natural sciences, interviews with public health practitioners, and theoretical support from ethnographic encounters with Amazonian ontologies, the conceptualization links the geopolitics of microbial bordering to biodiversity loss and deforestation, and suggests that microbial bordering should prompt acknowledgment of the role humans play in ecological patterns that far exceed human control and meaning making. The concept of microbial borders is relevant to global health and security efforts in general, expands the theoretical agenda for critical border studies, and contributes to the fields of global health security and New Materialism in International Relations by highlighting that international relations include our relations with non-humans, and that how we choose to cohabitate with them has large implications for human security.

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This article conceptualizes contemporary geopolitical violence in the Arctic through a semiotic register. Different living beings perceive different things, and these differences amount to different worlds, not merely different worldviews. Building on Eduardo Kohn’s reading of the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, and theorists of biosemiotics and ecosemiotics, the article analyses how signs in and between living organisms and their environments are political matters of life and death. Via the themes of invisibility, colors, and snow, the article traces semiotic relations between different living beings and their Arctic ecologies to weave a semiotic understanding of contemporary geopolitical violence in the Arctic and the role of climate change therein. The article defines the violence of climate change as a violence of not being able to recognize oneself, and builds on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s concept of multinaturalism to explain what it means that one world ruins other worlds.

To conceptualize the violence of the Nordic states in the Arctic, this article provides a spatial analysis of relationships between Norway, Sweden, and Finland and the Sámi and reindeer inhabiting their northern parts. The analysis is informed by Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of smooth and striated space and examines how the Nordic states, through their striation activities, are perpetrating violence toward nomadic forms of life. Rather than casting the spatial relationships between states and reindeer herders as “land use conflicts,” the article shifts the focus from competing activities to violence toward one form of life perpetrated by another. Tracing state efforts of bordering, rationalization of reindeer herding as an industry, infrastructure developments, and cultivation of selected predatory lines of flight, the article illuminates an indirect violence that is slowly eliminating nomadic forms of life. This loss highlights that in the sixth great extinction, the world is losing not only distinct biological species but also different forms of life within species. Ultimately, the striation activities of the biopolitical Nordic states, in their narrow focus on Western knowledge regimes, security, profit, and geopolitical positioning for an impending Arctic resource boom, enact a violent and destructive homogenization of what constitutes life.

Joined to the Hawaiian Islands by ocean currents and winds, Kalama Atoll (named Johnston by the United States) emerges from the sea 825 miles southwest of Honolulu. Over a period of 165 years, in furtherance of the U.S. imperial project, Kalama has been rendered both conservation frontier and island laboratory for an extraordinary amount of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. This article examines U.S. imperial governance at Kalama, an unincorporated U.S. territory, and how military ruination of Kalama has produced new military natures that call for observation and protection. Introducing a rubric of “conservation by ruination,” we highlight how a coalescing of toxic destruction and conservation efforts functions as a continuous geopolitical claim to the atoll, and how imperial formations at the atoll are weaved through technoscientific and multispecies assemblages. In essence, what is conserved in conservation by ruination is not wildlife, habitats, or nature, but empire itself. Kalama is a post-apocalyptic cyborg assemblage of bleached coral skeletons and radioactive debris, dioxin-laden leachate and crazy ants; a cacophonous ecology of weathered concrete and rusted metal, inhabited by seabirds and steadily dissolving into the sea. But it is also an atoll that remains connected to the islands and peoples of Oceania, and which is neither lost, small, isolated, or ruined. We therefore end the article by speculating on restoration of this atoll whose imperial formations capture not only its spaces, but also its futures.