This paper traces the development of feminist geopolitics as a distinct analytical, epistemological, and methodological approach in geography. Feminist geopolitics is explained as an analytic approach that connects seemingly disparate people, places, events, and issues to show the connections across various operations of power and productions of inequality and exploitation. In so doing, we demonstrate the ways in which feminist geopolitics challenges the scales of geopolitics and refocuses on the mundane, everyday reproductions of geopolitical power. We further discuss recent work in the field that examines issues of security and insecurity to illustrate what insights can be gained by employing a feminist geopolitical framework.

No abstract

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.

A broad body of research has examined the shifting spatialities of contemporary border enforcement efforts, drawing particular attention to how border enforcement efforts increasingly take place away from the territorial edges of border enforcing states. However, existing research largely focuses on border enforcement efforts that mobilize strategies of militarization, securitization, and criminalization. In response, this paper draws on work in the fields of emotional and feminist geopolitics, to broaden understandings of the sites, modalities, and spatialities of border governance. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival research, and discourse analysis, this paper examines public information campaigns launched by US border enforcement agencies between 1990 and 2012. In doing so, I show how these campaigns aim to affect migrant decision-making and reduce unauthorized migration by circulating strategically crafted messages and images into the intimate spaces of everyday life where potential migrants and their loved ones live and socialize. Unlike the hard power strategies of militarized borders and migrant criminalization, public information campaigns work as soft-power tools of governance that target the emotional registers of viewers and both respond to and counter particular gender ideologies. As this analysis suggests, understanding the full complexity of contemporary border governance requires that we broaden the scope of analysis beyond the hard power strategies of militarization, securitization, and criminalization to examine the softer side of border governance, a project that the insights of feminist political geography are particularly well suited for.