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Global restructuring has dramatically affected the value, extent, and significance of informal economic activities worldwide. Approaching informalization as a systemic phenomenon, this essay illuminates linkages among economic processes, widening inequalities, “governance gaps,” and global insecurities. It considers the historical context in which distinctive approaches to informality emerged and reviews three principal “islands” of existing research: mainstream, structuralist, and feminist. These variously illuminate patterns of economic inequality that are central to studies of international political economy. Informality’s significance to IR and security studies is further illuminated through a discussion of the processes and political economy of informalization in relation to global migrations, and the interaction of economic and political informalization in the context of “new” wars and security crises.

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In this introduction to the special section on "Engaging Geopolitics through the Lens of the Intimate", we first locate the papers collected here in the context of developing an "Intimate Geopolitics" project at the University of Manchester. We then review the importance of 'intimacy' and the concept of 'the intimate' across an array of disciplinary studies, drawing especially on the rich body of work by critical geopolitics scholars who have long challenged categorical binaries and territorial boundaries. Our focus here is exploring what insights we can bring to understanding the nexus of intimacy and global politics by deploying the lens of the intimate-understood as a variety of processes of attachment and relationalityin six globally dispersed case studies. Collectively, the papers presented here not only engage a wide range of issues and locations, but also contribute to research engaging geographically specific contexts and practices. We note that the papers 'cluster' around issues of migration, borders, 'home', asylum and visa regimes, prompting us to suggest that the papers productively inform three foci of inquiry. Specifically, the papers 1) enrich our understanding of bordercrossing beyond simple association of this with the movement of people, things and ideas; 2) deepen our understanding of how geopolitics is constituted by forms of attachments and relationality that are integral to forms of governance; and 3) help us explore how attachments are not simply additive but productive of geopolitical concerns.