Understanding South Asia through its borders

LSE’s Romola Sanyal introduces a special issue of Political Geography, “Geographies at the Margins: Borders in South Asia”, and argues that borders and margins are central to understanding South Asia’s history and present

Managing through ad hoc measures: Syrian refugees and the politics of waiting in Lebanon

This paper explores how the ad hoc and uneven implementation and enforcement of policies in the context of the Global South particularly in situations of large-scale refugee crises creates forms of waiting and precarity amongst refugees. This exploration is initiated by questions about how states in the Global South manage mass displacements of people whilst adhering to the principles of non-refoulement, a customary international law forbidding countries from forcibly returning refugees to conditions that may endanger their lives. How is this complicated in situations where states are not party to the Refugee convention and where refugee crises become protracted? How does this then lead to immobilizing refugees and compelling them to wait? I focus on the practices of the Lebanese state in response to the Syrian refugee crisis that has continued on from 2011. Lebanon has changed its regulations and decisions towards the large number of Syrians living in the country over the course of the crisis whilst adhering to the principle of non-refoulement. However, the policies enacted by the government are arbitrarily implemented and enforced at different scales of governance creating legal anxieties and immobilities for Syrians in the country. I draw on the work of critical legal and political geographers to argue that the ad hoc nature of the law, creates a fragmented landscape of mobility for Syrians, exacerbating conditions of precarity and poverty and, importantly, colonizing their futures

The continuing legacy of partition in India’s urban spaces

Romola Sanyal looks at how the history of migration and refugees in India can help us to better understand issues of contemporary urbanisation in South Asian cities

Diasporic scholarship: racialization, coloniality and de‐territorializing knowledge

In considering how knowledge reproduces the dynamics of coloniality in Geography, scholars have looked beyond the Global North and Global South as cartographical sites, instead seeing them as conceptual frameworks and epistemic positions. Building on this rich work, we draw attention to specific issues obscured within it. Whilst geographical scholarship has moved to recognizing how the Global North and South bleed into each other, it frequently continues to locate scholars themselves within specific territories, labelling them of the Global North or of the Global South, thereby re-territorializing scholars and their work and reflecting and revealing processes of racialization within the academy. We ask how those who do not fit into neat geographical imaginations of North and South represent ways to understand and know the world? Specifically, how can we centre the idea of diaspora as part of wider geo- and body political projects that aim to decentre knowledge production? We bring diaspora back into debates on knowledge production to explore how their understanding of the world, rooted in hybrid and transnational ways, can enrich engagements around postcoloniality and decoloniality. We detail how such voices illuminate how racialization, coloniality and difference continue to mark how we know and teach the world. Our argument makes imperative the case for de-territorializing scholars and scholarship

Platform economies and urban planning: Airbnb and regulated deregulation in London

The ‘sharing economy’ has become a new buzzword in urban life as digital technology companies set up online platforms to link together people and un- or underutilised assets with those seeking to rent them for short periods of time. While cloaked under the rhetoric of ‘sharing’, the exchanges they foster are usually profit-driven. These economic activities are having profound impacts on urban environments as they disrupt traditional forms of hospitality, transport, service industry and housing. While critical debates have focused on the challenges that sharing economy activities bring to existing labour and economic practices, it is necessary to acknowledge that they also have increasingly significant impacts on planning policy and urban governance. Using the case of Airbnb in London, this article looks at how these sharing or platform economy companies are involved in encouraging governments to change existing regulations, in this case by deregulating short-term letting. This has important implications for planning enforcement. We examine how the challenges around obtaining data to enforce new regulations are being addressed by local councils who struggle to balance corporate interests with public good. Finally, we address proposals for using algorithms and big data as means of urban governance and argue that the schism between regulation and enforcement is opening up new digitally mediated spaces of informal practices in cities

Digital informalisation: rental housing, platforms, and the management of risk

The eruption of disruptive digital platforms is reshaping geographies of housing under the gaze of corporations and through the webs of algorithms. Engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on informal housing across the Global North and South, we propose the term ‘digital informalisation’ to examine how digital platforms are engendering new and opaque ways of governing housing, presenting a theoretical and political blind spot. Focusing on rental housing, our paper unpacks the ways in which new forms of digital management of risk control access and filter populations. In contrast to progressive imaginaries of ‘smart’ technological mediation, practices of algorithmic redlining, biased tenant profiling and the management of risk in private tenancies and in housing welfare both introduce and extend discriminatory and exclusionary housing practices. The paper aims to contribute to research on informal housing in the Global North by examining digital mediation and its governance as key overlooked components of housing geographies beyond North and South dichotomies

Spectacle and suffering: the Mumbai slum as a worlded space

This paper examines the relationship between spectacle and worlding. Using Dharavi as the site (cite) of analysis, the paper considers how slum tours, art and television documentaries produce particular narratives and imaginaries of the slum. We move beyond the discussions of voyeurism and the aestheticisation of poverty and suggest that the knowledge of the slum is entangled with the motives, preconceptions and experiences of multiple actors, giving the slum a relation with the “world” that holds opportunities to disrupt hegemonic views of urbanism, while centering its own position as a locus of knowledge on urban poverty. The paper suggests that analysing the spectacle of the slum through the lens of worlding offers ways to think critically of how urban space is reordered and urban knowledge is produced and circulated

A no-camp policy: interrogating informal settlements in Lebanon

As fewer refugees move into formal camps, what kinds of non-camp spaces are emerging and how does that challenge the ways in which we understand the management and politics of refuge? This paper seeks to shed light on this question through an analysis of informal settlements in Lebanon. The Syrian crisis has displaced millions of people, most of whom have moved into neighbouring countries such as Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. The Lebanese government, faced with a longer history of Palestinian camps and their militarization has refused to allow the establishment of official refugee camps for Syrians. As a result of this ‘no camp’ policy, Syrians are forced to either live in private rented accommodation in towns and cities throughout the country, or in informal settlements (ISes) built on private, often agricultural land. These informal settlements are built and developed through a complex assemblage of humanitarianism, hospitality, security, economic and political considerations. In this paper, I look at the physical and social spaces of informal settlements in the Bekaa Valley, Eastern Lebanon, examining how differential access to aid, support, security and tacit recognition by the state has led to variations amongst them. In doing so, I expose how an informalized response to the crisis through a system of deregulation is enabling refugee spaces to emerge that are visible, yet unrecognized, flexible, yet precarious. These spaces destabilize the city/camp dichotomy by drawing together elements of both. In engaging with debates on informality, the paper contributes to a growing critical literature on refugee geographies and seeks to expand beyond the reductive narratives of refugee camps, thereby offering insights into refugee futures in increasingly uncertain times