Introduction to the Special Issue: Subterranean Geopolitics

TLDR

Recent scholarship in political geography, anthropology, and architecture has employed elemental and volumetric registers to investigate calculative, material, technical, and atmospheric interventions in, on, through, and beneath the earth’s surface. This special issue adopts a subterranean turn, engaging contributors to drill down, dive into, travel through, and speculate about underground and underwater domains. The authors conceptualize the subterranean as a volume characterized by distinct material qualities—height, pressure, depth, and shape—forming the analytical framework for their studies. Collectively, the nine papers provide diverse case studies—from a nineteenth‑century volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean to deep‑sea mining off Papua New Guinea—demonstrating how subterranean spaces shape geopolitical strategies, infrastructures, and security.

Abstract

Recent scholarship in political geography and allied disciplines such as Anthropology and Architecture has used registers such as the elemental and volumetric to explore the calculative, material, technical, and atmospheric interventions in, on, through and beneath the earth's surface. In this special issue, our contributors engage in a 'subterranean turn', as they drill down, dive into, travel through and speculate with underground and underwater domains. Although varied in their geographical environments and locales, and diverse in their time-frames, the papers speak to four themes that constitute a 'subterranean geopolitics. ' First, the subterranean is conceptualised as volume with distinct material qualities including height, pressure, depth and shape. There are multiple undergrounds on offer. Second, the subterranean is integral to nation-state building and geopolitical strategies of control, enclosure and exclusion. Third, there is evidence of and for subterranean infrastructures aplenty. States and other actors want to design, experiment and plan with the underground and underwater environments. Finally, the subterranean is never divorced from calculative, legal and technical regimes of regulation, and the cultivation of expertise – scientific, military, engineering – is a crucial element in these contributions to subterranean geopolitics. Taken together, the nine papers in this special issue offer a rich array of case studies including the nineteenth-century volcanic eruption in the Mediterranean (Hawkins Citation2018), subterranean nationalism in the South Atlantic (Benwell), lead mining in nineteenth-century English Peak District (Endfield and Van Lieshout Citation2019), a transnational gas pipeline running through Italy (Barry and Gambino Citation2019), subterranean security in Israel/Palestine (Slesinger Citation2019), natural gas infrastructure (Forman Citation2019), deep sea mining off Papua New Guinea (Childs Citation2019b), US military planning in and under Greenland's inland ice (Bruun Citation2018), and managing the shipping routes of the English Channel (Peters Citation2019).