Critical geographies of racial and spatial control

This article works through a set of studies that link racial and spatial control in explaining mutations of state-sanctioned and extralegal racism in concrete geographical conjunctures in the contemporary world. Critical human geography is particularly well poised to contributing to a broader debate about how to research racial formations beyond ideology, through materiality, embodiment and spatiality. Barbed wire, concentration camps, prison booms, aerial bombing, and the War on Terror are examples of material and geographical formations that must be explained beyond attention to social construction. Indeed, these technologies of power demonstrate the strength of state-sanctioned racism in our time, and the importance for critical scholarship to write with various forms of suffering in the ruins of contemporary racism, if we are to be able to understand new forms of anti-racism in the making.