Human Geography

Human Geography 19.1 has been published. All the published articles are available at: journals.sagepub.com/toc/HUG/curren…

Online first: Credibility, empire, and the geopolitics of distrust: Rethinking Iran's nuclear question - Samer Alatout, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… @sameralatout “Public discourse on Iran's nuclear program continues to return to a familiar question: does Iran intend to develop nuclear weapons? This paper argues that the persistence of this question is itself part of the problem. It is not simply an inquiry into intention, but a structure of suspicion—one that places Iran, despite its status as a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its declared prohibition on nuclear weapons, under a continuous demand to prove what it has already renounced. The question, in this sense, operates as a form of epistemic and political penalization. Rather than treating the issue as one of verification, the paper shifts attention to the conditions under which statements are believed, dismissed, or rendered unintelligible.” #Iran #IranWar‌ #nuclear #US_Iran

Online first: Geographies of the blackout: Infrastructural violence and spatial isolation in besieged Gaza - Ekrema Shehab, Bilal Hamamra, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “This qualitative study examines the spatial, social, and psychological impacts of systematic internet and electricity blackouts imposed on the besieged population of Gaza. Through 30 in-depth interviews with displaced residents in Rafah and Jabalia, the research evaluates these blackouts as acts of infrastructural violence and settler colonialism. Rather than passive consequences of war, the findings demonstrate that digital blockades operate as deliberate strategies of territorial and demographic control. Participants describe how the forced severance of telecommunications dismantles essential bonds of care, immobilizes bodies, obstructs humanitarian relief, and enforces severe spatial isolation.”

Online first and open access: Resisting detached abstraction and universality: The politics and practices of artmaking in the racialized suburbs of Scarborough, Toronto - Esmond Lee, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “This essay reflects on artistic practices as contextually grounded research inseparable from socio-political action through four temporary, limited and site-specific artistic interventions in Scarborough, Toronto's racialized suburb. Drawing from Flyvbjerg's long advocacy for phronesis in critical social sciences, phronetic approach is a problem-driven theoretical methodology that allows scholars, practitioners and activists rooted in the desire for political transformations and social practice to better participate in contested geographies of settler-colonial capitalist sub/urbanization.”

Online first: Indonesia's urban green spaces dilemma: Balancing law, ecology, and public space, highlighting Jakarta - Mohammad Raditia Pradana, Jarot Mulyo Semedi, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “This article intervenes in debates on how law, ecology, and urban governance produce the idea of “green space.” Using Indonesia's 30% Green Open Space (GOS) mandate as a critical case, it argues that the legal abstraction of ecology into measurable quotas transforms environmental care into bureaucratic representation.”

Online first and open access with abstract translated to Bislama: Becoming ready, remaining disciplined? Access to climate finance and the double bind of accountability in Vanuatu - Johanna Tunn, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “Multilateral climate finance has been positioned as a mechanism of climate justice, yet access to these funds remains highly constrained. Drawing on a governmentality-informed political ethnography grounded in Pasifika scholarship and fieldwork in Vanuatu's climate finance nexus, this paper shifts analytical focus from flows of finance to its infrastructures of access. It argues that green funds – particularly the Green Climate Fund – operate as disciplinary regimes that produce parallel governance structures and donor-centred accountability relations.”

Online first and open access: Between empires: Middling modernizers and the interstices of development - Hun Kim, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “The dismantling of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) marks more than a break in the global order, but the exhaustion of a liberal technocratic consensus forged in the postwar era. Despite the resulting rupture, modernization projects continue—not only through Washington, Beijing, or the World Bank but via a heterogeneous set of East and Southeast Asian actors operating in the physical and ideological spaces between competing empires. I refer to these actors as middling modernizers”

Online first, open access, and abstract available in Portuguese: The river is territory: Quilombolas in defense of the waters of eastern Amazonia - Alzinei da N Silva, Manoel M Ribeiro Filho, Benjamin Kantner, Rodrigo Peixoto, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “This paper calls for a local territorialization of rivers, specifically in Brazil's eastern Pará state where the pressures of development arrived with the opening of the Belém-Brasília Highway (1960), Trans-Amazonian Highway (1972), and Tucuruí Dam (1984). We write from a region accustomed to devastation under the mantra of economic growth and development. We offer three principal interventions within the framework of the river as territory. First, we emphasize the importance of the small tributaries, referred to locally as igarapés, which nourish these rivers. Next, in order to arrive at the affective power of rivers in Quilombola societies, we must consider the historical role of rivers as landscapes of flight, fear, and expert knowledge–factors in the formation of hydro-survivance which connects the layers of the past to the present moment in the Quilombola politics. Finally, rivers create the possibility of movement, and in this case, eco-social movements which network dispersed Quilombola communities with each other, but often go further, resulting in coalitions between Quilombolas, Indigenous groups, traditional populations (such as ribeirinhos), and environmentalists.”

Online first with abstract in Korean language ( in addition to English): The rise of Rights of Nature movement and its political implications in Ireland and beyond - Juneseo Hwang, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “This paper critically assesses the current state of the Rights of Nature in Northern Ireland, exploring their implications, analysing relevant planning cases, and examining political developments since the adoption of these motions. It contends that the Rights of Nature framework provides environmental defenders with a complementary yet essential tool to anchor their anti-mining resistance and to promote greater participation in environmental law and governance.”

Online first and open access: Digital extractivism(s) and digitally-facilitated extractivism(s): Towards conceptual expansion and clarity - Christopher W Chagnon, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “The rapid proliferation of digital technologies has increased interest in extractivism beyond traditional resource sectors. This article provides a review of the Anglophone literature on digital extractivism(s) and advances a new term – digitally-facilitated extractivism(s) – to improve conceptual clarity”

Online first: Voices from the territory, evidence-building processes, and scientific (un)neutrality: Learning lessons from indigenous responses to environmental impact assessment's territorial fragmentation in Tarapacá, Chile - Sascha Miguel Cornejo Puschner, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19…. "In contexts where extractivism operates as a neo-colonial state project, Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) frame mining's environmental consequences through techno-scientific knowledge serving primarily economic interests. The paper's core argument posits that EIA results in the fragmentation of territories, thereby undermining indigenous communities' worldviews and livelihoods. Such fragmentation is inherent to the institutional frameworks governing environmental management practices for both land and natural resources."

Online first and open access: The counterinsurgent work of green transition financing in Africa - Wangui Kimari, Henrik Ernstson, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “we look at recent events and narratives shaping formal green transition practices in Africa, and interrogate whether financing, demanded by both states and activists, will actually enable a recalibration in the power and energy relations on the continent. Our position is that, against the imperial scaffolding and unequal historical assemblages that are the foundation for the world today, forms of finance—whether as “loss and damages” or the “new global financing pact”—proposed by multiple African actors can serve to deflect and deny local impetus for structural change. We explore the counterinsurgent work of this financing through two key movements: the first is via discussing how energy transition narratives on the continent are increasingly framed as the opportunity for an agential “African Century,” rather than the continuation of racialized extractivism—business as usual.”

Online first and open access: Restructuring life and work through bulldozer “justice” in urban India - Ragini Jha, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… "This article examines the intensification of demolition drives in urban India over the past decade. It situates forced evictions within the history of “development” induced displacement and the contemporary rise of Hindutva nationalism. The Indian development model has historically relied on large-scale displacement for infrastructural expansion, conservation projects, and urban redevelopment. Policies to produce a “world-class” city have increased the incidence of forced evictions, even as avenues for rehabilitation have diminished. In recent years, punitive demolitions—popularly termed “bulldozer justice”—have emerged as a key instrument of repression targeting Indian Muslims, particularly migrant workers."

Online first and open access: On the dichotomy between housing justice and environmental justice - Richard Kirk, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “This article challenges the dominant framing of U.S. urban policy that forces a choice between housing production and environmental safety. I argue that this dichotomy is not pragmatic but ideological—an artifact of neoliberal racial capitalism and the financialization of housing that legitimizes continued harm inflicted on marginalized communities.”

Online first: The ambivalence of potential - Merle Davis Matthews, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/19… “Potential is an ambivalent concept, one that is often drawn on in ways that may occlude the political possibilities of the present moment. This paper engages with the tense of potential, highlighting how narrations of possible futures can foreclose alternative possibilities. I analyze two common modalities in which potential appears; potential as abstract hope, and potential as an otherwise that needs to be attuned to.”

Online first and open access: Lithium and green extractivism in Chile: Discourses and practices during Gabriel Boric's government - Camila Ponce Lara, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… “our findings reveal how Boric's administration has reinforced extractivist dynamics under the umbrella of energy transition, exemplifying what Svampa conceptualizes as the shift from the “consensus of commodities” to the “consensus of decarbonization.” The case illustrates how peripheral economies face structural limitations in overcoming resource dependency even under progressive governments, while indigenous perspectives and territorial rights are marginalized.”

Online first & open access: Indigenous marine resource management, decolonisation and development - Jeremy Anbleyth-Evans, Shankar Aswani, Felipe Kern Moreira, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… “many Indigenous peoples, their marine environments and their cultures are going extinct. Relevant to the UN Ocean Decade Challenge 10 Restore society's relationship with the ocean, the article reviews 200 Indigenous communities facing environmental injustices from nine major economic development impacts, mining, port development, oil and gas, military impacts, nuclear, aquaculture, sewerage, and migratory fisheries.”

Online first: Potential violence, trauma and all the feels: Towards collaborative, reflexive and self-aware methodologies for researching the far right - Christoph Hedtke, Felicitas Kuebler, Valentin Domann, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117… “While geographic scholarship has increasingly engaged with far-right mobilisations and imaginaries, little attention has been paid to the emotional challenges researchers face when studying these violent geographies. Drawing on individual and collective empirical work, this paper addresses the emotional labour involved in researching the far right, and it reflects on the personal impact and the methodological and institutional implications of such work. We combine personal fieldwork reflections with survey data to explore how violence is experienced and internalised throughout the research process. Our findings highlight the ways positionality, biography, structural constraints and institutional support shape researcher vulnerability,”

Online first: Governing through transition: The spatial politics of low-carbon futurity - Young-Jin Ahn, Zuhriddin Juraev, Jisun Kim, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117… “Low-carbon transitions are framed as technocratic fixes to climate crisis but function instead as spatial regimes of governance and accumulation. They reorganise power, territory and legitimacy while extending, not rupturing, carbon modernity. Under the moral sign of sustainability, decarbonisation reorders value through new infrastructure, financial instruments and scalar hierarchies. The green economy governs through crisis, turning ecological repair into control and profit.”

Online first and open access: How does settler-colonialism problematise the concepts of infrastructure and sabotage? Insights from debates about the Treaty of Waitangi in Aotearoa - Kyle R Matthews, Joanna Kidman, Sophie Bond, Karen Nairn, 2026 journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11… "We problematise the concepts of ‘infrastructure’ and ‘sabotage’ using a decolonial lens based on insights from recent acts of political resistance in Aotearoa.1 By tracing three case studies we ask: what is the infrastructure? Who is the saboteur? And how do temporalities inform these questions? We hold infrastructure as a contested concept in settler-colonial states that incorporates both state infrastructure which acts as the vehicle for colonial violence, and Indigenous infrastructures which have been subject to, and resist, that violence."