Introduction to the Handbook on the Geographies of Power

Abstract

In this introductory chapter, we explore the question of power as a plural rather than singular phenomenon, and what approaching “power in the plural” might mean for geographers and others interested in the relationship between power and space. By exploring recent debates in political geography, as well as anticipating the wider and more daring arguments made by the authors collected together in this volume, we argue that the spatiality of power is never singular and easily modeled according to straightforward theoretical bullet-points, but instead is best approached as plural, contextually emergent and relational, and as deserving of concrete yet transductive investigation in particular spacings and timings. One of our core interests – drawing on a variety of intellectual sources, including critical realism, Henri Lefebvre’s discussion of power and space, and more recent research on topology and so-called new materialisms – is to move beyond what we see as a rather limited discussion of power and space in political geography, and as such to put political geography “in question” as the taken-for-granted “home” of theorizing the relationship between power and space.

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