In our last issue we explored questions of licit and illicit economies of production alongside fractured geopolitical borderlands with a focus on questions of formal and informal practices of surveillance. This issue continues to explore the intersections between states and borderlands as well as to consider the interrelationship between subjects of and concepts in history.
The section titled “Concept Histories of the Urban” is organized around concepts that function as entry points for a consideration of the poetics and politics of urban transformation in the global South. Our contributors are concerned with how global urbanism reflects economic processes, e.g., those that go under the name of neoliberalism, which are shaped by convergent processes (real estate speculation, land grab, financialization of financial risk, deskilling, and deindustrialization) but take distinct spatial form and respond to local histories. These challenge anticipations of urban democracy and social mobility shaped by an earlier understanding of...
