It’s the first week of February and we’ve just published our March issue (!?)-Antipode 47:2.

As you’ll see, there are some superb essays in this issue, and we’d like to take this opportunity to make connections between them and other, either recently published or forthcoming, pieces.

Sarah Bracking’s The Anti-Politics of Climate Finance: The Creation and Performativity of the Green Climate Fund follows the design of the UN’s Green Climate Fund over the last few years, charting the struggle between states, corporations and banks and various civil society actors over the future of environmental governance. [See also Christian Parenti’s The Environment Making State: Territory, Nature, and Value.]

Noelle Brigden and Wendy Vogt’s Homeland Heroes: Migrants and Soldiers in the Neoliberal Era examines the relationship between neoliberalism and nationalism through the lenses of US citizens enlisting in the military and unauthorised Central Americans migrating to the United States. [See also Anthony Ince and colleagues’ British Jobs for British Workers? Negotiating Work, Nation, and Globalisation through the Lindsey Oil Refinery Disputes.]

Julianne Busa and Rebekah Garder’s Champions of the Movement or Fair-weather Heroes? Individualization and the (A)politics of Local Food looks at the degree to which local food consumers engage wider environmental and social justice issues, exploring the neoliberalisation and depoliticisation of the alternative food movement. [See also Margaret Marietta Ramírez’s The Elusive Inclusive: Black Food Geographies and Racialized Food Spaces.]

Andreas Exner, Christian Lauk and Werner Zittel’s Sold Futures? The Global Availability of Metals and Economic Growth at the Peripheries: Distribution and Regulation in a Degrowth Perspective analyses the changing role of metals in geopolitics as the growth of renewable energy decreases dependence on fossil fuels. [See also Mazen Labban’s Against Shareholder Value: Accumulation in the Oil Industry and the Biopolitics of Labour Under Finance.]

Santiago Gorostiza, Hug March and David Saurí’s “Urban Ecology Under Fire”: Water Supply in Madrid During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) investigates the role of workers in the resilience of water supplies in cities at war, considering urban flows, infrastructures and knowledges. [See also Verónica Perera’s Engaged Universals and Community Economies: The (Human) Right to Water in Colombia.]

Neil Gray and Libby Porter’s By Any Means Necessary: Urban Regeneration and the “State of Exception” in Glasgow’s Commonwealth Games 2014 puts Agamben’s “state of exception” to work in a study of the violent displacement of working class neighbourhoods connected to a sporting mega-event, highlighting the (mis)use of potentially progressive urban policy. [See also Amanda Huron’s Working with Strangers in Saturated Space: Reclaiming and Maintaining the Urban Commons.]

Sam Halvorsen’s Taking Space: Moments of Rupture and Everyday Life in Occupy London examines the tension between taking space-the practice of occupation-as a moment of rupture, intensity and radical possibility, and as one of everyday routines, rhythm and reproduction, considering the challenges faced by the Occupy movement. [See also Jennifer Spiegel’s Rêve Général Illimité? The Role of Creative Protest in Transforming the Dynamics of Space and Time During the 2012 Quebec Student Strike.]

Mahito Hayashi’s Rescaled “Rebel Cities”, Nationalisation, and the Bourgeois Utopia: Dialectics Between Urban Social Movements and Regulation for Japan’s Homeless analyses the dialectics of “commoning and othering”, detecting utopian currents-despite policing practices and workfare policies-in contemporary Japanese cities. [See also Ståle Holgersen’s Economic Crisis, (Creative) Destruction, and the Current Urban Condition.]

Katy Jenkins’ Unearthing Women’s Anti-Mining Activism in the Andes: Pachamama and the “Mad Old Women” looks at women’s (largely unrecognised) role in activism challenging the expansion of extractive industries across Latin America, developing an understanding of the gendered micro-politics of resistance and struggle. [See also Janet Siltanen and colleagues’ “This is how I want to live my life”: An Experiment in Prefigurative Feminist Organizing for a More Equitable and Inclusive City.]

Sara Nelson’s Beyond The Limits to Growth: Ecology and the Neoliberal Counterrevolution brings together autonomist Marxist analyses of post-Fordist transition with the geographical literature on ecosystem services to argue that the rise of the ecosystem service economy was central to the late-20th century “neoliberal counterrevolution”. [See also Bruce Braun’s New Materialisms and Neoliberal Natures.]

Susanne Soederberg’s Subprime Housing Goes South: Constructing Securitised Mortgages for the Poor in Mexico is a critical analysis on the social implications and power dimensions of residential mortgage-backed securitisation, one that explains how and why state-sponsored schemes subsidise financial and construction interests in the name of expanding home ownership for the poor. [See also Vern Baxter’s Rent, Real Estate, and Flood Mitigation in New Orleans East.]

Vicki Squire’s Acts of Desertion: Abandonment and Renouncement at the Sonoran Borderzone examines the intensity of security practices and significance of migratory acts on the Mexico-US border, drawing out the constitution of both sovereign power and the agency of subjects. [See also Jonathan Darling’s Asylum and the Post-Political: Domopolitics, Depoliticisation and Acts of Citizenship.]

Andrew Wallace’s Gentrification Interrupted in Salford, UK: From New Deal to “Limbo-Land” in a Contemporary Urban Periphery contributes to our understanding of low-income residents’ experiences of state-led gentrification, exploring the politics of “redevelopment” preparations and the landscapes that emerge when projects stall. [See also Justin Maher’s The Capital of Diversity: Neoliberal Development and the Discourse of Difference in Washington, DC.]

Finally, Keith Woodward and Mario Bruzzone’s Touching Like a State offers a theorisation of “how the state touches”; through an analysis of relatively non-violent interactions between police and protesters, the authors anatomise “soft force” and the subtle control of the movement of activists. [See also Justus Uitermark and Walter Nicholls’ From Politicization to Policing: The Rise and Decline of New Social Movements in Amsterdam and Paris.]