Fiona Mcconnell
Biographic Data
| ID | 224210 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Fiona Mcconnell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Fiona |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcconnell |
| SIGNATURE | MCCONNELL F |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3841-4263 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 645 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 50 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
Building a ‘community of common destiny’? Contested geopolitical imaginations of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in Central Asia
In recent years Central Asia has slipped from the focus of Belt and Road Initiative’s policymakers and commentators. This paper seeks to return attention to Central Asia and ask what geographical proximity to China means for how this initiative is received on the ground in Central Asia, and for broader understandings of the geopolitical imaginations underpinning the BRI. By turning attention to the often-overlooked concept of ‘community of common…
The political and legal geographies of archives: Evidence, expertise, place
This paper establishes a framework for political and legal geographies of archives. Moving beyond catch-all definitions of ‘the archive’, it interrogates the specific practices and spaces by which materials become archival, the professional expertise required to do so, and the evidentiary authority this bestows. Marginalised groups – including Indigenous communities, unrepresented nations, and racial and religious minorities – must navigate a par…
Rethinking the late colonial state in Africa through diplomatic training
This paper focuses on diplomatic training as a site for exploring the tensions in late colonialism around sovereignty and self-government. Training for the diplomats of soon to be independent states was understood by imperial governments as an ambiguous issue in this period immediately pre-independence: it offered the potential for the former metropole to sustain power and influence within a rapidly changing world, whilst at the same time challen…
Diplomatic Training and Spaces of Anticolonial Worldmaking
Focusing on training for African diplomats from newly independent countries in Cameroon, Kenya, and Zimbabwe, this paper makes the case for spaces of diplomatic training as sites for anticolonial “worldmaking” (Getachew 2019; Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self‐Determination ). Recent scholarship has highlighted the value of African leaders’ visions but largely overlooked the actors, spaces, and practices through which these visio…
You could start a new country, but you would need to discover new land: Exploring understandings of statehood with primary school pupils in England
State‐based imaginaries dominate how children are taught about the world in formal educational spaces. Geographical education in schools draws upon a range of representations from atlases to wall maps, which portray a highly ordered image of a world that is neatly divided up into bounded nation‐states. While scholarship within political geography has long sought to challenge the ‘territorial trap’ which underpins these approaches, and there is in…
Reimagining self-determination: Relational, decolonial, and intersectional perspectives
Self-determination language and practice are increasingly perplexing in the 21st century. Historically linked to decolonization processes and post-imperial transformations of the international system, self-determination has espoused both violent and non-violent resistance, and supported both existing and emergent sovereignty. With the Janus-faced relationship between self-determination and colonialism continuing to this day, the contemporary mome…
Digital Diplomacy and Non-Governmental and Transnational Organizations
This chapter considers how digital diplomacy is being reworked by three kinds of ‘new’ diplomatic actors: non-governmental organizations (NGOs), transnational advocacy networks (TANs), and diaspora organizations. In doing so, the chapter advances the following four arguments. First, the digitalization of diplomacy is inextricably tied to the pluralization of diplomacy, such that digital technologies have facilitated an expansion in the number of …
Geography and legal expertise: The transgressive nature of research at the boundary of geography and law‐making
While legal geographers have considered the geography of legal processes, there has been less attention on how geographers are contributing to the making of law. By orientating attention to the experiences and attitudes of the geographical profession, this paper examines how specific forms of knowledge become legally useful and the ensuing ethical, legal, and disciplinary implications. We are interested in the situated nature of these productions…
Simulating alternative internationals: Geopolitics role-playing in UK schools
Simulation and role-play have a proven track record as pedagogic techniques to provide students with insights into geopolitics, diplomacy, and international relations. Since the first Model United Nations (MUN) in 1947, simulations have proliferated within secondary and tertiary educational settings. However, these activities overwhelmingly focus on recognised nation-states, neglecting polities that are not UN member states, but that are often ac…
Digital geographies of diplomacy: The uneven digital mediation of spaces and encounters at the UN Human Rights Council
In Spring 2020, as COVID-19 spread across the globe, diplomats embraced the digital as a means of continuing to practise statecraft. Drawing on online observations of the (resumed) 43rd, 44th and 45th sessions of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) in 2020, and 23 interviews with representatives who participated in these sessions, this paper addresses two lacuna in the existing literature: the under-theorisation of the role of the spati…
Tracing Diplomatic Tutelage: (Post)colonial Pedagogies and the Training of African Diplomats
Throughout the twentieth century, colonies emerged from the so-called tutelage of European imperial powers to represent themselves as sovereign states. One consequence of this change was an expansion in overseas diplomatic training, aimed at inducting into international life the hundreds of diplomats required to staff new foreign services. This paper interrogates the pedagogical and (geo)political practice of tutelage-where guardianship and instr…
Rethinking self-determination: Colonial and relational geographies in Asia
This paper argues for a geographical analysis of self-determination by bringing literature on self-determination into dialogue with scholarship on postcolonial geographies and relational space. First, we draw from scholarship that conceptualises colonialism, including non-European colonialism, as playing out differently in different places. This shines a spotlight on a set of self-determination claims, which are resolutely anti-colonial but do no…
Understanding Diplomatic Training from the Global South: Transnational Networks and (Post)colonial Connections
Modern diplomacy is a Western and colonial project.1 Nevertheless, as a growing body of work is demonstrating, diplomacies and diplomats of the Global South have had a distinct influence on the development of global international relations through the second half of the twentieth century.2
Critically reflecting on the PolGRG Book Prize
Mapping Chinese Diplomacy: Relational Contradictions and Spatial Tensions
This paper maps out contemporary discourses of Chinese diplomacy that have proliferated under the aegis of ‘major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics’. We examine how these narratives are underpinned by webs of relationality that see China promoting equal and win–win partnerships with other state actors, yet are also defined by hierarchical premises for such diplomatic engagements. These relational contradictions are most clearly manif…
On the right to diplomacy: Historicizing and theorizing delegation and exclusion at the United Nations
This article analyses the disregarded notion of the ius legationis (right of legation), revisiting historical debates in diplomatic theory and law over who possesses or ought to have this right. By examining how the ius legationis manifested into a volitional or subjectional or natural right, we argue that this renders it not merely a legal issue, but a highly political and ethical question that is of direct relevance to contemporary internationa…
Practising legal geography
Legal geography is experiencing a “practice turn.” Understanding the material, spatial, and embodied characteristics of law is illuminating hitherto obscured experiences of justice, injustice, and political practice. It is contributions from scholars at the forefront of these concerns, from geography and cognate disciplines, that comprise the papers in the Practising legal geography special section. Across seven papers we are seeking to explore t…
Thinking with Diplomacy: Within and Beyond Practice Theory
Following the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it …
The Agendas of Tibetan Refugees: Survival strategies of a government-in-exile in a world of transnational organizations, by Thomas Kauffmann
An important and timely question lies at the core of Thomas Kauffmann’s book The Agenda of Tibetan Refugees: ‘how, after more than fifty years of exile, are the Tibetan refugees still able to attract such substantial assistance from Western governments, NGOs, other organisations and individuals, unlike other populations of refugees who are largely or totally forgotten?’ (p. 2) This success, Kauffmann argues, is due to a relational dynamic that ha…
Tracing modes of politics at the United Nations: Spatial scripting, intimidation and subversion at the Forum on Minority Issues
This paper seeks to add empirical depth and conceptual nuance to how we understand the dynamics of geopolitical interactions. It does so by turning attention to the role of space in how modes of politics are articulated. The micro-spaces of international institutions are brought to the fore through an examination of how geopolitical actors of different prescribed statuses – state diplomats and representatives of minority communities – interact in…
Possible futures for Geography and Geographers and Political Geography? A reading from the margins
Beyond bibliometrics
Certifications of citizenship: The history, politics and materiality of identity documents in South Asian states and diasporas
Experiences in the post-partition Indian subcontinent refute the conventional expectation that the 'possession of citizenship enables the acquisition of documents certifying it' (Jayal, 2013, 71). Instead, identity papers of various types play a vital part in certifying and authenticating claims to citizenship. This is particularly important in a context where the history of state formation, continuous migration flows and the rise of right-wing m…
Political geography in the impasse
Liminality and the diplomacy of the British Overseas Territories: An assemblage approach
This paper examines diplomatic processes that compose our geopolitical world as dynamic and yet also seemingly affirm the status quo. It turns attention to the entrepreneurial creativity of individual diplomats, the transformations occurring at threshold moments, spaces and practices, and the materiality of diplomacy that exceeds human agency. The paper does so by forging an innovative dialogue between assemblage theory and the notion of liminali…
Liminal geopolitics: The subjectivity and spatiality of diplomacy at the margins
This paper argues that the lens of liminality has the potential to enrich scholarship in critical geopolitics by offering a nuanced approach to the geographies and ambivalence of political subjectivity. In the context of a perceived proliferation of ‘new’ actors the paper turns critical attention to what happens at the threshold between the categories of state and non‐state, official and unofficial diplomacy. It asks what such a perspective on di…
Mimicking state diplomacy: The legitimizing strategies of unofficial diplomacies
Diplomacy and recognition play central roles in the conventional conferral of state legitimacy and functioning of the inter-state system. In broadening the diplomatic frame by stepping outside the conventional state-system, this paper brings a poststructuralist and performative toolkit to mimetic diplomatic practices. Adapting Bhabha’s notion of mimicry to diplomatic discourse, it demonstrates how non-state diplomacies draw on, mimic and interven…
De facto, displaced, tacit: The sovereign articulations of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile
Conceptualizing ‘diaspora diplomacy’: Territory and populations betwixt the domestic and foreign
This article bridges diaspora studies and diplomacy studies by proposing the concept of ‘diaspora diplomacy’, which considers the components of diplomacy and the changing relationships that diasporas have with states and other diplomatic actors. First, we ask who are the key actors engaged in diaspora diplomacy? Second, how is diplomatic work enacted by and through diasporas? Third, what are the geographies of diaspora diplomacy? Diaspora diploma…
Liminality and the diplomacy of the British Overseas Territories: An assemblage approach
This paper examines diplomatic processes that compose our geopolitical world as dynamic and yet also seemingly affirm the status quo. It turns attention to the entrepreneurial creativity of individual diplomats, the transformations occurring at threshold moments, spaces and practices, and the materiality of diplomacy that exceeds human agency. The paper does so by forging an innovative dialogue between assemblage theory and the notion of liminali…
Citizens and Refugees: Constructing and Negotiating Tibetan Identities in Exile
At the heart of the relationship between identity and the state is the construction of a binary between the citizen resident, in a bounded national community, and its archetypal “other,” the refugee. The case studied here fundamentally disrupts this dualism and the conventional mapping of citizen and refugee onto concepts of statehood and statelessness. With their own government structure operating within the state of India—albeit without legal r…
Performing Diplomatic Decorum: Repertoires of 'Appropriate' Behavior in the Margins of International Diplomacy
This paper interrogates the notion of diplomatic decorum in order to shine new light on the power relations that underpin performance, rhetoric, and emotional labor in international politics. In framing decorum in terms of Aristotelian rhetoric and dramaturgical principles, the paper focuses on representatives of minority communities, indigenous peoples, and stateless nations for whom adopting social behavior appropriate for the spaces of interna…
Critical Geographies of Peace
Political Geography and the environment
Understanding legitimacy: Perspectives from anomalous geopolitical spaces
Thinking with Diplomacy: Within and Beyond Practice Theory
Following the considerable interest in practice theory, this Collective Discussion interrogates what it means to practice and, ultimately, to think with diplomacy. In asking how empirical, methodological, and axiological disagreements over what constitutes diplomatic practice can be productively employed to develop or revise practice theory, the Discussion engages the historically and culturally contingent practices of diplomacy. In doing so, it …
Governmentality to Practise the State? Constructing a Tibetan Population in Exile
Drawing on the extraterritorial and nonstate centric form of power found in Foucault's notion of governmentality, I contribute to three emerging debates: the extent to which governmentality is a state or nonstate practice, the question of what is being governed, and the relationship between biopolitics and cultural politics. Focusing on the governance strategies of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile (TGiE) based in India, I explore how ideas of gove…
Governments-in-Exile: Statehood, Statelessness and the Reconfiguration of Territory and Sovereignty
Governments-in-exile are conventionally viewed as discrepant forms of political practice and geopolitical exceptions to the rules of sovereign statehood. However, despite significant limitations, polities such as the Tibetan Government-in-Exile enact state-like functions and are actively forging new political spaces and modalities of sovereignty. Contextualising governments-in-exile with regards to a range of twentieth-century geopolitical anomal…
Constructing legitimacy without legality in long term exile: Comparing Western Sahara and Tibet
Mapping Chinese Diplomacy: Relational Contradictions and Spatial Tensions
This paper maps out contemporary discourses of Chinese diplomacy that have proliferated under the aegis of ‘major country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics’. We examine how these narratives are underpinned by webs of relationality that see China promoting equal and win–win partnerships with other state actors, yet are also defined by hierarchical premises for such diplomatic engagements. These relational contradictions are most clearly manif…
The Fallacy and the Promise of the Territorial Trap: Sovereign Articulations of Geopolitical Anomalies
The relationship between sovereignty and territory lies at the core of the territorial trap. For, underpinning the first and ‘particularly powerful’ of Agnew's three ‘geographical assumptions that
Practising legal geography
Legal geography is experiencing a “practice turn.” Understanding the material, spatial, and embodied characteristics of law is illuminating hitherto obscured experiences of justice, injustice, and political practice. It is contributions from scholars at the forefront of these concerns, from geography and cognate disciplines, that comprise the papers in the Practising legal geography special section. Across seven papers we are seeking to explore t…
Certifications of citizenship: The history, politics and materiality of identity documents in South Asian states and diasporas
Experiences in the post-partition Indian subcontinent refute the conventional expectation that the 'possession of citizenship enables the acquisition of documents certifying it' (Jayal, 2013, 71). Instead, identity papers of various types play a vital part in certifying and authenticating claims to citizenship. This is particularly important in a context where the history of state formation, continuous migration flows and the rise of right-wing m…
Interventions on Europe's political futures
Working at the margins? Muslim middle class professionals in India and the limits of 'labour agency
This paper explores the work-lives of middle class Muslim professionals in India's new service economy. While these workers have successfully negotiated labour market entry into the 'core' growth sectors of India's globalising economy, they are simultaneously subject to different forms of social, cultural and political marginalisation. Strikingly, they also remain at the margins of both economic geography and development geography scholarship. Th…
Democracy-in-Exile: The ‘Uniqueness’ and Limitations of Exile Tibetan Democracy
A positive story of democracy in the Himalayan region is to be found in an unexpected place: in an exiled refugee population with an unrecognised government and no jurisdiction over territory. Based in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, the Tibetan Government-in-Exile (TGiE) is a fully functioning representative democracy with voters in three continents franchised to elect forty-three Tibetan Members of Parliament. This paper examines the uni…
The geopolitics of Buddhist reincarnation: Contested futures of Tibetan leadership
In attending to a religion and a region often overlooked in critical geopolitics, this paper examines the intersections between issues of legitimacy, agency and authority, and the case of T ibetan B uddhism. Buddhist values and political policies are deeply intertwined in the Tibetan case, to the extent that the political philosophy of T ibet – both prior to 1959 and in exile – is chos srid gnyis ldan , or ‘religion and politics combined’. Centra…
Interventions in the political geographies of 'area
The Biodiversity Convention. A Negotiating History
VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee , Seite 403 - 404
Rethinking self-determination: Colonial and relational geographies in Asia
This paper argues for a geographical analysis of self-determination by bringing literature on self-determination into dialogue with scholarship on postcolonial geographies and relational space. First, we draw from scholarship that conceptualises colonialism, including non-European colonialism, as playing out differently in different places. This shines a spotlight on a set of self-determination claims, which are resolutely anti-colonial but do no…
The Biodiversity Convention. A Negotiating History
VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee , Seite 403 - 404
Democracy-in-Exile: The ‘Uniqueness’ and Limitations of Exile Tibetan Democracy
A positive story of democracy in the Himalayan region is to be found in an unexpected place: in an exiled refugee population with an unrecognised government and no jurisdiction over territory. Based in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, the Tibetan Government-in-Exile (TGiE) is a fully functioning representative democracy with voters in three continents franchised to elect forty-three Tibetan Members of Parliament. This paper examines the uni…
De facto, displaced, tacit: The sovereign articulations of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile
Governments-in-Exile: Statehood, Statelessness and the Reconfiguration of Territory and Sovereignty
Governments-in-exile are conventionally viewed as discrepant forms of political practice and geopolitical exceptions to the rules of sovereign statehood. However, despite significant limitations, polities such as the Tibetan Government-in-Exile enact state-like functions and are actively forging new political spaces and modalities of sovereignty. Contextualising governments-in-exile with regards to a range of twentieth-century geopolitical anomal…
The Fallacy and the Promise of the Territorial Trap: Sovereign Articulations of Geopolitical Anomalies
The relationship between sovereignty and territory lies at the core of the territorial trap. For, underpinning the first and ‘particularly powerful’ of Agnew's three ‘geographical assumptions that
A state within a state? Exploring relations between the Indian state and the Tibetan community and government-in-exile
Exiled Tibetans in India are an unusual marginalised community. With their own government structure operating within the sovereign state of India, albeit without legal recognition, they are both de facto refugees from the perspective of the Indian state and Tibetan 'citizens' in the eyes of the Tibetan government-in-exile (TGiE). Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper examines the complex, dynamic and at times contradictory three-way relatio…
Critical Geographies of Peace
Citizens and Refugees: Constructing and Negotiating Tibetan Identities in Exile
At the heart of the relationship between identity and the state is the construction of a binary between the citizen resident, in a bounded national community, and its archetypal “other,” the refugee. The case studied here fundamentally disrupts this dualism and the conventional mapping of citizen and refugee onto concepts of statehood and statelessness. With their own government structure operating within the state of India—albeit without legal r…
Borders and borderlands: Windows on statecraft
Mimicking state diplomacy: The legitimizing strategies of unofficial diplomacies
Diplomacy and recognition play central roles in the conventional conferral of state legitimacy and functioning of the inter-state system. In broadening the diplomatic frame by stepping outside the conventional state-system, this paper brings a poststructuralist and performative toolkit to mimetic diplomatic practices. Adapting Bhabha’s notion of mimicry to diplomatic discourse, it demonstrates how non-state diplomacies draw on, mimic and interven…
Governmentality to Practise the State? Constructing a Tibetan Population in Exile
Drawing on the extraterritorial and nonstate centric form of power found in Foucault's notion of governmentality, I contribute to three emerging debates: the extent to which governmentality is a state or nonstate practice, the question of what is being governed, and the relationship between biopolitics and cultural politics. Focusing on the governance strategies of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile (TGiE) based in India, I explore how ideas of gove…
Leaky Geopolitics: The Ruptures and Transgressions of WikiLeaks
The unfurling of violent rhetoric and the show of force that has lead to the arrest, imprisonment, and impending extradition of WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, serve as an exemplary moment in demonstrating state-sanctioned violence. Since the cables began leaking in November 2010, the violent reaction to WikiLeaks evidenced by numerous political pundits calling for Assange's assassination or execution, and the movement within the US to have Wi…
The geopolitics of Buddhist reincarnation: Contested futures of Tibetan leadership
In attending to a religion and a region often overlooked in critical geopolitics, this paper examines the intersections between issues of legitimacy, agency and authority, and the case of T ibetan B uddhism. Buddhist values and political policies are deeply intertwined in the Tibetan case, to the extent that the political philosophy of T ibet – both prior to 1959 and in exile – is chos srid gnyis ldan , or ‘religion and politics combined’. Centra…
Interventions in teaching political geography: Reflections on practice
Geographies of Peace
From handshakes on the White House lawn to Picasso’s iconic dove of peace, the images and stereotypes of peace are powerful, widespread and easily recognizable. Yet if we try to offer a concise definition of peace it is altogether a more complicated exercise. Not only is peace an emotive and value-laden concept, it is also abstract, ambiguous and seemingly inextricably tied to its antithesis: war. And it is war and violence that have been so comp…
Diplomatic Cultures and International Politics: Translations, Spaces and Alternatives
Understanding legitimacy: Perspectives from anomalous geopolitical spaces
Constructing legitimacy without legality in long term exile: Comparing Western Sahara and Tibet
Diplomatic Cultures and International Politics: Translations, Spaces and Alternatives
Rehearsing the State: The Political Practices of the Tibetan Government‐in‐Exile
Liminal geopolitics: The subjectivity and spatiality of diplomacy at the margins
This paper argues that the lens of liminality has the potential to enrich scholarship in critical geopolitics by offering a nuanced approach to the geographies and ambivalence of political subjectivity. In the context of a perceived proliferation of ‘new’ actors the paper turns critical attention to what happens at the threshold between the categories of state and non‐state, official and unofficial diplomacy. It asks what such a perspective on di…
Changes at Political Geography
Conceptualizing ‘diaspora diplomacy’: Territory and populations betwixt the domestic and foreign
This article bridges diaspora studies and diplomacy studies by proposing the concept of ‘diaspora diplomacy’, which considers the components of diplomacy and the changing relationships that diasporas have with states and other diplomatic actors. First, we ask who are the key actors engaged in diaspora diplomacy? Second, how is diplomatic work enacted by and through diasporas? Third, what are the geographies of diaspora diplomacy? Diaspora diploma…
Interventions on Europe's political futures
Interventions in the political geographies of 'area
Political science (46 works) · Sociology (43 works) · Politics (42 works) · Law (40 works) · Political economy (23 works) · Law (21 works) · Geopolitics (13 works) · Diplomacy (12 works) · Geography (11 works) · Social science (11 works)