Sara Fregonese
Biographic Data
| ID | 913486 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sara Fregonese |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sara |
| FAMILY NAME | Fregonese |
| SIGNATURE | FREGONESE S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Birmingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4505-0661 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 285 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The banality of evil weathering
This commentary builds on Mikko Joronen's concept of malevolent weathering – the deliberate production of atmospheric conditions that pollute to enable spatial appropriation. The commentary positions malevolent weathering within broader debates on landscapes and airscapes of malevolence in Palestine. It then expands the purchase of malevolent weathering to a broader set of ordinary, yet impactful weathering, floating across diverse geopolitical c…
Big ugly lumps? (Counter)terrorism and the everyday atmospheres of Hostile Vehicle Mitigation
Adopting an atmospheric lens on the everyday and open-ended crisis of contemporary terror threats in cities in Western Europe, this article unpicks the contemporary logics, desires, and effects of the State in matters of urban counterterrorism by exploring the felt qualities and dispositions of the public around Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (HVM) measures in Birmingham (UK). It argues that the atmospheres around counterterrorism that security offic…
Confessing communism. A negative epistemology
Atmospheric geographies of (counter)terrorism
How are terror threats and counterterrorism measures experienced in everyday urban spaces? We argue that thinking atmospherically about the spaces of urban encounters with (counter)terrorism is important, firstly, to identify and question feelings and dispositions shaped by discourses, practices, and infrastructures of (counter)terrorism; secondly, to contribute spatial perspectives of felt experience to literatures on security and (counter)terro…
Introduction: Lockdown and the intimate
The lockdowns imposed upon cities, regions, and countries as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic are extraordinary state-sanctioned spatial interventions, both in terms of scale and scope. However, rather than a time-delimited event nor an exceptional circumstance of a temporary crisis, the pandemic lockdown was entangled with long-standing and on-going intimate and embodied histories of political violence, upheaval, militarization, displacement …
Lockdown and the intimate: Entanglements of terror, virus, and militarism
Despite their wide implementation since the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns are not spatial interventions unique to public health emergencies but have also recently been used to tackle the aftermath of acts of terrorism against crowded public spaces in cities. In this paper, we argue that lockdown, as a state-sanctioned security measure, bears longer political (often violent) histories that link individual mobility to geopolitics in corporeal and ev…
Urban atmospheres of terror
Shockwaves: Atmospheres beyond the Conflict City/Ordinary City Divide
Urban conflict literature has attempted new comparisons between contested cities in conflict zones and cities with no armed conflict. This literature tends to use representational frameworks around defensive planning and normative government discourses. In this article, I propose to expand these frameworks and to engage with epistemologies of lived experience to produce new relational accounts linking “conflict cities” with “ordinary cities”. The…
War and the City: Urban Geopolitics in Lebanon
War and the City examines the geopolitical significance of the Lebanese Civil War with specific focus on micro-level exploration of the way in which the urban landscape of Beirut was transformed by the conflict. Focusing on the initial phase of the war between 1975–76, known as the Two Years’ War, this study moves away from formal macro-level geopolitical analyses of the war and proposes an exploration of the urban nature of the conflict through …
Holidays in the danger zone. Entanglements of war and tourism
Of all places where I least expected war to creep up at me, is the tourist review website Tripadvisor. Prompted by a feature in The Observer on 28 January 2018, I searched for Vilina Vlas spa hotel
Interventions in urban geopolitics
Affective atmospheres, urban geopolitics and conflict (de)escalation in Beirut
Hybrid Sovereignty and the State of Exception in the Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon
This article traces a genealogy of sovereignty and exception in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon that highlights their mutual connections and contaminations with the mechanisms of Lebanese state sovereignty from 1948 onward. Drawing together two theoretical approaches emerging from the work of Giorgio Agamben and recent political geographical work on sovereignty, we explore the refugee camps as spaces of exception characterized by hybrid …
The Radicals' City: Urban Environment, Polarisation, Cohesion
Bringing together comparative case studies from Belfast, Beirut, Amsterdam and Berlin, this book examines the role of the urban environment in social polarisation processes. In doing so, it provides a timely and refreshingly innovative voice in the confusing babble on (counter-)terrorism, urban conflict and community cohesion. Despite their socio-political differences, these cities are telling cases of how the location and shape of very mundane o…
Everyday Political Geographies
Hotel Geopolitics: A Research Agenda
This article sets a new agenda for research into the geopolitics of hotels. Moving beyond the study of hotels as neutral sites of leisure and tourism, hospitality mediated by financial exchange, we argue that hotels need to be researched as geopolitical sites. Hotel spaces – from conference rooms to reception halls, from hotel bars to corridors and private rooms – are connected to broader architectures of security and insecurity, war- and peacema…
Mediterranean geographies of protest
This special issue of Euro-commentaries tackles the question of what links unprecedented anti-regime uprisings in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, with the largest protests in decades in several European cities. Beyond the specificities of individual cases, uprisings on both sides of the Mediterranean have highlighted strong and often violent collisions between resistance movements and state security. How are these collisions resha…
Urban Geopolitics 8 Years on. Hybrid Sovereignties, the Everyday, and Geographies of Peace
Urban events like 9-11 and the Arab Spring have deeply marked the first two decades of a century in which the majority of the world population will live in cities. This essay reviews present and potential future debates about the relation between cities and geopolitics, particularly the work of urban geopolitics. I trace three debates centred on three relationships: that between city and sovereignty; between official and everyday urban practices;…
Between a Refuge and a Battleground: Beirut's Discrepant Cosmopolitanisms
Beirut has experienced cosmopolitanism and its opposite. It is a site of multicultural encounters and communal entrenchment: a refuge and a battleground. How and where does Beirut's cosmopolitan project turn into violence? The notion of "discrepant cosmopolitanism" provides two answers, blurring accepted distinctions between multicultural openness and communitarian entrenchment. First, openness and closure are not opposed but part of discrepant c…
Beyond the 'Weak State: Hybrid Sovereignties in Beirut
Depictions of Lebanon in international politics have historically represented it as a 'weak state' whose domestic sovereignty is eroded by nonstate actors viewed as anomalies to extirpate. The War on Terror has been no exception. Since at least 2002 international efforts have aimed at reinforcing Lebanon's 'weak' domestic sovereignty against 'extremist elements'. These approaches adopt a classic understanding of sovereignty as the achievable, exc…
Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction By Martin Coward
The urbicide of Beirut? Geopolitics and the built environment in the Lebanese civil war (1975-1976)
The New Geopolitics of Responsibility in Barack Obama's Cairo Speech
Beyond the 'Weak State: Hybrid Sovereignties in Beirut
Depictions of Lebanon in international politics have historically represented it as a 'weak state' whose domestic sovereignty is eroded by nonstate actors viewed as anomalies to extirpate. The War on Terror has been no exception. Since at least 2002 international efforts have aimed at reinforcing Lebanon's 'weak' domestic sovereignty against 'extremist elements'. These approaches adopt a classic understanding of sovereignty as the achievable, exc…
Affective atmospheres, urban geopolitics and conflict (de)escalation in Beirut
Interventions in urban geopolitics
Hotel Geopolitics: A Research Agenda
This article sets a new agenda for research into the geopolitics of hotels. Moving beyond the study of hotels as neutral sites of leisure and tourism, hospitality mediated by financial exchange, we argue that hotels need to be researched as geopolitical sites. Hotel spaces – from conference rooms to reception halls, from hotel bars to corridors and private rooms – are connected to broader architectures of security and insecurity, war- and peacema…
The urbicide of Beirut? Geopolitics and the built environment in the Lebanese civil war (1975-1976)
Urban Geopolitics 8 Years on. Hybrid Sovereignties, the Everyday, and Geographies of Peace
Urban events like 9-11 and the Arab Spring have deeply marked the first two decades of a century in which the majority of the world population will live in cities. This essay reviews present and potential future debates about the relation between cities and geopolitics, particularly the work of urban geopolitics. I trace three debates centred on three relationships: that between city and sovereignty; between official and everyday urban practices;…
Urban atmospheres of terror
Hybrid Sovereignty and the State of Exception in the Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon
This article traces a genealogy of sovereignty and exception in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon that highlights their mutual connections and contaminations with the mechanisms of Lebanese state sovereignty from 1948 onward. Drawing together two theoretical approaches emerging from the work of Giorgio Agamben and recent political geographical work on sovereignty, we explore the refugee camps as spaces of exception characterized by hybrid …
Between a Refuge and a Battleground: Beirut's Discrepant Cosmopolitanisms
Beirut has experienced cosmopolitanism and its opposite. It is a site of multicultural encounters and communal entrenchment: a refuge and a battleground. How and where does Beirut's cosmopolitan project turn into violence? The notion of "discrepant cosmopolitanism" provides two answers, blurring accepted distinctions between multicultural openness and communitarian entrenchment. First, openness and closure are not opposed but part of discrepant c…
Mediterranean geographies of protest
This special issue of Euro-commentaries tackles the question of what links unprecedented anti-regime uprisings in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, with the largest protests in decades in several European cities. Beyond the specificities of individual cases, uprisings on both sides of the Mediterranean have highlighted strong and often violent collisions between resistance movements and state security. How are these collisions resha…
Atmospheric geographies of (counter)terrorism
How are terror threats and counterterrorism measures experienced in everyday urban spaces? We argue that thinking atmospherically about the spaces of urban encounters with (counter)terrorism is important, firstly, to identify and question feelings and dispositions shaped by discourses, practices, and infrastructures of (counter)terrorism; secondly, to contribute spatial perspectives of felt experience to literatures on security and (counter)terro…
The New Geopolitics of Responsibility in Barack Obama's Cairo Speech
Lockdown and the intimate: Entanglements of terror, virus, and militarism
Despite their wide implementation since the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns are not spatial interventions unique to public health emergencies but have also recently been used to tackle the aftermath of acts of terrorism against crowded public spaces in cities. In this paper, we argue that lockdown, as a state-sanctioned security measure, bears longer political (often violent) histories that link individual mobility to geopolitics in corporeal and ev…
The banality of evil weathering
This commentary builds on Mikko Joronen's concept of malevolent weathering – the deliberate production of atmospheric conditions that pollute to enable spatial appropriation. The commentary positions malevolent weathering within broader debates on landscapes and airscapes of malevolence in Palestine. It then expands the purchase of malevolent weathering to a broader set of ordinary, yet impactful weathering, floating across diverse geopolitical c…
Big ugly lumps? (Counter)terrorism and the everyday atmospheres of Hostile Vehicle Mitigation
Adopting an atmospheric lens on the everyday and open-ended crisis of contemporary terror threats in cities in Western Europe, this article unpicks the contemporary logics, desires, and effects of the State in matters of urban counterterrorism by exploring the felt qualities and dispositions of the public around Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (HVM) measures in Birmingham (UK). It argues that the atmospheres around counterterrorism that security offic…
The urbicide of Beirut? Geopolitics and the built environment in the Lebanese civil war (1975-1976)
The New Geopolitics of Responsibility in Barack Obama's Cairo Speech
Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction By Martin Coward
Urban Geopolitics 8 Years on. Hybrid Sovereignties, the Everyday, and Geographies of Peace
Urban events like 9-11 and the Arab Spring have deeply marked the first two decades of a century in which the majority of the world population will live in cities. This essay reviews present and potential future debates about the relation between cities and geopolitics, particularly the work of urban geopolitics. I trace three debates centred on three relationships: that between city and sovereignty; between official and everyday urban practices;…
Between a Refuge and a Battleground: Beirut's Discrepant Cosmopolitanisms
Beirut has experienced cosmopolitanism and its opposite. It is a site of multicultural encounters and communal entrenchment: a refuge and a battleground. How and where does Beirut's cosmopolitan project turn into violence? The notion of "discrepant cosmopolitanism" provides two answers, blurring accepted distinctions between multicultural openness and communitarian entrenchment. First, openness and closure are not opposed but part of discrepant c…
Beyond the 'Weak State: Hybrid Sovereignties in Beirut
Depictions of Lebanon in international politics have historically represented it as a 'weak state' whose domestic sovereignty is eroded by nonstate actors viewed as anomalies to extirpate. The War on Terror has been no exception. Since at least 2002 international efforts have aimed at reinforcing Lebanon's 'weak' domestic sovereignty against 'extremist elements'. These approaches adopt a classic understanding of sovereignty as the achievable, exc…
Mediterranean geographies of protest
This special issue of Euro-commentaries tackles the question of what links unprecedented anti-regime uprisings in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) region, with the largest protests in decades in several European cities. Beyond the specificities of individual cases, uprisings on both sides of the Mediterranean have highlighted strong and often violent collisions between resistance movements and state security. How are these collisions resha…
Everyday Political Geographies
Hotel Geopolitics: A Research Agenda
This article sets a new agenda for research into the geopolitics of hotels. Moving beyond the study of hotels as neutral sites of leisure and tourism, hospitality mediated by financial exchange, we argue that hotels need to be researched as geopolitical sites. Hotel spaces – from conference rooms to reception halls, from hotel bars to corridors and private rooms – are connected to broader architectures of security and insecurity, war- and peacema…
The Radicals' City: Urban Environment, Polarisation, Cohesion
Bringing together comparative case studies from Belfast, Beirut, Amsterdam and Berlin, this book examines the role of the urban environment in social polarisation processes. In doing so, it provides a timely and refreshingly innovative voice in the confusing babble on (counter-)terrorism, urban conflict and community cohesion. Despite their socio-political differences, these cities are telling cases of how the location and shape of very mundane o…
Interventions in urban geopolitics
Affective atmospheres, urban geopolitics and conflict (de)escalation in Beirut
Hybrid Sovereignty and the State of Exception in the Palestinian Refugee Camps in Lebanon
This article traces a genealogy of sovereignty and exception in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon that highlights their mutual connections and contaminations with the mechanisms of Lebanese state sovereignty from 1948 onward. Drawing together two theoretical approaches emerging from the work of Giorgio Agamben and recent political geographical work on sovereignty, we explore the refugee camps as spaces of exception characterized by hybrid …
Holidays in the danger zone. Entanglements of war and tourism
Of all places where I least expected war to creep up at me, is the tourist review website Tripadvisor. Prompted by a feature in The Observer on 28 January 2018, I searched for Vilina Vlas spa hotel
War and the City: Urban Geopolitics in Lebanon
War and the City examines the geopolitical significance of the Lebanese Civil War with specific focus on micro-level exploration of the way in which the urban landscape of Beirut was transformed by the conflict. Focusing on the initial phase of the war between 1975–76, known as the Two Years’ War, this study moves away from formal macro-level geopolitical analyses of the war and proposes an exploration of the urban nature of the conflict through …
Shockwaves: Atmospheres beyond the Conflict City/Ordinary City Divide
Urban conflict literature has attempted new comparisons between contested cities in conflict zones and cities with no armed conflict. This literature tends to use representational frameworks around defensive planning and normative government discourses. In this article, I propose to expand these frameworks and to engage with epistemologies of lived experience to produce new relational accounts linking “conflict cities” with “ordinary cities”. The…
Lockdown and the intimate: Entanglements of terror, virus, and militarism
Despite their wide implementation since the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns are not spatial interventions unique to public health emergencies but have also recently been used to tackle the aftermath of acts of terrorism against crowded public spaces in cities. In this paper, we argue that lockdown, as a state-sanctioned security measure, bears longer political (often violent) histories that link individual mobility to geopolitics in corporeal and ev…
Urban atmospheres of terror
Introduction: Lockdown and the intimate
The lockdowns imposed upon cities, regions, and countries as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic are extraordinary state-sanctioned spatial interventions, both in terms of scale and scope. However, rather than a time-delimited event nor an exceptional circumstance of a temporary crisis, the pandemic lockdown was entangled with long-standing and on-going intimate and embodied histories of political violence, upheaval, militarization, displacement …
Atmospheric geographies of (counter)terrorism
How are terror threats and counterterrorism measures experienced in everyday urban spaces? We argue that thinking atmospherically about the spaces of urban encounters with (counter)terrorism is important, firstly, to identify and question feelings and dispositions shaped by discourses, practices, and infrastructures of (counter)terrorism; secondly, to contribute spatial perspectives of felt experience to literatures on security and (counter)terro…
The banality of evil weathering
This commentary builds on Mikko Joronen's concept of malevolent weathering – the deliberate production of atmospheric conditions that pollute to enable spatial appropriation. The commentary positions malevolent weathering within broader debates on landscapes and airscapes of malevolence in Palestine. It then expands the purchase of malevolent weathering to a broader set of ordinary, yet impactful weathering, floating across diverse geopolitical c…
Big ugly lumps? (Counter)terrorism and the everyday atmospheres of Hostile Vehicle Mitigation
Adopting an atmospheric lens on the everyday and open-ended crisis of contemporary terror threats in cities in Western Europe, this article unpicks the contemporary logics, desires, and effects of the State in matters of urban counterterrorism by exploring the felt qualities and dispositions of the public around Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (HVM) measures in Birmingham (UK). It argues that the atmospheres around counterterrorism that security offic…
Confessing communism. A negative epistemology
Political science (19 works) · Law (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Politics (16 works) · Geopolitics (10 works) · Political economy (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Middle East Politics and Society (8 works) · Migration, Refugees, and Integration (7 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (6 works)