We are pleased to announce a forthcoming Special Issue in Political Geography, entitled “Power, Land, and Fire: Political Geographies of Burning”.
Wildfires have emerged as a defining feature of planetary climate disruption. Dominant media and policy circuits increasingly frame fire as an exogenous environmental catastrophe demanding urgent technocratic intervention. However, these crisis-driven framings often act as a smokescreen, obscuring the deep-seated socio-political processes through which fire geographies are created, governed, and weaponized.
This Special Issue positions fire as a central object of inquiry for political geography. Rather than treating combustion as an ecological disturbance, this collection approaches burning as a socio-material process constitutive of political space itself. Building on debates in pyropolitics, elemental and volumetric geographies, and political ecology, the issue interrogates how wildfire crises and burning practices participate in the production of territory, the exercise of state authority, and the uneven distribution of environmental risk across both the Global South and Global North.
Guest Editors:
Dr. Lorenza Fontana
University of Turin, Turin, Italy
Dr. Alessandro Tinti
University of Turin, Turin, Italy
Dr. Luisa Fernanda Escobar Alvarado
University of Turin, Turin, Italy
Dr. Nicola Manghi
University of Turin, Turin, Italy
Special issue information:
Interested to contribute? Feel free to contact us at this email address (alessandro.tinti@unito.it) with a brief indication of your proposed contribution by the end of October. We would be very happy to discuss potential fit with the Special Issue.
The deadline to submit the full manuscript will be 15th January 2027. All submissions deemed suitable to be sent for peer review will be reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. Once your manuscript is accepted, it will go into production and will be simultaneously published in the current regular issue and pulled into the online Special Issue.
The Guide for Authors and link to submit your manuscript is available on the Journal’s homepage at Political Geography.
