This paper examines, at the global scale, the biopolitical strategy of racism that Foucault articulated in the context of 19th-century Europe. Through my historical analysis both of the emergent notion of race and of biometric production of racial knowledge during Japanese colonialism, I endeavour to delineate a circulation of a political rationality of modern racism, which became globally generalised and constitutive of the formation of a non-Western nation-state. I argue that this emergence of global biopolitics, however, should not simply be reduced to a unitary operation but needs to be understood as the process of multiplication that reveals both the continuity and the contingency of the biopolitical strategy of racism in relation to particular spatiotemporal configurations. Furthermore, through an archaeological reading of Foucault on modern racism, I will suggest that Foucault's Society Must be Defended, albeit arguably underdeveloped in its geographical scope of analysis, can shed light on the operation of biopolitics and modern racism beyond the history of Europe.

In the wake of the recent proliferation of the securitization of crowded places, there has been a growth in the development of technologies of crowd behaviour analysis. However, despite the emerging prominence of crowd surveillance in contemporary emergency planning, little has been discussed about its impacts on our understanding of security and surveillance. Drawing from the case of crowd surveillance in Tokyo, this article examines the ways in which crowds are simulated, monitored, and secured through the technology of crowd behaviour analysis, and discusses its implications to the politics of security. It argues that crowd surveillance constitutes a unique form of the biopolitics of security that targets, not the individual body or the social body of population, but the urban body of crowd. The power of normalization in crowd surveillance operates in a preemptive manner through the codification of crowd behaviours that is spatially and temporarily specific. The article also critically interrogates the introduction of crowd surveillance in relation to racialized logics of suspicion and argues that, despite its appearance as a non-discriminatory and 'aracial' technology, crowd surveillance entail the racial coding of crowd behaviour and urban space. The article concludes with the introduction of crowd surveillance as a technology of border control, which reorients existing modalities of (in)securitization at airports.

This article aims to make a contribution to the field of critical geopolitics by exploring two rather underexamined facets of contemporary imperial geopolitics. First, the article suggests that the concept of disregard developed by Stoler can shed new light on everyday life at the margins of imperial geopolitics. Stoler argues that living a colonial life entails acts of disregarding certain forms of violence and injustice without fully accepting the colonial system as a whole. In conjunction with Memmi's earlier portrait of the colonised, Stoler's writing helps to understand the complexities and ambivalence that the colonised go through living in and off an empire. Second, the article demonstrates how practices of disregard play out in the (post)colonial and militarised context of Okinawa. Despite its significance in US military mapping, Okinawa remains an understudied site in the field of critical geopolitics. Situating Okinawa in the broader context of imperial geopolitics and its double colonial present, the article explores how islanders come to live their colonial life and make a living whilst disregarding certain colonial conditions.

This paper aims to make a contribution to ongoing debates in decolonial, indigenous, and island geographies through a case study of the Okinawan indigenous movement and its recent encounter with a neo-nationalist, and in effect neocolonial, movement. The Okinawan indigenous movement emerged against the backdrop of the continuing US military presence on Okinawa Island, which is the direct result of the post-war American military occupation and continues to be maintained by Japanese post-colonial policies. In the early 2000s, the movement achieved indigenous recognition by United Nations human rights bodies, which have since issued recommendations to the Japanese government to implement protective measures for the islanders, including indigenous land rights measures that are hoped to alleviate the militarised colonial situation. Not only does the Japanese government continue to ignore the recommendations, but the Okinawan indigenous movement today also confronts a new form of neocolonialism. In the past few years, a group of neo-nationalists and conservative politicians have initiated a countermovement against the Okinawan indigenous status. They have mobilised the unpopularity of the term 'indigenous people' in Japanese ('senjūmin') among Okinawans as a pretext for demanding the retraction of the recommendations. The case study shows that the different conceptualisations of decolonisation and indigeneity represent not only an analytical usefulness but also an empirical importance for they create a space in which these ideas can be (ab)used to both promote and hinder a decolonial pursuit of the reappropriation of colonised (is)lands. It illustrates a particular geopolitics of knowledge in which different actors mobilise different understandings of decolonisation and indigeneity for a decolonial or neocolonial end. The paper concludes with a discussion of the challenges for decolonial geographies that arise from the present study.

This paper explores the role of ignorance in contemporary imperial geopolitics and the political geography of islands. Ignorance and imperialism have gone hand in hand since as early as the European age of 'discovery'. The idea of empty spaces empowered earlier European colonial expansion by ignoring the existence of non-white indigenous people and communities. A few centuries later, the cartographic discourse of empty spaces still appears to be at work today in islands such as Okinawa where US bases have been stationed since the mid-twentieth century. The paper conducts a study of ignorance, or an agnotological study, of Okinawa. There has been a growing interest in studies of ignorance in the past few years, notably in sociology, science and technology studies, and studies of race and racism. Yet, ignorance as a focal point of analysis seems to be underdeveloped in studies of geopolitics and islands despite that the production of ignorance contributes to the maintaining of existing imperial spatial orders. The paper particularly examines the dominant discourses of US officials around the history of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, which often ignore, or disguise at best, the colonial foundation of military bases in Okinawa.