This special issue grapples with a text that stands at the inception of modern geo-and biopolitics -the 1901 essay 'Lebensraum: a biogeographical study' written by the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel . In this essay, the trained zoologist and founding father of modern political geography set out a theory of the world in which humans and their social institutions are but an effect of the natural world and therefore subject to nature's laws in much the same way as the animal and plant kingdom. Although Ratzel describes his essay as primarily written in the language of biogeography, he uses it to flesh out his conception of the state as an organism that struggles for Lebensraum (living space). The arguments Ratzel develops in this essay should be read as an attempt to draw on basic Darwinian ideas to account for the expansive tendency of late nineteenth-century imperialism and state competition. By treating historical and biological processes alike, Ratzel famously came to naturalise both the territorial configuration of world politics and the phenomenon of interstate war.Whilst already a notable academic figure during his lifetime, it is especially the posthumous career of his Lebensraum concept that has made Ratzel a continued object of fascination for geographers, historians and political scientists alike. Indeed, Ratzel remains something of a disgraced figure in the geographical canon today, given his reputation for environmental determinism and his influence on interwar politics. Indeed, it was one of his followers, the geographer Karl Haushofer, who claimed to have introduced Adolf Hitler to the idea of Lebensraum as the latter was cobbling together his 1925 book Mein Kampf in Landsberg prison. 1 It is thus difficult to understate the historical significance of Ratzel's Lebensraum concept, even if his essay's immediate readership would have been limited to academic circles.And yet, this special issue suggests that Ratzel's text is perhaps not 'merely' of historical interest, but of theoretical significance too. For whilst geopolitical ideas were mushrooming elsewhere too in the nineteenth century, Ratzel's work is unusual in its biogeographical understanding of the state as organism: a political life form that tries to secure its survival by conquering and defending space. It is the primacy of life within his political theory that links Ratzel to a range of ongoing theoretical debates on the nature and emergence of modern biopolitics -the politics of life -even though this connection has not yet been significantly explored. 2 Moreover, Ratzel's essay embodies and promotes what we would today undoubtedly call a 'more-than-human geography' that tries to bridge the divide between science and philosophy and takes off from an understanding of the human as an effect of the natural world. 3 Indeed, Ratzel's entire oeuvre rests on the fundamental assumption of the unity of life and earth. Life, he is never tired of repeating, is earthbound.Despite the fact that there has been a significant and continuous intellectu...

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This article stages an encounter between contemporary vitalist thought and the work of the controversial zoologist turned political geographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844Ratzel ( -1904. The remarkable degree of congruence between Ratzel's ideas and contemporary more-than-human geography, I argue, opens up crucial questions about vitalism as a political project.A discussion of Ratzel's concept and personal experience of war brings into sharp focus a number of problems in the academic language used by vitalism to blur the boundary between nature and society. The article concludes by suggesting that vitalism should pay closer attention to its own place in the history of modern biopolitical thought.

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Recent scholarship has drawn attention to a ubiquitous 20th-century political space that was long overlooked -the bunker. This body of work draws on a variety of theoretical influences and explores multiple historical contexts, yet most remains wedded to the late Paul Virilio's influential 1970s study of the Nazi Atlantic Wall. Enlightening as his 'Bunker Archeology' is, Virilio's theorization has constrained contemporary debates around the function, materiality and temporality of the bunker. Here, we seek to counter this set of limitations in three ways. First, we contest the idea of the bunker as a simple space of human protection and argue for a more expansive conceptualization that is attentive to the bunker as a site of extermination. Second, we challenge the assumed concrete materiality of the bunker and suggest an expanded typology, utilizing a range of materials and milieux. Finally, we take to task readings of the bunker as an obsolete relic by highlighting the continued construction, re-appropriation and reimagination of this architectural form.