This paper examines the relationship between the nation-state and migration through the activities of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The IOM operates at the intersection of nation-states, international human rights regimes, and neo-liberal governance. We find that the IOM enforces the exclusions of asylum seekers and maintains the central role of nation-states in ordering global flows of migration. In addition, we argue that the IOM acts on behalf of nation-states by using the language of international human rights, as though working in the interests of migrants and refugees. In providing a geographic appraisal of the IOM alongside its image and presentation with an analysis of its activities on voluntary returns, we address the new spaces of 'networked' governance that control and order migratory flows in the interests of nation-states.So we have two lines, then. Along the first the state is reterritorialized as a particular place, a territory with an inside and an outside. Along the second its border controls are dispersed and laid over other states, intergovernmental organizations, private agents like airlines, and mobile task forces. In the space between these two lines we find something new.

This paper assesses the concept of diaspora with the aim of revitalizing its geographical and spatial complexity. It examines contributions made by geographers and scholars in critical area and racial/ethnic studies. It highlights three spatial formations of diaspora: (1) transregional spaces that challenge state territoriality and the boundaries of national community; (2) the infrastructures that shape diaspora through paths of connection and difference; and (3) diaspora urbanism in which new political solidarities in and across cities have emerged. It is argued that these spatial formations conceptually revitalize diaspora by providing a critique of sociospatial borders.

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Disciplinary geography's history represents an important source for contemporary debates over the status of geographical knowledge across the social sciences. This article argues for a reorientation of geography's history by examining its interface with the development of area studies in the United States. It investigates the epistemological and institutional transformations that occurred in the decades before and after the Second World War as the regional concept transmuted into area studies. The article finds that although geography's regional concept shaped the spatial constructions of area studies, the latter's imaginative geographies fixed the regional concept along geopolitical visions of the nation‐state and Cold War regional blocs that continue to occlude social scientific attempts to redraw the borders of the world.