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Wars and conflicts around the world take the lives of millions and leave millions more displaced both physically and emotionally. With an unprecedented number of displaced peoples worldwide, the plight of refugees, stateless, and internally-displaced people remains a crucial global issue. The current COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent growth of restrictions and barriers to mobility and resettlement have further exacerbated the challenges faced by displaced persons.Recent and emerging geographic scholarship has paid considerable attention to the interlocking themes of mobility, borders, immigration and displacement as critical to understanding the current global refugee crisis. Geopolitics, in particular, has featured several themed issues and sections that attend to the various ways borders and bordering practices shape and inform migration, mobility and displacement. In 1998, then-editor David Newman organised a special issue on Boundaries and Territories and Postmodernity. This plenary special issue focused on the 'new world order' and the extent to which borders have become increasingly permeable in the post-Westphalian geopolitical context. The special issue also called for continued engagement with the subject of changing territorial orderings (Newman 1998).Over the last two decades, Geopolitics has sustained the conversation through special issues and sections on themes related to borders, mobility

We examine contradictions of populism and resource extraction in Mongolia in the context of the recent presidential election of Khaltmaa Battulga, who is often portrayed as dangerously populist. We consider Battulga's victory as an echo of Mongolian voters' sense of dispossession and discontent driven by gross wealth disparity and precarious livelihoods. Rather than treating these concerns as mere tools of the populist political agenda, we view them as moments of resistance to the asymmetry between accumulation and dispossession in Mongolia, a central outcome of 25 years of the neoliberal regime. We situate our analysis of Mongolia's resource politics through an examination of the world's second largest undeveloped copper-gold mine, Oyu Tolgoi. The mine offers a window into the country's turbulent resource politics that has concentrated wealth among a powerful few while nearly one third of Mongolians remain trapped in vicious poverty. Relying on fieldwork conducted over several years, the paper argues that public grievances against the asymmetry of accumulation and dispossession are routinely discounted by discursive tools within the populist paradigm. "Resource nationalism", in particular, is used by those who promote neoliberalism and the open market as a pejorative label to silence public grievances.

A massive monument of Chinggis Khaan (Chinggis Khaan's name is spelt differently depending on the language in which it was written and on conventions of transliteration. Among the most common are Chinggis, Genghis, Genghiz, or Jengiz. For the purpose of the paper, the Mongolian transliteration is used.) imposingly gazes down from the government palace in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia. The monument was erected in 2006 in commemoration of the 800-year anniversary of the establishment of “the Great Mongolian State.” Occupying arguably the most prominent national space, the monument serves as an arresting emblem of the state. With its silent yet triumphant symbolization, the monument articulates the state's new ideology in the post-Soviet era. The monument is one of countless symbolic and material grand-scale state expressions appropriating Chinggis Khaan. In this article, I examine the state's appropriation of Chinggis Khaan as the marker of Mongolian post-socialist national identity. In doing so, I critically examine how the state appropriates history, remembering and forgetting certain parts, to cultivate a shared sense of belonging and pride. Unifying the public in shared glorification and celebration of Chinggis Khaan ultimately serves to instill devotion to the national political and ideological project.