George Floyd’s murder by a white policeman has sparked the largest urban uprising in US cities since the 1960s. By contextualising this wave of uprisings in the broader context of similar uprisings in twenty-first-century US cities, this paper shows that such an uprising has long been in the making with the violence, murders and revolts that have marked US cities since the turn of the century. My argument in this paper is against the pathological framing of these uprisings that evokes the alleged irrational anger of those who participate in the uprisings and the bad behaviour of a few police officers. Such a framing directs attention away from the structural violence that is at the source of these uprisings, and perpetuates racialised images of those who participate in the uprisings as irrational and impulsive. These uprisings, I argue, are not the actions of irrationally angry individuals mindlessly following the crowds; they cannot be reduced to gratuitous looting and burning, and they are not triggered by some police officers behaving badly. The sources of this urban rage lie in systematic, mostly unchecked, violence. The rage that erupts in these uprisings is a political emotion guided by cognition and judgements about right and wrong, just and unjust, rather than a pathological reaction spurred by uncontrollable impulses. It is a deliberate response to white contempt and the violence associated with it. The information, practices and views in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG). 

This essay uses the quandary facing Swedish security policy decision-makers in 1863 as a starting point to discuss a few timeless topics of national strategy. Affected by pan-Scandinavian sentiments, in July 1863 Charles XV made a declaration of solidarity with Denmark, which faced a military threat from the German Confederation, promising Swedish troops to help defend the southern border of the Duchy of Schleswig. However, the King had not secured the support of his cabinet, which refused to back the King’s policy, so that despite intense diplomatic activity, no military assistance to Denmark was given when the Second Schleswig War eventually started. Using this historical experience as a case-study, observations and reflections are made about the security policy of small states, about the need to coordinate and de-conflict policy initiatives within the core executive, and about what is required for a declaration of solidarity to be credible.

In this one-day workshop we are going to make access. We aim to counteract the phenomenon that access to making (e.g., in makerspaces, fablabs, etc.) is not equally distributed, with certain groups of people being underrepresented (e.g., women*1). After brief introductions from participants and a set of three impulse keynotes, we will envision and make interventions together, such as speculative or provocative objects and actions. The workshop takes a constructive stance with the goal to not rest on empirical and theoretical findings or individual experiences, but to translate those into viable interventions. These serve as exemplars of findings with the clear goal of being deployed soon after.