This article evaluates the potential for agency exercised by the subterranean volume in geopolitical conflict. Joining recent geographical conceptualisations of territory as a volumetric assemblage with calls for an elemental geopolitics, it argues that the density of the underground layer creates a convoluted techno-political problem that obfuscates the state’s means of directly observing, visualising and knowing the topological space of territory. To illustrate this, a methodological approach based on the relational ontologies of actor-network-theory (ANT) and assemblage theory is applied to an empirical study of the geophysical sensing techniques used by Israeli engineers, scientists and military to manage cross-border tunnels built by the Palestinian militant group Hamas before and after the 2014 Gaza war. The soil conditions, settlement patterns and infrastructures in the Gaza-Western Negev region have necessitated experimentation with complex and multiple forms of scientific and political expertise in attempts to locate the invisible tunnels, alongside a shift towards increasingly oblique techniques of cartographic representation of the sub-surface. The contingency of these efforts has unsettled the State of Israel’s confidence in its ability to manage geopolitical risks through techniques of territorial control. This case raises poignant questions about the extent of the capacities and limitations of technological solutions and geopolitical practices to secure territory when confronted with the geophysical agency of the underground.

Participatory design (PD) and co-creation (Co-C) approaches to building Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have become increasingly popular exercises for ensuring greater social inclusion and fairness in technological transformation by accounting for the experiences of vulnerable or disadvantaged social groups; however, such design work is challenging in practice, partly because of the inaccessible domain of technical expertise inherent to AI design. This paper evaluates a methodological approach to make addressing AI bias more accessible by incorporating a training component on AI bias in a Co-C process with vulnerable and marginalized participant groups. This was applied by socio-technical researchers involved in creating an AI bias mitigation developer toolkit. This paper’s analysis emphasizes that critical reflection on how to use training in Co-C appropriately and how such training should be designed and implemented is necessary to ensure training allows for a genuinely more inclusive approach to AI systems design when those most at risk of being adversely affected by AI technologies are often not the intended end-users of said technologies. This is acutely relevant as Co-C exercises are increasingly used to demonstrate regulatory compliance and ethical practice by powerful institutions and actors developing AI systems, particularly in the ethical and regulatory environment coalescing around the European Union’s recent AI Act.

This paper uses Israel's technologically advanced Iron Dome short‐range missile defence system as a deep empirical case study to examine how affective atmospheres mediate the relationship between state power and the agency of technological objects deployed to govern (in)security. Drawing theoretically from productive tensions between more‐than‐human theories of object‐oriented ontology, actor‐network theory and affect theory, it evaluates Iron Dome as a scintillating ‘bright object’ with variable capacities and limitations that exceed the sum of its components. Iron Dome both overreaches and contradicts the intentions and governance logics of state elites within a spatio‐temporally distributed array of architectures, infrastructures and practices. Within this milieu, its affective power is ambivalent and capricious, and can both enhance and undermine the atmospheric production of security in ways that exceed both instrumental functionality and human intentions. These findings indicate how a geography of security that attends to the affective dimension of object politics can account for the complex and non‐causal ways in which technologies can either reinforce or inhibit security as an anthropocentric endeavour.

Whilst participatory practice is increasingly adopted in end user studies, there has been far less use of a participatory approach when designing lower down the software stack. As a result, end users are often presented with security controls over which they have no control but for which they retain the responsibility. Conversely, hardware and software engineers struggle to innovate new security control designs that are resilient to new and emerging threats. In a study utilising ethnographic research and stakeholder interviews, we show that there is a siloing of communities of practice between hardware security engineers, software engineers and coders, manufacturers in the technology supply chain and end users. Our findings indicate that this siloing and a lack of participatory practice impedes the development of a more cohesive digital security design that integrates security through the stack from the hardware layer upwards to the OS and application layers. These barriers make difficult the negotiation between what is possible lower down the stack with what is needed and wanted higher up the stack. Our findings suggest that a more holistic and comprehensive participatory design approach is required to negotiate a digital security by design paradigm that more evenly distributes power over and responsibility for security controls throughout the stack. Working with the HCI literature on co-production in design, this paper will suggest that a pathway for breaking through this impasse is to utilise objects in the design process of the hardware secure instruction set architecture as a feedback mechanism to incorporate other sets of designers and users in the design process to create a more workable stack.

This article reassesses themes in the present literature on borders in political geography by using the case study of Israel's border with Lebanon. This securitized landscape invites a definition of the border predicated on a neat dichotomy between one's own identity and a foreign and dangerous “Other.” However even this border is a complex and contradictory boundary, in which residents’ attitudes, beliefs and practices are ambivalent and defy neat categorization. This study provides a more nuanced account of geographical imagination at this border by treating the borderland as a heterotopic space, rather than perceiving the border as a fixed line, and by examining the everyday “micro-political” operations and materialities that inhabitants of the border region perform and experience. While there is clearly a relationship between security and identity at this border, the outcome of this research indicates that this relationship is non-linear and more complex than can be allowed for by a hostile cultural imagination solely based on a self/Other dyad.