‍An enduring image associated with the recent “fracking” boom in North Dakota’s Bakken region is a 2016 nighttime photograph of North America taken by NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite. In the image, an enormous swath of illumination as bright as major cities covers the sparsely populated northern Great Plains.

From wars fought over the shape of subterranean geological formations to new technologies for boosting the amount of recoverable oil and gas, and from the wildcatter’s fantasies of wealth from the depths to the petrostate’s modernizing megaprojects, few volumetric calculations have been as consequential for the modern imagination as the estimation of the earth’s oil and gas reserves.

The ground has volume. It is a voluminous surface. As such, it cannot be an object of sovereignty.

‍As a variety of electromagnetic spectrum, TV signal fits well into Helga Tawil-Souri’s (2017) description of the latter as “the information age’s most political and politicized dimension”. Even more so if one focuses on the terrestrial (in American English “over-the-air”) television transmission in which Earth-based TV stations broadcast audio-visual content by radio waves to antenna-equipped TV receivers in consumers’ residences.

Despite enfolding several Indian battalions within its hills, the border town of Uri had none of the buzz that I imagined would characterize the “garrison-entrepot” (Roitman 1998). Until the recent release of a Bollywood military-action film titled Uri:The Surgical Strike, the name Uri did not command the kind of patriotic charge associated with places like Kargil or Siachen, symbols of heroic confrontation with Pakistan in the war-map of Kashmir.

‍Cornel West once wrote that “it is imperative to steer a course between the Scylla of environmental determinism and the Charybdis of a blaming-the-victims perspective” (West, 1993, 2017: 57). West’s warnings of the twin dangers of racism, both of which have been flirted with by geographers, serves as a useful reminder for thinking about the vortex.

‍Lines are willfully ignorant of volume. Precisely because of this, lines are forced to confront volume at every turn. As they strive to abstract themselves down to one dimension, lines must negotiate endlessly with all three stubbornly material dimensions. Their linearity is never more than a bargain of convenience, a tolerable approximation of an abstract ideal. Abstraction is not itself an abstract process.

‍The rush of air and water over a territory are not the only flows that shape its terrain. And it is movement that, “instead of being subsequent to geography, is geography” (Steinberg 2013, 157). The term “eddy” can capture not just unidirectional movement and flows but also their unpredictable, counter-intuitive, spiral-like, concentric, centrifugal, and centripetal tendencies. Eddy is both natural phenomenon and a spatial metaphor for “human vulnerability and adaptability in times of unprecedented transformation.”

Bosnia-Herzegovina is doing very little since it is possibly expecting generous support through EU funds in order to address the situation from both a ‘security’ and a humanitarian perspective, in this way becoming a potentially relevant player in a broader region affected by a new impending ‘refugee crisis’. Croatia, on the other hand, prefers to act tough against these irregular mobilities and to mark its geopolitical agenda, literally, on the bodies of the refugees

We return to this region at the end of July 2018. As we feared, in the past few months the situation has become significantly worse for the refugees, with apparently up to 5000 people accommodated in makeshift camps and squatted buildings between Velika Kladuša and Bihać.