L.E. (Luis) Lobo-Guerrero, Prof

As a scholar engaged with history and the theory of international relations, I consider myself to be a historical epistemologist of order, power, and governance. I focus on how knowlege is and has been used to constitute understandings of life and space, in time. This has led me to be interested in biopolitics and geopolitics. 

I take biopolitics to be the study of the power relations through which life is understood and governed, and geopolitics as the study of the power relations through which spaces are created. On the first, I have studied insurance as a biopolitical security technology. On the second, I have focused mostly on maps and cartography in the making of imperial orders. 

My research approach takes distance from the privilege traditionally given to the politics of identity (for example the emphasis on rulers, of political entities, of personalities, and nationalities). It focuses instead on wondering about biopolitical and geopolitical phenomena by considering them to be connectivity effects. This approach focuses on exploring the terms under which something is being connected, and particularly, the politics involved. 

A sample of this approach can be seen in our book trilogy on the creation of (Western) global spaces.

More widely, I am fascinated with understanding and challenging the role binary logics have played in making livelihoods and lifestyles possible and the spatial orders that correlate them. I take pleasure in wondering how binaries such as the container/contained,  surface/depth, private/public, friend/enemy, right/left, and analogue/digital, to name but some, are continuously used to establish, and to challenge, orders. I like to question the metaphysical logic on which they operate to demonstrate that the life they seek to govern, always exceeds them, and the violence employed in asserting them is not necessary. 

My specialist teaching in the past years has mostly been through a third-year Bachelors module on Maps and Power, and the masters research seminars Strategies of Space, Maps and Power, and Geopolitics and Connectivity. 

My projects have been funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the Leverhulme Trust, the British Academy, the European Research Council, the Dutch Research Council, as well as various other European research agencies and the universities where I have worked and visited. I have contributed to the assessment of resarch for the Dutch, Flemish, British, Slovak, and Finnish, and Swedish research councils, mostly in the areas of International Relations, and History and Archaeology.