Doug Specht publishes new series of stories in Geographical and The Conversation

Dr Doug Specht, Reader in Cultural Geography and Communication at the University of Westminster and member of CAMRI, has recently published a series of articles in Geographical and The Conversation that span climate justice, human rights, electoral geopolitics and the politics of space. Together, the pieces showcase his distinctive combination of cartographic thinking, geopolitical analysis and concern for those on the frontlines of environmental and political crises.

In a new article for Geographical’s COP30 coverage, co-authored with Sarah Capes, Specht asks whether Indigenous leadership is genuinely a priority at the UN climate summit in Belém, Brazil, probing the gap between rhetoric and reality as governments brand COP30 the “Indigenous Peoples’ COP”. Writing in The Conversation, he turns to UK politics to argue that “the biggest climate stories often aren’t labelled ‘climate’ – so newsrooms miss them,” using the November 2025 UK budget to show how crucial climate decisions are now made through fiscal policy that political reporters cover without a climate lens.

Marking Human Rights Defenders Day, Specht’s Geographical feature “The courage to defend” foregrounds the lives of land and environmental defenders from the Peruvian Amazon to Central Africa, highlighting the lethal risks they face at resource frontiers and the vital role their geographically grounded knowledge plays in exposing abuses and holding power to account. In “Honduras’ electoral crisis and the geography of sovereignty,” he situates the country’s disputed 2025 election within a longer history of US-backed intervention and institutional decay, arguing that structural vulnerabilities and external leverage have eroded the country’s ability to exercise democratic self-determination.

Two further essays in Geographical turn to questions of place and memory. “Unpacking an abundance of space in Yorkshire” explores what appears on an Ordnance Survey map as an almost blank one-kilometre grid square in the East Riding, revealing instead a landscape dense with infrastructure, labour, biodiversity and lived experience, and using this “geography of nothing” to question how maps erase certain kinds of value. In “The forgotten Christmases: communities in conflict during the festive season,” Specht examines Christmas in war zones and communities affected by violence and displacement, tracing how conflict reshapes seasonal rituals and how humanitarian narratives often overlook those living through “ordinary” festive periods in extraordinary circumstances. A further piece for Geographical provides historical context for recent events in the Americas by explaining how the latest US seizure of a vessel linked to Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro echoes a century of gunboat diplomacy and continues patterns of coercive US power in the region.

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash