Photo by Rana Göksu

Geo-Materializing the Legal Imaginary: The Cycle of Produced and Producing Geography examines how land once rendered ‘null’ was later claimed as ‘full’, and how these transformations continue to shape our imaginaries on political authority, identity, societal organization, governing systems, and the ways we conceive of land. Rana Göksu traces the juridical geographies of nullification and dispossession through a geohistorical connection between British colonial dispossession in Australia and the Australian state’s territorial claims to 42% of Antarctica, exploring the role of geospatial techniques and their ideological geo-graphing in producing these imaginaries. Building on Lefebvre’s theory of space production and engaging Povinelli, Yusoff, and Fanon, Göksu reframes ecological ‘destruction’, ‘crisis’, and ‘death’ as ontological resistance to colonial and capitalist imaginaries and their ideologically produced geographies, arguing that the political power of geo-materialities and their capacities for world- and system-making do not seek liberal emancipatory resolution, yet decisively correspond to it.

Scholars and advanced students in critical legal theory, political geography, postcolonial studies, and environmental humanities; researchers with interests in settler colonialism, Antarctic governance, and spatial theory.

This book is available in paperback and as a gold open access e-book.

Get the book here

About the author

Rana Göksu is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of critical legal theory, geography, and materiality, specializing in legal geography and spatial theory. Göksu holds a PhD in law from the University of Kassel (Germany, 2025) and is a lawyer admitted to the Istanbul Bar Association.

About Counterpress

Counterpress is a non-profit academic press publishing critical and radical scholarship in law and the wider humanities, set up by the same people who started CLT. It is in this sense the kindred spirit of this blog, but for books.

We publish books in two streams. Our standard titles offer e-versions downloadable directly from the Counterpress website on a pay-what-you-can basis, including free access for those unable to pay. Our Gold Open Access titles are freely available to download with no barriers. Paperbacks for both streams are available through online retailers. All e-versions are released under a Creative Commons licence.

Whatever the stream, our commitment is the same: to make critical (legal) scholarship accessible to readers regardless of their personal wealth.

To read more about us and why we set up the press, please see our about page.

To peruse our other titles, please see our back catalogue.

If you are interested in submitting a book proposal, please contact us here.