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Abstract The work of beauty—in disciplining bodies, imagining nations, driving globalized commodity networks, and fostering booming tourist industries, for example, is a vibrant area of research across the Humanities and Social Sciences. However, an understanding of the complex ideologies, material objects, and practices of beauty remain undeveloped in our field. In this article we call on geographers to take beauty, and its spatialities, seriously. We center the powerful work of beauty in three connected arenas, each of long‐held interest to political geographers: nationalism, militarism, and development. For each we engage analyses of beauty from beyond our discipline. Drawing on our own research and that of a limited, but growing, body of geographers, we point to the instructive openings a feminist geographic approach to beauty, widely imagined but always grounded in power, offers. 

This article examines the geopolitics and geo-economics of security and surveillance. We comparatively focus on the effects of geopolitically powerful states – China and the United States – and their influence over the use of surveillance technologies in the name of spatial security in relatively weaker states – Nepal and Afghanistan. We use these two areas of comparison to address the similarities in security logics across disparate spaces and to highlight the everyday experiences and responses to both outside influence from powerful states and national security regimes. Through interview data from our respective qualitative research in Afghanistan and Nepal, we show how the logics of security situates particular racialized and gendered bodies as suspicious and examine how individuals living in these spaces experience, understand, and challenge these security regimes. We conclude by arguing for more comparative studies of security technologies and surveillance regimes. Additionally, we view these spaces of heightened security as potential sites for increased violence, rather than security.