Dr Francesco Buscemi

Profile

Francesco Buscemi holds a PhD in International Relations from Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies in Pisa, Italy. Susequently, he has worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Political Geography at the University of Bologna, Department of Histories and Cultures - Geography Unit, before joining the University of Leeds.

Research interests

Ciao/Hello
(Welcome, if you ended up here…but, a trigger warning first: the following may sound dry/boring, so for more about what I (try to) do, please also refer to: https://weaponscapes.cargo.site/ )

My research interests lie in political geography. From a thematic point of view, my work addresses questions about the relationship between on the one hand the governing of military means and war and, on the other hand, the production of political space at the supposed margins of authority and sovereignty.

Studying this relationship, I have positioned in dialogue with three main debates at the heart of critical human and political geography: debates on borderlands and frontiers; debates on the geographical aspects of biopolitics; and debates on the geographies of war.

More specifically, I pay attention to militarism and and anti-militarism in resistance. This is something I have delved into studying the political geographies of armed revolutionary movements in the borderlands of Myanmar.
In Myanmar I have conducted extensive qualitative fieldwork research on the processes of disarmament and rearmament of armed movements, delving into how the governing of weapons and armed forces is harnessed by the movements themselves to reshape their own polity in geopolitical-and-biopolitical terms: That is to say, as polities with their own population-body and “vital space” in the form of territory. Overall, I have also analysed how processes and practices of control of the means of violence (i.e. weapons and armed collectives) reproduce political space in borderlands beyond the concept of territory, looking also at places, scales, and networks.

As of late I am progressively interested in the question of how to live without war and military apparatuses in a conjuncture in which war and armies are presented as an inevitable vaccine for political communities.

Publications

Monograph

- Buscemi, F. (2025), Arms Politics. Becoming and Being a Weapon in the Borderlands of Myanmar, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ISBN13: 9781501781742.

Peer-reviewed Articles

- Buscemi, F. (2026), Violence at the Margins of the State: Concepts, Critiques and Contributions, XCEPT Working Paper – Theory Stream. https://www.xcept-research.org/publication/violence-at-the-margins-of-the-state-concepts-critiques-and-contributions/

- Frydenlund, S., Venker, N.T., Walton, M., Aye Lei Tun, Buscemi, F., and Prasse-Freeman, E. (2026), Reading Elliott Prasse-Freeman’s Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar, Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA (2023), Book review forum, Political Geography 126, 2026,103479, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103479.

- Buscemi, F. (2025), The Political Geographies of Community in Warscapes, Geoforum 164, 104349, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104349.

- Buscemi, F. and Proto, M. (2025), On the Natural Border: a Bio-Geo-Political Reading, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 50, e70009, https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.70009.

- Buscemi, F. (2024), Powers of the Gun: on Violence, Frontier, and Community, Geopolitics 30(2), 613-640, https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2024.2363921.

- Buscemi, F. and Proto, M. (2024), Telluric Geographies of the Means of Violence. On Alterity, Weapons, and Space at the Margins, Political Geography 109, 103046, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.103046.

- Buscemi, F. (2022), ‘Blunt’ Biopolitical Rebel Rule: on Weapons and Political Geography at the Edge of the State, Small Wars & Insurgencies 34(1), 81-112, https://doi.org/10.1080/09592318.2022.2121389.

- Buscemi, F. (2021), The Art of Arms (Not) Being Governed: Means of Violence and Shifting Territories in the Borderworlds of Myanmar, Geopolitics 28(1), 282-309, https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2021.1901083.

- Buscemi, F. (2021), Ecologies of Dead and Alive Landmines in the Borderlands of Myanmar, Italian Political Science Review (IPSR), July 2022, 217-235, https://doi.org/10.1017/ipo.2021.37.

- Buscemi, F. (2019), Armed Political Orders through the Prism of Arms: The Relation between Weapons and Insurgency in Myanmar and Ukraine, Interdisciplinary Political Studies 5(1), 189-231, https://doi.org/ 10.1285/i20398573v5n1p189.

Others

- Shae Frydenlund, Nicole T. Venker, Matthew Walton, Aye Lei Tun, Francesco Buscemi, Elliott Prasse-Freeman (2026), Book review forum on ‘Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar, Stanford: Stanford University Press, Political Geography, 103479 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2025.103479.

- Buscemi, F. (2024), Crimes in Archival Form: Human Rights, Fact Production, and Myanmar by Ken MacLean, Pacific Affairs 97(3).

- Buscemi, F. (2021), Arms Proliferation amid Heterogeneous Resistance in Myanmar, Trends Research, available at https://trendsresearch.org/insight/arms-proliferation-amid-heterogeneous-resistance-in-myanmar/

- (July 2021), A View from the Borderlands: An Interview with Lieutenant Colonel Tar Parn La, New Mandala, https://www.newmandala.org/a-view-from-the-borderlands-an-interview-with-lieutenant-colonel-tar-parn-la/

- Buscemi, F. (March 2021), Soup Not Coup, But What Boils in the Coup’s Soup?, New Mandala, https://www.newmandala.org/soup-not-coup-but-what-boils-in-the-coups-soup/