ABSTRACT
The 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union produced significant challenges to apparently stabilized orderings of scale and space of the United Kingdom, which was then framed by the supranational structures of the EU. The successful campaign to Leave (“Brexit”) revealed the contingent, contradictory, and contested character of these spatial and scalar orderings, not least by articulating a vision of restored national sovereignty (“we can take back control”). In the process, the campaign articulated new imaginaries of scale and space that reworked important tropes of proximity and distance, borders and boundaries, and lines of affiliation and antagonism. In many ways, then, the referendum reveals the significant place of scalar and spatial imaginaries within contemporary politics, most obviously, though not only, around nationalist projects. The long-drawn-out Brexit “moment” also reveals important analytical issues about the problems of realizing such imaginaries in political and governmental terms.
