ARTICLE Auratic Geographies: Bufers, Backyards, Entanglements Franck Billé Institute of East Asian Studies, Berkeley, California, USA ABSTRACT The concept of aura deployed in this article – a notion contained in inchoate form in the popular usage of “backyard” – evokes the tension between the apparent stable boundaries of the state and its much more ambiguous incarnation. It allows for a view of the state that is both unconfned to its physical boundaries and that melts into its contiguous neighbours. Building upon the recent work of philosophers on more-than- human entanglements and symbiotic assemblages, the auratic can also help challenge the Darwinian model currently predo- minant in geopolitics. Indeed, adopting collaboration and sym- biosis as organising metaphors rather than zero-sum survival predicated on competition and rivalry seems especially crucial in the current context of climate change and pandemics. “Enamored by fctions of environmental sovereignty, we imagine ourselves solitary.” (Cohen 2014, ii) Preamble It is now an established consensus that our jigsaw-like territorial sovereignty, seemingly neat and organised, is essentially a political fction (Cocks 2014; Krasner 1999). States are imagined as sociopolitical and cultural containers (Agnew 1994) but these containers are inherently leaky. Border literature has also underscored this fction by drawing attention to the many entanglements found across borders. Cultures are not discrete, and in spite of the hyphen that attempts to stitch them together, “nation” and “state” are never coextensive. Terms such as unbundled, fexible, aleatory, paternal, graduated, and varie- gated have been introduced by social science and political scholars as qualifers of sovereignty in order to account for the nonlinearity, nonhomogeneity, and noncontiguity of political borders. 1 While these forms of metastasised sover- eignty are certainly useful to unpack the spatial formation of neoliberal economies, interpreting territorial discontinuities through exceptionalism essentially presupposes the validity of the Westphalian model. In its critique of the state as bound container, this article takes a diferent approach. Rather CONTACT Franck Billé fbille@berkeley.edu Institute of East Asian Studies, 1995 University Avenue Suites 510 and 520, Berkeley, California, USA. GEOPOLITICS https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2021.1881490 © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC