I’ve been invited to give the Political Geography journal lecture at the 2012 Royal Geographical Society conference, which will be held in Edinburgh. The theme of the conference is ‘Security of geography/geography of security’, and so I’ve provisionally agreed that I will give a version of the lecture I’ll be giving a couple of months earlier at the University of Kentucky for the Committee on Social Theory, with the title ‘Secure the Volume: Vertical Geopolitics and the Depth of Power’. The lecture is intended to appear in a later issue of the journal. ‘Volume’ is one of the intended chapters of my planned next book, The Space of the World, so it will try out some of the ideas I have for that. I’m obviously very grateful to the editors of the journal for inviting me to do this.