Sparke’s work focuses on the changing geography of politics and citizenship in the context of globalization. Initially this took the form of research examining how borders, geopolitics and national sovereignty are remade in the context of trade liberalization. His research in North America, Europe and South East Asia complicated simplistic ‘geoeconomic’ meta-narratives about ‘the end of the nation-state’ and a ‘borderless world’ in the new millennium. It showed instead how forms of national sovereignty were still being drawn upon to enforce pro-market governance and neoliberal norms of citizenship at a transnational scale. As well as being written-up and published in a wide variety of articles and book chapters, this work also informed his first book, In The Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the Nation-State (Minneapolis, 2005). With the book he further sought to use geographical evidence about territorial transformations to explore the limits of abstract appeals to ‘space’ by critical theorists, including Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, Timothy Mitchell, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.
Funded by a NSF CAREER award and support from other foundations, Sparke has continued to study the impact of globalization on governance and citizenship into the present. Some of this work also informs his second book, Introducing Globalization: Ties, Tensions and Uneven Integration (Oxford, 2013). This is primarily a textbook, but it additionally attempts to deepen his critique of geoeconomic myth-making and the ways in which it continues to obscure the asymmetrical influence of national-state authority and sovereignty within a context of heightened global interdependencies. His textbook and teaching work about globalization have led in turn to research on the politics of global health, including into what he has come to theorize as the ‘biological sub-citizenship’ resulting from austerity and other neoliberal reforms. One example of this is his current work on unequal global access to the COVID vaccines, including all the exclusions from immunization created by the patent-based monopolies on vaccine IP.