This paper examines the deployment of nonviolence within critical geopolitics. It contends that geographers’ engagements with nonviolence lack grounding, often sliding towards ethical appeals for people’s responsive commitments. Building on Judith Butler’s notion of ‘precarious lives’, I underscore the emotional impetuses through which nonviolence can be harnessed as a concrete pathway for social change. ‘Precarious geopolitics’ as I call it, represents a geopolitics that is sensitive and sympathetic to the claims of nonviolence and a subdiscipline that can seize the opportune juncture truly to reposition itself as one of the arts of peace.