This article examines the planetary boundaries framework for environmental governance in port cities, highlighting tensions between planetary metrics and situated socio-ecological limits. Based on ethnographic research in Colombo, Valencia, Genoa and Rotterdam, it shows that environmental issues are experienced as socio-ecological problems affecting livelihoods, public health and territorial identities. While planetary boundaries are useful for diagnosing ecological risk, they hold limited capacity for environmental governance in port cities. Meanwhile, grassroots articulations of socio-ecological limits integrate justice concerns and reveal transformative potential. Ultimately, the operationalisation of planetary boundaries depends on socio-political negotiation, only effective for governance when grounded in local struggles.
This article addresses a key puzzle in comparative politics: how political competition persists in subnational dominant party systems without producing turnover. While existing scholarship attributes durability to rentierism or institutional manipulation, it struggles to explain sustained opposition activity and high participation. We examine Formosa, Argentina, governed by the Justicialist Party for over three decades, using archival research, 20 elite interviews and electoral data (2001-2021). We propose 'contained pluralism', whereby institutional design and electoral rules channel competition into non-executive offices. This strategy preserves a competitive fa & ccedil;ade, manages dissent and maintains high engagement while securing continuous executive dominance.
In this paper, I reflect on cities as metabolically entangled with the planet in the context of planetary boundaries. Reviewing a multi-disciplinary literature (urban metabolism, planetary urbanisation, Earth system boundaries), I conceptualise cities as simultaneously 'bound', 'bounded' and 'boundless' vis-& agrave;-vis the planet. Inspired by Tim Ingold's notions of entanglement and 'bindings against boundaries', I offer metabolic entanglements as an entry point to explore urban-planet interrelations. I then present conceptual and methodological reflections on how to follow urban metabolic entanglements - incorporating footprints and flows, infrastructures and nexuses, ports and corridors, chains and corporations, political conflicts and geopolitical competition, ecological systems and environmental pressures - all the way to where they reach planetary boundaries, and back to 're-bounded' cities.
The objectives of marine governance are usually considered to be the conservation and sustainable use of marine resources. However, the premises of all marine governance emerge from land-based knowledge, offering a static and anthropocentric view of the oceanic world. Although entire marine ecosystems are changing rapidly due to climate change, pollution, overfishing and other human impacts, political and legal scholars often regard the oceans and seas, and their inhabitants, as the passive objects of politics and governance. Investigating a specific marine governance agreement, namely the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement, through an ocean-centric reading, the article seeks to challenge the state-centric and anthropocentric postulates of contemporary marine governance frameworks. The article especially focuses on the subject of the Agreement - the fish - and scrutinises the unquestioned premises of the Agreement regarding the fisheries and the human-fish relations in the Central Arctic Ocean. By doing this, the article aims to offer a more nuanced, oceanic viewpoint on Arctic marine governance, a viewpoint which is needed to put forward post-anthropocentric governance frameworks in the future.
With the sea level rising by 0.5-2.0 m by 2100 for a 4 degrees C increase, up to 187 million people (2.4% of the global population) are at risk of forced displacement. In this context, the conditions for statehood established by the Montevideo Convention will be compromised by the total or partial loss of territory and mass migration. In view of this, the present paper seeks to answer the question of how to rethink the category of statehood in cases where states will face the total loss of their territory. It does so by exploring the potentiality of performative utterance to conserve statehood, thus advancing a new interpretation of this category. More specifically, the paper examines the Constitutional amendments adopted in Tuvalu in October 2023 as a paramount case to overcome the current conceptual boundaries of statehood through the lens of the theory of performative utterance.
This article develops the concept of 'urgent waiting' to describe a condition central to temporal bordering in contemporary asylum regimes. We argue that for refugees, delay and urgency are not alternating phases but a single, co-produced governing condition in which stasis and compulsory readiness are simultaneously imposed. To build this theory, we conduct a diachronic analysis of Estonia's bordering regime, contrasting the attritional 'slow time' of its pre-2022 asylum system with the accelerated 'crisis time' following 2022. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and interview data, we analyse the vernacular practices through which refugees navigate this condition.
This article examines how China's South China Sea (SCS) tourism was formed, enacted and recalibrated over time. Drawing on multi-decade data, we show that SCS tourism was more than a top-down territorialisation strategy but also a socio-economic enterprise, reflecting both Beijing's evolving foreign-policy calculations and the uneven weight of bureaucratic concerns and local lobbying. The Hainan government acted as a policy entrepreneur in advancing Paracel tourism and pursued a tourism hedging strategy. This research contributes to tourism geopolitics studies by bringing a multi-scalar, processual perspective and to SCS studies by offering a domestic political explanation of China's maritime statecraft.
