Acknowledging the attention already devoted to the politics of space, in this paper I formulate a different angle towards political space by drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's relational ontology. Thinking Being as Being-with, Nancy deploys a wealth of spatial metaphors. This stands in service of his ontology, preventing the reduction of co-existence to Oneness. Yet the prominence of space in his thinking also offers ways to consider space more politically, lending ontological reasons for the politicization of space. If Being is essentially co-appearance, I argue, how the spaces of co-appearance are structured and conditioned is a vital political question.
This essay clarifies the 'territorial discontents' framework in response to Laine's Beyond territorial discontents: The surprising persistence of borders in a fragmented world (2025) critique published in this journal. We argue Laine misinterprets our focused analysis of borders as increasingly salient geopolitical artifacts as a totalizing explanation. Addressing six key criticisms, we defend our deliberate focus on territoriality, refute charges of state-centrism, and problematize the liberal paradigm. We demonstrate that 'border perplexity' and 'ontological security' are compatible with our framework, while digital and everyday bordering function as extensions of our core factors. Ultimately, we propose a synthesis where territorial discontents act as a 'spark' producing contemporary border complexity.
Governments worldwide are grappling with the advent of AI and its potential for governance, improving public services and impacts for its citizenry. This provocation outlines these unfolding geographies of governance. Specifically, we provide a critical lens into the themes of digital transformation, AI and navigating polycrisis, with potential wider global resonance and interest for geographers. To do so, we critically reflect on the potential impacts of AI on public service delivery focusing on civil society organisations offering advice services to citizens in Wales and England. We outline key considerations centred on difference and devolution; connecting with citizens; and discontent and trust.
We examine support for the populist radical right in Italy using municipal-level data and apply spatial statistical methods to examine local, neighbourhood, and regional contextual effects, spatial dependence, and the halo effect of immigration. Our findings confirm a consistently negative association between higher education and radical right support, while revealing more nuanced, regionally contingent relationships with other social, economic, and demographic factors. Notably, the effect of unemployment varies considerably across Italy's North, Centre, and South macro-regions, while regional spillovers of non-EU migration explain voting patterns for both parties more effectively than localized hotspots of high immigration.
This paper reflects on how Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) shapes my research practice, attending to situated knowledge, positionality, subjectivity, and power relations in my research on care in Indonesian oil palm communities. I borrow from feminists' thinking that knowledge is partial, embodied, and shaped by the researcher's subjectivity, which manifests from lived experiences and intersecting identities. I draw on reflections from doing research during COVID-19 to examine how unequal power relations and ethical concerns influenced my methodological choices, including the use of YouTube as a research site. Taking positionality seriously, I propose, requires ongoing reflexivity in thinking and practising research.
This article critically examines the EU's New Pact on Migration and Asylum through the conceptual lens of the 'humanitarian border', which captures the entanglement of care and control in migration governance. Analyzing European Commission documents, it shows how the Pact invokes humanitarianism while reinforcing securitized and exclusionary practices. Three mechanisms produce migrant vulnerability: migration securitization, selective categorization of care, and pressure to perform as the 'deserving refugee'. These dynamics expose tensions in liberal democracies, where humanitarianism legitimizes restrictive border policies. The article contributes to debates on humanitarian bordering, showing how vulnerability operates as conditional rather than universal protection.
Rewilding is increasingly recognized as a promising strategy for habitat restoration and carbon sequestration, with initiatives rapidly developing in sparsely populated areas such as the Highlands of Scotland. Yet how rewilding intersects with land ownership and control, and the histories through which these sites came to be imagined as wilderness, is often sidelined in popular discourse. This paper outlines the decolonial ecofeminist lens I develop to examine this intersection, drawing together decolonial ecology and ecofeminist theory, and highlights how colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal relations and logics are reproduced through rewilding when questions of land ownership and control are sidelined.
This article reflects on care practices within the Maasai community in Kenya through a Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) lens. Drawing on fieldwork experiences from a PhD study, it examines how care shapes research relationships, gendered social relations, mobility, and intergenerational responsibilities amid environmental and socio-economic change. The paper explores feminist ethics of care in fieldwork, the emergence of women's cultural villages as sites of self-care and collective care, and the burdens and reciprocity of intergenerational caregiving. It highlights care as simultaneously exploitative and transformative, demonstrating FPE's value in revealing dynamic, multidirectional, and more-than-human care relations.
Here we introduce the special section on Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) and set out the six contributions and the themes and topics they convey. This is a timely intervention, with original contributions highlighting the rich insights of FPE. Before introducing FPE to place this section in context, and exploring each piece contained herein, we first reflect on some of the broad contributions of FPE to this current moment.
Valpara & iacute;so's port-city relationship has been reshaped by tensions between port expansion for economic growth and heritage-led urban tourism following UNESCO's 2003 designation. This article examines these dynamics around the proposed Terminal 2 project across two periods (2015-2016; 2023), using interviews with key actors. It traces a shift from conflict to partial collaboration after the project's failure, suggesting institutional learning. While moments of consensus emerged among authorities, businesses, and civil society, fragmented governance and competing urban agendas continue to produce uncertainty about the future of the port-city relationship.
This brief intervention reflects on the transformation of Exarcheia Square in Athens since the construction of the new metro stop commenced in August 2022. Through the dismantling of the neighbourhood's long-standing spatial contract between state power and dissent, the intervention traces how this infrastructural development operates as a political and symbolic project of homogenization and repression. Drawing on John Berger's writing on place, it explores the expected 'destiny' of radical urban spaces under late liberal capitalism and assesses how recent legal, political and community struggles continue to challenge this otherwise imposed future.
Exarcheia Square (Athens) and Gezi Park (Istanbul) were iconic sites of dissent and occupation in the mid-2010s. As part of a wave of popular action against finance capital and authoritarian governance with global significance, they garnered significant attention from critical urbanists and radical theorists. Here we introduce two reflections on these sites of politicization written from the standpoint of a decade later, tracing the radicalisms that have been nurtured, mutated, or withered away. We situate these totemic 'squares' in context and argue that much can be learned from returning to the squares once the spotlight of radical attention has dimmed.
In this article I reflect on my engagement with Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) when studying health and vulnerability. I highlight the crucial contribution of FPE in bringing the human body into the analysis of socio-environmental systems and conflicts, connecting the scale of personal, embodied experience to broader socio-environmental dynamics. FPE challenges the conventional view of vulnerability as only negative and to be avoided, instead inviting an 'otherwise' thinking of it as a common human trait and a potential site for empowerment and resistance. This shift promotes a focus on interdependence and care in socio-ecological transformation.
In this article, I reflect on my experience coordinating WEGO - a four-year feminist political ecology project which looked at environmentalism, justice and feminism through 15 PhD projects and a series of collaborative writing projects. I explain how the network positioned Feminist Political Ecology as a place to trouble power relations in different political and environmental debates to understand the intersectional and co-emergent conceptualization of gender, environment and resources. I aim to show how behaving ethically with care towards human and more-than-human others is a central guide to feminist political ecology in research and practice.
How does state-level planning balance equity, land use, and climate resilience goals? The author answers this question by analysing the 2024 revision to New Jersey's (USA) State Development and Redevelopment Plan (SDRP). The manuscript analyses the tensions among equity and climate justice goals as the state prioritizes the capitalist production of urban space and the built environment for economic growth. The findings advance understanding of growth coalitions at the scale of the state rather than previously studied coalitions at the city and regional scales, and they suggest that planners adopt an abolitionist stance to achieve spatial equity and climate justice.
Grounded in a feminist political ecology (FPE) framework, this study investigates how the persistent failure of drainage infrastructure in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city, unequally burdens low-income women residing in informal settlements. Employing two key concepts from FPE, gendered bodies as living infrastructure and infrastructural violence, the study argues that gender-blind disaster interventions and the selective implementation of anti-encroachment campaigns perpetuate slow violence against marginalized women while intensifying their domestic and community labour. The findings underscore the urgent need to integrate gendered perspectives into urban infrastructure planning and climate adaptation policies to promote more just urban futures.
This response to Castan Pinos and Radil's territorial discontent framework argues that their geopolitical focus, while valuable, inadequately captures contemporary border resurgence in its complexity. Beyond territorial revisionism, borders increasingly function as psychological anchors, digital infrastructures, and biopolitical regulators. The response demonstrates how borders are cast to function as protective skin during crises, mediating ontological anxieties about identity and belonging rather than merely asserting territorial control. Understanding border dynamics requires embracing border perplexity - their contradictory and unpredictable operations across multiple registers. The response calls for theoretical frameworks transcending state-centric territorial analysis to account for borders' simultaneous material and symbolic dimensions.
This paper explores Spain's border policies in Melilla and their paradoxical impact on Spanish territorial sovereignty. While intended to reinforce control, these securitization measures have paradoxically weakened Spanish authority over peripheral zones - a dynamic termed the 'sovereignty toll paradox'. By analyzing the June 2022 border episode, in which at least 27 migrants died, the study reveals how enforcement practices led to the operational abandonment and de facto cession of territory between Melilla's border fence and the legal boundary line. It argues that Spain's reliance on Morocco for migration control incurs territorial costs, thereby bolstering Moroccan geopolitical claims.
This article situates the Gezi uprising of 2013 in AKP-era urban enclosure and argues that occupation-based commoning produced a pragmatic Gezi spirit, later resurfacing in neighbourhood forums and assemblies, capable of jumping scales in crises yet difficult to reproduce in ordinary time under repression and militarization. It traces the state's counter-lesson: reorganizing neighbourhoods for consent and surveillance, repurposing local authorities and charity networks as top-down 'stately commons.' Finally, it reflects on how the idea of self-management reverberated at the level of municipalism, performed by political parties and institutional actors such as the Kurdish political movement and the Republican People's Party.
