The privatization of communal lands continues to be a central tenet of capitalist and settler-colonial appropriations with devastating implications for the dispossessed and land denied. This article traces how dispossession and resistance become bound up in the material infrastructure of privatization – fences, concrete, rebar and survey lines – and the colonial histories sedimented within them. In dialogue with legal-geographical work on property and materiality, I show how such artefacts become the nodes through which law’s abstraction gives way to struggle; once law is materialized in objects, these become susceptible to alteration and enrolment in new lives of legal association that can subvert – and creatively invert – the power trafficked through property. The analysis draws from ethnographic fieldwork in Mulonga village, central Zambia, where a privatization scheme evolved into a localized struggle between creative cultivators who reworked the things of property to resist displacement, and a bureaucracy that struggled to make them perform the political work assigned to them. Abstract property, I conclude, must be read alongside the contingency and resistant reworkings of its material articulation, which creates new legal surfaces upon which people can act, redirect legal signs, and unsettle translations through which private property achieves exclusionary effect.
President Zelensky has asserted: “We do not trade our lands and our people.” Both territorial integrity and human lives are considered ‘sacred values’ in wartime Ukraine, values beyond cost-benefit and exchange calculations. Yet, the human costs of continuing war to retake territory are so great in Ukraine that these sacred values are forced into a tragic trade-off. Using a survey of frontline Ukrainians from 2022 made up of residents and displaced persons equally (n = 1800), this paper shows that how the ‘lives versus territory’ dilemma divided respondents. We examined the degree to which wartime hatred of the Russian leadership and material insecurity explain people’s choices, and the role that personal stress plays as a mediator for these attitudes. The results reveal that respondents with higher levels of stress were more likely to prioritize saving lives over freeing territory. Displaced persons were also more likely to prioritize lives. The respondent’s material insecurity had modest impacts. For those most stressed during wartime, lives come before land.
Nuclear infrastructure development highlights an important empirical case in environmental governance: nuclear facilities concentrate environmental and social burdens locally, yet many projects proceed without sustained opposition. In the context of China, this paper argues that such outcomes are produced through county-level scalar governance strategies. Focusing on the Zhangzhou Nuclear Power Project, the study reconstructs how local authorities designed four concentric governance zones (20 km, 10 km, 2 km, 200 m) and calibrated distance-based interventions—compensation and relocation, tiered emergency planning and monitoring, graded communication and participation, and differentiated infrastructure and welfare investments—so that governance intensity corresponded to spatial exposure. Drawing on archival materials, policy documents, and semi-structured interviews with officials and project actors, corroborated by administrative records and implementation milestones, the analysis shows that scalar governance pursued distributive, procedural, and recognition objectives across zones. Importantly, the absence of organized resistance is interpreted not as conflict resolution but as the managed incorporation of grievances into institutional channels within a constrained political environment. By reframing nuclear legitimacy as the outcome of territorially differentiated state action, the paper contributes to debates on territory, scale, and environmental governance and positioning spatial justice as a conditional mechanism for managing uneven infrastructural risk.
Renewable energy increasingly complements fossil fuels in meeting rising global energy demand. Yet its rollout is neither even nor free of conflict. This theme issue foregrounds the spatialities and scales of renewable energy infrastructures and examines the deeply contested nature of energy transition efforts. Drawing on case studies from Morocco, Jordan, Namibia, Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador, the contributions offer insights into recent regional developments and highlight transregional and cross-scalar interrelations. They connect place-based research on contested energy projects in political ecology, geography and anthropology with nation-focused analyses of energy transition policy, and approach scale as an unfolding field of contestation. In doing so, they challenge notions of a homogeneous “local” in analyses of energy conflict and move beyond methodological nationalism while still recognizing the significance of the national scale. Together, the theme issue demonstrates the value of relational approaches for disentangling and understanding the contested geographies of contemporary renewable energy expansion.
Large-scale industrial projects linked to the green transition can proceed through accelerated and procedurally insulated authorization while formal opportunities for participation or contestation remain available. This article develops the concept of institutional closure to denote configurations in which competence allocation, authorization design, and procedural sequencing leave locally accessible intervention weakly aligned with the arenas and stages at which consequential development choices remain open. Using a structured qualitative comparison of six battery-related projects across five Hungarian municipalities, the analysis reconstructs authorization arrangements and traces local voice across political, participatory, administrative, and legal arenas. The comparison identifies patterned but non-deterministic variation among three predominant trajectories: juridified voice, in which legal and administrative arenas gain relative importance; procedural exhaustion, in which repeated engagement loses timely leverage over core authorization; and managed engagement, in which involvement remains concentrated on implementation or mitigation. Across the cases, local voice persisted without following a uniform trajectory or retaining uniform effectiveness. The findings illuminate a recurrent tension between speed and coordination on the one hand and deliberation and contestability on the other in green transition-linked industrial development. The framework provides a basis for examining other fast-track or procedurally insulated development settings.
