Territorial Struggles Research Articles

“Empire” Building in Medieval Iberia? Roots, Trajectories, Divergences

ABSTRACT The objective of this article is to reflect on the connections between early modern Spanish empire building and expansionism by Christian principalities during the medieval period. The core argument, which is, by necessity, reductionist owing to the brevity of this article, is that while late medieval / early modern attitudes about conquest and world domination drew heavily on the history, models, and practices of earlier centuries, the ideology of empire that emerged from the later fifteenth century was distinct in two primary, interrelated respects. First, the increased political fragmentation within Christian-ruled lands intensified the more localized, inward-looking dynamic of the territorial struggles against Muslim regimes that contrasted with the more global outlook of later medieval and early modern Christian imperialism. Second, the distinct ideologies of these sometimes coordinated but often competitive earlier expansionist efforts were founded upon different justificatory conceptions of sacred and secular history that, again, were, in essence, much more peninsular in their orientation.

The Redemption of Berlin’s Memory Landscapes: Yael Bartana’s Malka Germania

This article delves into the work of contemporary visual artist Yael Bartana, focusing on her recent artwork, the monumental video work Malka Germania (2021). Amidst the constant struggle over politics, commemoration, and territoriality in Berlin’s memory landscape, Bartana’s art emerges as a critical and thought-provoking intervention. By leaning on interviews with the artist, observations from exhibitions, as well as a thorough analysis of the video work itself, I propose an interpretation of Malka Germania as a radical rethinking of Berlin’s memory landscapes. I argue that the work not only reframes struggles over memory, but also materialises them as territorial struggles.

Analisis Hukum Dalam Menyelesaikan Konflik Penanaman Modal Asing di Kawasan Ekonomi Khusus Pulau Rempang Kota Batam

Development is one way to create people's welfare. Therefore, the results of development must be able to be enjoyed by all people as a form of increasing physical and spiritual welfare in a fair and equitable manner. To stimulate economic growth and focus investment policies, the government is aggressively creating Special Economic Zones (KEK) in various regions. It is hoped that people can feel the maximum benefits. Batam City has a strategic location, one of which is Rempang Island which has a lot of potential that can be developed, both in the tourism, economic and social sectors. However, there are misunderstandings between local communities and the government, giving rise to quite serious conflicts due to territorial struggles. So there is a need for efforts to protect the rights of people affected by the clearing of land for investment purposes on Rempang Island, Batam, which can be done with preventive efforts, repressive efforts or prosecution efforts. So this research uses normative juridical research methods, namely focusing on the analysis of doctrine, norms and the application of certain legal principles in dealing with certain legal subjects. With a statutory regulation approach and conceptualization method, it uses technical analysis of legal materials to solve frozen problems.

RECOGNITION OF VICTIMS OF FORCED DISPLACEMENT IN LAW 1448 OF 2011: REVICTIMIZATION AND INVISIBILIZATION PROCESSES IN THE BANANA ZONE

Territorial struggles in Colombia have been at the very core of the armed conflict, which has made this the country with the greatest displacement in the world. As a result of its multiple effects, as a product of the Peace Agreements, the national government of that time created the Victims and Land Restitution Law (1448 of 2011). However, its temporal delimitation excludes a large number of victims who lost their properties before the 1st. January 1991, during the 1980s when the conflict in the country deepened. In this sense, this article seeks to investigate the scope and challenges of the implementation of this Law in the Banana Zone, a municipality widely affected by dynamics of exploitation of natural resources, drug trafficking and paramilitarism, which, moreover, has a population majority Afro-Colombian, an aspect that requires the application of a differential approach.

Territorial Conflicts and Soybeans: Kanhgág Politics and Their Struggle for Land Rights in Southern Brazil

Today, Kanhgág people live mainly in small Terras Indígenas (Indigenous Lands) in southern Brazil. Those lands are the outcome of a history of equivocal alliances and conflicts between indigenous peoples and European colonisers. Presenting aspects of these relations in both historical and contemporary settings, this article traces continuities and transformations in indigenous politics and cosmology, focusing on the struggles over territory and resources now playing out around soy cultivation. Avoiding simplistic presentations of colonial impositions, it draws on kanhgág people's dualist cosmology, factional sociality and the fecundity of alterity to consider those territorial struggles within indigenous autonomy and alliances.

Dialogical devices and political possibilities of art: Occupy, Inhabit, Resist

‘Dialogical Devices and Political Possibilities of Art: Occupy, Inhabit, Resist,’ is a conversation with Sandra Calvo an interdisciplinary artist based in Mexico, exploring the intersection of art and struggles for home and territory. Sandra Calvo elucidates her dialogical approach in accompanying communities in struggle, employing dialogical devices that foster conversations and potential spaces for expression and re-signification in conflict scenarios. In this conversation Sandra talks about her work in Colombia and Mexico underlying the importance of listening and dialogue to denounce and confront extractivist and dispossession projects.

Analisis Pengaruh Konflik Rempang Galang terhadap Destinasi Wisata

The case of the Rempang community occurred due to the lack of legal protection for their land which was then labeled as squatters. Due to misunderstandings between local communities and the government, this creates quite serious conflicts due to territorial struggles. The RempangGalang conflict caused a decrease in the number of visitors to tourist areas on the island. The decline in the number of visitors has caused the local economy to decline. In fact, the chaos that occurred between the government and the Rempang community made visitors afraid to go on tours to tourist areas around Rempang-Galang.

Decolonizing the political economy of energy transitions: new energy spaces and pluriversal politics in Mexico

This paper draws on Critical Political Economy (CPE) to explore energy transitions in Mexico. It analyzes struggles over competing energy visions from a decolonial, spatial and post-development perspective. The article frames energy transformations as more than a move away from fossil fuels: They encompass a radical overhaul of universalized Eurocentric capitalist modernity that call the state’s role as both facilitator and driver of the energy transition into question. I examine two low-carbon infrastructure projects in the state of Yucatan, Mexico to build on Bridge and Gailing’s notion of new energy spaces as the sites, scales and spatialities through which broader questions of political economy and contemporary struggles are being worked out. CPE of the energy transition must ensure that low-carbon infrastructures are not deployed as new forms of extraction, but rather as the material basis of pluriversal transitions informed by affected communities and their territorial struggles. Both studies on the political economy of energy transitions and territorial struggles can benefit from an open dialogue about how socioecological transformations are imagined, designed and implemented.

Cultivating space for contemporary resistance in Brazil’s Amazon and Cerrado

AbstractThis paper investigates how contemporary labour-capital conflicts in the Cerrado and Amazon biomes of Brazil are centred on the expansion of value from land via dispossession and land titling, and the extraction of value through financial mechanisms that enhance the current and future rent from landholdings. Understanding the consequent territorial struggles between traditional collective ownership on the one hand, and private individual and corporate value capture on the other requires a departure from incumbent capital-(salaried) labour analyses in value chain studies. Resistance to further land capture for speculation reveals inter-and intra-class class tensions, and the facilitative role of the state in validating illicitly grabbed resources. Despite the adverse political conditions in Brazil, there are modest, but significant gains by autonomous land occupations and demarcations in confronting capital expansion. In the face of intensified land grabbing, violent threats, and the laundering of illicit resource extraction, the two cases presented open up new dimensions of, and possibilities for, capital-labour struggles linked to commodity expansion and extraction on resource-rich frontiers.

Corporalidad y estética indígena en la “Festa da Menina-Moça”: territorialidad, cosmopolítica y alteridad entre los Tenetehar-Tembé

In recent decades, indigenous peoples have been articulating processes that strengthen and/or revive rituals, cosmologies, aesthetics, and diversity of knowledge as a political strategy of resistance. This phenomenon is linked to forms of identity affirmation and maintenance of territorial rights, and has served as a lens for the anthropological analysis of indigenous reality. With this in mind, the article focuses on a set of aesthetic experiences and cosmological knowledge that take place during the “Festa da Menina-Moça,” an important ritual process and cosmopolitical event of the Tenetehar-Tembé people, located in the northeastern state of Pará, Brazil. The aim of this study is to comprehend the relationship between the social construction of the Tembé body and the role and “strength” (agency) of women in the production and aesthetic utilization of the festival. This utilization translates important aspects of territoriality, cosmopolitics, and alterity of this Tupi-Guaraní people of eastern Amazonia. The study is built upon two foundations: a review of anthropological literature and ethnographic theorization, drawing from both my field experiences in the villages of Guamá and the participant observation I conducted during the festival in mid-2018. Based on this analysis, I examine the paths or phases of the Festa da Menina-Moça and the effectiveness of Tembé aesthetics in the fabrication of the bodies-territories of the girls and boys during the liminality until their relational transformation into “true people.” This article offers an original interpretation of Tembé reality and its processes through the aesthetic expressions of the festival, which serve as a revelatory axis for the sociocultural dynamics and cosmopolitical relationships of the various indigenous groups. The conclusion drawn is that the social organization and political practices of the Tenetehar-Tembé people are strongly influenced by the celebration. In this context, cosmological knowledge and potential aesthetics construct “true people” while simultaneously (re)producing social bonds and ritual memory. These in turn, are mobilized and updated in other aspects of Tembé life, particularly in their political struggles for territory.

A Lived-in Shape Grammar: Parsing the Dwelling Activities in a Modernist Residential Building in Algiers

ABSTRACT: Residents of a building transform it over time and play crucial roles in making its life cycles sustainable. Introducing formal methods to study the impact of residents’ modifications in existing structures, we analyze Climat de France, a modern housing project in Algeria. Observing the distinction of designed and in-use contexts, we consider the building as it was once intended and as it is now lived in. We parse the south-west facade and define a shape grammar that consists of rules that represent and categorize the changes dwellers made on the original facade over time. We discuss residents’ modifications as tools of autonomy and outcomes of territorial struggles. Findings are both expected and unexpected, such as the issues of climate control and the patterns of knowledge exchange, respectively. The study interweaves some of the social and physical dynamics that trigger and shape the residents’ modifications, pointing out that shape grammars may be utilized to analyze the informal adaptations of a space by its users.

Women in the Geographies of Marronage - Territorial Intimacy as a Freedom Strategy: The Case of María de Los Santos and Her Bonga

As a strategy for freedom, marronage has usually been narrated as an initiative of enslaved men who defied colonial power to escape oppression and produce territorialised societies away from slavery. Drawing on historical Maroon studies in Afro-Latin America, feminist geography, and communitarian feminist praxis on territorio cuerpo-tierra (body-land as territory), this article explores the role of Maroon-descendant women in the making and remaking of territories in the Colombian Caribbean. Records in the General Archive of the Indies, the General National Archive in Bogotá, the Historical Archive of Cartagena de Indias and the oral tradition of Maroon-descendant communities themselves are used to explain the place of women in struggles for territory in the context of violent land dispossession due to Colombia’s armed conflict. This article also demonstrates how the reparation process to claim back lost lands is also a women’s matter. We can understand this as an intimate and affective, almost invisible process, as in colonial times, by analysing the spatial practices of María de Los Santos, an internally displaced woman from the community of La Bonga in San Basilio de Palenque, a town of descendants of fugitives from slavery. These practices, understood through the work of an anthropologist from this community, Jesús Natividad Pérez Palomino, are intimate yet collective and mobilise both the tangible and intangible legacy of marronage to enable her and her people to endure.

A Journey through Colonial Sakhalin ：Iwaya Sazanami’s Experience in Sakhalin

Iwaya Sazanami(1870-1933) was a prominent figure in modern Japanese children’s literature. He traveled to the colonial Sakhalin one time in his life, the main purpose of this journey being to give oral presentations of fairy tales to children in Sakhalin. He energetically traveled the colony, including Toyohara (currently Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk), Ōdomari (Korsakov), Shirutoru (Makarov), Noda (Chekhov) and Maoka (Kholmsk).However, regarding Sazanami’s visit to Sakhalin, as far as I know, there is no previous research. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to clarify what kind of experience Sazanami had in Sakhalin under Japanese rule, and the essence of the literature(Haiku), political ideology(His view of Sakhalin and the Ainu people) he formed there.In conclusion, Sazanami was a hardcore imperialist, colonialist and nationalist who was delighted to have won the territorial struggle with Russia, the enemy country, and made Sakhalin his own. And he strongly hoped that Sakhalin and the Ainu would be included and integrated as part of the Japanese nation and people, and that Sakhalin would achieve further civilizational development in the future.

The dark side of the energy transition: Extractivist violence, energy (in)justice and lithium mining in Portugal

Focusing on a case study in Northern Portugal, this research mobilizes an energy justice lens to unpack multiple forms of violence reproduced by lithium mining projects, advanced as urgent and necessary for the energy transition. Framed under ‘green transition’ discourses, a ‘corporate energy transition’ follows a mineral-intensive pathway which increases demand for critical raw materials and expands extractivism to new commodities and marginal territories. Lithium (Li) is central to this transition, with an estimated 1500 % rise in the global demand of this rare earth mineral by 2050. Yet, the socio-ecological impacts of Li-mining remain largely overlooked, despite driving significant environmental conflicts in Portugal and elsewhere. Based on empirical research, this article examines how Li-mining projects in Portugal reproduce distributive, recognition and procedural (in)justices which assist the ‘green grabbing’ and infrastructural colonization of peripheral territories, turned into new ‘green sacrifice zones’. By attending to the voices and experiences of those resisting Li-mining projects, the results present the energy transition as a ‘trojan horse’ for extractivism, with Li-mining driving multiple energy injustice(s), reproducing violence against local communities and disrupting wider multispecies relationalities in traditionally sustainable rural territories. The research contributes to: (1) unravel the empirical contradictions of a corporate energy transition, problematizing hegemonic socio-technical responses to address the climate crisis, which expand extractivism through depletion, segregation and exclusion; and (2) reveal links between energy (in)justices and the constitution of ‘green sacrifice zones’, highlighting how territorial struggles embed a clash between different relational ontologies in more-than-human territories.

Framing urban threats: A socio-spatial analysis of urban securitisation in Latin America and the Caribbean

In the context of growing concern with violence in Latin American and Caribbean cities this paper offers an analytical synthesis of urban securitisation which involves the construction of issues, spaces and populations as security threats. The synthesis contributes to debates on urban studies and critical security studies, which focus on neoliberalism as the driver of urban securitisation and militarisation as its main expression, by highlighting the embedded, contextualised and historically situated nature of securitisation and its multiple manifestations. The paper proposes a framework for the socio-spatial analysis of securitisation processes focusing on their causes, manifestations and consequences, while capturing their dialectic relation with cities’ spatial characteristics. Bringing together Lefebvre’s conceptualisation of the social production of space with Wacquant’s analysis of the penal-assistential state, and using secondary sources complemented by primary data from our research, the paper shows that urban securitisation in this region is contingent to four socio-spatial dimensions common to Latin American and Caribbean cities – segregation, territorial stigmatisation, overlapping insecurities and territorial struggles. Using a multidimensional framework, the paper illustrates how unaddressed legacies of colonialism and notions of state power in the context of struggles with criminal actors have driven urban securitisation and diversified its targets and techniques beyond militarisation. Under a securitising logic, programmes which often appear progressive are also shown to prejudice marginalised groups and undermine democratic values. The paper concludes with a call for further multidisciplinary analyses that account for the socio-spatial and historical particularities of contemporary forms of urban securitisation in this and other regions.

Weaving the Spiderweb: Mujeres Amazónicas and the Design of Anti-Extractive Politics in Ecuador

This article examines the strategic politics of an Indigenous network called las Mujeres Amazónicas (the Amazonian Women) that is resisting the expansion of extractive projects in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest. It asks, what are the Mujeres Amazónicas’ political strategies to resist extractive occupation and how do they develop and deploy these strategies in their territorial struggle? To answer this question, I analyze how their organizing is characterized by a political design that merges public expressions of resistance – such as mobilizations, protest marches, and other public actions – with communitarian practices that reproduce human and more-than-human life in the Amazon. To illustrate this strategic fusion, the article turns to an image that the Kichwa leader Elvia Dagua wove into an artesanía (handicraft) called la Araña Tejedora (the Weaving Spider). By analyzing Dagua’s artesanía and other self-descriptions of the Mujeres Amazónicas, the article shows how practices of communitarian reproduction are used and transformed by the Amazonian Women, thus enabling their political work and sustaining their lives at the same time. The strategic deployment of reproductive practices reveals how Indigenous women’s cultural and social identities are neither static nor unchangeable. It also illustrates that the Mujeres Amazónicas’ organizing should not be interpreted as a simple example of local politics responding to extractive occupation. By contrast, the article shows how the Mujeres Amazónicas are historical and political subjects with the power to shape the lines of political confrontation vis-à-vis the state and extractive capital, and to build global connections between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of living.

“You Can Kill Us with Dialogue:” Critical Perspectives on Wind Energy Development in a Nordic-Saami Green Colonial Context

This article explores Southern Saami reindeer herders’ experiences and contestations over state consultation and corporate dialogue during a conflict over the Øyfjellet wind energy project in Norway. Informed by a committed research approach and juxtaposition with findings from Indigenous peoples' territorial struggles in Latin-America, the article provides critical perspectives on governance practices in a Nordic-Saami green colonial context. The research draws on ethnography from a consultation meeting between Jillen Njaarke, the impacted reindeer herding community, and state authorities, as well as diverse written material. The study suggests that the state- and corporate-led “dialogues” displaced the root cause of the conflict, revealed epistemic miscommunication, and perpetuated relations of domination which limited emancipatory effects for Jillen Njaarke. The premises and discourses underpinning the “dialogues” further reproduced racist notions which devalue ancestral Saami reindeer herding knowledges, practices, and landscape relations. These findings challenge dialogue as prescription of good governance and conflict resolution in a context where democracy and compliance with Indigenous peoples’ rights are perceived as high.

Producing Territory, Resisting the State: Embodiment, Discourse, and Symbolism in Street Demonstrations in Iranian Kurdistan

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the Iranian Kurds’ production of territory during two rounds of street demonstrations in October 2014 and September 2017. Findings from semi-structured interviews and qualitative online data indicate that Kurdish demonstrators produced imagined territory by employing embodied discourses and symbolic practices. Situating the demonstrations within the context of the Iranian state’s securitisation of the Kurdish space, the article shows that the demonstrators deployed such discourses and practices as co-constructed tactics of resistance to avoid violent confrontation with security forces. The state’s oppressive power and its securitisation of space, therefore, had the ironically productive effect of prompting demonstrators to articulate and produce imagined territory through embodied, discursive, and symbolic tactics. Expanding on research that has focused on the territorial struggles of minoritized populations, the article makes a broader point that marginalised yet persistent collective geopolitical imaginations – in this case, Kurdistan – simultaneously inspire and are reproduced by minoritized peoples’ alter-geopolitical resistance.

Resilience and conflict: rethinking climate resilience through Indigenous territorial struggles

ABSTRACT Resilience to climate change demands a transformation in social and political relations, but the literature has largely neglected how these are embedded within legacies of conflict. We explore the roles socioenvironmental conflicts play in the scaling up of transformation amidst ongoing settler colonial projects in Indigenous territories in Nicaragua. Drawing on insights from resilience, climate change, and critical agrarian studies, this article reframes resilience as a process produced within socioenvironmental conflicts, placing contestation and negotiation in the centre frame. By re-signifying the meanings and practices of resilience, Indigenous agrarian struggles contribute to ‘eroding capitalism’ and its entwinement with climate change.

To cover the land in green: rain-fed agriculture and anti-colonial land reclamation in Palestine

ABSTRACT In the 1980s, Palestinian agronomists, activists, and farmers turned land reclamation into an anti-colonial project in the West Bank. Drawing on technical studies, interviews, and fieldwork, this article argues that anti-colonial reclamation is a composite of modernist engineering, peasant tradition, and international Leftist thought. Palestinian experts and voluntary work activists used reclamation to confront colonization and build a political collective to sustain territorial struggle. Today, this legacy shapes plans for landscape transformation and efforts to revitalize village agriculture. Reclamation highlights the importance of agricultural interventions in Palestinian anti-colonialism and reveals connections between seemingly disparate agrarian and Indigenous struggles against dispossession.