This article engages with the political struggles staged by illegalised migrants and activists in solidarity amid the long summer of migration and the “Greek crisis”. Grounding its analysis on Orfanotrofio’s housing squat in Thessaloniki, it narrates how such struggles are articulated to politicise migration and stage the equality of newcomers—migrants and refugees—and locals. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s political writings and contemporary geographical work on solidarity, the article argues that such struggles not only disrupt the exclusionary ordering of our cities but also construct political spaces and infrastructures of dissensus wherein equals in solidarity discuss common political problems and devise common political strategies. Through the notion of equals in solidarity, the article investigates how the performative enactment of equality can form the basis for solidarities across differences and analyses how some of the tensions that emerge around collective political subjectification are negotiated. Building on this, it explores some of the challenges and limitations that these struggles face in their efforts to transform the existing order of the city.

This article stages a dialogue between Jacques Rancière's political writings and the squares movement in Greece. From May to July 2011, a heterogeneous multitude of protesters reclaimed the squares of the country from their allocation in the police order and articulated a multiplicity of divergent discursive, organizational and spatial repertoires. This was an urban political event that reasserted the importance of urban spaces in expressing political dissent and experimented with new ways of being and acting in common. This article draws on Rancière's conceptualization of politics to read the squares movement as an opening of spaces of political subjectification. At the same time, through a close ethnography of the squares, it highlights the tensions that marked this process and focuses on two of these: the coexistence of nationalist and equalibertarian discursive and performative repertoires and the co‐implication of horizontal and vertical organizational practices. The article builds on this analysis to argue that the squares movement opened hybrid spaces of political subjectification and to explore some of the tensions in Rancière's political writings. This reading, in turn, informs a discussion of the legacies of the squares movement.

This article departs from accounts that either deify Indignant Squares as a model for 21st century political praxis or demonize them as apolitical/post-political crowd gatherings. By performing a closer ethnographic reading of the Indignants’ protests at Athens’ Syntagma Square, we depict the Indignant Squares as a consensual and deeply spatialized staging of dissent, which nevertheless harbours in its underbelly internally conflicting and often radically opposing political imaginaries. A closer reading of the organization, practice and discourses that evolved at Syntagma Square unearths the existence of not one, but two distinct Indignant Squares, both at Syntagma, each with its own topography (upper and lower square), and its own discursive and material practices. Although both squares staged dissent, they nevertheless generated different (opposing, even) political imaginaries. The ‘upper square’ often divulged nationalistic or xenophobic discourses; the ‘lower square’ centred around more organized efforts to stage inclusive politics of solidarity. The paper suggests that, rather than focusing on the homogenizing terms Indignants’ movement/ Indignant Squares we should instead be trying to develop a more nuanced theoretical understanding and a more finely grained empirical analysis of the discursive and spatial choreographies of these events. This, we argue, would allow us to go beyond either celebrating them as new political imaginaries, or condemning them as expressions of a post-political era. Talking of ‘Indignant Squares’ in the plural helps one explore in more grounded ways both the limitations and the possibilities that these events offer for opening up (or closing down) democratic politics.

This paper explores the entangled dynamics of de-politicization and re-politicization in the midst of the "Greek debt crisis". Critically revisiting Jacques Rancière's political writings, it argues that, despite common criticisms to the contrary, his oeuvre foregrounds the impurity of democratic politics. Rancière, the paper contends, offers critical heuristic tools in understanding and engaging with how processes of post-democratization and democratic politics intersect, become entangled, and are mutually constituted. Simultaneously, however, it also challenges Rancière's almost exclusive emphasis on political subjectification to argue for a plural understanding of the modalities and spatialities of democratic politics. Reading the politics of the "Greek debt crisis" through this lens, the paper unpacks how post-democratization has unfolded through an uneven and contested geography articulated at multiple scales. In parallel, it also maps the diverse and impure modalities of democratic politics in crisis-ridden Greece: from the staging of disagreement through the 2011 squares movement to the articulation of everyday commoning and solidarity movements to SYRIZA's meteoric rise to power. In so doing, the paper demonstrates how post-democratization and democratic politics are being shaped in constant relationship and tension.

Peak oil has acquired prominence in the political lexicon of an increasing number of critical and radical perspectives during the ongoing ecological and economic crisis. By examining examples within academia as well as initiatives such as the Degrowth Movement and the Transition Network, this paper documents how a series of red‐green discourses and movements mobilise the narrative of peak oil as an alarm bell that signals the inevitability of the present ecological crises and of the coming collapse of the fossil‐fuel economy. The paper, developing an analysis on two levels, argues that the ‘red‐green’ mobilisation of peak oil is problematic. First, a close reading of red‐green discourses shows how the weaknesses of the narrative highlighted in the literature (such as a naturalising and de‐politicising understanding of the materiality and finitude of oil) are reproduced by the red‐greens. Second, building on discourse and political theory, the paper highlights that red‐green interpellations of peak oil fail to transcend hegemonic discursive structurations in the field of environmental and energy security, where geopolitical apocalyptic imaginaries and biopolitical forms of securitisation are linked in reproducing post‐politicisation processes. Hence, the paper insists that the invocation of peak oil forecloses the possibilities for radical alternatives to the present socio‐ecological regime of accumulation and circulation.

This paper explores the potential for the formation of political solidarities across the spatial divisions being intensified by dominant responses to the European crisis. In doing so it takes inspiration from Doreen Massey's thinking around the contested terms on which space and politics are articulated and her engagement with the 2008 crisis through projects such as the Kilburn Manifesto. We argue that her book World City powerfully articulates a way of thinking about the spatial politics of a particular conjuncture. The paper traces the ways in which various political interventions in post-crisis politics have been shaped by distinctive 'nationed' geographical imaginaries. In particular we explore how left-wing nationed narratives impact on the discursive horizon and unpack their implications for the articulation of solidarities and emancipatory politics in the context of the 'European Crisis'. Building on this, we reflect on how trans-local solidarities and alliances might be articulated across sociospatial divisions and contest the decidedly uneven, racialised, gendered and classed impacts of dominant European politics. We argue that such solidarities and alliances can form a crucial intervention in challenging the dominant spatial politics of crisis and articulating left political strategies on different terms.

This paper mobilizes the trajectory of privatization policies around Thessaloniki's port as an entry point to explore the neoliberalization of urban infrastructure politics in Greece since the late 1990s. It asks how neoliberalization policies around the port were conceptually legitimized and traces their implications for urban infrastructure governance. In doing so, it draws from a reading of neoliberalism as a performative discourse. This understanding allows analyzing the contingent and situated articulation of neoliberalization discourses as well as the context-specific implications of neoliberalization. The paper suggests that since the late 1990s neoliberalization discourses in Greece were articulated with discourses of modernization. This coupling was mutually reinforcing for the two rationalities. On the one hand, successive rounds of neoliberal policies around the port were conceptually legitimized through functionalist references to the modern. On the other, performing neoliberalization constituted a key strategy in maintaining state legitimacy. Within such a configuration, successive failures and limitations of neoliberal polic(y)ing were (re-)inscribed in discourses of neoliberalization. Tracing the emergence and workings of this articulation in the case of Thessaloniki's port, the paper also examines how successive rounds of neoliberalization consolidated, through failing forward, forms of governance beyond democratic accountability geared around consensus formation.

Populism refers to forms of politics that put 'the people' at their centre, but the way 'the people' is understood varies widely. Questions of left populism have gained significant traction and engagement in the last decade - and this is a key focus of this article. While recognising the importance of Ernesto Laclau's analysis in On Populist Reason, the authors argue that his work is hindered by an overly formalist account of the political. Stuart Hall's writings on Thatcherism offer a more contextual and situated engagement with particular populist strategies, and have continuing relevance for understanding right-wing populism. Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece offer actually existing experiences of left populism. We discuss three limitations in their strategies: their 'nationed' narratives of the crisis; the relationship between the parties' leadership and grassroots politics; and the nature of their engagement with internationalist political projects. Part of the critical terms series