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This paper explores a new phenomenon which is assuming global proportions: the planning and construction of artificial islands. Varying in size, shape, and purpose, man-made islands are looming on the horizons of an increasing number of aspiring global cities and regions at the margins of global capitalism. From the Persian Gulf to the Black Sea, from the Caribbean to the North Sea, artificial islands are increasingly embraced as spectacular, technical signifiers of global participation and urban economic progress: as the ‘new cultural icons’. Appropriated in different contexts, island projects, however, can be (and are) also resignified. They thus change in form, meaning, and use. While islands have been objects of renewed interest in cultural and historical geography, surprisingly, these new man-made landforms seem to have gone largely unnoticed. This paper suggests a research agenda to engage with artificial islands as a new ‘metageographical’ category of emergent, yet historically resonant, social space.

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This paper seeks to bridge postcolonialism's turn to the environment with postconstructivist ecology and political ontology. Recent critiques by Chakrabarty, Spivak, and associated postcolonial theorists seek to expand the remit of postcolonialism and progressive politics to planetary imperatives, nonhumans, and anthropogenic environmental change. While the more-than-human and collective human environmental impacts are problematic for postcolonialism, they suggest ways to reorient postcolonial epistemology, critique, and progressive politics for the Anthropocene. In so doing, however, they unwittingly assume and reproduce Eurocentric and colonialist ontologies of nature and culture. This paper explains how. By revealing the inner tensions and contradictions within such accounts, I argue for the need to overcome the conceptual reticence within postcolonial studies to making ontological claims. Instead, I advocate a turn to postconstructivist ecology and political ontology. My argument extends tentative turns to materiality in recent postcolonial theory to suggest that postcolonial epistemologies need, increasingly, to attend much more radically to collective ontologies of immanence and ontogenesis. Postconstructivist currents in wider cultural and political geographies may be especially suited to composing and advancing these new postcolonial ecologies. The paper contextualizes examples of ontological approaches to ecology and politics through recent anthropological theory, critical indigeneity scholarship and Amazonian ethnography.

Why does critical political geography struggle to address, and research, peace? Recent efforts in geography do seek positive accounts of peace, but we argue that critical geographies remain problematically reliant on social agonism. Dominant theoretical lenses used to address critical politics reproduce dissension as the causal grammar of critical sociality and the constitutive effect of difference. We seek an alternative account of peace and sociality. The first half of the paper diagnoses how prevailing conceptual approaches to critique privilege agonism. The second half advances a positive account of peace, without losing the critical tenor of post-foundationalist or relational political insights.

This paper mobilises a decolonial critique of the Anthropocene. It argues for a certain epistemic disobedience to what, conceptually and politically, the Anthropocene seeks to legitimate. The paper counterposes recent critical and global governance epistemologies, which summon the Anthropocene as a new humanist and statist moment for universal politics, against plural, parochial forms of relational, non-statist affirmation. Hegemonic governance imaginaries that invoke universalist and naturalising rationales are shown to reproduce colonial logics. The paper argues for marginalised and systematically ignored forms of earth-bound relationality that evidence long-standing political and ontological means for responding to modernity's ecological and social harms. Earthbound and rooted life-worlds can affirm ecological responsibility and co-constitution otherwise. Two examples are presented, one from Afro-Caribbean geographies, another from Anishinaabe legal scholarship. Together they evidence enduring ecological reciprocities that unsettle and refuse the totalising rationalities invoked by Anthropocene horizons.