Some of the most recent articles from open access anthropology journals (beta)
This article analyses territorialization ‘from-above’ and ‘from-below’ in Kamoethway, Tanintharyi Region in relation to the public authorities of the Karen National Union (KNU) and changing Myanmar governments. Fieldwork in Karen villages of the Kamoet…
As the aquifers beneath the San Luis Valley hit new lows, farmers and ranchers in this agricultural hub of southern Colorado are being encouraged to fallow their fields. With water scarcity as a push factor and renewable energy mandates as a pull facto…
Rewilding is increasingly popular as a new paradigm for conservation, advocating the return of an autonomous nature, the ‘wild’, in closer coexistence with people. This approach resonates with transboundary conservation initiatives like the Kavango-Zam…
Research on degrowth has developed a strong conceptual vocabulary for envisioning alternatives, centered on life-making and collective autonomy within ecological and societal limits. Looking into the past and engaging with anarchism, we argue, can furt…
This article examines nostalgia and its political force around the Zayandehrud River in central Iran. Once seen as perennial and life-giving, the river is now dry for much of the year, turning its absent flow into an object of longing. This reflects a …
Conservation interventions have historically been guided by Western ontologies and epistemologies that separate humans from nature. Reflecting this, the natural sciences have been dominant in decision-making related to conservation, while the social sc…
This article questions dominant narratives that attribute conflicts and migration in the Sahel primarily to factors such as ethnicity, climate change, or poverty. Instead, we highlight land dispossession as a central, yet insufficiently examined, drive…
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Small, unevenly financialized companies are now shaping the development of new cobalt and nickel processing plants in the United States (U.S.). as the country seeks to secure its critical mineral supplies. Building on political ecology theories, this a…
Dominant biocultural conservation discourses on human–elephant conflict in India and elsewhere often reduce local communities to a victim/perpetrator binary. Even seemingly divergent models— fortress conservation, and rights-based approaches— reproduce…
The role of the state in social participation related to extractive projects in Latin America is relevant topic for political ecologists, because it intervenes and shapes the relationship between society and nature. The state is often accused of having…
Over the past decade, thousands of centuries-old olive trees in the Southern Italian region of Apulia dried out and the whole olive farming sector have teetered on the brink. Despite having been framed, by the phytosanitary authorities, as an exclusive…
Este artículo examina por qué las políticas de protección ambiental no han logrado transformar las estructuras de control privado sobre los recursos hídricos consolidadas desde el siglo XVI, analizando el caso del Parque Nacional de la Caldera de Tabur…
Drawing on a year of ethnographic fieldwork on the Galapagos Islands, conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2021), this article argues that the multiple geographical imaginaries of the archipelago as a ‘laboratory’ or ‘pristine nature’ that are …
This article draws on conversations and ethnographic observations with activists in Granada, Andalusia, as they learn to respond ‘otherwise’ to the socioecological challenges of the Dílar and Monachil rivers. They inhabit the disorienting space opened …
This article examines the impacts of the energy transition industry from an environmental justice perspective, proposing to understand supply chain metabolism through environmental conflicts and enhancing socio-metabolic analysis. By revisiting the con…
Extractivism is a global phenomenon driven by the logic of capitalism that is manifested chiefly in mining, but also in agribusiness. Women around the world have emerged as leaders of resistance movements against extractivism. In this article, we quest…
How might overabundant ferns vitalize and pressure political ecologies of landscapes and wildlife conservation? This ethnographic article interrogates the relational worlds of humans, animals, and the fern species known as the ‘bracken fern’ (the Pteri…
Quantitative tools for evaluating energy justice allow users to make quickly comparisons across options. Most of these tools overrepresent distributional justice at the expense of other dimensions that are more difficult to measure (e.g., procedural, r…
On Taiwan’s outlying Kinmen Islands, otters have become vibrant inhabitants of the islands’ waterscape. As a critically endangered species found only in Kinmen within Taiwan’s territories, otters have emerged as an affective actor in shaping policies a…
This article develops the concept of energyscapes to examine the production, governance, and transformation of socio-material spaces for tar sands extraction, distribution, and consumption in Canada. We argue that energyscapes is a helpful concept to u…
In 1968 a group of nine U.S.-born Holdeman Mennonites purchased Cerrado land and later became some of the first farmers to produce high yields of corn and soybeans in Southwestern Goiás, Brazil. This article analyzes how Mennonite religion affects the …
Multispecies ethnography explores human and non-human relationships, emphasising interconnectedness, cultural, socio-technical and political meanings, and the impact of multispecies interactions on society. Beyond the protection of emblematic species o…
A growing body of literature has recently adopted and advanced a newfound planetary perspective to explore its implications for understanding and influencing environmental and developmental politics and planning. It asserts that the focus on globalizat…