Contentious Islands: Coloniality, Ecologies and Mobilisation at the Margins

Islands are often approached as peripheral, small, isolated or exceptional spaces. This session instead treats islands as strategic sites for understanding contentious politics in turbulent times. Across archipelagos and island territories, struggles over sovereignty, coloniality, militarisation, tourism, extractivism, climate change, borders, migration, housing, labour, land and environmental justice reveal how global power relations are lived, contested and reworked in bounded yet deeply connected spaces. Moreover; recent global attention to Greenland’s evolving role in geopolitics underscores how insular territories continue to be sites where imperial ambitions and local autonomy collide in the contemporary world.

We welcome theoretical, empirical and methodological papers that examine protests, social movements, community organising, Indigenous and decolonial struggles, anti-militarist campaigns, climate and environmental justice movements, anti-touristification mobilisations, labour and housing conflicts, feminist and youth activism, and other forms of collective action on islands. Contributions may explore how insularity, scale, remoteness, dependency, ecological vulnerability, strategic location, colonial histories, state power and transnational networks shape repertoires of contention, movement infrastructures, political opportunities, repression, alliances and outcomes.

The session is comparative and open to single-case studies, cross-island and archipelagic comparisons, historical and contemporary analyses, and papers connecting island studies with political sociology, social movement studies, decolonial theory, environmental sociology and critical geography. We particularly encourage contributions from, or in dialogue with, island-based scholars, activists and communities. By bringing island experiences into the centre of sociological debate, the session seeks to rethink contentious politics from spaces too often treated as marginal.