This chapter demonstrates the importance of viewing socioeconomic and political relationships between sedentary and herding societies from the perspective of long-term shifts in climate. Such a perspective offers the possibility of reconsidering the socioeconomic features of conflicts that appeared between similar communities in South Asia, the American West, Africa, Australia, and the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This chapter captures the current state-of-play of the West Line hub in a continually turbulent region, speculating on how things might and should go in the future – both in the West Line and in other e-waste hubs that share many dynamics and predicaments. The future of the West Line and its long-standing e-waste industry teeter in the balance, buffeted by geopolitical currents. The West Line waste flows and burning emerged from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and have embodied it for decades, in a way that is increasingly salient in the recent years of a right-wing coalition government, and intensified conflict after October 7, 2023. The politics of waste is now explicit, with Palestinian municipal rubbish collection trucks blocked by military checkpoints, and Israelis calling for a creeping “green” annexation of Area C and whittling away of Palestinian authority in Areas A and B as the only way to prevent the “chemical terrorism” of waste burning. While these regional politics, which have so frustratingly frozen our promising hub-driven efforts, are surely sui generis, the underlying challenges are instructive globally for the interfaces between the e-waste hubs, environmental NGOs, and national e-waste policies, and this chapter closes in teasing out these broader lessons.

The introduction provides an overview of current theoretical concepts in animal and environmental studies for examining historical equine-human relations and previews the book chapters. The author argues that the embodied experiences of historical horses created real-world entanglements with the political and social structures that aimed to define or control them. This animal imprint, made visible in governance structures, was one way that animals participated in early modern social relations and imperial ecologies, and also gave rise to numerous possibilities for feral or counter-intentional responses within an expanding early modern empire.

As the Spanish empire expanded, the growing abundance of horses elevated an underlying tension between two colonial goals: to populate land with horses bred in new settlements, and to control land in new settlements by regulating the movement, reproduction, and possession of horses in them. The horse population increased due to both evolutionary environmental affinities and the use of traditional husbandry methods, such as loose herd management and protection of the commons, which had some unintended consequences. The responses of Spanish and Indigenous actors to these changes presented opportunities to negotiate the perception of and exercise of Spanish imperial power in a new equine political ecology.

By the late twentieth century, changing social, economic, and political conditions along with new scientific insights and trends in ethics and philosophy presented challenges not fully addressed by utilitarian and preservationist conservation. Indigenous rights activists, advocates for animal rights and the rights of nature, ecofeminists, scholars in the social sciences and humanities, legal experts, and representatives of nongovernmental organizations, national governments, and international development agencies offered diverse perspectives and agendas. Many disputed the idea that people are not part of nature, while others suggested that Indigenous peoples should be considered guardians of nature. Some promoted sustainable development along with attention to the social, political, and cultural consequences of conservation, particularly for the survival of threatened cultures and marginalized groups that have often been displaced by reserves. These developments led to the emergence of a stewardship approach to conservation that sustains complex ecosystems characterized by ecological and cultural diversity.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

Solomon Islands has often been seen as exemplifying wider concerns regarding customary land tenure, economic development and political instability in the southwest Pacific. Locals express concern regarding inequality in land control at multiple scales, while aid donors urge people to register land as a means to increase legal certainty, build peace and render land more ’marketable’. This chapter situates debates about land in Solomon Islands within wider global debates regarding customary tenure, gender inequality and state regulation. It highlights a long-standing divide in feminist debates, between those who perceive land tenure in terms of a hierarchically ordered and gendered ‘bundle of rights’, and those who perceive land as subject to fluid, negotiable claims. Drawing insights from legal geography, political ecology and feminist scholarship on legal pluralism, it suggests that a focus on the ways in which ‘access’ to resources is transformed into state-sanctioned ‘property’ recognises that property is negotiable while also highlighting factors that contribute to inequality. This approach also directs attention to the role of scholars in the formation of property.

This chapter synthesizes the book's arguments in a concluding discussion that brings the world of Archaic Cyprus into more substantive conversation on approaches to human-environment relationships writ large, from the horizons of eighth- and seventh-century BCE transformation across the Mediterranean to our contemporary struggles to conceptualize future triangulations of social and environmental change. It first summarizes the explanations for the settlement and land use patterns discernible in the material records from the Vasilikos and Maroni valleys, articulating local heterogeneities with signs of social inequality at the coastal town of Amathus. It then provides a hypothesis for the growth of social complexities during the Iron Age, driven by land management. Finally, Kearns contends that the Archaic countrysides of Cyprus also matter to conversations happening amongst scholars of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, as well as broader public audiences, on the seemingly threatening mediations of society and inequality that our current climatic regimes, and the unruly Anthropocene, present.

Chapter three theorizes unruly landscapes through the relations of polities, peoples, and shifting ecologies. It emphasizes the myriad ways in which human-environment relationships are forged relative to a given social and political order. Threaded within a critique of existing conceptions of the political geography of Iron Age Cyprus are arguments for taking seriously the dynamic resources, places and community boundaries, and temporalities of urban and rural terrains. The chapter utilizes claims drawn from rural studies, anthropology and political ecology, and history to investigate settlement hierarchies and resource control, territoriality, and social time.

Socio-environmental research has a rich legacy. Scholarship has evolved to be more interdisciplinary, as long before. Sustainability science builds on von Humboldt, Marsh, and Meadows. Research on social–ecological systems research is informed by Ostrom; resilience by Holling; vulnerability by White, Sen, and Beck; and CHANS by Marsh and Moran. Ecological economics emphasizes the economy as a subset of the Earth, leveraging Ricardo, Jevons, and Daly. Ecosystem services research, informed by Ehrlich and Odum, quantifies benefits from ecosystems. Industrial ecology views industrial systems ecologically, as done by Graedel, Ayres, and Kneese. Political ecology focuses on power relations, as did Marx, Polanyi, Shiva, and Blaikie and Brookfield. Environmental justice, pioneered by Bullard, considers unequal benefits and harms. Other systems research focuses on a given context, as on cities (Childe, Mumford, and McDonnell and Pickett), land (Melville), and food (Liangji, Malthus, Boserup, and Ho). Integrated assessments build on Meadows. Planetary and Anthropocene perspectives focus on the global scale (see Hutchinson, Boff). Legacy readings can help frame socio-environmental relationships and enrich collaborations.

The climate emergency is strengthening the understanding that humans, non-humans and the planet are intrinsically interconnected. International law has both participated in the creation of the paradigm that has led to these entangled socio-ecological problems and has proven to be inadequate for their remediation. This article argues that, through the multiple enclosure of natures, knowledges and times, international law imposes a vision of the world that is incompatible with the conception and functioning of the interconnected web of life. In light of this, we suggest that the political notion of commoning could offer useful intellectual opportunities for engagement with and a radical rethinking of international law as an element of ecological systems. By not treating natures, times and knowledges as objects of law, commoning opens an intellectual and confrontational space to rethink the premises, processes and aims of international law.