International Political Ecologies of Land

in Southeast Europe

About the project

The project ‘International Political Ecologies of Land in Southeast Europe: Policymaking, everyday experiences, and alternative political imaginaries’ (IPELSEE) investigates the relations that make and remake the meaning of land in political, social, ecological, and economic transformations.The main premise of the project is that examining land as a trans-scalar object is crucial for understanding new configurations of power and their local and global effects. To do this, the project forwards a multi-dimensional and transdisciplinary approach that investigates land as a site of policymaking, everyday experiences, and alternative political imaginaries in Southeast Europe.

While International Relations and Political Science have traditionally studied land as central to power and approached it through categories of territory and sovereignty, they remain limited and limiting when it comes to the multiple dimensions of land beyond those categories. IPELSEE excavates these different dimensions through place-based studies in South East Europe. Using archival research, participant observation, interviews, and policy analysis, IPELSEE brings to fore the politics of human-nature relations that underpin different conceptions and meanings of land.

The project is funded by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship (ID: 101060995): September 2023 to August 2025.

If you want to learn more about my approach in the project, you can read about it in the short article Land and human-soil relations in Southeast Europe.