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This seventh volume of Metapolis arrives at a conjuncture that feels, even by the compressed standards of recent years, genuinely historic. The old architecture of the post-war liberal order—already cracked by the 2008 financial crisis, hollowed further by the pandemic, and battered by the return of open warfare to the European continent—is now decomposing in real time. The United States (US), once the self-appointed guarantor of a rules-based international system, has officially announced the end of that role. As the Stimson Centre’s 2026 risk assessment put it plainly, Washington’s own National Security Strategy now declares that “the days of the United States propping up the entire world order like Atlas are over.” What replaces that order is not yet clear. What is clear is that the vacuum is being filled—by force, by extraction, by fear, and in some corners of the world, by remarkable acts of collective courage.

Photo_ Hayden_ CC BY 2.0

A Geography and Doctrine of Atrocity

That machinery has a geography. Its migration routes run through Darién, through the Sahara, through the waters between Libya and Lampedusa. Its detention centres are filling in Lesbos and on the US southern border. In the United States, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has more than doubled its personnel, conducting what the Trump administration proudly describes as the largest domestic deportation operation in American history—an operation that has already produced its dead, including Renee Good, a US citizen shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis in January 2026. The tactics deployed in these operations—the door-knocking raids, the terror by presence, the criminalisation of sanctuary—are not new to those who have lived under similar operations in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or the banlieues of French cities. They are being imported, refined, and scaled.

Meanwhile, the scramble for resources continues to reorganise the map. Greenland’s minerals, Venezuela’s oil and lithium, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s coltan—these are not background conditions to the political crises described in this volume. They are their engine. The Trump administration’s brazen overtures toward Greenland and its January 2026 military strike on Venezuela are not aberrations from a foreign policy tradition; they are, as several of this volume’s contributors argue at length, a direct continuation of doctrines—Monroe, manifest destiny, gunboat diplomacy—that never really went away. They merely took different forms during the decades when the architecture of multilateralism made their cruder expressions impolitic.

Cartographies of a Resisting World

What is striking about this particular moment—and what this volume’s editors find both urgent and hopeful—is that the hubris driving these actions is being met with a clarity of resistance that is equally unprecedented in its reach and its internationalism. From university campuses in the United States to neighbourhood assemblies in Latin America, from diaspora communities organising in European cities to indigenous movements defending territories across the Global South, a generation is connecting its local struggles to a shared global analysis. The Global Sumud Flotilla, in spring 2026, mobilised over a hundred boats and hundreds of overland trucks to break the siege on Gaza—not as a symbolic gesture but as a sustained, professional civilian presence. This is what resistance looks like when it refuses to be managed into legibility.

It is in this spirit that the six articles comprising this volume were assembled. They approach the theme from different geographies and different disciplines, but they share a commitment to thinking through the structural conditions that produce the frontlines, rather than merely describing the frontlines themselves. Together, they form a cartography of the burning world—and of the forces within it that are trying to find another way.

Ana María Larrea opens the volume with an in-depth analysis of the nature of capitalism and some of its effects: necropolitics, the rule of the super-rich, the re-primarisation of Latin American economies, extraction and violence. In The People Who Became a River: The Struggle for the Commons in Ecuador, the former deputy minister recounts some historic milestones she experienced first-hand, and whose significance resonated far beyond the small Andean country: both the constitutional recognition of the Rights of Nature and the proposal for international shared responsibilities for the protection and non-exploitation of the Amazon rainforests were pioneering initiatives in the safeguarding of natural spaces and the environment. However, the author makes it very clear that all these paths were paved collectively and from the grassroots up: it is organised civil society that is defending our planet’s natural heritage from the front lines. Indigenous peoples, environmental defenders, and local residents have mobilised in Azuay, gathering in human rivers to demand their right to water. In this regard, it is telling that the activists opposing mining projects in this region of southern Ecuador are referred to as Comuneros. The term actually refers to the Comunas (communes), a traditional form of community and indigenous organisation protected by the constitution in Ecuador’s decentralised state; but it is also symbolic in that they could well be considered communalists, defenders of the “commons”. For if Larrea’s article demonstrates anything, it is that they, who are leading the environmental struggles whilst facing persecution and criminalisation, are the ones safeguarding the common goods of all humanity across different parts of the world.

Jaume Asens continues the volume with a contribution that is as philosophically rigorous as it is politically urgent. In Germany and the Holocaust: the Weaponisation of Memory, Asens—philosopher, politician, and current member of the European Parliament—traces the long genealogy by which the memory of the Holocaust, born as an ethical imperative never to repeat, was gradually converted into a political instrument: a source of what he calls “moral capital” that granted Israel an exemption from the criteria applied to all other states, and that transformed the duty of remembrance into a mechanism of impunity. Drawing on the work of Norman Finkelstein, Hannah Arendt, and Enzo Traverso, among others, Asens shows how Germany’s particular reckoning with its past—which appeared, for decades, to represent a model of historical accountability—in fact encoded a functional philo-Semitism that revered the militarised Israeli state while failing entirely to extend the memory of the Holocaust’s ethical imperatives to other dehumanised peoples. The result, he argues, is a country that built entire museums to teach its children not to repeat barbarism, while aligning itself with a state applying the mechanisms of collective punishment and racialised violence to the Palestinian people. Critically, Asens connects this to Germany’s unreckoned colonial past—the genocide of the Herero and Nama peoples in Namibia, where practices were tested that would later reappear in Europe—arguing that the inability to face that earlier genealogy has left a moral vacancy that is violently resurfacing today. This is a necessary and uncomfortable article. It asks all of us to examine whose memory we protect, who bears the cost of whose redemption, and what happens when memory stops challenging the present and begins instead to shield it.

John Ralston Saul brings to the volume a perspective that is both historically deep and acutely present-tense. In Stubborn Compassion: A New Canadian Independence, the writer and philosopher argues that Canada’s current existential confrontation with US imperial pressure is neither surprising nor, ultimately, unnavigable—provided Canadians are willing to be honest about how they arrived here. With characteristic rigour and wit, Saul traces the line from the founding compassion of LaFontaine and Baldwin’s Great Ministry of 1848 through the repeated failures of Canadian economic sovereignty—the Gordon Budget of 1963, the capitulation of 1988’s free trade election—to the present moment, in which forty years of deep integration into the US economy has left Canada structurally exposed to a neighbour that has, simply, changed its mind about what that relationship is worth to them. Saul’s argument is not nostalgic; it is demanding. He insists that Canada’s multilingual complexity, its diversity, and its democratic continuity are not sentimentalities but strategic assets—assets that require, now, the courage to be deployed. His analysis of how empires function—normalising the previously unthinkable through casual repetition, invoking before acting—resonates far beyond Canada’s borders, and his invocation of Voltaire’s reminder that ridicule is democracy’s most effective weapon against authoritarianism feels both timely and necessary. The story of Greenland—where a small unarmed population made the world’s second most powerful man look like a fool—is, he suggests, a template: small peoples, weaponless, standing firm, forcing retreats. This is a text about compassion as a political practice, not a sentiment. It deserves to be read as such.

Lorena Fréitez Mendoza writes from inside the Venezuelan crisis with the precision of someone who has been thinking through its structure for years. In Rebuilding the Nation-Dam in the Face of Radicalised Imperialism: Challenges from Venezuela, the former minister advances a thesis at once classical and urgently contemporary: imperialism can only truly advance over a nation that has already broken down as a political community. Drawing on Gramsci, Turchin, and Venezuelan history from Bolívar to Chávez and beyond, Fréitez Mendoza argues that the US military strike of January 3, 2026—an event unprecedented in Venezuelan republican history—was not simply the product of American imperial ambition but the structural consequence of a decade of national dissolution: the haemorrhage of the diaspora, the fragmentation of the Chavista social base, the transformation of a revolutionary project into a demand for allegiance rather than a space for participation. Her analysis refuses the easy consolations available on either side of the Venezuelan political divide, insisting instead on the conditions necessary for a genuine national reconstruction—deliberation, participation, and the patient rebuilding of a political community capable of governing itself. In a world where the recolonisation of the Global South is accelerating, her argument that the nation—understood as a collective endeavour, not an ethnic or authoritarian project—remains the primary instrument of resistance against dispossession carries a weight that extends well beyond Venezuela.

Zeidon Alkinani contributes to the volume with a structural analysis of Arab geopolitics that is, in its ambition and its diagnostic clarity, one of the most crucial and daring analyses of this pressing issue. In Arab Existentialism in the Face of Regional Rivalries, Alkinani maps the condition he calls “penetrated regionalism”: the dynamic by which Arab strategic fragmentation—rooted in colonial cartography, the rise and fall of pan-Arabism, and the institutional failures of the Arab Spring—has become the structural condition that three non-Arab regional powers—Iran, Israel, and Türkiye—actively exploit and perpetuate. Drawing on regional security complex theory, Walt’s balance-of-threat framework, and comparative regionalism scholarship, he argues that Arab multilateralism is no longer merely a regional aspiration but a global systemic requirement—the absence of a coherent Arab collective actor generating economic and security risks that extend into energy markets, maritime chokepoints, and global capital flows. The 2026 Iran-Israel conflict and its cascading effects on the Strait of Hormuz serve as real-time evidence. Alkinani’s proposed architecture—five pillars of structured Arab multilateralism, binding on specific high-stakes domains without requiring prior resolution of all bilateral disputes—is a serious institutional proposal, not a utopian vision. His concluding formulation cuts to the heart of the matter: the Arab world’s most consequential strategic choice in the coming decade is not which external power to partner with, but whether to present itself as an actor with collective agency or a terrain on which others’ projects are contested.

Eva Saldaña Buenache closes the volume with Trenches of Hope: Ecotopias in an Upside-Down World, a piece that refuses to treat the climate crisis and the wars chronicled elsewhere in this issue as separate emergencies. Writing while Greenpeace’s Arctic Sunrise sails to support the Global Sumud Flotilla, Saldaña names the logic connecting these predicaments “fossil colonialism”: a doctrine in which the invasion of Venezuela, the pressure on Greenland and Cuba, and the war on Iran all converge, not by coincidence, on the world’s last reserves of fuel the planet cannot afford to burn. For Saldaña, decarbonisation is not an environmental add-on to peace-building but its precondition; demilitarising the world, she argues, is inseparable from breaking its addiction to fossil energy. She grounds this claim in the documented ecological devastation of Gaza, where the majority of agricultural land has been rendered unusable and most available water poisoned, arguing that there can be no climate justice on occupied and militarised ground. From there she turns constructive, laying out Greenpeace’s roadmap for the Iberian Peninsula, including energy sufficiency, public transport as a pillar of the welfare state, mass home retrofitting, food sovereignty, and a permanent citizens’ parliament, as proof that an alternative is not utopian but buildable now. Her closing brief for a “green social shield,” care as political strategy, and resistance to the criminalisation of protest through SLAPP suits rounds out a piece that reads less as a manifesto than as a working blueprint for what she calls an activist ecotopia.

The Return of the Roman Circus: Moral Collapse and De-civilisation

Reading these six articles together, several threads emerge that feel to us like the intellectual signature of this particular historical moment. An atavistic and bloody moment, which has brought back to life the words with which the British philosopher Jonathan Glover described the 20th century:

“Our origins continue to disfigure us. We still live in tribes with seemingly endless epidemics of mutual slaughter. Our political systems designed to contain violence continue to fail us on the whole. The festival of cruelty goes on (…)” [3].[3] Glover, J. (2001). Humanity: A moral history of the twentieth century. Yale University Press.

First is the collapse of moral immunity. Across all four contributions, in different registers and different geographies, we find the same dynamic: the frameworks that were supposed to protect against the recurrence of atrocity have been turned against that purpose. The memory of the Holocaust shields genocide. The “rules-based international order” licenses military invasions. Democratically elected governments conduct operations that by any other name would be called state terror.

If, according to the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, “Civilisation is nothing other than the attempt to reduce force to a last resort” [4],[4] Ortega y Gasset, J. (1994). The revolt of the masses. W. W. Norton & Company. (Original work published 1930). we must accept that humanity has failed. We are living in such a violent and dehumanised present that we could say we are immersed in a process of de-civilisation. To give just one—but eloquent—example, the images making global rounds, showing the Israeli Minister of National Security with a birthday cake bearing a drawing of a gallows, celebrating the Israeli Knesset’s approval of the death penalty for Palestinian hostages—including thousands of children—by means of this medieval method [5].[5] CNN. (2026, May 4). Israeli Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir celebrates birthday with a gallows-themed cake. Available here: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/05/04/world/video/israeli-minister-celebrates-birthday-noose-digvid-vrtc And it is not only the gallows that have made their comeback: the imperial spectacles of violence have returned too. As giant screens broadcast live the bombings in Lebanon to the delight of the masses [6],[6] Middle East Eye. (2026, May 22). Footage shows Israelis watching video of Lebanon bombings on big screen Available here: https://www.instagram.com/reels/DYoaQAGjtNP/ we must be reminded of the human circus attended by the Roman elites 20 centuries ago. Back then, entertainment meant watching a wild beast tear a slave or a prisoner to pieces; now the Zionist crowds revel in the spectacle of the very ethnic cleansing they are perpetrating.

Photo_ SkipKo_ CC BY 2.0

However, the response to this bleak outlook cannot be nihilism. The lesson drawn by this volume’s contributors is that moral frameworks must be constantly wrested back from those who would weaponise them, and that this wrenching is itself a form of politics, one that requires courage and precision in equal measure.

Building with Rubble: Towards National, Global and Structural Resistance

The third thread, running quietly beneath all six pieces, is what we would describe as the return of the nation as a site of resistance. Not the nation as exclusion, not as ethnic hierarchy or military chest-beating—but the nation as a political community capable of deliberating, organising, and defending its collective resources and dignity. Fréitez Mendoza makes this explicit; Alkinani argues it structurally for the Arab world; Saul insists on it for Canada with the force of a man who has watched his country sleepwalk toward its own dissolution; Larrea proves it from the grassroots and local level; and even Asens, in his critique of the weaponisation of national memory, implies its corollary—that genuine memory, genuinely universalised, could instead be the foundation of a politics that protects all dehumanised life. Finally, Saldaña translates this into a regional and community-based vision that places life—and the care work that sustains it—at the forefront.

We are at a juncture at which the outcomes are not determined. The old order is decomposing, but what emerges from that decomposition is genuinely open. The forces of extraction, coercion, and imperial restoration are real, well-resourced, and operating at scale. But so too are the forces of resistance: in the flotillas, in the university encampments, in the neighbourhood assemblies, in the patient intellectual work of contributors like those gathered in this volume. The question—and it is the question—is whether those forces can find forms of solidarity and coordination adequate to the scale of what they are facing.

There has never been a more important time to build those forms. And there has never been a more important time for a publication like this one—committed to putting the thinking of experts, activists, and scholars from across the world at the service of an active and engaged global citizenry—to do its work with seriousness and without illusion.

Just like those young women in Gaza who are making bricks by mixing rubble with clay, ash and glass [8],[8] BBC News. (2026, May 13). Gaza sisters win prize for turning rubble into reusable bricks. Available here: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ce8p7vngmp3o it is up to us to gather the fragments of destruction and try to rebuild from them. Both literally and figuratively, we must move from resistance to resilience, piecing together the broken shards from all these real frontlines. We invite you to read, to resist, and to act.

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