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Recent contributions in International Relations focus either on a shift from modernity towards postmodernity in approaches to address climate change, or underline the permanencies and continuities of modern thought and power hierarchies. In contrast, we suggest that there is a contradictory simultaneity of both of these framings through which the world is continuously decomposed and recomposed. Today climate change programmes seem to be driven by a key contradiction, which lies at the heart of the Anthropocene: the environment is ours to manipulate and yet is out of reach. Based on this framing, and thinking through Timothy Morton and Bruno Latour's writings on political ecology, we argue that "whatever action" best captures current policy thinking: multiple initiatives are taken without a telos; rather they are designed to avoid that opportunities for adaptation and climate mitigation are foreclosed.

This article argues that resilience programmes in conflict-affected areas of limited statehood could be understood as much as an effort to equip vulnerable populations with tools to mitigate the effects of poverty, discrimination, lack of opportunities and manage gender inequalities than as an opportunity for the international community to prolong their interventions, consolidate local partnerships and sustain hope. We demonstrate our argument through an examination of the implementation in post-UNMIL Liberia of the 'Spotlight Initiative', a new multi-year multi-million programme of the European Union (EU) and the United Nations (UN) focused on the complete elimination of harmful practices and violence against women.

Mapping and politics in the digital age : an introduction / Pol Bargués-Pedreny, David Chandler and Elena Simon -- Contestations -- On the epistemology of maps and mapping : De La Cosa, Mercator and the making of spatial imaginaries / Luis Lobo-Guerrero -- From cartographic gaze to contestatory cartographies / Doug Specht and Anna Feigenbaum -- Horizontalism is a map / Nicholas Michelsen -- (Analog) mapping the knowable and ways of knowing : relational ontologies of chickens and ancestors in rural Sierra Leone / Caitlin Ryan -- Governance -- Mapping epidemics : securitisation, risk and geopolitics / Adam Ferhani and Gregory Stiles -- About terms and conditions : the Aadhar biometric identification programme as a mapping analytic / Harshavardhan Bhat -- Mapping as governance in an age of autonomic computing : technology, virtuality and utopia / Antoinette Rouvroy -- Mapping without the world and the poverty of digital humanitarians / Pol Bargués-Pedreny -- Imaginaries -- Post(mortem) cartographies : reframing the cartographic exhaustion in the age of mapping's excess / Laura Lo Presti -- Mapping beyond the human : correlation and the governance of effects / David Chandler -- Map-i : Mercator revisited : from mapping modernity to postmodern creative cartographies / Inge Panneels -- Mapping's intelligent agents / Shannon Mattern.

This editorial is a call for radical work that deconstructs and creatively reimagines intervention and statebuilding discourses, processes, practices and tools. For over two decades, critics of liberal interventionism have advocated for the need to rethink its dominant top-down and state centric logics. We now see a new generation of scholars that mobilize feminist, marxist, queer, or decolonial theories to critically engage with the ongoing transformation of the post-liberal order. Interventions and statebuilding processes are key to these changes. As scholars and practitioners, we have an opportunity to partake in shaping emerging visions and nurture hope in complex times.

This article analyses how the concept of 'local ownership' has been employed within policy frameworks in the context of peacebuilding since the late 1990s. It identifies the paradox that lies in the increasing willingness to transfer ownership to the local population and the also explicit assumption that self-determination and self-government have to be avoided in democratisation and post-conflict situations. It is argued that it is important to investigate the paradox, the fact that ownership and self-government have opposed connotations within contemporary frameworks of peacebuilding, because in the literature this position is not seen as being contradictory. Far from being seen as a strategy containing an irreconcilable paradox, local ownership is conceptualised so that it resolves at the same time two problems at the core of international governance settings: it limits the international administrators' intrusiveness in national affairs and avoids the risk of giving too much responsibility to local authorities. While it is presented as a progressive strategy on all fronts, the conclusion of this article is that the concept of ownership, as it has been interpreted by the discourses of peacebuilding analysed here, has been of little value to post-conflict societies and, furthermore, it has denied their moral and political autonomy. This denial, disguised as a discourse that promises to embrace difference, is particularly flawed because it seems to permanently defer equality between internationally supervised populations and the rest of sovereign nations.

This paper explores how the idea of resilience has made its way into the external action of the European Union (EU) and selected member states (Germany, France and Italy) as a means to address areas of limited statehood and contested orders. It examines the debates informing the development of the EU's external action and current concerns in economic, political, and migration instruments. The main findings are that the EU's economic and political instruments have become gradually dominated by resilience framings, with an emphasis on multilateralism, adaptation, and long-term and bottom-up responses. Resilience also increasingly drives the humanitarian assistance and development cooperation policies in Germany and to a lesser extent France, which have gradually moved away from top-down administrative and centralized models of governance. The EU and member states like Italy, however, have been more reluctant to foster resilience to address migration issues. Instead, they have prevented flows of irregular migrants into Europe by means of containment strategies such as improving border management, policing, and surveillance and combating smuggling networks.