Chapter 25 of Earthopolis: A Biography of Our Urban Planet meditates on the crisis of the year 2020 as a culminant result of the Greatest Acceleration and as a moment to reckon with the consequences of humanity’s summoning of hydrocarbon power and People Power to run our cities. Can these driving forces of the Urban Planet generate a Just Transition that at once redesigns cities to harvest renewable forms of the day’s sunshine and wind and erases the many inequalities that beset Earthopolis? The chapter traces two spaces of hope, centered in our cities – spaces filled with burgeoning potential despite the revival of authoritarian politics, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the crisis of atmospheric overheating. These include spaces that generate new knowledge about the Urban Planet and its relationship to the Earth and Sun, and spaces where people are best able to mobilize the multiplicity and diversity of voices needed to re-envision humanity’s rule of Earth.

As a final comment on the outcomes of Thailand’s legal history, this chapter begins with a seemingly bizarre incident that occurred during Thai street protests in March 2010. Tens of thousands of rural demonstrators splashed their own blood on Bangkok’s public buildings to curse the ruling government and its legal and political institutions. An explanation of the demonstrators’ controversial actions is found in their reaction against efforts of the central Thai ruling elite over the past century to modernize Thai law, rationalize its religious administration, and eliminate rival systems in outlying regions. These efforts, in turn, are placed in the context of a centuries-old tradition of law, kingship, and religious purification through which Thai rulers centralized their power and demonstrated their legitimacy. The street protests in 2010 represented a failed attempt by rural workers simultaneously to claim their place in the Thai nation and to challenge its hegemony, to assert their rights under modern law, and to invoke pre-modern legal norms and identities.

This chapter examines protest in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Prior to 1991, street protests in Iraqi Kurdistan played important roles in perpetuating local claims and broadcasting popular perspectives in a series of regimes that gave ordinary people few avenues for exercising influence. Attention to such protests highlights the fact that the Kurdish struggle under the Ba’ath was waged not only by peshmerga in the mountains but by civilians in towns and cities whose public manifestations of discontent continually pushed the limits of Iraqi authority and validated collective action as a legitimate form of political expression. Since 1991 and especially after 2003, street demonstrations have played an increasingly significant role in Iraqi Kurdish political life. The chapter divides such protests into three main phases, each differentiated primarily by shifts in state society relations, resources and mobilization capacity. Initially focused on improving service provision and infrastructure in specific locales, popular protests soon broadened in geographic and political scope to encompass systemic reforms calling for the redistribution of resources and the rule of law. Expanded meso-level mobilization capacity combined with newly potent master frames and forms of mobilization helped build and sustain a significant level of popular challenge to Kurdish authorities.