The attention given to indigenous peoples' use of maps to make claims to land and rights of self-government raises the question: what exactly it is that these maps do? This paper outlines an analytic for examining indigenous mapping projects, drawing upon two prominent instances -by the Maya of Belize and the Mayangna community of Awas Tingni in Nicaragua -where human rights lawsuits have been woven together with participatory mapping. In each case, map-making was intricately linked to the formulation of legal claims, resulting in a pair of muchcelebrated maps and legal precedents regarding the recognition of indigenous land rights. We argue that these strategies do not reverse colonial social relations so much as they rework them. Notwithstanding the creativity expressed through these projects, they remain oriented by the spatial configuration of modern politics: territory and property rights. This spatial configuration both accounts for and limits the power of indigenous cartography. This impasse is not a contradiction that can be resolved; rather, it constitutes an aporia for which there is no easy or clear solution. Nonetheless, it must be confronted.

While there is much justifiable attention to the ecological implications of global climate change, the political implications are just as important for human well‐being and social justice. We posit a basic framework by which to understand the range of political possibilities, in light of the response of global elites to climate warming and the challenges it poses to hegemonic institutional and conceptual modes of governance and accumulation. The framework also suggests some possible means through which these responses might be thwarted, and political stakes in that construction of a new hegemony—which, to avoid suggesting we know or can yet determine the form it will take, we call “climate X”.

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This paper offers theoretical reflections on a series of questions raised by the shift in political ecology from the Third World to the First: what precisely constitutes a context for political ecology? How does something come to be a space or region that calls for political ecology? To respond to these questions, I argue for a turn to the thought of Edward Said, who articulates a Gramscian approach to geography that calls into question the constitution of the world.