Extra-legal Urban Governance
This call for abstracts invites scholars from diverse disciplines to critically examine extra-legal urban governance as a durable, persistent and inherent dimension of urban power, to explore its interactions with formal institutions, markets and actors, and to study the ways in which it contributes to shaping urban transformations and redefining urban experiences today.
Although the vast scale of global illicit markets (e.g., drug trafficking, arms smuggling, contraband, prostitution) is widely recognized, the processes and mechanisms through which their accumulated wealth is converted into territorial and urban assets remain insufficiently understood. In an era marked by the transnational flow of illicit capital, key questions demand closer examination: What borders—social, institutional, and spatial—must be crossed to transform illicit goods and services into urban power? How are the boundaries between legality and illegality enforced, negotiated, or blurred, and how do these boundaries shape the governance of urban spaces? How do they enable the public – and academic – invisibilization of the illicit?
IJURR welcomes particularly submissions of empirical research, case studies, and comparative analyses that advance a clearer understanding of the mechanisms through which illicit economies and their organized actors become embedded in urban fabric and influence urban transformations.
The editors will review the abstracts soon after the deadline and notify the author if a full paper is invited. Full papers invited in response to calls for papers will be subject to external peer review. These papers may result in the publication of a themed issue with an editorial introduction, or individual articles published in the journal.
Deadline for submissions: 1st June 2025
Abstracts should be submitted to the IJURR Office, subject heading: Extra-Legal Governance.
Previous Calls
Right-wing Populisms and the City
The recent years have witnessed an upswing of populist right-wing movements. The Trump presidency in the United States, the electoral victories of the ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ in Germany, National Action (and alias organizations) in the UK, and the Modi regime in India among others signal a new political landscape organized around xenophobia, Islamophobia and racial-ethnic division and exclusion. A pressing question is the role of the city, the urban experience, and urban politics in such resurgent right-wing populisms. We invite papers that address this question, that examine the spatialities of right-wing ideologies, that consider the persistent and resurgent histories of right-wing populisms, and that explore the implications of the present political conjuncture for urban futures.
Papers should conform to the submission guidelines of IJURR and will be subject to the usual processes of peer-review. In addition to full-length submissions, we also encourage briefer pieces (roughly 5,000 words) that might be more appropriately considered for the
Interventions section or the web ‘Spotlight On’.
The Call for Papers is now closed.