Territory, Conflict, and Political Subjectivation: Rethinking Power Asymmetries through the Case of Southern Apulia

This article reconceptualises territory as a historically situated configuration of power relations — not as a neutral administrative container or cultural repository, but as a field where domination, resistance, and subject formation are constitutively intertwined. Drawing on conflicts in Southern Italy — migrant labour struggles and disputes over large-scale energy infrastructures — we examine territorial conflict as generative: a process through which underlying power asymmetries become visible and contestable. Political subjectivities emerge contingently within such conflicts, yet face systematic neutralisation through technocratic, legal, and administrative translation that depoliticises dissent without eliminating it. The central problem is not conflict's disappearance but its reconfiguration under neoliberal governance. We trace how territory, conflict, and subjectivation operate together to both reproduce and contest asymmetries of power, arguing that territorial conflict constitutes a distinctive form of non-institutional political participation through which subordinate ac-tors challenge existing configurations of power.