From 5 to 8 October, 2026, our fellow Dr. Elena Pérez Lagüela participated in the congress ‘Contesting Hierarchies: Utopia and Future-Making in a Postcolonial World’, organised in the framework of the second phase of the project ‘Postcolonial Hierarchies in Peace & Conflict’ at the University of Marburg.

Across three days, participants worked together to examine how alternative futures are imagined and enacted in contexts shaped by colonial legacies and contemporary inequalities. Building on the projects’ engagement with the ongoing legacies of postcolonial hierarchies, the congress revolved around the ways in which these hierarchies are contested, negotiated, and transformed through visions of alternative futures.

Elena’s contribution to the panel ‘Infrastructures and Future Making’ reflected upon the role that narratives and imaginaries have in shaping peripheral states’ priorities in the context of the energy transition. She linked the role that states have in structural transformation processes to the narratives that are used to legitimise said endeavours, highlighting the fact that most narratives revolve around capitalist, mechanistic and economistic discourses, which render transformation efforts harder as existing conceptual approaches hardly ever offer imaginative proposition. She emphasised the instituting power imaginaries and examined some contemporary iconographies of the state, including the extractive state.

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