Spatial Injustice in Crisis: Urban Infrastructure, Conflict, and the Politics of Global Justice

Global crises—ranging from armed conflict and authoritarian governance to climate breakdown and infrastructural collapse—are increasingly materialized and contested through urban space. Cities are no longer merely backdrops to conflict; they have become strategic terrains where global injustices are produced, governed, resisted, and normalized. This paper argues that urban infrastructure—streets, housing, public space, energy systems, and digital networks—functions as a critical yet under-theorized mediator between conflict and global justice. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship in political theory, critical urban studies, and global justice, the paper advances a spatial justice framework for understanding contemporary crises. It examines how infrastructural systems are mobilized as instruments of power, exclusion, and control under conditions of conflict, while simultaneously serving as sites of everyday resistance and political agency. Rather than viewing infrastructure as neutral or technocratic, the paper conceptualizes it as a political apparatus through which sovereignty, citizenship, and rights are unevenly distributed. Empirically, the paper draws on comparative urban cases from conflict-affected and post-industrial contexts, including cities in the Global South and North, where governance failures, securitization, and neoliberal restructuring intersect. These cases illustrate how infrastructural decisions—such as zoning regimes, housing dispossession, surveillance technologies, and uneven access to public space—intensify social fragmentation and perpetuate global hierarchies. At the same time, the paper highlights grassroots and community-led spatial practices that challenge dominant power structures and articulate alternative visions of justice grounded in care, commons, and collective resilience. Theoretically, the paper contributes to debates on global justice by shifting attention from abstract institutional frameworks to material and spatial conditions through which injustice is lived and contested. It argues that global justice cannot be meaningfully addressed without engaging the urban as a political field shaped by infrastructural violence and spatial exclusion. By foregrounding cities as sites where global crises converge, the paper calls for a reorientation of global justice scholarship toward spatial accountability, infrastructural ethics, and place-based agency. Ultimately, the paper proposes that reimagining global justice in times of crisis requires not only normative political theory but also critical engagement with the everyday geographies of power embedded in urban environments.