Environmental governance, often characterized as a tug-of-war between central ambitions and local reluctance, provides a valuable lens for examining the dynamics of China’s central–local relations and their impact on policy processes, enhancing our understanding of both the changes and continuities of the Xi Jinping era. By analysing the eco-transformation of waste management through the framework of political steering theory, this article presents a nuanced avoidance strategy used by local governments, which we term minimum compliance. This strategy allows local authorities to cope with and sidestep centrally mandated policies while avoiding the consequences of policy failure. This study enriches the discourse on China’s central–local relations by exploring why top-level design has not reduced policy implementation deviations. It also highlights how local governments in the Xi era evade policy responsibilities in their daily operations and hedge against political pressure.

This study explores the experiences of Russian relocants in Turkey, focusing on their migration trajectories through overlapping waves of shock, relocation, and partial mobilization, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Initially, Turkey was an attractive destination due to its visa-free access, air connectivity, affordable cost of living, and established post-Soviet community. However, among the nearly one million people who fled Russia, many relocants – primarily young, educated, and entrepreneurial individuals from the information technology sector and oppositional groups – face various uncertainties in Turkey. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study, this research first examines the migration journeys of Russian relocants through their self-narratives, tracing the waves of the exodus in 2022. It then critically analyzes the legal, economic, and social uncertainties they encounter in Turkey. Finally, it explores how the physical and virtual “bubbles” formed in İstanbul function as coping mechanisms to navigate these challenges. Blending staying and returning, bubbles function as temporary “in-between” spaces, allowing Russian relocants to encounter Turkey’s novelties, while maintaining a “transnational double presence” through ongoing ties to their homeland, resulting in a form of “functional adaptation.”

This article reads Sonny Liew’s graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015) as an expression and interlocutor of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s method of potential history. Thinking alongside Walter Benjamin’s media theory and philosophy of history, Azoulay reconceives the camera shutter as a material apparatus that executes the imperial violence of expelling, and making obsolete, the past from the present in the name of progress. Azoulay’s critical practice finds its artistic analog in Liew’s comic, which contests official accounts of Singapore’s pre-independence history by remediating archived photographs of the nation’s former politicians. My bilateral reading of Liew and Azoulay advances ‘potential legal history’ as an emerging methodological-theoretical perspective that orients legal scholars to photographs, graphic novels, and other visual-narrative forms as vital matters for the reimagining of national histories.