Multispecies governance beyond post-politics: Territorial plurality and agonistic coexistence in human-cat conflicts

Conflicts over free-roaming cats are often presented as technical disputes about management tools. This article argues that they are rooted in substantial disagreements about cats, territories, and obligations while routed through a governance apparatus that is not designed to host them. Drawing on scholarship in political ecology, STS, environmental humanities, and human–animal studies, and informed by ongoing research in the Canary Islands, we reread cat governance as a territorial and relational problem: urban colonies, peri-urban margins, working rural landscapes, or conservation hotspots enact different cats and different claims to belonging, harm, and care. We show how dominant approaches—whether eradication or “consensual coexistence”—frequently operate through a post-political logic that narrows legitimate disagreement, treats dissent as a deficit to be corrected, and leaves the killability of certain animals as an unspoken underside of governance. To move beyond this impasse, we develop a conceptual vocabulary for multispecies governance beyond post-politics, centered on agonistic coexistence and non-eliminatory normativity. Rather than promising harmony, it makes lethal measures explicit and contestable, holds together incompatible goods (welfare, biodiversity, neighborly order, and rural livelihoods), and treats human-cat conflicts as symptoms of territorial plurality rather than failures of compliance. Cats thereby become a lens for analyzing how governance produces nature-in-space and for developing principles that can travel to other contested multispecies relations.