The Topographies of Social Love: Space, Culture and the Dilemmas of Nativist Movements

Abstract

This article explores social love as a collective and transformative practice. It examines how both physical and ideological spaces serve as contexts where relationships of belonging, care, and responsibility are enacted and contested. It argues that space and place are crucial to understanding social love because they shape encounters, define boundaries of belonging, and reproduce or challenge relations of power, exclusion, and coloniality. At the same time, by examining the complexities of love in relation to nation-states and nativist movements, the article illustrates how ideologies can manipulate, for example, the concept of Ordo Amoris to justify the treatment of marginalized groups, particularly migrants. The study also considers relational perspectives that challenge conventional boundaries of belonging, extending bonds of responsibility beyond those defined by proximity, kinship, or national and human identities. Each of these discussions concludes with illustrative cases: grassroots mobilizations against anti-immigrant violence in Minneapolis (2026) and the Guaraní ñande reko (“our way of being”). The aim is to analyze how different spatial and relational configurations can challenge exclusionary understandings of community.