Putting the car in context: a call for a situated technopolitical transition in global automobilities

With more than half of automobile sales for 2025 centered upon Global South countries, examining the embedding of global automobilization in these contexts and the potential to transition to greener modes is vitally important but largely unaccomplished. Further, despite the deep embedding of automobilization, sociotechnical approaches have proposed constitutively apolitical pathways for a sustainable transition. In this agenda article, we outline a theory and practice of situated technopolitical transition to respond to the power-filled automobilities being implanted in global Southern cities. Our theorization begins from the assertion that transition studies is not universal, as often presupposed, but rather highly contextual and emerging from a specific experience of colonial modernity. Drawing upon ethnographic research in Indian cities complemented with relational comparison with other contexts, we sample a range of situational politics that surround efforts to manage automobilization. We assert that, the technopolitics of global automobilities include phenomena such as the worlding of globalizing cities; kinetic elite claims to street space; and the invisibilization of women and others. We conclude by outlining the practice of an alternate techno-political transition strategy that is rooted in a Southern politics of radical incrementalism.