About

Methodology

The FWO ContainerHavens project is built around five global container ports: San Pedro Bay (twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, United States), Shanghai (China), Antwerp-Bruges (Belgium), Tanger Med (Morocco), and Cartagena (Colombia). The hypothesis animating this research is that ports are complex socio-legal enclaves whose dynamics and boundaries are defined not by their gates and fences, but by the multiplicity of local and transnational interactions that take place on a daily basis. In this regard, the project seeks to uncover the deeper ontological and epistemological implications of these ports, recognizing them as focal points of intense contestation, where economic imperatives clash with the interests of workers, the environment, and surrounding communities. Rather than mere spaces of circulation, ports are interpreted as dense, pluralist legal spaces shaped by overlapping legal and quasi-legal orders and as spaces that shape territories, ecologies, lives, and employment relationships.

The ContainerHavens Project, in partnership with Organisation des Jeunes Africains (OJA), organized the workshop “Understanding the Tanger Med Port and Its Socio-Environmental Impacts”. The session combined a panel discussion on the impact of port operations for local communities with a guided roundtable, where undergraduate students living in Tangier shared their own experiences and perspectives.

A storefront near the Port of Los Angeles displays solidarity with the ILWU (International Longshore and Warehouse Union), reflecting the close economic ties between San Pedro Bay’s dockworkers and the surrounding community.

The Ever Forward, pictured in San Pedro Bay, made headlines in 2022 after grounding in the Chesapeake Bay for over a month, a reminder of how a single vessel’s mishap can ripple through global supply chains.

In April 2026, ContainerHavens organized a workshop and field visit at the Port of Antwerp-Bruges with dozens of students, researchers, practitioners and engaged citizens.

The five case studies – located on different continents and characterized by different sizes and purposes – were selected to capture variations across the Global North and Global South, based on their relevance in terms of trade volume and the positions they occupy in global and regional trade systems. The cases also differ in governance models and legal traditions, providing a terrain of socio-legal investigation that reflects on the encounter between the need for global competitiveness and local socio-ecological dynamics. It is not just a matter of acknowledging that San Pedro Bay operates under a common law system, while the remaining four ports fall under civil law regimes, but of recognizing the legal interactions that operate underneath and beyond this layer. In terms of port governance models, for example, the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are landlord ports operating as city departments, while Antwerp-Bruges is a landlord port characterized by corporatized multi-level governance features. The ports of Shanghai and Tanger Med, meanwhile, feature centralized, state-led systems, and Cartagena operates under concession-based, fragmented arrangements.

Being deeply rooted in socio-legal scholarship and critical approaches to law and policy, the project methodology combines the “law in context” tradition with legal pluralism, the “law in global production” perspectives developed in the framework of the Institute for Global Law and Policy so as to enrich production-based relationships with the voices, experiences, and legal consciousness of the people who shape the ports and the resistance against them. This foundation grounds the project in an empirical method centered on observing law as it unfolds in practice, engaging qualitatively with the actors who enact, experience, or resist it, and sustaining genuine interdisciplinary dialogue.

In practice, this means combining desk research with fieldwork across all research sites. Desk research grounds the analysis of port policies, regulations, administrative decisions, legal cases, maps and expansion plans, internal communications, and public documents issued by relevant actors. Over several months, the research team conducted more than seventy semi-structured interviews across each case study, engaging a broad range of actors, including workers, civil society organizations, citizens, local, regional, and national authorities, port authorities, entrepreneurs, local and transnational corporations, and journalists. Sustained presence on the ground enabled participant observation, allowing researchers to follow the everyday unfolding of legal and administrative practices beyond what documents can reveal. Finally, through the organization of workshops and local events with both academic and non-academic actors, the project aimed to localize and disseminate research findings within the research sites, with the aim of avoiding research extraction.

Taken together, this multi-territorial, transdisciplinary, and multi-legal approach to ports enables a clearer understanding of the challenges they face, the problems they generate, the impacts they produce, and the ways power is exercised and value is created and distributed.

A VMM (Flanders Environment Agency) air quality monitoring station in Zwijndrecht, near Antwerp, measuring PFAS contamination in the area surrounding the port. Fieldwork visit, July 2024.

Signage inside Tanger Med’s port facilities. Fieldwork visit, October 2025.

A view of Tanger Med from the surrounding hills, overlooking the Strait of Gibraltar. Fieldwork visit, October 2025.

Peter Mbogo Kimani, PhD researcher at ContainerHavens, with Frances Ohlheiser, Director of Communications, during a fieldwork visit to Yusen Terminals, at the Port of Los Angeles, in November 2024.