Mar Menor and Vättern as Aquatic Doppelgängers
Abstract
Lake Vättern in Sweden and Mar Menor in Spain are different waters, yet each has come to be lived and governed in a doubled form: a familiar waterbody and an estranged counterpart. This paper develops the concept of aquatic doppelgängers to track how such splits are produced through civic, legal, and political practices that shape what counts as harm, who can speak, and what futures become plausible. The concept shows how doubling turns crisis into a dispute over what the waterbody is, opening a struggle over how it can be protected, defended, and acted for.
Submitted: Feb. 3, 2026 | Accepted: May 26, 2026 | Published Aug. 6, 2026 | Language: en
Keywords Ontological politics • Rights of Nature • Waterbodies • Aquatic doppelgängers • Legal personhood
Copyright © 2026 Marie Widengård. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.