The Gluon researcher is a dedicated integration expert who leads the co-creation process of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge. This booklet, The Gluon, describes the origins and nature of the Gluon approach and the Gluon researcher role.

Despite the widespread interest in interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity (ITD) as a means to address complex problems, many collaborations struggle with an integration deficit that leaves knowledge contributions in relative isolation and prevents ITD from fulfilling its promise.

Gluon researchers have three tasks. They design and implement integrative procedures, author integrated products, and study integrative methods. They therefore simultaneously learn how to co-create knowledge in different settings, while also extracting integrated observations about the problem domains that are studied. Like the elementary particle, a Gluon researcher therefore counterbalances the natural process of fragmentation that occurs when subatomic particles that collectively form a nucleus are not continuously connected. This division of labour reduces the workload of specialists and acknowledges the complementary contribution made by integration expertise in academia. The Gluon approach is therefore meant to radically improve the conditions for ITD.

Ultimately, this booklet serves to inspire ambitious ITD collaborations and calls on other integration experts to reveal themselves and share their expertise.

Over the last half-century, social scientists, political-geographers, urban planners, and architects have theorized on how we must proceed in the quest for justice, and more recently, spatial justice. Contemporary and post-industrial theorization has led to a communicative turn (Yiftachel, 2006) in planning theorization in the realm of justice; collaborative, inclusive and justice planning, as well as spatial justice theories, have attempted to assist practitioners, decision-makers and academics to operationalize and promote inclusivity, redistribution and procedural reform through planning processes (Soja, 2010).

However, this planning theorization largely stems from liberal ideals of democracy that are unable to address complex layers of conflict, oppressive power, and imposition (Miraftab, 2017). This debate asks the question, if these planning frameworks truly serve and represent a diverse intersection of a given populations’ conditions (Angotti, 2008; Miraftab, 2003,2007; Watson, 2009). This tension between planning theory and context specificity is a growing concern in the non-Western parts of the world (Souza, 2007; Malathy, 2012; Watson, 2009,2012; Miraftab, 2017,2009; Yiftachel, 2006), where spatial conflicts based on race, gender, ethnicity become the core of how injustices are perpetuated, in which dominating justice related planning (Purcell 2009) theory falls short of addressing.

This is increasingly problematic and relevant within today's political geography of our world, where the dialectic of power and ethnicity through space have shaped it significantly (Yiftachel, 2008). Oren Yiftachel describes this phenomenon as the rise of ethnocracy, a regime under which a dominant ethnic group appropriates the state apparatus and shapes most public policies (Ibid). Firstly, this paper aims to define the landscape of spatial justice and critically survey how scholars of planning theory, particularly of non-Western origins, have suggested reconceptualizing Western dominating planning theory. Second, this paper aims to explore possible alternatives of how spatial justice and planning theory can operate within ethnocratic regimes and geographies of conflict. And, departing from the case of Eelam Tamils in the North-East of Sri Lanka and particular ethnocratic characteristics, notions of spatial justice can be reconceptualized and contextualized to better equip practitioners, decision and policymakers, and academics within the realm of spatial justice and planning. To ultimately, suggest new directions on theory and practice, to help contextualize spatial justice within conditions of ethnocracy and conflict.