bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Capital, Subsistence, and Lakeside Violence
Authors: Perkins Harold A.
Published: February 2020

The tranquil setting in the North Woods of Wisconsin and Minnesota obscures a centuries-old history of resource conflict between indigenous Ojibwe people and whites. The subsistence activities of the Ojibwe, including hunting and fishing, have been restricted by whites to ever-smaller geographies in part to bolster capitalist extractive industries and tourist economies. Only recently have the Ojibwe successfully reasserted their treaty rights to hunt and fish off their reservations through litigation with the States of Wisconsin and Minnesota. White business owners- in what became known as the walleye wars- subsequently spurred violent protests at lakes where the Ojibwe exercised their reclaimed right to spear valuable sport fish. Other Ojibwe legal victories during the course of the walleye wars forced state fish and game authorities to better cooperate with the tribes to regulate fish and game outside the reservation system. One example is the killing of thousands of fish-eating birds called cormorants on an Ojibwe-controlled island in Leech Lake, Minnesota. Ojibwe authorities and state fish and game managers touted their work together to exempt the cormorants nesting there from protection because they both claimed the waterfowl destroyed the local walleye fishery. I argue this killing of cormorants is actually an extension of the original walleye war aimed at the Ojibwe because both events criminalized subsistence in order to protect fish as capitalist commodities. Violence is necessary in the criminalization process to replace the labor of subsistence with labor that produces surplus and exchange value from walleyes. Thus I argue this constitutes a fundamental contradiction for the Ojibwe who must manage walleyes simultaneously as a means of subsistence and as commodities for the market. The real danger here is that Ojibwe authorities- in the act of shooting cormorants- inadvertently support the same violent logic used against their people in the past that could be deployed against them again in the future.
Marxism and Multiculturalism Lessons from London's East End
Authors: Glynn Sarah
Published: February 2020

This article uses the lens of the East End of London, to examine 130 years of socialist and Marxist responses to racism and to ethnic and religious division. It looks both at how action was organised, and also at the debates of those trying to put Marxist ideas into practice, who all had to strike a balance between the pragmatic demands arising from working with ethnic minority groups, and the dangers of separatism. And it shows that, despite the difficulties, Marxism -far from neglecting divisions that cut across the basic economic categories of class, as is so often claimed – has a long history of analysing them and of arresting ethnic and racial conflict.
Book Review: Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings
Authors: Martin Lauren
Published: February 2020

Published as two of geography's first open-access, online collections, Radical Theory/Critical Praxis (edited by Rob Kitchin and Duncan Fuller) and Critical Geographies: A Collection of Readings (edited by Harald Bauder and Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro) mark what is hopefully the beginning of more expansive challenge to the current political economy of academic publication. The editors note the immediate difficulties of such an experiment: copyright limitations of previously published work; desires to capitalize on the value of such collections; RAE and tenure pressures; and the “currency” of a new, alternative press.
Green and Redd? Towards a Political Ecology of Deforestation in Aceh, Indonesia
Authors: McGregor Andrew
Published: February 2020

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) programme is poised to radically restructure forest management and politics. The programme will eventually provide $30 billion a year in grant and market finance to prevent carbon emissions caused by forest conversion in non-Annex 1 countries. As a consequence new carbon networks involving investment agencies, carbon traders, government departments and NGOs are forming to profit from the programme. This paper analyses the ongoing evolution of REDD from four perspectives drawn from political ecology – classic political ecology, eco-governmentality, eco-dependence, and environmental justice. I argue that both the dominant global managerialist perspective, that sees REDD as an apolitical technical and programmatic challenge, and the oppositional populist response, that sees REDD as a form of neo-liberal expansionism infringing on forest people's rights, gloss over the importance of place. Drawing from the experiences of two advanced REDD pilot projects located in the Indonesian province of Aceh, I explore the particularities of place in shaping how REDD is unfolding. Rather than rejecting, or uncritically accepting, this new form of green neo-liberalism I argue for more contextualised responses that maximise the social and environmental gains that can be made, while also highlighting the negativities involved.
The Nuclear Power Renaissance in the Uk:Democratic Deficiencies within the ‘Consensus’ on Sustainability
Authors: Johnstone Philip
Published: February 2020

This paper focuses on New Labour's policy towards the nuclear renaissance. It places this policy in the context of wider discussions on the democratic implications of the new constellations of governance emerging from the drive towards more sustainable futures. The paper identifies two crucial developments within the nuclear renaissance: firstly, the controversy surrounding the consultative process in 2006 and 2007; and secondly, the creation of new ‘efficient’ and ‘streamlined’ planning procedures through the establishment of the Planning Act 2008 and The Infrastructure and Planning Commission (IPC). The article builds on work which seeks to bring together questions of ‘democracy’ and ‘the political’ within discussions on ‘sustainability’. It argues that an understanding of these moments can only be properly established through an analysis of the wider discursive frame of ‘sustainability’ in which nuclear has been reinvented, and the way it has been utilized as a strategic tool of governing. The apparent ‘consensus’ on sustainability appears to foreclose discussions on multiple and divergent political imaginaries into a single shared vision. This is symptomatic of the wider conditions of the post-political and the post-democratic, where debate is reduced to managerial and technocratic particularities in which, regardless of public engagement, nuclear power becomes an ‘inevitability’.
“Martial Law in the Streets of Toronto”:G20 Security and State Violence
Authors: Smith Neil , Cowen Deborah
Published: February 2020

This paper examines the events, microgeography and broader context of the effective siege of downtown Toronto by Canadian security forces during the June 2010 meeting of the G20, and the unprecedented assault on peaceful protestors and innocent bystanders alike. An extraordinary clampdown of Toronto streets was organized by integrated security forces at the international, federal, provincial and local scales, leading to the arrest and jailing of a larger number of people (overwhelmingly released without charges) than in any other event in Canadian history. Whereas popular consternation emerged immediately against police brutality with many commentators aghast that this could happen in “Toronto the good,” suggesting that this represented an exceptional event, this paper argues that to a significant degree the crisis in the streets was precipitated by the security forces themselves, an argument buttressed by the refusal of the Canadian government to investigate the events. The paper connects the G20 to the larger issues of global political economic power and urban securitization, and puts the Toronto G20 police riot against protestors, if that is what it was, in the context of state power and the state's claimed monopoly over violence. Far from an exceptional event, this repressive assault expressed the DNA of capitalist state behavior and the selectivity of its targeted social violence.
Opinion Piece Teaching Financial-Monetary Hegemony in Geogeraphy
Authors: Gerhardt Hannes , Walter Andy
Published: February 2020

This opinion piece points to the need to more fully address the financial and monetary dimensions of the global political economy within geography education. The concept of financial-monetary hegemony is offered as a way to better understand a variety of issues commonly addressed in the geography classroom. More specifically, we suggest a concerted focus on both the increasing financialization of global capitalism and the related privileged position of the U.S. dollar in international banking and trade. We conclude that a more systematic pedagogical focus on financial-monetary hegemony can greatly enhance otherwise rather descriptive and abstract renditions of the world-system.
The Limits of Localist Reforms
Authors: Sharzer Greg
Published: February 2020

Localism is an ideology suggesting that small changes in economic organisation can foster widespread social change. However, it lacks an understanding of how capital centralization sets limits on the viability of decentralized production, local technologies and ethical small business. Localism shares the same bias towards individual exchange as the market economies it wants to reform.
Agents of Change and Obstruction: Municipal Councilors and Urban D/Development in the Mumbai Metropolitan
Authors: van Dijk Tara
Published: February 2020

Municipal Councilors are important agents of change and obstruction in processes of urban D/ development. This is presented by first discussing both the capitalist creative destruction side and targeted social program side of development in Urban India before moving on to Municipal Councilors’ working environment and daily governance activities. Using an analytical framework which combines Lipsky's concept of street-level-bureaucrats, Chatterjee's political society and Burt's structural holes, I argue that Municipal Councilors are friend and foe both to the urban poor and to the middle-classes and capitalists trying to world-class the region. Those interested in empowering the poor should endeavor to make common cause with these actors.
Social Justice and the Politics of Emotions
Authors: Van Wijnendaele Barbara
Published: February 2020

Based on research with poor young people about the empowering impact of participatory action research (PAR), this article points to the role of emotions in confirming or subverting processes of oppression. Although participatory action research increasingly recognises emotion as part of social research, I argue that PAR is still very much associated with reflection and structured representation as key to empowerment and change. There is still relatively little attention to how our ordinary, everyday emotions mediate processes of oppression or resistance, and to the importance of changing how we feel as an act of resistance.
Geographic Information Systems: A Critical Look at the Commercialization of Public Information
Authors: Noble Safiya Umoja
Published: February 2020

This paper is a political economic critique and exploration of the ways that private-sector companies in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) industry have emerged and consolidated themselves. This includes a discussion about buying, analyzing and selling spatial data mined from the Internet and other public resources, and how this is packaged and sold to other corporations for profit. I detail GIS research and development projects and the activities that are fueling growth. One of the fastest growing sectors of the GIS business is data mining and information processing, where companies are able to capitalize on the flow of information through proprietary systems or public networks like the Internet, and as such, are accumulating great wealth. GIS software projects are often the outgrowth of direct political and economic policy and funding, and industry giants are afforded greater access to purchasing huge data sets and labor to analyze and re-sell it. Public adoption and usage of GIS tools via the Internet is creating competitive tensions within the GIS industry and producing complex new partnerships. What is most critical to explore at this moment are the details of the industry, who it serves, and in whose interest. An understanding of the GIS terrain will better equip the public in making informed decisions about how state policies and consumer practices are contributing to, or disrupting, these activities.
Neoliberalism as Spectacle: Economic Theory, Development and Corporate Exploitation
Authors: Jackson Nicholas A.
Published: February 2020

Neoclassical economics has been thought to be in some way separated from actually existing capitalism. This is true, as well, for neoliberalism, the current policy framework based on neoclassical economics. Some perspectives argue that neoliberalism is a global colonizer implanted in, and taking over, actually existing capitalism through institutions or imaginations. I argue instead that neoliberalism is spectacle (“the birth-to-presence of a form of being that pre-exists”) requiring continual expert intervention to bring to fruition. I first lay out some recent notions of neoliberalism as colonizer through institutions and imaginations. I argue that these approaches break down as the focus moves away from academic departments and research and high-level policy departments of international financial institutions (IFIs), to the practice of development, especially corporate exploitation. “Neoliberalism as spectacle” more effectively accounts for corporate strategies that are often at cross purposes with neoliberal representations, for example privileging instability and barely controlled violence as strategy. Second, neoliberalism as spectacle brings appropriate focus onto what Latour terms the “small networks” masked by “big explanations.” Third, neoliberalism as spectacle re-focuses attention on the backstage maneuvers that accompany neoliberal onstage representations. If neoliberalism is a spectacle, then transformation must concentrate not only on challenging neoliberal policies and rationales, but also the myriad other ways, distinct from neoliberalism, that exploitation is accomplished (perceptions, coercive and non-coercive compulsion, legal/lobbying, strategic organizational changes, etc.).
Repeating Islands of Resistance: Redefining Security in Militarized Landscapes
Authors: Davis Sasha
Published: February 2020

Social movements near American military bases have been increasingly successful at opposing the continue militarization of their home communities. Focusing on groups from Puerto Rico, Guam, Hawai'i and Okinawa –as well as the global “No Bases” network – this paper examines how social movements in presently colonized places organize their multi-scalar activism to challenge the legitimacy of militarism. While the American state views many of these places as sacrifice areas for an imperial national security, these organizations resist this banal colonialism through campaigns for a localization of sovereignty and a redefinition of security. Inspired by strategies of decentralized organization, affinity, direct action and mutual aid these ‘newest social movements’ are not merely petitioning the imperial state for greater access to rights through a politics of demand, but are engaged with creating secure physical and social environments through struggles for local self-determination, demilitarization, and environmental decontamination. Through their activism these organizations challenge not only the legitimacy of contemporary imperialism, but also the notion that the nation-state is the proper institution (and scale) to define rights, sovereignty, health and security.
Census as an Instrument of Political Technology in the Age of Biopolitics
Authors: Butola B.S.
Published: February 2020

Human are other-driven beings. It is a dialectical process in that the need to construct the other is primarily driven by an urge for self-realisation and self actualisation. It is a universal urge in every individual and social group. It is particularly this urge to construct the other that motivates the human to venture into colonising relentlessly. Initially, colonisation was restricted to nature and its objects, but under capitalism it has become a generalised and universal phenomenon. Today, it has reached its climax after venturing into the last colony i.e. colonisation of life, its forms and processes. Human beings have used various tools and techniques for creating the colonies at different points of time. Census enumerations have adopted the universal political technologies under capitalism for the purpose of colonisation of life, its forms and processes.
Sustainable City as Fantasy
Authors: Davidson Mark
Published: February 2020

There can be little doubt that our current ecological crisis is being framed through the idea of sustainability. As we plan to deal with anthropogenic climate change, we talk of becoming more sustainable. We are projecting a sustainability vision; a certain future that we desire to achieve. In this paper I offer a Lacanian interpretation of this vision, arguing that we must understand how ideas such as the “sustainable city” operate as fantasy constructs. Here I want to emphasize the particular operation of this fantasy, since it is the very form of this operation that stymies the true politicization of climate change. The paper draws on Žižek's reading of Lacan to illustrate how sustainability (as fantasy) relates to our knowledge of climate change. Two brief illustrations of the operation of sustainability as fantasy are then outlined. The first draws on recent city planning in London, UK, to show how fantasy has gentrified the traumatic elements of climate change. The second illustration draws on a brief conversation with an urban policy-maker to sketch out how transgression is a functioning part of sustainability fantasies. In conclusion the paper turns to the question of politics through a relating of Lacan's psychoanalytical cure with a politicization of economy.
Digging into “Resource War” Beliefs
Authors: Le Billon Philippe
Published: February 2020

Water wars, oil conflicts and blood diamonds. Three terms reflecting a widespread belief that people fight over resources. Is this belief backed by evidence? What power relations does such a belief reflect and shape? If natural resources have a conspicuous presence in accounts of armed conflicts, the term ‘resource wars’ represents a gross oversimplification. Strategically deployed to prepare for ‘the wars of the future’ or to shame belligerents by exposing their ‘greedy’ motives, ‘resource war’ narratives often overlook the multiple causes of conflict and alternative options to militarized resource control. A main threat from ‘resource wars’ narratives is that they become self-fulfilling prophecies. As such, ‘resource wars’ studies should first be self-reflexive, and then strive to encompass the broad causes, specific historical contexts, and wide variety of effects that resource sectors have on the environment and social relations.
Capitalism is a Waste of Time: Utopia, Malthus and the Ideology of “No A Lternative”
Authors: Rhodes Jason
Published: February 2020

This paper argues that a now largely forgotten conversation between anarchist William Godwin and Thomas Malthus, and its legacy, has contemporary relevance for radicals attempting to combat the “no alternative” ideology of permanent scarcity. Malthus’ Essay on Population, which lectured the poor that increased access to the means of subsistence would only exacerbate their poverty, was written as an attack on Godwin's claim that the labor of society, properly deployed, could usher in a society of comfort, cooperation, and leisure. The paper traces the lineage of Godwin's argument through early 19th century British socialists to Marx, before returning to Malthus, who in Principles of Political Economy no longer treats scarcity as an eternal, natural state, but rather as the source of capitalist value, defined as the command over labor, and requiring a project of governance for its ongoing maintenance. Malthus’ strategy for the ongoing production of poverty and its resulting compulsion to labor is the inverse of Godwin's recipe for wealth and leisure, as he suggests that a significant portion of the labor of society be channeled into endeavors which produce nothing for which anyone exchanges their time. Malthus’ influence on Keynes is noted, and the contemporary relevance of this discussion for radical scholarship and politics is explored.
Scarcity, Neoliberalism and the ‘Water Business’ in Lima, Peru
Authors: Ioris Antonio A. R.
Published: February 2020

Water scarcity is a widespread phenomenon that still affects many cities and settlements around the world. Situations of scarce water resources are not external to society, but are directly and indirectly caused by deliberate attitudes towards nature and society. Conditions of water scarcity go beyond the physical insufficiency of resources to vividly contain the long-term inadequacy of social institutions. In the case of Lima, the capital of Peru, the material and discursive elements of scarcity have been exacerbated by political and ideological affirmation of market-based institutions and private property relations. Rather than being an extreme hydrological event, water scarcity is part of the urbanisation and modernisation of Lima under the sphere of influence of neoliberal policies. Scarcity has been constantly recreated and, in the end, has served as a legitimating tool to maintain social and spatial inequalities. The evolution of water infrastructure and the formulation of public policies have consolidated the patterns of discrimination, fragmentation and risks that characterise everyday life in the Peruvian capital. Understanding water problems ultimate requires a class-based approach that connects the local, national and global scales of interaction, which should be articulated together with considerations of culture and the micro-dynamic of power. Only through a political ecology approach it is possible to explain the synergistic ontology of water scarcity and the persistent obstacles to democratising water and the waterscape.
Bodies Do Matter: The Peculiar Persistence of Neoliberalism in Environmental Governance
Authors: Fletcher Robert
Published: February 2020

Substantial academic attention has recently highlighted the increasing and contradictory tendency to promote neoliberal market-based mechanisms such as “ethical” consumption as the solution to environmental problems exacerbated by processes of capitalist accumulation themselves. To date, the majority of this research has drawn on Marxist or Foucaultian frames, and thus has paid little attention to the embodied psychodynamic processes supporting this paradoxical dynamic. This article thus draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, primarily through the work of Slavoj Žižek, to analyze the role of fantasy and desire in sustaining faith in the potential of market-based environmental-ism. In the process, it seeks to synthesize Marxian, Foucaultian, and Lacanian perspectives in pursuit of a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding how contemporary environmental governance functions. It does so by treating the body as a crucial nexus of convergence among these different perspectives. The analysis is illustrated through discussion of how the practice of ecotourism, a quintessential market-based conservation strategy, is sustained through its promise to provide a transcendent experience of nature-culture unity yet instead offers, for the most part, a mere “pseudocatharsis” that paradoxically intensifies the very desire that it promises to satisfy and thereby supports the twin neoliberal fantasies of consumption without consequence and accumulation without end, in terms of which the body itself becomes a prime site of capitalization.
After the Green Rush? Biodiversity Offsets, Uranium Power and the ‘Calculus of Casualties’ in Greening Growth
Authors: Sullivan Sian
Published: February 2020

Biodiversity offsets are part of a new suite of biodiversity conservation instruments designed to mitigate the impacts of economic developments on species, habitats and ecosystems. Led by an international collaboration of representatives from companies, financial institutions, governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme (BBOP) of the market-oriented Forest Trends group, has created a global framework through which principles and standards for biodiversity offsets are being established. These enable the apparently unavoidable harm caused by development to be exchanged for investment in conservation activities both at different geographical locations and in the future. Offsets can also be traded via bespoke markets for environmental conservation indicators. Given a globalizing ‘green economy’ discourse that conservation can be a profitable enterprise if guided by market-based mechanisms and the entwining of ecological with economic spheres, biodiversity offsets are becoming key to current entrepreneurial interest in biodiversity conservation. The ‘green rush’ of my title refers to both this interest in conservation activities that can be marketized, and to an associated appetite in business and financial sectors for incorporating biodiversity offsets as part of a strategy for ‘greening’ the environmental harm caused by developments. I illustrate the uses to which biodiversity offsets are being put, through a case study connecting the extraction of uranium in Namibia for the generation of nuclear power in the UK. Biodiversity offsets are invoked to satisfy requirements for off-site mitigation of environmental harm at points of both extraction and ‘consumption’ of uranium in this case. I highlight some of the (anti-)ecological assumptions guiding calculations of complex ecological assemblages so that they can become biodiversity offsets, and draw attention to the intensified distributions of new environmental values with which biodiversity offsets may be associated.
Contesting Market-Based Conservation: Payments for Ecosystem Services as a Surface of Engagement for Rural Social Movements in Mexico
Authors: Shapiro-Garza Elizabeth
Published: February 2020

The Mexican national Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) programs, which provide financial incentives for rural landholders to conserve forest, were originally designed under the logic of market-based conservation. Based on a multi-sited, multi-scalar ethnography of Mexico's PES programs, this article examines the process through which a national rural social movement was able to redefine the market-based narrative of PES, the historical and political context that provided this window of opportunity, and the ways in which the movement's engagement led to a hybridization of the policy itself. The involvement of the rural social movement introduced a very different conception of PES – as a recognition by Mexico's federal state and urban society of the value of campesino (peasant) environmental stewardship and the economic support needed to allow these stewards to remain on the land. The direct involvement of movement members in the redesign of the programs had a significant impact on their conformation that reflected this vision of revaluing the rural: the inclusion of agroforests and sustainably managed timber lands; requirements for self-defined forest management plans; provision of dedicated funding for technical assistance; and the training of local extensionists. In mapping the evolution of the Mexican national PES programs we can begin to see how, in this particular place and time, rural social movements employed PES as “useful surfaces of engagement” (Escobar 1999: 13) for contesting the market-based notions of the federal state, international lending institutions and conservation non-governmental organizations. I position this analysis in the context of the global project of “grabbing green” and as an example of the frictions that can inhibit and even partially reverse the logic of the seemingly inexorable rise of market-based conservation policy and projects.
The Deep Meaning of “Market”: Understaning Neoliberal-Market Reasoning
Authors: Oetsch Walter Otto
Published: February 2020

Neoliberal theories share the idea of “the market” i.e. a “higher” instance or an autonomous process which commands people. But this concept includes a deep meaning, namely the picture of a world divided into two parts: a market and its contrary, like “the” state. This picture is similar to the way demagogues think – who hold true a form of thought in which the social world is stereotypically divided into two strictly separate parts: a homogenous in-group, “Us”, which is the target group of political propaganda, and a homogenous out-group. “The market” contra “the state”-view uses a binary code similarly, has a dynamic-actionistic momentum and is empirically unprovable. This can be shown in the writings of Mises and Hayek as in the neoclassical general equilibrium theory. My thesis is that this is the common element of the different theorists gathered in the Mont Pélerin society. The binary code of “the market” has an advantage in debates: it cannot be critized in principle, even in deep crises. Due to its quasi-demagogic deep structure, every mistake must be attributed to the “the” state, and the remedy for every crisis has to be a call for more “market”, as Tea Party representatives argue or the European austerity packages imply.
What's the Matter with Germany? On Fetishizations of the Euro Crisis in Germany's Public Discourse, and Their Basis in Social Processes and Relations
Authors: Belina Bernd
Published: February 2020

I use hegemonic German interpretations of the current crisis of the Euro as my point of departure to discuss why ideological interpretations of the crisis prevail in Germany. As such worldviews are rooted in social processes and relations, I discuss some that are relevant to the present conjuncture: uneven development and circuits of trade and credit/debt within the Eurozone, the history and scalar construction of the EU and the Euro, and the role of German export oriented capital. I focus on three fetishizations that structure interpretations favoring the interests of capital over those of the working classes: the fetishization of credit/debt, the fetishization of competitiveness, and the fetishization of territory.
The Political Economy of Nature
Authors: McCusker Brent
Published: February 2020

This article explores the dialectics of land use and livelihoods to formulate a political economy of nature approach to studying the production of nature. Rather than solely postulate “drivers” and “feedbacks” between changes in land use and livelihoods as change=population+affluence+technology (or some closely related variant) as is so often done in the mainstream land use literature, it is argued here that change is co-produced as households/agents negotiate axes of contradictions in their attempts to reproduce themselves and produce nature for exchange. I examine this relationship by mobilizing a non-deterministic variant of dialectics to generate a parallel epistemology for studying land use that explores change in the context of two recent trends in the agrarian change literature, namely depeasantaization and deproletarianization. As both of these processes entail a reconfiguration of rural production (manifest in changing land use and livelihoods), the approach taken here will provide insight and clarity to those debates.

I examine the moment of sublation as a source of change in the landscape, both physical and economic. I intentionally consider this approach as parallel and complimentary to positivist studies on land use and land cover change, rather than as a alternative framework, for reasons that are made explicit within the article. The findings from this research help to link land use changes to broader societal changes in ways that will be helpful to understanding linked climate and human change from a critical perspective.
Vulnerability and Livelihoods on MT. Kilmanjaro
Authors: O'Keefe Paul
Published: February 2020

Livelihoods in Tanzania are constructed through a diverse range of practices. This paper draws on the Livelihoods Approach alongside the ‘double exposure’ framework in order to explore how households on Mount Kilimanjaro construct their livelihoods, and are constrained by the local and wider political economy. Specifically, it uses these frameworks in order to explore how people may in future adapt to an increasingly changing climate. Most households in the case study region are found to be highly reliant on the natural base of the area, and are liable to be highly vulnerable to future climate change. Means by which households can reduce vulnerability are explored, and the most feasible are found to be those that involve a reduction in reliance on direct production from nature. The paper concludes with a discussion of the appropriateness of the research framework, and argues that a dialectical approach may enable more appropriate questions to be posed and engaged with.
“We Eat with Different Spoons these Days”: The Maintenance of Pastoralism as a Social Formation in the Sahara and Sahel
Authors: Graham Franklin C.
Published: February 2020

Despite the fatalistic rhetoric articulated by Western media and some experts, pastoralists have not disappeared. Drought, disease, famines, civil conflicts, theft, and banditry have certainly undermined livelihoods and forced families of Arab, Tuareg, Toubou and Fulani to settle and seek out opportunities that are not compatible with pastoralism, particularly in urban areas. This situation is not necessarily permanent and varies case-by-case and more significantly generation-to-generation. Some ex-pastoralists abandoned hopes of restocking their flocks but plan for some of their children to become future pastoralists. In addition, despite sedentarization, many retained customary practices of natural resource management, social norms and behaviors and find in the urban areas other pre-capitalist practices that are compatible with their means of everyday tasks and performances. Using the analyses of Tom Brass, Deborah Bryceson and David Harvey an argument is made that while pastoralists have lost their herds and shifted from their customary economy into a proletarian-capitalist one, the path is not unilinear and in fact, is fluid with pastoralists shifting from one to the other in times of dearth and prosperity.
Reconstituting Water? Climate Change, Water Policy Reform and Community Relations in South Australian Remote Towns
Authors: Wadham Ben , Boyd Ross , Willis Eileen , Pierce Meryl
Published: February 2020

Water is a principal medium of exchange within communities facing changing climate patterns and the ‘new dry’. For some parts of the globe water has been taken-for-granted, uncontested, yet for others highly variable, scarce and a measure of global and national inequalities. Australia as a large and diverse landmass is emblematic of those varied water contexts, yet as a whole, and after the recent ‘100-year drought’, water has become heavily regulated and marketised, and its material and symbolic meanings transformed. This has led us to ask: “What happens when water becomes marked or recognised as a scarce resource for all, indeed a site of contest and potential human conflict? How do the attempts to control water, through its market currency and environmental value, change the character of communities, the identities and interpersonal relationships that constitute the regional context?” After all, water is about far more than a material resource, it is also a cultural medium that is implicated the most fundamental aspects of life. In this study we explore the ways in which South Australian's living in the arid north of the state, above the Goyder Line, live and identify through the changing relations of water. Those changing relations are the changing availability and governance of water, nested within an ever-present public concern about climate change. We draw upon interviews with settler community members from a 200 square kilometre region across 7 towns or stations. Alongside the growing dry has been the developing commodification of water, having the effect of reducing local autonomy in the management and decision making about water conservation, supply and use. This paper considers the ways that these changes have transformative effects upon the differences and solidarities within local community relations.
Challenging the Agrarian Imaginary: Farmworker-Led Food Movements and the Potential for Farm Labor Justice
Authors: Minkoff-Zern Laura-Anne
Published: February 2020

This article addresses the need for more engagement between the alternative food movement and the food labor movement in the United States. Drawing on the notion of agrarian imaginary, I argue for the need to break down divides between producer and consumer, rural and urban, and individual and community based approaches to changing the food system. I contend that farmworker-led consumer-based campaigns and solidarity movements, such as the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ (CIW) current Campaign for Fair Food, and The United Farmworkers’ historical grape boycotts, successfully work to challenge this imaginary, drawing consumers into movement-based actions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with farmworkers and farmworker advocates in California and Florida, this research illustrates the possibilities for alternative food movement advocates and coalitions to build upon farmworker-led campaigns and embrace workers as leaders.
The World is Bumpy: Power, Uneven Development and the Impact of New ICTS on South African Manufacturing
Authors: Carmody Pádraig
Published: February 2020

Numerous academics and policy makers now assert Sub-Saharan Africa's (SSA) marginalization in the global economy is being reversed by an information technology revolution. However, while many claims are made for new ICTs - and mobile phones in particular - very little research has been done on the precise ways in which firms use these technologies and their developmental impacts. Drawing on over fifty firm-level interviews, this paper examines evidence of the uses and impacts of new ICTs in the wood products industry in Durban, South Africa and its surrounding region. In contrast to assumptions in much of the literature, it finds that rather than primarily being used to connect to global markets, they are most commonly used as technologies of local labour control and inter-firm competition. Consequently the use of these technologies may deepen existing inequalities and uneven development, and in some instances disinformationalisation, rather than reduce or overcome them.
Low-Wage Capitalism, Social Difference, and Nature-Dependent Production
Authors: Das Raju J.
Published: February 2020

Internationally, neoliberalism is often associated with the export-oriented production of nontraditional agricultural goods from poorer to richer countries. Shrimp aquaculture is a very important aspect of this process. Economic geographers, sociologists, and others have critically analyzed the problems of shrimp farmers and the adverse environmental effects of shrimp aquaculture. But they have generally neglected a crucial dimension: the conditions under which men, women, and children work for a wage in producing shrimps. The story of shrimp culture has been, more or less, the story of the missing wage laborer. Drawing on in-depth interviews in India, this paper discusses the conditions of laborers in export-oriented shrimp culture. It shows how the export-oriented production of shrimps results in the reproduction of a working class that works for abysmally low wages and under very poor conditions. The exploitation and domination of aqualaborers happens in ways in which capitalist relations are mediated by place-specific relations of difference and the specificities of nature-dependent production.
Dead Labor, Homo Sacer, and Letting die in the Labor Market
Authors: Tyner James A.
Published: February 2020

Within philosophy, a long-standing debate has addressed the moral distinction between ‘taking life’ and ‘letting die’. In this paper I re-situate this debate within the context of the capitalist labor market. Drawing on insights from both Marx and Agamben, I re-theorize the figure of figure of homo sacer as a (potentially) dead laborer to argue that an ideology of ‘letting die’ is systemic to capitalism; however, our legal, spiritual, and moral values, and the privileging of ‘negative rights’, continue to promote the belief that killing is morally worse.
Reinterpreting Traditional Cultural Properties: A Political Ecology of Emotion Perspective
Authors: Dallman Suzanne , Thien Deborah , Laris Paul , Ngo Mary
Published: February 2020

Interpretations of traditional cultural properties in the context of cultural resource management in the US demonstrate little understanding of, or concern for, the affective ecologies of landscapes. Institutional approaches to land development and resource management favor meanings and practices of the dominant culture and political structure that have often had devastating consequences for others, particularly American Indian tribes. In Northern California, Winnemem Wintu ancestral lands along the McCloud River were flooded in 1944 when the Shasta Dam was completed for the federal Central Valley Project. In the late 1990s, the US Bureau of Reclamation began investigating a proposal to raise Shasta Dam to increase water storage capacity, which would flood remaining Winnemem sacred and cultural sites. In Southern California, ancestral territories of the Tongva people were threatened by a proposed commercial development on a university campus in Long Beach in 1992. In each case, the proposed projects would destroy significant sacred spaces, which offer deep emotional connections crucial to maintaining tribal cultural identity and ancestral memories. Through these two case studies, we utilize a “political ecology of emotion” perspective to examine the emotional geographies associated with these ancestral landscapes and sacred sites, and related struggles against hegemonic approaches to cultural resource management. We argue that these intimate links between emotion, memory, identity, and place allow an opportunity for reevaluating institutional approaches to cultural resource management, and the meaning of traditional cultural properties.
Actor-Network Theory and Traditional Cultural Properties: Exploring Irrigation as a Hybrid Network in 19TH CENTURY Hawai'i
Authors: Berry Kate A.
Published: February 2020

During the late 19th century, customary Hawaiian systems of mutual sharing and obligations between chiefs and commoners were reconstructed into questions of property ownership and rights. Water was integral to this situation. Hawaiian spiritual worldviews concerning water and a political economy that supported traditional irrigation practices were undermined as immigrants imported their own approaches to agriculture and water governance. This paper examines changing irrigation practices during the latter decades of the Kingdom of Hawai'i through the Latourian lens of hybrid networks, with the goal of promoting more nuanced and active articulations of Traditional Cultural Properties (TCPs). Exploring hybrid networks – partially social, partially natural amalgamations bound up within their own historic and geographic conditioning – provides a means to connect with struggles over modernity and move beyond static notions of traditional culture or nature. If society is recognized as being carved into projects of modernity through networks associated with hybrids, then looking at the dynamic nature of water, culture, and the connections between them makes sense in identifying TCPs. This paper argues that TCP analyses should recognize change over time and spatial dynamics; explicitly acknowledge the significance of water as well as land; and assess relationships between nature and society through untangling hybrids.
Multiple Imperialisms: The Federal Reserve's Response to the Global Financial Crisis
Authors: Gerhardt Hannes
Published: February 2020

This article reviews three theories of U.S. imperialism: super-imperialism, ultra-imperialism, and imperial rivalry, in the context of the U.S.'s relation to the current dollar dominated, financialized growth model. Instead of ultimately choosing one theory over others, based on an analysis of the Federal Reserve's response to the financial crisis of 2007/8, the article finds evidence for all three approaches, each emphasizing a particular aspect of the global political economy. The U.S. is currently torn among three tendencies: (1) a hegemonic state that dominates geoeconomically; (2) a state serving the interests of a transnational capitalist class: (3) a state increasingly in geopolitical competition and rivalry with other states.
Book Review: This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate
Authors: Finn John C. , Castree Noel , Declet-Barreto Juan , Johnson Leigh , Larner Wendy , Liverman Diana , Watts Michael , Finn John C.
Published: February 2020

In Naomi Klein's latest book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (Simon & Schuster, 2014), the activist, journalist, and author lays out an argument that will probably be familiar to many readers of Human Geography. Carbon is not the problem, but rather a symptom of the real problem: global capitalism. The purpose of this Human Geography book review symposium is to give serious academic consideration to Klein's ideas, arguments, and visions of a carbon-free future. Thus in the pages that follow, six geographers—Noel Castree, Juan Declet-Barreto, Leigh Johnson, Wendy Larner, Diana Liverman, and Michael Watts—weigh in with their readings and critiques of Klein's book. Following these six reviews and concluding the symposium is the full text of the hour-long interview conducted by John Finn with Klein in late 2014.
Land Seizure, Dispossession, and Canadian Capital in Honduras
Authors: Shipley Tyler
Published: February 2020

While there is a growing literature on the phenomenon of land seizure by agribusiness and extractive industries, and their disastrous social and ecological effects around the world, there is often a shroud of vagueness and mystification about the concrete practices by which extractive companies come to gain access to the land itself. This is especially true since these companies increasingly veil their activities in plausible claims of “social responsibility.” This article documents the strategies by which foreign and especially Canadian capital has been grabbing and maintaining its control over land for mega-developments in Honduras, with an eye to the ways in which different tactics are adapted to each particular context in which they are applied. The purpose is to demonstrate the flexibility and complexity of these strategies and to lay the groundwork for future studies of these concrete practices in order to supplement the existing literature on land seizure.