Climate Change and the Nation State
Climate Change and the Nation State

Author: Anatol Lieven

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0190090189

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The climate emergency is intensifying, while international responses continue to falter. In Climate Change and the Nation State, Anatol Lieven outlines a revolutionary approach grounded in realist thinking. This involves redefining climate change as an existential threat to nation states - which it is - and mobilizing both national security elites and mass nationalism. He condemns Western militaries for neglecting climate change and instead prioritizing traditional but less serious threats. Lieven reminds us that nationalism is the most important force in motivating people to care about the wellbeing of future generations. The support of nationalism is therefore vital to legitimizing the sacrifices necessary to limit climate change and surviving and the effects of it (some of which are now inevitable). This will require greatly strengthened social and national solidarity across lines of class and race. Throughout, Lieven draws on historical examples to show how nationalism has helped enable past movements to implement progressive social reform. Lieven strongly supports plans for a "Green New Deal" in the USA and Europe. In order to implement and maintain such changes, however, it will be necessary to create dominant national consensuses like those that enabled and sustained the original New Deal and welfare states in Europe. Lieven criticizes sections of the environmentalist left for hindering this by their hostility to national interests, their utopian political naivet , their advancement of divisive cultural agendas, and their commitment to open borders. Radical and timely, Climate Change and the Nation State is an essential contribution to the debate on how to deal with a climatic crisis that if unchecked will threaten the survival of Western democracies and every organized human society.

Environmental Law: A Very Short Introduction
Environmental Law: A Very Short Introduction

Author: Elizabeth Fisher

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-10-19

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 0192512625

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Environmental law is the law concerned with environmental problems. It is a vast area of law that operates from the local to the global, involving a range of different legal and regulatory techniques. In theory, environmental protection is a no brainer. Few people would actively argue for pollution or environmental destruction. Ensuring a clean environment is ethically desirable, and also sensible from a purely self-interested perspective. Yet, in practice, environmental law is a messy and complex business fraught with conflict. Whilst environmental law is often characterized in overly simplistic terms, with a law being seen as be a magic wand that solves an environmental problem, the reality is that creating and maintaining a body of laws to address and avoid problems is not easy, and involves legislators, courts, regulators and communities. This Very Short Introduction provides an overview of the main features of environmental law, and discusses how environmental law deals with multiple interests, socio-political conflicts, and the limits of knowledge about the environment. Showing how interdependent societies across the world have developed robust and legitimate bodies of law to address environmental problems, Elizabeth Fisher discusses some of the major issues involved in environmental law's: nation statehood, power, the reframing role of law, the need to ensure real environmental improvements, and environmental justice. As Fisher explains, environmental law is, and will always be, necessary but inherently controversial. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Water, Technology and the Nation-State
Water, Technology and the Nation-State

Author: Filippo Menga

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-05-15

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1351754734

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Just as space, territory and society can be socially and politically co-constructed, so can water, and thus the construction of hydraulic infrastructures can be mobilised by politicians to consolidate their grip on power while nurturing their own vision of what the nation is or should become. This book delves into the complex and often hidden connection between water, technological advancement and the nation-state, addressing two major questions. First, the arguments deployed consider how water as a resource can be ideologically constructed, imagined and framed to create and reinforce a national identity, and secondly, how the idea of a nation-state can and is materially co-constituted out of the material infrastructure through which water is harnessed and channelled. The book consists of 13 theoretical and empirical interdisciplinary chapters covering four continents. The case studies cover a diverse range of geographical areas and countries, including China, Cyprus, Egypt, Ethiopia, France, Nepal and Thailand, and together illustrate that the meaning and rationale behind water infrastructures goes well beyond the control and regulation of water resources, as it becomes central in the unfolding of power dynamics across time and space.

Climate Change and the Nation State
Climate Change and the Nation State

Author: Anatol Lieven

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-03-02

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0190090197

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The climate emergency is intensifying, while international responses continue to falter. In Climate Change and the Nation State, Anatol Lieven outlines a revolutionary approach grounded in realist thinking. This involves redefining climate change as an existential threat to nation states - which it is - and mobilizing both national security elites and mass nationalism. He condemns Western militaries for neglecting climate change and instead prioritizing traditional but less serious threats. Lieven reminds us that nationalism is the most important force in motivating people to care about the wellbeing of future generations. The support of nationalism is therefore vital to legitimizing the sacrifices necessary to limit climate change and surviving and the effects of it (some of which are now inevitable). This will require greatly strengthened social and national solidarity across lines of class and race. Throughout, Lieven draws on historical examples to show how nationalism has helped enable past movements to implement progressive social reform. Lieven strongly supports plans for a "Green New Deal" in the USA and Europe. In order to implement and maintain such changes, however, it will be necessary to create dominant national consensuses like those that enabled and sustained the original New Deal and welfare states in Europe. Lieven criticizes sections of the environmentalist left for hindering this by their hostility to national interests, their utopian political naiveté, their advancement of divisive cultural agendas, and their commitment to open borders. Radical and timely, Climate Change and the Nation State is an essential contribution to the debate on how to deal with a climatic crisis that if unchecked will threaten the survival of Western democracies and every organized human society.

Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe
Politics and the Environment in Eastern Europe

Author: Eszter Krasznai Kovacs

Publisher: Open Book Publishers

Published: 2021-07-28

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1800641354

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Europe remains divided between east and west, with differences caused and worsened by uneven economic and political development. Amid these divisions, the environment has become a key battleground. The condition and sustainability of environmental resources are interlinked with systems of governance and power, from local to EU levels. Key challenges in the eastern European region today include increasingly authoritarian forms of government that threaten the operations and very existence of civil society groups; the importation of locally-contested conservation and environmental programmes that were designed elsewhere; and a resurgence in cultural nationalism that prescribes and normalises exclusionary nation-building myths. This volume draws together essays by early-career academic researchers from across eastern Europe. Engaging with the critical tools of political ecology, its contributors provide a hitherto overlooked perspective on the current fate and reception of ‘environmentalism’ in the region. It asks how emergent forms of environmentalism have been received, how these movements and perspectives have redefined landscapes, and what the subtler effects of new regulatory regimes on communities and environment-dependent livelihoods have been. Arranged in three sections, with case studies from Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Serbia, this collection develops anthropological views on the processes and consequences of the politicisation of the environment. It is valuable reading for human geographers, social and cultural historians, political ecologists, social movement and government scholars, political scientists, and specialists on Europe and European Union politics.

Climate Change and the Nation State
Climate Change and the Nation State

Author: Anatol Lieven

Publisher: Allen Lane

Published: 2020-03-05

Total Pages: 202

ISBN-13: 9780241394076

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In the past two centuries we have experienced wave after wave of overwhelming change. Entire continents have been resettled; there are billions more of us; the jobs done by countless people would be unrecognisable to their predecessors; scientific change has transformed us all in confusing, terrible and miraculous ways. Anatol Lieven's major new book provides the frame that has long been needed to understand how we should react to climate change. This is a vast challenge, but we have often in the past had to deal with such challenges- the industrial revolution, major wars and mass migration have seen mobilizations of human energy on the greatest scale. Just as previous generations had to face the unwanted and unpalatable, so do we. In a series of incisive, compelling interventions, Lieven shows how in this emergency our crucial building block is the nation state. The drastic action required both to change our habits and protect ourselves can be carried out not through some vague globalism but through maintaining social cohesion and through our current governmental, fiscal and military structures. This is a book which will provoke innumerable discussions.

Nation-States and the Global Environment
Nation-States and the Global Environment

Author: Erika Marie Bsumek

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-05-02

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 0199755353

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Hardly a day passes without journalists, policymakers, academics, or scientists calling attention to the worldwide scale of the environmental crisis confronting humankind. While climate change has generated the greatest alarm in recent years, other global problems-desertification, toxic pollution, species extinctions, drought, and deforestation, to name just a few-loom close behind. The scope of the most pressing environmental problems far exceeds the capacity of individual nation-states, much less smaller political entities. To compound these problems, economic globalization, the growth of non-governmental activist groups, and the accelerating flow of information have fundamentally transformed the geopolitical landscape. Despite the new urgency of these challenges, however, they are not without historical precedent. As this book shows, nation-states have long sought agreements to manage migratory wildlife, just as they have negotiated conventions governing the exploitation of rivers and other bodies of water. Similarly, nation-states have long attempted to control resources beyond their borders, to impose their standards of proper environmental exploitation on others, and to draw on expertise developed elsewhere to cope with environmental problems at home. This collection examines this little-understood history, providing case studies and context to inform ongoing debates.

States and Nature
States and Nature

Author: Joshua Busby

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-03-24

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 1108832466

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Busby explains how climate change can affect security outcomes, including violent conflict and humanitarian emergencies. Through case studies from sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, the book develops a novel argument explaining why climate change leads to especially bad security outcomes in some places but not in others.

The Green State
The Green State

Author: Robyn Eckersley

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2004-03-05

Total Pages: 349

ISBN-13: 0262550563

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What would constitute a definitively "green" state? In this important new book, Robyn Eckersley explores what it might take to create a green democratic state as an alternative to the classical liberal democratic state, the indiscriminate growth-dependent welfare state, and the neoliberal market-focused state—seeking, she writes, "to navigate between undisciplined political imagination and pessimistic resignation to the status quo." In recent years, most environmental scholars and environmentalists have characterized the sovereign state as ineffectual and have criticized nations for perpetuating ecological destruction. Going consciously against the grain of much current thinking, this book argues that the state is still the preeminent political institution for addressing environmental problems. States remain the gatekeepers of the global order, and greening the state is a necessary step, Eckersley argues, toward greening domestic and international policy and law. The Green State seeks to connect the moral and practical concerns of the environmental movement with contemporary theories about the state, democracy, and justice. Eckersley's proposed "critical political ecology" expands the boundaries of the moral community to include the natural environment in which the human community is embedded. This is the first book to make the vision of a "good" green state explicit, to explore the obstacles to its achievement, and to suggest practical constitutional and multilateral arrangements that could help transform the liberal democratic state into a postliberal green democratic state. Rethinking the state in light of the principles of ecological democracy ultimately casts it in a new role: that of an ecological steward and facilitator of transboundary democracy rather than a selfish actor jealously protecting its territory.

Nigeria and the Nation-State
Nigeria and the Nation-State

Author: John Campbell

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-08-13

Total Pages: 287

ISBN-13: 1538197812

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Nigeria, despite being the African country of greatest strategic importance to the U.S., remains poorly understood. John Campbell explains why Nigeria is so important to understand in a world of jihadi extremism, corruption, oil conflict, and communal violence. The revised edition provides updates through the recent presidential election.