Time, Climate Change, Global Racial Capitalism and Decolonial Planetary Ecologies

Time, Climate Change, Global Racial Capitalism and Decolonial Planetary Ecologies

Author: Anna M. Agathangelou

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-06-23

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 1000606767

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This book probes the interconnections of time and ecology in order to spark our imagination and inspire us to re-think the planetary, ecology, and otherwise. It presents debates that interrogate and elucidate the anxieties of the known and the unknown of this world and the planetary beyond, sifting through temporal accounts of the Anthropocene, human beings, and climate change. The chapters in this edited volume spur conversations with different thought systems and their underlying assumptions about the composition of structures of time and contingent temporalities. The authors engage rising temperatures in the oceans and air, the consequences, intended and unintended, of investments in various forms of "development", and the potential catastrophe unfolding in real time. Recent temporal strategies such as mitigation and adaptation to the "climate crisis" are challenged as they further compound and commodify the inquiry, the understanding and responses to environmental degradations, extractions, and displacements. Anti-colonial and decolonial debates about the structures of time, the planetary, and ecology are crucial contributions of this volume. Further, privileging the vantage points of the colonized and enslaved, the authors of this volume challenge dominant universal, cyclical, and retrospective structures of time and the planetary. Through research, poetry, art, and popular cultural analyses, the authors attend to the ways that the struggles of the "submerged," indigenous and black communities for climate justice become coded as a global warming crisis. This volume grapples with how racial climate struggles and unrest become mobilized both as a source of paralysis and as an opportunity for further expropriation and expansion of data accumulation markets for settler planetary projects all in the name of global warming. Ultimately, the authors in this volume argue that conventional attempts at exploiting the planetary all depend upon ideas of conquest and the mastery and control of ecologies, global governance, and individual behaviors. In this sense, fears about the unknown future of our planet miss what is at stake in the structures of time, the question of creation and invention. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Globalizations.


Global Political Leadership

Global Political Leadership

Author: Małgorzata Zachara-Szymańska

Publisher: Małgorzata Zachara-Szymańska

Published: 2022-01-01

Total Pages: 311

ISBN-13: 0367763915

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Global Political Leadership explores contemporary shifts in leadership, and the related leadership crisis, in the global world. Globalization is now perceived as a threatening and hostile force, with many of its advocates and political supporters turning away from it, but its processes cannot be reversed. New powers emerge, old ones re-emerge, and uncertainty about the future global order is increasing. This book tells the inside stories of global power games and asks important questions about the leadership crisis in the western world. The author provides an interpretative framework for contemporary shifts within the western political sphere based on the concept of global leadership. This framework presents the nature of the transformation caused by global processes, as part of which force and coercion have ceased to be the main modus operandi of the international realm. The issue of global political leadership has often been neglected in international relations literature, while being widely exploited by managerial and organizational studies. However, all social organizations have ‘gone global’ within the last several decades; they are more interconnected and more dependent on global processes, so the question of effective leadership strategies matching these new realities is highly necessary, even – or especially – at a time when globalization is no longer seen as a leading political programme. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of global affairs, politics and international relations, leadership and development, and diplomatic studies. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.


Economics and Climate Emergency

Economics and Climate Emergency

Author: Barry Gills

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-08-22

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1000649296

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This book explores a series of connected themes focused on the role economics and other influential forms of theory and thinking have played in creating the current predicament and the scope for alternatives and how they might be framed. Thirty years have passed since the inception of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the beginning of policy on climate change. Thirty wasted years. To most politicians, long-term collective interest has been denominated in meaningless units of time, a never and forever that has continually delayed action. From complacency has come potential disaster, and we are now living in a time of climate emergency and ecological breakdown. The next decade is a pivotal period requiring fundamental change. But numerous impediments remain. Continual material, energy and economic growth on a planetary scale are manifestly impossible, and yet economic theory takes these as a given and political leadership and policy seem unwilling to accept brute reality. Instead, they offer a series of implausible commitments and pledges rooted in technofixes, without addressing the fundamental drivers of the problems the world faces. The edited volume explores the issues and offers a variety of ways to think through the problems at hand, from postgrowth, degrowth and social ecological economics to policy assemblage and transversalism. The chapters in this book were originally published in the journal Globalizations.


Globalizations from Below

Globalizations from Below

Author: Theodor Tudoroiu

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-09

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1000645541

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Globalizations from Below uses a Constructivist International Relations approach that emphasizes the centrality of normative power to analyze and compare the four globalizations ‘from below.’ These are: (1) the counter-hegemonic globalization represented by the ‘movement of movements’ of alter-globalization transnational social activists, who try to put an end to the Neoliberal nature of the Western-centered globalization ‘from above’; (2) the non-hegemonic globalization enacted by ‘ant traders’ that are part of the transnational informal economy; (3) the partially similar Chinese-centered globalization, whose entrepreneurial migrants are strongly influenced and instrumentalized by the Chinese state; and (4) the first wave globalization ‘from below’ that paralleled (and outlived) the 1870–1914 globalization ‘from above.’ This book identifies their common features and uses them to define the concept of globalization ‘from below’ as a set of socio-economic or socio-political processes that involve large transnational flows of people, goods, and/or ideas characterized at least in part by informality. They are enacted by entrepreneurial or activistic individuals who either take advantage of the normative power of the hegemon at the origin of an international order and an associated globalization ‘from above,’ or – explicitly or implicitly – transgress, contest, and try to redefine dominant economic, legal, political, and socio-cultural norms, thus challenging the existing international order and globalization ‘from above.’ By constructing a unified theoretical framework, this book attempts to open a new field of interdisciplinary research that should take globalizations ‘from below’ out of their current scholarly marginality. This is one of the first scholarly works to collectively present more than one globalization ‘from below,’ and will be of great interest to students, scholars, and researchers of International Relations, International Political Economy, Development Studies, Economic History, Anthropology, Diaspora Studies, and Chinese Studies.


Post-Covid Transformations

Post-Covid Transformations

Author: Kevin Gray

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-11-10

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1000783596

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This volume explores the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the sustainability of the present global political and economic system and the extent to which that system may as a result be undergoing transformation. Towards this aim, the contributing authors raise a number of key questions. First, what is likely to be the impact of the pandemic on the current global order based on neoliberal hyper-globalization? Second, what insights do earlier pandemics along with other inter-related crises such as those of climate, inequality, social reproduction, and continued fallout of the global financial crisis offer for understanding the medium- to long-term implications of COVID-19? Third, to what extent might the COVID pandemic lead to progressive political transformations? Towards this latter goal, the contributors to this volume also offer a number of suggestions as to what a post-COVID-19 world might look like and how post-COVID transformations might be channeled in a direction more conducive towards social justice and equality. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Globalizations.


Planetary Improvement

Planetary Improvement

Author: Jesse Goldstein

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2018-03-16

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 0262535076

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An examination of clean technology entrepreneurship finds that “green capitalism” is more capitalist than green. Entrepreneurs and investors in the green economy have encouraged a vision of addressing climate change with new technologies. In Planetary Improvement, Jesse Goldstein examines the cleantech entrepreneurial community in order to understand the limitations of environmental transformation within a capitalist system. Reporting on a series of investment pitches by cleantech entrepreneurs in New York City, Goldstein describes investor-friendly visions of incremental improvements to the industrial status quo that are hardly transformational. He explores a new “green spirit of capitalism,” a discourse of planetary improvement, that aims to “save the planet” by looking for “non-disruptive disruptions,” technologies that deliver “solutions” without changing much of what causes the underlying problems in the first place. Goldstein charts the rise of business environmentalism over the last half of the twentieth century and examines cleantech's unspoken assumptions of continuing cheap and abundant energy. Recounting the sometimes conflicting motivations of cleantech entrepreneurs and investors, he argues that the cleantech innovation ecosystem and its Schumpetarian dynamic of creative destruction are built around attempts to control creativity by demanding that transformational aspirations give way to short-term financial concerns. As a result, capitalist imperatives capture and stifle visions of sociotechnical possibility and transformation. Finally, he calls for a green spirit that goes beyond capitalism, in which sociotechnical experimentation is able to break free from the narrow bonds and relative privilege of cleantech entrepreneurs and the investors that control their fate.


Forces of Reproduction

Forces of Reproduction

Author: Stefania Barca

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-11-26

Total Pages: 152

ISBN-13: 110887147X

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The concept of Anthropocene has been incorporated within a hegemonic narrative that represents 'Man' as the dominant geological force of our epoch, emphasizing the destruction and salvation power of industrial technologies. This Element develops a counter-hegemonic narrative based on the perspective of earthcare labour – or the 'forces of reproduction'. It brings to the fore the historical agency of reproductive and subsistence workers as those subjects that, through both daily practices and organized political action, take care of the biophysical conditions for human reproduction, thus keeping the world alive. Adopting a narrative justice approach, and placing feminist political ecology right at the core of its critique of the Anthropocene storyline, this Element offers a novel and timely contribution to the environmental humanities.


The Extractive Zone

The Extractive Zone

Author: Macarena Gómez-Barris

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2017-10-19

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 0822372568

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In The Extractive Zone Macarena Gómez-Barris traces the political, aesthetic, and performative practices that emerge in opposition to the ruinous effects of extractive capital. The work of Indigenous activists, intellectuals, and artists in spaces Gómez-Barris labels extractive zones—majority indigenous regions in South America noted for their biodiversity and long history of exploitative natural resource extraction—resist and refuse the terms of racial capital and the continued legacies of colonialism. Extending decolonial theory with race, sexuality, and critical Indigenous studies, Gómez-Barris develops new vocabularies for alternative forms of social and political life. She shows how from Colombia to southern Chile artists like filmmaker Huichaqueo Perez and visual artist Carolina Caycedo formulate decolonial aesthetics. She also examines the decolonizing politics of a Bolivian anarcho-feminist collective and a coalition in eastern Ecuador that protects the region from oil drilling. In so doing, Gómez-Barris reveals the continued presence of colonial logics and locates emergent modes of living beyond the boundaries of destructive extractive capital.


Work's Intimacy

Work's Intimacy

Author: Melissa Gregg

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2013-04-23

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 0745637469

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This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew "knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways. This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.


Transforming World Politics

Transforming World Politics

Author: Anna M. Agathangelou

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-06-02

Total Pages: 253

ISBN-13: 1135979944

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This book provides a critical understanding of contemporary world politics by arguing that the neoliberal approach to international relations seduces many of us into investing our lives in projects of power and alienation. These projects offer few options for emancipation; consequently, many feel they have little choice but to retaliate against violence with more violence. The authors of this pioneering work articulate worldism as an alternative approach to world politics. It intertwines non-Western and Western traditions by drawing on Marxist, postcolonial, feminist and critical security approaches with Greek and Chinese theories of politics, broadly defined. The authors contend that contemporary world politics cannot be understood outside the legacies of these multiple worlds, including axes of power configured by gender, race, class, and nationality, which are themselves linked to earlier histories of colonizations and their contemporary formations. With fiction and poetry as exploratory methods, the authors build on their ‘multiple worlds’ approach to consider different sites of world politics, arguing that a truly emancipatory understanding of world politics requires more than just a shift in ways of thinking; above all, it requires a shift in ways of being. Transforming World Politics will be of vital interest to students and scholars of International Relations, Political Science, Postcolonial Studies, Social Theory, Women's Studies, Asian Studies, European Union and Mediterranean Studies, and Security Studies.