Lost legacy: How 1989 marked the rise of environmental politics

Olaf Corry argues that Eastern European revolutions of 1989 did not just mark the defeat of the socialist utopian ideal but also the rise of new political ideas associated with political ecology: the physical and human limits to the modern expansionary project, people-powered politics and a growing global awareness. 1989 was a staging post in the relaunch of older concerns about resources and planetary limits, bringing a substantive critique of modernist ideas of untrammelled material expansion and state power into the history of European revolutions

Pictorial theories of global politics: why anarchy has retained its paradigmatic position

It has recently been pointed out that Kenneth Waltz based his seminal theorization of anarchy on a pictorial view of theories as essentially ‘pictures, mentally formed’ and that this provides his main buttress against theoretical criticism. This paper asks what other pictorial theories are in operation in the discipline and finds surprisingly few. Copious criticism of ‘anarchy’ as a theory has not resulted in a host of rival pictorial theories of world politics being developed and the lack of rival ‘theories’ leaving critics dependent upon anarchy. The paper begins with a note on the pictorial understanding of what a theory is before it investigates alternatives including hierarchy, anarchy, empire and network. It concludes that anarchy and hierarchy remain the only two pictorial theories of political structure in town and that this is a constraining factor in the development of fresh theoretical perspectives on world politics. The example of the Global Polity Approach which aimed to start from a new unit of analysis but lacked precisely its own pictorial theory of political structure is offered as a demonstration of the power of the unchallenged model of anarchy

Mapping the social study of carbon capture and storage technology as a climate strategy

It is important to be aware of different approaches to social studies of science and technology. Therefore, in order to get the full picture of what the social studies of CCS is about, where progress is being made and where more research is needed this paper surveys existing approaches and suggests a way of organising and thinking about the variety of studies of ‘CCS in society’ that exist or perhaps ought to exist. First the various existing social scientific disciplines currently being deployed to study CCS and other related technologies from a social science point of view are mapped out. Next I discuss different criteria by which social studies of CCS can be categorised. This is designed to give a better understanding of what kind of studies exist and what might be developed and to emphasise that within each discipline, a variety of different approaches can be found

It's the Society, Stupid! Communicating Emergent Climate Technologies in the Internet Age

Emergent or unproven technologies occupy a central role in post-Paris debates about climate change goals and their feasibility. New technologies have often faced major political and social challenges and the way they are communicated is changing as technical experts and scientists play a greater role in communicating directly online. We review the scope and key characteristics of communications on carbon dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technologies presenting data from a comprehensive survey of websites compiled to assess the state of global CCS communications. Our key empirical finding is that existing communications are techno-centric in their framing, overlooking economic, political and institutional aspects of CCS as a societal arrangement. We also find an overrepresentation of traditionally less trusted actors from business and government (resulting in a pro-CCS bias), rather than by independent academic researchers or NGOs. We offer some recommendations for how CCS and similarly emergent climate technologies might be better communicated in the age of the Internet, not just in terms of their technical features but also in terms of their societal impacts and the role they might play in a wider social and political context

Displacing the Anthropocene: colonisation, extinction and the unruliness of nature in Palestine

Recent ‘Anthropocene’ commentaries have argued that as humans have become decisively entangled in natural systems, they collectively became a geological species-agent potentially becoming aware of its own place in the deep history of planetary time. Through this, the argument goes, a pre-political collective consciousness could emerge, paving the way for a progressive construction of a common world, beyond particularistic justice-claims. The reverse case is made in scholarship of settler colonialism: the Anthropocene is rooted in histories of settler colonial violence and is deeply tied up with the dispossession and ‘extinction’ of Indigenous life-worlds. In this article, we foreground nature–human entanglement as crucial for understanding the operations but also the instability of settler colonialism in Palestine. We suggest that fractures and openings become legible when paying attention to the ‘afterlife’ of nature that was erased due to its enmeshment with Indigenous people. We provide a historical and ethnographic account of past and emerging entanglements between Palestinians refugees and their nature, ultimately arguing that indigeneity is recalcitrant to obliteration. With that in mind, we return to the Anthropocene’s focus on universal human extinction and ethical consciousness by critically engaging with it from the standpoint of colonised and displaced Indigenous populations, like the Palestinian refugees. We conclude by arguing that only when the profoundly unequal access to Life entrenched in settler colonialism is foregrounded and addressed, does a real possibility of recognising any common, global vulnerability that the species faces emerge