Coronavirus and the End of Resilience

Resilience appears to be the key policy buzzword of our times. International organizations, as diverse as the United Nations and the European Union, have now adopted resilience strategies across various policy areas – highlighted by the UN’s risk and resilience framework for its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (UN, 2017), the EU Action Plan for Resilience (European Commission, 2013), the European Union Global Strategy (EU, 2016) and other policy documents. This short piece argues that global responses to the Coronavirus appear to demonstrate that policy discourses of resilience may be one (so far, unremarked) casualty of the Coronavirus outbreak. ‘Keeping Calm and Carrying On’ is not an option. Acting normally, not panicking, not overreacting, is seen as dangerous and hubristic (Taleb et al, 2020). Being resilient will make the problems worse. Being resilient will make the virus spread. Better to close, to cancel, to restrict now, rather than to regret later

The Coronavirus: Biopolitics and the Rise of ‘Anthropocene Authoritarianism’

If the lesson of the global response to the Coronavirus is that humanity itself is the problem, then Anthropocene Authoritarianism looks set to pose a larger long-term challenge to our ways of life than the virus itself. With politics suspended, societies under lockdown, parliaments closed and States of Emergency in force globally (Runciman, 2020), many commentators have turned to Foucauldian-inspired understandings of biopolitics and population control to analyze contemporary events (Horvat, 2020; Agamben, 2020a; Demetri, 2020; Singh, 2020; Sotiris, 2020). Biopolitics has become a key concept in critical discourses of security governance in the last two decades (Rose, 2007; Esposito, 2008; Dillon, 2015). Deriving from the work of Foucault, at the heart of biopolitical thought is the relationship of politics to life as both the basis of governance and as an object to be secured (Foucault, 2007; 2008). For Foucault, ‘life’ was a way of articulating an ‘outside’ to the human world of politics, an outside that appeared natural but was, in fact, a malleable construct (Lemke, 2011)

Psychoanalyzing Nature, Dark Ground of Spirit

The ontological paradigms of Schelling and the late Merleau-Ponty bear striking resemblances to Spinoza’s ontology. Both were developed in response to transcendental models of a Cartesian mold, resisting tendencies to exalt the human ego to the neglect or the detriment of the more-than-human world. As such, thinkers with environmental concerns have sought to derive favorable ethical prescriptions on their basis. We begin by discerning a deadlock between two such thinkers: Ted Toadvine and Sean McGrath. With ecological responsibility in mind, both actually resist Spinozist reduction of the human being to the status of a mere mode among modes. But despite having the same general aim, they end up endorsing contrary practical conclusions. Our objective is to pinpoint the reasons behind this deadlock, indicative of two strands of post-Spinozist environmental thought which stand in tension, and to begin to propose an integrative way forward. The ethical weight afforded by Toadvine to the notion of resistance in the work of the late Merleau-Ponty, namely nature’s resistance to harmonizing, unifying pretensions, invites inquiry into two Merleau-Pontean notions he does not address: the barbarian principle, and the proposal to “Do a Psychoanalysis of Nature.” We trace these to their origins in the works of Schelling’s middle period, arguing that the Schellingian location of resistance in Spirit’s dark ground—alternately conceived as primordial Dionysiac madness, bottled-up within the substratum of consciousness—lends to an understanding of the human, and human responsibility, that harbors favorable implications for environmental ethics

Card Check Recognition: New House Rules for Union Organizing?

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Intervention and Statebuilding beyond the Human: From the ‘Black Box’ to the ‘Great Outdoors’

This article analyses intervention and statebuilding as shifting towards a posthuman discursive regime. It seeks to explore how the shift to ‘bottom-up’ or post-liberal approaches has evolved into a focus upon epistemological barriers to intervention and an appreciation of complexity. It attempts to describe a process of reflection upon intervention as a policy practice, whereby the need to focus on local context and relations, in order to take problems seriously, begins to further undermine confidence in the Western episteme. In other words, the ‘bottom-up’ approach, rather than resolving the crisis of policy practices of intervention, seems to further intensify it. It is argued that the way out of this crisis seems to be found in the rejection of the aspiration to know from a position of a ‘problem-solving’ external authority and instead to learn from the opportunities opened up through the practices of intervention. However, what is learnt does not seem to be able to fit into traditional modes and categories of expertise

Actor Network Theory and Sensing Governance: From Causation to Correlation

This article is organised in four sections. The first section introduces sensing governance in terms of the governance of effects rather than causation, focusing on the work of Bruno Latour in establishing the problematic of contingent interaction, rather than causal depth, as key to emergent effects, which can be unexpected and catastrophic. The second section considers in more depth how sensing governance enables politics by other means through putting greater emphasis on relations of interaction, rather than on ontologies of being, and links the methodological approach of sensing governance closely to actor network assumptions that disavow structures of causation. The final two sections analyse how correlation works to reveal new agencies and processes of emergence and how new technologies have been deployed in this area, providing some examples of how the shift from causal relations to sensing effects has begun to alter governmental approaches

The Death of Hope? Affirmation in the Anthropocene

This article engages with the imaginary that the great age of hope as critique is finally at an end. For hope’s detractors, the Anthropocene is imagined to be a gain in intelligibility at the price of the eclipse of both the modernist imaginary (with its optimistic telos of universal knowledge and progress) and its romantic critical counterpart of re-enchantment and hope. It appears that hope may have no place in the Anthropocene if re-enchantment is no longer possible. Man can then never be returned to the world or somehow reunited with nature (internally and/or externally). As some contemporary theorists are delighted to inform us, it seems possible that we will lose the belief that the world was ever there, in some way, ‘for us’ or that we can imagine moving beyond Enlightenment assumptions and returning the human, in less modern ways, to perhaps hear and heed the needs of our non-human planetary kin. It is argued here that, for hope to survive, it is necessary that the world be imagined as one in which it is possible for humans to find a sense of purpose or meaning in the world

Decolonising resilience: reading Glissant’s Poetics of Relation in Central Eurasia

In dominant Eurocentric policy imaginaries, a resilient community is able to self-govern and to autonomously manage risk through becoming more adaptive and responsive to potential threats, mitigating harms and maintaining societal equilibrium; ‘bouncing back’ rapidly to normal conditions. This paper seeks to move the discussion forward, suggesting alternative framings for the conceptualisation of community practices and understandings as part of the project of decolonising approaches to Central Eurasia. In drawing upon recent works addressing resilience via Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation, it highlights alternative understandings of resilience which are less subject-centred and more dependent upon becoming with others in relation. Crucial to these practices of relationality is the recognition of opacity - the acceptance that uncertainty and unknowability are integral to life processes and provide a vital invitation or opportunity to experiment and adapt through improvisation rather than mechanically responding to feedback effects in ways which close off alternative possibilities for change

The Transvaluation of Critique in the Anthropocene

This article considers the transvaluation of critique through the lens of the new affirmative critical approaches of the Anthropocene. The first section introduces the problematic of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch and also as symptomatic of the end of modernist ontological and epistemological assumptions of the divide between culture and nature. The second section then highlights how the Anthropocene thesis poses a problem for critique through fundamentally decentring the human as subject and challenging the temporal claims of Enlightenment progress. The third section analyses the implications of this closure for critical approaches and the shift towards a more positive view of the present: no longer seeking to imagine alternative futures but rather drawing out alternative possibilities that already exist. Critique thus becomes additive, affirmative and constructive. The final section expands on this point and concludes with a consideration of how contemporary theoretical approaches articulate the transvaluation of critique

Opportunities and Challenges: The Caribbean Involvement in Free Trade Area ofthe Americas

This Article will examine the region\u27s participation in the process leading to the establishment of the FTAA, and the benefits and challenges associated with its involvement in this hemispheric undertaking. Part One of the Article sets out the rationale for the establishment of the FTAA and the structure of the negotiations. The section also identifies some elements of the unique nature of the proposed grouping. Part Two discusses the challenges facing Caribbean countries as they participate in multilateral trade negotiations, including the FTAA. In Part Three, the Article critically reviews the early stages of the integration process in the Caribbean and examines the most recent developments in the process, particularly in the context of the process of globalization and liberalization. This is followed by Part Four, which discusses the Caribbean\u27s participation in the FTAA