Resisting Development: The politics of the zad and NoTav

Alexander Dunlap reviews the book The ZAD and NoTAV: Territorial Struggles and the Making of a New Political Intelligence, by the Mauvaise Troupe Collective.

We need to talk about robots

By Paul Robbins. A political ecology of robots is due, one that is rigorously empirical, dedicated to justice and animal welfare, but unromantic in every regard.

Why “Warning to Humanity” gets the socio-ecological crisis (and its solutions) wrong

by Salvatore De Rosa and Jevgeniy Bluwstein The "Warning to Humanity" signed by more than 15.000 scientists calls for action to save the planet proposing elitist environmentalism and missing the real target. Instead, scientists should analyse the roots of the socio-ecological crisis and join the grassroots struggles pushing  for structural changes from local to global …

Saskia Sassen on extractive logics and geographies of expulsion

By Gustavo García López* Saskia Sassen (Professor of Sociology, Columbia University) argues that the foundational transformation of capitalism since the 1980s is dominated by a speculative and extractive logic, characterized by “predatory formations” such as vulture funds making cities of ‘dead buildings’ and peripheries of expelled people. In her recent keynote speech at the  16th …

Climate politics in the long run

By Romain Felli*.  Stephen Schneider’s 1976 book The Genesis Strategy offers a stunning preview of contemporary debates over climate policies.   According to philosopher of science Bruno Latour, the rise of climate scepticism in public debates reflects the lack of political engagement from climate scientists. He argues that, having restrained themselves to a discourse of …

Patrick Bond: Climate justice movements need to hit Trump where it hurts most

By Ethemcan Turhan and Cem İskender Aydın * Political economist and climate justice expert Patrick Bond comments on the prospects for a progressive anti-capitalist agenda in the face of increasing alt-right populism, xenophobia, climate denialism and economic-political exceptionalism.  So we are back to square one: Trump’s withdrawal from Paris Agreement in early June 2017 has …

Pará, bloody Pará

Even when the police doesn’t kill in Pará, Brazil, it still lets others do the killing. The coup and the political power of the rural sector in Brasília have provided Amazonian gunmen with a carte blanche. We are living in times of death. The massacre of nine men and one woman in Pau D'Arco, on …

Planting the seeds of degrowth in times of crisis – Examples from Greece – Part II

By Marula Tsagkari * In the second of a two-part series, Marula Tsagkari explores how today, we are participants in a complex and severe crisis, and a radical crisis requires radical solutions. Through a number of examples it became obvious that in Greece there is groundwork for a transition to sustainable degrowth. There are seeds …

Planting the seeds of degrowth in times of crisis – Examples from Greece – Part I

By Marula Tsagkari * At the same time that the degrowth movement was gaining ground in the public discourse, Greece, was living the most severe economic recession since the Second World War. In the Chinese language the word crisis is represented by two symbols. The first means danger and, the second, opportunity. We must look for …

Tania Murray Li: There is no one trajectory of development

The world’s global institutions and governments with decision power on the future of millions of people living in rural areas want to continue with business as usual: industrialization and urbanization. Number two of a two-part video interview with Tania Murray Li. Tania Murray Li, Professor of Anthropology, Canada Research Chair in the Political-Economy and Culture of …