Related Papers
Policing Environmental Injustice
2021 •
Andrea Brock
Environmental justice (EJ) activists have long worked with abolitionists in their communities, critiquing the ways policing, prisons, and pollution are entangled and racially constituted (Braz and Gilmore 2006). Yet, much EJ scholarship reflects a liberal Western focus on a more equal distribution of harms, rather than challenging the underlying systems of exploitation these harms rest upon (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2020). This article argues that policing facilitates environmentally unjust developments that are inherently harmful to nature and society. Policing helps enforce a social order rooted in the ‘securing’ of property, hierarchy, and human-nature exploitation. Examining the colonial continuities of policing, we argue that EJ must challenge the assumed necessity of policing, overcome the mythology of the state as ‘arbiter of justice’, and work to create social conditions in which policing is unnecessary. This will help open space to question other related harmful hegemonic princ...
Political Geography
'Frack off': Towards an anarchist political ecology critique of corporate and state responses to anti-fracking resistance in the UK
2020 •
Andrea Brock
This paper puts forward an anarchist political ecology critique of extreme energy extractivism by examining corporate and state responses (or 'political reactions from above') to anti-fracking resistance in the UK. The planned drilling for unconventional gas and oil through hydraulic fracturing has triggered unprecedented opposition , with protest camps, direct actions, and legal challenges disrupting operations and slowing down planning and exploration development. Drawing on green anarchist thought, critiques of extractivism, statism, and industrialism, and a (corporate) counterinsurgency framework, I examine the strategies adopted by drilling companies and state actors to manage resistance and win the 'hearts and minds' of the population, deploying tactics from greenwashing in local schools to harsh policing of dissent. The latter has included the criminalisation and stigmatisation of land defenders, targeting campaigners as 'domestic extremists', physical abuse, targeting protesters with disabilities, and entering public-private security partnerships with local police forces which involve the 'outsourcing' of police communication to drilling companies. Such actions are complimented by the contracting of PR firms, lobbying, sponsorships of sports clubs and school competitions, 'astroturfing', and influencing local so-called democratic procedures. This has gone hand in hand with political efforts to classify operation sites as 'Nationally Significant Infrastructure projects' to facilitate the suppression of protest. These strategies are embedded in a recently well-documented history of police infiltration and corporate spying, laying bare an unapologetic commitment to sacrifice human and nonhuman wellbeing for industrial growth, commitment to extractivist ideology and centralisation of power at the cost of further eroding local autonomy and control.
Political Geography
The evolving techniques of the social engineering of extraction: Introducing political (re)actions 'from above' in large-scale mining and energy projects
2021 •
Alexander Dunlap, Judith Verweijen
Ecological catastrophe and global inequality are pressing, yet socio-ecologically destructive natural resource extraction continues unabated. This special issue explores the strategies and tactics employed by large-scale mining and energy companies to render extraction socio-politically feasible in the face of multi-pronged opposition. Extraction, we contend, does not only need physical engineering, but requires social engineering as well. This entails shaping the behavior of people to 'manage' dissent and 'manufacture' consent. Situating the social engineering of extraction in key debates in the literature, this special issue introduction traces the evolution of its main technologies and techniques, related to colonialism, wars of decolonization, neoliberalism and the 'green' economy, respectively. We conclude by outlining a number of ways to advance research on the social engineering of extraction.
A critical approach to the social acceptance of renewable energy infrastructures
Does Renewable Energy Exist? Fossil Fuel+ Technologies and the Search for Renewable Energy
2021 •
Alexander Dunlap
A revised version of the “End Green Delusions” essay (Verso, 2018), this chapter argues that there is no such thing as renewable energy, only fossil fuel+. Raw material resource extraction for so-called renewable energy development relates to spreading socio-ecological degradation. Recognizing the supply chain costs for “renewable energy” as well as the socio-ecological impact of implementing wind parks, the chapter contends that fossil fuel+ is a more accurate description of “renewable energy”. Furthermore, it contends that fossil fuel+ infrastructures are breaking ecological and planetary cycles by harnessing the vitality of “renewable resources”. This means widening the lens of renewable energy’s “social acceptance” research to understand the socio-ecological chain of costs for fossil fuel+ development.
Environmental Science and Policy
The green economy as counterinsurgency, or the ontological power affirming permanent ecological catastrophe
2023 •
Alexander Dunlap
As old as industrialism or civilization itself, socio-ecological problems are nothing new. Despite all efforts to resolve environmental dilemmas, socio-ecological catastrophe has only intensified. Governments, in response, have unveiled the green economy to confront ecological and climate catastrophe. The green economy, however, has worsened socio-ecological conditions, invigorating the present trajectory of (techno)capitalist development. This article argues that the green economy serves as a tool of global counterinsurgency, managing, preempting and redirecting the inevitable ecological anxiety that could mobilize for radical social change. While fragmenting ecological opposition, the green economy meanwhile serves as a "force multiplier" for market expansion and capitalist development, as opposed to actually working towards real socio-ecological mitigation and remediation. The article proceeds by defining counterinsurgency, and indicating its relevance to the green economy. Dissecting the technics of the green economy, the next section reviews its origins and epistemological foundations by investigating the concepts and operationalization of 'energy', 'biodiversity' and 'carbon'. Then, briefly, the article reviews the extractive reality of low-carbon infrastructures, revealing the socio-ecological harm implied and justified by the green economic and decarbonization schemes. The green economy, it concludes, is a governmental technology, preventing collective self-reflection and action to (adequately) rehabilitate ecosystems and address the structural socio-ecological problems threatening the planet, thus preforming a counterinsurrectionary function in the service of state and capital.
Energies Beyond the State: Anarchist Political Ecology and the Liberation of Nature
When the Wolf Guards the Sheep: The Industrial Machine through Green Extractivism in Germany and Mexico
2021 •
Alexander Dunlap, Andrea Brock
‘Green’ resource extraction is often positioned as solution to biodiversity loss and anthropogenic climate change, based on green capitalist fantasies of de-coupled, or ‘sustainable’ industrial growth and ‘green mining.’ Anarchists, but specifically green anarchists, have long been conscious of the green economic efforts to rebrand industrial and extractive operations. Providing a privileged lens to examine the green economy, anarchist political ecology is also able to stimulate imaginations and visions on how to immediately transform and appropriate industrial environments. This paper argues for an anarchist political ecology in assessing extractive projects and charting new directions in (re)imagining ecological, unruly and dignified futures. After discussing what an anarchist political ecology could look like, we draw on case studies of Europe’s largest opencast coal mine, the Hambach mine in Germany, and wind parks in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region (Istmo) of Oaxaca, Mexico, to examine corporate/state strategies of greening resource extraction and repression. This requires critical engagement with fossil fuels extraction, but also renewable energy systems, as manifestations of a green energy-extraction nexus designed to preserve and expand the present industrial-financial system. We then discuss eco-anarchistic social change that challenges the organizational structures of the industrializing colonial model. From initiatives of replacing roads with gardens, developing strategies for experimenting with urban food autonomy and questioning the degree of electricity dependence, this paper seeks to further a discussion on creating radical openings to confront colonial organization and infrastructure that permeates human and nonhuman lives. As scholars, we need to challenge our statist and industrial subjectivities, while developing strategies to deal with corporate/state counter-mobilizations to undermine the current trajectory of ‘progress.’ This means working to maximize ecological and social harmony, while aiming for total liberation against the imposition of market-based environmentalism, ‘green extraction’ and corporate-state projects of social control, ecocide and social death.
Current Sociology
Weaponizing people in environmental conflicts: Capturing 'hearts', 'minds', and manufacturing 'volunteers' for extractive development
2022 •
Alexander Dunlap
Local support is instrumental to natural resource extraction. Examining militarization beyond the battlefield, this article discusses the organization of volunteers in three controversial resource extraction projects. Drawing on the political ecology of counter-insurgency and 4 years of research that examined wind energy development in Mexico, coal mining in Germany, and copper mining in Peru, this article examines the weaponization of volunteers in environmental conflicts. It is argued that political acquiescence to natural resource extraction is manufactured by various means of coercion and reward, meanwhile volunteerism-or the appearance thereof-seeks to manipulate people's ambitions and desires. The manufacturing of volunteerism expresses a 'local' counterinsurgency approach, designed to counter-resistance groups by articulating a form of counter-organizing to defend extractive development projects (and transnational capital). The fact remains, however, that these groups often qualify for welfare programs, are paid, or are recipients of 'donations' to ensure a supportive presence in the target areas. Volunteerism, in the conventional sense, is 'hybridized' with paid work posturing as unpaid to organize legitimacy. Discussing counter-organizations and their relationship to armed and unarmed volunteerism, the article details how communities are divided to support natural resource extraction in times of widespread ecological and climate crises.
Journal of Genocide Research
The Politics of Ecocide, Genocide and Megaprojects: Interrogating Natural Resource Extraction, Identity and the Normalization of Erasure
2020 •
Alexander Dunlap
At the root of techno-capitalist development – popularly marketed as “modernity,” “progress” or “development” – is the continuous and systematic processes of natural resource extraction. Reviewing wind energy development in Mexico, coal mining in Germany and copper mining in Peru, this article seeks to strengthen the post-liberal or structural approach in genocide studies. These geographically and culturally diverse case studies set the stage for discussions about the complications of conflictual fault lines around extractive development. The central argument is that “green” and conventional natural resource extraction are significant in degrading human and biological diversity, thereby contributing to larger trends of socio-ecological destruction, extinction and the potential for human and nonhuman extermination. It should be acknowledged in the above-mentioned case studies, land control was largely executed through force, notably through “hard” coercive technologies executed by various state and extra-judicial elements, which was complemented by employing diplomatic and “soft” social technologies of pacification. Natural resource extraction is a significant contributor to the genocide-ecocide nexus, leading to three relevant discussion points. First, the need to include nonhuman natures, as well as indigenous ontologies and epistemologies, into genocide studies to dispel an embedded anthropocentrism in the discipline. Second, acknowledges the complications of essentializing identity and the specific socio-cultural values and dispositions that are the targets of techno-capitalist development. Third, that socio-political positionality is essential to how people will relate and identify ecocidal and genocidal processes. Different ontologies, socio-ecological relationships (linked to “the Other”), and radical anti-capitalism are the root targets of techno-capitalist progress, as they seek assimilation and absorption of human and nonhuman “natural resources” into extractive economies. Genocide studies and political ecology – Anthropology, Human Geography and Development Studies – would benefit from greater engagement with each other to highlight the centrality of extractive development in sustaining ecological and climate catastrophe confronting the world today.
Political Geography
Corporate security technologies: Managing life and death along a Colombian coal railway
2020 •
Line Jakobsen
Journal of Peasant Studies
'Murderous energy' in Oaxaca, Mexico: Wind factories, territorial struggle and social warfare
2021 •
Alexander Dunlap
This article examines the struggle against the new Électricité de France (EDF) wind park, Gunaa Sicarú, in Unión Hidalgo (UH), Mexico. Foregrounding Indigenous land defense, the article refers to wind energy as ‘wind factories’ to discuss agrarian change in the region. Revealing the counterinsurgency colonial model as a foundational approach to extractive development, the article argues that the distribution of money, Sicarios (hitmen) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are instrumental to engineering ‘social acceptance’. Moreover, the liberalism underlining NGOs, if not careful, advances processes of infrastructural colonization and, consequently, wider trajectories of (neo)colonialism.
