In recent years, I have been studying the development of renewable energy in Spain with the aim of developing a better understanding of energy transitions. My research shows that energy transitions are nonlinear processes that open possibilities for new social arrangements, but it also highlights the ways that such new social arrangements rework inherited relationships of power. In this paper I want to elaborate on this idea by focusing on the way big electrical corporations have been mobilizing the current context of economic crisis to rewrite energy policy. As a result, these big corporations are able to consolidate and extend into the future their position of control over the energy system, understood here to include not only technologies and resources, but also more crucially the social structures and relations of production sustaining their operation (Debeir et al. 1991 [1986]).
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Gavin Smith: Intellectuals’ Contributions to Popular Mobilization and Strategic Action under Different Conditions of Possibility
The argument I make here is a fairly obvious one. It is that the spatially widespread insurrections in the global south during the ’60s, and especially their victories against France in Algeria, the United States in Southeast Asia, and Portugal in its various colonies, obliged anthropologists and historians on the Left to rethink the way they did anthropology: their methods, their research design, and the concepts they used. Though in many cases it may not have been explicit in their work, the fact is that they began to design their research questions in very much the same way as the issues of “What is to be done?” that insurgents themselves had laid out (or were laying out) in their various forms. Moreover, the work of this bridgehead of Left scholars had a knock-on effect on the discipline as a whole, reshaping the entire enterprise of what sociocultural anthropology was.
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Jonathan Friedman: Did Someone Say Globalization? The Mystification of Intellectuals and the Cunning of History
In the fall of 2008, the “shock doctrine” came home to roost in the form of what has been referred to as a financial meltdown in the American but also increasingly larger segments of the world economy. Many were quite surprised, and there was certainly a sense of moral indignation about the entire affair. With media support there has been an ongoing witch hunt for the culprits who “got us into this mess.” But the proliferation of discourses has reacted to this crisis as if it were quite unique. The vacuum with respect to a longer-term comprehension of the scale and dynamics of capital accumulation, the various cycles that are packed into it, from shorter business cycles to longer cycles (including what Giovanni Arrighi and others have referred to as hegemonic cycles), are not part of the immediate reaction to losing one’s savings, pension, house, or livelihood. Consciousness would seem to be a short-term phenomenon, and, in large parts of the Western world, it was for a time reinforced by a myth that somehow business cycles were over and that growth had become a permanent fixture.
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Jane Collins: Reclaiming the Local in Movements against Inequality: A View from the United States
Many European nations have seen protests in 2013 as the state shifts its historic roles and responsibilities and protesters respond to cutbacks in public support as a breach of moral economy. At the same time, individuals and collectives have responded to austerity by creating and deepening forms of self-provisioning outside the realm of state and market.
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August Carbonella: Dispossession and Emancipation: Reframing Our Political Imagination
Everywhere we look, it seems, we are faced with the human and environmental devastation caused by contemporary processes of dispossession. How we are to confront this is the urgent political question of the day. Not surprisingly, this question has reinvigorated scholarly interest in dispossession, much of it inspired by the work of David Harvey (2003) on accumulation by dispossession and Peter Linebaugh (2008) on an expanded understanding of what constitutes the commons. These conceptual interventions are clearly both welcome and important, yet their explications of dispossession and commons, in the end, do not adequately address the political question. In brief, Harvey’s assignment of different political logics to the dispossessed in the Global North and South and Linebaugh’s evocative juxtapositions of different various commoning practices do not enable us to bring these struggles into a common relational frame. I suggest that a more sustained focus on uneven proletarianization—the end result of dispossession—will better serve our goal of understanding present protests and political possibilities.
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Marc Edelman: Dispatch from Geneva: A Treaty on Transnational Corporations? A Declaration on Peasants’ Rights?
An anti-TNC protest
The anthropology of human rights has devoted increasing attention to how diverse groups and societies interpret and implement (or not) international legal norms. The pioneering work of Sally Merry and her collaborators on how global women’s rights norms are enacted in local contexts saw this as a “vernacularization” process.1 Numerous scholars have studied the ways civil society organizations build alliances across boundaries of language, nation, ethnicity, class, and religion; construct shared imaginaries; and take rights claims to international governance venues in hopes of legislating new global norms. Few, however, have explicitly analyzed this in terms of what we might term “vernacularization in reverse.”2 To be concrete, reverse vernacularization involves the development of shared understandings and demands between, say, residents of a community in the Philippines affected by the mining giant Glencore and their counterparts near Glencore mines in Colombia, Peru, Zambia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Or, to take another example, small farmers in western Europe who seek to overturn prohibitions on saving and exchanging seeds and those in Brazil who face similar restrictions.
Florin Poenaru: The Wealth of Nations: Nature as Capital and Eco-criticism as Anti-Capitalism
In autumn of 2013, Romania witnessed some of the biggest post-1989 protests. From September to early December, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in major cities. People were furious about the government making a deal with a Canadian mining multinational for an opencast mine in Roșia Montana, a small mining town located in the Apuseni Mountains. In the making for almost 16 years, the project had been mired in controversy from the outset (e.g., see Kalb 2006). First, its very existence and the lack of transparency about what the deal included raised suspicions of complicity between local politicians of all stripes and the Canadian mining firm behind the project. Allegations of conflicts of interest, illicit lobbying, and top-level corruption were abundant. Long-term journalist investigations gave credence to many such views, documenting a vast network of business and political interests, both local and global, undergirding the project (Gotiu 2013).
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