Category Archives: Blog
Andrew Flachs, Ankita Raturi, Juliet Norton, Valerie Miller, and Haley Thomas: Building back bigger or degrowing local food? US alternative food networks and post-corona agrarian economies
There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. – John Steinbeck Midway through The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck turns away from the dispossessed […]
Sandy Smith-Nonini: Energy Crises in the Time of Covid: Precarious Fossil Infrastructures
The spectacle of Russia invading Ukraine has elevated tensions over Europe’s access to natural gas and may herald a sea-change in regional geopolitics of energy. But prior to Putin’s war, energy crises played out across dozens of countries in 2021. Ramped up economic demand in the fourth quarter contributed to many, but there were forewarnings […]
Marc Edelman: Encirclement: Historical Roots of Putin’s Paranoia
“What’s going on inside Putin’s head?” “He’s insane.” Questions and declarations like these pepper discussions of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. While insanity appears an obvious — albeit broad — diagnosis, particularly to those in the West, even the most delusional psychosis has its internal logics and deep structures. And while we can never really get […]
Chris Hann: The Agony of Ukraine
After nearly two weeks of violent conflict in Ukraine, it is increasingly difficult to stand back and see the bigger picture. The West has lined up behind the charismatic President Zelensky, who has addressed parliaments in Brussels and Westminster to rapturous applause. In Britain, football stadia and Oxbridge colleges (including my own) have draped themselves […]
Gavin Smith: Toward a non-theory of the reproduction of labour
Matan Kaminer’s reflections on the workshop, “Rethinking surplus populations” is full of interesting insights and challenging puzzles. As he says, “operationalizing this concept [surplus populations] for the analysis of particular ethnographic cases throws up real problems.” (Kaminer, 2022). A task preliminary to operationalizing the concept, however, is the task of clarifying what it refers to. […]
Andrew Sanchez: Work is Complicated: Thoughts on David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs
There’s a Committee for Committees! A few weeks ago, I received a message from a colleague. It was the sort of funny thing that one friend says to another when their most ridiculous suspicions have been proven true. It said: “There’s a committee for the membership of committees!” My colleague discovered this while filling out […]
Elizabeth Cullen Dunn: When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism
The invasion of Ukraine has been a shock not just to Eastern Europe, but to the post World War II international order. While the fundamental tenets of postwar geography—that national boundaries would not be moved, that each country had the right to territorial integrity, and that every nation-state could govern its own territory without interference—might […]
Don Kalb: “Fuck Off” versus “Humiliation”: The Perverse Logic towards War in Europe’s East
I like the tone and the global historical perspective of David Harvey’s FocaalBlog article. Harvey’s socialist internationalism versus competitive nation-statism should be the only national flag allowed in the 21st century. It was always already essential to make that point against the environmental and public health catastrophes we are facing. It has become even more […]
Derek Hall: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Response to David Harvey
David Harvey’s February 25 FocaalBlog post is presented as “An Interim Report” on “Recent Events in the Ukraine”. Harvey’s essay effectively covers some of the core forces that have led to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, from the devastating impact of 1990s shock therapy in Russia to Russian reactions to NATO’s bombing of Serbia in 1999 […]
David Harvey: Remarks on Recent Events in the Ukraine: An Interim Statement
This is a provisional text David Harvey prepared for the 2022 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. He allowed us, nevertheless, to publish it here because of the escalating Russia-Ukraine crisis.