Suchergebnisse

Review of: Ben Jaffel, Hager (2020). Anglo-European Intelligence Cooperation. Britain in Europe, Europe in Britain. Routledge, 234 pp. ; Reseña de: Ben Jaffel, Hager (2020). Anglo-European Intelligence Cooperation. Britain in Europe, Europe in Britain. Routledge, 234 pp.

.
This article critically engages with the question of mobility in the study of international politics by centering the concept of resistance. It starts with the example of the Canadian Government blocking the Roxham Road irregular border crossing in March 2023 and Canadian officials arguing in favour of normalizing movement between the US/Canada. In general, the paper challenges the global state centric project of normalizing movement by arguing that resistance always comes first. As such, this challenge does not only ask who/what gets to move freely and when; it is centers the very resistances to normalizing movement that emerges from within and without movement itself. The paper has three sections: the first acknowledges that celebrating movement is important because it loosens the state centric study of international politics and sets borders, states, and migrants adrift in a sea of irregular movements. It creates a differential analysis of movement which I refer to as "differential encounters". In the context of this article, recasting the state in the context of movement demands an engagement with Indigenous and migrant histories beyond the modern categories of immigrant or settler. It requires going beyond merely placing Indigenous peoples into other non-Indigenous migrations stories since it reproduces the colonial efforts to exceptionalize the immigrant experience in and through its universalization/provincialization. Such practical efforts to normalize movement allow the Canadian state to present itself as the apolitical and fixed arbiter of different movements and thereby displace the unceded mediating role inherent to Indigenous relationships to the land and its peoples. The second section shifts to an epistemological register of movements to recognize that celebrating movement can also depoliticize movements differences. Therefore, movement is not simply given; it is itself treated as diagnostic and productive by attending to the function of friction inside and between movements. Following the work of Anna Tsing, frictions are not only the product of movement but also the shapers and materializers of movement(s). They are the encounters that actualize, materialize, and define movements. They occur when movements interact, and they produce something new within the specific place-based context of differential encounters. Friction is becoming movement because nothing moves or matters without friction. This section "matters" the nine individuals, including two children, who lost their lives while being smuggled through the Akwesasne district of the St. Lawrence River, which straddles the US/Canada border. Their lives are mattered in and through the materialization of movements. Yet, in differential encounters, there can be no sovereign, disciplinary, or biopolitical accounting of bodies and lives: only frictions, movements, and resistances. These frictions both materialize and are material. They are historical and immediate. From macro to micro: the decision to deploy a particular technology is as significant as the reliability of an operation, machine, or equipment in the day to day.
The political frictions between movements, as such, become the focus of studies which centre movement. To find politics one must move with resistance. To move with resistance is to open untoward frictions. Moving with resistance politicizes those very movements and frictions that have become regularized and/or normalized. The final section argues that despite the emancipatory narrative attached to privileging ontological and epistemological approaches, resistance should always be situated as a generative force that comes first. This section uses the four-part documentary series Thunder Bay (2023), by Ryan McMahonm, the award winning Anishinaabe journalist, to investigates forms of resistance in Thunder Bay, Ontario, which sits at the head of Lake Superior. The history of Thunder Bay is defined by Indigenous/settler relations —a complex of trade, employment, governance, policing, and personal frictions —and amass into the colonial frictions of the city. Thunder Bay's purpose has not changed. It continues to exist in order to control, extract and extinguish Indigenous futures. While the documentary challenges the audience to see Thunder Bay as both an exceptional crisis in policing and as an exemplar case of continued Canadian colonialism, McMahon's series also helps the effort in this paper to rethink the concept of resistance in the context of movement and friction. To think about resistance as coming first, the concept of resistance itself must be redefined, not as opposition or reaction, but as an enduring medium of escalation and indifference. Resisting colonialism cannot erase its constitutive frictions; colonialism is a movement responding to already existing resistance, friction and movement. As such, the colonial project remains intact, and escalation adds new opportunities for the state to escalate in turn. Thunder Bay laments that, despite the inspiring efforts of individuals and movements, Indigenous resistance is reduced to new and further instances of friction that keep the wheels of the Canadian state turning. Resistance in movement is a prior interplay of indifferently releasing one movement and politically escalating other emergent movements that resurface in the wake. The article puts special attention to the concept of indifference since "to indiffer" break or turn away from the modern state form, is to actively dismantle those escalatory forces of resistance and friction captured by the state's ambition to appear static. However, just as resistance has come to mean opposition to movement and lost its political value, indifference has also been cast as a static apolitical form of being. Again, just as resistance escalates, it also indiffers. To indiffer evokes differing, but not in ways that contribute to a particular movement's escalation or friction. Instead, indiffering releases, liberates, suspends both escalation and friction. This does not mean that indifference has no relationship with escalation or friction in the abstract. To indiffer is an active unattending to a movement's particular escalation and friction. It is resisting, releasing, and forgetting and generating new frictions and movements. Yet indifference is not innocent —it is not only a weapon of the weak. The state also practices indifference. The indifferent state actively uncares about Indigenous lives because its own future requires unmaking of Indigenous future horizons. This article suggests that if resistance is no longer believed to be a willful action of the liberal subject, and resistance always comes in advance, then the frictions that unfold as movements inevitably unmap geographies of the state and open untoward irregular movements and futures.

Esta obra echa la mirada hacia el pasado y hacia el futuro en relación con lo que fue, es y podría ser el trabajo feminista en seguridad, mediante la combinación de un enfoque de sociología histórica con una visión prospectiva del futuro de este campo de estudio. El texto comienza con una reflexión, como cimiento de la discusión, sobre los estudios feministas de seguridad (EFS) antes de la existencia misma de la disciplina. A continuación, discute diferentes ideas sobre lo que los EFS son. Posteriormente, presta atención a las corrientes divergentes dentro los EFS, así como a las omisiones y críticas. Más que buscar reconciliar estas distintas consideraciones, se pregunta por los aspectos que puede tomarse de las mismas para abordar futuros potenciales de los EFS, y su contribución a los feminismos y/o a los estudios de seguridad.

In the field of economics, the two main branches that deal with the analyses of economy-ecology interactions are Environmental and Resource Economics (ERE) and Ecological Economics (EE). The latter is typically characterized as being fundamentally at odds with ERE's negligence of biophysical constraints to economic activity. EE has proceeded to develop as a pluralist and trans-disciplinary field whose literature engages in the stipulation of previously overlooked considerations. For some, this pluralism represents the biggest strength: its success hinges on both the acceptance of multiple and incommensurable epistemologies that detect fissures in the dominant epistemology and the debate that arises out of the different delineations of dissent. Others argue that over the course of EE's existence, pluralism has been insufficiently able to rid the field from mainstream, particularly neoclassical, economic epistemologies and formalisms.

The aim of this paper is to provide recommendations for the development of an alternative to the current formal abstractions of ecology-economy configurations. This is done through a reinterpretation of the natural capital concept from an eco-Marxist perspective. After introducing the natural capital concept and discussing how the treatment thereof differs across ERE and EE, we isolate strong sustainability as one of the main attributes of EE when it comes to formalization practices. Strong sustainability's prescription to treat natural capital as a complementary input in economic production functions has led to the implementation of various strategies concerning natural capital conservation. The bulk of these strategies has subsequently relied on monetary valuation for the purpose of embedding conservation strategies within the broader rationale of the market. In this paper we discuss monetary valuation in light of planetary boundaries, such as atmospheric sink capacities, and ecosystem services such as the habitat provision for endangered species. Critical studies have identified the monetary valuation of biophysical and ecological processes as commodification and we address both the theorized and experienced contradictions it is associated with.

In our view, the logic behind the exchange value assessment of ecological processes can easily be traced back to the underlying assumptions of mathematical formalization in EE. In order to dissect these assumptions, we find it fruitful to draw on ecological Marxism. After introducing the reader to the gist of Marx's ecological insights we discuss the concept of dualism in ecological Marxism and economics. We contend that our explicit focus on mathematical formalization forecloses a complete rejection of dualism since the specification of variables requires a process of conceptual distinction. This is why we adopt the notion of duality; where the separation and opposition between two essential elements is replaced by interdependence.

Having positioned ourselves in the eco-Marxist debate on dualism, we then proceed with a discussion of Marx's labour process theory and Moore's world-ecology. The labour process is subject to two elements: 'purpose realisation' and 'material metabolism'. The first refers to labour as an imposition of human intention; causing nature to capitulate to humanity's will. 'Material metabolism' describes labour as an exchange or mediation between itself and nature. World-ecology offers an ecological interpretation of capital accumulation over the course of history. One of the concepts used to distinguish historical ecology-economy configurations, or world-ecological regimes, over capitalism's long-dureé is the ecological surplus. This is a ratio between the system-wide appropriation and capitalization of both human and extra-human inputs. High ecological surpluses allow capital accumulation to proceed by means of labour productivity gains which are facilitated by appropriated labours, entities and processes. Low ecological surpluses hamper accumulation and trigger investments in new sources of appropriation, cheaper capitalized inputs or efficiency increasing technologies.

How do these two eco-Marxist insights facilitate a reinterpretation of the assumptions underlying the practice of mathematical formalization in EE? Through the concept of the ecological surplus, world-ecology allows us to consider the commodification of ecological processes as an instance of capitalization. When valuation techniques disclose the benefit of an ecological process in monetary terms, said ecological process can be treated as an input in the production function. But according to world-ecology, an increase in capitalization also diminishes the ecological surplus which subsequently hampers capital accumulation. This begs us to question why the capitalization of ecological processes is a dominant strategy in response to ecological degradations. We argue that capitalization is a fruitful strategy in the face of future constraints to accumulation, such as diminished labour or human-made capital productivity and/or future opportunities for accumulation through for example, greenwashing.

Marx's labour process theory allows us to further argue that the incentives which capitalization aim to foster can be seen as desired alternations to the 'material metabolism' element of the labour process. The socially defined set of 'purpose realisations' on the other hand remains faithful to "the endowment of natural objects with humanistic forms for the purpose not of use value creation, but exchange value accumulation". This leads us to conclude that the depiction of economy-ecology configurations by means of natural capital which enters the production function supports the underlying assumption that ecological sustainability is best achieved when capital bargains on behalf of nature. Furthermore, by explicitly focusing on capitalized ecological processes, the status-quo of formal abstraction in EE presumes dualism and is therefore incomplete. We argue that a more comprehensive portrayal requires the consideration of appropriated ecological processes in order to capture reciprocity and the unified management of interdependent flows which reproduce metabolic value. To this end, we introduce a trivial conceptual framework which summarizes the (proposed) mathematical formalization of economy-ecology configurations across ERE, EE and Ecological Marxism. The formal abstraction we propose from an eco-Marxist perspective is not only based on the consideration of appropriated ecological processes but also imposes duality instead of dualism between the 'societal' and 'natural' elements of production. The contribution of Ecological Marxism in this paper should not be seen as the formulation of an alternative to capitalization. Our proposed formal abstraction is based on the assumption that the 'purpose realisation' element of the labour process facilitates the goal of exchange value accumulation. Instead, we hope our contribution has shown that Ecological Marxism provides useful insights which can stretch the current confines of EE's mathematical formalization; allowing for a more comprehensive portrayal of economy-ecology configurations.