The journal Ecología Política (coedited by Fundació ENT) invites authors to send their article proposals for its next issue, number 67.
«VIOLENCES AND EXTRACTIVISMS»
The violence of conquest and colonization is the foundational element of a new sociopolitical order of global reach: a pattern of power that is established through and by means of violence and that persists to this day. The state, the market, the episteme, and the normativity of the so-called “Western civilization” are nothing but the institutionalization of conquest violence: the colonial-patriarchal order of capital, which imposes and assumes the normalization of a system structured upon the violation of the world of life itself.
Extractivism and violence are interconnected concepts related by the logic of plunder, contamination, recolonization, and new dependence: the time-space of accumulation is precisely characterized by systematic recourse to violence. Extractivist practices operate as an ontological-political matrix of a new historical mode of conceiving and producing human social life, ultimately becoming the current world-system.
In recent decades, this violence that promotes a rupture in existence has expanded, and even exacerbated. Violence emerges in all those extractive and/or illicit economic processes (mining, illicit economies, drug trafficking, agribusiness, etc.), with a particular impact on the Global South, from Abya Yala to Africa and Asia in the process of accumulation.
Thus, violence can emerge hand in hand with authoritarian governments (for example, the governments of Javier Milei, Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, or Benjamin Netanyahu) whose ultra-liberal and colonialist policies harm the environment and social structures through repression and social control, even leading to militarism. We also see violence emerging in border necropolitics that the Global North erects against migration from the Global South, and within the borders of the Global South itself.
Currently, we witness a surge in violence, both intra and transborder. While the “green” capitalist metabolism demands further extraction of natural resources (lithium mining, rare earths, fuels, etc.) to meet its material and energy needs, there is also a parallel increase in drug trafficking and other illegal activities (money laundering circuits in collusion with state agents, mining companies engaged in illegal mineral extraction, etc.).
All these processes have an impact on both the environment and the social and community structures of sacrifice territories; many indigenous peoples see their culture and identity highly threatened. However, wherever cases of violence (resulting from political and/or economic processes) occur, counter-violences, decolonialities, and the struggles of environmental defenders emerge. These resistances allow us to mobilize imaginaries and collective struggles to approach another possible world.
In this issue of the Ecología Política Journal, we aim to illustrate all dimensions of violence, as well as to present counter-violence imaginaries and collective struggles, sharing diverse perspectives on the following thematic axes:
- Conceptualization, from political ecology, of the different forms of violence.
- Links between political processes, extractivism, and authoritarianism with violence (wars, colonialism, ultra-liberal policies, etc.).
- Links of state agents and companies with illicit activities (mining, drug trafficking, etc.).
- Extractivism as a source of violence: environmental degradation, racism, links between transborder illegal mining and the rise of drug trafficking, land grabbing, etc.
- These latter points in relation to the Anthropocene and Capitalocene: new political orders with the Earth.
- Migrations, ecological collapses, political crises, and border violence.
- Resistance to violence: counter-violences, decolonialities, struggles of environmental defenders.
This issue will be published in JUNE 2024
PROCEDURE AND DEADLINES FOR SUBMISSION
The submission of articles will take place in two steps.
- Article proposal submission (250 words max.). Deadline: 14th February 2024
Once received, the proposals will be evaluated by experts in the subject and by the issue’s guest editors. The authors whose proposals are selected will be invited to send a complete manuscript. The invitation to submit the full manuscript does not ensure its publication, as manuscripts will then undergo a further review process.
- Submission of the final version of the article (to be translated from English to Spanish, if necessary): 10th March 2024
Both the abstracts and the final versions of the articles have to be sent to the following e-mail address: articulos@ecologiapolitica.info.