Polyvocal articulations of climate justice and the commonality of loss

The political-intellectual project of climate justice (CJ) is diverse in its analyses and proposals. Recently, some sympathetic critics have worried that, together with its often-contentious tenor, this polyvocality renders CJ incoherent and/or ill-suited to legal and policy application. Divergent choices of framing and means do matter, since they entail implications for the development of constituencies, alliances, and political, legal, and/or policy action. This paper argues, however, that rather than incoherence, the variation, fluidity, and complexity of CJ evidence logical adaptations to differing positionalities and circumstances, made necessary by the multiple, geographically varying dimensions of climate injustice. Critical political geographic perspectives (which happen to complement those of many movement adherents) help to expose this adaptive logic. Correspondingly, diverse articulations of CJ and their implications help show how political spaces and ecologies matter in contesting the multiple inequalities and power moves with which climate injustice is intertwined. Moreover, recent public health analyses and testimonies from affected groups suggest that shared experiences of rising, disproportionate climate-related death and other forms of individual and collective loss increasingly underpin and motivate CJ's multiple forms. The trajectories of compounding loss, still-rising greenhouse gas emissions, and the growing hegemony of CJ in a variety of settings underscore the need for continuing development of extensive solidarities among dispersed and differently positioned affected groups and potential allies. Though other approaches – including those which address climate injustices without naming them as such – may bear fruit, such extensive articulations of CJ are crucial needs that intellectual labor can help to meet.     

“Living together separately”: Thoughts on the relationship between political science and political geography

In their provocatively titled book, Living Together Separately, Michael Romann and Alex Weingrod argue that the shared terrain of Jerusalem obscures deep divisions in the physical and social lives of its Arab and Jewish ethnic communities (Romann & Weingrod, 1991). Multiple divisions exist not only among peoples sharing a common space; they are also found among communities of scholars sharing common intellectual interests. This has certainly been the case of Political Science and Political Geography during much of the twentieth century. Members of both disciplinary communities seek insights into the role of politics and political structures in human society, yet until recently they have pursued their work within orbits that only rarely intersected. They attended different conferences and symposia, they employed different methodological tools, and they did not draw heavily on each others published work.Recent theoretical and empirical developments have begun to erode the barriers separating Political Science and Political Geography, and a discussion of the relationship between the disciplines is thus both timely and welcome. Professor Elazar is an appropriate person to place at the center of this discussion, for his work as a political scientist is unusual sensitivity to geography. Professor Elazar's comments about research orientations and career constraints provide an interesting point of departure for such a discussion, but to understand the nature and depth of the divide between the disciplines it is important to consider the core intellectual constructs and practices that have characterized Political Science and Political Geography during the twentieth century. These have fostered theoretical orientations and research approaches that are sufficiently different from one another to create significant barriers to interdisciplinary contact.     

Limits to climate action - Narratives of bioenergy with carbon capture and storage

In recent years, bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) has been awarded a key role in climate mitigation scenarios explored by integrated assessment models and referenced in reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Because a majority of scenarios limiting global warming to 2 °C or 1,5 °C include vast deployment of BECCS, a critical discussion has emerged among experts about the moral implications of thus introducing an unproven technology into the policy realm.In this paper, we analyse this discussion as it has played out between 2013 and 2019, with a focus on how expert narratives are constructed in the mass media about the possibilities for decarbonisation within the current political-economic order. We find there are almost no narratives that support massive deployment of BECCS, and that all narratives presuppose limits to decarbonisation imposed by the current political-economic system. The perception of such limits lead some to argue, through deterministic and apolitical narratives, for the necessity of negative emissions technologies, while others argue instead that “degrowth” is the only solution. Thus, there is a distinct lack of positive narratives about how capitalism can bring about decarbonisation.     

The metropolitanization of Israel's settlement policy: The colonization of the West Bank as a strategy of spatial restructuring

Israel's West Bank settlements are a central point of contention in the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Overall, however, their rapid proliferation has been generally understood through the lens of an ideologically centered approach that highlights, specifically, the centrality of the national religious settlers' movement. Against this background, the article focuses on the overlooked reality of large, state-sponsored suburban settlements – and in particular on the role of the Israeli Ministry of Housing in their establishment between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s. Building on contributions in the field of political economy and political geography, we conceive the actions of the Ministry in the occupied West Bank as a result of a broader strategy of spatial restructuring. By considering both economic and political imperatives underlying this strategy, our analysis offers a more comprehensive assessment of the factors behind Israel's settlement policy. Drawing on a broad range of empirical sources, from archival material to in-depth interviews with Israeli planners, we argue that the proliferation of settlements has been largely the outcome of a process of metropolitanization – i.e. of the dynamics of urban development of Israel's main metropolitan centers and the adoption of a new, post-Keynesian policy paradigm based on market-oriented economic development. This process has constituted a major factor for the settlements' growth and, ultimately, in the emergence and naturalization of a new territorial configuration in the area of Israel/Palestine.     

Animating the urban: an ethological and geographical conversation

Abstract

Urban animals and their political ecologies constitute an arena of geographical scholarship that has intensified in recent years. Yet, little headway has been made in terms of understanding how sentient creatures inhabit and negotiate dynamic, metabolic environments. Focusing on urban macaques in Indian cities, the paper develops a conversation between geography and ethology. Firstly, the conversation provides insights into what urbanisation might entail for animals. Secondly, it assays ways in which non-human knowledges enable rethinking what expertise counts in urban governance. Thirdly, the conversation foregrounds other spatial topologies of the urban that become evident when animals’ lifeworlds are taken into account. The paper advances efforts to animate urban political ecology in registers yet inattentive to non-human lifeworlds. It concludes by reflecting upon the purchase of such etho-geographical conversations generate for political ecologies of urbanisation.     

The unbearable heaviness of climate coloniality

The extremely uneven and inequitable impacts of climate change mean that differently-located people experience, respond to, and cope with the climate crisis and related vulnerabilities in radically different ways. The coloniality of climate seeps through everyday life across space and time, weighing down and curtailing opportunities and possibilities through global racial capitalism, colonial dispossessions, and climate debts. Decolonizing climate needs to address the complexities of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, international development, and geopolitics that contribute to the reproduction of ongoing colonialities through existing global governance structures, discursive framings, imagined solutions, and interventions. This requires addressing both epistemic violences and material outcomes. By weaving through such mediations, I offer an understanding of climate coloniality that is theorized and grounded in lived experiences.     

The unequal geographies of climate finance: Climate injustice and dependency in the world system

Central to climate justice is the question of who will pay for the mitigation and adaptation efforts needed as the climate crisis worsens, particularly in countries that bear little responsibility for global greenhouse gas emissions. Climate finance is a complex set of mechanisms intended to address this concern. World-systems theory has long understood international development assistance as a tool that reproduces spatial dependency between states. In this paper, we ask whether climate finance follows the expectations of world-systems theory and reproduces relationships of dependency, or if it instead advances climate justice and challenges spatial dependency in the world-system. Through this analysis, we consider the implications of climate finance for world-systems theory. We use recent empirical data to ask whether climate finance follows or challenges world-systems theory expectations, focusing on five areas: (1) spatial flows of climate finance between the core, semi-periphery, and periphery; (2) the governance of climate finance institutions; (3) the types of projects supported by climate finance; (4) the relationship of projects to dominant systems of extraction, production, and consumption; and (5) the agency of peripheral state and non-state actors in shaping climate finance in relation to their interests. Taken together, we argue that climate finance in many ways reproduces relationships of dependency, though potential avenues exist for contesting this unequal balance of power and for advocating for climate justice. This case illustrates the need to approach analyses of dependency in a nuanced way, interrogating specific processes through which dependency is produced and contested across scales.     

The bourgeoisification of the Green-Line: The new Israeli middle-class and the Suburban Settlement

This paper focuses on Kochav-Yair and Oranit, two localities that exemplify the Israeli Suburban Settlement phenomenon. With the first being developed by a selective group of families and the latter by a single private entrepreneur, yet both with the full support of the state, they represent the selective privatisation of the national settlement project during the 1980s. Examining the geopolitical, social and economic interests that accompanied their development, this paper illustrates how both projects incorporated the upper-middle-class bourgeoisie in the national territorial effort along the border with the occupied West-Bank (the Green-Line). Analysing the planning and construction process of both case studies, as well as their spatial characteristics, this paper explains how the upwardly middle-class and its contractors were granted substantial planning rights. Consequently, enabling them to influence the production of space while promoting a new local suburban typology that is based on better living standards, private family life and a distinctive isolated community. Therefore, this paper illustrates the Suburban Settlement typology as an outcome of the bourgeoisification of the Green-Line, which domesticated the former frontier area and enabled its inclusion in the greater national consensus.     

The impact of precarious security conditions on renewable electrification: The case of the West Bank

Recent energy-related writing has highlighted the spatiality of renewable energy and its possible affinity to geopolitics. Yet, energy geography and geopolitics literature lack reference to security and how it may shape the energy landscape. This study unpacks the elusive concepts of security and territoriality and operationalizes them into measurable variables. Using statistical and qualitative methods, including an original dataset based on planning and building protocols, this study tests the interplay between security conditions and territoriality on renewable energy adoption. It examines the case study of the contested Area C territory in the West Bank, within the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The findings show that precarious security conditions discourage renewable energy diffusion, particularly when security is linked to territorial conflict. As land-intensive infrastructures, renewable energy systems challenge territorial claims. This study demonstrates how space acts as an intermediate variable connecting security concerns with the diffusion of renewable technology. Security interests use spatial planning as a key mechanism to negatively influence on renewable energy diffusion in contested territory, such as Area C, where power asymmetry heavily leans to the advantage of one party. These findings contradict the argument that renewable energy is a catalyst for peace building. They show how renewable energy projects create inequalities and are often held hostage by the territorial dispute between Israel and the Palestinians.     

Narratives of climate change: introduction

This paper introduces a special feature on narratives of climate change, containing papers by Richard Hamblyn, Sverker Sörlin, Michael Bravo and Diana Liverman. The feature reflects the rising cultural profile of climate change in the public sphere, as represented, for example, by Al Gore's documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth, and art exhibitions devoted to the subject.     

The Guests' Guests: Palestinian Refugees,Lebanese Civilians,and the War of 2006

Abstract: In the war between Israel and Hizbullah in 2006, 10,000 displaced Lebanese citizens were granted shelter and hospitality by Palestinian refugees in the camps of southern Lebanon. For the duration of the war, the Palestinian guests became hosts to their own hosts, and this temporary reversal of the usual relations of refuge set the scene for the rebuilding and renegotiation of relations between Palestinian refugees and their host country and its citizens. This paper addresses these events through a focus on the nature, politics and ethics of Palestinian hospitality and argues that hospitality was not simply a selfless act of giving, but also an instrumental act that had the potential to transform Palestinian–Lebanese relations in lasting ways.     

The archaeology of climate change in the Caribbean

This paper emerges from an attempt to more actively integrate archaeology with ongoing geographical and environmental discussions of human responses to the effects of climate change in the Caribbean. If archaeology is to contribute to the mitigation strategies currently being developed, then robust interpretations are necessary that can be practically integrated with inter-disciplinary action. This paper discusses the methods needed to provide the high-resolution data and interpretations required using archaeological and palaeoenvironmental research from a case study area in northern Cuba. Using data collected from an ongoing collaborative archaeological research project with the Cuban Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, we evaluate whether it is possible to make useful interpretations of human response to past changes in sea-level, precipitation and hurricane activity. Specifically, the effects of these activities on the changing nature of settlement locations, food procurement strategies and household architecture among pre-Columbian communities are evaluated. Indigenous mitigation strategies are identified and used to inform modern day preparation for the impacts of climate change in the Caribbean.     

The Palestinian village of Ijzim during the 1948 war: Forming an anthropological history through villagers accounts and army documents

In the summer of 1948, following over six months of clashes, the Palestinian village of Ijzim was captured by Israeli troops and its inhabitants were uprooted and dispersed throughout the Middle East. Ijzim was one of roughly 400 Palestinian villages and towns that were depopulated during the 1948 war in Palestine. The combination of information gathered from Israeli army documents and the refugees' oral accounts, collected in Israel, Jordan and the Occupied Territories of the West Bank, yields a complex picture of the local guerilla fighting and the social conditions that influenced the final consequences. Two main arguments are presented along the historical recounting of the events. The one sets the microcosmos of one village in contrast to the macro picture of the war. The other highlights the uniqueness and contribution of oral histories as sources that reveal facets otherwise missing. 1     

The whistleblower and the canary: rhetorical constructions of climate change

This paper is concerned with the historical dimension of the current debates on climate change, and argues that the history of the understanding of climate change has itself become part of the rhetorical account. Key historic moments of disclosure and revelation have become central to the ways in which climate change is presented as a persuasive narrative today. This paper takes a discursive approach to exploring the background of these signal moments in climate change history, and aims to show how they have helped to shape the terms of the current debate.     

Conventions of climate change: constructions of danger and the dispossession of the atmosphere

Climate change has emerged as one of the key issues of the early years of the twenty-first century, bringing together concerns about human relations to nature, the responsibility of rich nations to poorer, the links from local activities to global conditions, and the obligations of present to future generations. This paper focuses on three key ‘narratives’ that are enshrined in international climate policy – asserting that ‘dangerous climate change’ is to be avoided; that the responsibility for climate change is common but differentiated; and that the market (in the form of carbon trading) is the best way to reduce the danger. The goal of the paper is to analyse the origins of these narratives, the power relations they reflect and promote, and some of the concepts and images used to support them, including those of climate determinism, climate stabilisation, ‘burning embers’, ‘tipping points’, Global Warming Potentials, targets and timetables, and carbon credits. I argue that by choosing the market solution of trading carbon we have created a new and surreal commodity, unfairly allocated pollution rights to nation states based on 1990 emission levels, and established a new set north–south relations and carbon transactions in the name of sustainable development.     

Trapped in mirror-images: The rhetoric of maps in Israel/Palestine

The map of Israel/Palestine has long been used by both Israelis and Palestinians, from their unequal power positions, as a celebrated national symbol. It is virtually the same map, depicting a sliver-shaped land between River Jordan and the Mediterranean, two overlapping homelands in one territory. Thus, a single geo-body appears to contain two antagonistic and asymmetrical nations, locked in a bitter struggle. The article interprets the uncanny mirror-maps of Israel/Palestine by drawing on recent work in critical cartography. One approach has read maps as rhetorical claims for power and over territory; indeed, the mirror-maps of Israel/Palestine are often read as indications of maximalist territorial ambitions and hidden wishes to “wipe the other off the map”. However, this article suggests an alternative, de-territorialised reading of political maps as “empty signifiers” of multiple meanings. Following analysis of maps as objects of performance, whose meaning depends on users and contexts, the article emphasises the ritualistic sacralisation of the Israel/Palestine map. Embedded within discourses of memory and history, maps are tools of narrating the nation, often in diasporic contexts, carrying with them vast emotional significance to both peoples. These issues were largely left unaddressed by the territorial paradigm which has dominated scholarship and political negotiations. Moving the discussion of geography beyond narrow territorial claims towards an appreciation of the richness and heterogeneity of space is crucial, yet faces formidable challenges both politically and conceptually.     

Between improvement and sacrifice: Othering and the (bio)political ecology of climate change

In this article, we argue that othering is central to the government of climate change. Critically engaging with Foucault’s ideas on biopolitics and racism, we elaborate a conceptual perspective for analysing how such a “technology of government” operates. We review diverse literatures from geography, political ecology, critical adaptation studies and the environmental humanities dealing with discursive constructions of the other in three exemplary areas of intervention—mitigation (particularly “green” mineral extraction for renewable energy production); constructions of “vulnerability” in adaptation policies; and the governing of “climate migrants”. We contend that these interventions largely work through the extension of capitalist relations, underpinned by racist and colonial ways of seeing populations and territories as “in need of improvement”. And that, by legitimising and depoliticizing such interventions, and by suspending responsibility for their unwanted or even deadly impacts, othering helps to preserve existing relations of racial, patriarchal and class domination in the face of climate-induced social upheavals. Othering, we conclude, is not only a feature of fossil fuelled development, but a way of functioning of capitalist governmentality more broadly—which has important implications for thinking about emancipatory and climate-just transformations.     

Rethinking the Historiographical Impulse: The History of Ancient Israel as a Problem

The first part of this paper provides some insights into the problematic nature of the genre “history of ancient Israel”, both in terms of historiography and of historical epistemology. It is argued that the concept “history of ancient Israel” is essentially valid within a particular modern theological or biblical historiographical context. As such, this history of ancient Israel may indeed progress and generate new understandings but is nonetheless seriously limited by its main concern with “biblical Israel”. It is also proposed that in order to overcome these thematic and epistemological historical limitations, a wider history of ancient Palestine or the Southern Levant should be envisioned, into which to understand the epigraphic and archaeological realia of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, together with other contemporary polities in the region, and the later development of biblical traditions and texts. The second part of the paper addresses questions of ethnogenesis, socio-political organization and identity in the light of the previous discussion, setting the stage for an alternative history of Israel and other historical realities in ancient Palestine.     

Emotional healing as part of environmental and climate justice processes: Frameworks and community-based experiences in times of environmental suffering

This paper seeks to discuss the political role of healing practices in the context of climate and environmental justice struggles. We rely on literature and practices that have identified healing as a means for liberation from structural oppression and physical and symbolic violence, to humans, non-humans and nature – namely emotional political ecologies, transformative and healing justice and communitarian feminism. We also briefly discuss the experience of three collectives in Mexico, Colombia, and Spain who develop healing strategies as a way to emotionally support local communities exposed to territorial, environmental, and climate impacts and injustice. We argue that by further addressing the political dimensions of healing in environmental and climate justice, researchers, activists, and practitioners could expand the conceptualisation of (a) the spatial and temporal scales of climate justice by further engaging with the inter- and intra-generational emotional implications of environmental injustice, and (b) environmental and climate justice as a multidimensional and nonlinear collective emotional process.     

Isolation Through Humanitarianism: Subaltern Geopolitics of the Siege on Gaza

Scholars have argued that in attempts to achieve geopolitical goals, siege often results in covert assaults against civilian populations. In the Gazan context, siege subjects are rendered as surplus to the Israeli state, and are therefore isolated and deprived of basic human needs as well as human rights. In 2006, siege was enacted against Gaza, enforced by the Egyptian and Israeli militaries. As a consequence, the population of Gaza is isolated from the exchange of goods, services, people, and ideas. This article begins with an analysis of siege as a violent process and as a subset of occupation practices. Using ethnographic data collected in Gaza between 2009 and 2014, this article mobilizes the methods and approach of subaltern geopolitics to undermine the notion of siege as a humanitarian alternative to war. This study reveals the micro‐scale, graduated nature of siege and its impacts on the civilians living in Gaza.