Ecological Destruction and (Anti)Colonial Politics

Abstract

This panel interrogates the linkages between (anti)colonial politics and environmental destruction. Specifically, it explores these linkages across critiques of racialization and capitalist accumulation, democratic politics and social (and anticolonial) movements as well as environmental justice and international criminal law. Scholarship to be presented on this panel examines these issues across diverse geo-political areas and through radical democratic, non-elite theoretical perspectives as well as through the conceptual tools of international law. More concretely, research shared on this panel advances knowledge of the following issues. “Racing Climate Change” identifies environmental elements of racialization that yield a mutual implication of racial vulnerability and climate vulnerability in the context of Caribbean post-colonial politics. “Cyprus: From Sugar Island to Cotton Island” provides a long historical view on the commodification of nature as a vehicle of capitalist overaccumulation, which in turn drove colonial bureaucracies and their signature transnational socio-ecological relations. “Environmental Movements and Avant-Garde Political Agency” analyzes environmental social movements from a perspective of (anarcho-Marxian) democratic theory to distil the potential for innovative normative imaginations of the environment in such movements. “Inherited Worlds of Anticolonialism” examines (Bermudian and Garveyist) non-elite anticolonial thought and especially its resonances with global environmental movements and environmental ideas about colonial repair. Lastly, “International Criminal Law and Ecological Damage” examines theoretical articulations of nature and human agency through the professional lenses provided by international law to examine the geo-political importance of the newly proposed international crime of ‘ecocide.’ As a result, this panel opens up a conversation about (resisting) colonialism and climate destruction that relates questions of racialization, capitalist accumulation, anticolonial political thought, social movements and international legal innovations to one another.

Title	Details
Inherited Worlds of Environmental Anticolonialism c. 1890-1950	View Paper Details
Environmental Movements and Avant-Garde Political Agency	View Paper Details
International Criminal Law and Ecological Damage: Ecocide vis-à-vis Crimes against Humanity	View Paper Details
Cyprus, from a Sugar Island to a Cotton Island: Nature, Transition to Capitalism, and Colonialism	View Paper Details