Alexander Dunlap

Alexander Dunlap
Boston University | BU · Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS)

Doctor of Philosophy
Studying solar panel life-cycles and mining decarbonisation initiatives.

About

93
Publications
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Introduction
Dr. Alexander Dunlap is a research fellow at the Institute of Global Sustainability, Boston University. Alexander has examined the political ecology of low-carbon technologies, extractive development and police-military transformations in Mexico, Germany, Peru, France, Spain & Portugal. Currenlty a co-editor at Human Geography, Alexander also serve on the editorial boards Energy Research & Social Science, the Journal of Political Ecology & Globalizations.

Publications

Publications (93)
Article
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Political ecology has been slow to examine solar panel factories, even though manufacturing lower-carbon technologies sits at the crossroads of climate change mitigation and global markets. Influenced by environmental and energy justice, this article takes a political ecology approach to explore First Solar's manufacturing facilities in Perrysburg,...
Article
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Based on conversations with 38 interview respondents, four focus groups and participant observation, this article examines intensive solar energy development in east Riverside County, California. Focusing on the Desert Center area, it argues that environmental policy, expressed through market-imperatives and bureaucratically-centered modeling scien...
Article
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What is so-called 'green' extractivism and where did it come from? The introduction to this Special Section examines the origins and implications of the concept, linking it to a long history of exploitation, dispossession and (neo)colonialism under the guise of green-washing notions such as 'sustainable development.' Conducting an in-depth literatu...
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Where did postdevelopment thought go? Was its anti-development message too much for academia? While acknowledging some overlap between postdevelopment and mainstream academic decolonial thought, we argue that postdevelopment, and its conceptualization of the pluriverse directly challenges extractivism, statism, and capitalism or, in a word, develop...
Book
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This System is Killing Us is an insider look at the catastrophic effects that energy infrastructure and mining are having on communities, their land and our planet. Xander Dunlap spent a decade living and working with Indigenous activists and land defenders across the world to uncover evidence of the repression people have faced in the wake of unta...
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This article explores the seemingly unlikely intersection of jaguar conservation and green extractivism in the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico. The 'green' or environmental aspect of jaguar conservation, we argue, is largely manufactured, employing the qualities of ecosystems to market and advance forms of 'place-based' extraction. Analyzing jaguar conse...
Article
Replying to criticism to the term infrastructural colonization, this commentary article discusses the colonial and how colonization is conceived. Infrastructural colonization, as opposed to colonialism, takes a literal approach to territorial control, landscape and socio-cultural change, exploring the literal colonization of habitats, people, socia...
Poster
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Call for papers: The Pluriverse of transitions: towards anti-colonial and insurrectional energy transformations POLLEN 2024, June 11-13, and Human Geography Special Issue.
Article
This perspective article responses to the article 'Pluralizing energy justice: Incorporating feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous, and postcolonial perspectives' (Sovacool et al., 2023). While Sovacool and colleagues seeks to expand and, rightfully, address criticism of energy justice, we contend that by maintaining the framework of justice within the...
Article
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Below is a transcribed talk by Peter Gelderloos. This talk emerges from the book tour for The Solutions are Already Here: Strategies for an Ecological Revolution from Below. This talk polemically recapitulates themes within the book, advocating for an anti-authoritarian ecological revolution and, consequently, chastising the terms ‘climate crisis’...
Chapter
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The green economy and ‘green growth’ are not solutions to ecological and climate catastrophe. The dominate trajectory of techno-industrial development has to be reconsidered and placed within ecological limits. The ‘social’, related to environmental and climate justice, tends towards subordinating the ecological in the maintenance of modernist infr...
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This interview discusses energy justice, the university, academic research and autonomous politics. This dialogue expresses concern with energy, but also environmental, justice scholarship and movements. This entails the failure to adequately connect the continuity between (neo)colonialism, capitalism and statism in theory and action, which simulta...
Article
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The green economy and ‘green growth’ are not solutions to ecological and climate catastrophe. The dominate trajectory of techno-industrial development has to be reconsidered and placed within ecological limits. The ‘social’, related to environmental and climate justice, tends towards subordinating the ecological in the maintenance of modernist infr...
Article
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The generic template cover, £120 price point, no back cover description, and no paperback edition does a disservice to this book. If I had not systematically witnessed other mediocre books suffer this same fate, I would speculate that this was industry censorship. This book deserves the widest possible readership, and expensive hardbacks inhibit di...
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Isabelle Fremeaux & Jay Jordan. 2022. We are 'nature' defending itself: Entangling art, activism and autonomous zones. London, Pluto Press. 138 pp. + Endnotes and Index. £14.99(Paperback), ISBN 978-0-7453-4587-1 Reviewed by Alexander Dunlap.
Cover Page
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Presented below is a guide, or table of contents, that seeks to resist this fall into the academic abyss or irrelevance by offering a guide to contextualize themes, concepts and the general focus within the academic work developed by Alexander Dunlap. This guide emerged spontaneously in an attempt to offer a ‘platter’ or overview of their work to a...
Book
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Debates in Post-Development and Degrowth: Volume 2 is now available digitally! Click the link below to request a free physical copy. We will accommodate as many requests as possible. Building off the themes of the first edition, this issue contains three parts - 1) Theoretical Engagements: The Ideas We Need to Challenge; 2) False Solutions and Chan...
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As old as industrialism or civilization itself, socio-ecological problems are nothing new. Despite all efforts to resolve environmental dilemmas, socio-ecological catastrophe has only intensified. Governments, in response, have unveiled the green economy to confront ecological and climate catastrophe. The green economy, however, has worsened socio-...
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The European Union (EU) is highly dependent on importing raw materials for low-carbon infrastructures from around the globe. This material dependence has, since 2019, initiated legislation and efforts to intensify mining within the EU. The Iberian Peninsula remains a principle target area for the EU's critical raw material (CRM) mining initiatives....
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This introduction provides an initial approach to the conceptual framework of infrastructural harm. It draws upon existing scholarship to discuss infrastructures as relational arrangements co-formative of harm. By approaching infrastructures as sites of ongoing socio-political and environmental antagonism, we pay attention to the ways in which infr...
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Highlighting areas for investigation, the conclusion briefly discusses five areas in need of greater attention and care. This includes challenging further: (1) The “fossil fuels versus renewable energy dichotomy” and related supply webs; (2) quantitative data collection and energy models; (3) the normative language in energy research; (4) greater e...
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This article critically examines the GND (Green New Deal) platform by exploring the reality of energy development under the European Green Deal (EGD). Taking a special interest in degrowth positions on energy development, the article argues that the European Green Deal is an exercise in necropolitics; intensifying market relationships, extraction,...
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Book Review by Alexander Dunlap: The Solutions are Already Here: Tactics for Ecological Revolution From Below, by Peter Gelderloos (Pluto Press, 2022).
Book
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Policing and ecological crises – and all the inequalities, discrimination, and violence they entail – are pressing contemporary problems. Ecological degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change threaten local communities and ecosystems, and, cumulatively, the planet as a whole. Police brutality, wars, paramilitarism, private security operatio...
Book
Policing and ecological crises – and all the inequalities, discrimination, and violence they entail – are pressing contemporary problems. Ecological degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change threaten local communities and ecosystems, and, cumulatively, the planet as a whole. Police brutality, wars, paramilitarism, private security operatio...
Chapter
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Across the world, ecological destruction, or ecocide, is enforced, protected, and facilitated by police, military, private security, and mercenary forces, often against militant resistance by local communities. Yet, the impacts of policing on ecologies and nonhumans are rarely discussed, if not entirely ignored. This introduction to Enforcing Ecoci...
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Where are green anarchist and anti-civilization thoughts in academia? This article offers an encounter between green anarchism and decolonial theory to demonstrate its relevance as an action-oriented practice carried out across the world by groups or individuals rejecting domination and subjugation by state, capital, and other forms of power. This...
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Local support is instrumental to natural resource extraction. Examining militarization beyond the battlefield, this article discusses the organization of volunteers in three controversial resource extraction projects. Drawing on the political ecology of counter-insurgency and 4 years of research that examined wind energy development in Mexico, coal...
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What radical tactics might those seeking transformational action on climate or environmental sustainability undertake? What options are capable of stopping actors and institutions who already realize their actions and behavior may harm millions, degrade the biosphere, and contaminate the climate, but continue to do so, despite the scientific or mor...
Article
This article highlights the misleading calculations, reductions and overstatements of the recent Perspective article: 'More transitions, less risk: How renewable energy reduces risks form mining, trade and political dependence' by Jim Kane and Robert Idel. While in theory we might agree with the general claim of Jim Kane and Robert Idel 'that a tra...
Chapter
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The military and police are intimately related to ecological and climate catastrophe. Not only do repressive forces facilitate land grabbing, mining and establishing toxic industries, but they also necessitate these activities for their own equipment, vehicles, and, weapons, which damage ecosystems and socio-ecological relationships across the worl...
Conference Paper
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These ongoing developments make comparative enquiry into the multifaceted connections between ‘green extractivism’ and violent conflict timely. This panel looks for fresh empirical and theoretical insights into the ways ‘decarbonization’, ‘green growth’ and climate change mitigation policies shape and are shaped by dynamics of conflict and violence...
Article
50 Days Author Link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1do1w7tZ6ZtdQu This Perspective article, offers a commentary intervention to the article, ‘Transactional Colonialism in Wind Energy Investments: Energy Injustices against Vulnerable People in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec’ by Jacobo Ramirez and Steffen Böhm. After the introduction, the first section...
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‘Green’ resource extraction is often positioned as solution to biodiversity loss and anthropogenic climate change, based on green capitalist fantasies of de-coupled, or ‘sustainable’ industrial growth and ‘green mining.’ Anarchists, but specifically green anarchists, have long been conscious of the green economic efforts to rebrand industrial and e...
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Climate change now serves to justify new mandates for increasing ‘clean’ and ‘renewable’ energy, which affirms the existing European trajectory of infrastructural expansion. Employing a multi-sited political ecology analysis of infrastructure (MSPEAI), this article connects five environmental conflicts via a 400-kV high-voltage power line (HVPL). T...
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Climate change negotiations have failed the world. Despite more than thirty years of high-level, global talks on climate change, we are still seeing carbon emissions rise dramatically. This edited volume, comprising leading and emerging scholars and climate activists from around the world, takes a critical look at what has gone wrong and what is to...
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A revised version of the “End Green Delusions” essay (Verso, 2018), this chapter argues that there is no such thing as renewable energy, only fossil fuel+. Raw material resource extraction for so-called renewable energy development relates to spreading socio-ecological degradation. Recognizing the supply chain costs for “renewable energy” as well a...
Book
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This journal, Debates in Post-Development & Degrowth: Volume 1, published in collaboration with Tvergastein, emerges from the conversations, thinking, and course papers of the Spring 2021 course Debates in Post-Development & Degrowth at the Centre for Development and the Environment (SUM), University of Oslo, Norway. The University of Oslo (UiO) an...
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“Other extractivism,” Eduardo Gudynas (2021, p. 10) exclaims, “such as those found in agriculture, forestry and fisheries, go unnoticed.” While Gudynas is making a comparison with hydrocarbon and mineral extraction sectors, this concern does not apply to Ben McKay's new book, The Political Economy of Agrarian Extractivism: Lessons from Bolivia. Thi...
Chapter
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The Case for Degrowth is a short, accessible—even friendly—exhibition of degrowth history, ideas and proposals. Summarizing the book, the review expresses concern with how the book engages the Green New Deal, ignores anarchist contributions to social struggle and omits squatting as an existing degrowth pathway and form of political struggle. Despit...
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This article introduces the concept of renewable energy, then breaking down five ways to understand its reality via raw material exaction; land contracting; socio-ecological impacts; energy-use; and decommissioning. This demonstrates the serous stakes involved in the uncritical embrace and celebration of so-called “renewable energy” for peace and j...
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This article examines the struggle against the new Électricité de France (EDF) wind park, Gunaa Sicarú, in Unión Hidalgo (UH), Mexico. Foregrounding Indigenous land defense, the article refers to wind energy as ‘wind factories’ to discuss agrarian change in the region. Revealing the counterinsurgency colonial model as a foundational approach to ext...
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Ecological catastrophe and global inequality are pressing, yet socio-ecologically destructive natural resource extraction continues unabated. This special issue explores the strategies and tactics employed by large-scale mining and energy companies to render extraction socio-politically feasible in the face of multi-pronged opposition. Extraction,...
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Inspired by recent works by Lina Álvarez and Brendan Coolsaet in Capitalism Nature Socialism, this commentary introduces the concept of anarchist decolonization for further exploration. Recognizing constructive decolonial criticisms, the article briefly reviews the multiplicity of anarchist positions and their relationship to anti-colonial/decoloni...
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This article proposes a political ecology of resistance. This is done by putting forward insurrectionary political ecology as a lens of research and struggle, through the confluence of the complementary "political" practice of insurrectionary anarchism and the "ecological" method of "no-till natural farming." While seemingly different, the article...
Poster
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LENGTH: Abstracts: 250 to 500 words. Police violence and climate catastrophe are both integral to our contemporary political and social orders. Like ecological crises, contemporary police institutions and tactics emerge from historical systems of intersecting racialized, class-based and patriarchal domination. While policy and popular discourses of...
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Dans cet article, Alexander Dunlap, chercheur en écologie politique et en anthropologie à l'université d'Oslo, s'intéresse aux infrastructures énergétiques, notamment dans le secteur des fameuses « énergies vertes » ainsi que les résistances qu'elles rencontrent partout dans le monde. Après des travaux sur les éoliennes au Mexique et les mines de c...
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Governments and corporations exclaim that “energy transition” to “renewable energy” is going to mitigate ecological catastrophe. French President Emmanuel Macron makes such declarations, but what is the reality of energy infrastructure development? Examining the development of a distributional energy transformer substation in the village of Saint-V...
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At the root of techno-capitalist development – popularly marketed as “modernity,” “progress” or “development” – is the continuous and systematic processes of natural resource extraction. Reviewing wind energy development in Mexico, coal mining in Germany and copper mining in Peru, this article seeks to strengthen the post-liberal or structural appr...
Chapter
This chapter discusses critical agrarian studies and political ecology, two of the most central academic fields responsible for charting land control, territorialization and extraction in the service of techno-capitalist development. These academic subfields, we can say, specialize in examining the parts and developmental trends of the Worldeater(s...
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The book concludes with reflections on human power in the face of the Worldeater, outlining in a more hopeful mode some of the possible ways out of its entrails. The conclusion responds to the crucial question: do humans have the power to resist the allure of the Worldeater and escape its entrails—and what can they do? The conclusion advocates the...
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In this chapter, we bring total extractivism into view of the militarization of nature. This involves an extensive review of research into the violent technologies of extraction, including studies of the requisite levels of land control and territorialization for sustaining and accelerating the present techno-capitalist trajectory. Through this rev...
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This chapter seeks to answer how and why the world is being consumed, digested and ultimately reconfigured. It presents the concept of the Worldeater(s) in its manifold forms through an extensive theoretical discussion of the metaphysics—spirit—and shape-shifting processes underpinning techno-capitalist development. While unconventional in academic...
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The earth and its inhabitants are on a trajectory of cascading socio-ecological crisis driven by techno-capitalist development. Presenting the aim and scope of this book, the introduction lays out the key conceptual issue of total extractivism, naming the spirit and amalgamation of violent technologies comprising the totalizing imperative and tensi...
Chapter
This chapter interrogates the subtle shifts and blurring lines between conventional extraction—mineral and hydrocarbon—and ‘green’ extraction—intensive agriculture and renewable energy. Through the careful assembly of extensive amounts of empirics straddling these modalities of extraction, we identify and uncover a crucial nexus. We argue that this...
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The multiplicity of violent techniques employed to impose land control and extraction remains under acknowledged. This article reviews research conducted between the years 2014 and 2018 and draws on three case studies: wind energy development in Mexico, coal mining in Germany, and copper mining in Peru. The idea of 'engineering extraction' is advan...
Book
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Offering a thought provoking theoretical conversation around ecological crisis and natural resource extraction, this book suggests that we are on a trajectory geared towards total extractivism guided by the mythological Worldeater. The authors discuss why and how we have come to live in this catastrophic predicament, rooting the present in an origi...
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This article identifies an emerging faultline in critical geography and political ecology scholarship by reviewing recent debates on three neoliberal environmental governance initiatives: Payments for Ecosystem Services, the United Nations programme for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries and carbon-...
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Wind parks are widely propagated as 'a solution' or in many ways as 'a gift' to mitigate climate change and instigate economic growth, which should be 'rolled inside community gates' through new legislation enabling investments. This paper dissects two experiences of wind energy development in Crete, Greece and Oaxaca, Mexico, exploring key commona...
Book
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Renewing Destruction examines how wind energy projects impact people and their environments. Wind energy development, in Mexico and most countries, fall into a ‘roll out’ neoliberal strategy that is justified by climate change mitigation programs that are continuing a process of land and wind resources grabbing for profit. The result has been an ex...
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The Tía Maria copper mine situated above the agricultural Tambo Valley, southwest Peru, has sparked nearly ten years of protracted conflict. This conflict began in 2009, yet Southern Copper Peru or Southern, a subsidiary of Grupo Mexico, has faced ardent resistance. This article explores the ‘political reactions from above’, examining how Southern...
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Revisiting the village of Álvaro Obregón, or Gui'Xhi' Ro in Zapotec, this interview discusses village life since the wind energy conflict of 2012-2015. This interview serves as a companion piece or epilogue to a previously published article in the Journal of Political Ecology (JPE), titled: "Insurrection for land, sea and dignity: resistance and au...
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Providing a glimpse into the reality of wind energy development, the story of Álvaro Obregón is one of resistance. Álvaro Obregón is a primarily Zapotec semi-subsistence community located near the entrance of the Santa Teresa sand bar (Barra), where in 2011 Mareña Renovables initiated the process of building 102 wind turbines. Demonstrating the com...
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The German Rhineland is home to the world's largest opencast lignite coal mine and human-made hole – the Hambach mine. Over the last seven years, RWE, the mine operator, has faced an increase in militant resistance, culminating in the occupation of the Hambacher Forest and acts of civil disobedience and sabotage. The mine provides a European case s...
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The coastal Isthmus of Tehuantepec region of Oaxaca, Mexico – known locally as the Istmo – is regarded as one of the best wind energy generating sites in the world. Marketed as a preeminent solution to mitigating climate change, wind energy is now applying increasing pressure on indigenous groups in the region. The article begins by outlining a def...
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This paper examines the normalized power and social effects of flush-toilets. Beginning by laying a theoretical foundation with the concepts of structural violence, primitive accumulation, and modernized poverty, the section continues by outlining William Dugger’s four invaluation processes as a framework of approach. Then, a brief history of flush...
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The Isthmus of Tehuantepec region of southwest Oaxaca, Mexico, known locally as the Istmo, was identified in 2003 as a prime site for wind energy development. Supported by climate change mitigation legislation, a ‘wind rush’ engulfed the Istmo. Now, La Ventosa sits surrounded by high-tension wires and wind turbines, some only 280 meters from homes....
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On November 2014, the first Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) consultation was called for the Eólica del Sur wind project in Juchitán de Zaragoza, Mexico. Lasting eight months, the consultation was responding not only to the UN International Labor Organization’s (ILO) convention 169 that Mexico signed in 1990 but also to widespread uprisings...
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Sustainable development and climate change mitigation policies, Dunlap and Fairhead argue, have instigated and renewed old conflicts over land and natural resources, deploying military techniques of counterinsurgency to achieve land control. Wind energy development, a popular tool of climate change mitigation policies, has consequently generated co...
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This inquiry seeks to establish the importance of subreption as an approach to economic and social evolution that also proves integral to the tradition of radical institutionalism. We relate subreption's etymology and appearances in Roman, Canon and Scots Law, as well as in Philosophy, to its applications found in writings advanced by Thorstein Veb...
Article
This paper provides a comparative analysis of agricultural biotechnology and the United Nations program for reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). Despite the existing differences between the technical manipulation of biological systems and a conservation program aimed at reducing carbon and protecting forests, the two...
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Policies addressing climate change are driving major transformations in access to global land, forests and water as they create new ‘green’ markets that reinforce, and attracts the financial grid and its speculators. This leads us to examine the rise of state violence and subsequent environmental policies in forests, transferring into both ‘fortres...
Chapter
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The following is an academic writing on social warfare. This project began some years ago with the intention to gain insight into this attractive term and was later put on paper to animate a theory of power that could discuss the old subtle and evolving techniques of manipulation and management that are used against people in the present. This theo...

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