Oil, Power and Social Differentiation: A Political Ecology of Hydrocarbon Extraction in Ghana

While there is a voluminous scholarship focused on the nexus between resource extraction and development, the issue of how the harms and benefits of extraction are differentiated among several stakeholders based on factors such as their access to power, authority over decision-making, social status, and gender require further examination. This paper combines theoretical insights from assemblage thinking and political ecology to unpack the intertwined range of actors, networks, and structures of power that inform the differentiated benefits and harms of hydrocarbon extraction in Ghana. It can be observed from this study that power serves as a crucial ingredient in understanding relations among social groups, including purported beneficiaries of extractive activities, and other actors that constitute the networked hydrocarbon industry. Scale also reveals the relational nature of the different levels (i.e. global, national, sub-national, local) at which the socio-ecological ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ of hydrocarbon extraction become manifest. Based on these findings, the paper contributes to ongoing scholarly and policy discussions around extractivism by showing how a multi-scalar analysis reveals a more complex picture of the distributional politics, power asymmetry, and injustice that underpin resource extraction.

One-Size Does Not Fit All—A Networked Approach to Community-Based Monitoring in Large River Basins

Monitoring methods based on Indigenous knowledge have the potential to contribute to our understanding of large watersheds. Research in large, complex, and dynamic ecosystems suggests a participatory approach to monitoring—that builds on the diverse knowledges, practices, and beliefs of local people—can yield more meaningful outcomes than a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Here we share the results of 12 community-based, participatory monitoring projects led by Indigenous governments and organizations in the Mackenzie River Basin (2015–2018). Specifically, we present and compare the indicators and monitoring methods developed by each of these community-based cases to demonstrate the specificity of place, culture, and context. A scalar analysis of these results suggests that the combination of core (common) indicators used across the basin, coupled with others that are meaningful at local level, create a methodological bricolage—a mix of tools, methods, and rules-in-use that are fit together. Our findings, along with those of sister projects in two other major watersheds (Amazon, Mekong), confront assumptions that Indigenous-led community-based monitoring efforts are too local to offer insights about large-scale systems. In summary, a networked approach to community-based monitoring that can simultaneously engage with local- and watershed-level questions of social and ecological change can address gaps in knowledge. Such an approach can create both practices and outcomes that are useful to local peoples as well as to those engaged in basin-wide governance.

Infrastructures of Decolonization: Scales of Worldmaking in the Writings of Frantz Fanon

Political theorists are increasingly drawn to the recovery of anticolonial thinkers as global figures. Frantz Fanon is largely excluded from these discussions because of his presumed commitment to the nation-state and its territorialist assumptions. This essay claims, by contrast, that Fanon’s writings reveal an alternative way of thinking about worldmaking, less as a question of political and economic institution-building spearheaded by leaders than as a multiscalar project that permeates the production of the built environment and the creation of selves. I show how Fanon challenges the dichotomy between the global and the national by seeking to transform not just the national scale in relation to the international, but also the corporeal, urban, rural, and regional scales of an imperially configured world. In order to read Fanon as a scalar thinker and to highlight aspects of his thought that have been relatively neglected, I draw on concepts from geography, and specifically scalar analysis, which, I demonstrate, allows political theorists to develop a richer understanding of the operations of power in colonial contexts and how they can be restructured to inaugurate more liberated ways of being human.

The Importance of Annual Plants and Multi-Scalar Analysis for Understanding Coastal Dune Stabilization Process in the Mediterranean

Since ecological phenomena and patterns vary with scale, scalar analysis is a developing practice in ecology. Scalar analysis is most valuable in heterogeneous environments, since habitat heterogeneity is a key factor in determining biodiversity. One such case can be seen in the changes in annual vegetation in coastal sand dune systems. Most studies in these environments are carried out at the dune scale, comparing dunes at different stabilization states. However, a broader understanding of dune stabilization processes requires analyses at the finer scales of dune slope aspects (directions of exposure to wind) and patches (under and between woody perennial species). Here, we present the results of a study that combines the three scales (dune, slope, and patch) in the Mediterranean coastal dune systems in Israel. Through this multi-scalar analysis, we are able to describe processes at the finer patch and aspect scale and explain how they shape patterns at the dune scale. The results indicate that the dune scale exposes the differences in annual plant characteristics between mobile and fixed dunes, their slopes and patches and the reorganization and spatial distribution of annual plants within mobile and fixed dunes during the stabilization process.

The materiality of precarity: Gender, race and energy infrastructure in urban South Africa

Analysis of precarity has offered a critique of labour market experiences and politically induced conditions of work, housing, migration, or essential services. This paper develops an infrastructural politics of precarity by analysing energy as a critical sphere of social and ecological reproduction. We employ precarity to understand how gendered and racialised vulnerability to energy deprivation is induced through political processes. In turn, analysis of energy illustrates socio-material processes of precarity, produced and contested through infrastructure. Our argument is developed through scalar analysis of energy precarity in urban South Africa, a country that complicates a North-South framing of debates on both precarity and energy. We demonstrate how energy precarity can be reproduced or destabilised through: social and material relations of housing, tenure, labour and infrastructure; the formation of gendered and racialized energy subjects; and resistance and everyday practices. We conclude that analysis of infrastructure provides insights on how precarity is contested as a shared condition and on the prospect of systemic change through struggles over distribution and production.

Quasi-passive reflexive constructions: Bridging autonomous and passive situations

It is common for languages crosslinguistically to employ the same verb form in several diathetic constructions distinguished by a different degree of agent suppression. In South Slavic languages the so called ‘quasi-passive reflexive se-constructions’ (QRCs) encode a number of non-factual situations, expressing an array of semantically close meanings unified by modal semantics. The paper argues that QRCs in South Slavic languages represent a gradient category comprising potential, normative and generalizing situation types. The difference between these subclasses depends on the degree of implication of the agent in the construction: the agent is indirectly evoked in the potential, its presence can be felt in the normative, and a non-referring agent is present in the generalizing constructions. The intended interpretation of QRCs is obtained through the predicate-participant relation and pragmatic factors. In shaping the setting the latter may trigger overlapping between the subclasses. The goal of the paper is to prove that QRCs supply the cognitive link between anticausative reflexive (coding autonomous events) and passive reflexive constructions (coding agent defocusing situations): the potential type is closer to anticausatives, while the generalizing type shows affinity with passives. Such scalar analysis of QRCs may contribute to a better understanding of the typology of reflexive constructions.

Introduction

Since the 1990s, there has been a raft of case studies inquiring into the relation between space and protest in the field that has come to be known as social movement studies or social movement theory, whether it be resource in protesters’ tactical repertoires, a terrain that sets policing strategies, or an actant that influences movement-building. So why produce a special section on “the spatiality of protest” now? The first reason lies in what William Sewell observed almost 20 years ago, which is that “most studies bring in spatial considerations only episodically, when they seem important either for adequate description of contentious political events or for explaining why particular events occurred or unfolded as they did” (2001: 51). Despite efforts from within the field to push social movement studies further around the spatial turn (e.g., Martin and Miller 2003; Wilton and Cranford 2002), it appears as though little theoretical work about the spatiality of protest has been generated in the past 15 years.1 Within the field of social movement studies, the core concepts of opportunity structures, resources, and frames are far from “spatialized.” Curiously, the seemingly marginal theoretical interest in space is set against the fact that recent methodological and conceptual advances in social movement studies call for what is essentially a scalar analysis of protest (Nulman and Schlembach 2018).