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ABSTRACT
This special issue presents findings and reflections of scholars who participated in the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE). By mobilising conceptual frameworks from several strands of Marxist and post-structuralist theory—and empirically engaging with a range of historico-geographical processes—the articles in this issue contribute to debates in political ecology in two main ways. First, they critically analyse the political economy and ecology of contemporary capitalism, with an emphasis on accumulation strategies associated with the uneven expansion and crisis of neoliberalism. Specifically, they unpack and critically extend the frameworks of “accumulation by dispossession” and “nature's neoliberalisation” to engage with, among other cases, the political ecology of “austerity” in Southern Europe; historical and contemporary cases of “capital-driven disasters”; and political ecological dynamics taking place around relationships of “rent”. Second, the authors of this special issue analyse new and re-emerging forms of socio-ecological resistance and contestation, including both distributional struggles and movements against “commons' enclosures”. Moreover, they focus on how struggles can (and do) move from contesting capitalist forms of dispossession towards creating alternative “hegemonic” projects and blocs, by critiquing received “common sense” and constructing and performing alternative political ecological imaginaries informed by principles of solidarity and “commoning”. Taken together, the articles in this special issue present new ways of thinking and enacting political and ecological struggles outside established scholarly traditions and conventional disciplines.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 The network was funded by European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme; for more details, see http://www.politicalecology.eu.
2 The conference took place in Stockholm, Sweden, from 20 to 24 March 2016. See details about the event here http://www.ces.uc.pt/undisciplined-environments/.
3 It is not our intention here to make a case against Harvey. Indeed, it was David Harvey himself who—after listening to some of the contributors to this special issue present their work at an ENTITLE Summer School—commented: “It seems to me that what all of these cases have in common is the centrality of rent.”