An insurrection in energy research: a dialogue between Carlos Tornel and Alexander Dunlap on energy justice, capitalist warfare & decolonization

ABSTRACT

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 simultaneously subordinates anti-authoritarian and autonomous politics to liberal academic frameworks (e.g. recognition, procedure, distribution). Extractive development is not adequately challenged by energy justice, meanwhile academic decolonial theory tend to ignore combative struggles and discussion in the Global South or North. Academic decolonial theory remains selective about struggles, simplifies them and/or remains detached from societies-in-movement, which results in tokenizing and ignoring the complexities of autonomous and insurrectionary struggle. Discussing a range of intense topics, this dialogue suggests the need to advance decolonial and anarchist critique of energy and environmental justice scholarship, suggesting the need to move away from justice framings and towards autonomous political conceptions.

KEYWORDS:

• Energy justice
• environmental justice
• decoloniality
• anarchism
• sustainability
• resistance

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Societies organized on the same ideologies, logics, morals and materials as prisons. A term coined by Max Stirner and theme developed by Jaque Ellul, Micheal Foucualt, Freddy Perlman, Alfredo M. Bonanno, Jean Weir and many others.

2 The direct quote from Galeano (1997, p. 2) is ‘our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others … .’

3 This is a reference to James Ryan (2012, p. 2) summarizes that Lenin performed ‘28,000 executions (excluding battlefield deaths) on average per year directly attributed to the Soviet State, a sharp contrast with the approximate total figure of 14,000 executed by the Russian Tsarist regime between 1866 and 1917.’

4 The full Illich (1973, pp. 18–19) quote is: ‘The transition to socialism cannot be effected without an inversion of our present institutions and the substitution of convivial for industrial tools. At the same time, the retooling of society will remain a pious dream unless the ideals of socialist justice prevail. I believe that the present crisis of our major institutions ought to be welcomed as a crisis of revolutionary liberation because our present institutions abridge basic human freedom for the sake of providing people with more institutional outputs. This world-wide crisis of world-wide institutions can lead to a new consciousness about the nature of tools and to majority action for their control. If tools are not controlled politically, they will be managed in a belated technocratic response to disaster. Freedom and dignity will continue to dissolve into an unprecedented enslavement of man to his tools.’

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexander Dunlap

Alexander Dunlap is visiting research fellow at the Department of Global Development Studies, University of Helsinki. His work has critically examined police-military transformations, market-based conservation, wind energy development and extractive projects more generally in Latin America and Europe. He has published three books: Renewing Destruction: Wind Energy Development, Conflict and Resistance in an American Context (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019) and, the co-authored, The Violent Technologies of Extraction (Palgrave, 2020) and the co-edited volume: Enforcing Ecocide: Power, Policing & Planetary Militarization (Palgrave, 2022).

Carlos Tornel

Carlos Tornel is a PhD candidate in Human Geography at Durham University. His research interests focus on energy transformations beyond capitalist modernity, energy and environmental justice and Latin American decolonial movements. Email: [email protected]