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How Infrastructure is Shaping the World

We live in an age of “extreme infrastructure”, the most visible manifestation of which are “mega-corridors”. This study examines the political and economic interests driving such “mega-corridors” and the engineering of new “tradescapes”.

Extreme Infrastructure

“Extreme infrastructure” – the proposed construction of roads, railways and energy and water corridors worldwide on a vast scale – is reinforcing the divide between those who benefit from extraction, production and finance and those whose class interests are opposed to “just-in-time” delivery, cheap labour and the ravaging of the earth in pursuit of profit.

Injustice anywhere threatens Justice everywhere

This presentation to a meeting of Campaign Against Criminalisation of Communities (CAMPACC) asks: what “flashes of mutual recognition” might arise from deepening processes of mutual learning between communities criminalised by the “War on Terror” and those criminalised by “the Securitisation of Everything”. 

Water and the Struggle for Peace and Democracy

A presentation to a workshop in Baghdad, Iraq, on "Water as a Tool for Peace-building" looks at how salinisation, reduced water flows in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and dam construction upstream are triggering conflicts — and how these conflicts are rooted in the denial of democratic decision-making processes.

Subversive Suffrage Stitches

The “delight and beauty” inherent in acts of sewing, banner-making and crafting stained glass helped propel early 20th-century suffragists’ political struggles in pursuit of women’s equality.

Should We Put a Price on Carbon?

Putting a price on carbon isn't a serious strategy for addressing climate change. It can’t touch the roots of the problem, and isn't designed to. However, it continues to be embraced by business and the state because it's effective in delaying and diverting action on global warming.

An illustrated 13-page paper arguing these points -- based on a presentation at the University of Sheffield -- is available from The Corner House on request.

 

Scarcity, "Polite Society" and Activism

Scarcity has a stranglehold grip on much of the discourse of polite society, to the point where it is simply taken for granted that just about every social “problem” is, at root, a problem that arises from scarcity. Numerous conflicts result. And the dominant perspective is constantly being challenged by unpolite society.

Challenging Capitalist Fire

Today, a capitalist organization of fire dominates the world. Biotic fires in the open -- which ordinary people have long used to nurture agriculture and forests -- tend to be denigrated, even criminalized. More intense fossil-fuelled fires in combustion chambers, boilers and turbines, meanwhile, are tacitly encouraged as a sign of progress and civilization.

What with climate change and worldwide struggles to defend livelihoods against fossil fuels, vernacular struggles against this perverse organization of fire are sure to intensify.

Natures, Rights and Political Movements

Natures are partly composed of rights and rights are partly composed of natures. Every history of natures is a history of rights, and vice versa. Thus private property rights in land tend to come with a particular nature associated with hedges, fences and cadastral surveys. Similarly, the rights to global carbon-cycling capacity that are today parcelled out to industrialized countries under international agreements are tied to a novel, partly computer-engendered nature called “the global climate”.

The Mueang Faai Irrigation System of Northern Thailand

This 1991 article describes a non-aggressive form of irrigation formerly common in Northern Thailand, in which land, water, forest, agriculture and the spirits thereof form an ecological whole. The system holds signficant lessons for the current international discussion on the "rights of nature."