Digging into “Resource War” Beliefs

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 26-40 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippe Le Billon
Keyword(s):  
Natural Resources ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Resource Control ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
War Narratives ◽  
Water Wars ◽  
The Future ◽  
Widespread Belief ◽  
Multiple Causes

Water wars, oil conflicts and blood diamonds. Three terms reflecting a widespread belief that people fight over resources. Is this belief backed by evidence? What power relations does such a belief reflect and shape? If natural resources have a conspicuous presence in accounts of armed conflicts, the term ‘resource wars’ represents a gross oversimplification. Strategically deployed to prepare for ‘the wars of the future’ or to shame belligerents by exposing their ‘greedy’ motives, ‘resource war’ narratives often overlook the multiple causes of conflict and alternative options to militarized resource control. A main threat from ‘resource wars’ narratives is that they become self-fulfilling prophecies. As such, ‘resource wars’ studies should first be self-reflexive, and then strive to encompass the broad causes, specific historical contexts, and wide variety of effects that resource sectors have on the environment and social relations.

Gendered differences in emigration and mobility perspectives among European researchers working abroad

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Scheibelhofer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
The Future ◽  
Highly Skilled

This paper focuses on gendered mobilities of highly skilled researchers working abroad. It is based on an empirical qualitative study that explored the mobility aspirations of Austrian scientists who were working in the United States at the time they were interviewed. Supported by a case study, the paper demonstrates how a qualitative research strategy including graphic drawings sketched by the interviewed persons can help us gain a better understanding of the gendered importance of social relations for the future mobility aspirations of scientists working abroad.

Differences in temporal reasoning

Focaal ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 2013 (66) ◽  
pp. 25-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Ringel
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Temporal Reasoning ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
Temporal Complexity ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Temporal Flexibility ◽  
Shrinking City

Hoyerswerda, Germany's fastest-shrinking city, faces problems with the future that seem initially unrelated to the past and yet excite manifold conflicting accounts of it. The multiple and conflicting temporal references employed by Hoyerswerdians indicate that the temporal regime of postsocialism is accompanied, if not overcome, by the temporal framework of shrinkage. By reintroducing the analytical domain of the future, I show that local temporal knowledge practices are not historically predetermined by a homogenous postsocialist culture or by particular generational experiences. Rather, they exhibit what I call temporal complexity and temporal flexibility-creative uses of a variety of coexisting temporal references. My ethnographic material illustrates how such expressions of different forms of temporal reasoning structure social relations within and between different generations. Corresponding social groups are not simply divided by age, but are united through shared and heavily disputed negotiations of the post-Cold War era's contemporary crisis.

Natural Resources, Sustainability, and Intergenerational Ethics

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Natural Resources ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
Resource Conservation ◽  
Natural Resource Conservation ◽  
The Future ◽  
Intergenerational Ethics

This chapter examines a variety of views about the nature of society’s putative duty to conserve natural resources for the future, with a focus on the contested idea of sustainability. This chapter examines competing conceptions of sustainability and their implications for natural resource conservation across generations. Sustainability is a very popular concept, but there are many different positions on what might be called the “sustainability of what?” question. The chapter examines a number of competing views and shows how controversy here has informed the debate between so-called weak and strong conceptions of sustainability. It concludes with an examination of the politics of sustainability, and in particular the connections and possible tensions between goals of natural resource conservation and of global justice.

Natural resource and post-resource relations: the hierarchy of branches and the ratio of subjects

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Deineha Maryna ◽  
◽  
Marinich Volodymyr ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Relations ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Natural Resource ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Legal Regulation ◽  
Human Needs ◽  
Forest Law ◽  
Environmentally Sound ◽  
The Relationship

The article examines the place of Natural Resource Law and post-resource branches of law in the legal system, proposes a hierarchy of these branches and outlines the relationship between the subjects of natural resource and post-resource relations. The subject of legal regulation of Natural Resource Law is defined as qualitatively homogeneous natural resource relations, consisting of the use and reproduction of natural resources – a legally defined part of the environment that have signs of natural origin and are in ecological relationship with the environment and with each other, can be used as a source of meeting human needs. All natural resources, as well as the relationship to their use and reproduction, are closely linked. This connection will always be inseparable and reciprocal. It is established that in the system of Natural Resource Law public relations regarding the use and reproduction of certain natural resources are in fact its subsectors and provide a differentiated approach to the environmentally sound use of each of the relevant natural resources. Natural Resource Law is not a conglomeration of land, water, forest and subsoil law, but their qualitative unity based on a single nature, factors of development and the internal structure of social relations. It is concluded that neither the long history of legislation, nor a significant amount of regulations that are sources of post-resource industries, are grounds for denying the inseparable and mutual connection of post-resource branches of law with each other and with Natural Resource Law and the objective need for separation independent branch of Natural Resource Law. Keywords: Natural Resource Law, land law, water law, forest law, subsoil law, faunal law, floristic law, natural resource relations, post-resource relations, legal system, branch of law

Creating the Future Workforce in Food, Agriculture, and Natural Resources

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Resources ◽  
The Future

scholarly journals Narrating technonatures: discourses of biotechnology in a neoliberal era

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Myles Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Effective Strategy ◽  
Economic Implications ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Status ◽  
Political Economic

This article considers the role played by discourses of nature in structuring the cultural politics of anti-GMO activism. It argues that such discourses have been successful rhetorical tools for activists because they mobilize widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural and human worlds. However, these discourses hold dubious political implications. In valorizing the natural as a source of essential truth, natural purity discourses fail to challenge how naturalizations have been used to legitimize sexist, racist and colonial systems of injustice and oppression. Rather, they revitalize the discursive purchase of appeals to nature as a justification for the status quo, indirectly reinforcing existing power relations. Moreover, these discourses fail to challenge the critical though contingent reality of GMOs' location within the wider framework of neoliberal social relations. Fortunately, appeals to natural purity have not been the only effective strategy for opposing GMOs. Activist campaigns that directly target the political economic implications of GMOs within the context of neoliberalism have also had successes without resorting to appeals to the purity of nature. The successes of these campaigns suggest that while nature-culture dualisms remain politically effective normative groundings, concerns over equity, farmers' rights, and democracy retain potential as ideological terrains in the struggle for social justice.

Conclusion: Detroit and the future of the city

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Doucet
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Marginal Groups ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Many ◽  
The City

In this concluding chapter, the main strands of through within the book are brought together. The main narrative of Detroit as a symbol of urban failure is briefly discussed before shifting to a critical assessment of the city’s emerging narrative: that of comeback and renaissance. Both these one-dimensional narratives are treated as problematic and critiqued by using relevant chapters from the book. Two main policy and political insights are highlighted. The first is that much of Detroit’s decline has been a factor produced outside its boundaries so its solutions need to be thought of at these geographic scales. The second relates to working towards including different voices and perspectives about the future of the city and rethinking how power relations can give marginal groups real input into the systems which shape their lives. The many interviews and perspectives in this book provide pathways towards inclusive, fair and just cities.

scholarly journals The European Union and natural resources that fund armed conflicts: Explaining the EU’s policy choice for supply chain due-diligence requirements

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-425 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martijn C Vlaskamp
Keyword(s):  
Supply Chain ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Policy Design ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Due Diligence ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Conflict Zones ◽  
Resource Governance ◽  
Conflict Minerals ◽  
The Eu

Natural resources can be an important source of funding for warring parties in armed conflicts. Curbing the trade in these so-called conflict resources is, therefore, part of the European Union’s conflict management policies. The article explores the EU’s policies in this field and asks, specifically, why the EU is using supply chain due-diligence measures to achieve this goal. The author argues that they are the response to enforcement problems of most existing multilateral and unilateral sanction regimes because of state weakness in the targeted regions. This approach results from a broader idea from the EU that transparency can improve resource governance and, therefore, safeguard both its political and economic interests in conflict zones, such as the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, when the issue becomes specific—as in the EU Conflict Minerals Regulation—translating this idea into concrete policies becomes more contentious as the EU institutions set different priorities for the final policy design.

scholarly journals Site of Resistance or Apparatus of Acquiescence? Tactics at the Bakery

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
José Ciro Martínez
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Resistance State ◽  
Laws And Regulations

This article explores the importance and impact of a set of actions through which bakers manipulate laws and regulations that seek to organize and regulate how they do business. It builds on eighteen months of fieldwork conducted in Jordan, twelve of which were spent working in three different bakeries in the capital, Amman. Moving away from the idea that public policies are simply imposed, the article looks in detail at the social relations through which they are enacted. By honing in on the bakery, and examining arrangements between bakery owners, workers, consumers and ministerial employees, it illuminates modes of political agency that escape conventional binaries of domination/resistance, state/society and legality/illegality. I argue against seeing these practices as easily categorized forms of resistance or frivolous acts of corruption. Nor are they simply reinforcements of hegemonic control. Instead, ‘tactics’ at the bakery subvert the order of things to serve other ends. Foregrounding them in this analysis seeks not only to challenge views of power relations as strictly binary but to elucidate some of the ways in which citizens inhabit and engage with the neoliberal and authoritarian logics that pervade everyday life in Jordan.

scholarly journals Gainful game, set-up, cyberworld

2017 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Eldred
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Natural Resources ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Market Economy ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Philosophical Orientation ◽  
Essential Nature ◽  
Critical Insight ◽  
Set Up

There is a critique of capitalist market economy that consists in claiming not only that capitalist social relations are uncaring and alienating, nor only exploitative of the working class, but that the process of capitalist economy as a whole is a way of living, today globalized, that has gotten out of hand. Its essential nature is unmasked as a senseless circular movement that, besides ruthlessly exploiting natural resources, demeans human being itself and alienates it from the historical alternative of a purportedly authentic mode of human being rooted in collective, solidaric subjectivity. The present article offers an alternative hermeneutic cast for understanding capitalism as the gainful game that can serve as philosophical orientation in fighting for a free and fair social interplay in which the powers and abilities of free individuals are appropriately and reciprocally estimated and esteemed. This requires, first and foremost, seeing through the fetishisms inherent in the valorization of reified value that the mature Marx identified in his critiques of political economy as the essential nature of capitalism. Such critical insight is necessary for orientation also in today’s predicament of the ever more encroaching and ensnaring cyberworld.

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