scholarly journals Three implications of political ontology for the political ecology of conservation

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 545 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitrios Bormpoudakis
Keyword(s):  
Nature Conservation ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
The Political ◽  
Gold Mine ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
Ontological Turn

<p>Within political ecology, an important and timely critique has emerged which questions ontology and the nature of reality. This turn to ontology has been expressed in a new and influential paradigm, Political Ontology. In this article, I interrogate the politics of three tenets that seem central to  this  ontological  turn  within a political ecology of conservation context: (a) the insistence on the local, Indigenous and homogeneous subject and its corollary, the homogeneous Modern, Western subject; (b) the hegemony of the (green) neoliberal project, and (c) the incommensurability of non-modern and Western ontologies. I base my arguments on two case studies of resistance and/or struggle against green and un-green grabbing, the Skouries gold mine in Greece and the Lodge Hill development in England.</p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: political ontology, neoliberal nature, conservation, Indigenous, Greece, England</p>

scholarly journals The political ontology of climate change: moral meteorology, climate justice, and the coloniality of reality in the Bolivian Andes

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 921 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anders Burman
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Political Ecology ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Climate Justice ◽  
The Political ◽  
Relational Ontology ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Cognitive Justice ◽  
Ontological Turn

Abstract Taking Boaventura de Sousa Santos' argument that there is no global social justice without global cognitive justice as its starting point, this article suggests that there is no global climate justice without global cognitive justice (implying both ontological justice and epistemological justice). If we take "the ontological turn" in anthropology and other disciplines and its focus on indigenous ontologies seriously, however, we seem to end up in a situation that is difficult to maneuver in relation to conventional understandings of climate justice. When discussing climate change in relation to multiple ontologies, there are two risks: 1) reproducing what I call "the coloniality of reality", arguing that indigenous ontologies are actually nothing but a cultural (mis-) representation of the world; 2) reproducing a conservative relativism that leads to nothing but the maintenance of status quo and that bears a resemblance to climate change denial. A thorough ethnographic understanding of what I would call "the moral meteorology" of the Andes and a broadened understanding of climate change, however, make it possible to navigate between the Scylla of coloniality and the Charybdis of relativism and to articulate a radical critique of fossil-fueled capitalism from a relational ontology, demanding climate justice while denouncing coloniality, and discussing the political ontology of climate change without ignoring its political ecology - and vice versa. Key words: Coloniality; climate justice; cognitive justice; political ontology; political ecology; Aymara

scholarly journals Affinity and antagonism: Structuralism, comparison and transformation in pluralist political ontology

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-49
Author(s):  
Ben Turner
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
Ontological Commitments ◽  
Ernesto Laclau ◽  
Political Experience ◽  
Chantal Mouffe ◽  
Ontological Turn

This article develops a comparative and recursive approach to political ontology by drawing on the ontological turn in anthropology. It claims that if ontological commitments define reality, then the use of ontology by recent pluralist political theorists must undercut pluralism. By charting contemporary anthropology’s rereading of structuralism as part of a plural understanding of ontology, it will be shown that any political ontology places limits on the political, and thus cannot exhaust political experience. This position will be established through an analysis of the role of Claude Lévi-Strauss in the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and a comparison with the political ontology represented by perspectivism and potential affinity. Anthropology’s lesson for political theory is that ontology cannot simply be revised and treated in the singular, but that political ontologies must be analysed comparatively to reveal the shortcomings of, and recursively alter, one’s own political frame of reference.

Missing the political: A southern critique of political ontology

2020 ◽  
pp. 146349962097479
Author(s):  
Mónica L Espinosa Arango
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
Situated Knowledges ◽  
Ontological Turn ◽  
Political Praxis ◽  
Political Solidarity

Against the backdrop of a world in crisis that plays as the stage of the ontological turn and political ontology, and based on long-term research on Colombia’s Andean southwest indigenous politics, this article critically assesses political ontologýs claims to the powers of difference. Following Wolin, Mouffe, and Laval and Dardot, it presents a notion of the political that takes into account the passionate, educational and transformative aspects of indigenous political praxis and engagements with commonality. The analysis of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s ontological multinaturalism, Mario Blaser’s critique of modernity and Reason, and Arturo Escobar’s ontological political practice points at three interconnected problems: the persistent appeal to binary thinking; the making of relativism anew; and the problem regarding the dialogue and knowledge exchange between the ethnographer and the ethnographic subject. Recapturing the political is a way to engage complex and entangled political histories and experiences of democratization in which indigenous peoples emerge as bearers of the political. The feminist concept of situated knowledges is presented as an alternative to deal with knowledge partiality, self-reflexivity, political solidarity, and collaboration.

The New Terrain of International Law

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen J. Alter
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Courts ◽  
Constitutional Review ◽  
Delegation Of Authority ◽  
The World ◽  
The Law

In 1989, when the Cold War ended, there were six permanent international courts. Today there are more than two dozen that have collectively issued over thirty-seven thousand binding legal rulings. This book charts the developments and trends in the creation and role of international courts, and explains how the delegation of authority to international judicial institutions influences global and domestic politics. The book presents an in-depth look at the scope and powers of international courts operating around the world. Focusing on dispute resolution, enforcement, administrative review, and constitutional review, the book argues that international courts alter politics by providing legal, symbolic, and leverage resources that shift the political balance in favor of domestic and international actors who prefer policies more consistent with international law objectives. International courts name violations of the law and perhaps specify remedies. The book explains how this limited power—the power to speak the law—translates into political influence, and it considers eighteen case studies, showing how international courts change state behavior. The case studies, spanning issue areas and regions of the world, collectively elucidate the political factors that often intervene to limit whether or not international courts are invoked and whether international judges dare to demand significant changes in state practices.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John West
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Literary History ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Third ◽  
Religious Differences

Literary history often positions Dryden as the precursor to the great Tory satirists of the eighteenth century, like Pope and Swift. Yet a surprising number of Whig writers expressed deep admiration for Dryden, despite their political and religious differences. They were particularly drawn to the enthusiastic dimensions of his writing. After a short reading of Dryden’s poem to his younger Whig contemporary William Congreve, this concluding chapter presents three case studies of Whig writers who used Dryden to develop their own ideas of enthusiastic literature. These three writers are Elizabeth Singer Rowe, John Dennis, and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury. These case studies are used to critique the political polarizations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literary history and to stress instead how literary friendship crossed political allegiances, and how writers of differing ideological positions competed to control mutually appealing ideas and vocabularies.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Brooker ◽  
Margaret Hayward
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
Leadership Teams ◽  
Military Leadership ◽  
Rational Method ◽  
The Political ◽  
Unexpected Findings ◽  
Selection Of

The Conclusion points out that the preceding seven chapters’ examples and case studies have revealed some expected, and some unexpected conclusions. The six main cases revealed some expected uniformity in the leaders’ selection of rational methods. There was less uniformity, however, in the choice of the methods they emphasized, whether due to their personal preferences or to the circumstances they were facing. Two unexpected findings were the addition of a seventh appropriate rational method—learning—and the prevalence of dual-leadership teams. The conclusion goes on to suggest that this book’s theory and approach should be applied to versions of military leadership and to the political leadership of contemporary democracies.

Democracy and Political Culture

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ross McKibbin
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Social System ◽  
Political System ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
Social Structures ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The One ◽  
Definition Of

This book is an examination of Britain as a democratic society; what it means to describe it as such; and how we can attempt such an examination. The book does this via a number of ‘case-studies’ which approach the subject in different ways: J.M. Keynes and his analysis of British social structures; the political career of Harold Nicolson and his understanding of democratic politics; the novels of A.J. Cronin, especially The Citadel, and what they tell us about the definition of democracy in the interwar years. The book also investigates the evolution of the British party political system until the present day and attempts to suggest why it has become so apparently unstable. There are also two chapters on sport as representative of the British social system as a whole as well as the ways in which the British influenced the sporting systems of other countries. The book has a marked comparative theme, including one chapter which compares British and Australian political cultures and which shows British democracy in a somewhat different light from the one usually shone on it. The concluding chapter brings together the overall argument.

The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625-1642

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siobhan Keenan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Public Display ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Charles I ◽  
King Charles I

The Progresses, Processions, and Royal Entries of King Charles I, 1625–1642 is the first book-length study of the history, and the political and cultural significance, of the progresses, public processions, and royal entries of Charles I. As well as offering a much fuller account of the king’s progresses and progress entertainments than currently exists, this study throws new light on one of the most vexed topics in early Stuart historiography—the question of Charles I’s accessibility to his subjects and their concerns, and the part that this may, or may not, have played in the conflicts which culminated in the English civil wars and Charles’s overthrow. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book opens with an introduction to the early modern culture of royal progresses and public ceremonial as inherited and practised by Charles I. Part I explores the question of the king’s accessibility and engagement with his subjects further through case studies of Charles’s ‘great’ progresses in 1633, 1634, and 1636. Part II turns attention to royal public ceremonial culture in Caroline London, focusing on Charles’s royal entry on 25 November 1641. More widely travelled than his ancestors, Progresses reveals a monarch who was only too well aware of the value of public ceremonial and who did not eschew it, even if he was not always willing to engage in ceremonial dialogue with his people or able to deploy the power of public display to curry support for his policies as successfully as his Tudor and Stuart predecessors.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document