Populism of the kind displayed by the Yellow Vests is a revolt against social and ecological alienation and an affirmation of collective popular power. Since the gilets jaunes (‘Yellow Vests’) erupted onto…
Headless populism and the political ecology of alienation
Diets not riots: what would massive public dialogue on climate change look like?
The UN’s COP24 climate conference reaches its halfway point this weekend, and carbon emissions are going in the wrong direction worldwide. Debates about the best ways to tackle climate change…
Authoritarianism, populism and political ecology
by Amber Huff and Levi van Sant Based on a number of events convened under the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative, we introduce a series of interventions that explore how political ecologies…
Video: Hilary Wainwright on knowledge, politics and the left
On 31 October 2018 Hilary Wainwright, editor of Red Pepper magazine and author of the book ‘A New Politics From The Left’, spoke at a STEPS/IDS seminar at the Institute…
Who benefits and loses from large developments in Eastern Africa’s rangelands?
The past ten years have seen the spread of large-scale investments in infrastructure, resources and land across pastoral areas of eastern Africa. In the past, these areas were insignificant to…
Report from Rojava: Revolution at a Crossroads
Rojava’s revolution is one of the most promising projects of democratization and social transformation afoot in the current conjuncture in the Middle East. Its context within the ongoing Syrian War…
Narratives of scarcity and the global land rush
by Ian Scoones Narratives of scarcity dominate policy discourses about resources, including land. This was certainly the case during the peak of the global land rush, as we show in a…
Degradation Neutrality and the Faustian bargain of conservation finance
A critical assessment of ‘degradation neutrality’, the latest idea to emerge in global conservation efforts, is at the heart of a new article for the Antipode Foundation by Amber Huff…
Why agrarian studies should confront the rise of authoritarian, populist movements
Last week I was in Russia at the fascinating fifth BRICS Initiative in Critical Agrarian Studies conference. Throughout the event we heard about the emergence of particular styles of authoritarian populist regimes,…
Confronting authoritarian populism: a new initiative and a new paper
A few weeks back, I highlighted the launch of the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI), and the availability of small grants for doing research on both the contours of the…