Development

Another Forum is Possible

By
6
5 April 2013
DSCF2038

I waited a couple of days before sit­ting in front of my laptop and try­ing to organ­ize the com­bin­a­tion of feel­ings that had been invad­ing me since I left Tunis and the 2013 World Social Forum. It was my first time, and, as every first exper­i­ence, I had charged it with expect­a­tions, hopes, desires, and curi­os­ity. Forty-​eight hours after my depar­ture, when the meet­ing had been offi­cially closed and the atten­tion is now focused on the pos­sib­il­ity that the WSF will have a long term impact over the Tunisian situ­ation, the time has come to col­lect my thoughts, and to say why I do not wish this WSF to become a term of ref­er­ence for the lib­er­a­tion pro­cess that hun­dreds of thou­sands of Tunisi­ans star­ted ...
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On the Right to Peace and the Environment

By
0
18 February 2013
War and Destruction / Kuwait

Peace and the envir­on­ment are two equally wide-​reaching top­ics, and con­sequently they could be stud­ied sep­ar­ately and from a vari­ety of per­spect­ives. In this art­icle, we will endeav­our to demon­strate the rela­tion­ship between peace and the envir­on­ment start­ing with the idea that the pre­ser­va­tion of both is sig­ni­fic­antly com­prom­ised by the cur­rent eco­nomic sys­tem. Our cent­ral premise is that both peace and an eco­lo­gic­ally bal­anced envir­on­ment are incom­pat­ible with con­tem­por­ary eco­nomic practices. The mar­ket eco­nomy, which has been the pre­dom­in­ant sys­tem since the Age of Dis­cov­ery took hold in the six­teenth cen­tury, is sus­tained by the incess­ant exploit­a­tion of nat­ural resources and by viol­ent con­flict. Both our envir­on­mental exploit­a­tion and our con­flicts have been becom­ing increas­ingly intense and soph­ist­ic­ated, to ...
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Are we aware of the current recolonisation of the South?

By
0
18 October 2012
Oswaldo Guayasamin – Hands of Protest

It would not be sur­pris­ing if, in the con­text of an inter­na­tional con­fer­ence, a group of jur­ists from dif­fer­ent nations iden­ti­fied a set of com­mon jur­idical ref­er­ences based on dif­fer­ent legal sys­tems. This occur­rence would be attrib­uted to the pro­cess of glob­al­isa­tion. How­ever, it might also not be con­sidered curi­ous if a his­toric study about law in the nine­teenth cen­tury were to con­clude that legal sys­tems from vari­ous corners of the world shared a set of com­mon legal prin­ciples. It is com­mon for jur­ists from a sig­ni­fic­ant vari­ety of coun­tries to encounter the same legal and her­men­eutic mod­els as well as the same con­cep­tions of fun­da­mental rights, account­ab­il­ity, gov­ernance, and demo­cracy. In the past, as in the present, these mod­els were imposed on dif­fer­ent ...
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The Political Economy of Indigenous Dispossession: Bare and Dispensable Lives in the Andes

By
2
9 October 2012
Soscial Conflict, Cusco, Peru

The expan­sion of the extract­ive indus­tries has, as coun­ter­parts, first, the reac­tion of indi­gen­ous com­munit­ies in the defense of their com­munal goods (land, water, graz­ing, etc.), and second, the viol­ent counter-​​attack of the state through police and mil­it­ary repres­sion, legit­im­ated many times by the of excep­tion (in Peru the “state of emer­gency”, a kind of state of excep­tion, has been applied by gov­ern­ments in pre­vi­ous years to con­trol socio-​​environmental protests). Polit­ical eco­nomy and legal policy are both rel­ev­ant to this situ­ation and both are func­tion­ally connected. In respect of polit­ical eco­nomy, let us bring to mind what David Har­vey calls “accu­mu­la­tion by dis­pos­ses­sion”, which is just the the­or­et­ical update of the “prim­it­ive accu­mu­la­tion” described by Karl Marx, that is to ...
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Delinking, Decoloniality & Dewesternization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part II)

By
0
2 May 2012
Walter Mignolo

Christopher Mattison: To continue our earlier discussion about Bolivia in relation to “refunding” or “decolonizing”—you’ve stated on a number of occasions that capitalism or socialism, as they are currently constituted, are not the answers? One of the alternatives that you offer to this issue is “delinking.” Could you expand on what you mean by delinking in this particular instance and how it integrates into modes of dewesternization and the various layers of decolonization? ¶ Walter Mignolo: Let me first re-state that the world is currently moving towards both rewesternization and dewesternization. The political ambition of the US (announced by Hillary Clinton in Honolulu and followed up by President Obama) is to mold the Pacific into the American Century. This ...
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Toxic Mega-​mining in Mexico: Death and Despoilment 500 Years On

By
0
26 March 2012
BVS

On 15 March this year, when many families were preparing to get away for the bridge weekend (or in reality the few able to), Bernardo Vázquez Sánchez, leader of the committee of the United Peoples of Ocotlán (Coordinadora de Pueblos Unidos del Valle de Ocotlán, CPUVO) was killed in a shooting that also left Rosalinda Canseco and Andrés Vázquez Sánchez wounded. The gunmen – clearly identified by the community – were sent by the Mayor of San José de Progreso, Alberto Mauro Sánchez who, accused of assassinating another opponent of the mining project on 18 January 2012, is a fugitive from justice. But it was the Canadian mining company, Fortuna Silver Mines (operating in Mexico under the name Minera ...
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Neither Capitalism nor Communism, but Decolonization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part I)

By
4
21 March 2012
Walter Mignolo

Cris Mattison : During an interview that you gave with Madina Tlostanova in 2009, you posed the question (as a response) “Why save it at all?”—in regards to the economic system and the looming financial crisis. You continued by stating that it wasn’t the institutions that required saving, but rather our planet and the entwined human network. Or rather, that the primary concern should be with individuals rather than with institutions. Now, three years later, a great deal of effort has been spent on propping up these institutions, which leaves us  where  in terms of the individuals tied to the institutions? Walter Mignolo : Certainly the debate over the relationships between the State and the Market has been revamped ...
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Large-​Scale Housing Projects: Bombardment in the Cities

By
0
19 March 2012
"Mi historia no se vende" San Jose

San José, Colom­bia. We were search­ing for the only house in the street left stand­ing. Jump by jump, we dodged so much debris that I began to ima­gine I was mov­ing through one of those pho­to­graphs of the bomb­ing that took place dur­ing the wars in Europe. What sur­prised us most as we walked was to see so many chil­dren and teen­agers climb­ing over what was left of the build­ings. We noticed that they were pulling off, among other things, pieces of zinc roof­ing, clay tiles, doors that had already been worn away by the ele­ments, and any metal they could find: door handles, taps, and even man­hole cov­ers. When we asked them what they were doing, some answered that these ...
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