Theoretics

Counter Narrating the Hegemony of Violence in Climate Change Conflict

Climate change, extreme poverty and conflict emerge from social relations based in fear, selfishness, hatred and ignorance. To transform the inherent destructive powers of these relations requires a confrontation with governments, corporations, and individuals committed to following the same scripts that benefits the privileged minority while billions suffer the consequences. This project demands a battle of ideas, a radical shift to confront radical inequality. While wealth redistribution is not the topic of this paper, the ideologies that sustain and innovate processes of exploitation and inequality are central — more so in the ways these processes manifest themselves in climate change and conflict narratives. Nonetheless, the glaring increase of capital accumulation in the hands of a few governments, corporations, and individuals — despite radical inequality — deserves our attention and critique. As a privileged member, in many ways, of the world’s enigma — the United States of America — it is my responsibility to question the policies, ideologies, and practices that (re)produce inequities in social-environmental interactions.

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Disastrous Climate Change and Capital’s Failures: Restoring Nature/Society Equilibrium Through Alternative Frameworks

Market rationalities and corporate environmental management strategies are the vanguard of emergent transformational methodologies causing disastrous climate change and unchecked environmental degradation. The concepts seem at odds with each other since the corporation and market caprices are often the culprits instigating environmental crisis. But that aside, global climate change carries the potential to challenge or destroy the three pillars of sustainable development — environmental protection, economic development, and social development. The environment forms the foundation of our lived experiences and climate change threatens our foundation in new ways necessitating new approaches.

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Mechanisms of the Politics of Oil: Spaces of Exception and Functions of Governmentality in the Nigerian Context

Oil is the coveted natural resource. Governments are built and destroyed depending on their oil reserves and geopolitical importance. The presence of oil integrates the controlling power within the larger globalized world constructed around geopolitics, markets, and transnational corporations. Among the several states central to international oil distribution is Nigeria. Located on the Gulf of Guinea in Western Africa, Nigeria evolved from a colonial state system to a postcolonial state system, and from the 1980’s to the present, a neoliberal state system (Adejumobi 2011, 7). The Nigerian government embodies the characteristics of an authoritarian post-colonial oil exporter integrated into the globalized world — neoliberal, corrupt, elitist, militaristic, unequal, and constrained by contentious electoral politics.

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Ideology and Orientation: State Power and Catholic Social Thought

Indeed, we are living in interesting times. Our relationships, both with ourselves and others, constantly pass through intermediaries composed of our beliefs and ideologies that work as the distorting mechanisms limiting or expanding our horizons. These ideologies are created to socialize and orient us in society, but our society itself has become disoriented. Our disoriented society imbues, within each of us, ideologies of self-interpretation that work in the interests of those in power, those who control the state…

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Anarchism, the State Apparatus, and Andean Water Reforms

The absolutism of state power, being the nexus of coercion and violence in Anarchist and Marxist theory, narrows our attention on the state as the central site of transformative politics and resistance. Anarchists critique the belief that a modern society requires a state system to foster social order, equality, and justice. Generally, Anarchists are antiauthoritarian and seek an alternative model of human interaction based in voluntarism and oriented towards communication and localized collective decision-making. Social order is not imposed, as in the state-centric society, but collectivized through horizontal democratic processes. In other words, Anarchists seek a social life supported by the minimum amount of coercion where social agreements are voluntary and authority is conceived as practical rather than absolute and perpetual.

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Marx, Capitalism, Globalization, and Climate Change: Revolutionary Ideas For Climate Change Mitigation

This paper explores theories of Marx, environmentalism, ecology, radical ecology, and anarchism. The paper critiques capitalist societies, production, consumption and waste patterns, and argues for a dramatic shift in society and being. Nature is a limit to capital production; therefore, the current growth patterns are not sustainable and will lead to global catastrophe through climate change and the lack of natural resources.

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From De-to-Post-to-Neo-Colonization: A Brief History of Haiti’s Occupations

This paper begins with a historical survey of Haiti’s colonial history, then goes into Haiti’s (neo)colonial present. This paper utilizes postcolonial theory to critique the coercive system applied to Haiti.

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On One Condition: The Politics of Conditional Lending in Developing Countries

Nearly a universal institution with 187 member countries and $842 billion dollars in resources, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is most likely the most powerful of all international organizations. Originally mandated to manage a fixed exchange rate system, the IMF has extended its influence into development projects by imposing market-based economies in developing countries. The IMF’s complex governance and hegemonic free-market economic polices in congruence with the complex variances in domestic realities of its loan receiving member countries, sets up a system that simply does not produce a sustainable economic system that safeguards the human rights of a member country’s citizens. On the contrary, IMF policies violate human rights of member state’s citizens. Accountability for negative loan consequences must reach beyond territorial sovereign boundaries to the initiator of the reforms — the IMF.

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Complexity, Emergence, and IMF Responsibility: A case For Collective Responsibility

This paper utilizes complexity theory to establish an argument for collective identity and group responsibility.

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Communicative Action and Just Global Institutions

This paper explains Habermas’ Theory of Communication and then applies Thomas Pogge’s ideas of justice through the Habermas theoretical framework.

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Tuberculosis Diagnostics and Intellectual Property

This paper examines tuberculosis diagnostics and IP policy and law concerning the world’s most neglected diseases.

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China and Mitigating Climate Change

This policy paper analyzes China’s renewable energy policy in the context of climate change and capitalism.  This is a great look into China’s energy policy with data taken from dozens of peer-reviewed scientific journals.

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Visions of Terrorism

This short paper examines how the media supported military action in Afghanistan.  Using theories provided by both Derek Gregory and Melissa Britain, I attempt to illustrate the use of images to manipulate the discourse on the war on terror.

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