Periscope articles and content
Many of the pronouncements and plans advanced during the Action Strategies Working Group on day one were important, perhaps even essential, but did not strike me as particular original. The need for better networking and better education around climate change, … Continue reading “Analysis of Day 1”
James Hansen: This is a time pregnant with danger. This danger exists because of a large gap between what the science has made clear and what the public realizes.It has become clear from the science that we are in a … Continue reading “The Science of Climate Change Panel”
Pachamama o muerte! (Mother Earth or Death) Evo’s rallying cry at the beginning and end of his speech confirmed everything that I’d hoped to find in Bolivia. Here is a leader who really understands the stakes of the epic struggle … Continue reading “Analysis of Day 2”
Greetings from the Postmaster General of Bolivia. The Bolivian postal service is issuing two stamps that illustrate the impact of global warming in our country: an image of a glacier from the Bolivian Andes that only 10 years ago … Continue reading “Panel on the Rights of Mother Earth”
Jonathan Neele: I speak for an alliance of 6 labor unions in the UK (www.campaigngcc.org/greenjobs). We have a campaign for 1 million green jobs in the UK. But I want to join with all of you in this campaign, because … Continue reading “Unions and Green Jobs Panel”
I have the feeling that a lot is going on behind the scenes. Day three featured a mix of panels with expert testimony and reports by Working Groups. I’ll talk first about the latter. I attended presentations for the working … Continue reading “Analysis of Day 3”
Oscar Olivera (OO) is a trade unionist and leader of the famous water wars which unfolded in Cochabamba in 2000 following the privatization of the city’s water supply. The water wars, which involved shutting down Cochabamba for six months, were … Continue reading “The Cochabamba Water Wars: An Interview with Oscar Olivera”
I should add that there is, of course, lots and lots of media coverage here. Not enough international though. But Democracy Now!, beating mainstream coverage by a mile as usual, is covering the events. Check out their coverage here. It’s … Continue reading “Not Enough Coverage”
Before everything else, the Cochabamba conference was remarkable for bringing together a large group of radical activists from all around the world. The social connections and sense of possibility that resulted from the exchanges that unfolded in this setting … Continue reading “Cochabamba and Beyond”
Hannah Arendt noted in 1969 that Georges Sorel’s remark in 1906 — that “the problems of violence still remain very obscure” remained true. An additional half-century has elapsed since Sorel made his observation, but his remark remains true. The … Continue reading “Introduction”
My remarks are structured around a consideration of four images.These images will, I hope, enable us to confront the question of violence, of a specific kind of violence, by bringing it to us in its (almost) immediate actuality, in … Continue reading “Forging Life into a Weapon”
In my work, I have defended a nonviolent ethic through Derrida and Levinas, which begins with the commandment, “thou shall not kill.” But this ethic certainly does not end there. My book The Philosophy of the Limit gives us … Continue reading “Politics of Grieving”
My ethnographic work in Northern Ireland and South Africa and on the current war on terror has been an engagement with forms of life, communities, subjects, and silenced sovereignties, navigating, drowning, surviving, and dying, within ecotonesof informalized state violence. … Continue reading “The Becoming Non-State of the State”
If you work on Latin America then you know that there is a field of study there called “violentology,” and there are specialists whom you call violentólogos, particularly in Colombia, where the question of violence has become a kind … Continue reading “Violence and Language”
Michel Foucault observed that, although the head of the king had been cut off, in political theory the king remained in his place.For Foucault, theory did not appear able to think about politics without an organizing center, although in … Continue reading “Afterword”
