Nature is a Battlefield

Razmig Keucheyan is an assistant professor in sociology at the University of Paris-Sorbonne. He is the author of Le constructivisme. Des origines à nos jours and has recently edited a selection from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks in French. He is also the author of Nature is a Battlefield (Polity Books, 2016) and The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical Theory Today (Verso 2013).

• ContentsIntroductionChapter One: Environmental racismA philosophical eventThe colour of ecologyHurricane Katrina as a �metaphor� for environmental racismThe spatiality of racismLead poisoning and class strugglePostcolonialism and environmental crisis: the conflict in DarfurEcological inequalities: A Marxist approachThe archaeology of environmental racismRace and reforestationPurifying nature�� and naturalising raceExporting the environmentThe coming political ecologyConclusionChapter Two: Financialising nature: Insuring climatic risksFinancial markets �plugged into� naturePrinciples of insuranceNew risks?The ontology of catastropheRisk and postmodernityCat (catastrophe) bonds Nature as �real abstraction�Carbon markets and unequal developmentConstructing profitable marketsA �multi-cat� bond in MexicoEcological crisis and the fiscal crisis of the stateA derivative natureNature as accumulation strategyConclusionChapter Three: Green wars, or the militarisation of ecologyA doctrine emergesA benevolent dictatorshipChaos specialistsTerrorism and climate changeThe new military ecologyConservation and counter-insurgencyEconationalismAgent OrangeFrom the Cold War to green warsThe end of conventional wars?Double movementClimate refugeesNuclear deterrence and ecological crisisWar and biofuelsThe oceans destabilisedThe scramble for the ArcticThe North Pole and globalisationCommodifying the thaw The speed of the circulation of capitalConclusionConclusion: Game over?Notes

"We now have an eloquent new perspective on the crises of our time, illuminating the multiple links and intricate relationships among inequality/racism/globalization on the one hand, and the capitalist, financial, and military elites that drive them, on the other, all of this mediated by their multiple connections to the state and nature. Nature is a Battlefield is essential reading for understanding the next fifty years."John Foran, University of California, Santa Barbara