Subsistence societies, globalisation, climate change and genocide: discourses of vulnerability and resilience

Levene, Mark and Conversi, Daniele (2014) Subsistence societies, globalisation, climate change and genocide: discourses of vulnerability and resilience. The International Journal of Human Rights, 18 (3), 281-297. (doi:10.1080/13642987.2014.914702).

Abstract

Anthropogenic climate change poses the possibility of total human extinction. Subsistence societies, however, have been threatened with extinction ­primarily as a consequence of systemic development ­ for a very long time. Recent genocide scholarship, more particularly in relation to indigenous peoples, has engaged with some of these issues, even while terminologies such as ethnocide, cultural genocide, and indigenocide may suggest a restricted field of vision. Here, we argue that the very nature of a neoliberal globalisation and concomitant nation-state building makes all subsistence societies vulnerable to what amounts to structural genocide. But how does climate change exacerbate or complicate this bleak picture? The political economy of ‘business as usual’ in its dialectical relationship with the biosphere (expressed in the rising concentrations of greenhouse gas emissions) poses an acceleration of subsistence society vulnerability with catastrophic potential for extreme violence. But another scenario also presents itself. The very ongoing, seemingly impossible existence of non-marketised societies in direct relationship with nature, poses the possibility of their resilience in the face of climate change rather than those operating according to standard globalised norms. In conclusion, we propose that the crisis of anthropogenic climate change directly challenges not only assumptions about the ‘inevitable’ trajectory of globalisation with its supposed cast of survivors and victims but more precisely the purposefulness of ‘techno-rational’ epistemologies as set against those which might help humanity recover the possibility of a ‘moral economy’.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Download statistics