Le blog de Berliner Gazette

The transition to a “green” world is praised as a matter of the common good, therefore sacrifices are necessary, it is said. Significantly, these sacrifices are also to be made by those who are already among the exploited and suffering, as the scientist Amy Walker shows in her contribution to the BG’s “After Extractivism” text series.

There are more and more people who have lived in a catastrophe all their lives. The promise of a transition to a “green” world may seem like an escapist drug to them, but the hangover is unavoidable and what we are left with is nothing other than to set collective healing processes in motion, argues researcher Irina Velicu in her contribution to the BG’s “After Extractivism” text series.

In the midst of panic in energy markets – caused by Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine and the West’s sanctions policy – all climate goals and demands for environmental, let alone transition, justice are thrown out the window, warns us anthropologist, activist, and author Florin Poenaru in his fearless contribution to the BG’s “After Extractivism” text series.

Tackling the contradictions of capital and socio-environmental conflicts, in his contribution to the BG’s “After Extractivism” text series Mexico City-based researcher Henry Veltmeyer takes a critical look at how the technique of resource extraction has been captured by market forces and explores whether and how extraction can be reclaimed to post-capitalist and, ultimately, socialist ends.

The decaying post-Soviet mining cities are vivid illustrations of the on-going realignment of power relations after the end of the Cold War. As such they are both manifestations of new capitalism forms and platforms for the emergence of collective survival strategies, as urban anthropologist Maria Gunko argues in her contribution to the BG’s “After Extractivism” text series.

While Yugoslavia’s modernization project strove for the same domination over nature one witnesses in the rush to produce more and better today, it also created a platform for sociality – a radical difference that researcher Katarina Kušić explores in her contribution to the BG’s “After Extractivism” text series as a starting point for the much-needed transition into a just world.

In Serbia the government has set the stage for extra-legal extractivism, enabling private companies to expropriate land for extractive enterprises such as lithium mines. A series of large-scale protests succeeded in at least temporarily halting the development. In this contribution to the BG’s “After Extractivism” text series scholar-activist Aleksandar Matković takes stock of the situation.

Tackling the ecological-economic complex, green capitalism, and transition justice, the following text by Magdalena Taube and Krystian Woznicki outlines the Berliner Gazette (BG) 2022 project “After Extractivism” and serves as an introduction to the text series BG is developing in this context in cooperation with more than 50 activists, researchers, and cultural workers.

By undertaking a sharp analysis of gender debates in Hungary, the political scientist Eszter Kováts aims at carving out a critical space for East-Central Europe between right-wing anti-colonialism and universalising postcolonialism.

Tackling the Poland-Belarus border conflict from a decolonial perspective, researcher Kasia Narkowicz asks: Is it worse to die in a cold forest on the border between two right-wing nationalist states than in cold waters at the borders of liberal democracies? Does it hurt less to bury your children in Western Europe than in Eastern Europe?