Abstract
Given this reality of political–ecological life, it is no wonder that apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic fiction (zombie and otherwise) are among the best-selling genres for movies and film (e.g. Prospero, 2017). Climate change is upon us—with apocalyptic wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and other ecological events that threaten life as we know it. The oceans are warming, coral is bleaching, glaciers are melting, and the sea level is rising. At the same time, economic systems seem deeply precarious, on the verge of another catastrophic meltdown, as happened in 2008. And all this is happening in the context of rising xenophobic “populist” authoritarianism, not only in the United States (with the election of Donald Trump) but in “Turkey, Poland, Hungary, and a range of other countries” (Swyngedouw, Preface), including, most recently, with the election of Bolsonaro in Brazil, and the reelection of Modi in India and Duterte in the Philippines. We sit at the edge of an abyss.
It is in this context that Erik Swyngedouw, noted Professor of Geography at Manchester University, and one of the most cited scholars in the subfield of political ecology, outlines the political philosophy behind how we arrived in this current predicament, and asks if and how progressive and emancipatory politics can still be thought and practiced in the 21st Century? (Swyngedouw, 2018: xvi)
The book attempts to answer this question in three parts. The first part takes the reader through the political philosophy of the “post-political” that is indicative of mainstream liberal democratic politics and is largely responsible for having created the current crisis. In part II, Swyngedouw (p. xvii) charts the “political-ecological and socioeconomic processes through which the question of the political became evacuated from public space and integrated within post-democratic institutional arrangements.” In other words, why, when we already endure the impacts of climate change, are the range of responses and adaptations lodged in a discourse that continues to foreclose discussion of altering neoliberal systems of production and accumulation? Part III argues that the signs of hope are in “a range of new forms of politicization that mark the present geopolitical landscape in ways that open up an incipient ‘return to the political’ under the universalizing banner of freedom, equality, and solidarity” (p. xviii).
Part I of the book draws heavily on political philosophy. It describes the process through which liberal governance systems foreclose on democratic processes of deliberation and debate. This process of “depoliticization” is what Swyngedouw, borrowing from political philosophers, such as Crouch, Rancière, and Badiou, calls this process of “post-politicization” (p. 26, but appears repeatedly). The creation of the “post-political” has happened through political processes associated with neoliberal governance. The architecture of democratic systems (elections, parliamentary procedures, etc.) remain in place, but are bi-passed through “governance beyond the state” (p. 30; trade rules, standards regimes, implementation of policies and projects through unaccountable private sector and “civil society” organizations)—in short, a myriad of systems for governing economic and social life that has become a hallmark of the global neoliberalism. These processes foreclose on real democracy and political discourse, and powerful actors maintain them through both administrative systems, and state and non-state violence.
Part II focuses on how particular political ecological processes create the post-political. Again, drawing on political philosophers, Swyngedouw specifically criticizes the role of discourses around climate change and ecology that, on one hand, forecast the apocalypse, and, on the other hand, insist that the only acceptable way of avoiding the apocalypse is through measures that do not challenge the prevailing political order. As he says, “Al Gore’s emblematic documentary, An Inconvenient Truth becomes strangely enough very convenient for those who believe that civilization as we know it [(]. . . capitalism) needs to be preserved and immunized against potential calamity and revolutionary change” (p. 83). Part II finishes with two chapters that set up the reader for the call to activism in Part III. “Hotting up” (Ch. 5, pp. 91–112) argues that post-political attempts to address climate change have only moved us from forecast apocalypse to actual impacts of global warming. “Urbanization and Environmental Futures” (Ch. 6, pp. 113–125) connects the urban political ecology and environmental justice literatures, arguing that the inequality in exposure to “environmental goods and bads” is increasingly apparent in cities, and is engendering mobilization in resistance—specifically involving in the invocation of “places of politicization”—from Tahrir to Taksim square, to Manicotti park. Notably, in this section he has an excellent, concise overview of urban political ecology (pp. 116–118).
Part III of the book then moves “to considering a promise of the return to ‘the political’” (p. 127). Swyngedouw does this in two chapters. Chapter 7 provides a narrative through the “urban insurgencies that have emerged since 2011 when the Arab Spring unexpectedly began to challenge the political status quo across the Middle East” (p. 127). The chapter purports to give an overview of the drivers of these uprisings. It is here that I found the book a bit unsatisfying. Swyngedouw offers but theorized generalities to support his insights about the similarities in what sparked, geospatial tactics, and the impacts of the urban insurgencies across and beyond the Arab Spring. If one does not go in expecting more, this is OK, but this part of the book comes off as a bit high-minded. Still, there are interesting nuggets, such as the three elements of mobilization: (1) moving beyond the post-political, (2) redesigning the urban as a political dissentual field, and (3) understanding utopia as processual. Taken as a theoretical proposition, this could provide some guidance for field researchers, but since there is not much description of the cases, I did not see many clues about the actual operationalization of the concepts. Chapter 8 provides a broader view. It is here that Swyngedouw’s Marxian roots shine. The “post-political” is clearly another way of articulating Fukuyama’s (1989) “end of history.” The return of the political, then, is what can replace the aspirations of Marxists for an alternative to capitalism as an organizing principle for socio-ecological life. The promise of the political is about realistically imagining something else.
This is not, to be honest, a completely new exploration for scholars of political ecology and the “global democracy” movements. Work, for instance, on the “The Political Ecology of Everyday Life” (e.g. Loftus, 2012) focused on the subaltern and creative politics of resistance. So, too, have scholars on the emerging “global democracy” movements (e.g. Smith, 2014) focused on movements that gathered for events like the World Social Forums, united around the slogan of “another world is possible.” A growing scholarship on the inherent unsustainability of political economy of neoliberal economic globalization have pointed as well to rural resistances—specifically the global indigenous awakening, exemplified through movements such as “Idle No More” and the “No DAPL” movements in North America (e.g. McMichael, 2016; Patel and Moore, 2017). Swyngedouw’s contribution here, however, is in trying to build a theory for these resistances, focusing specifically on the urban uprisings that have upended apparently well-ensconced discourses around management and accumulation. The oligarchies of Egypt and Turkey installed even more repressive neoliberal regimes following the uprisings at Tahrir and Taksim Squares, just as the election of Donald Trump followed Occupy Wall Street and the Bernie Sanders campaign. Swyngedouw also notes that these insurgent movements opened new discourses (the political) around alternatives to the hegemonic organization of production and consumption, security, peace and justice, the relationships between humans and nonhumans. These discourses are, for Swyngedouw, “the promise of the political”—and they are the antidote for a world seemingly on the edge of the abyss.