Fwd: [WSMDiscuss] Fwd: CFP - Ecological Confederalism: Life Beyond the Capitol-Capital Complex

[Ashish Kothari]

This may be of interest,

ashish

Call For Papers

Ecological Confederalism: Life Beyond the Capitol-Capital Complex


Jeremy Anbleyth-Evans – University of Aberdeen, Scotland - jeremy.anb...@abdn.ac.uk
Simon Springer – University of Newcastle, Australia - simon.s...@newcastle.edu.au

Seeking contributions to a proposed edited volume.

Timeline Abstracts are due: August 15th, 2024. Chapters are due: February 15th, 2025.
Length Abstracts: 250 to 300 words.
Chapter length is expected to be between 7,000 and 9,000 words.

Ecological Confederalism is a global call for social experimentation with direct democracy, eschewing the hierarchical politics of corporate urban elites in capital cities. Rather than continuing to believe that the world’s current configuration of approximately 200 nation states is the only viable form of human political and economic organisation, we could instead look once more to Murray Bookchin’s (1991) conceptualisation of ‘Libertarian Municipalism’ as a map towards realising the inherent emancipatory potential of local democracies. Ecological confederalism has the capacity to both empower and liberate communities around the world through its geographical imagination of life thriving beyond the confined strictures of both capitalism and the state. While the number of local municipalities has continued to increase globally since the age of empire, with the passing of environmental planetary boundaries, a new system of participatory democracy and green economics is needed.
Despite rapid progress in the creation of municipalities since WW2 (Cities, and Governments, 2008), there is a simultaneous centralization of power with fewer influential actors through neoliberalism since the 1980s (Cameron, 2020). Thus, a new human geography of ecological confederalism can lead beyond calcified ideas of about the importance of ‘unitary states’, that is states with power concentrated in the capital city. This realisation is more important than ever, to liberate the human individual and expand the mycelium interconnections of local societies. In the present context, 166 of the 193 UN member states are unitary states, the rest are federal, none are democratically confederal (UN, 2021). Human political organization has accelerated through history becoming more complex, shifting from hunter gatherers or primitive communalism, to feudalism, to mercantilist empires, to the capitalist states of today (Dickens, 2004). Nevertheless, recent archaeological evidence suggests this is not as linear and homogenous as scholars would have us believe, with a huge variety of experimental political structures taking place over time (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021), and nor should we think of it as an ‘evolution’ or ‘development’ towards a preferable or higher mode of living.

Indeed, we contend that decentralizing power back towards local communities and Indigenous groups is not a regressive exercise, but can instead have dramatic, empowering, and stabilising effects on the political and social ecologies of the present moment. By identifying that power should flow from the local scale to realise the most environmentally just decisions, where societies can flourish despite the state (Ince and Barrera de la Torre 2024), this proposed volume therefore seeks to explore how this process would work in the context of ecological confederalism. We are interested in contributions that aim to dive into the ways in which direct democracy, social ecologies, food sovereignty, educational benefits and technology, questions of equality, population demographics, renewable energy production, circular green industries, currency tied to ecosystems, and local cultural interpretation of the good life can be enhanced through an engagement with the principles of libertarian municipalism, and those that explore the lessons that might be learned through its rhizomatic extension into ecological confederalism.
In particular, we welcome contributions broadly conceived in addressing themes including but not limited to: • Ecological confederalism as opposition to neoliberalism
• Geographies of direct democracy in practice
• Anarchist political ecologies and ecological confederalism • Indigenous foodway and food sovereignty • Prefigurative politics beyond the capitol-capital complex
• Post-statist ecologies of resistance • Social ecology and green circular politics • Technologies beyond the state
• Libertarian municipalism in the age of late modernity
• Critical social ecologies of public space
• Extending mutual aid networks
• Ecosystems and rhizomes of power
• Indigenous confederalism and First Nations beyond nation-states
• Geographies of not being governed

References
Bookchin, M. (1991). Libertarian municipalism: An overview. Green Perspectives, 24, 1-6. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-libertarian-municipalism-an-overview
Cameron, M. A. (2020). The return of oligarchy? Threats to representative democracy in Latin America. Third World Quarterly, 42(4), 775-792.

Cities, U., and Governments, L. (2008). Decentralization and local democracy in the world: First global report by united cities and local governments 2008. World Bank Publications.

Dickens, P. (2004). Society and Nature. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Graeber, D., & Wengrow, D. (2021). The dawn of everything: A new history of humanity. Penguin UK.

Ince, A., & Barrera de la Torre, G. (2024). Society Despite the State: Reimagining Geographies of Order. Pluto Press.

UN (2021). https://web.archive.org/web/20210213090624/https://www.un.org/en/sections/issues-depth/democracy/index.html

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