Mattersburger Kreis

Schwerpunktredaktion: Antje Daniel, Marie Jasser, Lorena Olarte

Enacting the Future - Environmental activism worldwide

Environmental disasters and the effects of climate change are becoming ever more evident. They highlight insufficient global and nation-state climate and environmental policies, the exploitation of natural resources, the extent of climate disasters such as drought, floods, and the decline of biodiversity, and related and overlapping problems such as migration, poverty, conflict, and marginalisation. The youth environmental movement ‘Fridays for Future’, which arose in 2018, has been instrumental in raising media and political awareness of environmental and climate issues and highlighting their global dimension. While we recognise the relevance of this movement, we also want to highlight the long history of the defence of nature around the world, such as movements for land and indigenous territory, anti-extractivist struggles, and in general environmentalist activities of the poor.

Against the backdrop of environmental and climate activism mobilising for a liveable future around the world, we want to examine connections within and between those movements. The global dimension of such activism illustrates that environmental and climate crises do not stop at nation-state borders and therefore require global solutions. Activism has also become more transnationally interrelated, which points to increased transnational or global conflict resolutions through activism, as is evident in Fridays for Future.

While we are currently witnessing a very active debate on climate activism, it remains limited predominantly to Europe and the United States. Environmental and climate activism from the Global South(s) are underrepresented in anglophone and German-speaking literature, despite their multiplicity. A consideration of this activism is not only important against the background of the globality of the environmental and climate crisis, but also because in the Global South activism might differ, as the conditions of activism and resistance are different. For example, lethal state and para-state violence against environmental activists is more prevalent in South America than in Europe. Post-development approaches have also shown that the conceptions of the good life, and more generally of future imaginaries, in the Global South are diverse, and thus the objectives of activism are quite different, as are their self-organisation and strategies, which are also a result of their specific historical, cultural, social, and political contexts.

In this special issue, we aim to provide space for scholars and activists based in or from the Global South to reflect upon environmental and climate activism. A further goal of this call is to shed light on the entanglements and complex relations between environmental movements of different localities.

Therefore, we are interested in theoretical and conceptual contributions concerning environmental, climate, and other movements as well as in-depth empirical case studies depicting the different ways in which futures are imagined, negotiated, and aspired to. We also wish to bring together academic research on the Global North and the Global South – two strands of research which have, with few exceptions, been addressed in relative isolation from each other. We are particularly interested in contributions which address the following questions, but are open to other questions of relevance as well:

What kind of imaginary of the future do environmental and climate movements aspire to?
Which strategies do environmental and climate movements employ to promote their visions of how society should be imagined differently, and how do they ensure that this takes place in accordance with their ethical concerns?
What human-nature relations environmental and climate movements based on? How do they differ or in what ways are they similar to one another?
What understanding of nature do the movements have?
In which cultural, political, and historical context do movements operate?
Are the movements’ aspirations globally entangled?
To what extent and how are imagined futures practised in social movements?
Which differences and similarities shape activism in the Global North and South?
How do social movements in or in-between the Global South and North solidarise with one another?
What possibilities arise for critically reflecting upon or understanding social movements from a post- or decolonial perspective?

Schedule

We invite authors from any discipline to send an abstract (maximum 300 words) including title, author(s) and institutional affiliation to antje.daniel@univie.ac.at; lorena.olarte@univie.ac.at; Marie.Jasser@univie.ac.at by March 15th 2023. By mid-April 2023, we will invite authors to write their texts, and will inform all others about our decision. The deadline for the submission of full articles (40,000 characters, including spaces) is June 30th, 2023. After editorial assessment and double-blind review, corrections and proof-reading, the special issue will be published in print and online (green open access) in December 2023.

Guidelines

Please submit abstracts and full papers in English and German. In order to expand the outreach of this call, we will also accept abstracts and full papers in Spanish. Communication with the editors may take place in English or German. Further information for potential authors is available here. For any questions regarding the procedures of publication, please contact clemens.pfeffer@mattersburgerkreis.at. For previous articles and issues of the journal, have a look at our archive.

Special Issue Editors:

Dr. Antje Daniel is a social scientist in social movement studies, political sociology, gender and future/utopia at the Department of Development Studies, University of Vienna. She is also an associated researcher at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg and the Centre for Social Change, University of Johannesburg. In her recent researches she analyses environmental movements in Europe, South Africa as well as protests against urbanization, for education and democracy.

Marie Jasser is a DOC-team fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria and an associate researcher at the Universidad Nur in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. She is researching the role of social movements in land conflicts in the Plurinational State of Bolivia and coordinates the research group SolPan+ Bolivia, where she focuses on self-organisation during the pandemic and society-state relations.

Born near the city of Cholollan in today’s Mexico, Lorena Olarte is a politico-ecological analyst working in (social)interdisciplinary fields inspired by notions of evolutionary biology and philosophy of science. She is not afraid of rattlesnakes and regards oyamel trees (A. Religiosa) as her grandparents. She has 12 years international experience working for international organisations, government, and grassroots. For those who consider it relevant, she is completing her Ph.D. in Political Science at the University of Vienna, studied at top-ranked Universities (e.g., UNAM, Sciences Po), and has been a Conacyt and Literar Mechana Fellow.

Schwerpunktredaktion: Julia Eder, Halliki Kreinin, Florian Wukovitsch

Just Transition – Eine globale Perspektive

(English CfP below)

Die aktuelle ökologische Krise erfordert rasch Maßnahmen. Der notwendige Strukturwandel zur Förderung ökologischer Nachhaltigkeit betrifft jedoch nicht nur die Produktionsstrukturen, sondern auch die Beschäftigten in den Wirtschaftszweigen, die umgebaut, geschrumpft oder komplett eingestellt werden müssen. Die Verhinderung einer Zunahme von sozialer Ungleichheit oder sozialer Notlagen ist daher heute ein ebenso zentrales Anliegen wie die Vermeidung der Entstehung abgehängter Regionen infolge des Strukturwandels. Während für Forscher:innen und involvierte Aketeur:innen vielfach klar ist, dass ein struktureller Wandel im Sinne einer Just Transition mit der Transformation der transnationalen Arbeitsteilung einhergehen wird, ist bisher nicht ausreichend erforscht, wie Länder des Globalen Südens davon betroffen sein werden.

Just Transition bezeichnet das Anliegen, im Zuge des Übergangs zu einer kohlenstoffarmen, kreislauforientierten und nachhaltigeren Wirtschaft die Rechte und Lebensgrundlagen der Beschäftigten zu sichern. Obwohl der Begriff zunächst ein wesentlicher Bezugspunkt der Gewerkschaftsbewegung war, haben ihn mittlerweile auch internationale Organisationen wie die ILO oder, in Europa, die Europäische Kommission aufgegriffen.

Da die Gewinnung fossiler Brennstoffe, die Energieerzeugung und die Herstellung von Waren für die Erreichung der internationalen Klimaziele umgebaut werden müssen, sind unterschiedliche Maßnahmen zur Unterstützung der Beschäftigten in diesen Sektoren erforderlich. Das umfasst zuvorderst sozialen Dialog und die demokratische Einbindung der Sozialpartner, der betroffenen Arbeitnehmer:innen und der breiteren Zivilgesellschaft, nebst sozialer Absicherung und aktiver Arbeitsmarktpolitik. Zweitens braucht es (öffentliche) Investitionen in kohlenstoffarme Wirthschaftsbereiche, die zur Steigerung der Lebensqualität beitragen und gute Arbeitsbedingungen bieten, beispielsweise in den öffentlichen Verkehr oder in das Bildungs- und Erziehungswesen. Drittens können lokale und regionale Pläne zur Förderung wirtschaftlicher Diversifizierung gemeinsam mit progressiver Industrie-, Forschungs- und Innovationspolitik die Schaffung neuer Arbeitsplätze unterstützen und die vom Umbau betroffenen Gemeinden stabilisieren. Und da sich auch globale Lieferketten im Zuge der wirtschaftlichen Restrukturierung ändern werden, müssen viertens die Herausforderungen, mit denen Arbeiter:innen und unterdrückte Gruppen im Globalen Süden konfrontiert sind, ebenso wie Perspektiven inter- und transnationaler Solidarität in den Fokus kommen.

Die gewerkschaftliche Debatte bezieht sich gleichermaßen auf Verteilungs- und Verfahrensaspekte der Gerechtigkeit wie auf Fragen der Anerkennung, wenn auch eher implizit. Klimaschutz wird nur dann erfolgreich sein, wenn die sozialen Auswirkungen umfassend berücksichtigt werden, auch aus einer historischen Perspektive. Das betrifft Fragen der Klimagerechtigkeit und globaler Produktionsbedingungen ebenso wie historische und gegenwärtige Macht- und Abhängigkeitsbeziehungen. Aus einem breiteren Blickwinkel ist die zentrale Frage: Wie können die Kosten des Klimawandels und der Klimapolitik in einer fairen und respektvollen Weise verteilt werden – innerhalb der Menschheit, in Zeit und Raum, aber auch im Hinblick auf andere Spezies und die Umwelt?

Die Sondernummer des Journals für Entwicklungspolitik zielt darauf ab, unterschiedliche progressive Ansätze einer Just Transition zusammenzuführen, die eine globale Perspektive einnehmen. Wir freuen uns daher über die Einreichung von Beiträgen zur Rolle von Arbeit im Übergang zu einer emissionsarmen und nachhaltigeren Wirtschaft, die die folgenden Aspekte diskutieren:

• welche Formen Just Transition-Konzepte heute annehmen (können);
• welche Elemente sie aufweisen müssen, um gesellschaftlichen Fortschritt zu fördern;
• wie sie in unterschiedlichen Weltregionen umgesetzt werden können bzw. sich auf andere Regionen (z.B. Länder des Globalen Südens) auswirken sowie
• was getan werden kann, um zu verhindern, dass sie ungleiche und abhängige Entwicklung reproduzieren oder gar verstärken.

Welche Möglichkeiten bestehen aktuell, Politiken der Dekarbonisierung bzw. Green New Deals zu entwickeln, die eher den Interessen der Beschäftigten und der Gesellschaft dienen als jenen des (transnationalen) Kapitals? Welche unterschiedlichen Ansätze lassen sich in der Wissenschaft und in der Zivilgesellschaft identifizieren, wo sehen unterschiedliche Akteur:innen Interventionsmöglichkeiten, und welche Koalitionen oder Formen von Governance sind zu diesem Zweck erforderlich? In welchen Angelegenheiten sollte der Staat intervenieren, um einen Ausgleich zwischen den Interessen unterschiedlicher Gruppen zu erzielen, und wie? Welche Bedeutung haben globale Wertschöpfungsketten und welche Einschränkungen ergeben sich aus Umwälzungen im internationalen Handel für (globale) Ansätze einer Just Transition?

Wir begrüßen Beiträge zu folgenden Themen:

• zur Rolle von Arbeit im Übergang in eine kohlenstoffarme Wirtschaft;
• Länderfallstudien zur Governance von Just Transition;
• zu Politics of Scale (geeignete Maßstabsebenen der Implementierung von Maßnahmen einer Just Transition);
• zur Bedeutung von Ansätzen einer Just Transition für eine erfolgreiche und breit akzeptierte sozial-ökologische Transformation;
• zur Entwicklungsdimension und zu spezifischen Herausforderungen in Ländern des Globalen Südens (Rolle von Just Transition in supranationalen, nationalen und regionalen Entwicklungsstrategien; Just Transition und nachholende Entwicklung; Just Transition und ungleiche sowie abhängige Entwicklung);
• zur Beteiligung von Arbeitnehmer:innen bzw. Aspekten von Wirtschaftsdemokratie;
• zu inter-/transnationaler Solidarität (Rolle von Gewerkschaften, progressiven Parteien und Regierungen, aber auch von Individuen in den Zentrumsökonomien zur Unterstützung von Just Transition im Globalen Süden);
• zum Verhältnis zu anderen Politikfeldern (wie hängen Just Transition und Industriepolitik, Infrastrukturpolitik, Bildungspolitik, Sozialpolitik etc. zusammen?)

Zeitplan: Autor:innen aus sämtlichen Disziplinen sind eingeladen bis 15. Mai 2022 ein Abstract (max. 300 Wörter) unter Angabe von Titel, Autor:in(nen) und institutioneller Zugehörigkeit an cfp@mattersburgerkreis.at zu schicken. Die Entscheidung über Annahme oder Ablehnung wird bis spätestens 31. Mai 2022 bekanntgegeben. Deadline für die Einreichung der vollständigen Beiträge (40.000 Zeichen, einschließlich Leerzeichen) ist der 30. September 2022. Nach einer redaktionellen Bewertung, Doppelblindgutachten, Überarbeitung und Korrektorat wird die Son-dernummer im Herbst 2023 in gedruckter Form und online publiziert.

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Just Transition – A Global Perspective

Special issue editors: Julia Eder, Halliki Kreinin, Florian Wukovitsch

The looming ecological crisis calls for urgent action. However, the promotion of structural change in favour of ecological sustainability does not only affect the economic structures of production but also the workers employed in the sectors that need to be transformed, shrunk or to be phased out entirely. Thus, it has become a concern to avoid increasing social inequality and deprivation as well as the creation of laggard regions that could go hand in hand with such developments. While it is clear for many researchers and involved actors that a just transition will require structural change and will cause the transformation of the transnational division labour, how this will affect countries in the Global South is currently understudied.

Just Transition is a concept describing ambitions to secure workers’ rights and livelihoods when economies are shifting to low-carbon and more circular and sustainable pathways. While being an important reference point of the trade union movement, the term has been taken up by international organisations such as ILO or, in Europe, the European Commission.

As the extraction of fossil fuels, energy generation, and manufacturing need to be restructured in order to achieve the international climate goals, workers employed in these sectors need support in several ways. This includes, first of all, social dialogue and the democratic consultation of social partners, the affected employees and broader civil society, along with social protection and active labour market policies. Second, there is a need for (public) investment in low-emission activities that help enhance the quality of living and offer decent workplaces, such as in public transport or education and care. Third, local and regional economic diversification plans together with progressive industrial, research and innovation policies can support the creation of new jobs and stabilize affected communities. Fourth, as also international supply chains will change in the course of economic restructuring, challenges for workers and other oppressed groups in the Global South and perspectives of inter- or transnational solidarity need to come into focus.

The trade union debate refers equally to distributive and procedural forms of justice but also to recognition, even if implicitly. Climate action will only be successful if social impacts are considered holistically, in a historical perspective – this pertains to climate justice and global conditions of production as well as past and present power and dependency relations. From a more general point of view, the core question is: How can the costs of climate change and climate policy be distributed in a fair and respectful way – among humanity, in space and time but also with regard to other species and the environment?

This special issue of the Austrian Journal of Development Studies aims to unite different approaches to just transitions with an explicitly progressive stance, adopting a global perspective. We ask for contributions discussing the role of work in the transition to low-carbon and more sustainable economies, outlining:

• what shapes just transition approaches (may) take today;
• what their components must be to foster societal progress;
• how they could be implemented in the various regions of the world and how they might affect other regions of the world (e.g., countries of the Global South) and
• what can be done so that they do not reproduce or reinforce uneven and dependent development.

Which possibilities do currently exist for developing low-carbon policies or “Green New Deals” that serve the interests of workers and society rather than those of (transnational) capital? Which different approaches can we identify in academia and in civil society, where do different actors identify potential for intervention, and which coalitions or governance designs are needed therefore? In what matter and how should the state intervene to mediate the interests of different groups/class factions in society? What is the significance of global value chains and which restrictions for (global) just transitions might result out of upheaval in international trade?

We appreciate contributions on:

• the role of labour in the transition to low-carbon economies;
• country case studies on the governance of just transitions;
• politics of scale (appropriate scales for implementing just transition measures);
• the significance of just transition approaches for a successful and widely accepted socio-ecological transformation;
• the dimension of development and specific challenges for countries of the Global South (role of just transition in supranational, national and regional development strategies; just transition and catch-up development; just transition and uneven and dependent development);
• workers’ participation and economic democracy;
• inter-/transnational solidarity (role of trade unions, progressive parties and governments, but also individuals in the core states to support just transitions in the Global South);
• relation to other policy fields (how does just transition interact with industrial policy, infrastructure policy, education policy, social policy etc.?)

Schedule: We invite authors from any discipline to send an abstract (maximum 300 words) including title, author(s) and institutional affiliation to cfp@mattersburgerkreis.at by May 15th, 2022. By May 31st, 2022, we will invite authors to write their texts, and inform all others about our decision. The deadline for the submission of full articles (40,000 characters, including spaces) is September 30th, 2022. After editorial assessment and double-blind review, corrections and proof-reading, the special issue will be published in print and online in autumn 2023.

Journal

The Austrian Journal of Development Studies (JEP) is one of the leading academic journals for development theory and global politics in German-speaking countries and beyond, since many articles and entire issues appear in English. The aim of JEP is to provide a forum for broad critical discussion and reflection on various dimensions of social development in the Global South and North, and especially on their entanglements. Our authors discuss global problems, policies and epistemologies in a broad sense and from multi- and inter-disciplinary perspectives. The topics of the journal cut across Development Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Gender Studies, Educational Studies, Global Studies, Global Sociology, Critical and Feminist IR, and many more fields and disciplines.

Guest Editor: Claudia Brunner

JEP 2023 UnDoing Epistemic Violence

General Topic

In the course of the ongoing post- and decolonial turn, the global entanglements of Eurocentrist, Androcentrist and Occidentalist knowledge with violence have increasingly come into view. Gayatri C. Spivak’s feminist-postcolonial understanding of epistemic violence as “the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other” is the preeminent theoretical touchstone for addressing this issue. Other feminists speak of epistemic injustice (Miranda Fricker) or epistemic oppression (Kristie Dotson). Boaventura de Sousa Santos has coined the strong notion of epistemicide, which decolonial theorists embed in the paradigm of colonial modernity. In addition to that, many authors have moved beyond criticising processes of Othering and focused on the powerful and privileged position of the colonial and imperial Self, for whom epistemic violence is an indispensable prerequisite.
Having shown how deeply embedded epistemic violence is, both in real-world politics and in the foundations of scholarly disciplines, feminist, post- and decolonial, and indigenous theorists proceed towards decidedly counter-hegemonic ways of knowing and modes of organising knowledge with a view to transforming, decolonising and/or and subverting dominant paradigms and practices. This agenda is as imperative as it is complex. From Development to Peace Studies, from Educational Studies to Global Sociology, from Philosophy to Gender Studies and beyond, the understanding and implications of colonial modernity have inspired critical voices to search for alternative modes of knowing the world, while fully acknowledging that we all operate on ‘modernity’s epistemic territory’. Theoretical concepts and notions such as pluriversality, colonial difference, epistemic disobedience, transmodernity, rearguard theory and many more have shown that, and also how it is possible to rethink the world and thereby transform both in paradigms and policies. However, all of these perspectives are well aware that substantial social and political change has never emanated from theories alone. Substantial societal change will continue to be fought and negotiated in the streets by social movements of marginalised and oppressed people across the world. They themselves have come up with alternative epistemologies, such as ubuntu, re-existance, and buen vivir, to name only a few approaches.
In this issue of the journal, we want to assemble approaches of knowing the world otherwise from all kinds of academic disciplines, and from all kinds of social movements, with a special focus on rethinking, unknowing and possibly undoing the, in many ways violent, condition(s) of global colonial modernity. We invite authors to focus on epistemic violence and its entanglements with other forms of violence when exploring ways of knowing the world otherwise. What is the potential of these alternative epistemologies and ontologies, and in which ways are they limited when it comes to un/doing epistemic violence? How can we challenge and change our colonial and imperial modes of knowing the world? In which ways do we have to keep asking, with Audré Lorde, whether the master’s tools are adequate to dismantle the master’s house, when it comes to undoing epistemic violence, especially within the field of knowledge production and education?
Articles may focus on regional or even local issues, or on specific theories and concepts, but should do so from a perspective that takes entanglements of North/South, West/East, Modern/Colonial and the like into account – or even dismantles these oppositions altogether. We invite authors to present their arguments and material through a deliberate focus on the problem of reproducing epistemic and other forms of violence while trying to undo it. We call on their contributions to carve out this specific focus of ‘un/doing’ within already critical approaches and concepts of knowing the world otherwise in order to strengthen a multi-, inter- and possibly even trans- or anti-disciplinary debate on un/doing epistemic violence as a prerequisite for reducing other forms of violence that keep existing orders of power in place.

Potential Approaches to the Topic (not exhaustive)

• debating the phenomenon of epistemic violence and ways of overcoming it, either by way of a comparative approach or within a specific disciplinary frame
• tackling the academia realm, the university or a given discipline as a specific site of un/doing epistemic violence
• discussing alternative epistemologies and ontologies with regard to reducing or avoiding epistemic violence in a given context, taking into account possible limitations and obstacles
• introducing specific counter-hegemonic didactics and pedagogies by which we can address the problem of un/doing epistemic violence
• analysing entanglements of epistemic violence with other forms of violence, with a focus on identifying intersections of potential intervention
• fathoming conceptual as well as political entanglements between violence and non-violence and the resulting problems from the perspective of un/doing epistemic violence
• delineating ‘modernity’s epistemic territory’ by way of exemplifying difficulties and successes in reducing epistemic violence
• challenging the concept of intersectionality when it comes to analysing epistemic violence
• correlating questions of race, sexuality, class and other co-constitutive categories with regard to un/doing epistemic violence
• focusing on social movements and their capacities for addressing and/or challenging epistemic violence

Schedule

We invite authors from any discipline to send an abstract (maximum 300 words) including title, author(s) and institutional affiliation to claudia.brunner@aau.at by April 30th, 2022. By May 31st, 2022, we will invite authors to write their texts, and inform all others about our decision. The deadline for the submission of full articles (40,000 characters, including spaces) is September 30th, 2022. After editorial assessment and double-blind review, corrections and proof-reading, the special issue will be published in print and online (green open access) in autumn 2023.

Guidelines

Please submit abstracts and full papers in English; communication with the editors can also be in German. Further information for potential authors is available here. For any questions regarding the procedures of publication, please contact clemens.pfeffer@mattersburgerkreis.at. For previous articles and issues of the journal, have a look at our archive.

Guest Editor

Claudia Brunner is a political scientist, peace studies and gender studies scholar, and Associate Professor at the Centre of Peace Studies and Peace Education, Department of Educational Science, at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria. For more information, see www.epistemicviolence.info

Journal