Beneath the sustainability branding lurk new environmental injustices and green colonialism. The green growth and clean energy plans of the Global North require the large-scale extraction of strategic minerals from the Global South. The geopolitics of transition imply sacrificing not only territories, but truly sustainable ways of inhabiting this world. A new subordination in the global energy economy prevents societies in the South from developing sovereign strategies to foster a dignified life.
The speakers will address the specifics of this new green colonialism and the alternatives being constructed by activists and policymakers in the Global South in coordination with allies in the Global North.
Presented by the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies and the Zolberg Institute for Migration and Mobility, at The New School -- in collaboration with The Global Just Transition (Institute for Policy Studies), Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South, and Global Working Group Beyond Development.
The Transregional Center for Democratic Studies - TCDS’s transregional and cross-departmental research and study programs, conducted both at home and abroad, bring together civic-minded students, junior and senior scholars, and civil society actors from various regional contexts. Our activities — region-based institutes, workshops, conferences, talks, and fellowships — are designed to further strengthen social and human capital, i.e., individuals and organizations concerned with the promise and sustainability of democracy. Our flagship projects have been the annual Democracy & Diversity Graduate Summer Institutes (held in Poland since 1991 and also in South Africa from 1999 to 2015), aimed at a rigorous quest for a more textured understanding of the precariousness of democracy as it arises almost everywhere.
About the Zolberg Institute for Migration and Mobility
In the world’s leading city of immigration, in a time of a troubling resurgence of anti-migrant action and rhetoric, in a University with a faculty and student body committed to social justice, the Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility supports critical and applied scholarship and provides opportunities for social action and policy engagement for faculty, students and the broader New School community.
The Institute fosters concentric circles of scholarship and action—in our University, our city, and the world. We contribute to the University community by offering courses, sponsoring lectures and events, and supporting extended visits of leading scholars. We engage deeply with New York City, supporting student work with the wide range of groups and communities in the City. We undertake initiatives to inform and influence public debate and public policy at the national and global level.
The term “mobility” in the Institute’s name is the key to our mission. It commits us to a dynamic understanding of concepts central to the field of migration studies—borders, citizenship and other forms of membership, the nation-state, forced migration, migration due to climate change and disasters. It also opens up for examination the prevailing political, cultural and economic narratives that both influence and are influenced by scholarship, policy and social action. It is a time for serious scrutiny of the premises, categories and policies that have produced the current historical moment, and for imagining new approaches to understanding human mobility (and immobility).
In collaboration with The Global Just Transition (Institute for Policy Studies), Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South, and Global Working Group Beyond Development.
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Dr Hamza Hamouchene is a London-based Algerian researcher and activist. He is the North Africa Programme Coordinator at the Transnational Institute (TNI), and a founding member of Algeria Solidarity Campaign (ASC), Environmental Justice North Africa (EJNA) and the North African Food Sovereignty Network (NAFSN). He has written and edited several books including The Arab Uprisings: A decade of struggles and The Struggle for Energy Democracy in the Maghreb. His writings have appeared in Africa Is A Country, Guardian, Huffington Post, Middle East Eye, New Internationalist, Jadaliyya, openDemocracy, ROAR and other places.