Violence. Brad Evans

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СКАЧАТЬ producing radical change in this context. That said, I maintain a strong and honest position, one that resists being mediated by the institutional power relations that define a large international organization. As a UNESCO water chair I am both external and internal to the organization. This allows me to maintain a position of partial autonomy.

      The people whom I have been in dialogue with at UNESCO are deeply committed to creating policies and practices that address social and environmental injustices. We may not always agree on how to do this, but it is crucial that different voices, experiences, and situations are part of the discussion, even when the outcome falls short of radical change.

      It is better to be at the table and contributing to the discussion than not at all. Every now and then, what one brings to the table animates the discussion enough to create small but meaningful changes.

       During the 1990s, it was common in policy circles to link the causes of conflict and violence to conditions of poverty and underdevelopment. A number of critics challenged this, as it seemed to place the blame for insecurity and vulnerability onto the shoulders of the global poor. Is there a danger that the same is happening today as environmental concerns are increasingly brought into discussions concerning the likelihood of violence and war?

      This question raises an important issue concerning displacement: the way in which structural and historical violence is obfuscated by pointing the finger of blame somewhere else. In much the same way that poverty has been identified as the cause of unrest, today environmental degradation is increasingly viewed as causing or having the potential to trigger social conflict, providing justification for the privatization of common pool resources or defensive strategies to secure and gain a monopoly over valuable natural resources.

      Whether the conflict in Darfur is blamed on desertification, or water scarcity as underpinning the ongoing conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, the problem of the equitable distribution of scarce natural resources and the deeper power relations concerning who reaps the benefits of these, and at whose expense, remains dormant.

      I am not suggesting that environmental degradation is unconnected to social and political unrest—it definitely is. However, to form a neat causal connection between the two disguises the myriad ways in which violence in the contemporary world operates.

      For instance, the threat of environmental degradation is used as a weapon of war. Here I am thinking of ISIS taking control of Mosul Dam in August of 2014, or of Syria, where water supplies were cut off from residents in Aleppo in both government- and opposition-controlled areas of the city.

      Environmental degradation is also used to justify the privatization of resources we share in common, under the guise of sustainable management, such as the privatization of water in Bolivia in the late 1990s, which increased the price of water, exacerbated poverty in the country, and fueled mass unrest. In this case, entire groups of people, future generations, and other species are denied or given limited access to common pool resources. I don’t see much difference between this and the previous example of ISIS seizing Mosul Dam. In varying degrees, all are instances of what the social theorist David Harvey might call “‘accumulation by dispossession.”

       If we maintain that climate degradation is indeed a form of criminal violence, and that neoliberal solutions cannot serve justice, what might a practice toward justice look like?

      There are two dominant political strategies that currently prevail in response to this problem. Either we try to mediate capitalism (this would be the “greening” of the economy argument) or we work from the outside to resist it (namely, the position of the radical activist). However, we’re now seeing a system of government that responds to environmental degradation by protecting the interests of the corporate sector ahead of civil society. The government is now a corporate actor that works with the private sector to privatize our shared resources. Meanwhile, the radical activist who frees minks from a fur farm, for example, can now be prosecuted under federal terrorism laws. In this way, tactics of working within the system to change it and the alternative approach of radical resistance each, in their own way, end up being absorbed into capitalist society and facilitating its smooth functioning.

      I am more interested in connecting conflicting political models, with the aim of creating new political solidarities. I don’t mean solidarity simply based on an issue—for instance when climate-change activists link arms with indigenous-rights activists or the anti-fracking movement. While this is important to do, I think the whole notion of solidarity needs to be deepened and expanded to include solidarities across different political practices, strategically switching between oppositional intervention from the outside and working from the inside to find a more effective path forward.

      This would be a bastard solidarity that combines the immanent politics of Spinoza and all its offshoots, which emerge by affirming the current situation differently to produce change, with the dialectics descended from Hegel and Marx, which begin by negating the current state of affairs so that contradiction leads to change. In my view, the change in question is only ever a provisional synthesis, not a stable, finished solution. As such, the struggle is necessarily continual and manifold, occurring in multiple ways and across numerous platforms. What unites them is a struggle premised upon love. A love of life, diversity, and openness. A love that works to defy hatred, oppression, and intolerance, and the violence this perpetuates.

      An emancipatory politics needs to be quick on its feet and recognize how capital accumulation functions and in turn build its political practices and thinking as a strategic response to this. No one political program is immune to appropriation by capital. Working within the system to change it is always going to involve risks of co-option, just as much as a politics that positions itself outside of the capitalist system would. Recognizing this and developing a critical realism regarding this situation that can switch deftly and quickly between the two positions is the basis for crafting a path forward.

      Environmental degradation is calling us to the witness stand of history. It demands we testify against ourselves and mount a case in our defense. Ultimately, we are all agents of history. To reduce ourselves to a role of mere observation is to deny us of our humanity.

SIX

      THE VIOLENCE OF FORGETTING

      When ignorance and power join forces, history itself can be erased.

      How do we develop the necessary educational practices to challenge the problem of violence in our times? How might we differentiate between competing pedagogies of violence and hope? And what lessons might be learned so that we can build collective futures? The political and cultural theorist Henry A. Giroux has been at the forefront of these debates with his impassioned call to take the power of education seriously. Education is always a political form of intervention, Giroux maintains. This discussion begins from the very real presence of violence in the United States as witnessed in repeated mass killings and what this means for cultural memory and civic engagement. Confronting the raw realities of suffering, Giroux then directly addresses the politics of ignorance and the intellectual conditions that give rise to systems of oppression. Finally, he identifies the challenges and difficulties faced by the modern university when teaching students about violence.

      Brad Evans interviews Henry A. Giroux

      June 20, 2016

      Henry A. Giroux is a professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. A leading public intellectual and critical pedagogue, his latest books include America at War with Itself, American Nightmare: Facing the Challenge of Fascism, and The Terror of the Unforeseen.

       Brad Evans: Throughout your work you have dealt with the dangers of ignorance and what you have called the violence СКАЧАТЬ