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Programming Racial Difference The tendency of European civilization through capitalism was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate—to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences. cedric robinson, black marxism, 1983. Like any mode of capital accumulation, accumulation through smart governance proceeds in part through positing social, hence geographic, nonequivalencies. The implementation of computerized property and waste tech moves through long-standing structures of group-based inequalities, extending them in time and space, transforming them, creating in the process novel contradictions and forms of resistance. The centrality of profiling is made clear in computer-assisted property appraisal. Trevor Ngwane illustrates how property regimes have long served as mechanisms for racializing space, expressed in submarket differentiations.66 cama software reproduces these submarkets under the heading of putative finer districts, comprising high levels of home ownership, median household incomes, and proximity to amenities, among other factors, on one hand and “inner-city” submarkets determined by the preponderance of old buildings, residences with low square footage, and low home sale values on the other.67 The profiles, which map onto residential segregation, are then used as rationalizations for placed-based (dis)investment and tax abatement. This preserves existing disparities in property value, thus ensuring that minority neighborhoods maintain their relative valuelessness. In fact, lowering the values of minority submarkets, which always precedes gentrification, was the point of establishing algorithmic appraisal in New York, which was legitimized through multicultural rhetoric. Computer-assisted waste management similarly generates spatial profiles in ways that naturalize the logics of the market and contribute to “group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,” given its toxic import.68 And it can do so only by encoding spatial and hence social differences. Municipalities also attempt to raise revenues from rural areas by coding them as distinct from cities in order to fund urban projects. This casts the rural as a resource for dealing with urban growth, though only through reproducing the nonurban. Technology firms similarly benefit from the production of regional difference by casting its commodity as a medium through which postcolonial hinterlands can close the development gap with Western countries. Smart governance reflects the extent to which forms of capitalist governance, computerized or not, rely on establishing notions of group-based inequality prior to and through the accumulation process. As Adam Bledsoe and Willie Wright argue, the enshrinement of racial inequality is one of several tactics of justifying the racialized effects of this process.69 And the tactic is deployed on a global scale. It is therefore important to stress that the planetary profusion of smart governance encounters, organizes, and disposes of humans and environments in ways that are prefigured by colonial racial classifications. This adds another dimension to the observation that contemporary urbanization is “variegated, uneven, volatile, contradictory, and emergent[and] assumes specific forms across divergent spatiotemporal contexts.”70 Specifically, we see that differentiation is not only an output of urban transformations but also an input, which offers deeper insights into where, why, and how economies of space are changing alongside sociotechnological mutation. Beyond the Algorithm Scrutinizing smart governance from the perspective of racial capitalism reveals the extent to which it is prefigured by and creates new forms of racial dispossession and disparity. These findings highlight the need for algorithmic abolitionist thinking that calls the types of norms and values behind smart governance to the fore. Such a point of view maintains that it is not enough to chronicle the unequal effects of the rise and spread of technologically administered populations. Such inattention to the social forces at work behind smart governance has led to some theoretical missteps. For one, in addition to chronicling how the spread of the smart city can reproduce established social inequalities, one must also scrutinize it in terms of whether or not the reproduction of long-standing social inequalities is one of its driving objectives.71 One thing that smart urbanization shows is that data-driven governance is employed in many instances to preserve if not expand inequity. This is most obvious in the way that racial taxonomies prefigure algorithmic practices in border patrol, law enforcement, and/or national security. The slow and uneven rolling out of smart technologies of governance does not signify the birth of a fully automated mode of statecraft, operating beyond the grasp of human control. Such phantom-like agency is an ideological mirage that renders invisible those who benefit from the application of computing technology to governance. Nor does it signify, as Zuboff suggests, the end of racial supremacy as an organizing principle of political and economic power.72 On the contrary, from the standpoint of racial capitalism, algorithmic governance is the latest vector of white supremacist political economy. It is therefore vital to understand the constitutive function that racial differentiation performs in creating conditions for smart modes of governance. As the cases explored above demonstrate, the algorithmic apparatuses of such cities are specifically designed such that they devalue specific areas and make them unequally susceptible to disinvestment and despoilment. In many instances, the key function is to legitimize the harmful practices required to increase profit rates, which are to begin with already ethno-racialized, gendered, nationalized, regionalized, and sexualized. An abolitionist view would direct attention to the extent to which such deployments of software technology permeate society. Moreover, the perspective is sensitive to the fact that the use of algorithms to differentiate populations and places according to their value can potentially generate new solidarities and ways of producing social space. The people and places that are identified by algorithms as economically devalued or exposed to pollution are revealed to share one common characteristic—they are relatively valueless from the vantage point of current configurations of global accumulation. This is not merely an issue of class: some of these groups are proletarianized; others are not. But what they all hold in common is that they have been differentiated by governances as less valuable, however defined. Acknowledging this provides a basis for coalition building between the various algorithmically devalued populations, which offers new opportunities for resisting the racial violence so central to the evolution of the capitalist mode of production.

Against the commensurabilities and rationalities of debt and finance capitalism, conditioned through the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism, we seek alternative frameworks for building capacities for grounded relationality. By grounded we mean quite literally situated in relation to and from the land but without precluding movement, multiplicity, multidirectionality, transversals, and other elementary or material currents of water and air. This is a being grounded and living relationalities in which the nonhuman world and the materiality of land and other elements have agential significance in ways that exceed liberal conceptions of the human. If the grounded relationalities of Indigenous philosophies might tell us anything, then, they remind us that knowledge must always remain grounded as the land calls to us and for us to find our place within the ongoing acts of interconnectivity that surround us. A number of questions arise with this shift from the epistemic trap of debt to the possibilities of relationality as affective and grounded alternatives to economies of dispossession and systems of extraction and exploitation. How might we apprehend relationality across systems of capitalism, colonialism, and chattel slavery and its afterlives? What happens when land is understood not as property or territory but as a source of relation with an agency of its own? How might reconceiving of land as relation shift the ground of racialized and embodied histories away from the territoriality of the state? How might building capacities for relationality outside the logics of propriation make it possible to handle incommensurate demands for justice? In other words, is there a way for land in itself to serve as an ontological condition for a different concept of the political that refuses conquest, doctrines of discovery, and the propriations of the propertied self? Finally, can land as the source of relation rather than the site of boundaries define a politics under which Indigenous sovereignty and Black reparations movements can (re)build capacities for relationality (aberrant to logics of propriation), rather than enact exclusivity or inclusion? In these times, when it is clear that liberal freedoms, misnamed democracy, fail to halt the expropriation of collective life by financial capitalism and its extractive resource mining, it is critical to turn our attention to ongoing praxes that build capacities for relationality beyond the logics of propriation. Because they have long understood inclusion in the liberal capitalist state as an unmaking of collective social being, as whitewashing ongoing violence, Black radical philosophy read alongside Indigenous critical theory may help us to think alternatives that are both transformative and realizable and, in fact, already manifest and discernable. Work by such scholars as Glen Coulthard, Saidiya Hartman, Shona Jackson, Tiffany Lethabo King, Lisa Lowe, Fred Moten, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, and Denise Ferreira da Silva offers energizing responses to global predatory formations of debt-driven accumulation, each drawing on Black radical traditions, critical ethnic studies, and/or Indigenous critical theory for epistemic-material activism. As Saidiya Hartman observes, “Skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” are all the afterlife of slavery.30 That afterlife persists as we are all asked to confront the ontological, political, economic, and moral implications and entanglements of colonization and slavery as they ostensibly compete for originary source within dispossessive regimes. In his work, Moten confronts the predatory formation of subprime debt speculation and foreclosures from the point of view of the Black radical tradition, which constellates around the anticapitalist norms of “consent not to be a single being” and “preservation of the ontological totality” (the survival of Black collectivity). Moten celebrates the subprime debtor for enacting a guerrilla “collateral agency”31 when he writes: For a minute, by way of policy that accompanied another of those periodic attempts to deconcentrate that mass and its ongoing project/s, home ownership was infused with and disrupted by a kind of carnival, a country-ass hoedown, an embarrassing barbecue. This disownership renewed an old experiment that moves at the intersection of squatting and “the imposition of severalty” (… to eradicate the Indian who was not vanishing quite fast enough by liberal conferral of the gift of private property.) That imposition [was updated] … in the name of “the ownership society” … so that it could continue its brutal, violent habit of enclosing our common capacity.32 Moten refuses to compare and oppose Black and Native dispossessions in racial capitalist settler colonial modernity and instead offers a way to conceive of debt as disownership that links contemporary forms of foreclosure to the enclosures of settlement, severalty, and allotment. As home ownership and its subsequent subprime mortgage within the existing structures of a well-established settler colonialism became “a kind of carnival, a country-ass hoedown, an embarrassing barbecue,” Moten acknowledges how “the ownership society” continues its brutal drive toward enclosing our common capacity and our capacity for the commons. Building on questions of the spatialities of settler colonial geographies, Tiffany Lethabo King, in her recent work on Black fungibility, argues for an analytic framework through which to consider how “Blackness mediated the ways the natural world could be imagined as manipulable and an open landscape in flux.”33 Such a framework disrupts the spatial and embodied boundaries that have at times separated Indigenous and settler colonial critique from Black studies by demonstrating how “Black bodies in the fluttering, stretching, and changing states became a symbol of unstable borders, processes, and the shifting power relations … [and where] Blackness, as expansion and spatial possibility, becomes a constituting feature of the spatial imagination of the conquistador/settler rather than just another human laborer exploited as a mere technology to produce space.”34 Such moves help us decenter bodies as the site of pure labor within the proprietary logics of settler colonialism and racial capitalism to think more fluidly about the porousness of those same bodies as they are made to move and remove, build and destroy, relate and tear asunder. Dene scholar Glen Coulthard confronts the debt-driven predatory formations active in Canada, where austerity provides alibis for renewed thefts of Indigenous lands and resources and more indebtedness and precarity generally. Inspired by Frantz Fanon’s belief that those struggling against colonialism must turn away from the colonial state and find in their own transformative praxis the source of their liberation, Coulthard calls for the reinvigoration of land-based norms, of “indigenous laws … that uphold the relations of reciprocity that shape our engagement with the human and nonhuman world—the land.”35 He refers to this transformation praxis as “grounded normativity” in Red Skin, White Masks. Recently, writing with Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg poet, intellectual, and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, he has reframed this praxis as a baseline for anticolonial solidarities against the proprietary and possessive regimes undergirding settler colonialism in North America. “Our relationship to the land itself,” Coulthard and Simpson write, “generates the processes, practices, and knowledges that inform our political systems, and through which we practice solidarity. To willfully abandon them would amount to a form of auto-genocide.”36 Grounded normativity, as Coulthard and Simpson explain, provides an ethical way of knowing and being that is more expansive than those ontologies that prioritize the human as exceptional, and it is a placement that extends memory through vast kinship networks that assume life, vibrancy, and agency beyond the limits of enlightenment notions of self, liberty, and property. Such Indigenous interventions to the categories of being codified by settler law, policy, and territoriality are also fundamentally critiques of colonialism as they reorient knowledge and power within and through Indigenous returns to land, philosophy, diplomacy, activism, and kinship. By decentering the human, such theories require us to consider further how colonialism has already inflected our understanding of nature, memory, and history through the production of archives and certain kinds of knowledge production that favor hegemonic white possession. Here, as a way toward ending this introduction, we’d like to offer a series of provocations and questions that arise when Black and Indigenous intellectual traditions are held simultaneously as offering disruptions to propriation and possession: How might we develop Coulthard’s fruitful concept of “grounded normativity”—the ethical framework “informed by what land as a mode of reciprocal relationship (which is itself informed by place-based practices and associated forms of knowledge) ought to teach us about living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way”?37 What would it be, then, to think and work for a grounded relationality, at once addressed to Black placemaking, geographies, and other racialized diasporas, as well as to proprietary violences incommensurate to yet not altogether separate from Indigenous land and sovereignty? What would it mean to consider the land itself as a site of an agentive fungibility that has been conscripted into the proprietary spatialities of colonial possessiveness and constrained into geographies of exploitation that no longer serve the relationalities of presence and care that have for so long been its domain as a common for all? The loss of land is not just a loss of property, territoriality, power, nation, or sovereignty; it is the loss of those philosophies that derive from the relationships the land itself activates, fosters, and nourishes. Working across the lethal confluences of imperial conquest and racial capitalist predation, the essays that follow engage such questions and the logic of propriation that organizes and underwrites economies of dispossession in the historical present.

Commodifying the land on which we try to survive The capitalist- colonial- enslavement project tied the need to acquire copious amounts of unfree labour to a need for recognisable and legal means for the acquisition of land as property. Interestingly, in many cases, in the accumulation of colonial territories, signed treaties were used to evidence transfer of title to land, from the colonised to the coloniser. This even though the initial indigenous ‘title’ was often an indigenous trust over land. Yet what was ‘received’ therefrom was outright ownership. In other words, what was granted was not what was ultimately taken, as the meanings of what is meant by land between the coloniser and the colonised did not coincide. For many indigenous and later colonised peoples, land was not alienable property to be exploited as a capital source or for the natural resources under the land. In the words of Kimmerer, land was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. (2013: 17) Conversely, to the colonisers, secured ownership of land was essential to enacting the conditions that were necessary for finacialisation and assuming the conditions of profligate life – boundless accumulation and exploitation of the earth’s resources, including human labour. This required colonial powers to be able to legitimately utilise both inexpensive land and unfree/ unwaged labour. This explains why, while chattel slavery did not exist in colonial possessions in some regions, colonising powers who had appropriated land in those regions still operated (and/ or permitted the operation of) plantation- like establishments relying on the use of unfree labour. So, ‘capitalist- colonial- enslavement project’ aptly describes the continuation in all three manifestations of a singular logic of accumulation and dispossession. The labour used in the colonies was almost always racialised, often coerced and unwaged, and also relied on the removal of indigenous people from their homes to be housed near or on the plantations. Portuguese colonial plantations produced goods – coffee in Timor, sugar and cocoa in Brazil, cocoa in São Tomé and Príncipe, and coffee, cotton, and sugar in Angola (Clarence- Smith 1990: 152– 72; Walker 2007: 75– 106; Shepherd and McWilliam 2013: 326– 61;Varela and Louçã 2020: 199, 223). The Spanish had cocoa plantations in Fernando Po (Sundiata 1996: 11– 14). Belgium’s brutal colonial activities in what was called the Belgian Congo, involved racialised use of enslaved, enforced, and tortured– compelled labour to work on these plantations, resulting in a loss of roughly 50 per cent of the indigenous population (Hochschild 1999: 280; Juif and Frankema 2018: 313– 43). There were British tea plantations across Southeast Asia and East Africa (Palmer 1986: 105– 26; Wickramasinghe and Cameron 2005: 4– 6). Coerced labour was also used in the British and French Empires across Africa and Asia for infrastructural development and defence: these included transport systems to extract resources from the colonies to the metropole (AkurangParry 2000: 3; Tharoor 2017: webpage; Daughton 2021: introduction). These examples illustrate, not just the lie of colonisation as infrastructural benevolence, but also its reality as expansion of pre- existing coercion of unfree labour that had been practised in the Americas under racialised enslavement (Wallman 2014: 51– 2; Siddiqui 2020; 50– 60). Colonisation did not depart from enslavement in its logics, but widened the geographical scope of racialised populations subject to dispossession of land, alienation from home, and being unfree labour. Therefore, being able to alienate land from indigenous populations was vital to the continuing economic success of a praxis of exploitative colonisation, whose logics were adapted and extended from racialised enslavement. Thus, the contemporary global economy continues to be fundamentally shaped by North– South extraction and accumulation practices that began during racialised enslavement and intensified in the formal colonial period (Feintrenie 2014: 1579; Bhambra 2020: 307– 22). The unequal opportunity to make massive profits by exploiting low- cost raw materials and unfree labour creates and maintains this racial and geographical divide (Aoki 1998: 52). The legal alienation of land as property and the legal epistemologies that maintain this are crucial to preserving and reproducing this global order. To unpack the process by which global appropriation of land for the Euro- modern machine becomes normativised, I begin our story at about the start of the 17th century. At this time Europe had not yet taken complete physical control of the land masses of the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. However, colonial desires to find new land to take control of and exploit had already been fuelling disturbances in mainland Europe, as land capable of alienation became scarce. Thus, for both the intellectual and the political classes in Europe, the question of acquiring land beyond European shores, becomes vital at this time. These desires and the conceptual logics to weaponise them crystallise in the 1600s, through the writings of scholars like Locke and Petty, (and later Hume and Adam Smith), as well as through the political enactment of land appropriation as a means to acquire private property. Prior to this time, under the European feudal system, land rights while mainly vested in nobles, were also granted in diminished form to those identified as serfs and peasants. In other words, access to land was granted unequally within this already unequal system. However, land was not treated as something from which others could be alienated completely – in other words, private property. The reasons for this are obvious. Unlike other types of choses classified as property, land is needed to ensure the existence of life itself as it provides a place to live and to produce food to live (Large 1973: 1040). So, the very experience of being human relies on access to land. This pre- existing praxis around land meant that making land private property required a fundamental rupture in the societal functions of land, law, as well as land’s legal ontology. In this vein, Cedric Robinson describes the emergence of racial capitalism as reliant on a conversion of European societal structure from retail mercantilism to more voluminous trade (2000: 18– 20). This conversion could not have been achieved without enabling private ownership to land. The means for obtaining this access relied on logics for differentiating human/ bodies and adducing values and fixed destinies to that differentiation, that already existed in European society (Kelley 2017: webpage). In other words, the hierarchical categorisation of human beings and bodies by class– race was already an integral part of European ways of being. This is discussed in the previous chapter. Nevertheless, it should be noted that at the time, these differentiations were not coterminous to what we now call race, as skin colour was not a key basis of differentiation, but differences were marked spatially and culturally, in religion, social class, and economics. Thus, the initial victims of racialised dispossession were Europeans – the Irish, the Roma, the working classes, and other thus differentiated populations (Kelley 2017: webpage). For example, when bankrupt feudal landlords in Scotland and Ireland increased their rents and maximised land use, they instituted enclosures of land and the removal of othered people who were already on the land. These removals – ‘clearances’ – were supported by scholarly reconceptualisation of not just who could be removed from land (origins of racialisation), but of the nature of land itself. William Petty (1623– 1687), influenced by Aristotle, Cartesian duality, Hobbes, and Bacon as well as his own personal experiences of deprivation in Ireland, articulated a theory of value that equated land with labour (Naldi 1989: 3– 36; Fox 2009: 388– 404; Bhandar 2018: 36– 51). Consequently, he suggested that ‘all things ought to be valued by two natural Denominations, which is Land and Labour … we ought to say, a Ship or garment is worth such a measure of Land’ (Petty 1899: paragraph 18). As labour is derived from the body, this analysis, though economically profitable, reduces (in perpetuity it seems) the value of the human body to its labour and removes from the value of land its vital function as sustenance of invaluable testamentary life. John Locke’s (1632– 1704) labour theory of property takes Petty’s arguments a step further by also relying on a schism between body and reason, as well as a more precise mathematical valuation of labour. He posits: Though the earth, and all inferior creatures, be common to all men, yet every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. … As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. (Locke 1999: 117– 18) A close reading of Locke’s labour theory of property reveals that it relies on several questionable foundations. First, the problematic conceptualisation of labour as property which is separate from the body fails to account for the fact that labour cannot be taken away from the body (Keenan 2010: 424; Bhandar 2014: 211). Thus, this schism relies on an idea of self- ownership that only makes sense if the human is defined only as ownable, either by the human in question or by another. By reducing the human solely to the labour produced by the body, this schism extends the understanding of prior practices of enslavement in ways that disappear the humanity of the enslaved. Furthermore, as the labour which is proposed to be mixed with the land here is intangible, Locke conflates different types of essences – labour, human, land, other tangible things – within the category of property. Additionally, the theory is used to explain the anterior acquisition of real property that had already been acquired, which had not been acquired in the way the theory posits and was not acquired thus subsequently (Quiggin 2015: webpage). Land in the Americas, of which he was writing, was acquired by violent dispossession and conquest. Once acquired, it is passed on by legal legitimation. Hence, the theory does not explain any form of acquisition of land in practice. So, the justification even though it proceeds as a legal truth, reveals itself as arising from a fictionally founded, antagonistic ‘politics of articulation’ and political expedience that sets the boundaries – epistemological and legal – of propriety (Devenney 2011: 152– 3, 161). In other words, while the theory does not explain the actual acquisition of land, as it purports to do, by creating fictional antecedents for the origin story of land as private property, it operates to entrench a legal and proper narration of land as private property. For example, Justice Sumner in Re: Southern Rhodesia (1919: 233) rejects Matabele and Mashona ownership of land because their land practices differed from this proper origin story. Consequently, this narration and articulation are of vital importance to understanding colonial accumulation/ dispossession of land, as Locke also places a very narrow, Eurocentric and mathematical definition on profitable labour and improvement of land that relies on racialised, gendered, classed (and other non- protected life) presumptions of who is law’s human, as well as whose labour and what type of labour has value (Nichols 2005: 44– 5, 48; Keenan 2010: 424; Quiggin 2015: webpage). Therefore, this narrow identification becomes a self- fulfilling prophecy thereafter of who has value and whose labour has value. Valuation in the eyes of the law and economics contingently relies on being able to amass large quantities of land and acquire large- scale labour to ‘improve’ said land. In essence, Locke’s labour theory of property is underwritten by the presumption that colonially accumulated land thus alienated, must be made profitable by the use of unfree labour (Graham 2010: 47). The theory of property also continues to have significance for how value placed on physical labour is considered less important to capital generation as compared to fiscal labour. Finally, and very importantly, the theory relies on the presumption that land is infinite (Quiggin 2015: webpage). This presumption about the boundlessness of land and the wealth it provides, under logics of property- fication, underpins the intractable capitalist over- exploitation of both land and unwaged labour. Consequently, we see how Petty and Locke (both writing in and around the 17th century), articulate ideas that consider the ‘value of both land and human life as equivalences based on the cultivation of land’ (Bhandar 2018: 36). Bentham additionally conceptualised this value as tied to the ability to sell the subject matter of value – land or labour (Ress 2020: 102). Thus, in terms of land as private property, its value is essentially linked only to claims to land that could be recognised by Euro- modern law. Native and indigenous titles and ways of being on land were completely disregarded. This is because, it was Euro- modern legal claims to land that granted the holder the right to maximise its commodity value, by alienation, ‘improvement’, and sale or security. Thus, racialised enslavement and exploitative colonisation became germane to the Euro- modern economic regime as the most expedient ways to accumulate capital. This process was and is bolstered by the language, organs, and structures of the Euro- modern law. So, by the end of the 17th century, the ‘truth’ of ‘land as private property’ had displaced all other land truths to become an indisputable fact in Euro- modern legal epistemology. This legal epistemology of land as alienable property, whose use must be maximised, therefore, facilitated the colonisation of most of the world by Europe between the 19th to the 20th centuries. Relying on narratives of improvement and civilisation, European colonial powers (often through trading companies) were able to legitimately lay claim to resource- rich territories, the best agricultural land across the world, as well as unfree labour, all for the maximisation of profits (Hickel 2017: chapter 3). Hence, it is not just the physical and administrative acts of colonisation of land and enslavement of human bodies that must be of concern to achieving decolonisation. We should also pay very close attention to how the redefinition of the teleologies of humanity and real property, as well as a conflation of the foregoing, (re)produce the colonial materialities and trap us into a temporal loop of destructive life. Just as emancipation did not end the hierarchical redefinition of human/ bodies as property, the ending of administrative colonisation has not brought about a return of indigenous meanings of land. Colonised alienated land was handed over to successor states through legal technologies that continued and did not disrupt logics of enclosure. Therefore, though reification of land as private and/ or alienable property through what is called ‘decolonisation’ manifested differently in settler and non- settler colonies, the direction taken in each case advances on the same logics of accumulation and dispossession. In most non- settler colonies, despite the dismantling of the direct administration of colonisation, the legal concept of uti possidetis juris (‘as you possess under law’) meant that inherited colonial boundaries often remained unaltered. Colonial possessions were ‘handed back’ intact, to ensure a continuous lineage of possession. Uti possidetis (initiated in Roman law) is a legal principle that evolved from being a tool to preserve the status quo where needed, to a temporary and transitionary legal mechanism to ensure stability during movement from colony to state (Shaw 1997: 492– 500). This mechanism took on more permanent operationalisation in the period of transition to flag independence. This is because preservation of colonial boundaries became a significant part of post- independence politics. This was markedly so on the African continent. Through Article 2 of the Organization for African Unity’s Resolution 16(I) of 21 July 1964, ‘all Member States pledge[d] themselves to respect the borders existing on their achievement of national independence’. A constant narrative in both the making of colonies and their disintegration was that colonial presence and mechanisms (including borders) purported to prevent violence that existed prior to the making of colonies and that would undoubtedly erupt once the colony became states. Consequently, it could be argued that those who were in control of the post- colony had a vested interest and desire in preserving the sanctity of their new state (Kantai 2007: 119). This desire could have crystallised around a need to prove the colonisers wrong or a more calculated interest in keeping consolidated colonial benefits for themselves by stepping into the shoes of the coloniser. Either way, the result was the increasing rigidity of colonial borders. Yet uti possidetis works in tandem with and in reliance on terra nullius; the use of uti possidetis ensures that there is no terra nullius, that there is no legal vacuum in the time between colony and state (Hasani 2003: 85– 6). Uti possidetis does not reject the problematic premise of terra nullius [or territorium nullius], that designates indigenous colonised peoples as ‘nobody’. Uti possidetis, therefore, ‘bestowed an aura of historical legality to the expropriation of the lands of indigenous peoples’ (Reisman 1995: 352).

One way in which structural hierarchisation of humanity and space– time within evolving frames of Euro- modern legal knowledge is invisibilised from within legal knowledge, is through the apparent nescience and persistent absence within it, of the significance of racialisation to the emergence of intellectual content, value, and method. Bhambra calls this ‘methodological whiteness’. This is a study of the world that does not ‘acknowledge the role played by race in the very structuring of that world, [which] treats a limited perspective – that deriving from white experience – as a universal perspective’ (Bhambra 2017: webpage). Similarly, Mills describes ‘white ignorance’ as both a false belief and absence of belief held by people racialised white, a worldview and racial frame, about racially othered people in the world (2007: 26– 31; 2014b: 18; 2015: 217– 27). This white ignorance underwrites the production of the racial contract, underpinning the global political structure of white supremacy, but also makes its production invisible, unquestioned, immutable, and immovable, especially within and by legal intellectual knowledge systems. Consequently, through methodological whiteness and white ignorance, a significant amount of Euro- modern legal epistemological production has not been designed to understand the world but is a continuing unsuccessful attempt to remake and regulate the world in Europe’s image – a white patriarchal, property- owning image. Anything that does not fit is exploitable or disposable … or both. This powerful hidden structure requires/ required a technology of reproduction. So, Maeso and Araújo indict the law in their definition of Eurocentrism as ‘interpreting a (past, present, and future) reality that uncritically establishes the idea of European and Western historical progress/ achievement and its political and ethical superiority, based on scientific rationality and the construction of the rule of law’ (2015: 1). Epistemological Eurocentrism, relying on Euromodern legal knowledge, produces a world out of itself that never existed, does not exist, and cannot exist on its own. It cannot exist without a trail of bodies in its wake. And it does not count the bodies that through this worldview do not count. Thus, our disciplinary divisions are unable to truly understand the world or provide useful solutions to its problems. This futility is a condition described by Gordon in his conceptualisation of disciplinary decadence in academia. Disciplinary decadence, according to Gordon, arises when a discipline, rooted in colonial practices, considers itself complete, self- created, entirely method- dependent, immortal, and omniscient about all other disciplines (2011: 98; 2014: 86; 2015a: 4– 5; 2018: 241). Any critique of such discipline can therefore only be acceptably justified by reference to the discipline itself. Hence, this decadence specifically exposes a methodological lacuna for disciplines in the Euro- modern academy, in respect of populations objectified at the time the discipline’s method and thought was formulated. ‘Problem people’ will not ‘fit’ into disciplines’ purportedly universal and objective method. So, we try in vain, using diversity measures, to fit such people into the strict dictates of the discipline, yet the field keeps on spitting them out, across space– time. In other words, within this intractable adherence to colonial method and logics, ‘non- normative people, become problems, instead of people who face problems’ (Gordon 2014: 81– 92). It seems easier to question the legitimacy of people whose ‘problems’ fall outside the sacred method of our discipline, than to question the method and presumptions that underpin the discipline – the soul of the discipline itself. Because to question the discipline is to question the (vision of the) world (it has created). In other words, we fall back on colonial logics of hierarchisation and delegitimisation of humanity to excuse the outcomes of the discipline – the necropolitical creation of death- worlds. This is what de Sousa Santos defines as abyssal thinking that relies on hierarchised binaries of life and death, of which he indicts Euro- modern legal knowledge as being particularly guilty (2016: 120). Within the academy, Euro- modern legal knowledge production has mostly ignored the effects of long histories of unfree labour and appropriation of indigenous land on the legal meanings of seemingly universal concepts and methods. For example, land justice for the coloniser is not the same as land justice for the colonised. Euro- modern justice for the coloniser is often actual injustice to the colonised. The coloniser’s right to private land historically relied on dispossession of indigenous land. But who those lands pass on to by succession and inheritance is determined, not by a universal understanding of justice, but by law’s adherence to order and authority. The law emerging from colonialism is thus subordinated to norms more protective of itself and the aims of the capitalist- colonial- enslavement project, than of life on the planet. True justice requires rethinking the norms of legal knowledge and not merely increasing the membership and demographics of our discipline (Gordon 2020: 38). Therefore, adherence to decadent method means that we are unable to adapt our epistemologies for different futures that do not follow on from the necropolitics of the colonial. This is what Gordon means by decay – turning from living thought. By trapping our discipline in thought that crystallised during a time when race science was used to abstract property out of humanity, through the legalised processes of racialised enslavement and colonial dispossession, we trap our world into reproducing the accompanying injustices of those modes of extraction and epistemologies along those hierarchised and geopolitical lines. This is because, disciplinary decadence operates along colonial lines, creating zones of closure, settlement, and negation of human possibility (Gordon 2018: 238). This is what I mean by the necropolitical production of death- worlds. Colonial logics and metrics produce especially narrow and limiting visions of humanity, including the space– time within which humanity exists, existed, will exist. So, the universalisation of a specific ‘particular’, results in the slow death of all other ‘particulars’ and the loss of utility of the chosen ‘particular’. Consequently, by trapping human possibility within rigid disciplinary dictates, transformation is rendered almost unachievable. Rather than justice, anything that exists on the other side of Grosfoguel’s ‘dividing line’, beyond the abyssal line, in the zone of non- being, is either eliminated or partly transformed to resemble this side of the line (Fanon 2008: 2; de Sousa Santos 2016: 120; Grosfoguel 2016: 9– 15). This stark division and negation of copresence is what makes ‘the claim of the universal translatability of the English word “justice” … an extraordinarily presumptive one’ (Gordon 2013: 70). Neutrality and universality are insufficient here, as epistemic injustice that arises through the obscuring of racialised knowledge cannot be assuaged by further obscuration of racialised knowledge. To mean anything at all, our quest for enduring justice through legal knowledge must be preceded and accompanied by an exploration of how the law’s present ontology was produced through colonial epistemologies, including language and spatial- temporal use and practices. To prevent further disciplinary decay, we must unpack colonial logics – their methods as well as the fundamental building blocks of their assemblage. Thus, in relation to legal knowledge, we must ask ourselves where the law has been, what it has done and if there is enough left of the discipline to ensure that all humans are law’s humans, that all of space– time is legible to legal knowledge. We must even be able to contemplate the destruction of the discipline for the benefit of humanity. In other words, let us ask, even if only hypothetically, if we are willing to let the discipline die, if it dies in service of the destruction of death- worlds and the creation of life- worlds? Is the law that has brought us this necropolitical death- scape, able to provide the design for flourishing future life- worlds?

This pattern of enthusiasm, followed by misunderstanding and ultimately failure, has been repeated over and over again by the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia when reaching out to India. Still, commentators and politicians across the English-speaking world have become immensely enthusiastic about India. India is known as 'the world’s largest democracy,' a 'natural ally' (in the war on terror and elsewhere), the possible 'democratic counterweight' to China, and a trading partner of 'massive economic potential.' In each case, India’s relationships with the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia are seen as finally emerging from decades of disappointment. India, it seems, has never quite lived up to the high expectations of the English-speaking world. This is the Anglosphere’s 'India problem': India does not fit the English-speaking world’s expectations of international behavior or its ideas of how international politics should operate. And yet, simultaneously, India shares many of the English-speaking world’s distinctive features: language, liberalism, and democracy. As a result, India has both confounded and beguiled the English-speaking world by engaging with Russia, refusing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty (NPT), testing a 'peaceful' nuclear device, and arguing against hierarchical forms of international order, all while seeking a 'polycentric' world order and rebuffing calls for new, closer relationships. There is little doubt that the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand share strong security relationships underpinned by a shared outlook on world affairs. They also share near-identical difficulties when reaching out to India. Indeed, India’s ambivalence towards the English-speaking world, as both an idea and a collection of states, has long defined its position in international affairs. The India problem can be seen in the way that India is talked about in mainstream Eurocentric International Relations (IR) theory, the foreign policy discourse of the Anglosphere states, but it is at its clearest in discourse which proclaims English-speaking unity. This is most certainly not India’s problem. The problem belongs to the English-speaking world. The idea of the unity of the English-speaking world has arisen repeatedly since Britain’s colonial expansion. In the mid-2000s, the idea of English-speaking unity arose again, in the form of the Anglosphere. Simultaneously, the Anglosphere states have again become obsessed with India, but in very troublesome ways. But what has not often been examined is how India relates to the English-speaking world, and why these relationships have each caused such continual disappointment. The 'India problem' lies in the English-speaking world’s understanding of India. It can be seen in the foreign policy discourse of the English-speaking states, in the idea of English-speaking unity as well as the way India is talked about in IR theory and in IR as a discipline. At the root of the India problem is the erasure of colonial violence from our understanding of international politics. In foreign policy discourse, seeing India as 'just like us,' sharing 'our' values or 'part of the Anglosphere' is premised on the erasure of colonial violence from the historical record. Similarly, seeing India as Edward Said’s Other, as an irrational, unknowable outsider who is fundamentally unlike us, reflects another side of the same problem. This characterizes India as unlike the English-speaking world, often emphasizing colonial and racialized ideas of India’s Otherness. This has now largely disappeared from foreign policy discourse, but was common in the period after Indian independence, in which India was seen as an unknowable, mysterious agent in international politics. Excluding India from the idea of the English-speaking world reflects its exclusive, racialized identity discussed by Srdjan Vucetic, and ignores the point that India shares much of what makes the English-speaking world. Including India in a superior Anglosphere, however, highlights only the positives of India’s colonial experience–an equally unacceptable proposition. Despite the obvious colonial overtones embedded within the idea of the Anglosphere, there remains a need to engage with the concept which results from its continued political/colonial power in international affairs. It is an idea and an identity. As an idea, it has long been debated and discussed by those who wish to see it embedded into the world order. It is as a political identity that the idea shapes foreign policy and contemporary international relations. Of course, debates on what the idea means feed into the political identity. The identity is predominantly felt by those atop the concept’s traditional hierarchy. As Vucetic has shown, this identity binds the US, the UK, Canada, and Australia together in defense of a US-led liberal/hierarchical world order. This form of order, frequently now referred to as 'rules-based order,' is presented by these states as benign, positive, ensuring stability, and as benefiting all states equally. India, however, views the US-led liberal hierarchical world order in a fundamentally different way to the Western-Anglosphere states. Rather than seeing this order as benign stability, India sees it as limiting its voice in international affairs and preventing the construction of a polycentric world order. Although we must bear these big-picture issues of global hierarchy in mind, they are not the focus of the book’s analysis. Rather, I analyze India-Anglosphere relations for the mutual perceptions of Otherness, seen in the context of the broader identity discourses circulating at key historical moments. On occasion, and particularly after 2001 and the emergence of the 'war on terror' narrative, this Otherness has transformed into a misplaced assertion of sameness and a shared identity. This shared identity, though, is made ambivalent by India and the Anglosphere’s different understandings of international hierarchy. As a result, although a shared identity has emerged, it has led the Western-Anglosphere states to reach out to India with very high expectations, which have continually been met with disappointment. These (mis)perceptions of Other are rooted in the long-term foreign policy arc of India and the Anglosphere and fundamentally related to hierarchy. Whereas the Western-Anglosphere states see their position atop international hierarchy as positive, benign, or even natural, India sees it as limiting its voice in international affairs, and at worst, as imperialist.

Settler colonialism and agricultural industrialization in Canada

Racial domination is reproduced differently based on relations of inequality over time (Wolfe, 2013). For instance, the logic of labour exploitation of African American slaves2 is profoundly different from the Indigenous context in Canada wherein logics of assimilation and extermination were coded through institutional structures, like the Indian Act (e.g. through blood quantum discourse, any non-native ancestry compromises ones indigeneity (Lawrence, 2008)). Without such distinctions, their reproduction often gets lumped into general analyses of racism (Lawrence and Dua, 2005)—thus continually neglecting how these logics (of elimination on one hand, and exploitation on the other) shape the variegated racial formations we see today. In the Canadian case, land, resources, and people were seized by force to accrue capital and construct a society of settler colonial patriarchal domination specifically. In turn, settler colonial relations are distinct from but interrelated to (with different core logics than) other racial formations, and ought to be analyzed as such. The idea of the ‘frontier’—carried out by (largely male) ‘unlicensed mavericks’ and ‘explorers’ (fur traders, bounty hunters, gold-seekers, ranchers and farmers) rather than formal state procedures—was foundational for settler colonialism (Wolfe, 2013). Farmers have played a specific role: the land and freedom their communities gained in the ‘new world’ resulted directly from the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Maintaining that freedom and all its entitlements involves ongoing possession of native land as well as retaining a landless, dislocated labour population—queue racialized migrant farm workers. These processes don’t look or feel like they did during initial seizure: they are bureaucratic, culturally and politically insidious, and not necessarily physically violent. Of course, many current farm families were not affiliated with initial seizure. In fact, many were fleeing their own hardships in Europe. However, they, like many of us, have privileged from this founding culture, which derives from land specifically. The political-economic implications of settler colonialism are expressed in Canadian landholding. Historical accounts of dispossession reveal how English common law and private property rights buttressed land seizure. ‘When a settler preempted land and met the terms of preemption, he (almost invariably, he) acquired title to the land in fee simple’ (Harris, 2004, 177). This system of estate production ‘embodied a perpetual and indestructible right to the land potentially for ever, and gradually became normative’ (Harris, 2004). Only through these conditions, wherein land rights were unilaterally seized from Indigenous peoples and distributed to incoming white European families, was the patriarchally structured ‘family farm’ able to emerge (Friedmann, 1978, 2005). Alternatives to wage labour were made available to large numbers of settlers in Ontario through the ‘gift’ of large plots of land, tools, and seeds, through which the household unit would supply labour so as to recreate its productive and personal consumption—demonstrating the centrality of patriarchy for settler colonial agriculture (Government of Ontario, 2006). In fact, household (kinship) labour was central to the emergence and success of simple commodity production during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (Friedmann, 1978). The household simple commodity structure was competitively superior to capitalist agriculture due to the interacting forces of kinship labour production, the availability of land, and technological adoption. Indeed, ‘the importance of the machinery lay not in its absolute reduction of costs of production, but in its reduction in the amount of labour required per acre harvested’ (Friedmann, 1978, 566). While acreage expansion needed the other two factors in order to be viable in North America, such expansion was nearly impossible for the average farmer in Europe at that time. The magnitude of land expansion in Canada was made possible through the settler colonial relation specifically, and was central to the success of the agricultural production system over the twentieth century. Moreover, much of the early success of commodity production in North America was due to ‘soil mining,' ‘in which colonists brought forth crops from the fertile virgin soil without replenishing it, and then moved on to new homesteads’ (Friedmann, 1978, 568). This was possible because of both (a) the breadth of settler colonial land seizure, and (b) the ways in which Indigenous peoples lived on and cared for the land prior to contact. Meanwhile, Indigenous peoples were largely restricted from practicing agriculture (particularly communal reserve production) and participating freely and autonomously in the colonial economy (Daschuk, 2013; Carter, 1990). As settlement proceeded, industry and commerce advanced, which was backed by extensive government support and credit extension to the settler farm base (Nelson, 2014; Friedmann, 2005). Effectively, European settlement on Indigenous land was tethered to colonial (and patriarchal) economic investment—a relationship that has only evolved and strengthened over time. Today’s agricultural production system has been shaped by these conditions. Over the century that followed, industrialization took hold, marked by aggressive mechanization and capitalization across the food system. As production increased and corporate intervention rose, farmgate prices declined alongside rising farm debt (Qualman, 2001). This ‘cost-price squeeze’ has occurred cyclically, only emboldened by government support for land consolidation, capitalization and corporate integration (Troughton, 1989; Holtslander, 2015). Over this time, family farms have been driven to expand, where today the average farm in Canada is 778 acres, about 500 acres larger than in 1930 (Statistics Canada, 2011). At its root, this trajectory of agricultural production is built on and advanced by features specific to settler colonial domination. Colonial land settlement conditioned capitalization, and specifically, the collaborative deployment of public and private capital in agrifood industrialization. The colonial state had a vested interest in supporting distinctly colonial capital backed by colonial companies who developed the infrastructure and equipment—both on and off farm—that necessitated the prosperity of the settler economy (which hinged on the success of agriculture specifically). For instance, governments and universities across Canada have played a central role in extension research since the nineteenth century, supporting research and development for crop breeding and pesticide innovation to facilitate moncrop production (Reaman, 1970). Since settlement, government has worked alongside private colonial capital to facilitate crossborder trade and encourage increases in efficiency. Notably, these colonial dynamics are further tethered to the emergence of racist labour policies in agriculture, most notably, the Canadian Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP), deployed to address labour shortages within the context of a growing economic squeeze on farmers (Perry, 2012; Preibisch, 2007; Walia, 2010; Binford, 2009).

Eddens ’21 [Aaron Eddens, Assistant Professor of Global Studies & Social Impact at Grand Valley State University; “Securitizing the Climate Crisis: Racial Geographies of Empire and the Agri-Fintech Frontier”; American Studies, vol. 60, no. 3-4, 2021, pp. 63-68, doi.org/10.1353/ams.2021.0041; accessed via University of Michigan Libraries, 07-28-2024] dliang

In this article, I trace an emerging agri-fintech/U.S. security state nexus by reading narratives driving index insurance projects alongside two sets of U.S. government documents: 1) U.S. intelligence community assessments that describe climate change and food insecurity as threats to American national se- curity interests and 2) U.S. global food security policy and strategy documents. Using the concept of racial geographies, I draw out parallels between the ways that agri-fintech projects and the U.S. security state position Africa as a space of perennial crisis. These geographical representations extend long-standing Western depictions of Africa as a singular, separate, and inferior space. They form the bases for a resilience logic that calls for outside interventions—on the part of American special forces or multinational financial corporations—in the name of securing an ever-expanding frontier of climate risk.

Food insecurity is an important determinant of public health. Undernutrition, particularly of children, is a primary cause of ill health and premature mortality in the Global South.9 Famines represent an extreme case of food insecurity. Groundbreaking work by philosopher and economist Amartya Sen highlighted a surprising fact about this extreme case that is politically informative about the structure of our society: famines often are unrelated to food availability. This point is counterintuitive. Before Sen wrote, the traditional approach to explaining famines appealed to food scarcity: famine involves starvation, and starvation is lack of food. This “food availability approach” was assumed in classic works of economics and philosophy (most famously by Thomas Malthus). If you wanted to explain a famine, you appealed to activity in or of the natural world that would interact with the food supply: pests, droughts, heat waves.10 In “Famines,” Sen appeals to two cases. The first is a famine in Ireland following a potato crop failure in 1822. There, people starved to death even though there was plenty of corn to eat. The second concerns the Bengal famine of 1943, in which three million people starved to death even though food production had actually increased relative to 1941, when there was no famine at all. The food availability approach does not offer a satisfying explanation to these famines. In both cases, Sen argues, the failures were sociopolitical: the reluctance of the British Empire to defend its colonized subjects rather than particular elites’ financial interests.11 The reason that people starved in Bengal and Ireland is explicable in terms of the framework offered by racial capitalism, especially as explained by Robinson and Gilmore. Robinson notes that the social structure enabled by splitting the ruled into separate populations arranged into a sharp, vertically organized hierarchy was developed in Europe (to the disadvantage of groups like the Irish and the Slavs) and came to operate on a world scale (incorporating Africans and Indigenous peoples) because of European colonization and subsequent capitalism.12 These distinctions in hierarchy, Gilmore’s definition tells us, become differences in grouplevel vulnerability, with groups further down the racial hierarchy systematically experiencing more vulnerability than groups farther up. This stratification is exploitable by the political powers that be: in Ireland, to defend profits and colonial control by largely English elites (higher up the racial hierarchy than the Irish) and, in Bengal, to defend the strategic interests of the British military (which feared Japanese invasion in rural Bengal). The theory of ecologically unequal exchange allows us to tell this same kind of story on a global scale, and with a wider reference to ecological phenomena than with the narrow focus on agricultural systems. This theory holds that our world economic system moves energy and biophysical resources from poorer to richer countries. This scheme in turn distributes ecological risks perversely, tending to concentrate them in the Global South.13 With the Global South carved into planetary politics by the same forces that colonized Bengal and Ireland, richer countries like those in Europe are “draining ecological capacity from extractive regions by importing resource-intensive products and shifting environmental burdens to the South through the export of waste.”14 Similarly, environmental economists and geographers have advanced the “pollution haven hypothesis,” which predicts that companies faced with stringent and costly environmental regulations in one country or region will move production to places with less-stringent regulation. The relationship is causal: higher-income countries (disproportionately yesterday’s colonizers) have more economic leverage against companies and more politically empowered populations, which correlates with tougher environmental regulations. Some empirical work has lent support to this hypothesis.15 The locating of manufacturing in countries with weaker environmental regulations redistributes environmental risk along the same lines as the ecologically unequal exchange theory predicts and can be viewed as one causal mechanism within that theory’s larger story.16 Inequitable distribution of environmental risk doesn’t happen only at the global scale. Within countries, there are “green crime havens”—areas of unlawfully elevated environmental risk. As with the pollution haven hypothesis, this concept represents the geographical distribution of pollutants and environmental vulnerability in ways that track power relations.17 And, as with the other theories, the relationship described is a causal one: researchers at Auburn University and the University of Florida explain that the havens arise “as part of power differences and corresponding zoning decisions,” not simply as a result of the havens’ proximity to natural resources that companies want access to for production.18 Whether one relies on the globally scoping ecologically unequal exchange theory, the transnational pollution haven hypothesis, or the idea of subnational green crime havens, the balance of evidence suggests that the geographical distribution of pollutants and environmental risk reflects social power dynamics. Moreover, the evidence suggests that the relationship between the political power of a population and its susceptibility to environmental vulnerability is a causal one, not simply a set of unhappy coincidences. This fits squarely into Gilmore’s definition of racism: “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Racial capitalism, then, links racial power and security disparities themselves to environmental exposures and health outcomes.

For Trutch, Indians had no rights to the land because they made no use of the lands, which were not “of any actual value or utility” to Indians.95 Such lands could only serve the public interest if they were thrown open for preemption. He had taken the same approach two years earlier in regard to the reduction of reserves in the Kamloops region and claims made by the Shuswap First Nation. Trutch concurred with the view of Philip Henry Nind, gold commissioner for the Cariboo region of the interior, that the Shuswap Indians’ claims to land were baseless as “they made no real use” of the land. As these claims were “very materially” preventing “settlement and cultivation,” Trutch urged Colonial Secretary Lytton to authorize an enquiry into the true extent of Indian land interests throughout the province.96

Improvement, of both land and people, was the reigning idea governing Trutch’s attitude toward First Nations and their entitlement to everdiminishing tracts of reserve land. Responding to concerns voiced by the bishop of British Columbia and the Aborigines Protection Society in 1871, he noted in his letter to the secretary of state for the provinces that despite the benefits accorded to Indians by white settlement, he had yet to meet “a single Indian of pure blood [who had] attained to even the most glimmering perception of the Christian creed.” Despite their concerted efforts to “advance the material and moral condition” and to “change their habit of mind,” the “idiosyncras[ies] of the Indians . . . appear to incapacitate them from appreciating any abstract idea, nor do their languages contain words by which such a conception could be expressed.”97

The material conditions of Black life prevent Black folk from accessing the energy saving techniques that are available to consumers, such as energy efficient refrigerators, modern insulation, and energy efficient heating and air conditioning. For example, renters in the U.S., which is disproportionately made of Black folks, are unable to implement many energy saving techniques– such as insulation, and energy efficient heating and air conditioning– because the choice to make such improvements is typically only accessible to homeowners, investment property owners and landlords. Beyond accessibility, the incentive structure of these types of home ‘upgrades,’ are generally expected in the long-term savings over years and decades; a cost-savings timeline which is not applicable to renters whose housing security is far more precarious (even if renters did purchase an energy efficient refrigerator, their rent may increase prohibitively in the coming months, making the investment in an energy efficient appliance more of a nuisance than a benefit.). Further, using these amenities works to alleviate the cost of electricity, which disproportionately benefits White households. Similar to the White Fight of the second industrial revolution, energy saving techniques are an opiate of the White middle class, one that works to alleviate the cost of energy consumption by further tangling the threads within the tapestry of oppression. An important condition of these relationships, one that is unique to the neoliberal epoch of the fossil economy, is the apparent color-blindness of environmental sustainability. Household energy saving techniques that are supported by energy distributors, and many other markets as well, are touted as environmentally sustainable and are a central part of strategic climate mitigation planning. Nonetheless, these narratives are also part of a hegemonic discourse of color-blindness that masks the reality of racial oppression in the United States. Here, again, instead of walking a path that heals the planet and unravels the threads of Black expropriation, the White middle class is being coerced into an alliance with an industry that perpetuates uneven development throughout the fossil economy.

When we hear about news of renewable energy projects, one must be forgiven for thinking that it’s all beautiful and shiny. But scratching a little bit beneath the surface of this language of "cleanliness," "shininess" and "carbon emission cuts" will reveal another picture, a picture of big capital robbing land and resource rights from the global south in order to safeguard the energy security of the global north.

TuNur solar project in Tunisia is a joint venture between Nur Energy, a British-based solar developer and a group of Maltese and Tunisian investors in the oil and gas sector. In July, the company has filed a request for authorisation from the Tunisian Ministry of Energy, Mines and Renewable Energy for an explicitly export-oriented solar project with a capacity of 4.5 GW.

Living through the fires of 2020 confirmed one thing: Emergencies bring people together. But to what end? The fires drew Oregonians together in the common goal of, on the one hand, helping those affected by the fire. On the other hand, however, people set about reestablishing the economic and cultural patterns of settler colonialism. Hence, from a certain perspective, a return to normalcy is also a doubling down on the social structures constitutive of that emergency. Governor Brown’s words of encouragement, “Oregon is strong, and we’ll stand together” (KOIN Channel 6, 2020), can be interpreted as a moment of forced assimilation into settler democracy, where Native people are asked to forget their national sovereign identities and become Oregonians. Emergencies, then, are key moments in how collective histories, futurities, and communities are experienced because they force the question of compliance with specific norms and power structures. Strict management of the framing and outcome of emergencies present crucial moments in the maintenance of settler colonial power because they offer a chance to mark and reestablish the boundaries of social formation and define the forces that pose threats to continued existence.

As historically defining experiences, emergencies are an element of perception. Far from a private and personal affair, perception is social, structured by what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky call a process of “inculcation” (2002: 1). Settler perception has a material- political infrastructure in the sense that it is underlain by economic and normative conditions that refract the colonial, White supremacist, and heteropatriarchal strategies of dominant society into the quotidian understanding of events, crystalizing intentional modes in subjects, bodies, and communities. These infrastructures are dynamic and multifaceted, but their alloyed effect regulates collective experience of emergencies always to the advantage of the settler state. The inevitable emergencies of capitalism and settler colonialism, whether intentionally produced or not, are an engine of this social inculcation.

Yet small bodies and intimate environments often get lost in big atmospheric narratives. Since its seventeenth-century origins in English, the term atmosphere has signaled the fluid medium of above-ground relations, its contradictory figuration as a space of geology and life, and a background that forges exchange between social and physical processes. Atmospheres can surround big and small bodies, and can shift as bodies entangle and disentangle spatially. With industrial pollution, lower atmospheric space abounds with plumes of toxic gases (methane, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide) as well as noncarbon by-products (e.g., nitrous oxide and ozone) that unpredictably concentrate in our bodies as we encounter a busy street, a power plant, or a factory farm. In addition to rising to heights where they can trap solar heat, these gases fix in soil and water, returning unpredictable flows of toxicity to the lithosphere where plants grow. These toxicities— often concentrated in poor and minority communities—contribute to childhood asthma, lung disease, and the spread of various cancers.

In an account of living with toxic sensitivity to airborne heavy metals, Mel Chen describes navigating and transforming unpredictable atmospheres and their conjoined affective and spatial entanglements. The improvisational strategies for prophylaxis—such as donning a particulate mask to avoid exposure to vehicle emissions on a busy street—inevitably conjure public surveillance. “Suited up in both racial skin and chemical mask,” writes Chen, “I am perceived as a walking symbol of contagious disease like SARS, and am often met with some form of repulsion.”21 Chen’s account points to how the materiality of everyday air pollution subtly intertwines with the materiality of race. Race, according to Renisa Mawani, might itself be understood as an atmospherics rather than a “social construction.” Drawing on Fanon’s accounts of race and atmosphere, Mawani explores “race as an affective movement, a force rather than a thing, a current that reconstitutes and reassembles itself in response to its own internal rhythms and to changing social and political conditions.”22 If race is not simply a phenotypic characteristic but an ecology of affective movement and exchange, the effects of carbon pollution— disability, disease, forced migration, and sometimes death—can catalyze the emergence of xenophobic fears about economic and ecological interconnection.

Liberalism: always too late, or capitalism’s colonial and enslaving proactivity?

In the IPCC reports, time as a linear human orientation is placed in the context of timescales of forces requiring human intervention but out of human control: climate change. The recent SRl.5 (IPCC, 2018), ‘Global Warming of 1.5°C’, representing the ‘newer instalment of the scientisation of climate change’, situates ‘the issue beyond democratic debate by declaring it a matter for the scientific expertise of the IPCC’, and inscribes it as an emergency (Garrard, 2020, p. 1). The report suggests ‘climate change is moving faster than we are’ (Masson-Delmotte et al., 2018, p. v), and its urgency demands our intervention. However, the moral and ethical articulation of the climate as a linear temporal ‘urgency’ does not allow us to understand ecological shifts or even climate change in a larger trajectory, including human conquest, property relations, and competition. Rather, the report’s ‘foreshortened timeframe’ speaks to the urgent need of global concerted efforts to mitigate climate change and signals how temporary responses and procrastination are not going to do the trick (Garrard, 2020, p. 2).

Labor Tax: How Underpaying Minority Workers Fuels AI Development In their investigative piece The Exploited Labor Behind Artificial Intelligence, Williams, Miceli, and Gebru [WMG22] expose the harsh realities faced by gig workers in the AI industry, who are disproportionately drawn from vulnerable populations. Big tech players in the AI industry such as Amazon and Facebook heavily rely on these laborers, including data labelers, content moderators, and delivery drivers. These workers, despite their indispensable contributions, often endure abysmal pay, constant surveillance, unrealistic quotas, and even safety hazards. Further details from the investigation reveal that data labelers, responsible for critical AI training data, can earn as little as $1.77 per task. In the troubling case of content moderators in Kenya, they are relentlessly monitored to make split-second decisions, even when confronted with disturbing content. These workers, whose labor sustains billion-dollar companies, are unjustly compensated. Izaguirre [I23] discussed a very recent example of labor exploitation within the gig economy 3 from the ridesharing giants, Uber and Lyft. In New York, these companies are set to pay a staggering $328 million to settle complaints that they wrongly imposed taxes and fees on their drivers that should have been covered by passengers. State Attorney General Letitia James unveiled this settlement, emphasizing how Uber and Lyft—which incorporate AI technologies for routing and pricing algorithms—had systematically deprived their drivers of millions of dollars in earnings and essential benefits. The drivers, akin to those engaged in data labeling for AI models, toiled for long hours in challenging conditions while being undercompensated. The repercussions of such labor exploitation have wide-ranging implications, demonstrating the persistence of these issues across different sectors of the gig economy. These drivers, often working long hours in challenging conditions, waited an arduous eight years for justice, emphasizing the enduring time burden in their battle for rights–we will explore the time dimension in the next subsection. Moreover, racial capitalism also rears its head in other ways in generative media AI applications. Startups have built systems to synthesize fake profile photos by exploiting images of minority models without consent or payment. The marginalized provide raw material—their unvalued data and likenesses—to advance technologies from which they do not benefit. An example of this is the Argentina-based design firm, Icons8, which built generative AI systems to synthesize fake profile photos by exploiting minority likenesses [H20]. Though the models’ images provided core training data, they received no payment for this labor, nor any share of the systems’ profits derived from their inputs. Once again, capitalism fueled AI development by commodifying bodies. The models’ data and likenesses became raw materials for tech advancement from which they did not equally gain. This case provides further evidence that we must scrutinize and address the human exploitation underlying much AI progress. Time Surcharge: The Burden on Minorities to Fix Biased Systems In 2019, a pivotal federal study by NIST unveiled the entrenched racial biases within facial recognition algorithms, revealing higher false positive rates for Asian, African American, and Native American faces compared to white counterparts [H19]. This disparity is not merely a technical oversight but a reflection of a broader societal issue where fairness is often assessed through a predominantly white lens, perpetuating and amplifying harmful racial stereotypes. These algorithms, failing more frequently with Black and Asian individuals, not only reinforce the misconception of homogeneity within these communities but also echo Cedric Robinson’s argument that capitalism morphs pre-existing social differences into racial disparities, using technology to further these divides. These biases extend beyond race to gender and age, with algorithms showing elevated error rates for women, the elderly, and the young compared to middle-aged white men. Simone Browne, in Dark Matters [Br15, p. 113], elucidates how these systems perpetuate stereotypes, such as misclassifying Asian males as females and Black women as men, illustrating how AI models, like capitalism, disseminates racial and gender stereotypes on a massive scale under the guise of technological neutrality. The case of Brandon Mayfield, as discussed by Browne, exemplifies how biases in AI systems can have real-world consequences. A veteran and a lawyer who had recently converted to Islam, Mayfield was erroneously matched by FBI algorithms to a fingerprint found on a bag containing a detonating device linked to the 2004 Madrid bombing [Br15, p. 115]. Despite being one of twenty matches, his recent conversion to Islam and status as a veteran, both associated with prejudicial stereotypes, led authorities to single him out. Mayfield’s personal life and beliefs were publicly exposed under a false accusation, and he remained entangled in legal battles to clear his name until November 2010. This wrongful identification underscores how minoritized groups not only bear the brunt of these biases but also face a “Privacy Levy,” paying a significant personal and financial price due to prejudiced technological systems. This systemic bias embedded within AI technologies serves capitalist ends in several ways. Firstly, it perpetuates a cycle where the burden of correcting and navigating biased systems falls disproportionately on marginalized communities, consuming their time and resources—a “Time Surcharge” that benefits the status quo by 4 maintaining existing power dynamics. Secondly, the deployment of such technologies, especially in law enforcement and surveillance, opens lucrative markets for tech companies, capitalizing on the state’s desire to monitor and control, often at the expense of those already marginalized. In essence, these biased algorithms are not just products of existing societal inequalities; they are tools that capitalism exploits to further entrench its dominance, ensuring that the costs of innovation are borne by those least able to bear them, while the profits accrue to those already in positions of power. It is important to point out that the concept of a “Time Surcharge” extends beyond the realm of AI and technological bias, reflecting a broader systemic issue that minoritized communities face across various bureaucratic and social systems. This enduring burden of time, as analyzed in the context of racialized administrative burdens by Ray, Herd, and Moynihan in Racialized Burdens: Applying Racialized Organization Theory to the Administrative State [RHM22], is often utilized as a means to punish and control, reinforcing poor living conditions. Similar to the ways in which biased algorithms require marginalized groups to navigate and correct flawed systems, these bureaucratic processes consume excessive amounts of time, serving as barriers that maintain social and economic inequalities. These practices are reminiscent of historical strategies designed to disenfranchise and exploit marginalized populations, perpetuating a cycle where the costs of bureaucratic inefficiency and technological innovation are disproportionately borne by those least equipped to handle them, while the systems in place continue to benefit those in power. The development and implementation of biased AI systems are stark manifestations of racial capitalism, where technological advancements are leveraged to amplify and profit from racial and social disparities. The need for a concerted effort to address these biases is not just a matter of technical accuracy but of challenging the capitalist structures that incentivize and benefit from the perpetuation of inequality.

Agbanyim and Chikwendu ’23 [Chimezie Stella Agbanyim, Department of History and International Studies Nnamdi Azikiwe University, and Chinyere Phillis Chikwendu, Department of History and International Studies Nnamdi Azikiwe University. “NEO-COLONIALISM AS A FACTOR IN AFRICA’S STATE COLLAPSE SINCE INDEPENDENCE”, 2023, accessed Jul. 24.]//max

Political Instability: Neo-colonialism has also contributed to political instability in many African countries, which in turn has led to state collapse. Many African governments have been propped up by foreign powers that have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo – dominance and exploitation. This has led to corrupt and authoritarian regimes that are more concerned with preserving their own power than with serving the needs of their citizens. In Somalia, for example, foreign intervention has contributed to a fragmented and unstable political landscape. The country has been embroiled in civil war for decades, and foreign powers have often supported rival factions in an attempt to maintain influence in the region.30 This has led to a lack of effective governance and a breakdown of institutions. Western powers have often supported authoritarian regimes in Africa, as long as these regimes are willing to cooperate with their economic interests. This has led to the suppression of democratic movements and the stifling of dissent. The result has been a lack of accountability and transparency in governance, which has contributed to the erosion of state institutions and the breakdown of the rule of law. Perhaps, a good example can be seen in France’s continuous influence on Africa. France has maintained its influence in its former African colonies, even long after they gained independence. This continued influence has been facilitated by several factors, including the maintenance of military bases, economic ties, and cultural influence. France’s military bases in Africa have been used to intervene in political conflicts in African countries, often at the behest of French-friendly governments. This has undermined the sovereignty of African states and contributed to political instability. Cohen31 argued that France’s political approach towards Africa has remained stuck in a pattern heavy on military action in countries like Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Chad, and Mali, with little recourse for new foreign policy tools. The approach employed by France has ignored ongoing political and social dynamics in the Sahel, amongst other areas in Africa. It has also kept France from doing enough to discourage the militaries of countries like Chad and Mali from overthrowing their leaders in coups. In a nutshell, France’s political influence on African states has been criticized for promoting a colonial worldview of political domination and for contributing to ethnic conflicts and social unrest which is antithetical to nation-building in Africa. Another example can be seen in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The exploitation of mineral resources by foreign countries like China amongst others, in this country, has contributed to a cycle of political conflict and instability. The DRC is home to some of the world's richest deposits of minerals, including cobalt, copper, and coltan, which are used in the manufacture of electronic devices. The extraction of these minerals has often been carried out by armed groups, who use the proceeds to fund their activities. The involvement of foreign companies in the exploitation of mineral resources has further marginalized local communities and perpetuated the cycle of violence. China’s Sicomines deal secured with DRC is at the forefront of China’s big indirect role in the continued resource curse mineral-driven conflict in the DRC’s Eastern region driven by mineral resource wealth.32 All these have unarguably contributed immensely to Africa’s state collapse. The constant pressure from the West on the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to maintain a colonial geo-political set up that asserted boundary to new states, some of which cut across pre-existing ethnic group states and kingdoms, has also resulted in political instability and constant inter-boundary dispute in Africa. Moreover, some of the states that emerged were different in sizes with unequal natural resources and economic potentialities. For instance, Ghana, Nigeria and Zambia are very rich in natural resources like gold, crude oil, coal etcetera; while Chad and Niger are not so fortunate. Also, Nigeria and Sudan tends to be larger than Gambia and Togo. Thus, the maintenance of these uneven boundary structures by African states, even at its peril, has further reinstalled the neo-colonial grip of the West on Africa, which will remain a cog in the wheel for an even successful nation-building to take place in the continent. Social and cultural Fragmentation/Marginalization and identity Crisis: Neo-colonialism has led to socio-cultural fragmentations and identity crisis in Africa. The imposition of western values, languages, and education systems has eroded local traditions and indigenous knowledge. This socio-cultural dominance has created a sense of alienation and disconnection amongst African populations, exacerbating social divisions and weakening social cohesion. Certainly, neo-colonialism has also contributed to social marginalization in many African countries, particularly for marginalized groups or communities such as ethnic minorities, etcetera. Foreign powers have often influenced and supported governments that discriminate against certain groups, perpetuating inequalities and exacerbating social tensions. More often than not, the leaders of such governments in Africa are enticed by material gains from foreign influences, at the peril of the citizens or group. Good examples can be drawn from Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Zimbabwe, the discrimination against the country's white minority, as well as the Ndebele ethnic group has fueled social unrest and undermined the legitimacy of the government.33 In South Africa, the legacy of apartheid has contributed to ongoing inequality and poverty, fueling social unrest and undermining the country's stability.34 Neo-colonialism has perpetuated social inequality in Africa, by entrenching the power of elites who benefit from the economic and political structures created by neo-colonialism. The neo-colonial model of development has favoured the interests of multinational corporations and foreign investors over the needs of local communities. This has resulted in the displacement of people from their lands and the destruction of the environment. The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few has also led to a widening social gap between the rich and poor, exacerbating social tensions and fueling conflicts. Under such auspices, no meaningful development can take place in Africa. There have been several social upheavals and evictions as a result of the colonial geopolitical structure that imposed boundaries to new governments, some of which straddle pre-existing ethnic group states and kingdoms. For example, the Bakongo group is split into the borders of Angola, the Belgian Congo, and the French Congo35 amongst others. Today, some Ewe people reside in Ghana, others in Togo, and also in Benin.36 The Somali group is shared among Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and Djibouti amidst the other countries that speak the language.37 One significant result of this has been the ongoing boundary conflicts that have hampered social relations between some of these independent African states, including Ghana and Togo, Somalia and Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda, and Nigeria and Cameroon, among others. Thus, each African nation-state is created by the arbitrariness of these borders. The nature of these boundaries further divides African nation-states made up of people or groups with diverse cultures, traditions, origin and languages. This in itself remains antithetical to the success of nation-building in Africa. The fueling of the religious crisis in Africa by the West has been another neo-colonial tool that has led to state collapse in the continent. Countries like Burkina Faso, Cameron, Mozambique, Chad, Nigeria, DR Congo, Mali, and Libya, have been recorded as African countries with extreme violations of religious freedom caused by Islamic extremism.38 Religion in Africa has been politicized and used by the elites and the West to mobilize support for certain government which is believed would serve the interest of these former colonial powers that be. Religious rivalry culminated in most civil wars in the African continent and the result was quite devastating. More often than not, these conflicts lead to displacement and migration of individuals from Africa which brings about brain drain; the looting and destruction of life, properties/infrastructures which in turn lead to economic down turn; as well as mutual mistrust and suspicion amongst ethnic groups within the diverse nation-states. All these negate the nation-building process.

Let us take two predominant topics of today’s American radical academia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism is undoubtedly crucial; however, “postcolonial studies” tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic of the colonized minorities’ “right to narrate” their victimizing experience, of the power mechanisms which repress “otherness,” so that, at the end of the day, we learn that the root of postcolonial exploitation is our intolerance toward the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself is rooted in our intolerance toward the “Stranger in Ourselves,” in our inability to confront what we repressed in and of ourselves. The politico-economic strug­gle is thus imperceptibly transformed into a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to confront its inner traumas … The true corruption of American academia is not primarily financial, it is not only that they are able to buy many European critical intellectuals (myself included – up to a point), but conceptual: notions of “European” critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of Cultural Studies chic. My personal experience is that practically all of the “radical” academics silently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the secure tenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play on the stock market). If there is a thing they are gen­uinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the (relatively) safe life environ­ment of the “symbolic classes” in the developed Western societies. Their exces­sive Politically Correct zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third World sweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost identi­fication, a kind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is: “Let’s talk as much as possible about the necessity of a radical change to make sure that nothing will really change!” Symptomatic here is the journal October: when you ask one of the editors to what the title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, that October – in this way, one can indulge in the jargonistic analyses of modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retaining the link with the radical revolutionary past … With regard to this radical chic, the first gesture toward Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least play their game straight and are honest in their acceptance of global capitalist coordinates, in contrast to the pseudo-radical academic Leftists who adopt toward the Third Way the attitude of utter disdain, while their own radi­cality ultimately amounts to an empty gesture which obligates no one to any­thing determinate. II. From Human to Animal Rights We live in the “postmodern” era in which truth­ claims as such are dismissed as an expression of hidden power mechanisms – as the reborn pseudo-Nietzscheans like to emphasize, truth is a lie which is most efficient in asserting our will to power. The very question “Is it true?” apropos of some statement is supplanted by another question: “Under what power con­ditions can this statement be uttered?” What we get instead of the universal truth is a multitude of perspectives, or, as it is fashionable to put it today, of “narratives” – not only of literature, but also of politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his/her story. The two philosophers of today’s global capitalism are the two great Left-liberal “progres­sives,” Richard Rorty and Peter Singer – honest in their respective stances. Rorty defines the basic coordinates: the fundamental dimension of a human being is the ability to suffer, to experience pain and humiliation – consequently, since humans are symbolic animals, the fundamental right is the right to nar­rate one’s experience of suffering and humiliation.2 Singer then provides the Darwinian background.3

This year, the impossible happened: I accepted an offer for a tenure-track (TT) position in a top US public university music program. For harpists, a TT job is a unicorn (within the past five years, only three TT positions have opened in the US). Due to declining university enrollment, budget and program cuts, and other administrative decisions stemming from the neoliberal turn in US higher education,[4] TT jobs — especially in music — are becoming increasingly scarce. With that in mind, I would be lying if I said job security wasn’t a motivating factor in my choice to remain in academia.

However, I’d like to think that receiving a key to the ivory tower won’t change my empathetic recognition that it’s “fucked up for you” as much as it’s “fucked up for us.” A huge part of why I wanted to be in academia in the first place comes from my commitment to higher education and my belief that the university can be more than just a place that insulates elitism or gorges on middle-class aspiration. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and cultural/economic upheavals[5] in the US, my role as a university professor should be more than just teaching my students how to better play the harp, penning scathing critiques from the comfort of my desk, or fighting for the bigger office with the better view. Rather I must participate in the reform necessary to sustain the social, cultural, and economic relevance of post-secondary music education: 1) a pragmatic turn in curriculum that will better equip students to succeed after graduation; 2) the implementation of civic responsibility in the classroom, to encourage students to listen to each other more thoughtfully and consider how their research and performances intersect with public life; 3) a recognition of the real economic obstacles faced by those in the arts so we can improve our mentorship of financially-disadvantaged students; and 4) the diversification of artistic voices in identity (i.e., race, gender, sexuality, and class) and in forms (e.g., genre, performance practice, interpretation, theories). Perhaps these hopes are naïve — exposing my lack of experience — but they motivate me to continue my journey as a post-secondary educator.

For many years, there have been concerns about “biopiracy” – the misappropriation of genetic resources (GR) and traditional knowledge (TK) from indigenous peoples and local communities, often in developing countries. Biopiracy involves researchers or companies obtaining GR or TK, using it to develop commercial products like medicines, and obtaining patents without adequately compensating or getting permission from the original TK/GR holders.

Some well-known examples of alleged biopiracy include: patents on wound-healing properties of turmeric, which had long been known in India; patents related to neem tree extracts, also used for centuries in India; Japanese and American patents on extracts of the African “Hoodia” cactus, traditional used by San people to stave off hunger; and a US patent on the Amazonian “ayahuasca” vine, considered sacred and used in ceremonies by indigenous peoples. You can see a Sean Connery look-alike doing this in my image below.

The race for patents on biodiversity and bio cultural knowledge is a contemporary "gold rush," with devastating consequences for the ecosystem and local bio cultural communities. The alignment of global forces does not allow for a decrease in the scope of the patent system. Nor are justified outrage and indignation against the excesses of the patent system likely to yield more than marginal moral victories. The more effective approach may be to undermine the ethos of the contemporary patent systems by operating from within the international patent system itself.

This objective is achievable if the patent system is applied creatively to address the needs of peoples genuinely committed to the sustenance and conservation of biological diversity for the benefit of the entire world.9' Communal patents give scope for blocking the issuance of future patents on biological diversity and also afford weak local communities a stronger basis for the negotiation of terms for access and benefit sharing. Providers of bio cultural knowledge deserve to have the right to determine when, where, and how their bio cultural knowledge is used.92