How to connect the local and the global in intersectional ecopolitics
Key concepts
Gender justice
Racial justice
Socio-economic justice
Intersectional justice
Intergenerational justice and collective rights
Regeneration
Liberation and co-liberation
Bringing capitalism back into our analysis
Key methods
Allyship
Safe spaces
Language frameworks
Critical pedagogy
Decolonisation
Consciousness raising
Feminist practices
Debunking
Trauma work
How to connect the local and the global in intersectional ecopolitics?
Introduction
One of the most powerful tools of oppression is dividing the oppressed. Of these separations the division of the world into nation states has proven to be one of the most enduring and impactful. In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was much euphoria that “globalisation” would make the world “flat”. Physical borders would become irrelevant. Free market enthusiasts were excited about the possibilities of unbounded business opportunities. Likewise, activists were hopeful that a new era of global social movements was dawning. With the rise of right-wing nationalism, from Trump and Bolsonaro to Modi and Erdogan, however, the nation state and its divisions have made a powerful comeback. With the reintroduction of border controls even in the heartlands of the EU, a world of free movement of people, and a unification of social movements across the world seems further away than ever. What does that mean for activists?
The slogan “think globally, act locally” has been used to encourage local groups to act with a global consciousness when tackling social injustice, economic exploitation, and environmental destruction. Others have argued, to the contrary, that we should think about very particular local problems, such as domestic violence or crumbling shorelines, and then bring these struggles to global political attention. The vexed question at the heart of these different approaches is how to be concrete enough to provide community and accountability, while forging solidarities with those we know least, but with whom we are connected through capitalist chains of exploitation and production, or the shared humanity of racialised and working-class populations. The term “glocal” popular in business boardrooms as much as among activists is often not more than a rhetorical plaster for what remains a glaring practical and conceptual gap.
Neither progressive nationalism nor abstract globalism seem to address these problems in a satisfactory way. They are prone to exclusivist nativism and an aloofness that lacks rootedness in people’s real lives. This raises the normative question of how to juggle our moral obligations towards our neighbours, colleagues, fellow citizens and humans on the other end of the planet. It also raises the practical question of how to create communities of belonging that are small enough to create intimacy and trust while being open enough to avoid a homogeneity that would obstruct rooting intersectional experiences firmly in the collective identity of the group. Five concepts, developed from the perspective of and hence potentially limited to experiences in Western Europe, might be helpful in coming closer to realising this objective.
Ingredients
Whose global, what planetary?
First, we must recognise the exclusions and epistemological violence inherent to terms like “global” or even “planetary”. Whose vision of the global are we talking about? Whose experience of the planet? The London, Paris, New York bobo-hipster cosmopolitanism stands in stark contrast to the globalisation experienced by poorly paid employees in call centres in the Philippines who work from dusk till dawn to keep the service economies in the US and Europe alive, destroying health, families and community ties. No matter how abstract, universalist geographical terms like “the global” are imbued with asymmetries along the lines of race, class, gender, ability, nationality, among others. Any meaningful attempt to establish local-global solidarities must take this reality as a basic assumption. Who are you speaking to and about, and most importantly, who are you not speaking to in your framing of the global? What connections are side-lined and whose voices are silenced in your conception of the global? Are diasporic relations, refugee routes, histories of slave trade, racialised care work and rising sea levels relevant in your respective local struggle? What other surprising links might your local struggle- for union recognition, against an airport expansion, against police brutality, for gender parity- reveal about our conception of how we differently inhabit the planet, and how this needs to be part of our understanding of “planetary boundaries”?
Global learning
In response to the eurocentrism that dominates university curricula and feuilletons, the UNESCO called for the development of “global citizenship education” and the OECD has urged educators to focus on developing “global competencies”. In some iterations, this is simply a response to the fact that students within universities in the Global North are no longer as culturally and socio-economically homogeneous as they used to be when higher education was mainly reserved for the white middle classes. “Diversity and inclusion” have become trendy catchwords in the neoliberal vocabulary of institutions, from universities to governments and businesses. A certain scepticism as to what that means in each context is sorely needed. Like many so-called “second generation immigrants” criticising being targeted by the integration agenda of their countries, who ask “integration into what?”, we may ask, “inclusion into what”? Who set the parameter of what gets included, what counts as legitimate diversity, creating new exclusions, along novel categories of the politically suspect or morally repugnant Other? The diversity agenda has frequently been used to defend power hierarchies imbued in the status quo by allowing, gradually and after much emotional labour invested on the part of marginalised groups, a few more people (women, people of colour etc.), to sit at the table. The power relations governing this table, its rules of operating, however, often remain unchanged. If the attempt to connect the local to the global is not to reproduce the power hierarchies that structure global political and knowledge relations, the learning cannot be merely additive. It cannot mean simply adding more, letting the core untouched. If you feel your position and the way you see your struggle has not been significantly transformed by your engagement with the global, then think again, dig deeper. Connect with those you haven’t thought about yet. That might be the trade unions of the factories that build the microchips for the arms factory you are trying to block, or the youth organisation in Yemen or the Western Sahara where these weapons are being used.
In this way, global learning can become part of a process of decolonisation. Re-frame your perspective. Think about the indigenous people of the lands who are affected by what you do, your own ancestors maybe, drawing on embodied forms of knowledge and wisdom. How does your struggle contribute to creating, in the words of the Zapatistas, a world in which many worlds fit?[1] Decolonising our ways of knowing is a long process, a lifetime commitment. It will require listening, reading, watching, being uncomfortable, listening more, reading more, dealing with your shame, change your practices, enter solidarity, keep listening, commit to lifelong learning. Books by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, bell hooks, Linda Smith, Sara Ahmed, Walter Mignolo, Boventura de Sousa Santos, Audre Lorde, Vandana Shiva and others might help on this journey. Find a group and start the journey together!
Speculative feminism and decolonial histories
One of the most potent weapons against the assumed naturality of the status quo is the possibility to imagine otherwise. Stories, art, poetry, science and religion are ways of creating meaning and knowledge that defies these boundaries. Science fictions, speculative feminism and clifi (climate fiction), from Ursula Le Guin (The Word for World is Forest) and Margaret Atwood (Oryx and Craig) to Octavia Butler (Parable of the Sower), Amitav Ghosh (The Great Derangement) and Nnedi Okorafor (Lagoon), among others, offer connections to alternative pasts and futures that are hard to imagine from our local limitations. They also serve as warnings against the techno-capitalist optimism that “now it’s better than ever”, which is often used to cover up the scale of a wealth and power accumulation unprecedented in the history of humankind. According to an Oxfam report, in 2017 eight men owned the same wealth as the poorest half of the world. This number is likely to be even smaller today. Critical and decolonial histories help to uncover how expropriation of indigenous lands, chattel slavery, exploitation of unpaid care work and catastrophic destruction of the very natural environment we need to survive, have fuelled these riches. Post-colonial trajectories of resource extraction, underemployed labour and the outsourcing of polluting industries are still the backbone of the world economy. Your local struggle is a part of that. On whose shoulders do you stand? Who got ostracised or arrested fighting for where you are now, here and on the other side of the world? Critical and decolonial histories can be invaluable in rooting yourself in their thought, practice and song, and to empower us with humility and the transformative vision we need to confront the intersecting crises we are facing.
Positionality
There is a good chance that those reading these lines hold a significant amount of privilege, through their education, economic status, institutional embeddedness, enabled by our backgrounds, unearned trust, favours that were bestowed on us, and the caring relationships and social systems that helped us through the tough times. The “myth of meritocracy” (Michael Sandel) tries to tell us that these are our own achievements. In most cases, they are not. And that other people didn’t get accepted into the same universities, didn’t get our jobs, or do not know how to dress and speak to be recognised as respectable members of the establishment, is not their fault. While of course personal agency is not irrelevant, these are to a significant degree outcomes of where we stand in the intersectional positionalities of race, class, gender, geography, nationality, ability and natural environment. The liberal smokescreen of equality of opportunity helps to cement social hierarchies and moral superiority, which is then normalised as entitlement to speak, act and decide over and for others.
Recognising our own positionality is critical to any form of solidarity between localities in an hierarchical world system. However, “acknowledging my privilege” has of late part become a performative exercise. Almost apologetically powerful people acknowledge that they are white middle class men, without any influence on their actions or political viewpoints. This form of “checking my privilege” can sometimes be worse than not doing it in the first place. A British-Bangladeshi friend of mine hates it when people “check their privilege” in her presence, as this too often again centres the experience of white people, and she is expected to grant absolution and gratitude. As the Combahee River Collective statement from 1974 already makes clear, an affirmative idea of identity politics is not about colour of skin, gender or class background alone. It is about the politics that are rooted in those experiences. A purely representational identity politics has little to say about the deeply racist and xenophobic policies implemented for example by Priti Patel, British Home Secretary of Ugandan-Indian background. Questioning one’s own positionality should be a constant internal reflection, adapting to whatever social situation you might find yourself in. In the positive masculinity work with Beyond Equality, we encourage the men we work with to ask themselves, WAIT, “Why Am I Talking?”, to make space for voices we so urgently need to listen to. One way to bring critical reflections on positionalities into groups is to encourage people at the beginning of a meeting to briefly share how their background and experiences have shaped who they are and how they think. This is a simple tool that can create a space where people are willing to share about how hidden disabilities, migration histories or traumatic events have given them particular insights into the social and political world, and encourages others to recognize the limits of their own experiences. Of course, this should only be an invitation. Privilege checking exercises might help those people who are unaware of these issues, there are plenty of videos of those online, like the one organised by BuzzFeed.
No MCB (micro-consumerist bollocks)
In the face of likely partial systems collapse and possible civilisational breakdown, spelled out e.g. in the book “Deep Adaptation” (2021) edited by Jem Bendell and Rupert Read, capitalists are getting cold feet. As Naomi Klein discusses in “This Changes Everything” (2019), they know that the climate catastrophe is the biggest challenge to capitalism in the 21st century. That is why the single sector most responsible for the catastrophe we are in, the fossil fuel industry, has been on a relentless campaign to try to persuade us that it is us, not them, that are responsible for the mess we are in. Despite the fact that the fossil fuel industry has produced both unfathomable wealth and unprecedented destruction of the ecosystems necessary for our survival, they advertise themselves as part of the solution. Our role, in the hyper-individualistic narrative of late capitalism, is to be better consumers, to make more sustainable choices. Demand for sustainable goods will produce supply for sustainable goods, which will save the planet. Except it doesn’t. Yet, the campaign of shifting the blame for the most momentous catastrophes in the history of humankind has remarkable success. In 2004, an advertising company working for BP invented the idea of a “personal carbon footprint”. This conveniently shifts the blame for the destruction of the atmosphere from the world’s most powerful business-conglomerates to the individual consumer. The degree of delusion this has created is staggering, embodied by European tourists who complain about the poor recycling facilities in their Maldives’ beachside bungalow, having just blasted several people’s annual carbon budgets into the atmosphere. In confronting the climate crisis, as with racism or heteropatriarchy, little actions matter. But they matter only a little bit. Large-scale shifts in how we organise the economy, education, media, and politics are needed to reach the levels of action that are able to prevent the worst of climate breakdown. George Monbiot has coined the term “Micro-consumerist bollocks (MCB)” to describe the diversion strategies that focus on green capitalist consumption. They are at best a distraction, at worst the depoliticization of the very people that, if given the means to both organise and see themselves as political communities, could have had the power to dismantle the death machine of carbon capitalism. It is one, after all, that otherwise will make most of the earth uninhabitable within this century.
Preparation
Commit e.V.: Or from “development” to glocal learning
When I was studying for my undergraduate in Munich in 2009, Commit e.V. was a much sought after student association. Every summer they organised a roughly six week trip to Sierra Leone and another country in West Africa for interested students, mainly attracting political science majors. Like many, I was fascinated by the prospect of getting an insight into “development aid” and travelling to Africa with them, helping in the schools to teach some English and hold workshops, providing a change of scenery, or at least of teacher, during the summer months. In my first year, I decided to join other societies and when I came back to sign up two years later, I was informed that the association had stopped its core activity, its major source of attraction. They had decided to no longer go to West Africa and instead focus on critical reflection on what they were actually doing, and why, and whether they were able to do development cooperation in a critical and constructive way, or whether that was just wishful thinking. During the next years, the association underwent a remarkable transformation, from attracting adventure-hungry students that wanted a taste of “development” work, towards one of the foremost organisations providing critical global learning in the city. They started to critically interrogate the implicitly racist and colonial entanglements that had motivated their earlier activity and now focused on critical whiteness and work with refugees while mapping exploitative and imperialist connections linking their home town with the Global South. Instead of trying to “help” the people West Africa, they changed their perspective to center on co-liberation: the conviction that their own liberation—from racism, imperialist complicity and neo-colonial exploitation, was bound up with the liberation of the people on the other side of the globe.
Their flagship project “Building Perspectives”, offered young people a week long intensive experiences around purpose, global ethics, anti-racism and critical questioning everything that the young people doing the course had learned until this point in their life. Their first target group were modelled after their former selves. The mostly white urban middle class that dreamed of the wide world—providing them with critical reflections on their positionality, “voluntourism”, underdevelopment and world systems theory. Their second target group were refugees who had just come to Germany looking for orientation, contact and interesting opportunities. They managed to get funding for so-called “refugee integration” from the local municipality and turned this into a reflexive bootcamp on critical thinking about glocal relations. They centered the stories of the people who had fled thousands of miles, sharing their traumas and dreams, bringing the global into the local Bavarian surroundings. Glocal learning was actualised by not talking about, but with and learning from people marginalised and forced to move by war and exclusivist border regimes. Among the many things I took away from that experience was an enormous respect for the resilience of people with diverse migration histories. I was also struck by the importance of transnational, financial and cultural links that keep people going, the liberating power of poetry, and the entrepreneurial spirit with which some migrant communities struggle and thrive despite the most adverse conditions.
Decolonial and critical walking tour
Many institutions, particularly those proud of their traditions and centuries of history, often expose a self-narrative of progress towards ever greater achievements. Many universities try to embody this story by combining the narrative of changing your life with the promise to enable you to change the world. These narratives, which are often tied to the respective national histories and the violences imbued in them, are frequently perceived as exclusive, particularly by those who did not grow up in the elite circles that for so long claimed that their predominance in these institutions was their entitlement. To provide an alternative account and to shed a light on the hidden histories of the university, a collective of students at Cambridge developed a “Decolonial and critical walking tour”. Our idea was to highlight and to keep a collective memory alive of the people that had fought for what we now took as self-evident, and to bring to light the erased injustices that had been swept under the carpet for far too long. The tour started at Jesus College Cambridge, which for decades displayed a uniquely precious cockerel from the Benin Bronzes in its dining hall. After years of student activism and pressure, in 2021, Jesus College became the first institution to return an item of the Benin Bronzes back to Nigeria’s Commission for Museums and Monuments. The tour stopped at St John’s College to discuss the history of slave abolition, pointing out that not only William Wilberforce, but also some of the most notorious advocates of slavery were contemporaries at the college. At Trinity College we told the story of Bertrand Russel, now one of its most celebrated alumni. Russel was one of the few pacifist activists at the time. After his conviction under the Defense of the Realm Act, he was dismissed from the college. The tour also passed the commemorative plaque in honor of Watson and Crick, where people continued to engrave the name “Rosalind Franklin”, highlighting the suppression of her role in understanding the molecular structure of the DNA. We passed key sights of the 5 year student-led campaign, including the occupation of the “Old Schools”, the University’s administrative heart, that pushed for the divestment of Cambridge University from fossil fuels in 2020. Most localities are connected to the global economy and history in surprising ways. Dismantling the stories of the status quo, this decolonial and critical walking tour provided alternative perspectives on a venerated institution, highlighting its complicity in chattel slavery, developing technology for highly polluting extractive industries, and the role of student activists from the 19th century to today. Knowing this creates possibilities to connect the dots and take inspiration from the global struggles of rebellious subjects in unexpected places.[MM11] [MOU12] Relevance often emerges through proximity, which is why knowing about the unsung (s)heroes of your own intellectual and political community can inspire new alliances and forms of activism. One practical tool I learned to use was the database of the “Slave Compensation Commission” at UCL, where you can look up whether specific people or institutions benefitted from slavery in the UK. Try it out!
Tips
“Africa is Key” Solutions to the Global Crisis, podcast with Esther Stanford-Xosei, via 3rd Space, https://3rd-space.org/podcast/africa-is-key-solutions-to-the-global-crisis-with-esther-stanford-xosei/
George Monbiot on why individualist consumerism is part of the problem not the solution to the destruction of the planet:
A simple and powerful story by the Zapatistas in their tour of Europe in 2021:
On the connection of different struggles, and the original meaning of “identity politics”: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/until-black-women-are-free-none-of-us-will-be-free
Jem Bendell and Rupert Read eds. (2021) Deep Adaptation. Navigating the Reality of Climate Chaos. Cambridge: Polity.
UCL Database on the Legacies of Slavery:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/project/details/
Global Social Theory, a rich and diverse set of resources exploring thinkers and concepts beyond the Western canon, from Gloria Anzaldua to Zhang Yiwu, from Biopower to the Racial Contract, https://globalsocialtheory.org/