Schedule 9th International Degrowth Conference

Degrowth has failed to adequately address the geopolitical implications of the transformation it envisages. Degrowth has equally failed to build a convincing theoretical basis for how the political project it puts forward might manage violence and build peace. Conventional international relations scholarship offers few routes and precedents with which to confront the question of how security can be provisioned, and violence mitigated between actors outside of militarization, economic growth, and relative power accrual. This paper looks to the international theory of the 19th-century anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose theory may help us think anew about collectively abrogating violence without relying on militarization and vertical structures of coercion. Proudhon’s international theory suggests warfare’s root rests in humanity’s unsustainable desire to consume and in the parasitism of hierarchical (particularly capitalist) social relations, and that only a decentralized, mutualist political program that places economic justice at its core can balance antinomic social forces and bring peace. Framing the geopolitical questions surrounding degrowth in Proudhon’s terms, this paper argues that the political, economic, and ethical prescriptions of degrowth, particularly its anarchist and autonomist currents, offer a robust paradigm wherein the drivers of warfare are ameliorated, and a positive peace engendered, in doing so, further concretizing degrowth’s “concrete utopia”. This theoretical argument is accompanied by an account of the security challenges faced by a prospective degrowth project in the context of a transition. Assuming the continuation of a violent, expansionist, and colonial geopolitical landscape in the short term, the usefulness of several pathways and policies going forward are explored.

Info

Day: 2023-09-01
Start time: 12:45
Duration: 00:15
Room: ZV-8-1
Type: Paper Presentation
Theme: Contemporary emancipatory internationalism

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