Wann: Thursday, 11 May 2023, 18:30.
Wo: Hörsaal 3 (H3, room D 212), University of Vienna, Department of Political Science, NIG, Universitätsstr. 7, 2nd floor, 1010 Vienna.
Speaker: Matthias Schmelzer (Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena)
Moderation: Ulrich Brand (IPW | University of Vienna)
Comment: Katrina Cano (University of Leuven)
Abstract
Faced with multiple crises, recent years have seen the rise of degrowth as a newly emerging field of research on alternatives to development in the global North, as well as increasing calls for ecological reparations to the global South to address the harm done by colonial, capitalist and extractivist development over the past centuries. The lecture makes a twofold argument about the need to closely interlink these. On the one hand we argue that degrowth needs to develop into a global justice perspective by integrating demands for (ecological) reparations, freedom of movement and a global-justice oriented reshaping of the international economic system – demands most prominently articulated from global South movements. Without this global justice outlook, degrowth risks becoming an inward-looking, provincial, localized, and eventually exclusive project within Europe and the global North. On the other hand, demands for reparations – strongly articulated from the global South – should incorporate the call for degrowth in the global North. The fast and massive reductions of global North emissions that are necessary to guarantee non-repetition of past harms – while at the same time working to end the imperial mode of living and the global North appropriation of labor – will require, so the argument, transformations in the rich countries along the lines of degrowth. In presenting this argument, the talk sketches five avenues of internationalist policies for what could be called worldmaking after growth.
