discussing the subject of
Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World
by Jairus Grove
from Duke University Press
Jairus Victor Grove contends that we live in a world made by war. In Savage Ecology he offers an ecological theory of geopolitics that argues that contemporary global crises are better understood when considered within the larger history of international politics. Infusing international relations with the theoretical interventions of fields ranging from new materialism to political theory, Grove shows how political violence is the principal force behind climate change, mass extinction, slavery, genocide, extractive capitalism, and other catastrophes. Grove analyzes a variety of subjects—from improvised explosive devices and drones to artificial intelligence and brain science—to outline how geopolitics is the violent pursuit of a way of living that comes at the expense of others. Pointing out that much of the damage being done to the earth and its inhabitants stems from colonialism, Grove suggests that the Anthropocene may be better described by the term Eurocene. The key to changing the planet’s trajectory, Grove proposes, begins by acknowledging both the earth-shaping force of geopolitical violence and the demands apocalypses make for fashioning new ways of living.
Jairus Victor Grove is Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the Hawai’i Research Center for Future Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa.
Visit: http://jairusgrove.com/
What has been said about the work of Jairus Grove:
“In Savage Ecology Jairus Victor Grove gives us a weirdly hopeful eco-pessimism. ‘We broke the planet,’ he writes, and ‘now it is our planet.’ Agree or not, the breadth of his archive (neuro-torture, algorithmic warfare, drone strikes, and cybernetic nation-building) and audacity of his thinking (biopolitics is now ‘almost quaint,’ he says, given the geopolitics of the Anthropocene) are simply exhilarating. Your thinking cannot survive this book unchanged. Fortunately, Grove says, ‘the end of the world is never the end of everything’ (though it may well be the end of us).” — Bonnie Honig, author of Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair
“What Beck did for risk society, Hardt and Negri for empire, and Barad for technoscience, Jairus Victor Grove does brilliantly for global violence, delivering an ecology of warfare that is not only a corrosive critique of the three horsemen of our now daily apocalypse—geopolitics, biopolitics, and cybernetics—but a creative strategy for sustaining life now and thereafter. Grove is a philosopher with a hammer, writer with a stiletto, and artist with a spray can.” — James Der Derian, Michael Hintze Chair of International Security Studies, the University of Sydney
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