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Accepted Paper:
Enclosures and Commons: on energy’s not-so-contradictory extraction frontier
Theodora Vetta
(Universitat de Barcelona)
The paper discusses the simultaneous production of enclosures and commons at the intersection of various extraction regimes (coal, green and financial) within the greek energy sector. The workings of structural violence feed on legitimacy struggles around rights, responsibility, and social worth.
Paper long abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic and the current war have accelerated global concerns and interventions for mitigating the climate socio-economic crises. The skyrocketing energy prices and shifting geopolitical interests have boosted the pressure for energy sovereignty, pointing, among others, to a more intensified renewable energy production within Europe. In Greece, the quest for sustainable futures rests on violent decarbonization processes (including privatization and financialization of energy) and the revalorization of particular (rural) spaces and livelihoods, enabled by fast-track legislation and the financial crisis of the past decade. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the main phasing-out coal region of Western Macedonia, massively shifting to mega-solar projects, the paper discusses the production of social worth at the intersection of various extraction regimes ( coal extraction, green extraction, financial extraction). I argue, first, that the struggles of legitimacy for decarbonization and the renewable-energy turn are embedded within the historical patterns/frictions of citizenship-making in the region; and, second, that the concrete workings of structural violence at play involve, in this case, the simultaneous creation of enclosures and commoning (energy cooperatives), renegotiating concepts of rights, responsibility, and opportunity.