Format/Structure

This panel will consist of a series of short presentations, maximum 6 papers, followed by a collective discussion with the audience.

Long Abstract

Environmental injustice begins even before the soil, forest, or air is polluted, exploited, or stolen (Velicu 2020). Within the extractivist paradigm — understood as a structural and slow form of violence that reproduces a colonial-capitalist logic prioritizing profit at all costs — power is exercised through tactics and practices deployed by corporations and the state to secure access to resources ( Dunlap & Riquito 2023, Gamu & Dauvergne 2018). The “Green Transition” is a continuation of the imperative economic growth depoliticizing the extractivist logic and leading to alienation from dissensus politics (Rancière 2011). Socio-ecological losses and climate inequalities as well as sacrifice zones’ of green capitalism cannot be understood without acknowledging their embeddedness in the colonial history of capitalist relations (Andreucci et al 2025).

The concept of “grey zone” or “complex complicity” emerging from Transitional Justice studies (Mihai 2020), help make sense of contradictions and ambiguities of uneven power relations involved in the extractive violence of resource conflicts and governance. Such relations challenge attachments to moral purity in the allocation of blame, which overlook the complex political, social, and cultural circumstances of particular acts (Neu et al 2016). Complex complicity explains “traitorous” or criminal behavior in an intersectional way, and sheds light on the ambiguous positions of those directly affected by extractive projects. These concepts move us beyond a reductive view of oppression, or compliance, revealing the co-constitutive and performative nature of power and resistance, reproduced through asymmetrical relations and processes of subjectivation as race, ethnicity, gender, class, age, ability etc (Velicu & Garcia-Lopez 2017).

This Panel has 6 pending paper proposals.
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