Format/Structure

A conventional panel with individual or group presentations, but this can be rediscussed with the presenters once they are selected.

Long Abstract

Geopolitical tensions currently stand as one of the main obstacles to advancing post-growth (Kallis et al., 2025) and akin visions for post-capitalist eco-social ‘transitions’ (Escobar, 2015), from delinking to post-extractivism (e.g., Ajl, 2021; Veltmeyer, Ezquerro-Cañete and Gudynas, 2023). In many countries, rearmament has overshadowed the ecological crisis as a political priority, while many territories are going through absolute eco-social catastrophes because of war. Without engaging with those questions, horizons of radical eco-social transformation are but a pipe dream. Nonetheless, to the extent that these tensions reflect a world-historical context of increasingly unstable US hegemony, the geopolitical conjuncture may also offer new openings for those transitions. The analysis of geopolitics, furthermore, must not focus too much on military aspects, as it must include at least two other dimensions: the geoeconomic competition that shapes the capitalist production of space; (Schindler et al., 2024) and geopolitics as a discursive tool that legitimises state and military power (e.g., Foresta, 1992). While some recent academic agendas point in this direction (e.g., Graddy-Lovelace and Ranganathan, 2024; Hasselbalch and Kranke, 2024; Lang, Manahan and Bringel, 2024), far more research is needed to understand how social forces can navigate an international sphere ravaged by conflict and haunted by further military escalation, structured around a capitalist geographical logic, and objectified by militaristic geopolitical discourses to overcome the logic of capital at different scales and institute alternative socio-ecological relations. The panel, therefore, invites contributions that shed light on the geopolitical dimensions of post-growth, post-capitalist eco-social transitions, addressing but not limited to topics such as: concrete geopolitical obstacles and openings for transitions; internationalist, anti-imperialist, anti-militarist, and non-aligned geopolitical strategies; pathways for constructing a ‘post-growth’ international sphere; potentialities and limitations of existing challenges to the US-led international order; multi-scalar governance mechanisms that can enable transitions; and so forth.

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