Presentation short abstract

Drawing on anarchist thought, I demonstrate how the linear temporalities underlying green transitions reproduce injustice through their outcome-oriented logic. Confronting temporal injustice requires repoliticizing time: not acceleration but plural rhythms; not deferred but present emancipation.

Presentation long abstract

Green transitions are increasingly criticized for reproducing extractivism, dispossession, and injustice, yet the temporal logics underlying these processes remain largely unexamined. Current transition debates operate within what may be called “chronos,” a linear, managerial temporality characterized by roadmaps, tipping points, and urgency narratives. Crisis discourse reinforces these "chronopolitics," turning the future into an object of governance rather than collectively lived temporal practices. Recent calls for "war economy" mobilization intensify this logic, imposing standardized rhythms and centralized control that deepen injustice, particularly for communities already experiencing "slow" (or not so slow) violence stemming from extractivist practices.

The paper argues that anarchist temporalities offer crucial insights for reimagining just transitions. Anarchist thinkers – from Goldman and Landauer to Graeber and the Zapatistas – reject deferred emancipation and the promise of justice "after the transition." Instead, they foreground prefiguration, mutual aid, reflexivity, and present-tense utopian practice as ways of inhabiting time otherwise. They privilege what may be called “kairos,” e.g. the lived, opportune moment of collective action, over teleological progression toward distant endpoints.

Confronting green extractivism requires not only material and epistemic change but also a repoliticization of time itself. The paper proposes that just transformation must be lived as plural, emergent present-tense rhythm rather than administered as a timeline of control, allowing space for joy, care, reflexivity, and the recognition that transformation is both process and practice, not merely outcome.