geopolitical ecology (youssefbouchi)

In this episode, we speak with Priti Narayan about the devastating floods that hit Chennai, India—a city grappling with the compounding effects of climate change and urban inequality. Reflecting on the floods a decade later, Priti unpacks how such dramatic events both reveal and deepen the everyday structural violence embedded in urban life.

We explore how climate disasters are experienced unevenly, shaped by social, economic, and spatial injustices, and how responses to these events often reproduce the same inequalities they expose.

Priti also shares powerful reflections on the role of public scholarship and activism—especially in moments when violence is not always visible, but deeply felt by marginalized communities.

Priti is an Assistant Professor at UBC Geography. Her research and teaching interests center around urban processes and politics, particularly in India. In her primary research project, she examines how contemporary urban development interacts with state-society relations in Chennai, India. She uses ethnographic and archival methods to investigate how residents negotiate with local politicians, bureaucrats, and activists to preserve citizenship in urban landscapes marked by violent, large-scale slum evictions. She has been learning from collective struggles for tenure security for the urban poor in Chennai for over 13 years now. 

Priti is passionate about collaborative activist scholarship which highlights lived experiences — drawing on the politics of expertise and knowledge production, feminist methodologies, and public scholarship. She frequently collaborates to write about economic and social protections for unorganized workers and urban development in Tamil Nadu. Her writing has appeared in news and media outlets such as The Times of India, The Hindu, OpenDemocracy, and Kafila, among others.

We encourage you to read Priti’s public articles, such as these:

Slow violence and the Spectacle – Dispossession, segregation, and the Chennai Floods: Priti Narayan

Rosenman, E. and P. Narayan. 2023. Economic geography for and by whom? Rethinking expertise and accountability.

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction & Experience

(08:25) 2015 Chennai floods

(15:35) How come is preparedness for disaster weak? 

(19:00) Is it "corruption"?

(23:30) Actors of unevenness

(41:00) On slow violence

(46:43) Public scholarship

(56:24) Suppression of dissent

(1:11:00) Critical hope

In this episode, we sit with Philippe Le Billon and Erik Post and discuss a wide array of topics all connected by a thread of seeing ‘sustainable development’ as yet another iteration in a long history of capitalist development. 

By examining violence and systemic injustices, as well as counter-hegemonic resistances, we situate the projects and paradigms advertised as ‘sustainable’ in a long history of colonial extraction and exploitation.

Of course, as with most things, there are nuances that cannot be ignored; that is, how does sovereignty and independence fit into this picture? How do we make sense of violence that may appear to some as happening in a vacuum, but are fundamentally intertwined with global empire? How do we reconcile national development in the Global South with the impacts of development on nature? 

These are some big questions, to which critical insight is offered by our guests Philippe and Erik today.

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Philippe Le Billon is a Professor at the University of British Columbia, jointly appointed in the Department of Geography and the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs.

His research interests bring together political geography, political ecology, and war studies. He has focused most of his work on the links between natural resources and armed conflicts, but has also examined the political economy of war and reconstruction, the resource curse, corruption, as well as natural disasters and political crises.

His work spans multiple geographies, from Latin America to South East Asia to Sub-Saharan Africa and it tackles various ‘resources’ wrought from the Earth: from food to fossil fuels to metals and minerals that are notoriously associated with the violence accompanying their extraction, such as Cobalt in the Congo.

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Erik Post is currently in Mexico conducting fieldwork for his PhD Dissertation, which he is working with Philippe on completing. Broadly, his research explores geopolitics, violence, and colonialism in Latin America and the decolonial futures proposed by Indigenous struggles for racial, environmental, and climate justice. 

He examines how these conflicts are influenced by, and themselves influence power structures, state and corporate discourses and practices as well as the mobilization of values, norms, and principles in the politics of sustainable development and alternative development rationalities.

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Important Resource shared by Erik Post and mentioned in this episode re: resisting extractivism in Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico: 

https://poderlatam.org/sierra-de-apuestas/

It is a website where people can consult and download the research report “La Sierra en juego. El costo de la extracción en la Sierra Norte de Puebla” which he wrote with PODER. You can also explore the accompanying online platform “Sierra de Apuestas" with an interactive map and network analysis of corporate ownership.

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Reading:

The Green Transition in Context—Cobalt Responsible Sourcing for Battery Manufacturing

Proyectos de muerte and proyectos de vida: Indigenous counter-hegemonic praxis to sustainable development in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, Mexico

Sophie L. Van Neste is an associate professor in urban studies at INRS (Tiohtià:ke/Montreal), holder of a Canada research chair in urban climate action. Her research focuses on social movements in urban environmental politics and participatory action research for justice in climate adaptation. 

In this episode, we sit with Sophie and discuss the politics of climate adaptation, or how urban landscapes are changing as a result of a warming planet. Key topics include planning/organizing around extreme heat in Lachine, Montreal; the role of historical uneven development in present day climate adaptation; and “climate justice” as a framework for coalition building. Hope you enjoy it!

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Some papers by Sophie: 

Place, pipelines and political subjectivities in invisibilized urban peripheries

Forthcoming, discussed in this episode: Extreme heat and uneven urban development : missing politics in climate adaptation. Van Neste SL, D’Amours, AM, Poulin E. 2024.

Some valuable resources mentioned by Sophie: 

⁠Just Climate Adaptation In Cities: Reflections For An Interdisciplinary Research Agenda⁠ by Vanessa Castán Broto

Check out the website of the living lab on climate adaptation to which Sophie belongs:https://laboclimatmtl.inrs.ca/ 

Sophie asks you to keep an eye out for a collaborative book coming up co-written with municipal and community actors. 

Sophie speaks to the legacies of uneven development also in this blog interview with the group Heritage Montreal and the McCord Museum; you can see there a few images of the site: https://blog.heritagemontreal.org/patrimoine-et-transition-ecologique-perspectives-urbaines-et-memorielles-avec-sophie-van-neste/ 

NOTE: it’s in French.

In this episode, we sit with Max Ajl, author of A People’s Green New Deal (2021), to discuss a range of issues pertaining to climate justice. We discuss the GND’s (lack of) engagement with anti/imperialism, class struggle over the socialization of the means of production and why it’s necessary in a just transition, the political economy of land, structural adjustment programs, national sovereignty, Palestine, and how all of these things connect. 

Max Ajl is an associated researcher with the Tunisian Observatory for Food Sovereignty and the Environment and a postdoctoral fellow with the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen University. He has written for Monthly Review, Jacobin and Viewpoint. He has contributed to a number of journals, including the Journal of Peasant Studies, Review of African Political Economy and Globalizations, and is an associate editor at Agrarian South & Journal of Labor and Society.

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Concepts to look into that Max refers to:

• “Imperial core” & “World-System” are terms adopted from the World-Systems Theory. It is a framework for conceptualizing the global dimensions of the capitalist mode of production in such a way that sees spaces of concentrated capital accumulation, industrial development, and advanced militarism as the “imperial core” and spaces where land and labor are exploited in service of the former as the “periphery.” Of course, the theory is much more complex than that and deserves further reading. The wikipedia page does a decent job at explaining it and you can access it here. 
• “Primitive accumulation” is a Marxian term that refers to the accumulation that happens prior to capital accumulation. In short, capital accumulation refers to the surplus value extracted by the owners of the means of production (capitalists) from the worker (by worker we mean the working class as traditionally understood but also from nature). Primitive accumulation is what precedes this moment, and in Marx’s usage of the term it was referring to the Enclosures in England, whereby peasants were displaced from their lands, yanked from their sources of food and labor, in service of privatizing large tracts of land and insert them into a market system in the making. Today, there are contemporary adoptions of this term to conceptualize the necessary dispossession enabling profit-making. An example of this is David Harvey’s “accumulation by dispossession.”
• If you’re unfamiliar with “feudalism” or the feudalist mode of production, visit this page.
• “Structural Adjustment Programs” are loans issued by the IMF and World Bank to countries in crisis under the pretense of stimulating "economic growth and development" but are fundamentally imperialist tools used to open up postcolonial geographies to Western capital. The loans are conditional upon the recipient country's adoption of "structural adjustment" which refers to a policy paradigm in which the state privatizes some assets and sectors, cuts back on social spending, and overall creates conditions that are favorable to capital accumulation with a degraded social safety net. Read this short article for more context.

Holly Caggiano is an Assistant Professor in Climate Justice and Environmental Planning at the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. Her research explores social dimensions of climate transitions in the US and Canada, and how diverse stakeholder groups form coalitions to advocate for energy systems change. 

In this episode, we chat about efforts to mobilize towards a just energy transition, ranging from the Green New Deal as a framework for community action to building cultures of sustainability and care on campuses and beyond.

Paper by Holly discussed in podcast: 

A new framework for imagining the climate commons? The case of a Green New Deal in the US 

Some valuable resources mentioned by Holly: 

Planning the Green New Deal: Climate Justice and the Politics of Sites and Scales by Kian Goh

Mutual Aid Disaster Relief - a group that gives Holly hope! 

Karim Safieddine is a PhD student interested in understanding the ways in which social movements, for what they represent in terms of various aspects of intellectual and organizational leadership, challenge or reproduce prevailing power relations and ideological norms between late 20th and 21st century Lebanon. In this context, his research focuses on the historical and contemporary development of the "Lebanese Left", particularly in relation to other more dominant local political forces. While he heavily relies on Gramscian optics in his studies, he is open to various models and methods. He was the President of the Secular Club at the American University of Beirut, which is where I know him from, as I participated briefly in the Club’s political landscape during my undergrad years. 

In this episode, we discuss a multitude of topics particular to Lebanon, Palestine, and Syria–from the various forces of power, oppression, hope, and resistance to the various moments and figures in history that shaped and reshaped the realities of millions of people, of institutions, of knowledge production, and so on. 

The conversation was always rooted in the multifaceted anti-establishment movements in Lebanon, which inevitably requires us to constantly contextualize, analyze, and comprehend what these movements were up against, the tools they had (and didn’t have) at their disposal, moments in which they were stubborn and moments in which they did the self-reflection necessary for more meaningful ways, and what it meant to be situated in the geopolitical context that was and is also constantly changing. 

We break it down into two sections: Lebanon before 1990 and Lebanon after 1990, leading to the present conjuncture, where we end the episode on some reflections by Karim on what challenges and opportunities lie ahead, in such a pivotal moment. 

For your reference, Isa and I compiled a small timeline of post-1990 Lebanon that could help you better understand the conversation (see below). Also, Karim mentions a lot of names of people as well as movements that I highly recommend looking up as you listen. It could be arduous and disruptive to pause and reflect at times, but doing so gives the experience - as well as Karim’s voluntary work - the reflective value it deserves. 

1990: Ta’if and beginning of Harirism / post-war neo-liberal order 

2000: End of Israeli Occupation of South Lebanon 

2005: Cedar Revolution + Assassination of Hariri + End of Assadist Occupation of Lebanon.

2006: July War (w/ Israel) 

2008: “May 7” / Hezbollah “invades” Beirut

2011: Arab Spring (Focus: Syrian Revolution and War) 

2015: “You Stink” Movement 

2019: Thawra / October 17 Revolution 

2020: Beirut Blast

2019-Present: Economic collapse 

2023 Oct. 7–Present: Zionist onslaught + assassination of Hassan Nasrallah + End of Assad regime in Syria. 

Finally, here are some pieces written by Karim: 

13 Years After the Arab Uprisings: The Strategic Choices of Lebanon's Anti-establishment Movement

Lebanon's opposition today: A story of perpetual crises

Hezbollah couldn't save Gaza or Lebanon: Only state-building can ensure our future

Karim’s IG account: @safieddinekarim 

PS: Special thanks to Chafic Mouharam for conversing with me over the past years about Lebanon. We were together in Toronto when the horrible Blast in Beirut took place and we processed, mourned, and reflected together. He helped inform some of my questions in this episode. Thank you, Chafic.

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction & Personal Experiences

(20:16) Lebanon Pre-1990

(41:35) Lebanon Post-1990

(1:01:45) Anti-establishment and 2019 Thawra

(1:22:00) Looking ahead

Tending to this podcast and putting out episodes, let alone tending to our daily responsibilities, has been incredibly challenging. Our hearts break every day as we witness not only the continuation, but also expansion, of genocide.

This here is a reflective note from Youssef's experience trying to find the necessary balance between insanity and political consciousness to show up both for oneself and for others, in solidarity.

It is also a call to Arab activists, thinkers, and researchers to reach out to us if they'd like to participate in an episode.

A lot has happened and changed in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine since we last spoke with Karim Safieddine over a month ago in our episode titled “Anti-Establishment Positions in Lebanon and Beyond.” So, we decided to have him back on to try and make sense of this moment, where a lot of shifts, some positive and some negative, are unfolding right before our eyes. We discuss a variety of issues, from the South of Lebanon which continues to have Israeli Occupation Forces on the ground in violation of the ceasefire agreement’s deadline to the introduction of two new figures into Lebanese politics—President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam.

If you haven't already, do check out our previous episode with Karim!

Finally, here are some links to further explore/clarify some things mentioned in the episode:

1. When Karim mentions May 7, this is what he refers to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Lebanon_conflict

2. "Self Criticism After Defeat" link to book: https://saqibooks.com/books/saqi/self-criticism-after-the-defeat/

3. Links related to ecological crisis and ecocide:

* https://www.jibal.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Jibal-Research-design-eng-digital-DD20211123.pdf

* https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/06/05/lebanon-israels-white-phosphorous-use-risks-civilian-harm

* https://www.wilpf.org/the-ecocide-of-palestine/

* https://www.newarab.com/analysis/ecocide-gaza-environmental-impact-israels-war

* https://www.newarab.com/news/gaza-conflict-has-caused-major-environmental-damage-un-says

* https://www.arab-reform.net/publication/the-environmental-impact-of-syrias-conflict-a-preliminary-survey-of-issues/

In this episode, we sit with Osprey Orielle Lake and dig into the topics she explores in her book The Story is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis as well as her work with the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN). We discuss worldviews as a portal to different ways of knowing and being that resist the extractive and exploitative logics underpinning capitalism; origin stories and the ways in which what Osprey calls “dominant culture” alienates us from nature and one another; feminism and the intersections of feminism and climate justice; land back, the rights of nature, and the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty.

Osprey Orielle Lake is the founder and executive director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN). She works internationally with grassroots, BIPOC and Indigenous leaders, policymakers, and diverse coalitions to build climate justice, resilient communities, and a just transition to a decentralized, democratized clean-energy future.

Osprey sits on the executive committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature and on the steering committee for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty. Osprey’s writing about climate justice, relationships with nature, women in leadership, and other topics has been featured in The Guardian, Earth Island Journal, The Ecologist, Ms. Magazine and many other publications.

She is the author of the award-winning book Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature, and her new book, The Story is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis 

Some resources mentioned by Osprey that you should check out:

• Gendered and Racial Impacts of the Fossil Fuel Industry in North America and Complicit Financial Institutions

• The Need for Real Zero Not Net Zero: Shifting from False Solutions to Real Solutions and a Just Transition
  

I had the honor to host Dr. Hicham Safieddine, a brilliant Lebanese scholar and historian at the University of British Columbia. 

His work has included a detailed study of the emergence and transformation of global and national monetary regimes and financial systems under capitalist expansion, debt, war, colonial conquest, national liberation and revolution. He also works on the history of economic thought, as well as modern Arab and Islamic thought, with an emphasis on the age of anti-colonial national liberation in the mid-20th century. 

In this episode, we discuss Hicham’s conception of the border regime that defines the geographies of zionist settler-colonialism. He put forth the conception of “a state without borders, borders without states” to help us hone in on an adequate framing to what’s happening in our homelands today.

Then, we discuss what the new phase of US empire in terms of Trump’s ethnic cleansing plans for Gaza as well as all the tools of US empire he inherits, which have been used, albeit in variegated ways, all over the Global South throughout history. I ask Hicham to dissect and discern all the imperial tools that the US has at its disposal to assert and reassert its hegemony.

Finally, we tackle the silencing and censorship we see in and out of the academy, specifically leaning on Hicham’s experiences at UBC as well as having taught and lived in the UK previously. As usual, we end with a note of critical hope. I ask Hicham what keeps him going, and I’m pleased that he felt comfortable enough to share it with me, despite the fact that he has personally been impacted by zionist violence. 

Please check out Hicham’s work, starting here:

Banking on the State: The Financial Foundations of Lebanon

Mahdi Amel, Arab Marxism and National Liberation: Selected Writings

As wildfires rage across Los Angeles, Erika takes a moment to reflect on the personal and the political dimensions of this catastrophe.

We urge listeners to think critically about the individuals and communities most impacted by this situation, and by the climate crisis more broadly.

These fires expose and remind us all that the vulnerability of physical structures people call home hinges upon the vulnerability of social structures that render home-making a precarious luxury.

With every crisis, cracks are exposed. In one of the richest economies in the world, and despite the fact that California has experienced wildfire after wildfire over the past years, we still saw an underfunded LA Fire Department with incarcerated folks on the frontlines of the fires and a crumbling water infrastructure. Is this climate adaptation? Transferring wealth from the bottom-up, shrinking the public purse, and converting taxpayer money to capital fueling the military-industrial complex?

We need a new system.

Here are some articles we urge you to engage with:

‘Running to danger and saving lives’: 1,100 incarcerated firefighters are on the LA frontlines

Shattered in the Fire: A Historic Black Haven

Who Will Pay for LA’s Wildfires?

How Big Oil Made It Harder to Fight the Los Angeles Fires

There’s No Such Thing as a Natural Disaster

And here's a displaced Black families GoFund Me directory:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pK5omSsD4KGhjEHCVgcVw-rd4FZP9haoijEx1mSAm5c/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Liam is a PhD researcher in Geography at the University of Toronto and a volunteer tenant organizer in Vancouver. He’s interested in labor, community, and movement organizing strategy, and the politics of reproduction under capitalism.

In this episode, we sit with Liam Fox to discuss the extractivist paradigm of pipelines ripping through Indigenous land in so-called Canada. Specifically, we discuss the regulatory regime in which oil and gas extraction (and the infrastructures required to move it) is articulated and applied. This inevitably entails the engagement with ‘Canada’ as a settler-colonial, extractivist state, bringing to the fore an engagement with the expropriation and dispossession of Indigenous peoples as well as Indigenous resistance. 

We also discuss Liam’s PhD research, which focuses on the history and future of political and class consciousness in and around Alberta’s tar sands. Projects like Liam’s are incredibly important for those of you who are thinking about things like the Just Transition, Climate Justice, and/or a Green New Deal. 

We land in a space of thinking about solidarity and class consciousness; specifically, building unlikely alliances as an essential strategy for anti-capitalist futures. 

From there, we conclude with some thoughts on organizing/mobilizing in our immediate communities as a means of achieving said solidarity across difference. This is where Liam’s role as community organizer with the Vancouver Tenants Union comes in. 

Main pieces discussed/mentioned in this episode:

• Liam Fox’s paper: Pipelines in the “Public Interest”? The Jurisdictional Work of a Concept in Canadian Pipeline Assessment

• Naomi Klein’s interview with Leanne Simpson: Dancing the World into Being: A Conversation with Idle No More’s Leanne Simpson

Further recommendations:

• Pollution is Colonialism by Max Liboirin 

• Red Skin, White Masks by Glen Coulthard

In this episode, we have a heartfelt and eye-opening conversation with Hammad Jabr, a dedicated Palestinian activist and emerging scholar whose work has been central to student organizing for Palestine at UBC and beyond. Hammad shares his journey from Palestine to Canada, discussing the personal challenges of navigating movement as a Palestinian and the impact of becoming part of the diaspora.

We talk about his role in building solidarity spaces on campus, especially amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza, and dive into the student encampment movement. Hammad also introduces us to the concept of Urbicide, which he explores in his recent report on Gaza. This framework exposes the systematic destruction of Gaza’s infrastructure, civil life, and resources for survival, empowering activists to ground their arguments in the material realities of displacement, starvation, and loss of life—countering Zionist propaganda with documented facts.

Finally, we discuss Palestine in the World, a course on Palestinian liberation that Hammad is co-designing for UBC's Geography department. As both an activist and geographer, Hammad brings an invaluable perspective on resistance, anti-Zionism, and the intersections of academia and activism. We’re grateful for this powerful, deeply reflective conversation.

Chapters:

(00:00) Introduction

(02:00) Hammad's journey

(27:36) UBC Encampments

(46:20) Political Education / Urbicide

(1:18:53) Political Education / Palestine in the World

(1:45:00) On Critical Hope