#11 Frontlines Are Everywhere | Kolin Sutherland-Wilson, Governance and Land Defense on the Frontlines
featuring Kolin Sutherland-Wilson (Gitxsan Nation – Fireweed Clan, from the village of Anspayaxw)
In this episode, Kolin and Jeff discuss Gitxsan governance and land defense on the frontlines.
Kolin Sutherland-Wilson (Gitxsan Nation – Fireweed Clan) is a land defender, storyteller, and video-maker from the village of Anspayaxw.
Globalization, Security, Sustainability
Simon Dalby | trans. Adela Despujol Ruiz-Jiménez
With the new geological age known as the Anthropocene heralding dramatic disruptions in the earth system, geopolitics needs to be fundamentally reconsidered to deal with these new circumstances. Planetary boundaries and ecological change are now the key contextualization for considering future global political arrangements.
We now find ourselves in a new geological age: the Anthropocene. The climate is changing and species are disappearing at a rate not seen since Earth’s major extinctions. The rapid, large-scale changes caused by fossil-fuel powered globalization increasingly threaten societies in new, unforeseen ways. But most security policies continue to be built on notions that look backward to a time when geopolitical threats derived mainly from the rivalries of states with fixed boundaries. Instead, Anthropocene Geopolitics shows that security policy must look forward to quickly shape a sustainable world no longer dependent on fossil fuels.
A future of long-term peace and geopolitical security depends on keeping the earth in conditions roughly similar to those we have known throughout history. Minimizing disruptions that would further put civilization at risk of extinction urgently requires policies that reflect new Anthropocene “planetary boundaries.”
About the Author – Simon Dalby
Originally from Ireland, Simon Dalby is Professor Emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University, where he teaches classes at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. He has been one of the key authors in the development of critical geopolitics, and his research interests include climate change and environmental security. In these fields, he has recently published works such as Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate Disrupted World (2024), Rethinking Environmental Security (2022), and Reframing Climate Change: Constructing Ecological Geopolitics (2016).
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La elevación del nivel del mar, las alteraciones agrícolas, los incendios desmedidos, las sequías y las temperaturas extremas están cambiando las relaciones internacionales. Esto es geopolítico en el sentido de que las decisiones políticas sobre las modalidades de economía y las fuentes de energía están configurando las circunstancias futuras de la humanidad, reconvirtiendo partes sustanciales del geo. Las decisiones sobre si potenciar la capacidad para extraer combustibles fósiles frente a la mayor producción de placas solares, o si utilizar procedimientos para regenerar los bosques en vez de talarlos, ahora tienen consecuencias de una magnitud tan grande que están alterando el funcionamiento del Sistema Tierra. Este es el nuevo contexto de la geopolítica.
Geopolítica del Antropoceno sugiere que las nociones tradicionales de geopolítica, y la supuestamente inevitable rivalidad de las grandes potencias y sus ambiciones territoriales, tienen que trascenderse si se quiere lograr un mundo habitable para la mayoría de la humanidad en las próximas décadas. Para ello, el libro revisita debates centrales de la geopolítica sobre seguridad, soberanía, fronteras, territorio y poder teniendo en cuenta las actuales amenazas a la integridad ecológica. Al adoptar una perspectiva de la ecología política en una escala global, busca superar las ideas tradicionales de protección y seguridad medioambiental, invitándonos a repensar nuestra imaginación geopolítica para que la protección del planeta en el Antropoceno sea efectiva.
Sobre el Autor – Simon Dalby
De origen irlandés, es Profesor Emérito en Wilfrid Laurier University (Canadá), donde imparte clases en The Balsillie School of International Affairs. Ha sido uno de los autores clave en el desarrollo de la geopolítica crítica, y sus intereses de investigación incluyen el cambio climático y la seguridad medioambiental. En estos campos ha publicado recientemente obras como Pyromania: Fire and Geopolitics in a Climate Disrupted World (2024), Rethinking Environmental Security (2022), o Reframing Climate Change: Constructing Ecological Geopolitics (2016).
#7 Frontlines Are Everywhere — Aaju Peter, Inuit Self-Determination Amidst Shape-Shifting Colonization
featuring Aaju Peter (Inuk lawyer, activist, filmmaker, educator, and clothing designer)
Aaju Peter CM and Dr. Jeff Ganohalidoh Corntassel talk about promoting education in Inuit communities, challenges to food sovereignty in the Arctic, the role grief plays in resilience, and more in Episode #7 of Frontlines Are Everywhere.
Aaju Peter is an Inuk lawyer, activist, filmmaker, educator, and clothing designer. She is on the frontlines of defending the rights of Inuit, including the right to an education and to engage in seal hunting. The documentary Twice Colonized (2023) follows Aaju’s efforts to establish a permanent Indigenous forum at the EU while she undergoes a personal journey of loss and healing.
Listen to Episode #7 on YouTube.
#2 Frontlines Are Everywhere — Regenerating Indigenous Food Sovereignty
featuring Nephi Craig of White Mountain Apache & Diné Nations (founder of the Native American Culinary Association (NACA), Creator/Chef at Café Gozhóó)
Dr. Jeff Ganohalidoh Corntassel of Cherokee Nation sits down with Nephi Craig of White Mountain Apache and Diné Nations for the second episode of the Frontlines Are Everywhere podcast series. Nephi Craig is the founder of the Native American Culinary Association (NACA) and the Creator/Chef at Café Gozhóó.
They discuss Nephi’s journey as a chef, and how it brought him back home to the White Mountain Apache Nation where he continues to share his skills and cultivate his cooking style. They discuss the frybread (bannock) controversy, as well as being at the frontlines of health and wellness.
Listen to Episode Two of the Frontlines Are Everywhere podcast on YouTube.
The Frontlines Are Everywhere podcast takes a critical look at world politics and Indigenous nationhood by discussing Indigenous-led resurgence and activist movements, Indigenous trade networks, Indigenous climate action and the formation of new alliances that transcend colonial state borders among other topics. Dr. Jeff Ganohalidoh Corntassel will be interviewing Indigenous scholars, activists, artists and knowledge holders from across Turtle Island and around the world in order to gain insight into how Indigenous peoples practice their own forms of Internationalism through intimate connections to land/water, culture and community.
#1 Frontlines Are Everywhere — Leading a Restoration Revolution
featuring Cheryl Bryce of Songhees Nation (Lekwungen knowledge-holder, kwetlal / camas protector, Lekwungen Community Toolshed, Colonial Reality Tours)
Dr. Jeff Ganohalidoh Corntassel of Cherokee Nation sits down with Cheryl Bryce of Songhees Nation for the inaugural episode of Frontlines Are Everywhere podcast series. Cheryl Bryce is a Lekwungen knowledge-holder and kwetlal/camas protector. She runs the Lekwungen Community Toolshed and Colonial Reality Tours.
They discuss the restoration of kwetlal/camas food systems and traditional land management. She will also share about her nation’s efforts to protect Stqéyəʔ (Stakaya), the wolf who resided on Tl’chés (Discovery & Chatham Islands) and made international news when his life was cut short by a hunter.
Listen to Episode One of the Frontlines Are Everywhere podcast on Youtube or Spotify.
The Frontlines Are Everywhere podcast takes a critical look at world politics and Indigenous nationhood by discussing Indigenous-led resurgence and activist movements, Indigenous trade networks, Indigenous climate action and the formation of new alliances that transcend colonial state borders among other topics. Dr. Jeff Ganohalidoh Corntassel will be interviewing Indigenous scholars, activists, artists and knowledge holders from across Turtle Island and around the world in order to gain insight into how Indigenous peoples practice their own forms of Internationalism through intimate connections to land/water, culture and community.
An Interview with Tiffany Joseph: Land and Water Stewardship in a Time of Crisis
On November 3rd, 2023, Jeff Ganohalidoh Corntassel spoke with Tiffany Joseph. Tiffany is of Sḵxwu7mesh and W̱SÁNEĆ ancestry. She currently coordinates the Rematriate Stewardship project with the XAXE TEṈEW̱ Sacred Land Society. She describes herself as being “drawn to work that promotes wellness of our minds, bodies, and the environment in which we live, because the wellbeing of the land and the people is intertwined” (visit her website for more). The following conversation covers pollinators, extractivism, Palestine, and what it takes to show up for land and water defense. This interview is part of the Special Section: Honouring Indigenous Land and Water Defenders, edited by Jeff Ganohalidoh Corntassel, in Borders in Globalization Review 5(1): 7–53.
BIG_Review 4.2
Spring/Summer 2023
This outstanding collection of scholarship and artwork enriches border studies and cultural reflections on (and against) borders, and it is available for free, in open access CC-BY-NC (except where stipulated).
Leading the issue, guest-editor Birte Wassenberg, historian and Europeanist, presents a Special Section with five research articles advanced from a doctoral seminar on Europe’s changing borders called Frontières en mouvement, or Frontiers in Motion. The papers (by scholars Claude Beaupré, Yaël Gagnepain, Nicolas Caput, Tobias Heyduk, and Morgane Chovet) illuminate diverse aspects of borders, cross-border governance, and the pursuit of continental integration. Together, the section works toward a more realistic assessment of European borders, demystifying euphemisms of ‘Europe without borders’ and moving beyond reductive binaries of open/closed or good/bad.
In the Chief Editor’s Choice Portfolio, readers experience the unsettling visual creations of Israeli artist Ariane Littman. Mapping the Wound: Feminine Gestures of Empathy and Healing (featured on the cover) curates years of performative art and multimedia sculpture in which Littman applies bandages and gauze to Israeli maps, landmarks, and citizens, treating subject and object alike as wounded and torn. The work is powerful and timely, as Israeli citizens have been protesting en masse since early 2023 the authoritarian overreach of the Netanyahu government; in this context, the Palestinian question is jarring, even when muted or unheard.
Following the special section and cover portfolio, readers are treated to an eclectic series of academic, artistic, and policy treatments of borders today. Our Poetry section features poems by Sotirios Pastakas and Dvora Levin with exquisite verses on the morbidity of borders. Our Art & Borders section brings you a special mixed-media collection called Embarked Lives, featuring Chilean artist Enrique Ramírez’s oceanic portrayals of cross-border migration. Readers are also treated to a Review Essay by a scholar of borders and film, Michael Dear, who constructs a history of the genre of US–Mexico-border cinema. And Malvika Sharma, student of border studies and native of the borderlands of Jammu and Kashmir, shares lived experiences of a homeland divided through the art form of Short Story, in a dreamy fiction inspired by real yearning and hope. Changing tempo, our Policy section presents two detailed reports on quite different technologies of cross-border governance, with Veasna Yong focusing on the behavioral technique of ‘nudging’ and Mary Isabel Delgado Caceres wading into the potentials of digital blockchain. This issue also features a Research Note in the form of an alternative map of the Canada–US border region, showing not the international boundary line but rather different kinds of Indigenous communities that straddle and thereby call it into question (even as the authors, Guntram H. Herb, Vincent Falardeau, and Kathryn Talano, are sensitive to their own adoption of settler knowledges and to themselves not being Indigenous). Readers will then enjoy two excellent Film Reviews of contemporary cinema showcasing the plights of refugees seeking access to European society, by borders scholars Şeyma Saylak and Natasha Sofia Martinez. Finally, the new issue closes with two Book Reviews: Michael J. Carpenter summarizes the contribution of Maurice Stierl’s important book Migrant Resistance, and Molly-Ann P. Taylor shines a light on Michel Hogue’s landmark Métis and the Medicine Line.
Climate Change, Security and Sustainability
Simon Dalby, Susan Horton, Rianne Mahon, Diana Thomaz | Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: Global Governance Challenges | 2019
Violent conflict continues to plague many parts of the developing world, with mostly deleterious consequences for peoples and places where violence occurs. The complex relationships between organized violence and sustainable development affect the ability of states and other agencies to accomplish many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In particular the discussion about Goal 13 on climate change now intersects with Northern security fears and policy responses that are sometimes seriously at odds with local drivers of environmental change. Contemporary analyses warn of “backdraft” effects if inappropriate policies aggravate rather than ameliorate conflict. Unravelling these complex interconnections is one key to the effective implementation of the SDGs agenda, one that is increasingly urgent as climate change accelerates, and appropriate policies are needed to deal with context-specific disruptions in many diverse places.
Dalby, Simon., Susan Horton, Rianne Mahon and Diana Thomaz. “Climate Change, Security and Sustainability.” Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals: Global Governance Challenges. Abingdon-on-Thames: Routledge, 2019.
Special Issue: Confronting Borders in the Arctic
Journal of Borderland Studies | Volume 33, Issue 2 | 2018
In this thematic issue, six papers and three short commentaries investigate the evolving nature of borders in the Arctic in an era of climate change and globalization. Together, they illustrate how processes unique to the Arctic, such as sea ice melt and Inuit self-governance, tell a larger story about the co-evolving relationship of people and the environment, and the physical and constructed borders that give them meaning. Arctic human–environment relations are embedded in distinct histories and materialities in which border-making is understood as a multi-scalar arena of subnational and transnational actors, rather than the exclusive domain of the state. At the same time, the Arctic is shaped by powerful agents of change whose impacts span national borders and reconfigure environmental barriers. The papers in this issue reveal the ways in which Arctic climatic, political, economic, and demographic change amount to a transformation in thinking about Arctic borders and bordered spaces. We hope that the Arctic case will stimulate further investigation in borderlands around the world undergoing similarly transformative changes to physical and human systems.
Read the full issue here: Journal of Borderlands Studies Special Issue: The Arctic: Vol 33 No 2: Spring 2018
Contents
Confronting Borders in the Arctic by Scott Stephenson
Global Arctic by Klaus Dodds
Finding the Global Arctic by Jessica Shadian
The “Global Arctic” as a New Geopolitical Context and Method by Lassi Heininen and Matthias Finger
Navigating Political Borders Old and New: The Territoriality of Indigenous Inuit Governance by Jessica Shadian
(Un)frozen Spaces: Exploring the Role of Sea Ice in the Marine Socio-legal Spaces of the Bering and Beaufort Seas by Kristen Shake, Karen Frey, Deborah Martin, Philip Steinberg
Rescaling Borders of Investment: The Arctic Council and the Economic Development Policies by Heather Nicol
Drawing Boundaries in the Beaufort Sea: Different Visions/Different Needs by Rob Huebert
“Anthropocene Formations: Environmental Security, Geopolitics and Disaster.”
Simon Dalby | Theory, Culture & Society | 2017
The discussion of the Anthropocene makes it clear that contemporary social thought can no longer take nature, or an external ‘environment’, for granted in political discussion. Humanity is remaking its own context very rapidly, not only in the processes of urbanization but also in the larger context of global biophysical transformations that provide various forms of insecurity. Disasters such as the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns and potentially disastrous plans to geoengineer the climate in coming decades highlight that the human environment is being remade in the Anthropocene. Humanity is now a geological actor, not just a biological one, and that insight, captured in the term Anthropocene, changes understandings of both security and environment in social thought, requiring a focus on production of environments rather than their protection. Disasters help clarify this key point and its significance for considering geosocial formations.
Dalby, Simon. “Anthropocene Formations: Environmental Security, Geopolitics and Disaster.” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 2-3 (2017): 233-252.