- The political ecology of understanding the creation of the international order! - Social movements and the challenge to existing orders! - Linking the body and spaces of resistance

1. International Security, Crime, Terrorism & Conflict
The Food System in Crisis social movements, food insecurity and bio-politics
Dr Matt Reed

2. “Just as living things require inputs..so do cities.
That is cities cannot exist without those inputs urbanites require clean air, water, food, fuel and
construction goods to subsist …” pg.41
– David Kilcullen !
- “Out of the Mountains: The coming age of the urban guerilla” 2013

3. Outline
- The political ecology of understanding the creation of
the international order!
- Social movements and the challenge to existing orders!
- Linking the body and spaces of resistance
Key terms - political ecology,
climate, food security, food
system, social movement
theory, ordering, bio-politics!
Key thinkers - Davis, Castells,
Foucault

4. Food Security - Increasing public policy concern
❖
Projections of shortage - climate change, limits of
physical inputs (peak oil, water etc)!
❖
Global demographic changes (young, southern)!
❖
Urban-rural transition (urban, littoral, unplanned)!
❖
Dietary transition (plants to meat)!
❖
Changes to international order (rise of China, US
hegemony)

5. flows across
pacific!
reversed
ENSO
impacts on monsoon
Shifts in weather patterns
- ENSO - El Nino - Southern Oscillation!
- Global climatic change, irregular!
- shown as nations but regions effected!
- changes to heat/rain fall patterns

6. ENSO impacts
❖
Droughts in Australia, China,
India and Southern Africa !
❖
Profound impact on
agricultural production,
particularly cereals (wheat,
corn, rice) but also pastoral
production systems!
❖
These are traded as
commodities globally

7. Making of the 3rd world
❖
Davis argues that severe ENSO cycles in late 19th C allowed
imperial expansion, intersection of imperialist militarism,
global market and climate!
❖
India, China - people often had higher standards of living and
were centres of industrial production - “Even outcaste
agricultural labourers in Madras earned more in real terms
than English farm labourers” p.55!
❖
Whole of free trade system held up funds from Asian trade ‘the
starving Indian and Chinese peasantries were wheeled in as
unlikely saviours’ p58

8. “Nineteenth-century peasant producers in India
and China - and, to a lesser extent, in Brazil and
southern Africa - existed increasingly in the late
Victorian world market but not of it.” p54
Mike Davis, - Late Victorian Holocausts/The Origin of the Third World
“Between 1875-1900 - a period that included the
worst famines in Indian history - annual grain
exports increased from 3 to 10 million tons; as Dutt
pointed out, this quantity equaled the annual
nutrition of 25 million people.” p59

9. Contemporary China, and place names
HEILONGJIANG
HARBIN
CHANGCHUN
JILIN
INNER MONGOLIA
ÜRÜMQI
XINJIANG
SHENYANG
HOHHOT
GANSU
YINCHUAN
XINING
QINGHAI
LANZHOU
TIBET
(XIZANG)
SHANDONG
JIANGSU
ZHENGZHOU
HEFEI
HENAN
HUBEI
WUHAN
CHANGSHA
SICHUAN
HUNAN
- Massive ethnic violence and revolts!
- Imperial government forced to abandon mechanisms protecting
against ENSO induced famines!
- ‘Britain’s dominant role in Chinese foreign trade, built by
Victorian nacrotrafficantes with gunboats, thus leveraged the
whole free trade imperium’ Davis p.60
ANHUI
HANGZHOU
GUANGXI
ZHEJIANG
NANCHANG
FUZHOU
FUJIAN
YUNNAN
GUANGDONG
GUANGZHOU
HONG KONG
NANNING
HONG KONG
MACAU
HAIKOU
HAINAN
SHANGHAI
SHANGHAI
JIANGXI
GUIYANG
KUNMING
NANJING
CHONGQING
GUIZHOU
19th Century China
SHIJIAZHUANG
JINAN
SHAANXI
CHONGQING
LHASA
TIANJIN
HEBEI
TAIYUAN
XI’AN
CHENGDU
TIANJIN
BEIJING
SHANXI
NINGXIA
LIAONING
BEIJING

10. British India - Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Burma
JAMMU & KASHMIR
SRINAGAR
JAMMU
PUNJAB
SHIMLA
CHANDIGARH
The British Raj 19th Century
HARYANA
DELHI
“If the history of British rule in were to
be condensed in a single fact, it is this;
there was no increase in India’s per
capita income from 1757 to 1947. There
was no economic development in the
usual sense of the term.” Davis p.63!
!
- Commercialisation of agriculture wheat, cotton, opium, indigo led to
impoverishment and starvation.!
!
- Raj choked off the development of
peasant agriculture into capitalist
agriculture.
JAIPUR
HIMACHAL
PRADESH
DEHRADUN
UTTARAKHAND
UTTAR
PRADESH
LUCKNOW
RAJASTHAN
GANDHINAGAR
MADHYA PRADESH
DADRA &
NAGAR
HAVELI
BIHAR
PATNA
RANCHI
BHOPAL
DAMAN
SILVASSA
CHHATTISGARH
MAHARASHTRA
(ODISHA)
RAIPUR ORISSA
MUMBAI
HYDERABAD
GOA
PANAJI
KARNATAKA
ANDHRA
PRADESH
BANGALORE
KERALA
THIRUVANANTHAPURAM
CHENNAI
PONDICHERRY
TAMIL
NADU
ITANAGA
GANGTOK
JHARKHAND
GUJARAT
ARUNACHAL PRADES
SIKKIM
ASSAM
SHILLONG
MEGHALAYA
DISPUR NAGALAN
KOHIMA
IMPHAL
MANIPUR
AGARTALA
TRIPURA
KOLKATA
AIZAWL
MIZORAM
WEST BENGAL
BHUBANESWAR

11. Why all this talk of the 19th C?
❖
Importance of:!
❖
Agricultural commodities - food (wheat, tea, coffee),
drugs (opium) & industrial inputs (indigo)!
❖
Global trade and international order!
❖
Consequences of financialization of commodities for
poorer people!
❖
Intersection of climatic variation and social systems.

12. http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/in-tahrir-square-18-days-of-egypts-unfinished-revolution

13. Global/Arab Spring 2010 ❖
Food price spikes after ENSO events - draught/floods increased financialization/speculation of food
commodities!
❖
US and Europe bio-fuels - food = fuel!
❖
Urbanised populations very reliant on often subsidised
food products.!
❖
Then it all kicked off! [http://youtu.be/bu9YBJ_wp3I]

14. Social movement definitions
❖
Shared Identity!
❖
❖
Informal networks!
❖
❖
not one single organisation
Solidarity!
❖
❖
may transcend class/gender/ethnicity!
support one another!
Unconventional protests

15. Protest
❖
Transcending ‘normal’ politics!
❖
Bearing witness - sincerity and sacrifice!
❖
Numbers - mass protests!
❖
Symbolic acts - images!
❖
Cultural protest - tailored to the governance system!
❖
Control of (urban) space

16. Hybrid urban spaces
❖
Castells!
❖
"In our society, the public space of the
social movement is constructed as a hybrid
space between the Internet social networks
and the occupied urban
space: connecting cyberspace and urban
space in relentless interaction, constituting,
technologically and culturally, instant
communities of transformative practice.' p
11!
❖
Co-ordination across time/space !
❖
Increase speed of communication and
experimentation !
❖
Diffusion and availability

17. Protest movements 2008 - 2014
- Arab spring (Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Morocco, Turkey,
Yemen, Bahrain) + protest in Iran!
- Occupy movement (US, UK …..)!
- Indignadas (Spain) + Greek & Italian protests!
- Brazilian protests
- Riots in the UK, Sweden and
China!
- On-going protests in
Thailand!
- Suppressed peaceful Sunni
protests in Iraq

18. Stuffed & Starved
❖
A focus of governance on the body !
❖
The starved - those without food or
insecure!
❖
❖
threat of insurrection!
The stuffed - those who’s bodies
are over fed!
❖
threat of illness and drain !
❖
Regulation of the body - medical
interventions!
❖
Also national security - competition
between nations - eclipse of liberal
order?

19. “The body and everything that touches it: diet,
climate, and soil – is the domain of the Herkunft:
“The body manifests the stigmata of past
experience and also gives rise to desires, failings
and errors” (Foucault 1998:375)!
–Michel Foucault (1998:375)
Herkunft - descent - as discussed by Nietzche

20. Future thoughts
❖
The nexus of the global commodity chain written on the
body !
❖
Security in this context multifaceted - national, familial,
personal….!
❖
Food system vital in a wider political ecology !
❖
Borders of the licit/illicit commodities - central role of
drugs!
❖
Opportunities not just for repression but revolt

21. Contact
mreed@glos.ac.uk!
!
@Reedmtweet!
!