New issue out now - and freely available

We’re always pleased to announce new issues, but January 2016’s–the first issue of our 48^thvolume–really is something special…

The issue–all of which is freely available online–opens with a remarkable essay, The Natures of War by Derek Gregory. In what might well be Antipode‘s longest ever paper, Derek considers nature as “a medium through which military violence is conducted” in the First and Second World Wars and midcentury Vietnam. His conclusion is particularly powerful:

“I make these points [about the experiences of soldiers in the Western Front’s mud, the deserts of North Africa and rainforests of Vietnam] not to minimise the continued–and often heightened–suffering of civilians in today’s wars…but to disrupt the lazy politics in which the Left supposedly cares about ‘their’ civilians while the Right cares about ‘our’ soldiers. For war diminishes, degrades and damages everybody. While I have been writing this essay, I have heard endless declarations about ‘boots on the ground’ (or the lack of them) in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere. If I have shown nothing else, I hope it is that we must attend to both the bodies that fill those boots and the ground through which they struggle.”

Next up is Stuart Elden and Adam David Morton with Thinking Past Henri Lefebvre: Introducing “The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology”. As the title suggests, this piece introduces that which follows: Henri Lefebvre’s The Theory of Ground Rent and Rural Sociology. Lefebvre will be known to most geographers for his prodigious work on everyday life, the city, the production of space, and, increasingly, the state. Less well known is his longstanding interest in questions of the rural. This new translation is the first step in Stuart and Adam’s project to take on a disciplinary reductionism that “essentialises a critique of the political economy of space to urban space at the neglect of the rural-urban dialectic”, opening up new lines of geographical investigation.

The Antipode Foundation funded the translation as part of our efforts to facilitate engagement with scholarship from outside the English-speaking world. In the coming months and years we hope to break down some of the barriers between language communities, enabling hitherto under-represented groups, regions, countries and institutions to enrich conversations and debates in the journal. Watch this space…

The rest of the issue covers some exciting ground: climate change, carbon credits and citizenship; patriarchy and white privilege in the food justice movement; the past, current condition and future of the concept of “sustainability”; a struggle to produce an urban commons; the cultural barriers faced by transnational social movements; the governance of “crise s” in Greece; challenges confronting indigenous solidarity activism; and the rise of populist politics in these “austere” times.