Abstract
This article combines world-systems, decolonial, eco-feminist and post-human ecological approaches to deconstruct the planetary crisis of the hegemonic civilization. Underpinned by anthropocentric, androcentric, hetero-patriarchal, Euro/Western-centric, modern/colonial and capitalist systems of power, this civilization causes devastating socioecological effects. Globalized through (neo)colonialism/(neo)imperialism, it has subjugated the rural under the urban and the Global South under the North, becoming globally hegemonic. Through the coloniality of power hegemonic conceptions of progress, growth, development and modernity have been spread, procuring the loyalty of semi-peripheral and peripheral regimes into a civilizational obsession with endless accumulation based on the “mastery of nature.” Most “postcolonial” elites, especially across “emerging economies,” have not broken with this coloniality. They often reproduce govern-mentalities aimed at “catching-up” with, cloning, emulating, imitating or conforming to hegemonic models enacted in the North’s metropolitan cores. Overcoming this crisis requires not only a critique of neoliberal capitalist modernity, but a world-systemic transformation towards ecosufficient lifeways based on indigenous, eco-feminist, and post-human alternatives.
Highlights
We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe [or Western civilization]
Environmental, energy, food, financial, and social reproduction crises are disrupting the world-system (Ahmed 2010; McMichael 2011; Chase-Dunn 2013; Houtart 2010; Kallis, Martinez-Alier and Norgaard 2009; Foster, Clark, York 2010; Goodman and Salleh 2015; Peterson 2010; Rockstrom et al 2009, 2009b; Salleh 2012; Smith 2014; Steffen et al 2007). This planetary crisis, we argue, has been triggered by a globalizing mode of civilization that has Journal of World-System Research | Vol 22 Issue 2 | What Goes Around become hegemonic
We address the mode which, we argue, has become globally hegemonic; we elaborate a theory of the “infrastructures of power” which—we contend—underpin the mode of civilization globally hegemonic
Summary
This planetary crisis, we argue, has been triggered by a globalizing mode of civilization that has Journal of World-System Research | Vol 22 Issue 2 | What Goes Around become hegemonic.2 This mode of civilization is constituted and underpinned by anthropocentric, androcentric, hetero-patriarchal, Euro/Western-centric, modern/colonial and capitalist systems of power. This coloniality of power has often consumed the creativity, energy, and “resources” of (semi)peripheries in aspirational attempts to emulate and/or conform to hegemonic models by, for example, aggressively pursuing accelerated modernization, developmentalism, urbanization, industrialization, and massified commodity/consumerist cultures at almost any cost, human or ecological.
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