Dangerous Idea Research Articles

The racialization of danger: patterns and ambiguities in the relation between Islam, security and secularism in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT The question of European foreign fighters in Syria has transformed security and counter-radicalization into important pillars of the liberal secular governance of Muslims in Europe. By exploring how Dutch integration and counter-radicalization policies connect the idea of danger to Muslims and Islam, de Koning analyses how admission to the Dutch nation-state is regulated according to what kind of deficiencies outsiders are thought to have, locating them in ideas about ‘race’, culture and religion. By focusing on the idea of a racialization of danger, de Koning argues, first, that, already prior to 9/11, a securitization logic existed in Dutch policies in which a form of Islam that was perceived to be ‘unacceptable’ was regarded as a potential danger to social cohesion and the rule of law. And, second, in analysing the process of racialization, that we should take into account its ambiguities in order to understand how the racialization of Muslims works.

Want to do better science? Admit you're not objective.

When science is viewed in isolation from the past and politics, it’s easier for those with bad intentions to revive dangerous and discredited ideas. When science is viewed in isolation from the past and politics, it’s easier for those with bad intentions to revive dangerous and discredited ideas.

Long-term forecasts of the COVID-19 epidemic: a dangerous idea.

INTRODUCTION: Mathematical models have been used to obtain long-term forecasts of the COVID-19 epidemic. METHODS: The daily COVID-19 case count in two Brazilian states was used to show the potential limitations of long-term forecasting through the application of a mathematical model to the data. RESULTS: The predicted number of cases at the end of the epidemic and at the moment that the peak occurs, is highly dependent on the length of the time series used in the predictive model. CONCLUSIONS: Predictions obtained during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic need to be viewed with caution.

Evaluation the Effectiveness of Anxiety Treatments: Cognitive Therapy in Comparison to Spiritual Therapy

Anxiety disorders comprised of about 12% of the population, which leads to mild to severe impairment. Anxiety defines as a state of tension, worried thoughts and concern over the idea of risk or danger. The authors investigated the impact of cognitive and spiritual therapy in female students diagnosed with anxiety disorder. Data were collected by means of Spielberg anxiety questionnaire. Results revealed that the levels of anxiety were decreased by cognitive and spiritual therapy. The findings of this study highlighted the possible benefits of cognitive and spiritual therapy in reducing anxiety. However, literature review shows that spiritual therapy could be more effective in comparison to cognitive therapy for treating anxiety.

The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam by Stephen J. Shoemaker

Reviewed by: The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam by Stephen J. Shoemaker Jay Rubenstein Stephen J. Shoemaker The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018 Pp. viii + 260. $59.95. Stephen J. Shoemaker’s The Apocalypse of Empire: Imperial Eschatology in Late Antiquity and Early Islam grows out of his previous book, The Death of a Prophet: The End of Muhammad’s Life and the Beginnings of Islam (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015). There, Shoemaker argued that Islam, at its point of origin, centered on apocalyptic ideas. In the current volume, he wanted to answer the most frequent objection that audiences raised: if the first Muslims believed the end was near, why did they bother to build an empire? In the late antique world, Shoemaker responds, apocalypticism was always enmeshed in concepts of empire. One might observe further that eschatological programs, medieval and modern alike, have served as calls to action rather than to surrender and withdrawal. In any case, Shoemaker sensed a lacuna, and The Apocalypse of Empire is his response. In this book, Shoemaker ranges well beyond Islamic themes, offering a sweeping history of apocalyptic thought over the course of eight centuries, including Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, as well as Muslims. Such a broad survey is, of necessity, less a close reading of sources and more a general presentation of historiography, but one made in this case with a single argumentative purpose. For while on the surface the book offers a case for the enduring power of eschatology to shape imperial dreams, in practice, its narrative looks always toward the rise of Islam and how preceding apocalyptic dialogues gave it shape. The nexus between apocalypse and empire begins in earnest, in Shoemaker’s analysis, at a traditional point: the reign of the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–164 b.c.e.). His programmatic persecution of Jews, beginning in 167 b.c.e., inspired a handful of apocalyptic texts, notably the biblical book of Daniel as well as other short works collected in 1 Enoch. These powerfully [End Page 335] imagined texts served as calls either to resist or rebel against Antiochus’s rule. When Macedonian hegemony ended, the apocalyptic ideology survived, but the identity of the villains shifted to the new rulers, the Romans. In the Dead Sea Scrolls, for example, the communities of Qumran presented themselves as training for war against Rome during the Last Days, which lay not in the future but rather had already begun. Later Jewish writers, particularly after Roman armies destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 70 c.e., continued to weave themes of war and judgment into anti-imperial texts. Against this background the actual book of “Apocalypse,” John of Patmos’s Revelation, receives surprisingly short shrift. Presumably, John falls too much on the side of “patient endurance” rather than active resistance. Still, and plainly, Revelation has proven a supple enough text, and the millenarian vision of chapter 20 a dangerous enough idea, that The Apocalypse of Empire would have benefited from a more extended consideration of it. Later Christian apocalypticism faced a unique challenge. The key variable, and the obvious one, is Constantine’s conversion to Christianity. The traditional anti-imperial tone of eschatology turned on its head. Instead of a parody of godly rule, Constantine’s court became a precursor of heaven. The chief literary product of this revision was the oracle of the Tiburtine Sibyl, to which Shoemaker devotes most of the second chapter. Composed in the late fourth century and circulated in several languages with multiple revisions over the course of centuries, it is a notoriously difficult text to work with. The most controversial point is its ending. In most manuscript copies, the Sibyl concludes with the story of the Last World Emperor, a character who unites a faltering Roman Empire against armies of barbarians and pagans. Under his rule, a reinvigorated Rome achieved an astonishing series of military victories, until the emperor decided to lay down his crown in Jerusalem. Some readers question whether this legend was part of the original Tiburtine Sibyl or...

From soul to mind in Hobbes’s The Elements of Law

ABSTRACTThis paper examines the significance and originality of Hobbes’s use of ‘mind’, rather than ‘soul’, in his writings on human nature. To this end, his terminology in the discussion of the ‘faculties of the mind’ in The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640) is considered in the context of English-language accounts of the ‘faculties of the soul’ in three widely-read works from the first half of the seventeenth century: Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), and Edward Reynolds’s A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (1640). For Hobbes’s contemporaries, man’s soul conveyed God-like powers to human beings; for Hobbes this is a dangerous idea. Accordingly, he establishes a sharp divide between ‘soul’ and ‘mind’, understanding the two terms to be concerned with two very different things: one with soteriology, the other with mental abilities. Like his contemporaries, Hobbes thought that understanding the faculties reveals the way to live a good life. But unlike them, his moral and political philosophy relies on citizens accepting that they are not like God, rather than looking to restore the ‘divine’ within themselves.

Does technology make us stupid?

Miranda Anderson is an Anniversary Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Stirling, UK. On Aug 8, 2019, Anderson gave a talk as part of the Cabaret of Dangerous Ideas (CODI), a series of events in which academics from the four universities in Edinburgh speak about their research. Anderson's talk was entitled “Has you phone replaced your brain?”. The so-called dangerous idea at the heart of Anderson's talk was that the mind or cognition are not limited to the brain, but in fact extend across the brain, body, and the world, leading to the concept behind the extended mind hypothesis, championed by philosophers including Andy Clark and David Chalmers.

The mad leading the blind: Perceptions of the vaccine-refusal movement among Australians who support vaccination

BackgroundVaccine refusal is shaped by the social ecology in which it occurs. How people who refuse vaccines are communicated to and treated may affect the nature and strength of their negative vaccine beliefs, and their responsiveness to health promotion messages. Yet little is known about how people who refuse vaccines are perceived by the public. Our research examined perceptions among pro-vaccine Australians of the vaccine-refusal movement. MethodsDescriptions of the vaccine-refusal movement by 2666 pro-vaccine Australians were analysed using thematic discourse analysis. Descriptive themes were identified via inductive, iterative coding. Discourse analysis techniques were then used to interpret latent beliefs about the vaccine-refusal movement. ResultsParticipants had negative and stigmatising perceptions of the vaccine-refusal movement. They believed the movement is dangerous, misinformed, and comprised of charlatans and fools who are unintelligent, selfish, overly emotional, conspiratorial and scientifically illiterate. Discursive analysis showed that these perceptions were underpinned by beliefs that people would have to be defective in some way to believe anti-vaccine rhetoric. Furthermore, perceptions were underpinned by beliefs that the movement spreads not only disease, but also dangerous ideas that were seen to attack the social order, institutions, values and reason. Participants′ intensely-negative views related to their inability to imagine why someone would refuse vaccines. ConclusionsThis research provides a focused, qualitative account of public perceptions of the vaccine-refusal movement. The findings are concerning: stigma towards vaccine-refusing people may adversely affect their wellbeing and entrench their negative vaccine beliefs. The research suggests that more compassionate, nuanced discussion of vaccine refusal in the public sphere is needed. It also supports the need to systematically examine public attitudes towards vaccine refusal as a determinant of vaccine confidence.

Poison to the Beasts: Changing Poisons and Poisoning Practices in Campaigns to Kill Norwegian Birds and Mammals, 1845-1967

Abstract Between 1845 and 1967 deadly poison was often used to kill and eradicate unwanted wild animals in the Norwegian fauna. The major targets of these poison practices were rats, predators and crows. This article presents the main types of poisons used, the main methods of poison administration and the legislation covering the poisoning-practices in regards to the various species, as well as negotiations over the killing methods and wildlife eradication programmes. Examining the changing social and political organisation of these eradication campaigns brings new insights into the cultural history of poison, into the cultural relations between man and nature and into changing human ideas of safety and danger. We suggest that practices of intentional killing by poisoning of larger animals impinged upon attitudes towards direct or indirect poisoning of insects and concern over toxic risks.

Conferencias Aranguren ¿Fin de la intimidad? Ensimismarnos: contra las amenazas transhumanistas

La noción de intimidad tiene diversos orígenes y acepciones. En la tradición filosófica, Séneca, Agustín de Hipona, Lutero, Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Freud, Ortega y Zambrano concibieron la intimidad desde diferentes enfoques. Esta contribución dedica especial atención a Ortega y Gasset, porque vinculó ensimismamiento y técnica. Asimismo afirma una intimidad voluntariamente compartida que se desarrolla mediante relaciones íntimas en red. Sin embargo, algunos sistemas tecnológicos amenazan la intimidad. Es el caso de la inteligencia artificial promovida por el transhumanismo, que surgió con el programa NBIC (nano-bio-info-cogno, NSF 2001). Transhumanistas tecnocientíficos de gran influencia mundial, como Harari, han defendido ideas particularmente peligrosas para la intimidad de las personas. Para combatir esas amenazas se requiere promover una intimidad compartida y en red. Asimismo hay que desarrollar la noción de tecnopersona, reinvindicando el derecho a la intimidad de las tecnopersonas en el mundo digital.

Dying in Service to a Dangerous Idea: Organising the Foundations of an African Jubilee Movement

Jubilee is a revolutionary idea that many generations have struggled to act on. Africa is seeking to overcome centuries of colonialism and its extractive structures. Yet this is the African century where African population growth and youthful energy will profoundly impact the globe – for good or ill. Having courage to enact Jubilee principles through grassroots movements could see the creation of a uniquely African economy good for people and the environment that could bless the nations. We can do this by implementing a combination of different movement principles: 1) prayer and discipleship; 2) developing new organisational wineskins; 3) building peace and deep relationships; 4) communicating a unifying and hopeful narrative; 5) forging new identities; 6) formulating concrete plans and communicating clear demands; and 7) persisting in our action even through difficulties. If African movements can tap into the deep divine well of courage and strength to die in service to God’s jubilee calling then perhaps we will see a continent changed forever. Dying each day to self, we cannot rest until we hand over this vision to the next generation.

Beyond solutionist science for the Anthropocene: To navigate the contentious atmosphere of solar geoengineering

The emerging narrative of the Anthropocene has created a new space for changes in global environmental change (GEC) science. On the one hand, there is a mounting call for changing scientific practices towards a solution-oriented transdisciplinary mode that can help achieve global sustainability. On the other hand, the scientists’ desire to avoid exceeding planetary boundaries has broken a taboo on researching solar geoengineering, a dangerous idea of deliberately cooling the Earth’s climate. Whilst to date the two features have been discussed separately, there is a possible confluence in the future. This paper explores this close yet precarious relationship between transdisciplinary GEC science and solar geoengineering in the context of Future Earth, a new international platform of Earth system science. Our aim is to understand how a transdisciplinary mode of science can navigate the contention over solar geoengineering and its course of research without breeding polarization. By seeking the immediacy of ‘problem-solving’, Future Earth is drawn into the solutionist thinking that orders the mode of engagement in pursuing consensus. However, because conflict is inescapable on the solar geoengineering debate, transdisciplinary engagement might as well aim at mapping out plural viewpoints and allowing people to disagree. In transdisciplinary engagement, as co-design signifies the engagement of stakeholders with decision-making in science, a fair and transparent procedure of making decisions is also needed. From our own experience of co-designing research priorities, we suggest that, if carefully designed, voting can be a useful tool to mediate the contentious process of transdisciplinary decision-making with three different benefits for collective decision-making, namely, efficiency, inclusivity and learning. For the future directions of transdisciplinary GEC science, since the Anthropocene challenges are truly uncertain and contentious, it is argued that the science for the Anthropocene should move away from a solutionist paradigm towards an experimentalist turn.

Differences in structure and dynamics of networks retrieved from dark and public web forums

Humans make decisions based on the information they obtain from several major sources, among which the comments of others in Internet forums play an increasing role. Such forums cover a wide spectrum of topics and represent an essential tool in choosing the best products, manipulating views or optimizing our decisions regarding a number of aspects of our everyday life. However, many forums have extremely controversial topics and contents including those which radicalize the readers or spread information about dangerous products and ideas (e.g., drugs, weapons or aggressive ideologies). These just mentioned activities are taking place mainly on the so called “dark web” allowing the hiding of the identity of members using dark forums. We use network theoretical approaches to analyze the data we obtained by studying the connectivity features of the members and the threads within a wide selection of forums (including dark and semi-dark) and establish several characteristic behavioral patterns. Our findings reveal both common and rather different features in the two types of behavior. In particular, we show that the various distributions of quantities, like the activity of the commenters, the dynamics of the threads (defined using their lifetime) or the degree distributions corresponding to the three major types of forums we have investigated display characteristic deviations. This knowledge can be useful, for example, in identifying an activity typical for the dark web when it appears in the public web (since the public web can be accessed and used much more easily).

Stephanie Welch, director. A Dangerous Idea: Eugenics, Genetics and the American Dream.

S<scp>tephanie</scp> W<scp>elch</scp>, director. <i>A Dangerous Idea: Eugenics, Genetics and the American Dream</i>.

Dangerous Ideas: The Force of Ideology and Personality in Driving Radicalization

ABSTRACTGraeme Wood’s The Way of the Strangers gets as close as is humanly possible to an ethnography of recruiters and sympathizers of the Islamic State. Contrary to much writing on radical Islamism, Wood convincingly shows that the Islamic State’s ideas—rooted in a literalist reading of ancient Islamic sources—are central in motivating many of the movement’s followers. His accounts of individual adherents also suggests, however, that ideas are not the only factor, as certain personality traits influence who is attracted to radical Islamist movements.

Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich by Michele K. Troy

Reviewed by: Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich by Michele K. Troy Paul Moore Strange Bird: The Albatross Press and the Third Reich. By Michele K. Troy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017. Pp. 440. Cloth $40.00. ISBN 978-0300215687. Recalling his trip to Berlin in 1934, British author, artist, and sometime Hitler admirer Percy Wyndham Lewis noted "the Albatross editions I saw everywhere" (5). The ubiquity noted by Lewis seems surprising at first glance—the Albatross Press had specialized in publishing works of Anglo-American literary modernism for the continental market, in English, since 1932. Later a model for Penguin Books, the firm built a reputation for publishing cutting-edge literature at affordable prices, its offerings including works banned in the English-speaking world, such as James Joyce's Ulysses and D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover. The house won the contract to publish "Lady C" four days before Hitler became Chancellor (62). This now-forgotten publishing house was able to survive and thrive under a regime that railed publicly against "un-German" culture and held books in translation to be "an insidious channel of dangerous ideas [and] a failure of patriotism on the part [End Page 168] of German readers," as one official fulminated in 1938 (157). Yet sales in Germany represented a third of the Albatross Press's total market by the late 1930s. How this situation could be, and the negotiations and compromises required to bring it about, is the subject of Michele Troy's richly detailed volume on the Albatross Press. Troy's avowedly transnational history of the business and its personalities is written with flair, and very well researched—her bibliography lists twenty-eight archives in seven countries, as well as seven similarly dispersed private collections. Among the wealth of information on the key personalities of Albatross Press and their relationships with each other, the somewhat slippery figure of John Holroyd-Reece stands out. Symptomatic of the times is the fact that his international dealings called him to the attention of the French Secret Service, which opened a file on him as a suspected German agent in 1937. Troy's sympathetic portrayal makes clear that his personal charm, ambition, and skill, as well as his "well-honed amorality" (324), were necessary to exploit the regime's economic and ideological priorities for the survival of the business. The reader is tempted to judge Holroyd-Reece more harshly than Troy herself does, given her account of him browbeating an associate-turned-rival while the latter was in a hospital bed after being hit by car, and indeed her admission, at the book's end, that it remains unclear whether Albatross ever "turned a profit on his watch" (325). Indeed, little in this book will disabuse readers inclined to see the 1930s, with W.H. Auden, as a "low, dishonest decade." Even prior to Hitler's chancellorship, a German competitor used xenophobic and antisemitic innuendo in an unedifying attempt to snuff out their nascent rivals. For the Nazi regime, it was useful to cultivate the market for English-language books as a much-needed source of foreign currency; in this way, Troy argues, "Nazi censorship [was] as much economic as moral" (101). Yet such tolerance extended only so far, with the vigilance of Nazi newspapers such as Der Stürmer leading to Albatross offerings by Jewish authors being banned and the regime blocking the firm's takeover of its German competitor due to the former's "foreign owners" (78). Troy also reveals a degree of self-censorship on the part of the publishers, making substantial cuts to Aldous Huxley's Beyond the Mexique Bay (1934) and removing its more explicit criticisms of Hitler's regime to ensure that at least an abridged version of the book could enter the German market. Its initial run of 12,000 copies sold out. Just as important as the export trade and accommodations with the government to the survival of the Albatross Press was the well-known factionalism of the Nazi hierarchy and "fragmentation" of its bureaucracy. Troy emphasizes, as have historians such as Erhard Bahr and Guenter Lewy, that "multiple government factions struggled...

The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob

Reviewed by: The Secular Enlightenment by Margaret C. Jacob John D. Eigenauer Margaret C. Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019). Pp. 339, 13 b/w illus. $29.95 cloth. The great debate in Enlightenment studies in the past twenty-plus years has centered on the causes of secular modernity: What happened to move the world from the Middle Ages to our Secular Age? One dominant answer, propounded by Jonathan Israel across three massive volumes (Radical Enlightenment [2001], Enlightenment Contested [2006], and Democratic Enlightenment [2011]), is that our modern values arose from the world's wholesale acceptance of the materialist philosophy that undergirds Baruch Spinoza's (1632–1677) complex thought. A second answer is that our modern world was born of myriad factors ranging from global expansion (and the ensuing contact with unknown peoples) to increased literacy (making people more worldly and informed) to expanding economies (enhancing quality of life and freeing people from the cares of quotidian struggles). While Israel's thesis is enticing and powerfully argued, the majority of scholars see advances toward secularism as irreducible to the forces of philosophy; they therefore embrace a more complex system of causes. Margaret Jacob stands firmly in the latter camp. In her most recent work, The Secular Enlightenment, Jacob argues for a view of the Enlightenment that encompasses many factors that added impetus to increasing secularism across the long eighteenth century. These include "new spatial realities": politics, "the spread of money," imperialistic expansionism, "subversive literature," "travel literature," the expansion of cities, increased sociability, the growth of luxury goods, heightened literacy, and encounters with new peoples in faraway lands. Jacob's argument seems to be that new uses of and encounters with "space" (think of expanding cities and intercontinental exploration) opened up ways of seeing the world that contrasted with traditional views and invited increased secularism (9–24). Encounters with formerly unknown peoples outside Europe, for example, led people to speculate in travel literature (both real and fictional) about what it meant that some peoples had no conception of God—a possibility that denied a longstanding orthodox tradition that claimed that everyone possesses an innate idea of the divinity. Increased sociability in cities (in pubs, clubs, cafes, and masonic lodges, for example) created the possibility for expressions of "the outrageous, daring, and free" (20). And growing literacy made these dangerous ideas more widely available. However, even though these ideas certainly lend support to social history (over against a history that emphasizes ideas as primary motive forces), the account in the first chapter leaves a number of questions unanswered. While it is certainly true that encounters with non-European peoples invited many questions, we do not [End Page 443] learn what those questions were or how they were answered. As Andrew Curran notes in his essay on "Anthropology" in The Cambridge Companion to the French Enlightenment (2014), these travelogues speculated on "human diversity, human origins, human comportment, human anatomy and (supposedly different types of) human minds" (30). How did secular attitudes emerge out of discussions of these topics? What answers were forwarded that moved the world towards increasing secularism? These are the type of questions that should be addressed in a discussion that theorizes that new conceptualizations of "space" promoted a more secular worldview in the long eighteenth century. There is no doubt that eighteenth century Europeans encountered conceptions and uses of "space" that forced them to rethink their worlds. But we do not learn in Jacob's chapter on space what those conceptions were or how they emerged. In fact, after a discussion on "space" in the first chapter—a discussion that ends with the assertion that "space had truly become emptied" (32)—the term virtually disappears from the book. Jacob announces in the second chapter another major theme in her view of the secular eighteenth century: time. Jacob sees time before 1680 as being understood in a decidedly non-modern way. Unfortunately, she does not explain what that experience was like or attempt to define the pre-Enlightenment concept of time. She makes references to changing ideas about the age of the earth, but does not explain how these new ideas relate to a more modern sense...

“The Most Dangerous Idea?” Islamic Deliberations on Transhumanism

This paper provides a discussion of aspects of the transhumanist movement and their intellectual and bioethical implications from an Islamic perspective. After an introduction to transhumanism and some of its variations, it discusses the underlying suppositions of transhumanist thought: The supposed absence of the body – mind – soul complex and the idea of volitional evolution of humankind. It then goes on to discuss the notion of enhancement and body modification, on a technological, pharmacological and genetic level from an Islamic point of view. In conclusion, the paper discusses the idea of “the good life”. The paper concludes that, although transhumanism is not a new idea, but rather a conglomerate of old ideas in technologically backed dystopian garb, and although there are obvious disparages between tenets of transhumanism and Islam at a very basic level, Muslims ought to be aware of its trajectory, as influences and repercussions will be felt globally.&nbsp;

History and philosophy of geography III: The haunted, the reviled, and the plural

This report takes a new English-language translation of Friedrich Ratzel’s infamous essay Der Lebensraum (1901) as a prompt to consider the ethical questions that are raised by revisiting geography’s dangerous ideas and discredited practitioners. Attending to a series of recent interventions that offer new readings of Ratzel and his essay, I consider how historiographical practice and moral obligation intersect in the process of making sense of, and coming to terms with, disciplinary pasts that haunt the present. The report concludes by considering the future of the series of which it forms part and argues that the task of narrating progress in the history and philosophy of geography should be assumed by a more diverse range of authors than has heretofore been the case.

The new politics and geographies of scarcity

Scarcity is a dangerous idea and has long been a totalising discourse in resource politics and mainstream economics. A large body of work has critiqued the naturalisation of scarcity in discourses of environmental change, and has highlighted problems in how scarcity is conceptualised and the ways in which scarcities are socially and politically generated. Despite this, the ‘scarcity postulate’ – an assumed mismatch between infinitely expanding human desires and finite means to realise them – remains a powerful concept that continues to be deployed and re-deployed in a host of debates concerning environment and natural resources. From the ‘Limits to Growth’ debates that influenced environmental movements in the 1970s, discussions concerning the causes and consequences of the overlapping food, fuel and finance crises of the 2000s to debates concerning climate change, environmental security and militarisation in the Anthropocene, the discursive constellation of scarcity seems always at work. The focus of this special issue is the cross-scalar dynamics of what we identify as a ‘new politics of scarcity’. This new politics is associated with new framings, contestations and entanglements of scarcity that are associated with new configurations of actors, new political economic relations and new spatialities and geographies of resource control and violence. Building on the empirical cases developed in this special issue, we examine the dynamics and the ‘work’ of the new cross-scalar scarcity politics in sustaining elite and capitalist power through justifying resource acquisitions and enclosures, large-scale policy reforms in the name of ‘austerity’ and intensification of extraction whilst politically side-stepping more thorny politics of (re)distribution, mis-appropriation, dispossession and social justice. We conclude by looking at alternative framings and vernacular conceptions of sustainability that challenge dominant scarcity-driven policies and programmes that intensify local exclusions and inequalities.