No abstract

No abstract

Ongoing discussions of welfare and human viability that focus on state responsibility to provide care and services rarely consider how new sources of vulnerability are emerging within the context of climate change. Scholars attentive to these processes often use the designation “Anthropocene” to characterize the current period of large-scale anthropogenic environmental changes. This essay argues that although the Anthropocene adds a much-needed corrective to climate change narratives that view human action as inconsequential, it treats humans as if they were a single, homogenous force, undifferentiated by history, geography, vulnerabilities, and relationships to the reproduction of sociomaterial environments. Most crucially, this essay problematizes the historical and ontological separation of natural and anthropogenic environmental conditions and human and nonhuman social actors that undergird narratives of the Anthropocene. Such forced distinctions, it argues, limit the ability to recognize emerging vulnerabilities that pose a threat to human and nonhuman well-being. More specifically, this essay relies on fieldwork from South Asia to examine how everyday social, material, and affective relationships bind people to nonhumans and shape the ways they envision welfare that are not captured in overwhelming state emphases on landlessness, housing, or services.

This article analyzes how environmentalism reinscribed violent forms of state sovereignty in the disputed region of Kashmir in the aftermath of a decade-long uprising against Indian rule. After the return of an elected government, six years after its suspension in 1990, environmental restoration legitimized new forms of state and nature making in Kashmir. Nature rather than territory emerged as an arena of citizen activism, which further strengthened the state's ability to regulate the use and management of Kashmir's water resources. State and civic bodies deployed discourses of history and restoration to create new and imagined ecologies based on visions of nostalgia, commerce, and esthetics. By undermining place-based understandings of nature and ecology, discourses of environmental stewardship and conservation ended up fostering violent mechanisms of social and political control.

No abstract