La Amazonía brasileña ha estado históricamente afectada, en especial durante el siglo xx, por actividades para la acumulación de capital en el Norte global mediante la desposesión de territorios, la deforestación, la explotación de recursos naturales, la minería y otras prácticas extractivistas. Sin embargo, con la emergencia de agendas y actores encargados de la promoción del «desarrollo sostenible», se han puesto en marcha numerosos planes y programas (CDM, REDD+, etc.) que han transformado las estrategias de acumulación, compatibilizándolas con la conservación, a través del «capitalismo verde». Este artículo busca desentrañar las implicaciones de esta transformación en la explotación del territorio amazónico brasileño, y su inserción en la ecología-mundo, a nivel político, socioeconómico y de género desde un enfoque estructuralista, marxista y ecofeminista.

The Anthropocene as a new epoch brings into question the traditional modes of conceptualising International Relations. We believe that it does this by forcing students and practitioners of International Relations to think through how the discipline works as a set of ideas and practices, in fact, as a way of understanding the nature of problems and policymaking per se. As a discipline, International Relations is particularly sensitive to the questioning of the problematics of human exceptionalism, rationalist problem-solving and liberal modernist imaginaries of progress, which have shaped the agendas of international peace, development and democracy. Beyond the dark days of the Cold War, when International Relations was essentially a strategic exercise of Realpolitik, the discipline has staked a lot on the basis that Enlightenment liberalism is the universal panacea to human ills and that irrational structures or agencies can be civilised or tamed to further the interests of humanity, both in national or global regimes of good governance and the rule of law. These dreams of liberal universal solutions appear to have run aground in the Anthropocene as the last decade has marked a shift away from universal, modernist or ‘linear’ understandings of power and agency. In a world, construed as more complex, contingent and relational and replete with crises and unpredicted ‘tipping points’, traditional assumptions are up-ended and unintended consequences seem more relevant than ‘good intentions’. Concomitantly, the methodological focus has switched away from understanding the essence of entities and towards privileging the analysis of relations, networks and contexts. Key to this has been debates focused around climate change and global warming which explicitly cast policy problems not as external threats to the ‘good life’ (that requires securing) but as instead questioning the starting assumptions of separations between inside/ outside, humanity/ nature, solutions/ problems and referents/ threats. This elicits a very different way of thinking. If natural processes can no longer be separated from the historical impact of human development and are no longer merely the backdrop to a purely human drama of domestic and international political contestation, then the modernist understanding of the nature/ culture divide, separating social and natural science, no longer holds. Nature can no longer be understood as operating on fixed or natural laws, while politics and culture can no longer be understood as operating in a separate sphere of autonomy and freedom. These assumptions, central to modernist constructions of progress, are seen to no longer exist or to have always been problematic. Thus, the Anthropocene is not merely a question of new or more pressing problems, such as climate change and extreme weather events, but also a matter of the tools and understandings that are available to us: in other words, it is a matter of how we know —of epistemology— and also of what we understand the world to consist of —i.e. questions of ontology. Consider, for example, the conventional understanding of security as the protection of a valued referent against external threats. The condition of the Anthropocene challenges such a notion of security. The Anthropocene as a condition, problematises easy assumptions about ‘us’ as the security ‘referent’ —as the object to be secured. The problematisation of ‘us’ —the privileged gaze of the Western policymaking subject— opens up a substantial set of problems which deeply impact the disciplinary assumptions of International Relations. This is expressed, for example, in Bruno Latour’s concept of Earthbound people, i.e., an imaginary collective of people who consider themselves sensitive and responsive, due to being bound by and to the Earth. We are the problem as much as the solution, the ‘them’ as much as the ‘us’, the ‘enemy’ as much as the ‘friend’. Accordingly, the Anthropocene condition calls for reflection upon —and ultimately transition away from— the idea of a separation between nature and humanity. To perform this shift in perspective, concepts such as “worldly” or “ecological security” have been proposed. Matt McDonald develops a notion “ecological security” through an engagement with existing discourses of climate security. According to him, established ways of thinking about climate security would reinforce a problematic nature-culture divide by either presenting climate change as an external threat to vulnerable human communities or, conversely, human actors as a threat to fragile nature in need of protection. Ecological security would instead focus on supporting and sustaining the long-term resilience of ecosystems —understood as entangled systems of both human and non-human elements. Ensuring that “ecosystems can continue to function in the face of current and future change” is accordingly, the only defensible approach to security in the condition of the Anthropocene. Similarly, a worldly approach to security stresses that threats such as war, major industrial accidents, or ecological collapse do not affect humans in isolation but rather endanger the common worlds co-constituted by humans and diverse nonhuman beings. Harrington and Shearing hold that security in the Anthropocene should become oriented towards an “ethics of care”. Care, according to them, is able to emphasize the types of deep relational thinking that are so appropriate when discussing the Earth’s ongoing and unknown patterns of interactions and responses. It allows one to see security as a radical entanglement between humans, non-human animals, plants, bacteria, materials and technology. Learning how to navigate this entanglement with care will be a primary task for International Relations in our Anthropocene world. This article is organised in three sections. Firstly, we introduce the concept of the Anthropocene. We refer to the Anthropocene as a condition that we are in rather than as an external set of problems which we are confronted with. Understood as a condition which we are in, rather than merely a set of strategic and tactical problems which we confront, the Anthropocene enables us to go beyond the traditional binaries of our disciplinary tradition. The second section provides some background to the disciplinary history of International Relations, here we seek to briefly flag up the importance of thinking the Anthropocene in relation to the history of the discipline, which could be understood as moving from an ‘inter-national’ or state-centred focus during the Cold War to a global set of much broader concerns from the 1980s to the 2000s, to an increased interest in the Anthropocene, understood as a ‘planetary’ challenge to the liberal universal assumptions that followed the decline of ‘realist’ hegemony. The third section focuses on the implications of the Anthropocene for three key themes: knowledge, governance and security.

El presente trabajo indaga en la creciente interrelación de las normas internacionales en materia de derechos humanos y protección medioambiental, a través de las reivindicaciones y la construcción de discursos específicos de parte de múltiples actores internacionales. Dando cuenta de determinadas dinámicas en el espacio internacional, se formulará una aproximación genealógica para abordar dos procesos simultáneos e interdependientes por los cuales las normas internacionales se han ido transformando: por un lado, la introducción de la dimensión ambiental en las agendas, instrumentos jurídicos e instituciones en materia de derechos humanos; y por otro, la adopción de los lenguajes de los derechos fundamentales dentro del régimen internacional de protección ambiental. Se pondrá el foco en el papel transformador de un conjunto de actores no hegemónicos en los estudios de Relaciones Internacionales, que se identifican como los principales impulsores de la creciente interrelación entre las estructuras normativas y discursivas de derechos humanos y medioambiente.

In this article, we present a historical analysis on how Sardinian pastoralism has become an integrated activity in global capitalism, oriented to the production of cheap milk, through the extraction of ecological surplus from the exploitation of nature and labour. Pastoralism has often been looked at as a marginal and traditional activity. On the contrary, our objective is to stress the central role played by pastoralism in the capitalist world-ecology. Since there is currently little work analysing the historical development of pastoralism in a concrete agro-ecological setting from a world-ecology perspective, we want to contribute to the development of the literature by analysing the concrete case of Sardinian pastoralism. To do so, we will use the analytical framework of world-ecology to analyse the historical dialectic of capital accumulation and the production of nature through which pastoralism -understood as a socio-cultural system that organises nature-society relations for the reproduction of local rural societies- became an activity trapped in the production of market commodities and cheap food exploiting human (labour) and extra-human factors (e.g. land, water, environment, animals etc.). Looking at the exploitation of extra-human factors, the concept of ecological surplus allows us to understand how capital accumulation and surplus was possible thanks to the exploitation of nature, or rather the creation of cheap nature and chap inputs for the production of cheap commodities. We analyse historical pastoralism to understand how geopolitical configurations of global capitalism interact with the national and local scales to change pastoral production, nature and labour relations. We will pay particular attention to the role of land and the relationship between pastoralists and animals. The article is based on secondary data, historical material and primary data collected from 2012 to 2020 through qualitative interviews and ethnographic research. We identify four main cycles of agro-ecological transformation to explore the interactions between waves of historical capitalist expansion and changes in the exploitation of agroecological factors. The first two phases will be explored in the first section of the paper: the mercantilist phase during the modern era and the commodification of pastoralist products, which extend from the nineteenth century to the Second World War. In the mercantilist phase, the expansion of pastoralism finds its external limits in the trend of international demand (influenced by international trade policies that may favour or hinder exports) and its internal limits in the competition/complementarity with agriculture for the available land that results in a transhumant model of pastoralism. In this phase, the ecological surplus needed for capitalist accumulation is produced by nature as a gift, or nature for free, which results in the possibility of producing milk at a very low cost by exploiting the natural pasture of the open fields. The second cycle, “the commodification of pastoralist products”, started at the end of the nineteenth century, with the introduction on the island of the industrial processing of Pecorino Romano cheese, and which was increasingly in demand in the North American market.  This pushed pastoralism towards a strong commodification. Shepherds stopped processing cheese on-farm and became producers of cheap milk for the Pecorino Romano processing industry. Industrialists control the distribution channels and therefore the price of milk. Moreover, following the partial privatisation of land and high rent prices, shepherds progressively lose the ecological surplus that was guaranteed by free land and natural grazing, key to lower production costs and to counterbalance the unequal distribution of wealth within the chain. At the beginning of the twentieth century, although the market for Pecorino Romano was growing, these contradictions emerged and the unfair redistribution of profits within the chain (which benefited industrialists, middlemen and landowners to the detriment of shepherds) led to numerous protests and the birth of shepherds' cooperatives. The second section of the paper will explore the third agro-ecological phase: the rise of the “monoculture of sheep-raising” through the modernisation policies (from the fifties until 1990s). The protests that affected the inland areas of Sardinia, as well as the increase in banditry, signal the impossibility of continuing to guarantee cheap nature and cheap labour, which are at the basis of the mechanism of capitalist accumulation. On the basis of these pressures, the 1970s witnessed a profound transformation that opened a new cycle of accumulation: laws favouring the purchase of land led to the sedenterization of pastoralism, while agricultural modernisation policies pushed towards the rationalisation of the farm. Land improvements and technological innovations (such as the milking machine and the purchase of agricultural machinery) led to the beginning of the “monoculture of sheep raising”: a phase of intensification in the exploitation of nature and the extraction of ecological surplus. This includes a great increase of the number of sheep per unit of agricultural area, thanks to the cultivated pasture replacing natural grazing and the production and purchase of stock and feed. Subsidised agricultural modernisation and sedentarisation can once again "sustain" the cost of cheap milk that is the basis of the industrial dairy chain. However, agricultural modernisation results in the further commodification of pastoralism, which becomes increasingly dependent on the upstream and downstream market, making pastoralists less autonomous. Moreover, given the impossibility of further expanding the herd, the productivity need of keeping low milk production costs has to be achieved through an increase in the average production per head. Therefore, there are higher investments in genetic selection to increase breed productivity, higher investments to improve animal feeding and a more intensive animal exploitation to increase productivity. These production strategies imply higher farm costs. In this context, the fourth phase, the neoliberal phase (analysed in the third section of the paper) broke out in Sardinia in the mid-1990s. With the end of export subsidies and the opening of the new large-scale retail channel in which producers are completely subordinate, it starts a period of increased volatility in the price of milk. In order to counter income erosion and achieve the productivity gains needed to continue producing cheap milk, pastoralists have intensified the exploitation of both human (labour) and non-human (nature) factors, with contradictory effects. In the case of nature, the intensive exploitation of land through monocultural crops has reduced biodiversity and impoverished the soil. In the case of labour, pastoralists have intensified the levels of self-exploitation and free family labour to extreme levels and have also resorted to cheaply paid foreign labourers. Throughout the paper, we reconstruct the path towards the production of "cheap milk" in Sardinia, processed mainly into pecorino romano for international export. We argue that the production of ecological surplus through the exploitation of nature and labour has been central to capital accumulation and to the unfolding of the capitalist world ecology. However, we have reached a point of crisis where pastoralists are trapped between rising costs and eroding revenues. Further exploitation of human (cheap labour) and extra-human (nature and animals) factors is becoming unsustainable for the great majority, leading to a polarization between pastoralists who push towards further intensification and mechanisation and pastoralists who increasingly de-commodify to build greater autonomy.