Cycles of Justice: Reimagining Space, Resisting Extractivist War
This interactive workshop will consider the significance of cycling for reimagining and resisting extractivist political economies and their resulting resource wars.
Opening with some remarks on the relationship between extractivism and war, we will argue that the United States and Israel’s current attack on Iran, as well as the violence unfolding in the Middle East since October 2023, is indeed about oil. But it is also about the prerogative of the most powerful players in the world system to accumulate wealth through resource extraction. And for those resources, which include but are not limited to oil, car-centric (both gas and EV) transportation networks are a major destination. What we are witnessing in the Middle East, in other words, is a war not just for oil, but for cars.
From here, we will connect these large-scale spatial dynamics to struggles for power on the streets of cities and towns. Here, we will take up the theme of infrastructural justice, noting how public space reallocation is political in terms of who dominates our streets and whose suffering this domination is predicated on. We will then ask workshop participants to actively think with us about how we can develop antiwar and antiextractivist infrastructures in which cyclists and citizens of resource rich regions, wheelchair users and workers aboard Persian Gulf ships, and pedestrians and Palestinians might move through a more justly designed world.
John Munro is the author of The Anticolonial Front: The African American Freedom Struggle and Global Decolonization, 1945-1960 and, with Radhika Natarajan, the Public Books Imperialism Syllabus.
Myka Tucker-Abramson is the author of Novel Shocks: Urban Renewal and the Cultural Origins of Neoliberalism and Cartographies of Empire: The Road Novel and American Empire.