​Transnational Infrastructures and the Transformation of Global Orders

Abstract
This book offers a multidisciplinary insight into the significance of infrastructural change for global orders. While infrastructures form the material basis of our everyday lives and their design and use determine the further development of our societies, infrastructures themselves often remain invisible in everyday life. Although they are and have always been subject to political conflicts their contestation often only becomes visible when the circulation of data, goods and people is disrupted. Rarely has this been more evident than at the moment, when we are experiencing a multitude of overlapping global crises. The threat of the nearing climate catastrophe shows us the inadequacies and climatic impacts of our energy and transport systems. The Russian war of aggression in Ukraine and the subsequent energy crisis underline how dependent we are on infrastructures and how their political instrumentalization contributes to the escalation of conflicts. The COVID-19 pandemic has further exposed the vulnerability not only of national infrastructures but also of global supply chains. These crises illustrate twofold: first they show that transnational infrastructures are no longer only deepening ties between individuals, societies, and states. This was for long the hope of transnational actors. Infrastructures may still stabilize global orders, but they also foster their reconfiguration, facilitating the establishment and rise of certain political actors and the decline of others. Second, these crises force us to ask about the significance of transformed infrastructures for global orders; how this transformation manifested itself historically and how it is shaping the present and future alike. What can a comprehensive understanding of the impact of infrastructures on global orders contribute to the challenges of the 21st century? With this anthology we approach this question from different perspectives. The book deals with infrastructures in different fields – from energy to transport, from communication to migration – and at different levels of society – local, regional, global. What unites all the contributions is an interest in showing what the respective dynamics within and among these fields as well as the driving forces behind these developments mean for our society. This book is aimed at a wide audience from infrastructure researchers to IR experts as well as from colleagues with expertise in specific policy fields to the general reader interested in the effects often invisible transnational infrastructures have on the organization of their everyday life.
Bieling, Hans-Jürgen, Thomas Diez, Riccarda Flemmer, and Andrea Futterer (eds., 2025): Transnational Infrastructures and the Transformation of Global Orders, edited by Hans-Jürgen Bieling, Thomas Diez, Riccarda Flemmer, and Andrea Futterer. Heidelberg: Springer Nature. (Link)

 Proximity as Method: Concepts for Coexistence in the Global Past and Present (2024)

Flemmer, Riccarda, Gil, Bani, and Jacky Kosgei (eds., 2024): Proximity as Method: Concepts for Coexistence in the Global Past and Present, Delhi: Routledge. (Link)
Abstract
This book examines proximity as a benchmarked concept that can be deployed across a range of humanities disciplines to rethink the ways in which existences in the world are always already coexistences – and to parse the heuristic, ethical, epistemological, praxeological consequences of this recognition.

The volume:
- Brings together diverse theoretical approaches and utilizes a range of methodological instruments – conceptual, textual-analytic (whether in the realm of literary or religious studies, or theology or law), archival, digital, sociological or politological;
- Includes empirical case-studies that allow calibrated and scaled exemplifications;
- Launches forays onto unexplored conceptual terrain, or call into question hallowed truths of scholarly procedure.

The volume will be essential reading for students and early researchers in the social sciences and the humanities.

Special Issue: What Is at Stake? The Ontological Dimension of Environmental Conflicts (2024)

Introduction
Environmental conflicts are commonly understood as human struggles over the ownership, accessing, and distribution of natural resources (Martinez-Alier 2002). “Nature” appears therein often as a predefined given, where conflicts take place and “natural resources” are managed and taken as mere goods to be exploited, developed, or protected by humans. This view suppresses social systems where rivers, mountains, and animals are conceived as living beings with agency (Blaser and de la Cadena 2018; de la Cadena 2015; Collard et al. 2018; Escobar 2015; Wilson and Inkster 2018). This is particularly present in struggles over the extraction of natural resources, large-scale development projects, and conservation areas overlapping with indigenous peoples’ territories or the lands of peasant communities. In contrast, an ontological perspective on environmental conflicts suggests that neither the objects nor subjects in these conflicts are predetermined facts or entities; rather, defining them is a crucial dimension of this very struggle itself. The aim of this special issue is hence to make “ontological politics” visible and to investigate the oftentimes overlooked ontological dimensions of environmental conflict by focusing on the contested question of: What is at stake? The contributions show that the conflict dynamics in the context of resource extraction, conservation projects, and devel- opment initiatives cannot be fully explained or understood without unraveling dissent about knowledge production, power asymmetries, and the political economy at play in managing nature. These are deeper struggles ultimately rooted in different ways of under- standing what both nature and human-nature relations are according to the respective parties involved.
Flemmer, Riccarda, Gresz, Verena, and Jonas Hein (eds., 2024): ‘Special Issue: What Is at Stake? The Ontological Dimension of Environmental Conflicts’: Society and Natural Resources 37 (5). (Link)

The Laws of Extraction-Environmental Rights and Legal Regulations in Struggle over Natural Resources in the Americas: An Introduction (2018)

Flemmer, Riccarda (ed., 2018): ‘The Laws of Extraction – Environmental Rights and Legal Regulations in Struggles over Natural Resources in the Americas: An Introduction’ as guest editor of fiar – forum for inter-american research of the International Association of Inter-American Studies (IAS), 11 (3): 7–15. (Open Access)
Abstract
The Americas, and especially South America, have been a source of natural resources ever since colonial times. Eduardo Galeano’s book The Open Veins of Latin America ( Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina), first published in 1971, remains a powerful metaphor for depicting the economic exploitation of the subcontinent by European countries and later the United States. In recent decades, however, global and domestic conditions of access to these resources have changed. On the one hand, new actors—especially China—are diversifying the global customer base while American economies have developed their own demands for primary goods. Among South American governments, a “commodities consensus” (Svampa 2015) prevails. In the mean time, new models for using the revenues generated from the extraction and the export of natural resources in order to improve living conditions have led to the coining of the term “neo-extractivism” (Gudynas 2009).

Entrevistas con líderes indígenas: ¿Mecanismos participativos para lograr justicia ambiental y formas democráticas de la gobernanza de recursos naturales? (2018)

Abstract
A nivel global, existe un consenso amplio sobre la importancia de fortalecer la participación de los pueblos y comunidades afectados en la toma de decisiones sobre el medio ambiente. Gobiernos y empresas han reconocido el derecho de los pueblos indígenas al consentimiento libre, previo e informado (CLPI). Sin embargo, se ha demostrado que, en la práctica, estos procesos ofrecieron posibilidades limitadas para ejercer una influencia real. Como respuesta a estas limitaciones, los pueblos indígenas desarrollaron instrumentos alternativos para la gobernanza ambiental, tales como referéndum populares, mecanismos de planeamiento participativos y protocolos propios. Las siguientes dos entrevistas se desarrollaron en el marco del evento “Gobernanza ambiental indígena: Estrategias y retos para salvaguardar el futuro“ organizado por Maria-Therese Gustafsson (Universidad de Estocolmo, Suecia) el 30 de Noviembre y el 1 de Diciembre 2017 en la Universidad de Estocolomo, Suecia, y han sido resumidos para esta edición de fiar.
Flemmer, Riccarda (ed., 2018): ‘Entrevistas con líderes indígenas: ¿Mecanismos participativos para lograr justicia ambiental y formas democráticas de la gobernanza de recursos naturales?’ In Special Issue ‘The Laws of Extraction/ Las leyes de la extracción’ of fiar – forum for inter-american research of the International Association of Inter-American Studies (IAS), 11 (3): 62–70. (Open Access)